Thought of the Day - "Bari Weiss and The Fight for the West"

 Sixty years ago tomorrow President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Most of us remember where we were. I was in a college classroom, when I saw the American flag being lowered to half-mast. It seemed impossible that a young, attractive, vibrant President could be dead. Four of our Presidents have been assassinated, the first three within a traumatic thirty-six-year period: Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1881, and McKinley in 1901. 

 

On a cheerier note, we are two days from celebrating Thanksgiving, that special American holiday when the Pilgrims gave thanks to God for having survived their first winter and for the bounty of their harvest. We, too, owe thanks to God for the bounty that is ours, but more important to all those who came before that we might live freely in this exceptional nation.

 

I hope you are able to spend it with family and friends, for they are the glue that secures our civilization. Caroline and I will be at our daughter’s with her family, and with our younger son and his family – twelve in all.

 

Happy Thanksgiving! Sydney

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Bari Weiss and The Fight for the West”

November 21, 2023

 

“There is no place like this country. And there is no second America to run to if this one fails.”

                                                                                Bari Weiss (1984-)

                                                                                Speech, Federalist Society’s Barbara K. Olson’s Memorial Lecture

                                                                                November 13, 2023

 

Civilizations may be compared, but they are not comparable. Freedom, equal rights, rule of law, living standards, property rights vary considerably among cultures. None is perfect, as man is not perfect. But the West, as defined as Australasia, Europe, and North America[1], has provided the fairest system and the best opportunities for the aspirant, which is why so many have chosen to immigrate to those nations. The West traces its origins to classical Greece and ancient Rome. Judaism is often cited as the first monotheistic religion.[2] And Christianity was birthed in the eastern Mediterranean basin. Over a 2,300-year period, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, and others gave voice to the West’s culture. It was enhanced by the Enlightenment (1585-1815), with individuals like Shakespeare, Locke, Adam Smith, Rousseau and founding fathers of the United States: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Novelists like Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and scientists like Charles Darwin and Marie Curie added to its stature, as did artists like Michelangelo, Titian, and Rembrandt; and composers like Mozart and Beethoven. 

 

The West is not just a physical place. It was (and is) an idea – here in the United States it was (and is) an experiment in self-government, embedded in a melting pot of free people. Today, we who live in the West are beneficiaries of three thousand years of Western culture. We are fortunate to live in countries with the greatest individual freedom and the highest standards of living. We thank those who came before us, who fought and persevered for our liberties. Yet it has become popular, in recent times, to denigrate the West, to focus on its weaknesses, mistakes, and limitations, and not on its strengths and its slow move toward equality, justice, and fairness – to sublimate the individual to the group with which he or she identifies.

 

…………………………………………………..

 

Bari Weiss defends the West. She is remarkable – a journalist, writer, and editor, who describes herself as a “liberal uncomfortable with the excesses of left-wing culture...a left-leaning centrist.” However, Vanity Affairdescribed her as a provocateur and other publications claim she is a conservative. From my perspective, she is commonsensical.

 

She is the founder of The Free Press and hosts the podcast Honestly. She is young, a 2007 graduate of Columbia University, first hired as a Bartley Fellow that same year by The Wall Street Journal. The next year she became a Dorot Fellow in Jerusalem. She worked at The Wall Street Journal until 2017 when she was hired by The New York Times. In 2020 she penned a public resignation letter to the publisher, Mr. A.G. Sulzberger. She wrote of a new consensus having emerged in the press, “…especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

 

But it is her November 13 speech at the Federalist Society’s Barbara K. Olson’s Memorial Lecture that demands focus. Her subject was the fight for the West: “You Are the Last Line of Defense.”[3] The speech should be read in its entirety, but it is worth reviewing. She spoke of the “civilization war we are in” – including an ongoing war against Islamic terrorism. Barbara Olson, on American Airlines flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon, was murdered by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001. Twenty-two years later, on the morning of Shabbat, Hamas terrorists, in “a scene from the history of the Nazi Holocaust,” raped, mutilated, and butchered 1,200 Israelis. She drew attention to differences in reaction to the two events. Twenty-two years ago the world was horrified. On October 8, people took to the streets. They “rejoiced on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York.” “The social justice crowd,” she said, “– the crowd who has tried to convince us that words are violence – insisted that actual violence was actually a necessity.” She spoke of university presidents who, lucidly (and correctly) condemned George Floyd’s killing, now “offered silence or mealy-mouthed pablum about how the situation is tragic and ‘complex.’” 

