14 min read
December 19, 2024
A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration . . .
Dear Intelligent American,
This space has a particular admiration for the works of amigo David Bahnsen, man of finance, acclaimed author, and a public intellectual to boot. And: a strategist who gets results. In World Magazine, Jerry Bowyer explains David’s role, partnering with the good folks of Alliance Defending Freedom, in successfully challenging mighty Walmart to change its ingrained DEI ways. Read about it below.
Good intentions are fine, when not paving the road to Hades, but when deployed with smarts and purpose, well, change—the good kind—can happen. And did. What a nice present for America. Thanks, paisan.
This missive is the last Civil Thoughts arriving before Christmas. Your Favorite Newsletter will next appear accompanying three French hens. In the meantime, may faithful friends gather near to you and yours once more.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!
Read These Before You Settle Down for a Long Winter’s Nap
1. At Plough Quarterly, Johann Huleatt makes the case for wise friendship and a love of virtue. From the piece:
As fellow citizens, we have weathered our fair share of storms in the past decade, from a pandemic to hurricanes. Such shared experiences ought to have formed reservoirs of goodwill and trust that we might tap into to propel our society toward a future of camaraderie.
But something has gone wrong. Cicero, again, sounds strikingly familiar: “Our political practice has already swerved far from the track and course marked out for us by our ancestors.” What is the main problem, in his view? What has permitted this deviation from the good practice of the citizens of the old republic, and its slide into tyranny and toward empire? It sounds so familiar: “I seem now to see the people estranged from the Senate, and the weightiest affairs of state determined by the caprice of the mob. For more people will learn how to start a revolution than how to withstand it.”
Above all, Cicero says, it is the friendships of wise and virtuous citizens which preserve a state. Considering the lives and friendships of good citizens of the earlier republic, “it is impossible for us even to suspect any one of these men of importuning a friend for anything contrary to good faith or to his solemn oath, or inimical to the commonwealth. Therefore, let this law be established in friendship: neither ask dishonorable things, nor do them, if asked.” To preserve the republic, we must first mend our friendships; to mend our friendships we must become citizens of virtue.
2. More Plough: Alex Sosler reports from the intersection of beauty and vo-tech. From the article:
In response, a group of inspired educators founded the American College of Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston. Their vision is to restore the crafts of tradesmen and tradeswomen. Modeled after the French system of the Compagnons du Devoir, they are trying to reproduce the medieval guild system in the contemporary world. A guild did two things. First, it policed its craft. Guilds, rather than the government, set and oversaw standards, deciding who was qualified and what was quality. (True, there was limited entry access; today, thanks to a push toward equality, disadvantaged people, women, and minorities can more freely enter the trades, and we are better for it.) Second, training was open and shared. Because apprentices were part of the guild, they had a wealth of resources to draw on and masters to learn from. Unlike today’s business world, it was not primarily competition that spurred the guilds forward, but a desire to do good work and become better craftsmen.
Rather than teach quick, easy processes with cheap materials, ACBA aims to train men and women to create and preserve beautiful, lasting structures. As you walk around its small campus underneath an overpass in downtown Charleston, you notice that the building is decorated with projects from students and professors. Architectural carpentry students made the entry doors. A chandelier made by blacksmiths hangs over the entryway. When I visited, students were working on a plaster installation. These final projects “proved” students belonged to the guild and could enter the workforce performing quality work worthy of respect. The building was beautiful—and the beauty was developed in-house.
3. At Civitas Outlook, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney offers caution when asking, “Is Woke Losing?” From the piece:
What, more specifically, lies behind my call to avoid undue optimism regarding the hope for quickly and permanently putting the threat of Woke despotism behind us? To begin with, what the English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton labeled the “culture of repudiation,” that is, active and unremitting efforts to negate the Western civilizational inheritance, is deeply ingrained in education at every level, and in intellectual life more broadly. It will not be uprooted or replaced in one presidential term or two. In a connected vein, gender ideology and the new racialism in the form of the 1619 Project continue to shape the minds of the young and have massive resources behind them. It took decades for mainstream conservatives and centrists to acknowledge the salience of these “civilizational” issues, with many establishment types accommodating themselves to the cultural revolution in the name of a misplaced “moderation.” The necessary “education” of such elites will not happen overnight.
