Oliver O’Donovan takes stock of Abraham Kuyper’s Pro Rege: “These first two volumes of Pro Rege contain some memorable things. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the opening, designed to engage a conservative readership by shock. Announcing his high admiration for the world of traditional Islam, where religious decline is not as advanced as in the West, Kuyper plunges into a profoundly nostalgic lament for a Christendom that has been swept away by loss of public piety and the technological conquest of nature. To his distressed gaze, the tough fabric of modern idolatry offers no weak point for penetration. Urban massification, technological control, egalitarian communications, loss of educational coherence, the power of finance, and the false spirituality of art all knit together to build the worldly city as a religious surrogate, a Babylon opposed to Jerusalem.”
New Orleans at 300: “Lafcadio Hearn was a journalist working in the Midwest when he took a job with the now-defunct New Orleans Daily Item, where he spent a decade writing about New Orleans before settling in Japan. For northerners in the latter part of the 19th century, Hearn served as an oracle for interpreting the crown jewel of Dixie. He wrote: ‘Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations…But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.’”
Two books on how to create and sustain a flourishing economy might be of interest. First, Samuel Gregg reviews Pierre Lemieux’s vigorous critique of protectionism: “For those looking for concise and empirically informed critiques of common protectionist economic arguments, this book is extremely helpful in accurately summarizing protectionist views and how they don’t square with the economic evidence. The author’s arguments are helped by his refusal to caricature his opponents’ reasoning. He takes them at face value.” Second, Charles Fain Lehman reviews Oren Cass’s critique of measuring the health of an economy in terms of Gross Domestic Product: “The trick of this model is that it is agnostic as to how Americans acquire the wealth that they subsequently spend. So, for example, it is not an issue if more and more working-age men drop off the labor force, because surging transfer payments can push down the ‘real’ poverty rate—transfer income replaces labor income. Nor is it an issue if the marriage rate falls and out-of-wedlock births soar, because the wage benefits of marriage can be replaced (again, primarily by transfer payments). What matters is that people have wealth, not where it comes from. This arrangement has worked well to maximize the variables it prioritizes: In real GDP terms, Americans are better off than we were 70 years ago. But along numerous other axes, we are doing much worse. Millennials are expected to be on average worse off than their parents, reversing the steady intergenerational trend. Majorities of Americans have been consistently dissatisfied with government and the direction of society for years. Further political upheaval looks set to rock the country even as the stock market surges. Cass’s fundamental argument is that this apparent mismatch between certain economic indicators and the country’s general state is a function of the decision to be agnostic as to the source of our wealth, and specifically to deemphasize work.”
Can scientists resurrect extinct animals? Julia Zarankin writes about a Californian nonprofit that is trying to bring back the passenger pigeon and other species: “Dedicated to genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species, the team there is intent on harnessing emergent biotechnologies to genetically engineer and reintroduce endangered or extinct species, including the woolly mammoth, the black-footed ferret, and the heath hen.”
On Monday, Alice B. Lloyd reported that hundreds of antiquarian booksellers temporarily stopped using AbeBooks to protest the Amazon-owned subsidiary’s decision to stop hosting booksellers from five countries. The New York Times reports that the strike was successful: “It was a rare concerted uprising against any part of Amazon by any of its millions of suppliers, leading to an even rarer capitulation. Even the book dealers said they were surprised at the sudden reversal by AbeBooks, the company’s secondhand and rare bookselling network.”
Essay of the Day
In Modern Age, Lauren Weiner revisits Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence:
“Nearly all the novel’s moral intricacy is preserved in the film, which for my money makes the latter’s occasional descent into melodrama tolerable—as does the compelling acting of Pfeiffer, Day-Lewis, and Ryder. The communication between Day-Lewis and Ryder, verbal and nonverbal, exerts a kind of terrible fascination: they spend most of the movie subtly lying to one another. After their wedding goes off as planned, the family matriarch and all the others circle the wagons around May Welland Archer and frown upon any contemplated waywardness by her husband. He, a believer in Ellen’s right—any woman’s right—to divorce a bad husband, looks miserable; she, a woman who would never let such thoughts as that cross her mind, looks quietly victorious.
“In what are the practices and values of Old New York supposed to be grounded? Wharton’s version of what Henry James, her friend and mentor, called ‘the Puritan residuum’ looks pretty attenuated. On the other hand, she isn’t so entirely post-Protestant as to leave her characters with nothing to believe in. Ellen had been given a bad start in life, as the matriarch says in the movie, getting dragged about Europe by her expatriate American parents, ‘Continental wanderers [who] lavished on her an expensive and incoherent education.’ What she gives Newland is an outsider’s critique of his little world that he finds refreshing. What he gives her is an example of kindness and loyalty that her hard life had taught her to believe did not exist.
“Scorsese and Cocks, hewing closely to the original, do not omit these redemptive hints. They make the movie’s final third into a flash-forward, and it adds as much sweetness as sorrow to the depiction of the life of a quiet and cultured Wall Street lawyer who knuckled under. He lost his great love but finds consolation in his children. ‘Newland Archer in his fifty-seventh year,’ we are told, ‘mourned his past and honored it.’
“In sympathizing with the story’s nonconformists, as they should, viewers might take this tale as a demonstration that ‘conformity to the discipline of a small society’ is all bad. That would be too easy, though.”
Photo: Storm clouds
Poem: Chad Abushanab, “Missing”