 

She spoke of how antisemitism has moved “from the shameful fringe into the public square.” But, as she noted, it is not just about Jews: “It is an early warning system that society itself is breaking down.” She argued that we have lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil and that we have replaced ideas with identity, debate with denunciation, and “the rule of law with the fury of the mob.” She spoke of how this inverted worldview swallowed “all the crucial sense-making institutions of American life:” universities, media, cultural institutions, major corporations, high schools and elementary schools. It is a world view that “measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity.” Merit, hard work, aspiration, talent take a back seat to “unearned privilege.” In Gaza today, Israel and the Jews are “powerful and successful…, so they are bad; Hamas is weak and coded as people of color, so they are good.”

 

“So,” she asks, “what do we do?” Her answer: First, “we must recover our ability to look and discern.” We must distinguish between good and bad, between just and unjust. We must remember that it is “human beings – not cultures – [that] are created equal.” Second, the law must be enforced: “Everyone needs equal protection, not only of the law, but from forces of chaos and violence.” Third, double standards regarding free speech, especially at universities, must be eliminated. For too long, they have played favorites “based on the speech they prefer, and the racial group hierarchies they’ve established.” And fourth, she said you must “accept that you are the last line of defense and fight, fight, fight.” It is, she added, “time to defend our values – the values that have made this country the freest, most tolerant society in the history of the world – without hesitation or apology.

 

……………………………………………..

 

Our democratic system is fragile. It is one that has, historically, welcomed criticism. However, there are those who, in the pursuit of personal power, would destroy what time, “blood, sweat, and tears,” and ideals have created. President Reagan used to warn that democracy was always one generation away from failing. On September 17, 1787, in response to a question by Elizabeth Willing Powel as to what the Constitutional Convention had created, the 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin, replied: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Our system of government, born in the Age of Enlightenment, is a political manifestation of Western civilization and its values. Threats to it by those ignorant of history are real, especially when those threats come draped in the language of social justice. We must respond affirmatively to Franklin’s assertion. Bari Weiss is doing her part to keep alive the ethics and standards that the West gifted us. We must do our part.  

 

---

---

[1] In defining the West, some include western Russia, along with Central and South America. 

[2] Others claim the first monotheistic religion was Zoroastrianism in Persia.

[3] Her speech: https://www.thefp.com/p/you-are-the-last-line-of-defense

 

More Essays from Essex - "Downsizing"

 I have been working on a Thought of the Day, which I hope to get out early next week. But in case it does not come together, I want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving. Just don’t eat too much and travel safely.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Downsizing”

November 18, 2023

 

“I believe your home tells a story about who you are and who you aspire to be. We represent ourselves

through the things we own…We should surround ourselves with things we care about, that have meaning.”

                                                                                                                                Nate Berkus (1971-)

                                                                                                                                Interior Designer

                                                                                                                                New York Daily News, May 2, 2023

 

At some point, almost everyone downsizes. It is said we amass too many things over our lifetimes. But getting rid of stuff is not easy. It is the subject of a new play I Need That by Theresa Rebeck starring Danny DeVito as Sam, the hoarder. And “hoarding is a damaging psychological condition, and not just an annoying habit,” according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, quoting researchers at Stanford University. 

 

For most, downsizing occurs in one’s later years, when the house where children were raised becomes too large – too much for aging muscles and bones. For us that happened in 2015 when we put our home in Old Lyme on the market. It was a house we had designed and built between 1991 and 1993, when we moved east from Greenwich. It sits on nine acres, on the estuary of the Connecticut River about a mile north of its mouth, where salt water from incoming tides dominates fresh water flowing south. 

 

By the time we sold the house and moved, Caroline and I had been married for over fifty years, raised three children and were grandparents of ten. We have always been collectors; so living amidst the antique and used-bookstores of eastern Connecticut, as well as living in the art colony of Old Lyme, was like catnip to a kitten. Given the length of our marriage and our collecting habits, we ended up with a lot of stuff. Moving from a 5,500 square foot house to a 1,450 square foot apartment meant adjustments.

 

Nevertheless, for us the process was relatively painless. Our biggest problem was unloading a few thousand books. Many were taken by our children. A few were sold. About two thousand were donated to the local library, and approximately 700 accompanied us to Essex Meadows.