Journalism remains a shipwreck, at once shamelessly partisan and ideological. The pretense of “objectivity,” or at least of balance and fairmindedness, is long gone. The mainstream media from the major networks, the cable networks (except Fox News), and prestigious magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic see authoritarianism and worse at work in every effort of decent and reasonable people to protest or resist the progressivist agenda. The members of the Fourth Estate freely play the “fascist” card and succumb without shame to the reductio ad HItlerum, as Leo Strauss already called it in the early 1950s. Once thoughtful intellectuals such as Anne Applebaum and Bill Kristol have become hysterics, crying “1933” every time the mix of conservatives, populists, and advocates of national sovereignty fight back against the elite consensus or make the most minimal of political gains. New forms of media (think Joe Rogan) have emerged, but legacy media continue to drive and shape a censorious elite consensus.
4. At World, Jerry Bowyer tells of the exploits of one determined man. From the article:
We have been assisting financial adviser David Bahnsen . . . who filed a proposal challenging the retailing giant for making decisions for what appear to be political, rather than business, reasons. While Walmart succeeded in blocking Bahnsen’s proposal, he came back the following year and, in coordination with Alliance Defending Freedom, challenged the company’s lack of respect for viewpoint diversity and religious freedom among employees. The company vigorously denied the problem, and we vigorously denied their denial. Despite a failure to come to any substantive agreement, Walmart did request information from ADF on what full protection for viewpoint diversity would look like. It appears that the company now realizes the problems were real, as it has also pledged to significantly modify its offensive and ideologically driven diversity training programs and refocus on belonging instead of diversity.
Bahnsen recently filed a proposal challenging the company’s membership in GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media), a consortium of companies that pledged (before it shut down earlier this year) to limit advertising in ways that amounted to discrimination against conservative media. This will be a great opportunity for Walmart to show that it is serious about getting back to political neutrality. A good next step would be to offer specific faith-based employee resource groups instead of the current airport interfaith chapel “to whom it may concern” faith-based groups.
5. At First Things, theologian Carl Trueman explains why he is not Catholic. From the reflection:
J. Gresham Machen, the Presbyterian controversialist who came to prominence in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, argued that confessional Protestantism and Roman Catholicism were separated from liberal Christianity by, among other things, their commitment to supernaturalism. (Both agreed that the tomb was really empty on the third day.) In other words, the former were species of Christianity while the latter was a completely different religion. I would update his critique today by saying that liberal Christianity need not necessarily deny the supernatural. It can also be characterized by a commitment to the supernatural that is nonetheless eclipsed by the natural. It has a concern for the immanent and no real use for the transcendent. Joel Osteen is a fine Protestant example of this: I see no reason to doubt he believes in the Resurrection, but the doctrine is at best merely instrumental to his vision of Christianity, a means toward achieving personal happiness and material success. The same applies to those, left and right, for whom party politics and influence in D.C. seem far more important than the rather less exciting realities of everyday Christian worship, catechesis, and discipleship.
Ironically, Pope Francis seems to fit into this Protestant liberal paradigm too. I have numerous friends who have swum the Tiber over the last decades, mainly for intellectual or aesthetic reasons. Ironically, the intellectual heft of historic Catholicism and its enviable aesthetic achievements seem to be the very things that the pope regards with indifference. And both of these seem to connect to that telltale sign that always presages trouble in Christian circles: a loss of the transcendent in favor of the immanent.
6. At Sapir, Richard A. Shweder tells of “Humboldt’s Gift” of an enlightened vision for the modern university. From the piece:
You can see the connection: The university’s core mission of pursuing and expanding knowledge is hindered by any constraints on that pursuit or its articulation.
That spirit was certainly present in 1973 when then–President Edward Levi welcomed me (and other new faculty) to the University of Chicago. He assured us that provocation and skepticism in the context of reasoned debate were virtues at the university we had joined, even more so when those debates dared to raise taboo questions, engage dangerous ideas, or lead to upsetting conclusions. He may well have had Socrates in mind as he spoke.
