tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6148415319738848842023-11-15T22:13:31.911-08:00History GadflyGleaves Whitney on leadership, history, geography, and the American presidencyGleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.comBlogger115125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-48992887643944771482017-10-02T11:47:00.001-07:002018-01-09T10:53:00.909-08:00Tonsor: Western Civ: Socrates<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>Following is my revised lecture on Socrates. It was originally composed when I was a graduate student under the tutelage of Stephen Tonsor at the University of Michigan. </i> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The core idea: Socrates offers a compelling answer to the question of how to be happy and live a good life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>I. Introduction to Socrates</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">One of the reasons that I am a humanist and not a social scientist is that I believe individual human beings can be leaders who make a difference and even change the course of history. One intellectual leader who changed the course of human thought was Socrates. Although he</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> lived 2,400 years ago, he remains a sure guide for the perplexed to this day. He took up the question thoughtful people in the ancient world asked and keep asking to this day: How can I be happy and live a good life?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The answer Socrates offered might surprise many people nowadays because it has nothing to do with having a great career, accumulating awards, or owning things. For Socrates, the key to being happy and to living a good life was to love wisdom above all else. Loving wisdom leads us to </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">act with relentless virtue and to seek the unvarnished truth. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">We know, for example, that we cannot be happy if we act badly and are plagued by a guilty conscience. Instinctively we sense a connection between virtue and happiness.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates also knew that there were social consequences to the quest for wisdom. Because moral and intellectual discipline is so hard, because the "long, arduous apprenticeship of self-mastery" never ends,[1] citizens might begin </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">to question their faith in democracy, for citizens must learn to govern themselves before they can presume to govern others. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>II. A Giant of the Earth</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In a recent <i>Time</i> magazine survey of the most consequential human beings who have ever lived, Socrates ranks 68th. That may not sound spectacularly high until you realize that he is 68th out of 107 billion people who have ever lived.</span><span style="font-size: x-large;">[2]</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> When expressed mathematically -- 68/107,000,000,000 -- Socrates peers down on us </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">like a giant of the earth (because of course he is).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">It's perhaps surprising that he ranks so high. In the first place, Socrates did not leave behind any of his own writings. We only know this enigmatic man through the observations of others -- Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Aristotle -- and these sources are hardly in agreement about the man. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Moreover, Socrates did not do the things that get most people into the history textbooks. He never founded a religion, never founded a nation, </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">never led an army,</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">never held high office,</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">never discovered a new world, never wrote an epic poem, and in fact did not leave us one word in his own hand. He had no career, no money, no school, and likely held public office only once, and then only briefly. He was a man of simple habits who spent most of his waking hours roaming the streets of Athens in search of people who might teach him something important.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">What Socrates did have was a keen intellect that he generously shared with students. Through his students, especially through Plato, this lover of wisdom became one of the most consequential human beings who ever lived.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>III. Three Contexts</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Historians and biographers like to write of the "life and times" of a person. Framing a biographical narrative in its broader context helps readers see things that might otherwise be missed. There are at least three important contexts that help us understand what it was like to be Socrates.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">First is the fifth century BC, a time of remarkable synchronicity throughout Eurasia. Along with Socrates in Athens, there also lived at this time the Buddha in India, Confucius in China, Zoroaster in Persia, and some of the great Jewish prophets in the Middle East including Ezra, Nehemiah, Malachi, and Esther. Countless millions of people </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">down to the present day have</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> been inspired by these religious and philosophical leaders, a few of whom never wrote a word. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">So important was this era to the moral and spiritual development of humankind that the philosopher Karl Jaspers put the fifth century BC at the center of the "axial age," which saw human history turn.</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Second is the Greek intellectual revolution that occurred not just in Athens but in Ionia in Asia Minor. There arose a number of thinkers who today would be called scientists, as they did not resort to the gods to explain what happened in nature but instead used reason to search out what caused earthquakes, storms, seasons, and the proliferation of life. Socrates was not a systematic philosopher. He did not use reason as the pre-Socratic philosophers did, to investigate nature and propose a comprehensive view of the cosmos. Rather, he used reason to explore man's search for the good life, the way ethicists might today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Third is the Golden Age of Athens. This flowering of culture occurred after Athens won a war against the superpower of the day, Persia -- not once but twice (490 and 480 BC). Socrates lived through most of the Golden Age. But the splendor of democratic Athens faded rather suddenly when she and her allies began fighting their fellow Greeks, the Spartans and her allies, in the devastating Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), which exhausted every polis that got caught up in the conflict. The last five years of Socrates's life coincided with a terrible time in Athens. The war had ended, but there were recriminations over who made Athens lose both the war and the peace. An annoying gadfly who was critical of the Establishment made himself an easy target to swat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>IV. Life of Socrates</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Historiographically we cannot avoid the "Socrates problem." Because this gadfly did not himself leave behind any writings, our portraits of him have been colored by others. It turns out the sources lead to two divergent views of the man. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">On the negative side, the comic playwright Aristophanes poked fun of Socrates as a silly but dangerous fellow who was always putting the wrong ideas in people's heads; he was just another sophist. For a fee he would teach students how to be clever and confound his listeners, making the worse argument look better and the better argument look worse. Other detractors were angry that Socrates tore down the authority of the greatest democrats of Athens during the postwar years when the polis desperately needed stability. Because Socrates challenged the status quo, he was thought to be impious, a revolutionary who created new gods. Crowning all these reasons was the charge that Socrates corrupted the youth and thus the future of the weakened city-state. The dastardly Alcibiades had been his student, after all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">On the positive side, Socrates was veritably worshiped by his pupils Plato and Xenophon, who wrote of his sterling character, unimpeachable integrity, and relentless pursuit of virtue. They also admired the fact that their teacher was a skeptic of all received opinion when it came to the Big Ideas -- justice, virtue, piety, love, knowledge, and other notions. Because Socrates was a brilliant conversationalist, he attracted many youth who felt he put the romance in the search for wisdom: The "long, arduous apprenticeship of self-mastery,"[3] according to Socrates, was the most noble thing we human beings undertake.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Historians will never be able to reconcile these two different views of Socrates. But based on Plato's early dialogues and other source material, the following is what we can say with some degree of certainty:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">He was born in Athens in 470 BC. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">His name means "master of life."</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">His father Sophronicus was a stone mason. His mother Phaenarete was a midwife. Later in life, Socrates would compare himself to a midwife: as a midwife mastered the skill or art of delivering babies, so the lover of wisdom mastered the art of giving birth to the truth.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">For the first forty years of Socrates's life, it was glorious to be an Athenian. The recent defeat of the Persians from the east gave the upstart democrats in the West the confidence and energy to unleash their talents. The result was the Golden Age. All through Socrates's childhood and early adulthood, Athens was experiencing a great cultural flowering on the way to becoming the freest, most advanced civilization in the world. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Despite all the beautiful statues sculpted during the Golden Age, Socrates did not fit the physical ideal of the Greek man</span><span style="font-size: x-large;">. The sometime stonemason was short, stocky, and ugly. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Instead of spending his life plying his trade, Socrates was intent on pursuing wisdom. What was knowledge? Opinion? Virtue? Vice? There was no consensus in ancient Greece. Perhaps most striking of all were the irreconcilable teachings of Parmenides and Heraclitus. The former saw reality in terms of being; the latter, in terms of becoming. Faced with these contradictory doctrines, Socrates managed to hold both in dynamic tension. This fact is critical to understanding how his mind worked. Socrates was no ideologue. His accommodation of irreconcilable intellectual tensions led to his trademark skepticism and love of paradox.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The turning point in Socrates's life came when his friend, Chaerephon, went to Delphi to consult the Oracle of Apollo there. The priestess, who was inhaling hallucinatory vapors, told Chaerephon that Socrates was the wisest of men. When Chaerephon later reported this delphic utterance to Socrates, the humble stonemason didn't believe it. He hardly felt wise and he certainly fell short of fulfilling the delphic command to "know thyself." From that point forward, Socrates's mission in life was to determine whether the oracle about his wisdom were true. He went about Athens, in the agora and the neighboring workshops of craftsmen, questioning the smartest people he could find; citizens who, by reputation, were considered wise. What he discovered is that people know lots of things badly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Somewhat late in life Socrates married Xanthippe. She was thought not to have a good temperament and was referred to as</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> a shrew.</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Her husband did not prioritize breadwinning. Socrates apocryphally said of marriage, "By all means marry. If you marry well you will be happy. If you don't marry well you will become a philosopher!" He also urged restraint when criticizing other people's marriages: "No one but the husband and wife knows where the sandal pinches."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">In the <i>Apology</i> Socrates tells us that he and Xanthippe had three sons. At 70 years of age, he reported having a son who was almost grown and two other boys who were considerably younger. That means he started having children after the age of 50.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The second most important woman in his life was apparently Diotima, who he claimed taught him everything he knew about love. I have no idea what that really means and shall leave his mysterious reference to her to your imagination.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">For most of Socrates's early years, life in Athens was good. Then came the Peloponnesian War, the devastating civil war from which Greece never recovered. In the conflict Socrates fought on the side of the Athenian alliance against the Spartans and their alliance. He was what Americans would call a "grunt," a heavily armed infantry soldier or hoplite. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Up to the age of 70, this combat veteran, Socrates, would have no doubt felt pressure to remain in fairly good physical condition because it was expected that men could defend their polis. Nevertheless, he was showing signs of old age at his trial.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Despite physical limitations, Socrates walked the talk. He</span> did not scold others for failing to exercise temperance and self-control while excusing himself from the same rigors. He had the capacity to endure Herculean physical discomforts for others' sake. One story relates how he gave his sandals to a fellow hoplite who was suffering in the snow. Socrates, barefoot, endured the ordeal cheerfully and without complaint. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates always consumed wine in moderation and never got drunk. This trait may be one reason that he was able to resist sexual advances and never be seduced. In Plato's <i>Symposium</i>, the reader gets the idea that Alcibiades had a crush on Socrates and tried to seduce his teacher on numerous occasions, without success. Indeed, Socrates urged people to keep romantic love in proper perspective. A much better outlet for the heat of passion is to pursue truth and virtue, wisdom and beauty -- relentlessly pursue them like a man in love. Ultimately he argues that the most worthwhile endeavor a human being can undertake is the arduous search for wisdom, for wisdom is the foundation of the good life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates was a self-described gadfly who believed it his duty to sting Athenians with their own hypocrisy and smallness of soul. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">But he did so with a wonderful sense of humor, often ironic and self-deprecating, sometimes cutting and sarcastic</span><span style="font-size: x-large;">. His funny way of questioning authority attracted an estimable following among the youth of Athens.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Among Socrates's students, as we have seen, was Alcibiades, who was no democrat and who led a naval expedition to ignominious defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Guilt by association was counted against Socrates in the tough years following the war. The relationship with Alcibiades and other critics of democracy no doubt hurt Socrates at his trial.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Since Socrates was relentlessly virtuous, the cowards who wanted to take him down had to fabricate charges. Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon accused Socrates variously of atheism, of believing in gods not sanctioned by the state, and of corrupting the youth of Athens with his own idiosyncratic religious beliefs. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates was brought before a court. After listening to the testimony of both sides, t</span><span style="font-size: x-large;">he jury voted 281 to 220 to convict the old man and sentence him to death. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">About one week after his trial </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">in 399 BC, Socrates </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">drank the cup of poison hemlock in jail, the victim of judicial murder. Soon he became renowned as</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> a martyr for wisdom. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">After the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, the trial and execution of Socrates is arguably the most famous case of judicial murder in world history. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Like Jesus he is a supreme example of someone who lived by his principles, even unto death.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In the popular imagination Socrates is usually remembered for two things: for saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living," and for drinking the cup of poison hemlock at his judicial murder. As we have seen, the two are connected:</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> The Establishment, feeling the sting of Socrates's rebuke after years of war, made him the scapegoat for its incompetence and troubles.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>V. Philosophy of Socrates</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Despite his humble origins, Socrates became a man for the ages. He is justly considered one of the founders of Western philosophy. Even his name is significant, dividing an ancient era in two: the pre-Socratics and what followed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">To be a philosopher in the original, literal sense is to be a "lover of wisdom." Socrates was most definitely that. He was not an academic philosopher in the way we understand the term today; he did not earn degrees or pursue a university career or write articles for peer-reviewed journals. Rather, h</span><span style="font-size: x-large;">e was profoundly curious and largely self-taught,</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> and that made him</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> an original. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates did not create a cosmology or metaphysical system, as many of the pre-Socratic thinkers had. Rather, he pursued the definitions of terms that he believed were essential to living a good life -- piety, justice, virtue, truth, goodness, beauty, love. To define a thing well is the prerequisite to understanding it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates distinguished himself from two types of public intellectuals in his day, the sophists and the pre-Socratics. Despite being accused by Aristophanes of being a sophist, </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates actually had no respect for their ilk. For a fee the sophists taught the sons of the wealthy how to use rhetoric and emotion in self-serving ways. Sophists considered it sport to manipulate people out of their convictions, power, or wealth. In democratic Athens, these cunning men focused on manipulating others instead of doing the hard work of reforming themselves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates was also different from the pre-Socratics. These "scientists" in Asia Minor were doing something new, searching out natural explanations for phenomena that had previously been explained by myths since time out of mind. As pioneering as these thinkers were, Socrates did not show much interest in them. He did not devote his energies to learning from nature; nor from history. He focused rather on how to live the good life in the polis he loved. He said his "teachers" were his conscience (his <i>daemon</i>), the men of Athens, and a woman named Diotima. He learned both by listening to his <i>daemon</i> when it warned him away from doing or saying something; and by conversing with the citizens of Athens, putting questions to them, to see in what ways they spoke in error and in what ways truth. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In the pages of Plato, Socrates's conversations tended to follow a pattern. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">1. Socrates would approach a respected citizen or recognized expert in some area -- say, the law. <i>Whom</i> he approached was important. The person had to command social respect. Socrates did not want intellectually to "punch down."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">2. He would open the conversation by saying he wanted to learn more about some Big Idea -- for example, justice -- because he was not wise when it came to knowing what it was. He'd profess ignorance about the Big Idea, the <i>what</i> of the conversation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">3. Socrates would then ask basic questions about the idea of justice to see what the expert would say. Usually the first round of questions would try to establish a philosophically sound definition that always and everywhere applied, one that did not admit of any exceptions. But because Socrates was a skeptic, no answer offered by his interlocutor ever settled the matter. Every so-called answer just led to more questions. Such dialectical conversation is potentially never ending -- but that is the point. It is hard work to name (and define) things rightly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">4. Never-ending inquiry was just what Socrates sought. Listening carefully to his interlocutor, Socrates would always hear problems with the conventional definitions. Socrates would engage in cross-examination (Greek <i>elenchus</i>) during which he would point out the holes in the expert's definition, or explain why an illustration might be inadequate or an analogy fallacious. At no point in the process would he nastily accuse his interlocutor of being poorly educated -- au contraire. Often he was flattering. But the irony was rich, for the conversation would hold a mirror up to his interlocutor's mind and reveal that the interlocutor was not as educated as he thought he was. Socrates simply let his interlocutor's own words convict him of his ignorance. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">For the Establishment, it was maddening the way Socrates inadvertently humiliated prominent citizens. But it was precisely these democratic leaders who were responsible for the disastrous Peloponnesian War and irreparable decline of a great polis. The result was not good for Socrates: He</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> made enemies in the Establishment and this would prove critical at his trial. Remember, he either implied or told people to their face that "the unexamined life is not worth living." That would be taken as an insult. His persistence in saying such a thing led, when he was seventy years old, to 280 of 501 jurors sentencing him to death by drinking poison hemlock.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In sum, we can say of Socrates the philosopher: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">He wanted us to know the truth to the extent that conversation, reason, and elenchus could uncover it (the concern of epistemology).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">He wanted us to listen to our conscience and to behave in a relentlessly moral manner (the concern of ethics).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">And in the polis he wanted to live in a community that pursued the good life, the virtuous life (the domain of wisdom), because that is the greatest thing men and women can do. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>VI. Impact of Socrates</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">To the everlasting chagrin of his enemies, death did not silence Socrates. He would continue to teach, generation after generation, wherever we encounter the Big Ideas -- of philosophy, of liberal education, of the good life. We get an idea of the scale of Socrates's long-term impact when viewing the Renaissance painting by Raphael, <i>The School of Athens</i>. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtWP7kAWzottyRjjsL-5gfZvow5KuamVltPLF7R-qUO2X1xm5vAoA_awxhsbLdP2TUUh0s68qsmtDUGU1cMXABPhDHJT1qcHKVNgdWToQ0b57V3l3dcA1gBhgXrmMoVN0nvT6si06cVqh5/s1600/83344948bd4d1ef7f77be7c288930282.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtWP7kAWzottyRjjsL-5gfZvow5KuamVltPLF7R-qUO2X1xm5vAoA_awxhsbLdP2TUUh0s68qsmtDUGU1cMXABPhDHJT1qcHKVNgdWToQ0b57V3l3dcA1gBhgXrmMoVN0nvT6si06cVqh5/s640/83344948bd4d1ef7f77be7c288930282.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In his great painting, "The School of Athens," Raphael places Socrates among the figures at the top of the steps. <br />
The gadfly is in the olive robe several figures to the left of Plato and Aristotle, who are conversing.<br />
Why do you suppose Raphael paints Socrates with his back to Plato and Aristotle? </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Decisive for Socrates's future impact was the fact that his pupil, Plato, worshipped him. As Henry Adams observed, there are two ways we impact eternity: One is by having children; the other is by teaching. And did Socrates ever impact eternity by teaching Plato. Plato would memorialize Socrates in some three dozen dialogues. Alfred North Whitehead would say that all subsequent philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates is not only a founder of the liberal arts tradition in the West. Scholars who have studied him are finding ever stronger links to a number of later giants in the canon. There is evidence, for example, that Shakespeare wove Socrates's teaching into <i>Timon of Athens</i>. "Shakespeare's genius," writes Darly Kaytor, "is at least in part due to his uncanny ability to transform [Socratic] wisdom into fully realized dramatic action."[4] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Socrates was a master of irony, of the distance between what seems to be and what is. Socrates often strikes the pose that he knows less than everyone else, when it's quite clear from his conversations with Athenians that he knows more than anybody else. He doesn't go around pounding people over the head with his superior knowledge. Rather he lets others arrive at that conclusion after trying to answer his questions. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Shakespeare was likewise a master of irony, the distance between what seems to be, and what is.[5]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Some 24 centuries after his death, Socrates continues to inspire teachers and thinkers because of the scenes from his life and the way he teaches us today. Again and again in Plato's dialogues, we see that Socrates </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">perfected the art of dialectical conversation with its keen listening and close questioning. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Because of his skepticism toward "conventional wisdom," because of his ability to question every easy answer, he is the "patron saint" of both teachers and students who enjoy drilling deep into a topic in the classroom. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">He is a permanent rebuke to the sophist, a rejection of the person who can make the bad seem good and the good seem bad. Socrates stands for truth.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Indeed, Socrates's life -- his witness, unto death, to truth and virtue -- would make him a hero to all who value a liberal education. A liberal education is that which befits a free human being. This point is worth elaborating. The value of a liberal education is not just that it imparts certain skills -- deep reading, critical thinking, clear communication, and analysis of complex problems through the lenses of different disciplines. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Above and beyond these admirable skills, a liberal education should impart critically important values -- the values Socrates taught by example. His life is a testament to the proposition that "one becomes free only through a long, arduous apprenticeship of self-mastery, generally under the tutelage of those more in possession of the requisite excellences" than the students are. These, then, are the ultimate values of a liberal education: truth and goodness, virtue and beauty, wisdom and the lifelong quest to know.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">So I end on the question that concerns us in this class: Does Socrates deserve to be a role model for your generation? Should precious hours in Western Civ 101 be devoted to teaching future lawyers, engineers, and business leaders who this gadfly was, what he taught, and why he was martyred? I believe so, and my confidence is reinforced every time I reread Plato's <i>Apology</i> and the other early dialogues that tell us about Socrates's life. In Plato's exquisite portrait of his teacher you will come face-to-face with a great human being -- a hero of the liberal arts who implores us to value what is best in us.</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">What do we value?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Hopefully we value our conscience. When it comes to conscience, Socrates speaks of the importance of listening to and obeying that inner voice, that "still small voice" that urges us to do the right thing. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Hopefully we value our character. When it comes to character, Socrates implores us to guard this most precious possession of ours through the relentless pursuit of virtue. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">You don't sell your soul for a quick buck.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Hopefully we value our knowledge. When it comes to knowledge, Socrates prompts us to seek the truth no matter where it might lead, even when it hurts or confounds. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Hopefully we value witnessing to others. When it comes to witnessing, Socrates shows us how a besieged man nevertheless exhibits the courage to stand up to malicious accusers and a corrupt society. