Reviews and News:
Roger Scruton takes Slavoj Zizek down a few pegs: The “release of Zizek into the world of Western scholarship could almost suffice to make one regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe…The machine-gun rattle of topics and concepts makes it easy for Zizek to slip in his little pellets of poison, which the reader, nodding in time to the rhythm of the prose, might easily swallow unnoticed. Thus, we are not ‘to reject terror in toto but to re-invent it’; we must recognize that the problem with Hitler, and with Stalin, too, is that they ‘were not violent enough;; we should accept Mao’s ‘cosmic perspective’ and read the Cultural Revolution as a positive event…Zizek’s defense of terror and violence, his call for a new Party organized on Leninist principles, his celebration of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the countless deaths notwithstanding and, indeed, lauded as part of the meaning of a politics of action—all this might have served to discredit Zizek among more moderate left-wing readers, were it not for the fact that it is never possible to be sure that he is serious.”
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A libertarian against democracy: “Before we elect people to the trust of the presidency and thereby grant them power over others, we expect them to demonstrate some capacity and knowledge. So why not something similar, writ small,before granting people the power over others granted by access to the voting booth? Brennan suggests that we limit voting, and he proposes a number of ways in which the current system of suffrage might be replaced by a system better directed to social progress. Against Democracy makes a persuasive argument—if we rely on Mill’s understanding of voting as the exercise of power over others. But the allure of that utilitarian thinking comes from its simplicity, and the simplicity comes from a terribly short-sighted intellectual reduction of the cause and purpose of voting in a representative democracy.”
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Gardens of Petra rediscovered: “Recent excavations at Petra have revealed a startlingly advanced irrigation system and water storage system that enabled the desert city’s people to survive – and to maintain a magnificent garden featuring fountains, ponds and a huge swimming pool.”
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Steven Donoghue reviews The Big Book of Jack the Ripper.
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In Case You MIssed It:
The politics of C. S. Lewis: “He was known to have ‘contempt for politics and politicians,’ in the words of his brother Warnie, and he steered clear of the political controversies of his time. Yet as Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson, associate professors at the University of Missouri and Calvin College, show in their groundbreaking new book, C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, Lewis’s understanding of truth and human nature, of what constitutes the good life and the good society, had significant political implications…Lewis had ‘a very limited view of government’s role and warrant,’ was skeptical of its capacity to inculcate virtue and worried about its paternalistic tendencies. The duty of government was to restrain wrongdoing.”
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T. S. Eliot in a letter to Stephen Spender: “I am not concerned with how people behave, but with what they think of themselves in their behaviour; and I believe that the man who thinks himself virtuous is in danger of damnation, whatever line of conduct he adopts.
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In The London Review of Books, Jon Day writes about the legendary Olympic distance runner Emil Zatopek
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Lee Rosenbaum finds the Brooklyn Museum’s overhauled collection of American art oddly selective: “It seems perversely fixated on what’s shameful in our country’s past. While it’s legitimate to raise uncomfortable issues, the relentlessness of the negative critique makes the installation sometimes seem less a celebration of American culture and achievements than a recitation of our nation’s faults. The introductory wall text fires a warning shot: ‘Some of the objects . . . raise difficult, complex issues, since many works were made for and collected by racially and economically privileged segments of society’…John Singleton Copley, born poor but risen high on the strength of prodigious talent, is caught in the net of ‘Pan-American Privilege’ in the next section. His portrait, c. 1772, of New England monarchist Abigail Pickman Gardiner,dressed in ‘the height of London fashion,’ is one of three depictions of ‘privileged Americans’ leading off the display devoted to the Colonial era.”
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Classic Essay: Russell Kirk, “The Importance of Unwritten Constitutions”
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Interview: Bill Kristol talks to Harvey Mansfield about P. G. Wodehouse, Swift, Churchill, and more.
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