Levi’s view of the mission of the modern university is likely to drop the jaw of most contemporary university presidents. Behold what he declared to the members of the Citizen’s Board of the University of Chicago in a 1967 address. He told them that the university’s goal is not to be popular with the public, or to weigh in directly on political or commercial matters. Nor is it to develop industrial innovations, challenge the injustices of the world, or be a pipeline for the training of professionals. He told them that the university’s true mission is not moral, but intellectual: “improving the stock of ordered knowledge and rational judgment.”
7. At Man of Steele, Eli Steele finds hoopster phenom Caitlin Clark’s claim of “white privilege” to be a victim of victimization. From the commentary:
I don’t doubt Clark’s sincerity here. I can’t say for a fact so I have to assume here that her way of thinking is largely due to her generation — she was born in 2002. She grew up in times when race was more ideological than a reality. The words that Clark spoke were not her own words, words earned through actual experiences, but words that are ideological constructs crafted over the years by racial justice activists. This great athlete who honed her own individual style of play into one of such charisma that it draws major crowds, was simply conforming to cliched racial mantras.
I have a feeling that it sounded pleasing and virtuous to her ear and ego when she told Time, “The more we can elevate Black women, that’s going to be a beautiful thing.”
Who’s the “we” here? White people? Whether she realizes it or not, she repeats here the old stigma of blacks as a perpetually helpless and discriminated against people who need elevating by others. Did Magic need Larry to elevate him? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar by Bill Walton? KC Jones by Pat Riley? And on. It is beyond time to retire this black victim-white savior insult once and for all.
8. At The Epoch Times, Jeff Minick reminds us of the fighting at Bastogne on its anniversary. From the article:
On Dec. 16, 1944, 30 German divisions smashed into U.S. and British forces in the heavily wooded Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg. The Germans counted on bad weather as their ally for this breakthrough. The predicted snow fell, and mists and clouds choked the skies, rendering air support for the Allies impossible at times. Record-low temperatures and freezing rain added brutality to the deadly massive brawl that ensued.
“I was from Buffalo, I thought I knew cold,” Baseball Hall of Famer Warren Spahn wrote years later in his autobiography. “But I didn’t really know cold until the Battle of the Bulge.”
At the heart of what Winston Churchill called “the greatest American battle of the war” was Bastogne, a Belgian town where seven intersecting roads made it vital in the German plan of attack. Typical of countless scenes of the fighting in and around Bastogne was 14-year-old Maria Gillet’s eyewitness account. A wounded American was being carried to shelter at one of the ice-cold, bombed-out buildings. She wrote in her journal: “Where his legs have been, I can see only a shapeless mass of crushed flesh, blood spills onto the floor. My thoughts go to his faraway mother.”
9. At The European Conservative, Michael Locke finds Tolkien has the cure for what ails England. From the beginning of the essay:
One of the most surprising things about reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time is the ending. After spending many hundreds of pages fighting terrifying monsters and vast armies, the protagonists return to their home to find it overrun with a nondescript band of ruffians. The penultimate chapter is spent recounting the struggle to return the Shire to its previous condition, a process that involves rousing the demoralised hobbits to overthrow the rabble who have taken control of their land.
On the face of it, the small-scale episode is something of a comedown from the sweeping drama that occupies most of the novel, and many readers have found it a puzzling or anticlimactic resolution to the story. Tolkien himself claimed that it was integral to the plot, foreseen from the very start. As this reader gets older and returns to the book from time to time, I find myself in agreement: far from being an unsatisfying addendum to the real action, the Scouring of the Shire is the very heart of the book, and it offers a sobering insight both into the post-War country Tolkien inhabited, as well as the deep corruption of contemporary England.