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Hopefully we value the democratic way of life, but with due caution. When it comes to democracy, Socrates challenges some of the givens of our day -- above all, our unquestioning faith in popular sovereignty. Today w</span><span style="font-size: x-large;">e keep a scorecard on the progress of democracy around the globe and think of democracy as one of the great achievements of Greek civilization. That's why all democratic leaders like a photo op atop the Acropolis, with the Parthenon as the backdrop. But Socrates was pessimistic about democracy, a critic of mass rule. In Book 6 of the <i>Republic</i> </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">(by Plato), Socrates has a conversation with Adeimantus in which he compares democracy to a ship. Out at sea, with a storm on the horizon, who do you want to captain the ship? Just anyone? Or do you want someone who is well trained in piloting and navigation? Letting citizens vote without a proper education is as irresponsible as letting just anyone sail from port without a chart or training and experience as a captain. Now, Socrates would be tried by a jury of 501 of his peers and unjustly convicted and executed. This is not the way a free government should operate. </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">A free government is only sustainable if citizens can govern themselves. Socrates patiently revealed, through conversations that held a mirror up to fellow citizens, that they did not sufficiently understand such basic concepts as justice, piety, virtue, truth, and goodness when applied to themselves. Yet they presumed to govern others?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Do <i>we</i> presume to govern others?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">Our nation needs the gadfly's sting right here, right now, to rouse us from the complacency in our soul and the corruption in our society. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">__________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">[1] This discerning phrase is from R. J. Snell, "Betraying Liberal Education: A Response to President Paxson of Brown University," <i>Public Discourse</i>, October 2, 2017, at URL http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/10/20175/?utm_source=The+Witherspoon+Institute&utm_campaign=506e63ad9c-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_15ce6af37b-506e63ad9c-84184425. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">[2] Since the original lecture was composed some three decades ago, I felt it important to update the historical ranking in light of the world's larger cumulative population. See URL http://ideas.time.com/2013/12/10/whos-biggest-the-100-most-significant-figures-in-history/. About the survey<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">: "<span style="color: #333333;">Historically significant figures leave statistical evidence of their presence behind, if one knows where to look for it, and we used several data sources </span><span style="color: #333333;">to fuel our ranking algorithms, including Wikipedia, scanned books and Google n-grams.... </span><span style="color: #333333;">When we set out to rank the significance of historical figures, we decided to </span><em>not</em><span style="color: #333333;"> approach the project the way historians might, through a principled assessment of their individual achievements. Instead, we evaluated each person by aggregating millions of traces of opinions into a computational data-centric analysis. We ranked historical figures just as Google r</span><span style="color: #333333;">anks web pages, by integrating a diverse set of measurements about their reputation into a single consensus value."</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #333333;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #333333;">[3] Snell, "Betraying Liberal Education."</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #333333;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #333333;">[4] See Darly Kaytor, "Shakespeare's Political Philosophy: A Debt to Plato in <i>Timon of Athens</i>," at URL https://muse.jhu.edu/article/483647/pdf</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #333333;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #333333;">[5] URL https://markandrealexander.com/2015/07/30/shakespeare-and-plato-the-poetdramatist/</span></span></span>Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-32294252698420942312017-09-15T11:18:00.000-07:002017-12-19T09:17:26.538-08:00Tonsor: US History: Washington, DC<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I was having a beer with a couple of other graduate students. We were looking out onto State Street, enjoying the warm air and kibitzing about our classes during Week One at Michigan. The man across the table swilled his beer and then said, with apparent satisfaction, "There are no more conservative professors in Ann Arbor."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Oh, that's not true," I shot back. "I had lunch with him."</span><br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt66OYBLQBTSaYrsdaKLMqLsnviOzPiWMoIaDhrNSHrDGA3lFBUxgULPGOGckRBUqSn0zbuehKCTumbMv9aEAsAV6L1ABDFisgcpIC15mqFuZrVbFMJKwOnXjRrd72U74zovqqN4T31Z6j/s1600/rackham.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt66OYBLQBTSaYrsdaKLMqLsnviOzPiWMoIaDhrNSHrDGA3lFBUxgULPGOGckRBUqSn0zbuehKCTumbMv9aEAsAV6L1ABDFisgcpIC15mqFuZrVbFMJKwOnXjRrd72U74zovqqN4T31Z6j/s400/rackham.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rackham Graduate School at U of M</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">That comeback may have gotten a laugh, but it pointed to a real problem: the anemic state of ideological diversity among academics in 1987. Not just at Michigan but across the nation, faculty in the social sciences and humanities were overwhelming liberal and voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Political diversity was noticeably absent in Rackham Graduate School, the home unit of history graduate students at the university. Tonsor informed me that he knew of only one other professor in U of M's history department who voted Republican, and with more than 60 profs, our history department was arguably the largest in the U.S.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I hasten to add that, although the other profs I would encounter at Michigan were liberal, my experience in Ann Arbor was not as horrid as what was being reported on many American campuses. Perhaps I chose my classes wisely and had a little luck, but my profs were fair. They challenged but never docked me on ideological or religious grounds, nor did I sense there was ever a political litmus test to win grants or earn good grades. David Hollinger, Raymond Grew, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Tom Tentler, David Bien, Kathleen Canning, Jim Turner, Victor Miesel, Linda Neagley -- I never saw them politicize history in their lectures, classrooms, or seminars. Indeed, it was they who taught me that academic rigor requires intellectual diversity.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">II.</span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The next morning, a Tuesday, I arrived at Tonsor's office in Haven Hall to tell him about an upcoming trip that would require me to miss one of his classes. He was not yet in for office hours, so I looked at the material he'd posted on his door. You can tell a lot about a person by what they post on their door. What caught my eye was a cartoon from the <i>New Yorker</i>. It showed a baseball scorecard of two teams, the Realists and Idealists. In each of the nine innings, the Realists had scored a run or two, while the Idealists had been shut out. Yet the final score was Realists 0, Idealists 13. It made a good laugh all the better knowing who posted the cartoon on his door.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Hello, Mr. Whitney," said Tonsor as he neared his office. I was beginning to learn his tone of voice, that note of deliberation characteristic of his greeting. It was as though he awaited the unwrapping of a pearl. As he flopped his satchel down on the desk, I sat briefly to tell him about my upcoming trip to Washington, DC, in observance of Constitution Day. I could tell that he was genuinely pleased for me, as I had won first place in a national essay contest on American foreign policy in the Middle East.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Visiting the monuments to American leaders and ideals is <i>de rigueur</i>, of course, but at this stage in life I prefer the art museums -- the Corcoran, National Portrait Gallery, and American Art Museum. I do not linger outside in the shadows of all those cold marble exteriors, but stay as long as possible inside our temples dedicated to art. It is where I find 'emotion recollected in tranquility.'"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Speaking of marble," I said, "I'm excited to make a pilgrimage to the Jefferson Memorial, but I was wondering if you knew of a memorial to John Adams."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes, but it's not in marble. It's in the parchment of the Constitution of 1787. As you know, Adams was not in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention. He was in London. But he had drafted the oldest extant constitution in the U.S., the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and his intellectual architecture provided the scaffolding for the framers in Philadelphia.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"An interesting study in contrasts, Jefferson and Adams. Jefferson told Americans what they wanted to hear. Adams told Americans what they needed to know."[1]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I looked at Tonsor quizzically.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"All Americans," he replied, "tend to look at the nation either as disciples of Jefferson or as disciples of Adams. To the Pollyannas, Jefferson wrote what they wanted to hear, that we were a good and exceptional people. He was sunny, optimistic, a <i>philosophe</i> of the Enlightenment, a Republican as radical as Paine, an ideologue in sympathy with the Jacobins who really did think all men were more or less equal at birth. His Lockean intellectual and moral formation made him emphasize not nature but nurture. It was experience and institutions that shaped the man. This is why he put such great emphasis on reform and education, even on the necessity of bloody revolutions to make institutions more enlightened.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Adams, on the other hand, was the spokesman for us skeptics with a tragic sense of life. He was dour, pessimistic, a man of Augustinian temperament, though doctrinally a Unitarian. In his eyes America was not exceptional for the reason that Americans were just as evil, covetous, and lecherous as people anywhere else in the world. Constitutionally a Burkean, Adams revered the achievement of the British Constitution and Common Law to forestall ambitious men grasping at power. Through observation he concluded that men were not equal at birth, and thus he believed nature more powerful an influence than nurture. He had great fear that American democracy would descend into demagoguery, disorder, and decline. The passage of time has vindicated him.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Were Plutarch alive today, he might have made an interesting study in contrasts between Jefferson and Adams. Such a study would invite Americans to decide who got it right, or whether either got it fully right. For myself, I am much more inclined toward Adams than toward Jefferson. In fact, I am occasionally told by his biographers that I am temperamentally and intellectually similar to Adams. He understood history and human nature better than Jefferson did. But what about you, Mr. Whitney? Are you not more -- ?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I honestly do not yet know," I said, sensing that Tonsor was about to indict me for being more Jeffersonian. "I have a lot more reading to do. At this point I know more about Jefferson and like thinking about him as a person. Adams is less approachable to me -- too dark and excitable."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor sat silently in his chair like a block of marble, looking at me with expressionless eyes. I felt judged.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">III.</span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After an awkward moment Tonsor admonished me: "Do not become corrupted by the Imperial City. It's where scholars go to die. As for the conservative movement -- well, it died when it put on a blue suit and went to Washington."[2]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Now that -- that last sentence -- illustrates how Tonsor tossed out seemingly effortless aper<span style="text-indent: 48px;">ç</span>us that left me vexed. I was under the impression that conservatives were enjoying their heyday with Ronald Reagan in the White House. Before I could ask for elaboration, he returned to the matter at hand, and said that we could arrange to discuss the material in History 416 that I'd miss. That was considerate of him -- not every professor was so accommodating.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">On my way out the door, I remarked with a smirk that Cassirer's <i>Philosophy of the Enlightenment</i> was as tough as its billing.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">With an arch smile and a waggle of the head, Tonsor replied, "Among intellectual histories of the Enlightenment, it's Moby Dick. There are easier whales to harpoon, but they wouldn't be as much fun to pursue."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">__________________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] This formulation is also Gordon S. Wood's in talks and in <i>Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson</i> (New York: Penguin, 2017), Chap. 1.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Even though he enjoyed access to the art and to the Library of Congress, Tonsor did not particularly care for Washington, DC. In one of his letters he wrote upon his return from a two-week stint in DC, "I am so pleased to be home. Washington is not my place ... however kind everyone was to me." Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, June 16, 1980, p. 1; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
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Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-25857978759340937742017-09-11T12:29:00.001-07:002017-09-21T05:10:42.244-07:00Tonsor: America: Liberal or Conservative at the Founding?<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">A heavy overcast settled over the Huron Valley. Expecting a cold rain at any moment, I sought shelter in Haven Hall. My hope was to intercept Tonsor coming down from his office, then to accompany him on the</span><span style="font-size: large;"> walk across the Diag to class. I had the proverbial "deep question" for him. Seeing him emerge from the elevator in his Paddington Bear hat, I greeted him and after pleasantries put my subject before him:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Professor Tonsor, I am interested in how you think about the American founding. A political philosopher I'm reading says that America was the product of the Enlightenment, meaning that it was founded as a classical liberal nation. According to this view, conservatism in America is just classical liberalism's 'right wing,' pushing for freer markets in a free-market system and smaller government in a federal system. American conservatives are thus not like European conservatives who, in reaction to the French Revolution, sought to restore the <i>ancien regime</i> with its monarchy, mercantilism, and three orders. Since that old-world conservative tradition never existed in the U.S. after the founding, what we call 'conservative' on this side of the Atlantic looks much different from conservatism in Europe. Do you think that conservatism in America is just classical liberalism's right wing and nothing more?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor responded: "The question, as you ask it, is not well framed. It tries to make the founding an 'either-or' event: liberal or conservative? But the interpretive methods that characterize the humanities encourage us to think not in terms of 'either-or' but in terms of 'both-and.' Complex events elicit divergences of interpretation. Note that I use the plural, "divergences" of interpretation. Given human incomprehension, it is rare to have just one interpretation that is intellectually sufficient.[1]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"We</span><span style="font-size: large;">re we all liberals then? Were we all liberals in 1776 and 1787? That's what you're asking. From the viewpoint of the political philosophers who see the founding as the outcome of debate during the Enlightenment, we were liberal. But is there another way of reading the Founding? Taking in the longer perspective of Western civilization, we might ask: Were we conservative in any sense that is prior to and separate from liberalism? And the answer to that question is, yes, most definitely, if you consider the founders' inheritance from the ancient world and Christendom." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I said, "That longer perspective is what Russell Kirk achieved in <i>The</i> </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">Roots of American Order</span></i><span style="font-size: large;">."[2] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"There are many who have looked at the American founding in a longer perspective -- Wilson Carey McWilliams, for instance.[3] But since you are taken with Russell Kirk's argument, Mr. Whitney, I'd like you to elaborate."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Oh, my. I was taken aback when Tonsor suddenly lobbed the question back to me -- it was unusual for him to do so. But since I was the one who had just teed up Kirk's <i>Roots</i>, I had to run with it. </span><span style="font-size: large;">The ideas in </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">The Roots</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"> were once considered mainstream in the academy,[4] and </span><span style="font-size: large;">I had read the book with enthusiasm before moving to Ann Arbor.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> But in the 1980s the book was hardly ever referenced much less taught in American and Western civ surveys. This presented problems for a graduate student. In the company of the methodological gatekeepers in Michigan's history department, it was best not to cite Kirk's <i>Roots</i> since his thesis was considered out-of-date at best; and racist, sexist, classist, and elitest at worst.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Taking a deep breath I said: "There is truth in the claim of the political philosophers. Since we were the first nation established in the modern age, our political economy was liberal from the start. In the first place, we didn't have a feudal or mercantile economy. We had a modern free-market system that owed much to Adam Smith and the Enlightenment. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Second, we didn't have a feudal or absolutist monarchy. Instead we had a mixed constitution that was the result of enlightened reflection [5] on liberal philosophers like Locke and republican thinkers like Montesquieu; the resulting federated polity balanced the primacy of the individual (seen in the liberalism of the Bill of Rights) with the primacy of civic virtue (seen in the republicanism of the Northwest Ordinance, Article III), and did so within a framework of innovative checks and balances to thwart the tyranny of the majority (seen in the Constitution of 1787). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Third, we didn't have a social order that looked like the <i>ancien regime</i> with its aristocratic privileges, noble titles, and laws upholding primogeniture. Traditionalist European conservatives -- Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Pio Nono -- hated what we were. They condemned 'Americanism.' Our natural aristocracy renewed itself each generation in a relatively mobile society where most could rise due to merit and a little luck. So, yes, in all these fundamental ways, we were not a conservative European nation but a modern liberal one that owed its founding institutions mostly to the Enlightenment."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Fine, but is there another way of reading the founding?" asked Tonsor in his laconic way.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," I said, "there's also truth in the claim that our founding was conservative -- deeply conservative in ways that were prior to and separate from liberalism. Our modern liberal roots, strong as they are, do not tell of deeper roots still. America's deeper cultural roots are revealed in our unwritten constitution, our habits of the heart, and our syncretic worldview -- a fusion that holds in dynamic tension the living traditions of ancient Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, as well as medieval London."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I'm surprised," said Tonsor, "that you stop at medieval London. Remember that Protestant and Catholic thinkers were engaging the Enlightenment in the </span><span style="font-size: large;">seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Archbishop Fenelon, Bishop Berkeley, John Locke, John Witherspoon -- they sift</span><span style="font-size: large;">ed the Age of Reason in light of what Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London had to teach.[6] Out of that dynamic tension, out of that struggle between those who argued for continuity and those who argued for change, emerged the Founders' syncretic worldview. The intellectual leaders of the American founding -- Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Dickinson, Wilson -- stood atop the pinnacle of that worldview." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">One thing about my conversations with Tonsor: He always kept my mind on the stretch. There was no resting with him. I had never read any Dickinson or Wilson and in fact did not know that they were intellectual leaders of the founding.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Dr. Kirk," I said, "does speak to our moral and spiritual formation. When Americans go to church or temple on Sunday, we are walking into the space inspired by premodern, illiberal religions that originated in the Near East between two thousand and three thousand years ago.[7] In theory liberalism is neutral when it comes to religion. It claims to have no necessary or sufficient need for citizens to believe in the God of the Christians or the God of the Jews. Yet Judeo-Christian moral norms and spiritual comfort have been a cornerstone of our culture from the start."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," said Tonsor. "To paraphrase Tocqueville: 'I doubt whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious indifference and complete political freedom. I am inclined to think that if he lacks faith, he will be a subject. But if he believes, he has the chance to be free.' Liberalism, he thought, cannot exist in some theoretical cultural vacuum. It needs religion to prop it up."[8]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Sucking in a larger breath, I said: "Another example Dr. Kirk explores comes from our intellectual formation. When young Americans read Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others who inform our defense of reason and discourse, they are entering a space inspired by premodern, pre-liberal philosophies that originated in the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago.[9] Liberalism does not mandate what must be taught. It tries to be value free when it comes to knowledge. It claims to have no necessary or sufficient need for citizens to pursue the ancient classics that originated prior to and separate from liberalism. Yet we know that deep engagement with the 'great books' expands the competence of citizens to assess the human condition and to judge current events."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor weighed in: "So it seems that, in addition to religion, liberalism needs the interior reflection encouraged by the humanities to prop it up." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I think so, yes," I said in agreement. "Still another example in Kirk comes not from the Anglo-Saxons so much as from medieval England after the Conquest. Liberals would like to take credit for many of the developments that have contributed to ordered freedom in the modern age -- the common law, <i>stare decisis</i>, Parliament, <i>habeas corpus</i>, trial by jury, and other individual rights that were later adopted by liberalism.[10] In truth, they cannot. There was no -ism called liberalism when these rights and innovations appeared in the Middle Ages. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Yet their absence today would be unthinkable in liberalism's public square."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor objected: "Stop right there. Using the term, 'public square,' is such a banal descent into cliche."[11]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Okay," I said, trying to disguise my pique. Unfortunately, I was becoming used to Tonsor's gratuitous criticism of the way I said things. At the same time, I figuratively slapped my forehead since the word "okay" also made him peevish. If ever I wanted to drive him nuts I could say: "The public square is okay." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">It was probably a good thing that I did not have time to dwell on Tonsor's peevishness since we had mounted the stairs and were entering the classroom. I was proud of myself for making the case that classical liberalism could not fully account for the American mind. Using Kirk, I had pulled back the curtain on our founders' deeper conservative roots -- evidenced by the living traditions they embraced from Semitic Jerusalem, Mediterranean Athens, cosmopolitan Rome, and Germanic London. Conservatism was not just the right wing of classical liberalism but something much richer.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After Tonsor slapped his satchel down on the table at the front of the class, he came back to the desk into which I was settling. "You know, Mr. Whitney, we must talk more about <i>The Roots</i>. It's a beautiful work in conception but a flawed work in execution."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">My professor's words reminded me of something I'd read between Fort Collins and Ann Arbor the previous summer. At the beginning of the road trip to Michigan I had grappled with Tonsor's "The United States as a 'Revolutionary Society,'"[12] and it occurred to me then that his 1975 essay might be a critique of Kirk's 1974 book. Both were written in anticipation of America's bicentennial celebration, and both sought to plumb the meaning of the American experience. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor's thesis was that the American founding revitalized Britain's governing principles and thus could be seen as a conservative event. However, in the process of revitalizing Britain's governing principles, the American founding also unleashed the ideas of liberty and equality to an unexpected degree. After 1776, the empire of liberty would spread as never before. Also after 1776 and especially after the four Civil War years culminating in 1865 -- what Lord Acton called "the Second American Revolution"[13] -- the empire of equality would spread as never before. The American founding, paradoxically, was just as much an act of revolution as it was an act of conservation. Looking back, Kirk had focused on the American founding as a fusion of the living traditions of four old cities -- Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. Looking forward, Tonsor saw the American Revolution as a launchpad that took man's aspiration for more liberty and more equality to new heights. It was both-and: both a conservative and an innovative event; both a stroke for liberty and a stroke for equality.</span><br />
<i><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i><span style="font-size: large;">Given my admiration for both men, I needed to come to terms with the tension between Kirk's and Tonsor's interpretation of the founding era. Each in his own way seemed to sound the right note. Could their notes be harmonized? <i>The Roots</i></span><span style="font-size: large;"> was one of my favorite works of history, plumbing the subjects I liked to think about most. It played no small part in my decision to pursue graduate studies in history. <i>The Roots</i> was also an important work since it preserved an interpretation of American history that was important to keep alive, somewhere, anywhere, in the postmodern academy that dismissed it amid a swarm of deconstructing "narratives." But Tonsor's insight was also critically important to understanding how America became the country she was. Could I keep the thought of both men in dynamic tension? </span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSZPiVkN6Jds17J-Row6hPpJZs515sT3CoQgKSjbs2jb2IvTbIH6_gXd4dr8D8wDeuxomPQyFdGhZmHA0LNxtb3wDrPsCsUP-l1n0dxjyFXJUnFtA3hQfBQWtmzKEG4prGwMAERD4FwJTz/s1600/51WixePpuFL._SX321_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSZPiVkN6Jds17J-Row6hPpJZs515sT3CoQgKSjbs2jb2IvTbIH6_gXd4dr8D8wDeuxomPQyFdGhZmHA0LNxtb3wDrPsCsUP-l1n0dxjyFXJUnFtA3hQfBQWtmzKEG4prGwMAERD4FwJTz/s400/51WixePpuFL._SX321_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="258" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kirk published the Roots in 1974 in anticipation<br />
