I mentioned Lee Harris below. I'm a big fan. His long essay on Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology and its derivative book, Civilization and Its Enemies, are really surprising and interesting takes on the terror war and its stakes that I've passed along to numerous friends and correspondents.

Harris has a new long, long essay in Policy Review that I bookmarked a while back and just now got around to plowing through. It's worth it. Basically, this is a criticism of three defenses of tradition, and an attempt at surpassing them. In his view, progress is guaranteed by tradition, which sounds like a paradox until you consider the role of tradition is (for him) to set an ethical baseline for civilized behavior.

Much of it is dense and he throws around smart-guy names like Popper, Durkheim and Hayek; at the same time it's got light spots which deal with gigantic incestuous cockroaches and Julia Child's recipe for bouillabaise. It's great stuff if you're a brandy-snifter conservative, interested in the pedigree of ideas; but it's also just a useful, accessible introduction into what smart people are saying about tradition and why they think it matters (though Edmund Burke gets short shrift). If that's not your cup of tea, at least skim on down to the last couple sections, starting at "Death to the Exemplary."

Because here's the strange thing: you're not quite sure where this is all going as you read it, but then all of a sudden you realize you're reading a very smart gay man launching a secular, articulate defense of the traditional definition of marriage.

I'll leave you for a while with this great excerpt:
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If the reflective class, represented by intellectuals in the media and the academic world, continues to undermine the ideological superstructure of the visceral code operative among the “culturally backward,” it may eventually succeed in subverting and even destroying the visceral code that has established the common high ethical baseline of the average American — and it will have done all of this out of the insane belief that abstract maxims concerning justice and tolerance can take the place of a visceral code that is the outcome of the accumulated cultural revolution of our long human past.

The intelligentsia have no idea of the consequences that would ensue if middle America lost its simple faith in God and its equally simple trust in its fellow men. Their plain virtues and homespun beliefs are the bedrock of decency and integrity in our nation and in the world. These are the people who give their sons and daughters to defend the good and to defeat the evil. If in their eyes this clear and simple distinction is blurred through the dissemination of moral relativism and an aesthetic of ethical frivolity, where else will human decency find such willing and able defenders?
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Posted by: seedubya at 03:41 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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