Some themes are particularly resonant. Rather than being occupied by a foreign army, the Shire’s corruption is sustained mainly from within. Although we discover that the origin of the rot lies in the meddling of the wizard Saruman, it is primarily the hobbits who operate the institutions of the revolution, something that appals the returning heroes. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” says Sam to a hobbit working for the regime. “You can give it up, if it has stopped being a respectable job.” “We’re not allowed to,” comes the miserable answer. A kind of madness has descended over the land, compelling ordinary people to engage in organised oppression of their own kind. Some of this is due to fear, but perhaps the greater motivation is simply a kind of numb shock: no one knows precisely why or how the Shire has changed, but suddenly it has, and once all the light and song has drained out of it there is no resisting the new dispensation.
10. At Law & Liberty, Jerome Foss explains how FDR reinvented the Bill of Rights as a distinct—and, to his New Deal scheme, politically beneficial—aspect of constitutional influence. From the essay:
The War, no doubt, gave FDR’s elevation of the freedoms of the first ten amendments a rhetorical appeal, emphasizing a Bill-of-Rights Constitution rather than a Separation-of-Powers Constitution cleared the way for the sorts of policies implicit in FDR’s progressive vision of American public policy. This explains much of the ambition of the early New Deal legislation that largely ignored the traditional limitations on congressional authority, such as the non-delegation doctrine and federalism. The Court struck down the cornerstone of FDR’s New Deal, because it violated these institutional limitations. In response, FDR proposed packing the Court with his own nominees. Some of FDR’s opponents turned to the idea of a national bill of rights to push back against his Court-packing plan. This may have been an attempt to use some of FDR’s previous arguments against him, but it might have also signaled to the public that those arguments rested upon a sound reading of the Constitution—that the Founding generation really did give us a second fundamental text called the Bill of Rights that protects individual liberty. Few at the time seemed to notice that this reading was being pushed to help Americans feel better about increases in federal authority.
Always the master politician, FDR saw an opportunity to reshape the American imagination about the American Founding. He planned a big celebration of the Bill of Rights for 1941, the 150th anniversary of the amendments’ ratification. In preparation, in 1939, he urged Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Georgia—the three original states that did not ratify the ten amendments—to now do so as a symbolic act of national unity and affirmation. They complied, and thereby reinforced the new narrative. The path was laid for the inauguration of a new national holiday.
11. At Spiked, Tom Slater explains how Britain has been engulfed in censorship. From the piece:
Britain hasn’t been suddenly turned into a dictatorship by newly elected prime minister Keir Starmer, as some of the more wild-eyed voices on X might have you believe. But we have been engaged in a decades-long, deeply illiberal experiment in policing ‘hate speech’—which is now making us an international laughing stock.
The offence of inciting racial hatred, of which Pearson was accused, was first created in Britain in 1965, with the passage of the Race Relations Act. This notion that it was the role of the state to define and police hatred—that, in essence, censorship was our path to racial harmony—was enshrined in law and elite culture.
This sits in stark contrast to the United States. It was in the 1960s—amid the civil-rights revolution, the bottom-up demand from black Americans for their rights—that the expansive free-speech protections Americans now enjoy were won. Until then, the First Amendment had essentially been a dead letter—gifted by the Founders but never enforced in practice.
The project of speech policing and thought control was embraced enthusiastically by Tony Blair’s government. In 2006, the then New Labour government passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, introducing the offence of ‘incitement to religious hatred’. Were it not for a successful campaign to rein in that legislation, led by comedian Rowan Atkinson, it would have criminalised ‘abusive or insulting’ language about religion, too.
12. At The Giving Review, Michael E. Hartmann argues that Trumpian pledges to move federal agencies from Washington to the hinterlands might be a welcome idea for conservative nonprofits ensconced in the nation’s capital. From the piece:
“Swamp” is perhaps the most-familiar metaphor for the national capital city, where so much power—existing and desired, institutional and personal—resides. As part of “draining it,” some conservatives have suggested that a federal-government department and agency or two be relocated from Washington, D.C., to elsewhere. Geographic diffusion of the power, the thinking goes, might change the way in which it’s so overbearingly and sometimes arrogantly exercised. The resulting less physical distance from, and more awareness of and responsiveness to, everyday Americans in the heartland would be beneficial. . . .