 

We were fortunate. Our three children appreciate “brown” furniture, as long as drawers on old bureaus work, and one can sit on a caned chair without falling through. Their homes have walls on which pictures were hung, floors on which rugs were laid, cabinets that accepted curios, and shelves that took in books. And we did our share. Minimalists we are not. A few might use the word “clutter” to describe our apartment, but to us our “treasures” are treasures. On our walls, including the hallway outside our apartment, hang almost 200 photos and pictures. And I confess there are a few dozen books that have been relegated to the floor. As a son of sculptors, we have examples of my parents’ work, including rubber animals, which in mid 20^thCentury were sold to schools around the world under the name Red Shed Rubber Animals.

 

So, while downsizing may be necessary, it does not mean we have to live like monks. Chacun à son gout, as my mother-in-law used to say. We empathize with Sam and his “castle of clutter.” As for researchers at Stanford, we justify our squirrel-like habit by arguing that collecting is not the same as hoarding. Books, pictures, furniture, objects carry memories. And, as Nate Berkus said, they reflect who we are.

"Moral Clarity"

 I hope this essay does not come across as narcissistic or sanctimonious. Certainly, no one should read into this essay that I am an example of moral righteousness, for I am not. But it is a subject which many of us think about, especially now with both political parties being held hostage by extremists, with neither side listening to the other and with both deliberately misinterpreting what is being proposed; with hatred pervading our elite universities, as seen in a rise of anti-Semitism; and with both presumed presidential candidates lacking a moral spine. Given our time and place, some thoughts on moral clarity seemed timely.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Moral Clarity”

November 13, 2023

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

“Over the years, I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear

and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the strength to

confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil.”

                                           Natan Sharansky (1948-)

   Soviet dissident and Israeli politician

                                          The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, 2004

 

Critics of “moral clarity” claim the world cannot be divided into good and evil, that there are too many nuances. As well, these critics tell us that the words “moral clarity” suggest exclusionary views, such as that expressed in the phrase, “My country, right or wrong.”

 

In my opinion they misunderstand the words, as they assign a moral equivalence based on claimed beliefs. The fact that Nazis justified the extermination of the Jewish people as a means to achieve a pure, Aryan race was an act of pure evil, as was their concept of lebensraum. It was evil that drove Hamas terrorists to parachute in and slaughter Jewish civilians, including children, in the most horrific manner. None of what they did could be compared to Israelis giving Palestinians two weeks to leave northern Gaza before sending in armed forces to ferret out terrorists in tunnels beneath Gaza City’s civilian population. Moral clarity is the ability to think clearly about good and evil, of what is right and what is wrong. There are times when wars are fought for good causes. Moral clarity implies the existence and ubiquity of evil.

 

However, among the extreme Left, the words have become pejorative, as they associate them with American conservatives. They link them to Ronald Reagan, whose popularity has never sat well with the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, and they were popularized by William Bennett in Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, a book that highlighted the tension between good and evil. Moral clarity demands the United States has a strong defense, the ability to confront enemies and support allies.  

 

As Natan Sharansky wrote in the rubric above, the challenge for western democracies is to acknowledge that evil exists. Those living under dictatorships, victims of Ku Klux Klan marauders in the early part of the 20^thCentury, and Jews subject to anti-Semitism today understand how evil infests individuals. In his 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but right through the human heart. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years…It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” That each individual, regardless of race or religion, is capable of evil (as well as of goodness) has long been understood by the clergy. When Jesus was asked by His disciples how to pray, He responded with the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer rooted in the Torah and that includes the line “but deliver us from evil.” Yet there are and always have been nations that use evil to motivate their people, like the Nazis in World War II, and China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea today. They claim some group is intent on denigrating their lives so they must be destroyed, as Nazis said of Jews in the 1930s, and that today the Chinese say of the Uyghurs, Russians say of the Ukrainians, and as Iran’s proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis – say of Israelis. Evil may arise in individuals’ hearts, but it can be manifested in government actions. 

 

In his 1794 book Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Poetical Fragments, Joseph Addison wrote: “No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.” It was with that in mind that on November 11, 1997, Justice Antonin Scalia spoke of the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, not just about what Germans did to Jews, but of how it happened in a nation noted for its civilization – a country that had been a world leader in art, music, science, and the intellect. “To fully grasp the horror of the Holocaust,” he said, “you must imagine (for it probably happened) that the commandant of Auschwitz or Dachau, when he had finished his day’s work, retired to his apartment to eat a meal that was in the finest good taste, and then to listen, perhaps, to some tender and poignant lieder of Franz Schubert.” Evil can appear swathed in clothes of the benevolent. Sinclair Lewis’ dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here comes to mind. Because it can.