of America's bicentennial celebration.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">_________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[1] Tonsor thought that the most difficult problems of modern history did not usually involve <i>what happened</i> but <i>why it happened</i>. Rarely was there just one correct interpretation of why a historical event or movement occurred. Sifting a variety of interpretations was thus a fixity in Stephen Tonsor's thought. He demonstrated appreciation for different interpretations in one of his first publications after graduate school, when he assembled and compared then-current interpretations of Nazism: Stephen J. Tonsor, <i>National Socialism: Conservative Reaction or Nihilist Revolt?</i> (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1959). The pamphlet is in a series called "Source Problems in World Civilization." In a statement that serves as the foreword, the publisher explains that the task of the historian "is essentially one of selection ... for it is only through selection that knowledge can be arranged in meaningful and usable patterns." Tonsor's pamphlet is a selection of the most compelling interpretations of the philosophical and ideological roots of Nazism. Tonsor concludes: "Perhaps the variety and contradiction in the four major interpretations of National Socialism [in this pamphlet] suggest the difficulty involved in reaching conclusions concerning any historical event or movement. Moreover, these are only four among many interpretations.... If the judgments of [conflicting students and historians] are sometimes ambiguous or slow in coming, perhaps the fault lies in mankind's incomprehension rather than in history's opaqueness." (pp. i, 26, 27).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Russell Kirk, <i>The Roots of American Order</i> (Malibu: Pepperdine University Press, 1974). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] Wilson Carey McWilliams, <i>The Idea of Fraternity in America</i> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). This award-winning book treats some of the same themes as Kirk's <i>Roots</i> and Tonsor's "The United States as a 'Revolutionary Society,'" but precedes them both.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] For an earlier statement of Kirk's basic thesis, see the address by the former president of the American Historical Association, Carlton J. H. Hayes, "The American Frontier -- Frontier of What?" December 27, 1945, <i>American Historical Review</i>, vol. 50, no. 2 (January 1946): 199-216, at URL https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/carlton-j-h-hayes. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[5] Alexander Hamilton, <i>Federalist Papers</i>, 1 and 9, 1787. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[6] For a recent study of the traditionalists' confrontation with the Enlightenment, see Ulrich L. Lehner, <i>The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[7] Kirk, <i>Roots</i>, chaps. 2, 5.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[8] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Et tu, brutish?" <i>Christian Science Monitor</i>, April 9, 1979, p. B36.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[9] Kirk, <i>Roots</i>, chaps. 3-4.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[10] Kirk, <i>Roots</i>, chap. 6.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[11] Both Tonsor and I were alluding to a recently published book by Richard John Neuhaus, <i>The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America</i> (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[12] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The United States as a 'Revolutionary Society,'" <i>Modern Age</i>, vol. 19, no. 2 (spring 1975): 136-45.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[13] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Stephen J. Tonsor, "Quest for Liberty: America in Acton's Thought," Introduction by James C. Holland (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Occasional Paper No. 1, 1993).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-4726323964964386732017-09-10T14:02:00.000-07:002017-12-20T10:26:50.574-08:00Tonsor: Intellectual History: First Class: The Joy of the Intellectual Historian<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Thursday, September 10th, couldn't come fast enough. It was the first day of the semester. I had been living in Ann Arbor since August 4th and was eager to start academic work.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Throughout the morning, fog and thunderclouds moved through the Huron River
Valley. Although the Diag looked gloomy under a dark canopy of trees, the
outermost branches of the honey locusts showed hints of the yellows soon to
come under crisp autumn skies. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">I arrived in East Engineering early to find a good seat for my
first class at U of M: History 416, Tonsor’s Nineteenth-Century European
Intellectual History. I still could not believe my good fortune to attend
such a storied class. I took my place three rows back from the lectern. For the
next few months, this was the space in which I would learn the most about the
public Tonsor, both as a teacher and intellectual historian. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSiSjRByeTRUarmtX45J34Vylk3v3cS0TRQhjuUiupgQ9CE81bXtBNYYCtgNm21v5SfDjPYbupYVbcsUvUmEEmTjW966wOpKie374DO29jiAcreQJ4S6oBTLWXOqoXQjs2l3-uwp904hgC/s1600/s-l300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSiSjRByeTRUarmtX45J34Vylk3v3cS0TRQhjuUiupgQ9CE81bXtBNYYCtgNm21v5SfDjPYbupYVbcsUvUmEEmTjW966wOpKie374DO29jiAcreQJ4S6oBTLWXOqoXQjs2l3-uwp904hgC/s320/s-l300.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The vibe at Michigan</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">An affable fellow a few years my junior sat down to my left. He sported a tee shirt with a familiar slogan on campus: “Harvard, the Michigan of the East.” “Have you ever taken Tonsor
before?” he asked.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“No, this is my first semester at Michigan. I get the
impression we are going to learn a lot.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">“He may look like the Paddington Bear but he’s got a reputation,” the student
said with a shake of his head. “He’s been known to kick trash cans at faculty meetings
that don’t go his way. And when a feminist challenged him in one of his
classes, he said to her face that her soul was as filthy as the floor she
walked on.” My eyes inadvertently dropped to the floor. I had put myself
through Colorado State University as a janitor, so I knew filth on floors.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">With those two episodes in my head, I saw the barrel-chested Tonsor
walk into the classroom looking vaguely harried. His head was thrust forward,
and his mouth was open from walking fast and ascending the stairs to the second
floor. His eyes appeared to recede behind thick lenses. He carried a brown
satchel, well worn and scarred, out of which he took several books and a
handwritten lecture on lined, yellow paper. I would learn that it was Tonsor’s
habit to lecture from scripted notes, each topic
contained in its own manila folder.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[1] </span>His final warm-up routine was to write the authors and titles of important books
on the chalkboard. On this first day he wrote the following:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Roland N. Stromberg, <u>European Intellectual History since 1789</u> (third ed.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Ernst Cassirer, <u>The Philosophy of the Enlightenment</u></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">M. H. Abrams, <u>Natural Supernaturalism</u></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Hegel, <u>Philosophy of History</u></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">J. S. Mill, <u>On Liberty</u></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Marx and Engels, <u>The Communist Manifesto</u></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Jacques Barzun, <u>Darwin, Marx, and Wagner</u></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">These were the seven books the class would read during the
semester. I took note of the balance of materials: three original sources, three secondary works, and one textbook for good measure.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">At 9:30 a.m. sharp, Tonsor began his lecture in the most inadvertently
humorous circumstances I’d ever seen in a classroom: “Do not think,” he said
importantly, just when a jackhammer started to pound away outside the window…. “Do not
think,” he repeated more loudly to the jackhammer's rat-a-tat-tat…. Then, drawing
himself up, he bellowed, “Do not think that it is I who am speaking to you. No,
it is the Voice of History.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG-HpRsScNvfwJaB-g35cHRd1poX37XCENJEmiE3HGWjAzwg5lzaLKLbp67UKI0MLrNWvzUsmBqwQkTsgKDzOqDzR4PEXx3cKZACUssjnGh468gIkkwZP-i1r0mOlkwnGqolJIif-Gac62/s1600/03-East-Engineering.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG-HpRsScNvfwJaB-g35cHRd1poX37XCENJEmiE3HGWjAzwg5lzaLKLbp67UKI0MLrNWvzUsmBqwQkTsgKDzOqDzR4PEXx3cKZACUssjnGh468gIkkwZP-i1r0mOlkwnGqolJIif-Gac62/s320/03-East-Engineering.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">East Engineering</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">No, actually it was the Voice of the Jackhammer. At least that’s
what most of the 40 students in the class must have been thinking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor glared at the window, fixated on the
construction work on East Engineering. “You really should go to the university
administration, protest this intolerable racket, and demand the refund of
your tuition!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Some of the students shifted uneasily in their chairs;
others tried to laugh. His burst of temper reminded me of my father.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;">Composing himself, Tonsor thrust his head forward over his
yellow pages of handwritten notes and resumed: “I quote Ernest Renan, one of
the most interesting apostates of the nineteenth century. He abandoned the
priest’s cassock for the historian’s gown. But more on the apostate Renan
later.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">“This course in modern European intellectual history will challenge you in fundamental ways. First, the content is more abstract than the material you've encountered in other history courses. By focusing on beliefs and knowledge, values and symbols, ideas and ideologies, we shall explore what is unique about human beings -- our capacity to imagine, to reason, to deliberate, to develop ideas -- capacities that sharply differentiate us, in kind, from the rest of the animal kingdom.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">“The noisome squirrel that invades my garden has a social order; he has a sense of territory; he communicates with other squirrels; he builds nests; he mates; he eats and is eaten -- by me when I've had enough of his mischief. But there is no evidence that he thinks abstractly about his relationship to himself, to other squirrels, to the world, or to his creator. He exists in the realm of necessity, not of freedom. No matter how refined his instincts, he is incapable of creating, modifying, rejecting, or transmitting abstract ideas. He has no notion of authoring 'A History of Squirrels.'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">“The second way this course will challenge you is to see that ideas change; they develop. They are not static but have a rich arc within the larger human adventure. If you were to write the history of squirrels, the story of their lives 10,000 years ago would be the same, in all the essentials, as the story of their lives today.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">“Not the human story. From the drawing of cave paintings to the Neolithic Revolution and the invention of civilization forward, our way of life, our language, our society, our military technology, our economics, our politics -- all have changed, profoundly, many times over. All things human change because we think about them, criticize them, grow bored with them, and imagine something different that might make life better. The history of ideas, especially since the transition to modern times, is also one of dramatic change. It is sometimes hard for students to grasp, but what you think of liberty in 1987 is not what French revolutionaries thought of liberty in 1793. What you think of equality today is not what coffeehouse Marxists thought of equality in 1848. What you think of the Constitution on its two hundredth anniversary is not what citizens thought of the Constitution two centuries ago.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The third challenge is related to the second. Because you are going to become more aware of changes in human thinking, I hope this course encourages you to break out of your familiar, limited way of seeing things. History is a core discipline of a liberal arts education precisely because it frees you from the fallacy of presentism, the belief that you should judge the people of the past by the standards of the present. In this history course, you will be urged to develop the habit of sympathetic identification with those who lived in the past; to try to put yourselves in their shoes; to understand them on <i>their</i> terms, not yours; to comprehend their way of thinking, not yours. Otherwise, once you fall back into <i>your</i> conceptions of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, you cease to think historically. You lack perspective, and without perspective, your worldview is impoverished."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Tonsor then turned to the board and wrote in large letters, “<i>Einf</i><span style="font-family: "cambria";"><i>ühlung</i>.</span>” “<i>Einf</i><span style="font-family: "cambria";"><i>ühlung,</i></span>” he said slowly, “is German for 'sympathetic understanding' -- one of the most important concepts in the study of history, and we shall recur to it often.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
He resumed reading from his notes. “The fourth way this course will challenge you is to see that it's the changes in the way we think that make other changes possible. We shall discover that changes in the mind often precede changes in society, the economy, politics, military strategy, and so forth. Changing the way people think is one of the most revolutionary things you can do. If a people think Copernicus describes reality better than Ptolemy does, and change their mind about astronomy; if a people think Newton describes reality better than Aristotle does, and change their mind about physics; if a people think Darwin describes reality better than Genesis does, and change their mind about life on earth; if a people think Lister describes reality better than Galen does, and change their mind about medicine; if a people think Madison describes reality better than Plato does, and change their mind about politics; then that people will create a different world than would have existed otherwise.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I also hope that you will learn to see the intended and unintended consequences of ideas. The Enlightenment went far to dethrone divine revelation and, in its place, enthrone experimental science. The <i>philosophes</i> did so thinking that reason was a better guide to reality than the faith and obedience called for in Genesis. But Pascal observed that the heart has its reasons that reason cannot comprehend. Sometimes man is moved to think and act in a way that is contrary to the dictates of reason or conventional wisdom. When John Dalton formulated atomic theory, he saw its useful applications but never dreamed of 'the bomb.'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">“We can see how ideas have consequences in a contentious matter before the American people today. Our Constitution does not interpret itself. Whether your senator votes to confirm Judge Robert Bork, President Reagan's nomination for the Supreme Court, depends in part on whether he believes in a strict or loose interpretation of our fundamental law. Each of these interpretations has consequences.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I quote John Maynard Keynes, <i>The General Theory</i> [1935-1936], final paragraph:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the general encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">“Fifth and finally, I hope this lecture course in modern European intellectual history challenges you to follow the Delphic inscription, 'know thyself.' Know thyself, not in the self-indulgent way of the therapy culture, but in a deeply humanistic way.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"In readings and lectures we will encounter a series of revolutions. More specifically, we will account for dramatic changes in European thought from the Enlightenment to the advent of Romanticism around 1750. From Romanticism we shall turn to positivism and then to the anti-positivist revolt in the 1870s. We shall consider the content of the determinative ideas in culture and society. And we shall also attempt to provide an explanation for the many ideological changes that occurred before, during, and after the French Revolution. There is heavy emphasis on the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism as well as on the emergence of Realism and Naturalism. As you grapple with each of these -isms over the next fifteen weeks, you will recognize yourselves and understand better where your own ideas, values, and beliefs come from.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I hasten to add a caveat. It is well to remind ourselves that it is given to historians the possibility of seeing only a portion of the truth of the age they are studying. For all their great insights and achievements, our great historians remain children of their age. In our day they are typically bourgeois, liberal, and some denomination of Protestant. That their vision is partial and incomplete should not surprise us. That they are occasionally able to rise above some of the obscuring mists of their time is surprising enough.[2]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"There will be regular class discussions of the texts -- you can see that I've written them on the board. Your participation will constitute one-quarter of the grade. Your mastery of the material will also be evaluated by a midterm examination and by a final examination. Be sure to bring blue books on exam days.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[3]</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Paddington Bear: Stephen J. Tonsor (1923-2014)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In these first few minutes I noted that Tonsor pronounced certain words the way Catholics from south Saint Louis do. His “or” sounded like “are”; his “for” like “far”; his “order” like “ardor.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">“During our time together, we will challenge an idea that arose in the Enlightenment and attracted many apostles in the nineteenth century. It's the idea that history is the story of unending progress. Students today may think that it
is, but it is not. Civilized men forever contend with barbarism. As a professor of mine used to say, quoting Virgil to the ordinary
Illinois farm-boy and farm-girl types whom he taught, ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sunt lacrimae rerum</i> – things have tears in them.’”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[4]</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Once Tonsor settled into his lecture, he commanded the room.
I thrilled at his rhetorical strategy, which was a study in definition. He laid
before us the key terms of the course, elucidating on “nineteenth century,”
“modern,” “European,” and “intellectual history.” The most memorable image in
this first half hour of the lecture was borrowed, he explained, from his most influential professor at Illinois, Joseph Ward Swain. “The study of history is like driving
a car, in reverse, at night. Looking through the rearview mirror, you can only
see a narrow section of a dimly lit road already traveled. What is more, the
farther back you go, the dimmer the light. Holding that analogy in mind, you
will understand why even the most rigorous research must be wedded to the imagination. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, there is no good history without
imagination.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I was writing furiously, using the shorthand system that I had taught myself as an
undergraduate and capturing every syllable I could.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Relief came in the form of a fascinating digression when a woman raised her hand.</span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"Yes," Tonsor said with a note of impatience that would have done Professor Kingsfield proud. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"I'm having trouble with the notion of intellectual history as a discipline. Isn't it hard to prove anything that you can't see and touch? I mean, you mention the importance of imagination, but how can a historian document another person's imagination?"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"Through the symbolic record the other person leaves behind," said Tonsor, "through music, art, architecture, sculpture, poems, novels, essays, and letters. Tell me: Have you ever written a letter to a friend that expresses your feelings? Neither you nor your friend nor anyone else could see the emotions, per se, but they burned inside you and you found a way to express them symbolically, in the words you composed. Don't you think your friend understood the non-material thoughts and feelings you expressed symbolically? </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"I want the class to take note of the important question this young lady raises. History is not like the physical sciences that apply reason to the sensate physical and chemical world, a world of necessity. Nor is history like the social sciences that apply statistics to human characteristics and behavior as though we were only a herd animal. Are you not more than a herd of cows?"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">The class laughed.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"No," said Tonsor, "history does not preoccupy itself with the realm of necessity nor with the ethology of herds. It is neither a natural science nor a social science. Rather, history is a humanistic inquiry. It seeks to understand man as he exists in the realm of freedom: the way he sees the world, the choices he makes, the efforts to satisfy his will. What is more, h</span></span><span style="font-size: large;">istory seeks to decipher the symbolic ways we have created meaning and imparted wisdom over time -- through music, art, architecture, reading, conversation, study, research, and writing.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> It follows that h</span><span style="font-size: large;">istory is an exploration of the temporal depths of culture. It seeks to comprehend the way tradition, order, and continuity are in tension with disruption, disorder, and change. Yet another way history is a humanistic inquiry is that it respects the individual human person and the difference one person can make. When the historian is writing biography, he tries to get inside his subject's thoughts, feelings, and imagination."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"But," the woman persisted, "tell me more about how the historian studies thoughts, feelings, and imagination? They are not visible to the senses."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"Listen," said Tonsor, showing more energy now that he was challenged, "what we cannot see is often more powerful than what we can see. Do your parents love each other?"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"Yes," the woman said, wondering how the conversation would turn.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"While you can see both of your parents, you cannot see the love between them, per se. Right? But you infer their love by observing the way they have committed to one another, speak to one another, care for one another, help one another, write little love notes to one another, and enjoy each other's company. It is love, yes? You know it is love, right, even though you cannot see the thing directly?" </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"I suppose so."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">"Love -- like beauty, truth, goodness, friendship -- exists in our consciousness; it is relational; the Platonists and theologians would say it first inhabits the very mind of God. It is not something to be measured on a physical scale but rather is apprehended by our feelings, our mind, our soul, our illative sense.[5] That is what makes it transcendent -- it is above and beyond the sensate world and yet can be inferred by its effects in the sensate world.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Alfred, Lord Tennyson famously put the matter this way: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Nothing worthy proving can be proven,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Nor yet disproven...."[6]</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I was reminded of the words of a hymn:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Eye has not seen, ear has not heard</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">What God has ready for those who love Him.[7]</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">Our introduction to intellectual history.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">After this exchange, Tonsor tried to whet his students’ appetite for the first text we'd cover -- a doozy of a read -- Ernst Cassirer’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Philosophy of the Enlightenment</i>. I don't know how persuasive he was with most of the undergraduates -- they were not exactly kittens discovering the bowl of cream. I'd wager he spoke over their heads. But he was clear and direct.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“If you are like the thousand or so students who have preceded you in this class, then you will find this first reading difficult. This is a good thing -- you would not learn if it were not difficult.” Tonsor added, <i>sotto voce</i>, “<i>Herr Doktor Professor</i> Cassirer will no doubt cull the less serious scholars from the class.” The sarcasm in the word “scholars”<i> </i>seemed to reverberate as much as the jackhammer had.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It’s true. Cassirer's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Enlightenment</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> was</span> even more intimidating than our professor. At home that night I would discover that it was the most difficult book I had yet encountered in my academic career.[8] On second thought that's not true -- it couldn't hold a candle to college calculus. Cassirer was, more precisely, the most difficult author I had yet encountered in the humanities. Importantly, in this first lecture Tonsor used Cassirer to demonstrate one of the things intellectual historians do: They clothe naked ideas in their biographical, historical, social, cultural, and philosophical finery.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Among the highlights from Tonsor's heavy-hitting first lecture:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">book</i> you will learn about the original Enlightenment project in the eighteenth century. In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">author</i> you will learn about a reconstituted enlightenment project in the twentieth century. The link between book and author will help you understand the continuity and change of Enlightenment ideals over three centuries.” I thought: This is brilliant pedagogy. Tonsor is assigning a book that is unsurpassed in the secondary literature of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, by an author who was himself a primary source in an attempted twentieth-century enlightenment.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">Nazi Germany (1933-1945)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Hear the gravamen of Cassirer's brief. Like many of his contemporaries, he felt the sense of doom, the fracturing of civilization in the modern age. It was evident in two world wars; in the incompatible -isms that proliferated; and in the antihuman philosophies that propagated. British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey captured the spirit of the age: 'The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' It was in this dark age -- yes, this <i>dark</i> age -- that Cassirer pondered whether the Enlightenment project, chastened and renewed, might not help civilization come through the crisis. The fact that the project did not entirely succeed tells us something important."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Then Tonsor tried to convey the romance of intellectual history -- an important undertaking because, by the 1980s, intellectual history was pass<span style="font-family: "cambria";">é and took a back seat to</span> social history<span style="font-family: "cambria";">. </span>“It may surprise you to learn that bookish scholars can be heroes. But I tell you that Cassirer was a hero. In an atmosphere of decline and fall – first of Weimar Germany then of the Third Reich – he sought to preserve the best of German civilization: the liberal, humanistic Germany built up by Kant, Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and other leaders of the <i>Aufkl</i><i>ärung</i>. After the catastrophes of World War I and the twenties, he watched the Weimar Republic weaken and become susceptible to the Nazi takeover. Yet he was not passive in the face of the rising irrationality and violence. Writing <i>The Philosophy of the Enlightenment</i> with urgency in the early 1930s, he sought to fortify Weimar’s cultural immune system to resist Nazi ideas and symbols. He and other intellectual leaders did not succeed in stopping Hitler, of course, and Cassirer even took the fall of the Weimar Republic as a personal defeat.[8] Yet his work would assist Germany in its odyssey back to civilization following the world wars. That’s one reason why <i>The Philosophy of the Enlightenment</i> remains an exemplar to this day. You don’t know whether you, too, may someday be called to serve your fellow man in this profoundly important way. In Cassirer you might find a heroic model of intellectual and moral courage.”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">“Cassirer wrote about the Enlightenment at the University of Hamburg, an unlikely place for a renascence of anything resembling enlightened thought. The poet Heinrich Heine said that Hamburg, a city of merchants, is where poets go to die."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Although he was a contradiction to his age, Cassirer was an important cultural thinker prior to his death in 1945, and he remains so now. Cassirer came of age when modern philosophers had dug a Grand Canyon between the sciences and humanities. Peering into the vast rift between these two ways of knowing, he conceived the improbable task of building a bridge that would once again link the two rims of this philosophical canyon. We must give Cassirer credit for his audacious attempts to reconcile physical nature with the human spirit, the exact sciences with the arts, the objective with the subjective, reason with passion, analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. In the fractured modern age, he was a reconciler. To integrate all knowledge was one of the great Enlightenment projects; the goal of all the great humanists. Cassirer, arguably the greatest German humanist of his generation, was uniquely qualified to revive the Enlightenment project. Even if the project ultimately failed, his ambitious effort to unify the sciences and the humanities – to reunite the knowledge and truth on both sides of the epistemological canyon – was a heroic effort to restore the cultural unity of the West.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">Auguste Comte (1798-1857)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor next said he hoped we'd find ourselves “arguing” with Cassirer during the entire course, from the first class to the last. “Ernst Cassirer was part of the revolt against Auguste Comte and the array of positivist ideas that were so influential in nineteenth-century Europe.[10] Positivism confines itself to the data of the senses and of experience. If you are an atheist, you are probably a positivist. Cassirer argued that the stakes of the anti-positivist revolt to Western civilization were high: If positivism went unchecked, if there were no anti-positivist revolt, then man would eventually regard himself merely as a material being. His free will, his moral agency, his spiritual life – all would suffer. This is an internal argument that each of you must also settle. And you thought that intellectual history would be dry!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The lecture took a personal turn when Tonsor told the class he read Goethe every day. Indeed, it was his regular reading of Goethe that helped him understand Cassirer. For Cassirer was also devoted to Goethe and read him religiously.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Each morning, as I dress," Tonsor seemed moved to reveal, "I read a passage from Goethe. It is from the book, <i>Mit Goethe durch das Jahr</i>, and I am much struck by his writing and his wisdom. It is odd, this relationship with a man so long dead. Yet he has become very familiar to me."[11]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Permit me to use this thought to push the fast forward button three decades, to 2016, as I write these reflections on my years in Ann Arbor. It has been a delight to discover a resurgence of interest in Ernst Cassirer. Young scholars have recently written several excellent books that argue for his centrality to twentieth-century intellectual history. Stephen Tonsor was one of only a handful of intellectual historians who stressed Cassirer's importance back in the 1980s.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Among these young scholars is Edward Skidelsky whose important 2008 book on Ernst Cassirer reminded me of Tonsor's first lecture in History 416. Like Tonsor, Skidelsky discusses how Goethe was resurrected at the end of World War II as the lost hero of a former Germany, an enlightened, liberal, humanistic Germany. It was no accident that Weimar was chosen to be the home of the first German Republic following World War I – it was Goethe’s home as well and thus highly symbolic of the promise of German humanism. Also after World War II, the historian Friedrich Meinecke proposed public readings of Goethe as a form of national reeducation after the Nazi years. German intellectual leaders like Cassirer looked to Goethe to recall Germany to the ideals of the Enlightenment and to its humanistic promise.[12]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">A passage Skidelsky quotes by Cassirer’s wife, Toni Cassirer, is particularly apt:</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEne_lilI3hACbpluWHCoas41EQFj5Z-DnbN9pRet6RndvzG-IEkNS4BvsHvHn_UbWzloymH4I0nPr7m0tjEFAMZTtdl6-MHuJO3roUDX8ikQF7ewgN_st5d_Z2UvX8NitwomTCQ9SXQFP/s1600/Goethe_%2528Stieler_1828%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEne_lilI3hACbpluWHCoas41EQFj5Z-DnbN9pRet6RndvzG-IEkNS4BvsHvHn_UbWzloymH4I0nPr7m0tjEFAMZTtdl6-MHuJO3roUDX8ikQF7ewgN_st5d_Z2UvX8NitwomTCQ9SXQFP/s320/Goethe_%2528Stieler_1828%2529.jpg" width="259" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">The Greatest<br />