Might conservative D.C. think thanks, other nonprofits, and activist organizations benefit as well from less distance between them and, and more awareness of and responsiveness to, the everyday’ers in the heartland? Isn’t what’s good for the “goose” of government good for the “gander” of these groups, too? There might have been less flat-footedness among them during and in the wake of 2016, among other things.
Let me just suggest Green Bay, Wis., for example. It’s a great place with nice people, and might be worth considering. It’s got industry, is easy to get to and from, and has affordable housing options. In addition to the successful football team, moreover, it has a superb symphony. Outdoor recreational opportunities abound, though more in Summertime. Climatologically, it’s not really even conducive to much swampiness.
Lucky 13. At Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, Andrew Guckes reports on a growing local nonprofit—coming off a successful fundraiser—that helps the disabled. From the story:
When Zev and Chani Baram founded the charitable organization Philly Friendship Circle two decades ago, they were just two young professionals who thought they could use their time to positively impact the community. Twenty years later, the organization is thriving and on the heels of hosting a fundraising walk event last month that garnered more than 650 attendees. Needless to say, things have gone well for Philly Friendship Circle since the early 2000s despite operating in the competitive nonprofit space.
“My husband and I are co-founders, and we’ve built this organization from [consisting of] just two friends paired together to now hundreds of people being involved,” Chief Relationship Officer Chani Baram said. “Our model is all about bringing different segments of the community together and bringing together friends of all abilities.”
The organization primarily organizes events that unite children, teens and families with peers that have some sort of disability. These functions afford both parties a valuable experience. For the disabled, they get the chance to bond with others and enjoy traditional social activities that they might otherwise be discouraged from taking part in. For the abled, they are given the chance to learn about someone else’s experience and hopefully understand the difficult reality of a disabled person’s everyday life a little better.
Bonus. At RealClear Religion, Andrew Fowler wonders about Luke—Gospeling Greek and recounter of Things Nativity. From the reflection:
Yet Christ’s birth shares similarities to Greek myths—but was that purposeful? Just as God subverted the Roman Empire’s rule, did he, in his divine providence, turn the Greek myths on their head? After all, as the Catechism states, God is an author. He is an artist, deploying literary devices like parallels, symbolism and foreshadowing, with setups and payoffs, throughout the Old and New Testaments. (Jesus’ parables certainly demonstrate the mastery of effective storytelling.) Therefore, for him to use already established and popular story frameworks like those in Greek myths, but transform them into something illuminating and true, cannot be completely dismissed. In essence, Christ’s birth mirrored the Greek myths to draw the Gentiles’ attention to the Gospel, while revealing his awesome majesty in time and in history.
Indeed, truth is stranger than fiction. The cynic, therefore, misses the point when trying to dismiss Christ’s divinity—or as a real figure who walked the earth—when highlighting the similarities between the Nativity and Greek myths. God, through St. Luke, knew exactly who he was speaking toward: to the Gentiles who starved for a Creator who truly loved them. He expressed this love in a way that resonated with those unfamiliar to his voice. Luke converted after hearing Christ’s story. So have billions hence.
Humans love a good story, and the Nativity, two thousand years later, still remains as beautiful and powerful as ever, inspiring Christians and today’s “Gentiles” to awe, wonder, love and hope.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Esther Larson and David Bass declare that the time for philanthropists to seriously fund mental-health care is now. Read it here.
Due. The Center for Civil Society hosts its important “In the Trenches” Master Class on Strategic Planning this January 30th, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern, via Zoom). Nonprofit leaders who are contemplating the need for, and the benefit of, having an actionable strategic plan would be well advised to attend. Get more information right here.
Tre. More PD: The wonderful Maria D’Anselmi tells all about Heritage Foundation’s “Innovation Prizes.” Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What do you call Santa’s little helpers?
A: Subordinate Clauses.
A Dios
Fascinating, no, why the shepherds were sore afraid? What they saw in the sky were not drones!
Merry Christmas to All, and Tiny Tim Too,
Jack Falalalala, who will be yearning for Seven Fishes and baccala cakes at [email protected].