 

Our Founding Fathers recognized the presence of evil, which is why they designed a government with checks and balances and judicial restraints. It was not designed to be efficient – efficiency was left to the private sector – but to be deliberative, with decisions and laws based on compromise, arrived at through consensus. The nation they created had many imperfections – the existence and persistence of slavery being the most notable. But they also created a country where justice was allowed, albeit slowly, to rise. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That has been true in democracies, where the people have a say in the government under which they live, but it has not been true in much of the world, where rule of law, property rights, free markets, and equal justice do not exist. And even in western democracies, the move toward justice can be uneven.

 

We hear complaints of the wrongs America has committed, and no one can deny that slavery existed, that native populations were killed and/or mistreated, and that limits were placed on who could vote. Those wrongs existed but were corrected. Time and history must be considered, and credit must be granted for adaption to change. Man was not created pure and good, and neither were nations, but both should be measured on how they adapt over time. Man first appeared perhaps 300,000 years ago. For most of that time he was tribal. It took thousands of years for him to begin living in communities and cities. Survival meant constant wars, and the defeated were often enslaved. Progress was slow and uneven, as we know from earlier civilizations that flourished and disappeared. We who are alive today are fortunate to live where and when we do. Are not Americans better off today than a hundred years ago? And were not most Americans better off in 1923 than in 1823. And were not Americans in 1823 better off than colonialists in 1723? It is not just standards of living that have improved over time, it is that freedom, gradually, was extended to more people – at first to those of non-European heritage, to non-property owners, and then to blacks and women.

 

But we cannot be complacent. As Ronald Reagan once said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same…” We should respect this exceptional nation that has lived more closely to dictates of moral clarity than most others. But we should not boast of our fortune. Like religion, we do not have to carry patriotism on our sleeves, but we should not forget that we are an example for the oppressed and dispossessed across the world. We should never be ashamed of who we are.

 

Rape, murder, incest, torture, and robbery are evil in every culture. They and the seven cardinal sins – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth – are the antithesis of moral clarity. We must restrain the evil that is present in each of us and promote the good, which is also within us. Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as moral clarity. It is not a catch phrase or a figment of the imagination. The path toward moral clarity is not always clear. It may be disguised and hard to distinguish; it may be elusive. But, as Justice Potter Stewart once said about pornography, we know it when we see it. Most important, it is a code to live by. 

"Necessary Trouble: Growing Up in Midcentury," Drew Gilpin Faust - A Review

Today is Veterans Day – Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth. It was originally celebrated as Armistice Day, as it marked the end of fighting on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. But as that truce held, the day assumed a new name. Today, in the U.S. we use this day to celebrate all those who have served in the United States Armed Forces. While I have always been pleased that I did serve in the Army, but as one who completed his military obligation with six months of active duty and five and a half years in the inactive reserves, I have always felt guilty of being lumped with those who were in combat, men and women who put their lives on the line for their country.

 

And I prefer the term Remembrance Day, as we should take a few minutes to think of and thank those who did serve, whether in France, Italy, the Philippines, Korea, South Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, or in any place where American soldiers were sent to aid their own nation or that of Allies. And that includes my father who, at age 34 and with four children, served in Italy with the 10^th Mountain Division in 1944-45. Thank God he came home, where he and my mother bore another five children. What we owe them can never be adequately re-paid.

 

…………………………………………………………………..

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

“Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury,” Drew Gilpin Faust

November 11, 2023

 

“This was an issue between me and my conscience

about what was necessary for me to live my life.”

Drew Gilpin Faust (1947-)

Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury, 2023  

 

Socrates, who allegedly said that the unexamined life is not worth living, would have praised this reflection of Harvard’s first female president. While we do learn that the average American family in the mid-1950s “ate 850 cans of food annually,” and that they welcomed innovations like “instant oatmeal, instant coffee and Swanson’s TV dinners,” in this book Ms. Faust examines her responses to the social and cultural tectonic shifts that rattled the 1950s and ‘60s, especially the lives of those white and comfortable. 

 

She was born in Virginia in 1947 to parents steeped in the “benevolent paternalistic concern” toward black servants that characterized wealthy, land-owning whites, at a time when prejudices were hidden “beneath a surface of politeness and civility that scarcely masked the assumption of superiority…” She grew up in the northern reaches of the Shenandoah Valley, where her father raised thoroughbreds and her mother tried to train her to be a lady “in a man’s world.” But she also grew up to the rumblings of dissent, emanating from the Civil Rights and Women’s movements, at a time when the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik questioned America’s leadership in science. She came to her majority as earlier protests became crescendos, when drugs and the sexual revolution seized America’s youth, when the Vietnam War raised questions about the Nation’s commitment and morality, and finally when the non-violence preached by Martin Luther King gave way to violence. 