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“His interpretation of history; his feeling for nature; his ongoing endeavor to broaden his outlook, to extend his knowledge to almost all fields so as to strengthen his judgment and guard it against all one-sidedness, to free it from the influence of parochial experience, to distance it from the events of the day – all this derived from Goethe. His firm faith in the value of human personality, his longing for form and harmony, his abhorrence of violent destruction – both of his own ego and of the surrounding world – his loathing of ideological, political, and religious slogans – in short, everything that constituted the essence of his being, came from Goethe. I learned to understand Goethe through Ernst and Ernst through Goethe.”[13]</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Could this quotation about a scholar's immersion in Goethe get at something in the core of the professor standing before us?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Exactly one minute before class was to end, Tonsor wrapped up. Cassirer, he intoned in his peroration, was one of the giants of twentieth-century intellectual history. Of Jewish parentage, his early grounding in the liberal arts prepared him for graduate study in history, literature, and philosophy, which he would skillfully integrate throughout his career. Many of his best works, including <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Philosophy of the Enlightenment</i> (1932), were written in Weimar Germany, at the University of Hamburg, where he also supervised young Leo Strauss’s doctoral dissertation – another seminal thinker in the intellectual community I was learning about. Cassirer's warning against dismissing Enlightenment thought, on the eve of the Nazi takeover, made the book as poignant as it was significant. Because he was Jewish, he was part of the diaspora out of Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933. “Central and eastern Europe,” concluded Tonsor, “never recovered from the diaspora and attendant loss to culture.”</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Notes</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">[1]</span> In
this classroom habit Tonsor followed his mentor. See his essay, “Joseph Ward Swain,” in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Equality, Decadence, and Modernity </i>(Wilmington,
DE: ISI Books, 2005), ed. Gregory L. Schneider, p. 311.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Albert Schweitzer and the Crisis of Protestant Liberalism," unpublished lecture, no date, p. 13. Tonsor was always denigrating his work. In the March 21, 1989, prefatory note to his colleague David Hollinger, he wrote about the lecture: "I am certain it will be a disappointment to you -- as it was for me." I am grateful to David Hollinger for mailing me his copy of this lecture of Tonsor's in early November 2016.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">[3]</span> URL <a href="http://www.lsa.umich.edu/saa/publications/courseguide/fall/archive/Fall87.cg/390.html">http://www.lsa.umich.edu/saa/publications/courseguide/fall/archive/Fall87.cg/390.html</a>,
accessed September 7, 2016<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">[4]</span> Tonsor,
“Joseph Ward Swain,” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Equality,
Decadence, and Modernity</i>, p. 312.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[5] John Henry Newman, <i>Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Ascent</i> (London: Burns, Oates, 1874), Chapter 9, pp. 266ff.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">[6] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Ancient Sage," ll. 36-37.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[7] Marty Haugen's hymn is drawn from Paul, 1 Corinthians 2:9.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">[8] </span>To provide context to Tonsor's lecture on Cassirer in History 416, I am most indebted to and grateful for the background information and insights provided by Edward Skidelsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture</i> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">[9] </span>Skidelsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cassirer</i>, pp. 212-13.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">[10] </span>Skidelsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cassirer</i>, p. 1.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[11] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, February 15, 1986, p. 3; in GW's possession courtesy of Alfred Regnery.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">[12] </span>Skidelsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cassirer</i>, p. 76.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "cambria";">[13] </span>Toni Cassirer, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer</i> (Hildesheim, Germany: Gerstenberg, 1981), p. 87; trans. and quoted by Skidelsky, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cassirer</i>, p. 240.</span><br />
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Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-3909915771381110912017-09-08T07:36:00.001-07:002017-09-10T15:08:59.312-07:00Tonsor: Catholicism: Confrontation with Modernity<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWudP-h77fsAupKEf4imAdpvpp0SpsEwTWrFvpf33ndmwL1TuthTiKmqX__yU5TK5DP2V2SpWmzvNl91uYt6kYWTlUhEE50wZ7aOFoLyUCGx_dXyz9MoB1IZ8bQED1EUYA3pK8weXNQIYz/s1600/tseliot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWudP-h77fsAupKEf4imAdpvpp0SpsEwTWrFvpf33ndmwL1TuthTiKmqX__yU5TK5DP2V2SpWmzvNl91uYt6kYWTlUhEE50wZ7aOFoLyUCGx_dXyz9MoB1IZ8bQED1EUYA3pK8weXNQIYz/s400/tseliot.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">"You speak about the confrontation with modernity," </span><span style="font-size: large;">I observed in our next office-hour conversation. "</span><span style="font-size: large;">More than that, you have dedicated your life to it -- it is your mantra. But what specifically does the Catholic confrontation with modernity look like?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor answered: "It looks like Chesterton ... Belloc ... Dawson ... Maritain ... Gilson ... Guardini ... Sheed ... Ward ... Waugh ... and a host of others who led the Roman Catholic intellectual renaissance. It looks like Eliot ... Lewis ... Auden ... and many more who led the Anglo Catholic intellectual renaissance. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"You no doubt want to know: What do these Roman- and Anglo-Catholics share in common? </span><span style="font-size: large;">One element they share is humility. </span><span style="font-size: large;">These Catholics -- integral humanists all, since they recognize that man is both matter and spirit -- these Catholics know that the underlying order which is perceived in the course of human experience and history never reveals itself in its completeness and perfection. Human limitations, passions, and sinfulness always stand in the way of a complete vision and harmonious accommodation.[1] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"People are sorely mistaken if they believe God revealed what a specifically 'Catholic' social arrangement, political regime, or economic system should look like. The proclamations of today's televangelists notwithstanding, Jesus is not a registered Republican. He is not a Yankee-doodle patriot. He did not ordain our federated polity or free-market economics. These systems are of human devising. They are more or less satisfactory, and they are always conditioned by man's inadequacy and sinfulness. To elevate a human invention is to worship man rather than God, and Karl Barth was correct to call such excesses of enthusiasm by their right name: idolatry.</span><span style="font-size: large;">[2]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Nevertheless, t</span><span style="font-size: large;">o be a Catholic in any meaningful sense <i>is</i> to confront the modern age, to critique modernity. </span><span style="font-size: large;">T</span><span style="font-size: large;">he task of the Church in every age is to be like the parent who pesters teenagers with relentless questioning before they go out on a date. Since the modern age is a particularly petulant teenager, the Church must challenge the culture, standing up to any individual or authority who would harm life, violate religious freedom, or diminish the dignity of the human person. The Church -- along with her integral humanists -- should thus be a gadfly, a sign of contradiction to our base drives and animal motives. Note that I said 'should be.'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"In practice, the body of believers has hardly presented a unified front. That's because there are two kinds of Catholics -- positivists and realists. There are many nominal Catholics in the academy and they tend to be positivists. You will know they are positivists by their governing assumptions. Positivists believe that religion is a purely human phenomenon that reflects the evolution of human consciousness. Thus ethics are merely social conventions. Positivists would say that a controversial issue like abortion, if it is considered 'wrong,' is only 'wrong' because the hierarchy says so, or because the catechism and canon law say it is. In other words, it is only 'wrong' because human beings with authority claim it is wrong. Such positivism is similar to what one hears about rights: Human beings have rights because the state or society says so.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"There is another position, that of the official church and her integral humanists. They are realists. The realists think that morals are grounded not in social convention but in objective reality, a reality that is inseparable from the order of creation. For the realist, abortion is wrong because it offends God and disorders man.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The gap between positivists and realists cannot be papered over. There is a perennial battle between them. Take, for instance, the issue of premarital sex since it is linked to other nettlesome issues like birth control, abortion, children out of wedlock, and intractable poverty. To think like a modernist is to be a positivist and say, Premarital sex is only 'wrong' because social convention makes it so, but that does not make premarital sex intrinsically wrong at all times in all places. To think like a traditionalist is to be a realist and say, Premarital sex is intrinsically wrong because it violates the order of nature, of reality, and it offends God. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The positivist-realist divide is one of the fundamental chasms in the modern mind. It is a fierce battle line in the present culture wars. When I say that to be Catholic is to confront modernity, what I mean is that the traditionalist Catholic will weigh the so-called truth-claims of the positivist against his own beliefs as a realist. Every ethical proposition, every action, will be sifted and tested -- not necessarily rejected outright, but sifted and tested: To what extent is it true, good, and in adherence to the natural law? To what extent can error teach us something of value? This has been the Catholic way from St. Augustine to the Dominicans to Lord Acton. It is the way of charity, and we are called to be charitable in our disagreements -- though I find it exceedingly difficult to be charitable toward silly people!" </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor was in a rare revelatory mood. To get him to admit a weakness was like trying to get a bone from a bulldog. But since it was best not to point that out, I simply said: </span><span style="font-size: large;">"To disagree without being disagreeable, as Gerald Ford likes to put it."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," he nodded.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I wanted to stretch our discussion from the conversational to the civilizational. What elements in the critique of modernity united the Roman- and Anglo-Catholic realists? "From your teaching it is clear that the Catholic confrontation with modernity will also venture onto a larger stage, that which shines a light on the course of a country or a civilization. Won't Catholic cultural critics judge a country or civilization against its best moments. For the U.S. a benchmark might be what the founding fathers achieved to expand the empire of liberty. Another might be what the civil rights movement did to expand the empire of equality. For Western civilization a benchmark might be the advance of peace and prosperity in the nineteenth century; or the will of </span><span style="font-size: large;">the allies to fight to the death to secure victory in World War II</span><span style="font-size: large;">."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," said Tonsor. "And determining those benchmarks would be a good debate to have. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The important thing to realize is that becoming a Catholic, like being a conservative, is to embark on a quest for order. Ultimately this quest is not for a humanly created order invented as a form of political wish-fulfillment, but a discovery, though history and experience, that such is the way things are. The notion that the ideologue can create his own order out of whole cloth, fashion his own paradise out of nature, build his own utopia out of ideology, has been the human calamity of the past two centuries."[3]</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOTW9_1skjZiemuXIZRhacmDRIZAKhVxim_clc9__c5SMGA5rpKG7-OFnYi3VOe0pwZtt-NaqR8RFZkSHa7lNtA6_NqQ2t6Pv24T4lXHhrB7OkPRiCK6jP3Jo0WV4CnknfRBXakV7Jr6v5/s1600/Otto_Greiner_-_Prometheus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOTW9_1skjZiemuXIZRhacmDRIZAKhVxim_clc9__c5SMGA5rpKG7-OFnYi3VOe0pwZtt-NaqR8RFZkSHa7lNtA6_NqQ2t6Pv24T4lXHhrB7OkPRiCK6jP3Jo0WV4CnknfRBXakV7Jr6v5/s320/Otto_Greiner_-_Prometheus.jpg" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Prometheus, by Otto Greiner (1909)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"It's a thin line between prudent progress and Promethean overreach." I offered.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," he said simply. "If the first requirement of the integral humanist in our day is to confront modernity with humility, then the second is to name things rightly; to say, after careful consideration, This pattern of thinking or that pattern of behavior is disordered. It is imprudent. Tragedy will follow in its wake." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Still one more thing is needed," concluded Tonsor, sitting squarely like</span><span style="font-size: large;"> a block of granite</span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"What is that?" </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The temptation for Catholics and conservatives to be as Faustian as the modernists. But we must be watchful lest we become what we disavow. In the end, perhaps the confrontation with modernity comes down to the simplest thing -- being an example, ourselves, of how best to live. That loving dedication to family, community, and all those who lent their lives in the past to the fashioning of a living tradition that can only be religious. Service in the cause of the good, the true, and the beautiful is always an act of compelling love."[4]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">_________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Mistaken Assumptions," <i>Modern Age</i> (winter 2002): 59.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] <i>Ibid</i>.: 58.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] <i>Ibid</i>.: 59.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] <i>Ibid</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-61122713963180682642017-08-31T16:24:00.002-07:002017-10-11T19:25:17.600-07:00Tonsor: Intellectual History: Equality<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">After we began the walk back to campus, the mood settled and Tonsor broached a topic related to the one we had probed over lunch. "You'd be interested in a book I'm working on, Mr. Whitney. It's about equality. Remarkably, there has been no systematic historical exploration of the idea of equality in recent times. This, despite the ridiculous overproduction of monographs! Yet historians have failed to provide an account of the development of the idea of equality. I argue that this notion -- equality -- has provided the key signature of the modern world. No idea has played a larger role in the history of the past two or three centuries than that of equality."[1]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"When it comes to equality," I said, "it seems everyone nowadays embraces some form of trickle-down Marx." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Very true," Tonsor said with a gust of laughter. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Now," he said, "insofar as the historian can discern, inequality characterized all civilizations in the past. In fact, if one were to argue that the experience of history constitutes a prescriptive norm, then one must confront the fact that the great bulk of human experience constitutes an argument against equality. Until the eighteenth century nearly all men regarded inequalities of wealth, status, and power as in the nature of things, an unalterable given. That changed sometime in the eighteenth century. Witnessing the American and French revolutions, men in substantial numbers questioned inequality from the standpoint of political and social justice.[2]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Roughly speaking, equality is to the modern age what freedom was to the early modern age. As you know, freedom -- freedom of thought, speech, religion, politics, economics, national independence -- stamped nearly all important historical struggles from the Reformation to the French Revolution and beyond. We are still under freedom's spell. But a</span><span style="font-size: large;">t some point after the French Revolution, equality eclipsed even freedom as a value and now plays a larger role than ever in our debates, polities, and aspirations."[3]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Your subject reminds me of Robert Frost's poem, 'The Black Cottage.' There the poet ponders Jefferson's famous lines in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created free and equal. It is 'a hard mystery,' Frost says. The idea is so radical that people don't know what to do with it:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">But never mind, the Welshman got it planted</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Where it will trouble us a thousand years.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Each age will have to reconsider it.[4]</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," my professor said. "It is a hard mystery."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">We waited at Hill Street to let the traffic near the campus clear.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"As you know," Tonsor resumed, as soon as we could walk again, "I advise my students to be alert to historical development. By historical development I mean neither the ideological distortions that you see in the Hegelian dialectic, nor the Whig notion that the 'past is prologue,' nor the nationalists' Darwinistic chest-thumping, nor the Marxian scheme that imposes a theory of scientific inevitability on the historical record. None of that is history. That is ideology -- a one-size-fits-all ideology. History is an empirical discipline. I want students to explore historical development empirically. I want them to order their thinking in a disciplined manner, which means, first, </span><span style="font-size: large;">examining the symbolic record men have left behind and, second, </span><span style="font-size: large;">basing their interpretation on the canons of reason, logic, and evidence. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"History is also a humanistic inquiry. So it is important that students understand the meaning of any given development to the human person in community. What are the implications -- morally, spiritually, politically, socially, culturally -- for the human beings experiencing that development?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I thought: Tonsor's advice to students was about as succinct a statement as I'd heard of the normative method that had been developed by historians over the last two centuries. It was the method championed by the German historian Leopold von Ranke in the mid-nineteenth century. But nothing stays the same in the modern age. The Rankean method had come under withering fire by the time I was in graduate school. In fact, the Rankean ideal was the subject of a book I had been encouraged to read, <i>That Noble Dream</i>, by Peter Novick. The University of Chicago historian was wholly skeptical of the quest for historical objectivity -- it was a myth.</span><span style="font-size: large;">[5]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Not that anyone was arguing that history was a nomothetic science; it was as far away from Platonic absolutes as a field could be. But historians influenced by postmodern theory were drawn to the other extreme, that history was just another literary genre; as such, it was nothing more than subjective, relativistic "narratives" filled with tentative truth-claims. Tonsor in his Aristotelian way rejected both extremes -- rejected the view of history as a rigorous nomothetic science and rejected the view of history as a mere literary genre. History for him was the sweet spot in between. It was an empirical discipline that valued evidence, facts, reasoning, and veracity; it was also a humanistic inquiry that plumbed how man's interior struggles and external confrontations and accommodations with reality left a record that subsequent generations could examine. This record helps us understand what human beings believed and valued. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I further appreciated that Tonsor did not confine exploration of the past to "the written record" as so many historians taught, but to the larger "the symbolic record" since he himself liberally used art, iconography, music, and architecture in his intellectual history and cultural criticism. His return to the topic at hand pulled me out of my meditations on the complex nature of historical inquiry.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"In the case of equality," Tonsor said, "the development has been exceedingly complex. The idea is more convoluted, has meant more different things, has undergone more transformations, than just about any other idea in the modern age.[6] Would you agree?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I would!" I said, excited that Tonsor was sharing his book proposal with me. "Recently at Mass the reading was from Matthew,[7] the parable about all the laborers getting the same wage, even the ones who show up near the end of the day. It caused quite a ruckus. People didn't get it then, and we don't get it now." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I continued: "There are so many different ways to look at the idea of equality because there are so many different arenas in which the struggle for equality has taken place. It's been humankind's running struggle, I suppose, since Hammurabi and Moses. The priests -- they have to define what religious equality looks like. Are all human persons equal by virtue of having souls and being created in the image and likeness of God? The judges -- they have to work out what the equality of all persons under the law looks like. The politicians -- they have to determine political equality through norms like one man one vote. The entrepreneurs -- they must seek economic equality by eliminating barriers to entering the marketplace and obstacles to growing their businesses. The social theorists -- they come up with redistributive policies like guaranteed income and school vouchers to give every disadvantaged family a ladder up." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"You are referring to Milton Friedman," observed Tonsor. "One of our most creative thinkers on the right when it comes to the problem of equality and the related idea of equity. And then there are the abstract philosophers who continue to spin out their ethereal theories. They can be interesting and not altogether unproductive. But it's important to note that when a philosopher like John Rawls writes about equality, he is only ratifying changes that have already occurred in a <i>Sitz im Leben</i>, in a real historical and cultural context."[8] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I hardly heard what Tonsor last said because a policy idea suddenly occurred to me, out of the blue: "What if we provided a national income for every American adult below a certain line of adjusted gross income, and tied that income to the nation's economic performance. In any given year, if the economy did well, and more revenues came in to the Treasury, then the income floor would be higher. Giving everyone the dignity of a minimum income would satisfy the left. And giving everyone a stake in robust economic growth would satisfy the right. Maybe such a vision of the common good could unite left and right," I offered, steeling myself against his usual charge, that I was being Pollyannaish. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"It will never happen," he said grumpily. "Still, you should write your idea up for <i>National Review</i>. They might publish it."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">After a few moments my professor continued: "What I find especially fascinating is the distance between all the paeans to equality -- by the political scientists, philosophers, Marxist theorists, and historians -- and the absence of equality in the world as we find it. As you know, works dealing with the organization of human society tend to divide into how society is, or how it ought to be: into descriptive or prescriptive treatments. So: Machiavelli in <i>The Prince </i>wrote descriptively; Plato in the <i>Republic </i>wrote prescriptively. Christopher Jencks in <i>Inequality</i> wrote descriptively; Huxley in <i>Island</i> wrote prescriptively. But no author can claim to have found true equality in our civilization. Is this not strange? In a day when demands for equality are at an all-time high, when the rhetoric of equality is at a fever pitch, when the promise of equality is a staple of political life, the fact is that while certain kinds of equality have increased over the past two centuries, there is, overall, little enough by way of genuine equality.[9] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Muhammad Ali seeks more political and economic equality. But he is who he is and earns what he earns because of a peculiar combination of genetics, metabolism, training, and opportunity that can only be described as extraordinary. No amount of political or economic equality can suppress that fact.[10]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"And so it is that our experience of individuals and of society is not the experience of equality but rather the experience of the most intense and pervasive inequality. And yet the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence asserted that 'all men are created equal.' Surely there is a contradiction in American political theory in particular and in Western political theory as a whole between prescriptive and descriptive social and political analysis. So we must ask, what exactly does the clause mean? Did it mean the same thing to Thomas Jefferson as it did to the son of a hardscrabble farmer in south-central Illinois named Abraham Lincoln?[11]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"The idea of equality is central to understanding the American experience. It is the fundamental idea that lies behind the American Revolution and the extraordinary society we in America have created. More important still, the idea of equality has transformed not only the political life and society of the United States but also the life and society of the world.[12] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Yes, the notion of equality has been the single most potent revolutionary force the world has ever seen. Over and over again in the course of the past 200 years, mankind has defied tradition and status, blood and accumulated usage, in the hope of regenerating and recreating society. More often than not these revolutions have ended in failure and even a diminution rather than an increase in equality."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Thus confirming Orwell's quip," I said, "that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others?"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," Tonsor chuckled. "Orwell's mordant wit gets straight to the heart of the matter: Ideologues have been manipulating the idea of equality for two centuries now. Still, it is equality that has provided the dynamism, the moving force that has energized modern history. The great liberal and leftist revolutions of the past two centuries have all been made in the name of equality."[13] </span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">____________</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "A Few Unequal and Preliminary Thoughts," in <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), pp. 63-65.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[2] This statement stretches the chronology found in J. B. Bury, <i>A History of Freedom of Thought</i> (Kindle ed.), p. 8; Bury's book is favorably cited by </span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor and informed some of his thinking on the subject. See Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i>, p. 65.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[3] Again, t</span><span style="font-size: large;">his statement stretches the chronology found in J. B. Bury, <i>A History of Freedom of Thought</i>, </span><span style="font-size: large;">p. 8. See</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i>, p</span><span style="font-size: large;">. 65.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Robert Frost, "The Black Cottage," lines 64, 68-70, in <i>North of Boston</i> (1915). Many thanks to W. Winston Elliott III for reminding me of the origin of those lines.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[5] Peter Novick, <i>That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession</i> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[6] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i>, p. 63.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[7] Matthew 20: 1-16.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[8] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor, "A Few Unequal," in </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i><span style="font-size: large;">, p. 63.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[9] <i>Ibid</i>., p. 64.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[10] <i>Ibid</i>., p. 65.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[11] <i>Ibid</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[12] <i>Ibid</i>.,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> p. 68.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[13] </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">Ibid</i><span style="font-size: large;">.</span>Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-12673577616338921012017-08-31T15:11:00.001-07:002017-09-26T17:04:14.016-07:00Tonsor: American History: The South<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg8n73zqKaqljmI2ywKN_XQ8vTTVyTP2DEiJFBksnShSe0nywI9wDQ0lLRHwjNumEsuOhEWPur6n9z9mUCFhcNR8WM_sfsumxZ9ntYbzwuKoax7CI8WWx7obpgSpcO5b5fOfxu6olqIhD9/s1600/CdANmCxXIAAxZGt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg8n73zqKaqljmI2ywKN_XQ8vTTVyTP2DEiJFBksnShSe0nywI9wDQ0lLRHwjNumEsuOhEWPur6n9z9mUCFhcNR8WM_sfsumxZ9ntYbzwuKoax7CI8WWx7obpgSpcO5b5fOfxu6olqIhD9/s400/CdANmCxXIAAxZGt.jpg" width="302" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jesse Jackson received a surprisingly high<br />
percentage of the white vote when he ran in<br />
Democratic primaries and caucuses <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">in 1988.</span><br />
In Michigan he easily won the Democratic caucus.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">Jesse Jackson made a remarkable run for the presidency in the early months of 1988 -- two decades before America would elect its first black president, Barack Obama. Michigan played a significant role in the ascent of the civil rights leader: After he won the Democratic caucus with 55 percent of the vote, Jackson for a brief time was the Democratic front-runner since he had the most pledged delegates. Whatever their politics, many voters recognized that it was a significant threshold for an African-American to cross</span><span style="font-size: large;">.[1]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor was cynical about this historic moment. When I joined him and Caroline for lunch a few days after the caucus, he dismissed the result: "Jesse Jackson's showing in Michigan is a fluke and he won't win -- he can't win. America is not ready for a black president. To cite that great expert, the comedian Don Rickles: 'Last year we said things can't go on like this, and they didn't -- they got worse.'"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">He chuckled, but I was not feeling the vibe. Because of recent conversations among my circle of acquaintances and friends, the topic hit an irritating boil that was ready to pop. In my agitation I hardly noticed that the ever-gracious Caroline set a plate of hot food before me.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Well," I said, "I was born and raised in Texas and also spent part of my childhood in New Orleans, and I find it interesting how many Northerners think they're experts on the South. Some of our colleagues on campus have expressed dismay that Jackson is racking up primary victories below the Mason-Dixon Line, and not just with the support of black voters. He's winning with significant white support, too.[2] I am starting to think that Northerners don't want to give the South any credit for overcoming the burden of its history." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">My Texas drawl was subtly surfacing in my speech, as it often did when I spoke about my childhood home at any length or with any passion. Tonsor sat squarely in his chair, looking at me through his thick glasses with that sphinx-like expression of his. I had no idea what he was thinking -- maybe he had never heard my Texas accent before -- but I raised the ante in an effort to get him to play his hand.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I've been surprised by the prejudice against the South on campus," I persisted, "and by the condescension toward Southerners. Yesterday one of our department's star grad students said that a Southern accent knocked ten points off a speaker's IQ. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"But I'll tell you what I think after living in the North these past several months: When it comes to race relations, I think the North needs the South to be its scapegoat. Look at how Northerners are always calling out the South for being racist. But notice that they bring out their fog machine to obscure the truth and hide their own racist past."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor, I perceived, began to shake his head but I could not tell whether it was in agreement or disagreement. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Don't you think," I repeated with growing heat, "that a lot of Northerners use the South as a scapegoat to deflect attention away from their own legacy of racism -- whether it's Brown University capitalizing on the New England slave trade, or it's Indiana reviving the KKK after World War I, or it's Detroit being the most segregated city in North America? Aren't b</span><span style="font-size: large;">oth sections of the country stained with the blood of America's original sin.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">It's always easier to look at the splinter in the other fellow's eye than to deal with the splinter in your own. I don't think the North is in any position to lecture the South when it comes to race."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Caroline and Tonsor fussed with their food. They were uncharacteristically quiet. It suddenly occurred to me that I was violating their hospitality. Here I sat at the table of two Northerners who were feeding me and who likely sympathized with my complaint. But I had a burr under my saddle, and my heated and defensive rant was not conducive to friendly conversation. The irony was not lost on me that I was acting in a very un-Southern way; my mother would have been mortified. Apologizing, I looked for a way to change the subject.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"You are just expressing your Southern pride," said Tonsor with understanding. </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"It just shows that you feel comfortable enough with us to say what's on your mind," added Caroline kindly.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Thank you for saying that," I said. "As you can probably sense, I feel more conflicted than ever. It's not as though I can return to the South and fall into the old conversations. I cannot act as though I haven't learned things. Maybe the Dunning School is not the last word on the subject."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaQYxqR9xPiNYlHXXtidSKS5woy-vQjYjbUFG0WH4Tft_Ezcdt8fZBT-kh1HDzBKllPWfSNJmqOsZofOr37KVe1rJWezmXIoqwnyhRSk6zL-bxcboyLv04kr12k3C_Qj2yVIFu0nGoroxS/s1600/870666619.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaQYxqR9xPiNYlHXXtidSKS5woy-vQjYjbUFG0WH4Tft_Ezcdt8fZBT-kh1HDzBKllPWfSNJmqOsZofOr37KVe1rJWezmXIoqwnyhRSk6zL-bxcboyLv04kr12k3C_Qj2yVIFu0nGoroxS/s400/870666619.jpg" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Columbia University historian William Dunning<br />
(1857-1922)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">For Caroline's benefit, and for mine too it turned out, Tonsor elaborated, "Mr. Whitney is referring to one of the most influential historians in U.S. history, William Dunning. During the Gay Nineties and early twentieth century he</span><span style="font-size: large;"> left his mark on the first generation of university-trained doctoral students who wrote on the Reconstruction era, and their work would influence the interpretation of Reconstruction for a hundred years. [3] His intellectual genealogy is also worthy of note. He himself was German trained -- by the extreme nationalist Heinrich von Treitschke, a historian who is best handled with tongs. After returning to the U.S., Dunning established himself at Columbia where he was a teacher of Carlton J. H. Hayes, who was a teacher of Joseph Ward Swain, who was a teacher of mine."[4]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"So your professional genealogy descends from Dunning?" I queried, wondering whether I had just stuck my foot in my mouth.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I would be a mutation," Tonsor said sarcastically, "for I am much more in Lord Acton's line of descent and have never considered myself part of Dunning's so-called school. But it is important to know who he is. Dunning notched his gun by slaying apologist after Northern apologist of Reconstruction. Not surprisingly his legacy is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the South is quite enthusiastic about him. He and his doctoral students at Columbia did painstaking archival research to demonstrate how much the Radical Republicans hurt the former Confederate States of America. There was much of value in their findings, for they help us understand why the South resents the North to this day. On the other hand -- a stained hand, no doubt -- in retrospect he is considered a racist. People think his work </span><span style="font-size: large;">extended the shelf life of Jim Crow and </span><span style="font-size: large;">made black disenfranchisement respectable. Today, as you can imagine, his shade is persona non grata at the American Historical Association, which is ironic considering he was one of its founders.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I also mentioned Lord Acton whose reflections are to the point. It is my considered judgment that Acton was the most knowledgeable foreign observer of American affairs in the nineteenth century. His writings on America are not much read nowadays because he supported the South in the Civil War. Yet I urge you to read his long essay on what he called the Second American Revolution; it's published in his journal <i>The Rambler</i>, and it's misleadingly titled, "Political Causes of the American Revolution." Acton was no defender of chattel slavery -- not at all like Calhoun who wrote of slavery as a 'positive good' -- yet he believed the federal system of states' rights was critically important to upholding freedom and curbing the enlargement of the national government, not to mention the expanding tyranny of the president. The South, Acton believed, was fighting for liberty, for progress, and for civilization.[5] </span><span style="font-size: large;">And while he believed that most great men were bad men,[6] he sympathized with the tragic pathos of Robert E. Lee, who felt duty-bound to defend his homeland against invasion. He wrote to Lee following his surrender, 'I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.'"[7]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I silently noted the irony that Acton wanted to uphold freedom in the states that supported slavery but, feeling that I had been combative enough already, kept the observation to myself. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"For me," I offered instead, "there's no going home to the same South. I see it differently now. I'll always love my family, of course, and the flavors, smells, and scenes of my childhood, but I've had to rethink what I learned in childhood -- about race, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, all of it. I mean, m</span><span style="font-size: large;">y generation is probably the last to see Southerners stand when the band strikes up Dixie! </span><span style="font-size: large;">Even my view of Lincoln has taken a 180. Several members of my family thought he was a tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution. They could never speak his name without gnawing their hand over his invasion of the South. They have a point. But then you travel. You read. You talk. You reconsider. It takes time to come to terms with the South's mixed legacy." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"You are dealing with a tangle of myth, memory, and the politics of nostalgia. Because the Civil War is the American Iliad,[8] it is constantly being refought in the public memory. Much is at stake, for myths make meaning, meaning makes politics, and politics make myths.[9] It will take time, but you will find a way to come to terms with your Southern legacy," Tonsor said, and added, in a softer register: "Maybe it's harder for Texans because of the pride Texans have in the Lone Star State. But with time and perspective you will sort it out.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I have a similarly complicated relationship to my home, the Great River Country of south-central Illinois, with its large horizons, its prairie panoramas, and its riparian woodlands. The Land of Lincoln," he added with a mischievous grin. I smiled back at him, for we had reversed roles. In dialogue he was more likely to be the edgy one with the chip on his shoulder; I the patient listener. Today we got to see things from the other side of the fence.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYFxF8N4XTSzDjvfUjNQc2T1BPZzLTCvnw7-whppp6gxQmILpK7zRCHKNpFxYdulE4AH8OQz-beeHRJd8zaMmLfYNm2qcEbJso3lPc90A48QLSY75RHpoTwPqizk-RE4bLiS0SXMmYLSfT/s1600/20120615-175041-pic-38185815.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYFxF8N4XTSzDjvfUjNQc2T1BPZzLTCvnw7-whppp6gxQmILpK7zRCHKNpFxYdulE4AH8OQz-beeHRJd8zaMmLfYNm2qcEbJso3lPc90A48QLSY75RHpoTwPqizk-RE4bLiS0SXMmYLSfT/s400/20120615-175041-pic-38185815.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lincoln Hall, where Illinois's history department once was housed. The<br />
edifice looks like a Roman temple dedicated to a "god," Abraham Lincoln,<br />
whose bust is in the alcove at the end of the lobby.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I was raised on Lincoln," said Tonsor. "He was everywhere in my childhood. After World War II, when I attended Illinois -- a land-grant university whose founding was owed to Lincoln's support for the Morrill Act -- I encountered his words every day, literally. The history department was then in Lincoln Hall, a building that was designed to look vaguely like a Roman temple to a god, and in this case the god was Abraham Lincoln. As you approach Lincoln Hall from the Main Quad, you can look up at the entablature which girds the top of the building and see a <i>Bartlett's </i>worth of Lincoln quotations."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The hall is a veritable shrine to Lincoln," added Caroline. She looked at her husband and said, somewhat tentatively: "There must be three dozen quotations of the President, and a bust in the lobby." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes." Then, turning to me he remarked, "I have mixed feelings when I return home, to south-central Illinois. Caroline and I usually drive back to Jerseyville over the Fourth of July to be with family. But there is always something depressing about going back. So many people there have never reached for more than a very average life. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Meaningful conversation can be tough slogging.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">Most of what they know about the world comes from lowbrow television shows. But these are my people and it's home.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"So I understand your attachment to place, as well as your very complicated relationship to Texas and the South. It's similar to my complicated relationship to south-central Illinois. The irrational attachment to place is one of the things that makes us human. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Alas, the importance of place is often overlooked in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Ann Arbor. Here reign the deracine."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;">____________</span></div>
</div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] R. W. Apple Jr., "Jackson Wins Easily in Michigan in Surprising Setback to Dukakis," <i>New York Times</i>, March 27, 1988, at URL "http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/27/us/jackson-wins-easily-in-michigan-in-surprising-setback-to-dukakis.html?mcubz=0; R. W. Apple Jr., "Jackson Is Seen as Winning a Solid Place in History," <i>New York Times</i>, April 29, 1988, at URL http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/29/us/jackson-is-seen-as-winning-a-solid-place-in-history.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=0. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] E. J. Dionne Jr., "Black and White: How Jesse Jackson Made History While Losing Wisconsin, <i>New York Times</i>, April 10, 1988, at URL http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/10/weekinreview/black-and-white-how-jesse-jackson-made-history-while-losing-wisconsin.html?mcubz=0; E. J. Dionne Jr., "Jackson's Share of Votes by Whites Triples in '88, <i>New York Times</i>, June 13, 1988, at URL http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/13/us/jackson-share-of-votes-by-whites-triples-in-88.html?mcubz=0.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] For a more recent treatment of the state of the historiographic debate over William Dunning and his legacy, see <i>The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction</i>, ed. John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, Foreword by Eric Foner (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Joseph Ward Swain," <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 312.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[5] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Quest for Liberty: America in Acton's Thought," Introduction by James C. Holland (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Occasional Paper No. 1, 1993).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[6] Lord Acton letter to Mandell Creighton, quoted in </span><span style="font-size: large;">Gertrude Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics </i>(Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Kindle edition), chap.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> 9, loc. 4880.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[7] Lord Acton letter to Robert E. Lee, November 1866; quoted by </span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor, "Quest for Liberty."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[8] This expressive allusion was used by the University of Chicago professor Richard Weaver in "Lee the Philosopher," <i>Georgia Review</i>, vol. 2, no. 3 (fall 1948): 297. Previously it was the title of a book that was published when Tonsor was an undergraduate: Otto Eisenschiml and Ralph Newman, <i>The American Iliad: The Epic Story of the Civil War</i> (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[9] A similar formulation was offered by the Berkeley historian T. J. Stiles, "We Need a New Museum that Tells Us How We Came to Believe What We Believe," <i>History News Network</i>, August 27, 2017, at URL http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/166765. </span>Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-88899328351315420552017-08-16T00:00:00.000-07:002017-08-21T14:09:29.265-07:00Tonsor: Catholicism: Integrated Humanities Program<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">I.</span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Between the decision to become Catholic and my formal reception into the Church, the ardor that propelled my conversion stalled and my spirits took a nosedive. Insecurity about my career resurfaced. For the previous several years, w</span><span style="font-size: large;">hen I thought about what I ought to do with my life, I visualized myself teaching at a college where I could do some good for the students, the college, and the culture. </span><span style="font-size: large;">I thought the best means to that end was graduate study in a good history program since that would maximize my development and opportunities. That's why I ended up at Michigan studying under Stephen Tonsor.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Although I am not the type to wear my religion on my sleeve, I still needed to process how the conversion might alter my work: Should I aim to teach in a secular or Catholic college? What if my only job offer were from an ideologically grounded college? Would my faith become an issue in graduate research and teaching? Would my conversion put off professors in a position to help my career along?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">A voice in me asked:<i> What would you do if you were not afraid?</i></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">To allay my concerns, I sought out my <i>Doktorvater </i>and soon-to-be-godfather, Stephen Tonsor. He did not pull punches, and the following dialogue would turn out to be important to my career.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Okay," I said, finding Tonsor in his office at the appointed hour, "here I am at Michigan, trying to figure out the extent to which my conversion might inform my work, particularly my approach to history."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor nodded but, uncharacteristically, did not respond right away. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I then introduced an idea that I thought would give Tonsor and me grist for conversation: "I am looking for models of what I should or should not do next. When I lived in Colorado, a professor told me about the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. I wondered how three professors -- Dennis Quinn, John Senior, and Frank Nelick -- got away with creating a Catholic 'Great Books' program at a public R1 university. They believed that there was such a thing as truth and that the academy should offer students an integrated approach to the search for the truth.[1] But the dean and most of the faculty were skeptical. They accused the program's founders of being part of an 'international conspiracy' that required narrow sectarian teaching, religious indoctrination, brainwashing, and proselytizing.</span><span style="font-size: large;">[2]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Even Catholics were charging the IHP with providing a safe-house for potentially schismatic Catholics who followed Archbishop Lefebvre who by then was in open defiance of the Pope.[3] All this happened little more than a decade ago and it makes me ask: How self-consciously 'Catholic' can or should a Catholic scholar be?"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor answered: "You are asking the necessary questions -- I'd worry about you if you didn't -- and regarding the IHP I can certainly argue for the defense. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"It's true: The Integrated Humanities Program was a political failure. Yet its founders were courageous visionaries willing to stick their necks out[4] at a time when the centrifugal forces in our society were tearing all semblance of coherence in higher education to shreds. Those were years of campus unrest, the Kent State shootings, and radical curricular experimentation.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"So Quinn, Senior, and Nelick came along and had a vision of restoring the humanities on campus. They wrote beautifully of recovering the liberal arts, of inspiring wonder, of pursuing knowledge for its own sake.[5] They were antimodernists and Thomists who challenged the modernists and pluralists at KU. Predictably, the antimodernists and Thomists could not gain the support of the modernists and pluralists.[6] Within ten years, KU's faculty killed the IHP in a democratic vote. That should surprise no one: A democracy killed Socrates, and a majority vote condemned Jesus to death.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZYqUv8dgvvyGRk4hHrGC5rTQmoWZ8uFqZ2_zjwVjSnelhu35RnQk59eXIx47I7k22XOtjJUkWXIDLHLcSDfOnM0OFbQ5zz0gYZzAHpif8Km1wn9fQKOV7IxAsvoWyNhpizxvL9dHD_qr1/s1600/Screen-Shot-2017-04-26-at-11.19.13-PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZYqUv8dgvvyGRk4hHrGC5rTQmoWZ8uFqZ2_zjwVjSnelhu35RnQk59eXIx47I7k22XOtjJUkWXIDLHLcSDfOnM0OFbQ5zz0gYZzAHpif8Km1wn9fQKOV7IxAsvoWyNhpizxvL9dHD_qr1/s400/Screen-Shot-2017-04-26-at-11.19.13-PM.png" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">John Senior, a Catholic convert and one of the three founders of the Integrated Humanities Program at Kansas. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Image at URL https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2557-recalling-why-they-resisted-dr-john-senior-s-classic-the-glass-confessional</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"It became a national story. Some would charge that KU's dean, a jesting Pilate, was determined to kill the program from the start. Not only did he ask the Thomists, 'What is truth?' He handled the death sentence quite clumsily. A committee scotched the program by bureaucratic maneuvering that would strip IHP faculty of their power of initiative. Asked whether they could accommodate such an arrangement, I recall Dennis Quinn saying, 'I refuse to kiss the hangman'; and John Senior saying, 'I won't participate in my own execution.' Basically KU mandated that the integrated search for truth be disintegrated.[7]</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">"So, yes, by one measure the program was a political failure; it could not survive in a public R1 university. But b</span><span style="font-size: large;">y another measure it enjoyed some academic success. During the few years of its existence, students voted with their feet; they flocked to the program by the hundreds.[8] The classical readings, learned discourse, stargazing, and integral view of reality made them alive to a much richer intellectual life than the ordinary fare. It inspired them to wonder about the truth, goodness, and beauty that are revealed in creation. These were Olympian achievements on Mount Oread.</span><span style="font-size: large;">[9]</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGdrIL019xAbhIwxH9-9YIzSgLCmnysDAxSpPRclnzlYhB8rNAiCfwBvd9erfpP3gUPT1Aa4XFGN8oUWo4vguWrxltw3sNQUGq7OfzFFGW7TcZqWCufcseCMGVkbAY2QRlEnd1pb9Jmd16/s1600/No._10._State_University_of_Kansas%252C_on_Mount_Oread%252C_Lawrence%252C_Kansas._%25285569456560%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="491" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGdrIL019xAbhIwxH9-9YIzSgLCmnysDAxSpPRclnzlYhB8rNAiCfwBvd9erfpP3gUPT1Aa4XFGN8oUWo4vguWrxltw3sNQUGq7OfzFFGW7TcZqWCufcseCMGVkbAY2QRlEnd1pb9Jmd16/s640/No._10._State_University_of_Kansas%252C_on_Mount_Oread%252C_Lawrence%252C_Kansas._%25285569456560%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">KU is built atop a considerable hill called Mount Oread. Image at URL<br />
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/No._10._State_University_of_Kansas%2C_on_Mount_Oread%2C_Lawrence%2C_Kansas.<br />