 

From an early age she had been an activist, fighting for freedom. She writes: “Freedom had been a pressing concern for me from the time I was a small child and first launched battles with my mother about clothes and hair and girls’ rules…There was my gradual discovery that others around me confronted far greater injustices…that freedom meant not just ‘freedom from’ but ‘freedom to.’” At age ten, disturbed by black children being unable to attend her school, she wrote President Eisenhower: “Please Mr. Eisenhower, please try and have schools and other things accept colored people.”

 

The book ends in 1968 when, at twenty-one, she casts her first presidential vote, in protest, for comedian Dick Gregory. But student activists were becoming more violent, which was an aversion to her exposure to Quaker precepts at Bryn Mawr: “One of my greatest challenges as an activist was probably that I was too polite for the revolution…I was much more comfortable with a politics grounded in debate and persuasion, and with power exerted through democratic expression, than with the new performative and coercive style coming to characterize young militants.”

 

Her title comes from John Lewis (1940-2020) who inspired her along with many of her generation to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble,” to effect change. Drew Gilpin Faust went on to get her PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught until 2001 when she was appointed dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and Lincoln Professor of History. Her sound judgement and moral sense are infectious. Her examined life is an antidote for our troubled times.

"Octogenarians on a College Tour"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Octogenarians on a College Tour”

November 3, 2023

 

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give,

to roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live.”

                                                                                                         Hans Christian Anderson (1805-1875)

                                                                                                        The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography, 1847

 

On October 19, Caroline and I embarked on a ten-day 1,694-mile trip to visit four grandchildren in four colleges in two states – North Carolina and Pennsylvania. When we arrived back in Essex on the 29^th, my wife said she would like to do it all over again. Exhausted from thirty-plus hours of driving (and once being hacked), I mumbled incoherently. Even so, it was a delightful trip.

 

The trip began inauspiciously in Darien, where we had spent the first night with our son and his family. Next morning, in the rain, I inadvertently turned north on the Merritt Parkway instead of south. After five miles it dawned on me that, like a horse anxious to return to the barn, our car had decided to go home. Cussing, we turned around and headed south – across the GW bridge and through New Jersey. One hundred and forty miles later we bunked at the Embassy Suites in Newark, Delaware. 

 

Saturday was beautiful, as it would be for the balance of the trip, at least until we got back to Darien. We headed for Richmond and the elegance of the Jefferson Hotel, 212 miles to our south. After a delicious dinner and comfortable night in a room that had a bathroom the size of our library, we headed for the Inn at Elon in Elon, North Carolina. The Inn is on the campus of Elon University, where granddaughter Anna, a senior, adds grace and beauty to a graceful and beautiful campus. Dinner with Anna was at the Inn. On Monday, we drove the 46 miles to Winston-Salem where grandson Jack is a senior at Wake Forest University – a beautiful college on a hill-top. We stayed at the Graylyn Estate, a 20,000 square-foot stone house, adjacent to the campus. (Ads for Camel cigarettes decorated the men’s room.) Jack welcomed us with a pleasant tour of the campus and the apartment he shares with three friends, two of whom joined us for dinner at the Village Tavern. I wonder if he will find accommodations as nice in New York City when he starts work next August.

 

Tuesday was our longest day – 286 miles to Fredericksburg and dinner with Caroline’s nephew. Wednesday, we drove 226 miles to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania where granddaughter Margaret is a sophomore at Bucknell University. We are familiar with the college, as our youngest son and oldest granddaughter are graduates; it was nice to be back, especially with the adorable Margaret as guide.  We had dinner with her at Elizabeth’s on Market Street. On Thursday morning, after a tour of the area with Margaret, we headed for Lancaster, home of Franklin & Marshall College, which this year admitted grandson George as a freshman. George is running cross-country, and we met his coach who had nice things to say. George took us to dinner at Iron Hill Brewery, where he had a soft drink. I had a beer.

 

We came home on Sunday via the Oyster Point Hotel in Red Bank, New Jersey and our son’s home in Darien. What pleasure to see four grandchildren happy and doing well. We arrived back confident that, despite headlines, if these four students are representative of what the nation is producing, our future looks secure. And, best of all, nobody pointed us toward the archaeology department.