_%285569456560%29.jpg</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Perhaps an even greater success occurred in the realm of the spiritual, as evidenced by the number of Catholic conversions and vocations the IHP inspired. The spate of spiritual conversions was a notable outcome[10] -- and it doomed the program. Quinn, Senior, and Nelick were reviled, envied, and feared; victims of their own success. Or should I say martyrs?"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I was eager to jump in: "What does it say about the intellectual ecology of the academy these days that Catholic scholars cannot thrive if they take religion seriously?"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"It's a fallen world filled with struggle," Tonsor said forcefully. "Are you surprised?"</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I did not want to come across as naive since Tonsor felt disdain for the Pollyanna type.[11] I decided it was prudent not to continue that line of thought but just to let him keep talking.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"In the modern age," observed Tonsor, "there is a running battle over our most fundamental beliefs. Ours is a society where few men live in the house in which they were born; few live in the landscape which was their homeland. S</span></span><span style="font-size: large;">cience has transformed the values and t</span><span style="font-size: large;">echnology has transformed the conditions of life. Religion, the essence of changelessness, remains the last redoubt against modernity. Not surprisingly, faith has become a battleground between those who would surrender to transience and those who would defend the permanent things. For the latter, it's a fierce and rearguard battle. As Henry Adams remarked, we have long since entered the era when 'whirl is king.'"[12]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Suddenly Tonsor switched gears: "The IHP appeared at the wrong time and in the wrong place."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">I looked at him quizzically. "What do you mean?" After his capable defense of the program, I was now unsure what he actually thought.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Despite my high regard for Quinn, Senior, and Nelick; despite all their program's attractive strengths; there were legitimate reservations. I'm not talking about the jaundiced critics who accused the IHP of being part of an international conspiracy. That's an old anti-Catholic canard and it is shameful that Ph.D.s trained in the most sophisticated research methods would, without evidence, say such an absurd thing.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"A moment ago I argued for the defense. Now I shall argue for the prosecution." In using this method, Tonsor was tipping his hat to the primary method of the liberal arts -- from Socrates to the medieval scholastics to Lord Acton -- to examine all sides of an question. It was high irony on Tonsor's part -- to critique a traditional liberal program by applying the traditional method of the liberal arts -- but it effectively set up the point he was about to make. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"We must ask: Were the three professors advocating too strongly for Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas?[13] Did they exclude competing views to the detriment of the students' education? </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">I heard that the professors frowned on students asking questions,[14] which is inexplicable because teaching students to ask questions in the dialectical pursuit of truth is the sine qua non of a liberal education. To stifle questions in</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> the humanities is problematic. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Students do need to learn the range of debate when it comes to the perennial questions. They do need to know how to engage in rigorous dialectic with their professors and with each other. </span><span style="font-size: large;">It's what puts the liberty in a liberal education. The freedom to shape one's informed worldview: that freedom is what keeps one's mind from being servile. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Add to these concerns additional ones -- for instance, that the students had 24 semester hours of freshman and sophomore humanities courses with just those three professors who all had the same Thomistic worldview. It's understandable that people of good will had questions. It was not only the pluralists who questioned whether the program served the best interests of the students.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"You see, the syllabus came out of the pressed-flower school of liberal education --" (He paused at my laughter.) "It relied too heavily on a set of premodern 'Great Books' which is not always the best way to initiate students into the modern intellectual problems they will face. Maybe the radio addresses of C. S. Lewis capture the students' imagination more than, say, the summas of Thomas Aquinas.[15] </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">The teacher must be flexible.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"In addition, the program's ahistorical approach to those 'Great Books,' its failure to give students adequate context, seriously hinders the enjoyment of reading them for the first time. I mean, how can you tackle Virgil's <i>Aeneid</i> or Dante's <i>Inferno</i> without a map, without knowing where to place the historically conditioned worldview of the people threaded through the story? This was also the design flaw in Mortimer Adler's set of 'Great Books of the Western World.'</span></span><span style="font-size: large;">[16]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> It was ahistorical to a crippling degree, which is why no one reads them; in most houses the volumes just sit on bookshelves like knick-knacks. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Also, there was the program's attitude to modernity -- how it taught or, rather, did not teach students to engage modernity. The modern project is exceedingly problematic, but not everything about modernity is morally evil, intellectually misguided, and psychologically alienating. We are called to confront -- not just to reject outright, but to confront -- modernity: to test it and sift it and prove it. It's sometimes the most modern of authors who help us do that. While Goethe did not believe in transcendence the way a thirteenth-century Thomist did, I would defy anyone to do better than <i>Faust</i> for</span><span style="font-size: large;"> exploring and understanding the tragedy of the modern spirit.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"Now, I do not know John Senior personally, but after he converted to Catholicism in the early 1960s[17] he adopted an extreme position in his rejection of modernity -- rather too extreme, in my view. He apparently has a low opinion of Vatican II and </span><span style="font-size: large;">attends Mass at Society of Pius X chapels.[18]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> His antimodern theology spilled over into the IHP whose assigned readings pretty much stopped at the year 1300 AD.[19] Well, time did not stop in 1300 AD. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"And that leads to my final point: Not one of the teachers who founded the IHP was professionally trained in history. Their approach was largely literary and philosophical; by their own admission they "taught in the poetical mode";[20] Now, after I returned from the war I was a serious student of poetry and in fact considered becoming a poet.[21] At Illinois I took many philosophy courses and came close to pursing a philosophy Ph.D. I have great respect for my colleagues who are "lovers of wisdom." But poets and philosophers are sometimes tempted to take historical shortcuts. They do not work hard enough to understand the philosopher's cultural context and the development of ideas over time. I look skeptically on the work of people who inadvertently create wrinkles in time because doing so distorts the narrative of what really happened, <i>wie es eigentlich gewesen</i>. Then the danger is that the poet and philosopher are presenting something that looks more like propaganda than history. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"Being antimodern is romantic and quixotic but it can be misguided if it's the sole exposure college students will have to the humanities. If you do not adequately prepare your students to confront the modern age -- if their minds are not truly engaged when they approach Goethe, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud because the well has already been poisoned -- then you are doing your students a great injustice. It takes courage to confront modernity, but students in the liberal arts have to get a sense of its complexity. They must be taught to test and sift the modernist authors in order to discern the truth, goodness, and beauty in their writing -- or in the debates provoked by their writing. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"So, as much as I admire the integrity of Quinn, Senior, and Nelick; as much I as prefer to root for Catholics on the home team; I did find problems with the Integrated Humanities Program, serious problems that would have made me reluctant to lend it my unqualified support had I been at Kansas in the 1970s."[22]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">As I listened to this <i>pro et contra</i>, I was surprised by how thoroughgoing Tonsor's criticism of the Integrated Humanities Program was. Although a devout Catholic who attended Mass faithfully, he could not support fellow Catholics when he thought their love for the thirteenth century shortchanged students who had to learn to confront modernity. In the years to come, I would learn other surprising things about his view of the Church. He was certainly Catholic -- but not the Catholic of my projections.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>IV.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor wanted to be done with discussing the IHP and go directly to the point I was raising. "You will have to find your own way to come to terms with your conversion and your career. I cannot tell you how to do it.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"But I say this: If you believe that God is ultimately the author of all truth, then you will not be afraid of searching for truth wherever it might be found. Diamonds have been discovered in dunghills. The Catholic humanist knows this to be so and is not afraid to explore places outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom. Keep this assurance in mind -- it will always be the bridge between your faith as a Catholic and your work as an historian."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">A eureka moment, this. Tonsor's words, which threaded through my mind like lightning in the night sky, supplied a therapeutic shock. His thought reminded me of something he had written in another context, a beautiful passage I had read in Lincoln, Nebraska, back in 1987 when on the journey to Ann Arbor. There he had written that it was important to "conceive of truth as God's own to be cherished and loved for His sake."[23] </span><span style="font-size: large;">If I remained focused on pursuing truth, I should never again feel agitated about the relationship between my religion and my work. They would forever be organically connected.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">It was a lovely thought -- meditation on which was cut short by a practical consideration: "What about the methodological gatekeepers who guard the ramparts to the profession? They do not speak of God as the ultimate author of truth, and they would roll their eyes if they heard me do so."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Again, I cannot tell you how to negotiate history's gatekeepers. I could have done a better job myself. You must find your own way.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"But I have never counseled Catholics to retreat into the comforts and isolation of the Catholic ghetto. No, we Catholics should take our distinctive Catholicism into the WASP world, into the humdrum of the secular world, and engage. We should engage not just for our own sake -- since o</span><span style="font-size: large;">ne cannot be a good Catholic without doing so -- </span><span style="font-size: large;">but also for the sake of the world.[24] </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"In coming years you will find yourself trying to integrate two things: becoming a true humanist and a well-formed Catholic. The two are closely related. Our priests, poets, artists, and scholars in the humanities are entrusted in a special way with our patrimony. The humanists are the great conservators in every age. They live from the tradition even when they live against the tradition. They are the historical memory of mankind and because they are, they guarantee to us our humanity. W</span><span style="font-size: large;">ithout the humanists, o</span><span style="font-size: large;">ur culture would shuffle about, aimlessly, like an Alzheimer's patient without memory.[25]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Unfortunately a disheartening trend has been under way for several years now. T</span><span style="font-size: large;">oo many humanists are committing treason. Recall the term made famous by the French novelist and philosopher, Julien Benda, who wrote of t</span><span style="font-size: large;">he 'treason of the intellectual.' The treason of the intellectual, the treason of the humanist, occurs when he refuses to fulfill the role to which he has been called: he trades the contemplative life for the active life.[26] It's a bad deal -- bad for himself and bad for his culture. </span></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5JEwHmZ7xXvN-wYtJWncgSLHDquJwORD3vo8SeGoZ8H8UTYb3e1Q9A_hWb_M6uTvr3MIUUGy8zEqPiD2JWqbJ4BninXp3O9HSZdxbc2hT3SP_jnZ-LNNrGn4CKeP-NDe2AHihbwXAnPM4/s1600/1892059.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5JEwHmZ7xXvN-wYtJWncgSLHDquJwORD3vo8SeGoZ8H8UTYb3e1Q9A_hWb_M6uTvr3MIUUGy8zEqPiD2JWqbJ4BninXp3O9HSZdxbc2hT3SP_jnZ-LNNrGn4CKeP-NDe2AHihbwXAnPM4/s320/1892059.jpg" width="210" /></span></a><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"What's behind this treason, you might ask? It is politics. The intellectual</span><span style="font-size: large;"> has abandoned his calling because he has been beguiled by politics. In our day s</span><span style="font-size: large;">ome trace the beguilement to the Reagan presidency.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> After Nixon and the Watergate scandal</span><span style="font-size: large;">, good people turned away from politics. But Reagan came onto the scene. He was a charismatic figure and successful leader -- so successful</span><span style="font-size: large;"> he</span><span style="font-size: large;"> put the romance back into politics and seduced conservative intellectuals away from their calling</span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> N</span><span style="font-size: large;">ow the humanist </span><span style="font-size: large;">is making political activism and the manipulation of power his calling."[27]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I was taken aback by this charge against the Reagan revolution. I had assumed that Tonsor, a thoroughgoing conservative and stalwart Republican, was a big fan of Reagan's. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"It is simple arithmetic," he said. "The more humanists abandon the academy, the fewer there remain to teach. It's not just the conservative movement that is damaged when our humanists put on a blue suit and red power tie and go to Washington; it's the culture, the humanities, our universities. But t</span><span style="font-size: large;">here are other and more important things for the humanists to do. In times like these, perhaps the </span><span style="font-size: large;">ivory tower is the best defense against barbarism."[28]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"But," I countered, "if the academy is becoming hostile to humanists, doesn't it make sense that a lot of them would want to work in a sympathetic administration?" </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"So then what? Do we abandon the field? If there is to be a Catholic intellectual life, then Catholic humanists will have to stand up in the academy; humanists who have the courage to join battle; humanists who are unabashedly, unselfconsciously, unapologetically Catholic.[29]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The situation is not hopeless. The intellectually formed Catholic already has the makings of the good humanist. That's because Catholicism has a vision of the wholeness of man which is essential to the humanities. If we ought, as Lord Acton cautioned the historian, always to look for the cloven hoof, then we also ought to look in every man for the divine image: a comprehension of body and soul, of the real and the ideal, of nature and grace, of necessity and freedom, of sorrow and joy, of creatureliness and divinity, of all the contradictory and complementary elements which we as men find in our natures. There is no better antidote to ideology than the Catholic vision of the wholeness of man."[30] </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"There's your hermeneutic of dynamic tension again," I said with satisfaction. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">He growled and waved the thought off with irritation. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I must also say this: Professors Quinn, Senior, and Nelick got at least one of the fundamentals right: Education must be integral if it is to be successful. Our partial truths cry out for completeness, while our experiences need the confirmation and affirmation which derive from the experiences of others. Truth is always catholic, error always sectarian and subjective. Consequently community is always essential to the discovery and communication of truth. Because this is the case, we must, if we take the question of liberal education seriously, see that our colleges and universities are genuine communities and not simply a congeries of buildings housing atomistic students and alienated professors, each in his own bubble doing his own thing.[31]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"You are a Catholic humanist in formation. You seek what Jacques Maritain called 'integral humanism.' Leave off taking cues from the despairing and decadent culture of our times and with the aid of the Holy Spirit proceed to make all things new -- whatever you encounter -- be it in scholarship, imaginative literature, music, art, architecture. In all such endeavors you have a charge to keep. Doing nothing is not an option. For we will never recover harmony, dignity, clarity, and beauty until we discern once more the wholeness of man.[32]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: large;">"So be that person at the seminar table and speaker's podium who resists the ideologues who would reduce man to pure matter like the Marxists or pure spirit like the Gnostics. Be the integral humanist who sees man in all his marvelous and vexing complexity. <i>Ecce homo!</i> Or with Shakespeare say, 'What a piece of work is man!' </span><span style="font-size: large;">This is why we study the humanities, </span><span style="font-size: large;">to know thyself and our kind. Therein lies the path to</span><span style="font-size: large;"> becoming more fully human, because when we look into the depths of the human person, we also discover intimations of our God."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>V.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">It did not seem that Stephen Tonsor was going to show me how to handle the methodological gatekeepers of our profession. It was disappointing, but I did have the other members of my committee to consult.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps Tonsor was teaching me something more valuable than how to dodge the methodological gatekeepers. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">On the bus ride back to North Campus, I reflected on his intellectual style. He delighted in keeping his interlocutors off-balance. Whether our conversation was about politics or religion, poetry or intellectual history, I found him sometimes delightfully, sometimes maddeningly, sometimes inscrutably unpredictable. Here I had thought he would endorse the IHP because it was one of the boldest experiments yet in integral humanism in a public university. Yet he had thought through his reservations. He could not be shoehorned into the little box a lot of people tried to put him in (an antimodernist, Catholic, conservative box). I accounted his unpredictability a good thing. It did not arise from the lack of first principles -- au contraire. Tonsor's surprising answers to my questions arose out of his fierce intellectual integrity, his utter resistance to the groupthink of the herd, and his wonderful way of testing and sifting modernity in order to detect truth, goodness, and beauty wherever they could be found, even in modernity.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I realized that</span></span><span style="font-size: large;">, even after almost three years of study with him,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> I still did not know this man, Stephen Tonsor. But what a guide for the perplexed he was!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">What would I do if I were not afraid?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">______________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[1] </span>Deb Reichmann and Daniel L. Reeder, "In Search of the Good Guys," <i>Kansas Alumni</i>, vol. 77 (April 1979), p. 1; </span><span style="font-size: large;">Robert K. Carlson, "What Price Truth? Death by Administration," <i>Crisis Magazine</i>, January</span><span style="font-size: large;"> 1, 1995; at URL http://www.crisismagazine.com/1995/what-price-truth-death-by-administration</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] "College Assembly Votes to Do Away with IHP," <i>Kansas Alumni</i>, vol. 77, no. 8 (June 1979): 2-3; </span><span style="font-size: large;">Carlson, "What Price Truth?" <i>Crisis</i>; at URL</span><span style="font-size: large;"> http://www.crisismagazine.com/1995/what-price-truth-death-by-administration. See also the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1973, document titled "Petition Concerning Re-evaluation of PIHP," March 26, 1973; also box 1, folder 1977, document by Dennis B. Quinn, "Education by the Muses," September 13, 1977, p. 1.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] Sharon Mielke, "College Program Suspect," <i>United Methodist Reporter</i>, no date found, p. 3. See also John Senior's own writing about "the threat of excommunication hanging over us who attend Mass at Society of Pius X chapels," in John Senior, "Recalling Why They Resisted: Dr. John Senior's Classic 'The Glass Confessional," in <i>The Remnant</i>, June 1, 2016; at URL https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2557-recalling-why-they-resisted-dr-john-senior-s-classic-the-glass-confessional. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[4] There have been numerous tributes to the founders of the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, especially to John Senior. See, e.g., Philippe Maxence, "John Senior: In Piam Memoriam," <i>Crisis Magazine</i> (April 5, 2012), at URL http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/john-senior-in-piam-memoriam; Dwight Longenecker, "John Senior and the Restoration of Realism," <i>The Imaginative Conservative</i> (April 26, 2017), at URL http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/04/john-senior-restoration-realism-dwight-longenecker.html; and Patrick Martin, "A Tribute to John Senior," originally posted in <i>The Catholic Thing</i> (April 9, 2009), reposted by the Catholic Education Resource Center, at URL http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/education/catholic-contributions/a-tribute-to-john-senior.html. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[5] See, e.g., University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1977, Dennis B. Quinn, "Education by the Muses," September 13, 1977, pp. 1-6.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[6] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Reichmann and Reeder, "Good Guys," <i>Kansas Alumni</i>: 2.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[7] </span><span style="font-size: large;">"College Assembly Votes," <i>Kansas Alumni</i>: 3. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[8] "Old IHP Courses Thrive," <i>Kansas Alumni</i>, vol. 79 (November 1981); Longenecker, "John Senior," at URL </span><span style="font-size: large;">http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/04/john-senior-restoration-realism-dwight-longenecker.html. </span><span style="font-size: large;">In addition, there are abundant student testimonials in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folders 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[9] Again, see the </span><span style="font-size: large;">abundant student testimonials in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folders 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981; also see </span><span style="font-size: large;">Carlson, "What Price Truth?" <i>Crisis</i>; at</span><span style="font-size: large;"> URL http://www.crisismagazine.com/1995/what-price-truth-death-by-administration.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[10] See the short biography of one of the program's most accomplished converts, Bishop James Conley, whose academic mentor and Catholic godfather was John Senior, at URL http://www.lincolndiocese.org/bishops/bishop-james-conley/biography. Again, see</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Longenecker, "John Senior," at URL </span><span style="font-size: large;">http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/04/john-senior-restoration-realism-dwight-longenecker.html.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[11] Ann Tonsor Zeddies conversations with GW, East Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 18, 2017, and June 17, 2017; also Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, Michigan, June 28, 2017.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[12] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Haunted House of the Human Spirit -- an Editorial," <i>Modern Age</i> (fall 1985): 291.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[13] For KU faculty who were already hostile to the IHS, the final straw would have been John Senior's book, <i>The Death of Christian Culture</i> (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978). Published when the IHS was on its last legs, the book was an unsparing attack on modernism and a vigorous defense of a medieval scholastic school of philosophy known as Aristotelian-Thomistic Realism.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[14] </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Stephen J. Tonsor, "Liberal Education: Courses or Questions?" in <i>Tradition and Reform in Education</i> (</span><span style="font-size: large;">La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974), pp. </span><span style="font-size: large;">94-96.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[15] </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor, "Liberal Education," in <i>Tradition and Reform in Education</i>, </span><span style="font-size: large;">pp. 94-99.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[16] </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">For the ahistorical approach of the program see p. 2 of "IHP: An Outline," in University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integral Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1980s. The unnamed author -- likely IHP founder Dennis Quinn -- states in the document: "The lectures do not deal with what is commonly called 'background,' historical, anthropological, archaeological, economic, or social. Little attention is given to dating, authorship, or problems of text or translation."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">
<span style="font-size: large;">[17] Andrew Senior quotation in the sidebar, </span><span style="font-size: large;">in John Senior, "Recalling Why They Resisted: Dr. John Senior's Classic 'The Glass Confessional," in <i>The Remnant</i>, J</span><span style="font-size: large;">une 1, 2016; at URL https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2557-recalling-why-they-resisted-dr-john-senior-s-classic-the-glass-confessional.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[18] To see why it is regarded as both extreme and controversial to attend Mass at Society of St. Pius X chapels, see URL http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cedsspx.htm.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[19] Tonsor was exaggerating to make a point, for he was not a big fan of the "Great Books" approach to a college education, most of whose volumes were written in premodern times. Recall that Tonsor's field of expertise was not classical, not medieval, but Modern European Intellectual history. He always wanted his students to grapple with important modern books. In my research on the IHP in the University of Kansas Archives, I found the original syllabus and saw that most of the books assigned were indeed "Great Books" written prior to about 1700 but, in fairness to the founders, there were still numerous selections from the modern age that the students were required to read when the IHP was designed to be a four-year program. See Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder ND, </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">"A College of Integrated Studies" (1970), pp. 4-5</span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[20] Again, for the ahistorical approach of the program see in the University of Kansas Archives, </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Pearson Integral Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1980s, </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">"IHP: An Outline," p. 2. The unnamed author -- likely IHP founder Dennis Quinn -- states in the document: "The lectures do not deal with what is commonly called 'background,' historical, anthropological, archaeological, economic, or social. Little attention is given to dating, authorship, or problems of text or translation." For the passage in which one of the program's founders says they "taught in the poetical mode," see </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Dennis B. Quinn, "Education by the Muses," September 13, 1977, p. 1, in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, </span><span style="font-size: large;">series 63/1, box 1, folder 1977.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[21] Caroline Tonsor conversations with GW, Chelsea, MI, June 28, June 30, and July 7, 2017; also Caroline Tonsor email to GW, July 5, 2017. Tonsor's statement was not idle reminiscing. He and his future wife Caroline (nee Maddox) met at the University of Illinois Poetry Club, where the young combat veteran produced a number of fine poems that Caroline later assembled in a chapbook. Much of their courtship revolved around their close reading of modern poets -- Goethe, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, and T. S. Eliot. Moreover, after Tonsor finished his undergraduate degree at Illinois, one of his best friends, fellow war veteran Jackson Cope, offered to set Tonsor up in his house in Columbus, Ohio, so that Tonsor could write poetry without worrying about paying the rent. Ann Tonsor Zeddies conversation with GW, East Grand Rapids, MI, April 18, 2017; and phone conversation with GW, July 7, 2017.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">[22] For a critique of the IHP by a historian at KU who was in direct confrontation with the IHP founders, see James E. Seaver, "Remarks to the College Assembly," February 20, 1973, in the University of Kansas Archives, Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, series 63/1, box 1, folder 1973.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[23] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Tradition: Use and Misuse," <i>Modern Age</i> (fall 1964): 415.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[24] Stephen J. Tonsor, </span><span style="font-size: large;">"The Idea of a Catholic University," in <i>Tradition and Reform in Education</i> (</span><span style="font-size: large;">La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974), p. 210.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[25] Tonsor, "Haunted House": 292.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[26] <i>Ibid</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[27] <i>Ibid</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[28] <i>Ibid.</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[29] Tonsor, "Idea of a Catholic University," p. 210.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[30] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor, "Idea of a Catholic University,"</span><span style="font-size: large;"> p. 212.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[31] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Redefining Liberal Education, <i>Modern Age</i> (summer 1972): 273.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[32] Tonsor, "Idea of a Catholic University," p. 212.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-47134591623048296752017-08-13T11:00:00.000-07:002017-09-05T12:44:05.299-07:00Tonsor: Intellectual History: Goethe III<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After the bus returned me to the North Campus, I ignored all the books I'd brought home except <i>Faust</i>. Tonsor had gotten my attention when he said he read Goethe every morning; regarded the Weimar poet as a worthy "mentor and model"; and paraphrased Matthew Arnold to the effect that "<i>Goethe was by far our greatest modern man ... the thinker who, more than any other, interpreted the modern world to itself</i>."[1] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">At this point the distinction between literary criticism and literary history seems apt. The former is about literature that endures by raising questions with which each new generation wants to grapple. The latter is about literature that raised questions with which the author's generation wanted to grapple.[2] Given its critical reception generation after generation, there is no doubt which category Goethe's <i>Faust</i> is in. Let's grant that it was a masterpiece when it came to interpreting the modern world to itself. Yet that was then, in the modern age. W</span><span style="font-size: large;">e were all postmoderns now.</span><span style="font-size: large;">[3]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> To what extent did the drama</span><span style="font-size: large;"> continue to have the poetic power to interpret the present, postmodern age to itself? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">That was one question. Another was what Goethe and <i>Faust</i> can teach us about what came before postmodernity. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Surely the drama's power is revealed in its critique of modernity -- especially in Faust's encounter with Philemon and Baucis. This old couple from ancient Greek mythology was made famous by Ovid in </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">Metamorphoses</span></i><span style="font-size: large;">. Goethe appropriates the story to make a moral point about Faust's "Faustian" ambition to transform a coastal wasteland into the world's breadbasket. To do so will require flexing modern technology's muscle to reclaim the land -- and also evicting the lovely Philemon and Baucis, known for their sacrificial hospitality, from their humble cottage. The eviction is carried out by thugs who kill the old couple. By showing us Faust's totalitarian ambition and absolute power over Philemon and Baucis, Goethe seems to be confronting modernity for its arrogant and ruthless quest for "progress"; by extension he seems to be criticizing modernity for killing off the West's classical heritage, symbolized by Philemon and Baucis's deaths. These two damning indictments of the modern spirit proved prophetic. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Also, in interpreting the modern West to itself, how did Goethe navigate Western civilization's two competing sources of authority, Christendom and the Enlightenment?</span><span style="font-size: large;"> The poet witnessed in his life (1749-1832)</span><span style="font-size: large;">, on the one hand, the mythic power of Christendom; on the other, the rational force of the Enlightenment; and they </span><span style="font-size: large;">were in dynamic tension with one another. While </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">Faust</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"> was informed by elements of both -- both Christendom and the Enlightenment -- </span><span style="font-size: large;">Goethe was taken in by neither. He was not a fan of the institutional churches Protestant or Catholic, nor did he swallow the Enlightenment hook, line, and sinker. Yet it is precisely his critical distance from these two competing sources of authority that made him such an interesting commentator on them in isolation and in relation to one another. Examining that dynamic tension in Goethe was one of the ways Tonsor wanted me to confront modernity. Consider:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Christendom looked back to the past and carried the burdens of history with humility; the Enlightenment looked forward to the future expecting to muscle mankind toward ever brighter social conditions (the aspiration of the great reclamation project). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Christendom redeemed man's failures in time by raising them to a higher spiritual plane; the Enlightenment achieved redemption by shaking off the burden of history. The aim was to learn from mankind's past failures. And the Enlightenment did -- perhaps a little too glibly, a bit too arrogantly -- confident that its way would lead to a better world than any of the alternatives. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Christendom could be pessimistic about change. The Church knew that with every advance in the name of progress, something of great value was lost; progress was stalked by tragedy, so Christendom emphasized continuity. The Enlightenment in its optimism believed otherwise: It emphasized change as necessary to betterment here on Earth. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Indeed, wasn't </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">Faust</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"> a tragedy so long as it embraced the Enlightenment's secular values, seen most poignantly in the great reclamation project's ruthless treatment of Baucis and Philemon? Wasn't it in fact a comedy (in Dante's sense) when it embraced Christendom's transcendent values, which assured the salvation of Gretchen's and Faust's souls? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Before talking to Tonsor, I thought I knew <i>Faust</i> enough to be conversant.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">As an undergraduate, I was taught the conventional modernist interpretation: that <i>Faust</i> unfolds entirely within a naturalistic setting; that the symbolic spiritual characters at the beginning and end of the play are just that -- symbolic -- allegorical references that do not upend the "natural supernaturalism" that tied Goethe's worldview together.[4]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After talking to Tonsor and reading several critical essays in the book I brought home, it was apparent that I knew </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">Faust</i><span style="font-size: large;"> hardly at all. How could I? Goethe tells us he conceived of </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">Faust</i><span style="font-size: large;"> in his twentieth year and revised it up through his eighty-second year. It is the work of a lifetime, the monument to his genius, and at the same time maddeningly difficult. "Incommensurable" is how he himself described the drama. Perhaps it is telling that Goethe described his work as "fragments of a great confession."[5] A confession of what? Perhaps it is even more telling that he described </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">Faust</i><span style="font-size: large;"> as "an evident riddle" that would "delight men on and on and give them something to work at" -- itself a Faustian project if ever there were one.[6]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">And now I find myself laboring over the riddle that has preoccupied generations of scholars. My first question is whether <i>Faust</i> challenge</span><span style="font-size: large;">s modern readers with a binary choice -- a stark "either-or": either the naturalism of the neopagans who emerged from the Enlightenment, or the transcendence of earlier generations of Jews, Christians, and Renaissance Neoplatonists? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But then I realized that was the wrong question. Integral humanist that he was, Tonsor was teaching me to reject "either-or" thinking and instead embrace "both-and" thinking. This hermeneutic of dynamic tension was consistent with the tradition of the humanities, which foster widening circles of interpretation rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of ideologues. So when it came to </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">Faust</i><span style="font-size: large;">, </span><span style="font-size: large;">Goethe invited modern audiences to judge the characters and plot in the light of both Enlightenment values and Christendom's values.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Goethe seemed to be shining the light of the transcendent onto the secular modern project, wanting his audience to deal with both.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">A strictly naturalistic interpretation of <i>Faust</i> is contradicted by the internal evidence of the play. In the text are unreconciled tensions that should open us up to explore the ambiguities and ambivalences in the modern project. From the beginning of Part I to the end of Part II, Goethe uses images, iconography, ideas, and language that affirm not just the naturalistic, but also the transcendent -- even a kind of Renaissance Neoplatonism -- which might serve to link the naturalistic and transcendent elements together.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">This interpretation, I hasten to add, does not rely on Goethe himself believing in transcendence and Renaissance Neoplatonism. True, Goethe worked on the play for some six decades, from the start of the <i>Urfaust</i> in 1769 to the final revision of Part II in 1832, so all manner of Enlightenment and Romantic ideas made their way into the work. We know, moreover, that the young Goethe was fascinated with Renaissance Neoplatonism, Protestant mysticism, and alchemy. But our interpretation of the play need not rely on any of these biographical nuggets. Rather we should ask: What do we see with our own eyes? What does the internal evidence of the drama say about the relationship between the natural and transcendent?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Goethe pushes his audience into an encounter with the transcendent in the very first lines, at the beginning of Part I, and he drives his audience higher and higher into the transcendent with images, iconography, ideas, and language at the end of Part II. Thus a</span><span style="font-size: large;"> close reading of Faust supports Tonsor's integral humanistic interpretation of the play -- a "both-and" hermeneutic that weaves together the contrary threads one finds in the immanent and transcendent, time and eternity, secular and sacred, Earth and Heaven, creation and God.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Other "both-and" tensions that Goethe invites us to explore are the Enlightenment vis-a-vis Romanticism, classical pagan Greece in tension with medieval Christian Europe, and premodern beliefs alongside modern skepticism.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Goethe was a great poet, in no small part, because of his keen awareness of these tensions and conflicts, these ambivalences and ambiguities, that characterize the human estate. The fact that this complexity informs his treatment of the characters and worldviews in the play is precisely what appealed to Tonsor. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Goethe's ambiguous <i>Faust</i> reminds me of Shakespeare's similarly ambiguous <i>Hamlet</i>, where the characters' conflicting values cannot be painted over or easily reconciled.[7] To ignore the ambiguity and tension in Goethe's drama is to do violence to the play by forcing it into the straitjacket of ideology -- which in the humanities is the equivalent to committing a capital crime. </span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the face of all the authoritative naturalistic readings of <i>Faust</i>, the burden is on the integral humanist -- a humanist who looks at man as both a material and spiritual being -- to look at the evidence afresh and see if a compelling case can be made for both matter and spirit in the work. Tonsor nudges me in the direction of integral humanism, which searches out the relationship between the naturalistic and the transcendent in images, iconography, ideas, and words. When it comes to Goethe's <i>Faust</i>:</span> </div>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see the transcendent in the fact that the play has an omnipotent God -- a personal God who oversees the cosmos and the afterlife. He must approve Mephistopheles's proposal. Thus it is not a play that will make atheists feel reassured about denying the existence of God. </span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see the transcendent in the fact that the characters have souls. Naturalism would contest the idea of an immaterial soul, arguing that science has yet to discover a soul that can be separated from consciousness at death. But the worldview of the play counters naturalism with an older anthropology. That anthropology sees a desiring soul whose eternal destiny is determined, not so much by the actions in this life, as by a kind of Final Judgment at the gateway to the next.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see the transcendent in the character of Mephistopheles, the Devil whose two-fold purpose is to undo the work of creation and to negate man's belief in the transcendent. More specifically his goal is to steer man's striving soul away from God, the source of his being, to the endless pursuit of material, worldly, pseudo-satisfactions. No doubt, many nineteenth-century readers would have read <i>Faust</i> with St. Augustine somewhere in their heads, who famously wrote: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."[8]</span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see the transcendent in the first wager, the one between God and Mephistopheles, over Faust's soul. It is treated as a prize of incalculable value. Mephistopheles and God would not contend over Faust's soul if the stakes were merely over corruptible, finite matter as opposed to an eternal spirit.</span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see a hint of the transcendent in the suggestion that the soulless and nihilistic Mephistopheles is inferior even to the alchemically created little man, the Homunculus, born from a test tube.[9] </span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see the transcendent </span><span style="font-size: large;">in the images, iconography, ideas, and language of the Prologue, which takes place in Heaven, as well as in the conclusion, which returns to Heaven. The play's bookends do not present merely a symbolic Heaven because a merely symbolic Heaven would rob <i>Faust</i> of its drama. If the action in the end is just symbolic, why should we care? </span> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I also wondered about Goethe calling his play a tragedy. If the reader confined himself to the naturalism that dominates most of the play, it would indeed be a tragedy. In naturalistic terms the story of Faust does not end well. In naming the play, I think Goethe was following his idol, Shakespeare. The Bard signaled that his play was a tragedy if the title was the main character's name: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello. Thus Goethe titled his play <i>Faust</i> to signal that it is a tragedy, which is true if one follow's only Faust's natural life span.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But as readers know, the play's real meaning is not revealed within Faust's natural life span. At Faust's death, God in his mercy intervenes, tricks Mephistopheles, and arranges for the angels to snatch Faust's immortal soul away from certain damnation. What was a tragedy in its naturalistic setting becomes a comedy in the cosmic setting -- a comedy because it has a happy ending for the main character of the play.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The fact that <i>Faust</i> reveals itself, in the end, to be a comedy </span><span style="font-size: large;">is a powerful argument for the transcendent. Nothing Faust does can make this unexpected turnabout happen. It is entirely God's doing. The surprising final scenes are a rebuke to the naturalists who have fallen short of understanding the fullness of reality.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>IV.</b></span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Now, when it comes to transcendence, <i>Faust</i> does not just lead modern audiences into the foggy heights. No, the transcendent is detailed in sharp relief. I would argue that it is a syncretic transcendent that combines concepts found both in traditional Catholicism and in Renaissance Neoplatonism. </span> </div>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see Catholic traces in Gretchen's intercessory prayers. The reader encounters her in Heaven, praying for Faust's soul in exactly the way Catholics through the ages have been taught that the communion of saints prays.</span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see Catholic traces in the allusion to a very traditional Purgatory. Goethe's Purgatory with its hosts looks a lot like Dante's holy mountain in the <i>Purgatorio</i>. Its purpose is to be a school of virtue and holiness for the soul, to prepare the soul to encounter a transcendent God in a transcendent Heaven.</span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see Catholic traces in play's insinuation that the socialists and progressives strive for perfection on Earth in vain. Utopian schemes cannot remake human nature. Technology cannot conquer the evil in the human heart. Such measures always fall short of the true progress a society could theoretically achieve. In light of Faust's land reclamation project near the end of the play, the messages seems to be that real, lasting progress only takes place in the soul of one who has struggled to become holier on Earth and who finishes the work in a spiritual Purgatory that prepares his soul for Heaven.</span> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see Catholic traces in the last lines about "Eternal Womanhood" that "draws us on high" -- surely an allusion to the Virgin Mary. </span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see Catholic traces not directly in an en</span><span style="font-size: large;">counter with Jesus, but indirectly by the presence of his holy believers in Heaven. By this indirection, Goethe was less likely to offend the modern sensibilities of his readers.</span></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>V.</b> </span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Thus far we have seen how the internal evidence in <i>Faust </i>reveals several interesting things. The play does not support a strictly naturalistic worldview; nor an anti-theistic worldview; nor even an anti-Catholic worldview. Rather, the play is set in a complex cosmos of Goethe's creation, a syncretic vision that is characterized both by immanent nature and by transcendent spirit. As we have seen, the latter seems vaguely informed by Catholic dogma and doctrine, even though Goethe was not a Catholic. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">As surprising as the Catholic allusions may strike some readers, perhaps even more surprising is the Renaissance Neoplatonism worked into the play, like yeast kneaded into flour.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">There are frequent references to illumination -- from candles to the sun -- that the Neoplatonists are known for. </span></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Also in the course of the play, Faust learns that in this life he will never behold the Absolute (the sun) directly, but only through the mediation of the world. This is the meaning of the famous scene when Faust sees the sun's light refracted into all the colors of the rainbow. </span></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">We see the Neoplatonism, finally and most convincingly, in the Mystic Choir's last speech of the play. "All that passes is only a parable." Could Goethe be any clearer? Reality is most fully encountered in transcendence, in Heaven, in the Neoplatonists' sun. It is least fully encountered in earthly things that are distant from the sun.</span> </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The critics who argue that the play takes place strictly within a naturalistic world need to explain the transcendence, Catholicism, and Renaissance Neoplatonism that infuse the work, especially at the end. "All that passes is only a parable." This line of verse can only mean that the symbolism in <i>Faust</i> flows not from the material world to a symbolic spiritual world, as is frequently argued -- not at all. The Neoplatonic symbolism in <i>Faust</i> flows in the opposite direction -- from the real spiritual world to the symbolic natural world.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Thus no arrangement in the material world -- no Utopia, no commune, no social engineering, no project to perfect a man or a people -- can fulfill the striving soul. In fact, any such effort is likely to corrupt the striving soul.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor had told me that morning: "It was Oswald Spengler, reading Goethe, who discerned the distinctive character of Western culture: It was Faustian because of the way it inspired the striving soul to engage in unceasing though ultimately unsuccessful effort to conquer nature -- including human nature. For when the godly myth of love is displaced by the demonic myth of power, there is a near certainty that the consequences will be disastrous. And yet that precisely is the mythic displacement which increasingly characterizes the modern world."[10]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">A profoundly wise insight, this.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>VI.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So even though <i>Faust</i> is about an increasingly naturalistic West, it is not ultimately a naturalistic play, despite what most critics say. Ninety-nine percent of the action may take place in naturalistic, indeed Romantic, settings, but the reader must account for the one percent of the play that is transcendent and that gives the play most of its meaning -- even if it offends modern sensibilities.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Now, I do not wish to carry the spiritual argument to absurd lengths. The tragedy does not mirror the Catechism; it would not be compelling if it did. It does not rubber stamp Christian dogma; it's fiction and it shouldn't. It is not a picture of Renaissance Neoplatonism; it would lose its relevance it if were. But -- this was Tonsor's point -- a fair reading of Faust should not alienate people persuaded by a Neoplatonic cosmology or a Christian worldview.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Would it be absurd to wonder whether Goethe's was studying Catholic doctrine at the end of his life, when he was composing the final scenes of the tragedy? Was he meditating on the final scenes of his own life? </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Would it be a stretch to suggest that Goethe was taking one of the most important sets of readings in the liturgical cycle, about God's mercy for all human beings, and applying the lesson to <i>Faust</i>? Many commentators have been disturbed by how easy it is for Faust's soul to be saved at the end of the play, considering what a self-centered, unethical man he has been throughout most of the work. Our sense of justice may justifiably be offended. But scripture has declared that "God's ways are not man's ways."[11] At a crucial turning point in the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah declares that God's mercy is not just for His Chosen People, Israel, but for all human beings.[12] There is a similar turning point during the ministry of Jesus, when he shows mercy to two despised foreigners, the Canaanite woman and her daughter, over the protests of his disciples who want to send them away.[13] Finally, the apostle Paul confirms these turning points in his letters to the Galatians and Romans. The message is: God is the God of all; not of some, but of all human beings, "that he might have mercy on all."</span><span style="font-size: large;">[14] </span><span style="font-size: large;">I would be interested in searching through the writings that Goethe left behind in 143 volumes plus to see if this interpretation has merit. </span> </span><span style="text-align: center;"> </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>VII.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I learned three important things from Tonsor today:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">First, as a passionate reader of Goethe, who was his "mentor and model," Tonsor has carefully examined the internal evidence of the document as well as considered its external context. The most literal, commonsense reading of <i>Faust</i> leads one to see both naturalistic and transcendent elements -- the complete cosmos in all its complementarities and contradictions. Thus the play is about as anti-ideological as can be.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Second, perspective matters. It determines the assumptions that are brought to the primary sources as well as the questions that are put to them. If you see the play only through a naturalistic lens, your interpretation will be radically limited -- different from what you will see if you allow for both naturalism on Earth and transcendence in Heaven. The "both-and" approach is the integral humanists' way.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Third, Tonsor is the type of scholar who will not be corralled with the herd. In fact, in his stubborn independence he is a lot like Goethe.</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">If you closely read the end of </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">Faust</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"> Part I and </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">Faust</span></i><span style="font-size: large;"> Part II, you cannot help but see its creator swimming against the current of modern thought. Goethe was a challenge to his age, a sign of contradiction. It was as Matthew Arnold said: He interpreted the increasingly materialistic modern age to itself, and did so by warning us not to forget the abiding spiritual drama of man's existence.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">How bold! Such a thing could only have been</span><span style="font-size: large;"> crafted and pulled off by a genius. "<i>Goethe was by far our greatest modern man ... the thinker who, more than any other, interpreted the modern world to itself</i>."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Now I think I am beginning to believe it.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOaBPjA8cZd81N5j0fEJgFgLz3b-8Py0hdHM5dw4WtAEym7vIdNk337PfDFlqj3S0Qc-dclzYEW98CRQIkK85Bjt58FVTsVsstYkH270w5VTrAgkWE3ly2Y4QcjR-RjqaaxWLPfvRYN7j9/s1600/interior_dante_divinecomedy_par_27_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOaBPjA8cZd81N5j0fEJgFgLz3b-8Py0hdHM5dw4WtAEym7vIdNk337PfDFlqj3S0Qc-dclzYEW98CRQIkK85Bjt58FVTsVsstYkH270w5VTrAgkWE3ly2Y4QcjR-RjqaaxWLPfvRYN7j9/s400/interior_dante_divinecomedy_par_27_1.jpg" width="340" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dante's <i>Purgatorio</i> (Canto 27), by Gustave Dore</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">___________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] The sources for each of these statements are found in the earlier dialogue but for convenience are repeated here. For the observation that Tonsor read Goethe every day, see Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, MI, July 7, 2017. On the comment that Goethe was Henry Regnery's and Stephen Tonsor's mentor and model, see Stephen J. Tonsor, </span><span style="font-size: large;">"Henry Regnery," <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 322. For the </span><span style="font-size: large;">paraphrase of Matthew Arnold, see Arnold, "A French Critic on Goethe," in </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">Mixed Essays</i><span style="font-size: large;">, quoted by Helen C. White, "Matthew Arnold and Goethe," </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">PMLA</i><span style="font-size: large;">, vol. 36, no. 3 (September 1921): 336, 338.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Carolyn Heilbrun's distinction cited by Elizabeth Vandiver, "Foundations," </span><i style="font-size: x-large;">Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition</i><span style="font-size: large;">, 2nd. ed. (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2004), p. 7.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Stephen J. Tonsor, </span><span style="font-size: large;">"Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative," <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 304.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Goethe, <i>Poetry and Truth</i>, Part II, ch. 7; quoted by Jane K. Brown, <i>Goethe's Faust: The German Tragedy</i> (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 29.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[5] Goethe quoted in Susan Sage Heinzelman, "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe," <i>Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition</i>, 2nd. ed. (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2004), lecture 60, p. 392. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[6] The term comes from the classic study that Tonsor assigned in the first semester of History 416: M. H. Abrams, <i>Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature</i> (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">[7] Goethe's idol, Shakespeare, wrote tragedies that explore the ambiguity of the human condition. On Shakespeare's stage, life is not black and white but gray and grayer -- unending clashes of unreconciled values and opposing beliefs that introduce much misery into the human condition. See Norman Rabkin, <i>Shakespeare and the Common Understanding</i> (New York: Free Press, 1967).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[8] Augustine of Hippo, <i>Confessions</i>, Book 1.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[9] Johann Peter Eckermann, <i>Conversations with Eckermann</i>, trans. John Oxenford, conversation of December 16, 1829, in the Kindle ebook edition, loc. 6657.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[10] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Stephen J. Tonsor, </span><span style="font-size: large;">"The Use and Abuse of Myth," <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 184.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[11] Isaiah 55:8; Romans 11:33-35.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[12] Isaiah 56:3-8.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[13] Matthew 15:21-28.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[14] Galatians 3:28; Romans 11:1-32.</span>Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-73540643677615308282017-08-13T10:30:00.000-07:002017-08-27T15:14:45.948-07:00Tonsor: Intellectual History: Goethe II<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">As I labored my way back to the bus stop near the Diag, a grocery bag of books in each arm, I reflected on Tonsor's habit of reading Goethe every morning and his sheer delight in discussing <i>Faust</i>. How had my professor kept such enthusiasm for the same work since the 1940s?[1] How could he wax eloquent about a Dead White European Male in the 1980s when to do so on a college campus was considered bad form? Stanford University's debates over "the core and the canon" had made international news.[2] Goethe was now suspect, as guilty as the next DWEM of racism, sexism, classism, and chauvinism. Some scholars even indicted Goethe for inspiring the Nazis. It is one of the terrible ironies of German history that the concentration camp at Buchenwald is but fifteen minutes from Goethe's Weimar.[3]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">If you knew Stephen Tonsor, you could take it to the bank: He was not going to be cowed by the canon wars. Au contraire: He was the type who would go out of his way to laud DWEMs like Goethe if he thought it would get under the skin of leftist critics. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It was risky behavior. A former student of Tonsor's whom I had met, Bob Houbeck, asked him why the Left had not taken him down. After all, Michigan was a leftist stronghold and Tonsor would have been low-hanging fruit. Tonsor told him, "The Left just never got around to targeting me. Maybe it's because of my guardian angel."[4] No wonder Tonsor believed in the transcendent in <i>Faust</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The historian in Tonsor sought out Goethe for the obvious reasons -- his preeminence in the republic of letters; </span><span style="font-size: large;">his mastery of a half-dozen languages and a dozen literary genres;</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">his status as the last great classical writer of Western civilization; his brilliance as a polymath; his scientific discoveries; his </span><span style="font-size: large;">attractive personality and </span><span style="font-size: large;">dazzling conversation, rather like Lord Acton's. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The cultural critic in Tonsor appreciated Goethe for the critical reasons discussed earlier. The Weimar poet grasped as few others did the newly emerging psychological, philosophical, and theological problems presented by modernity. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDuiu60iQa902yv1yOXSHsOJb6ZsFZPU_iLjPScWmcBhO2-MFqwJd1ss0HUmz2Nb9Y6KdDL2LmOgs3rT6pcIz1Lt287GX8e5A5hwLZjR9dOTUSEZH3gqf3-Dl_XR_SSRl7o1ikpzpi_NUH/s1600/regnery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDuiu60iQa902yv1yOXSHsOJb6ZsFZPU_iLjPScWmcBhO2-MFqwJd1ss0HUmz2Nb9Y6KdDL2LmOgs3rT6pcIz1Lt287GX8e5A5hwLZjR9dOTUSEZH3gqf3-Dl_XR_SSRl7o1ikpzpi_NUH/s400/regnery.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry Regnery (1912-1996)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: large;">The Germanophile in Tonsor loved Goethe for yet another reason, one whose motive was less</span><span style="font-size: large;"> apparent. If you listened to him over a period of time you figured it out: Tonsor felt the burden of modern German history, and Goethe was the rebuke to what had gone wrong in that history -- from Luther's cleavage of Western Christendom ... to the radical Germanic thought of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud ... to the nation's barbarous behavior in two world wars. In contrast to these evils and errors stood Goethe (and Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Humboldt and Mann, and, and, and --), who </span><span style="font-size: large;">reminded the nation of the better angels of their nature and who thus </span><span style="font-size: large;">represented the great humanistic storehouse of the German people</span><span style="font-size: large;">. For all these reasons Goethe held the lamp that could guide Germans still. So Tonsor, who took such great pride in his German heritage, found much pleasure in spending time with Goethe. </span><span style="font-size: large;">And he enjoyed sharing that pleasure with students, colleagues, and friends. Goethe, in fact, was</span><span style="font-size: large;"> one of the bonds that Tonsor and his Germanophilic friend, Henry Regnery, shared. Regnery, too, was eager to restore German culture to its pride of place in the world.[5] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">On a more personal note, Tonsor remarked that "Goethe has served as Henry Regnery's mentor and model. He has been very important in my formation, too."[6] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">In a world that was reevaluating Dead White European Males, it was one thing to cultivate a private admiration for Goethe. It was another to make a public declaration of it. By the 1980s, the postmodern academy was not a particularly accommodating place for a historian and cultural critic like Stephen Tonsor. I</span><span style="font-size: large;">n his interior life he was </span><span style="font-size: large;">a conservative, a Catholic, and an integral humanist. By temperament and education he</span><span style="font-size: large;"> swam against the postmodern current. Yet h</span><span style="font-size: large;">i</span><span style="font-size: large;">s discipline, modern European intellectual history, required him to teach the very radicals, progressives, and postmodern theorists who reviled his most cherished beliefs. To his credit, Tonsor could lecture on those radicals, progressives, and postmodern theorists with the best of them, and generations of students profited from his teaching. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Nevertheless, a</span><span style="font-size: large;">t Michigan when I knew him, he was a stranger in a strange land -- a sojourner through a kingdom ruled not by his beloved Goethe but by that troika of dominating Germanic thinkers -- Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. </span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WtmHzGEa4rXgv6buKtfLqvLIKJyprhZACz6bjvbaFrfJItwgWrxoirHU07cMY-xseCsQovyc4opzbFIePTmcJgTCd-Bw76TyJSwG_zsgFQvathFcMuVJfepCXpGRMG5rXj9EJNyuXPyW/s1600/Paul_Ricoeur.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WtmHzGEa4rXgv6buKtfLqvLIKJyprhZACz6bjvbaFrfJItwgWrxoirHU07cMY-xseCsQovyc4opzbFIePTmcJgTCd-Bw76TyJSwG_zsgFQvathFcMuVJfepCXpGRMG5rXj9EJNyuXPyW/s400/Paul_Ricoeur.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), explored<br />
the distance between what we say<br />
and what we mean.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">What united these three titans of modern thought was their insistence on a radical, even a militant, reading of the great books. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur famously called such a reading the "hermeneutics of suspicion."</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Literary scholars would call it "critique."</span><span style="font-size: large;">[7]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor did not share the radicals' admiration for such a method. He must have asked himself, from the Sixties forward, why the New Left and each succeeding wave of scholars approached the best-loved books in an increasingly militant manner. He saw first-hand how intellectual history had undergone a paradigm shift called the "linguistic turn," which explored the degree to which philosophical problems were really linguistic problems. Richard Rorty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault -- all of them became quite modish by the 1980s and infused intellectual history with a sophistical jargon that Tonsor abhored. The young set of intellectual historians were not as ingenious as they thought they were; they were just channeling the ancient nihilists, Gorgias and Protagoras. It was all very wearisome to Tonsor. Must all truth-claims be treated with suspicion and hostility (unless, of course, they came from one's own ideological allies)? Could there not still be space in the academy for what St. John's College tutor Eva Brann called "the principle of charity" when reading and discussing important works?[8] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">The Oxford English professor, Helen Small, would argue years later that methodological balance was needed to restore the humanities: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"the work of the humanities is frequently descriptive, or appreciative, or imaginative, or provocative, or speculative, more than it is critical."[9] </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">Yes.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">And the University of Virginia English professor, Rita Felski, would similarly challenge her colleagues: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"Why is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage? What sustains their assurance that a text is withholding something of vital importance, that their task is to ferret out what lies concealed in its recesses and margins? Why is critique so frequently feted as the most serious and scrupulous form of thought? What intellectual and imaginative alternatives does it overshadow, obscure, or overrule? And what are the costs of such ubiquitous criticality?[10]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">Yes ... yes! </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>IV.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">When I started graduate school at Michigan in '87, the very dangers that Tonsor had already stared down now reared up at me. If he had three strikes against him, I had three strikes against me before joining the program. By tacking conservative, by becoming a Catholic, and by approaching important books with a humanist's appreciation rather than a radical's suspicion, I too was a stranger in a strange land. </span><span style="font-size: large;">I was asking questions that did not align with the postmodern agenda.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">In contrast to the training of previous generations -- think of Tonsor's in the years after World War II, which tended to be deferential toward the canon -- my generation was being trained "to read against the grain and between the lines" to expose the lies, bad faith, and self-delusions that riddled the canon. That in essence is what it means to practice the "hermeneutics of suspicion" or "critique."[11]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Nor was that all. At Michigan it was not just </span><span style="font-size: large;">the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and </span><span style="font-size: large;">"critique" that were taught. It was also the attitude, or pose, that accompanied radical methods. In the West's elite programs, Felski has observed, one finds the humanities' methodological gatekeepers "patrolling the boundaries of what counts as serious thought." They foster "the cultivation of an intellectual persona that is highly prized ... suspicious, knowing, self-conscious, hardheaded, tirelessly vigilant." A degree of "arrogance" and "nonchalance" earns one style points.[12]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I wanted to pursue graduate studies because I loved history. I wanted to understand the past. But I would soon be forced to make a decision. On the one hand, I might have to tolerate the distasteful parts of a graduate education to land a teaching job. On the other hand, to strike a postmodern pose was not for me -- it felt inauthentic. I was not looking to be radical or subversive but to discover the meaning of the past -- more in line with Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of faith" than the "hermeneutics of suspicion." This led me to ask questions that were different from those of the radical students and professors around me.</span><span style="font-size: large;">[13] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I kept these qualms to myself -- and the irony of such a position was not lost on me. Any presentations I gave, any papers I submitted, deserved to be treated with the very hermeneutics of suspicion I found so distasteful!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">What a conundrum I had worked myself into. How did I get there?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>V.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">My first exposure to critique was at the University of Konstanz in 1984-'85, during my Fulbright year in then-West Germany; Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss were two leaders of reader-response criticism, making Konstanz a pilgrimage for postmodernists during the mid '80s. My next exposure came at a summer course at the University of Oxford in 1985, when I learned about the linguistic turn in intellectual history. Later still I was able to refine my knowledge of critique in an advanced English class at Colorado State University. Although I was intellectually curious about critique during these years, I never felt that it was the approach that I needed to adopt to do my work. Critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion did not get at the questions I was asking.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">In addition to these courses, I noticed a disconnect between the English and history departments at CSU in the 1980s. The English classes that were taught by younger faculty were a world apart from the history classes that were taught by older faculty. These latter men -- for they all were male -- were old school. Thus my history classes at CSU tended not delve into the hermeneutics of suspicion. There was still joy to be had in reading thoughtful, engaging books of history without seeing them through critical theory. As a result, one of the younger English professors accused his older colleagues in the history department of running a "suburban book club." Cute, clever even, but not convincing. I approached graduate school with the mistaken notion that I could work toward a Ph.D. in European intellectual history -- in an elite department at an elite university -- without having to embrace the hermeneutics of suspicion.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4vJnSlhxP3qP-pg1PHU0bX42jhzVCtuOSBmJVKDEVUR93WsdJMIALFr4wieontNLWhO2dITG_gIJT8u28kBmtOBhyphenhyphenW2U6f7x2XczpXHQVYPkaZcdv9lyamqOjQaG9rqlE7PBkF-oTtP1P/s1600/mark.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; font-size: x-large; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4vJnSlhxP3qP-pg1PHU0bX42jhzVCtuOSBmJVKDEVUR93WsdJMIALFr4wieontNLWhO2dITG_gIJT8u28kBmtOBhyphenhyphenW2U6f7x2XczpXHQVYPkaZcdv9lyamqOjQaG9rqlE7PBkF-oTtP1P/s400/mark.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Mark (1924-2010)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">How mistaken I was. Through no fault of their own, the older generation of scholars whose classes I took taught me the way they had been taught, and I surmised that I could follow their path. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">One of my older professors at CSU was</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Tom Mark.[14] A Hungarian-American who had fought the Nazis in World War II, Professor Mark taught me Shakespeare. He was a character on campus and something of a gadfly. One evening when a famous postmodern literary critic visited the Fort Collins campus, Professor Mark showed up. The visitor was filled with self-importance. He impressed the audience with his display of critique, slashing and burning the literary canon. Most of the younger professors seemed attentive and appreciative. When the time came for Q&A, Professor Mark raised his right hand; he held a pipe in his left hand, close to his mouth. The visiting critic called on him, and Professor Mark asked, slowly, deliberately: </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Why?" </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">He drawled the word out and his New York accent hung in the room like the sword of Damocles. Then he went back to puffing his pipe.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Why?" It was all Tom Mark said. I and a number of other people in the audience started to laugh, quietly at first, and then more conspicuously. The laughter amplified the absurdity of the nihilism expressed by our pompous guest. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Later, when I got to know Stephen Tonsor, his contrary manner would sometimes remind me of the same in Tom Mark. These dedicated humanists were two of a kind. But they were a vanishing kind, and I did not know, when I arrived at Michigan in 1987, how close they were to extinction. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">____________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, MI, July 7, 2017. She distinctly remembers her husband's well-worn copy of Goethe when they moved to the North Campus of the University of Michigan in 1955. She also conveyed to me that, prior to Ann Arbor, they enjoyed discussing Goethe's poetry when they were in the University of Illinois Poetry Club from 1946-'48, and when Stephen Tonsor studied in Zurich, Switzerland, from 1948-'49. Caroline Tonsor email to GW, July 5, 2017.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">[2] For an overview of the conflict at Stanford University within the larger context of the culture wars, see Andrew Hartman, </span><i><span style="font-size: medium;">A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars</span></i><span style="font-size: medium;"> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), esp. pp. 227-30.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">[3] See, e.g., Susan Sage Heinzelman, "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe," in <i>Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition</i>, 2nd ed. (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2004), pp. 393, 395.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[4] Robert Houbeck conversation with GW, Flint, MI, June 15, 2015.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[5] Alfred Regnery conversation with GW, Washington, DC, May 17, 2017.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> For passages that abundantly demonstrate Henry Regnery's love of the best in high German culture -- relevant to this project because they reveal how Tonsor came to see Regnery as a fellow Germanophile -- see Henry Regnery, <i>Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher</i> (Chicago: Regnery Books, 1985).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">[6] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Henry Regnery," <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 322.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[7] </span><span style="font-size: small;">Paul Ricoeur, </span><i>Freud and Philosophy</i><span style="font-size: small;"> (1970), quoted by </span><span style="font-size: small;">Rita Felski,</span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><i>The Limits of Critique</i><span style="font-size: small;"> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), </span><span style="font-size: small;">Introduction.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[8] "The principle of charity" is from a quotation by Eva Brann at URL http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/08/attitude-reader-book-eva-brann.html. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: small;">[9] Helen Small, <i>The Value of the Humanities</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 26; quoted by </span><span style="font-size: small;">Felski,</span><i> Critique</i><span style="font-size: small;">, </span><span style="font-size: small;">Introduction.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[10] </span><span style="font-size: small;">Felski, </span><i>Critique</i><span style="font-size: small;">, Introduction.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[11] <i>Ibid</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[12] <i>Ibid</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[13] Ricoeur, <i>Freud and Philosophy</i> (1970); and Felski, <i>Critique</i>, Introduction.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">[14] For more on Tom Mark, see URL http://english.colostate.edu/2014/04/announcing-the-dr-thomas-r-mark-assistive-technology-room/.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-37284084174570537622017-08-13T10:07:00.000-07:002017-08-29T11:36:06.658-07:00Tonsor: Intellectual History: Goethe I<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">To the chagrin of one who'd spent practically his entire life in America's sunbelt, that first winter in Ann Arbor was brutal: The sun didn't shine. From my neighbors I learned it hardly ever came out in winter. Between Thanksgiving and Easter, Michiganders might as well have been living in the gray exile of northern Siberia.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But this Saturday morning the sun did shine and, feeling extra energy, I decided to go to the Library Book Sale. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor had told me about this venerated local institution </span><span style="font-size: large;">held every Saturday morning in the basement of the downtown Ann Arbor library. He suggested it would be an inexpensive way to build up my professional library. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I cannot forget the way he intoned: "If you are serious about pursuing history, Mr. Whitney, you must have two things: self-discipline and a personal library."[1] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It was serious business, the Library Book Sale. Patrons including many grad students lined up before the 9 AM starting bell, grocery bags in hand, quivering, ready to do combat with the other patrons to snatch up $1 hardbacks. The naked displays of bestiality put even my dogs to shame.</span><br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor already had a collection of 10,000 books.[2] He went to the Library Book Sale not to expand his professional holdings but to buy picture books for his grandchildren. That was sweet. And sure enough, on this Saturday morning he and Caroline showed up after the initial throng had charged the basement.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFnRTrXwbZhSPCDTpzhrN5xMnDpu7xZPyMtcX6vB7ps9guc69EpXQNUKvWXOQ9FFX0y3msSRNXKUwN4EUC-iSFl5qBm4nev3sxhV_BLcORDrw_pQHPZ91sSZ5LkEqKvvRFXCkC6Z_1BJYz/s1600/9780393972825_198.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFnRTrXwbZhSPCDTpzhrN5xMnDpu7xZPyMtcX6vB7ps9guc69EpXQNUKvWXOQ9FFX0y3msSRNXKUwN4EUC-iSFl5qBm4nev3sxhV_BLcORDrw_pQHPZ91sSZ5LkEqKvvRFXCkC6Z_1BJYz/s320/9780393972825_198.jpg" width="196" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Goethe spent virtually his entire<br />
adult life writing Faust,<br />
from 1769-1832, a span of<br />
more than 60 years.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">We hailed each other from a distance but stuck to our work because patrons elbowed their way to the front if you showed any distraction or weakness. After about a half hour of jockeying, I'd managed to fill two grocery bags and queued up to pay. The Tonsors were right behind me. When he saw that I had picked up Goethe's <i>Faust</i>, his eyes lit up through his thick glasses.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"That is a very fine edition, Mr. Whitney. I hope you profit by it as much as I have. Every morning I start my day reading Goethe and the German missal."[3]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Caroline added with a good-natured chuckle: "Yes, Stephen starts his day reading about the Devil in us, then steels himself to do battle with the Devil in us the rest of the day!" </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"That's true," Tonsor said with a quick gust of laughter. "The Devil is part of us all, as is the angelic. As Goethe said, <i>Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten.</i> Where there is much light, there is stronger shadow."[4]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Goethe -- every morning," I said, making sure not to sound incredulous.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Every morning," he repeated with barely suppressed pride. "To have spent a long life reading the poet is a beautiful thing. I am reminded of what Goethe himself said to his friend, Eckermann: 'I am like one who in his youth has a great deal of small silver and copper money, which in the course of his life he constantly changes for the better, so that at last the property of his youth stands before him in pieces of pure gold.'"[5]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Goethe's words provided an apt segue to pay the cashier for our books. On the way to the exit, Tonsor lavished more praise on his idol: "Goethe, it has been said, was '<i>by far</i> our greatest modern man' -- the last great classical writer of European civilization, as Virgil was the last great classical writer of ancient Rome. He grasped the tragedy of the modern age, perceiving that the very civilization we have created is Faustian. That's why Matthew Arnold called Goethe <i>the most helpful thinker of modern times -- the thinker who, more than any other, interpreted the modern world to itself</i>."[6]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Whoa! These were superlatives that make you lean into a speaker, especially if he's your dissertation advisor. Here I had been studying European intellectual history yet did not know of Goethe's world-historical importance. How had I missed it? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Often in conversation with Tonsor, I worried that I did not know enough. Now, on yet another topic -- Goethe -- I was going to have to move out of the shallows and into the depths. </span><span style="font-size: large;">It helped that I was discerning a pattern in Tonsor's thinking when it came to the confrontation of modernity: In his head he communed with a circle of the dead dominated by Goethe, Acton, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Parkman -- c</span><span style="font-size: large;">osmopolitans and liberal conservatives all. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I couldn't think of anything to say that matched the profundity of Tonsor's observation about Goethe. So I resorted to the cheapest currency of conversation, autobiography: "I had the opportunity to study a bit of Goethe in my German classes back at Colorado State, but I didn't read him at all when I lived in Germany, which I now regret."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"That is to be regretted," Tonsor said disapprovingly. Caroline's sympathetic instinct kicked in and she frowned at him: "Maybe Gleaves had other things he needed to read!"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"When in Germany, one should read Goethe," Tonsor said firmly, determined to win the point.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Well, I hope to correct my negligence now," I said. "I had a great German professor guide us through <i>The Sorrows of Young Werther</i> in the original. But I'm afraid I'll have to undo some of the instruction I received from the English professor who taught us <i>Faust</i>. One of the last Old Marxists in the academy, Dr. Bates presented Goethe's tragedy as a critique of the admen on Madison Avenue -- the capitalists who manufacture, manipulate, and multiply consumer desires -- desires that can never be satisfied. People are just so many consumers who have the potential to become addicted to shopping. Bourgeois life is the endless desire for never-ending stuff. The Marxist Mephistopheles, it turns out, is a very dapper adman, nothing at all like the horned Devil of medieval folklore." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor grunted. "</span><span style="font-size: large;">Vulgar Marxists: Johnny-one-notes who bleach all the color out of life!</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">To see Goethe's Devil as a glorified adman makes even the demons howl with scorn.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">Mephistopheles is not on Madison Avenue. He is on Main Street. He is on the Diag. He is you!"[7]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Really, Stephen!" protested Caroline, her frown returning. She looked at me sympathetically.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor dismissed her: "I don't mean my comment to be taken personally. It's the universal message of Goethe's <i>Faust</i>."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"You'll have to tell me what it means," I said with a forgiving grin.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">When we walked out into the sun, things had warmed up a bit but none of the snow on William Street was melting. My professor didn't seem to notice the cold. Now that he had the opportunity to talk about Goethe, he started breathing in little puffs as his mind revved to a white heat. I had been around Tonsor enough to know that he saw his confrontation with modernity through the lens of a few great authors: Tocqueville, Acton, Burckhardt, Parkman -- they informed his approach to intellectual history. Now, out on an icy Ann Arbor sidewalk, I was about to learn how to see modernity through Goethe's gimlet eye. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXjyLt8OLlvUMllKbKOCJ4Etl0jmJVQP4WD5s67q-7VOVT8EK0-O-saxt77SAP2cqBqwdlYRHQJtq9FGAfzH6LjjfXH0jRGayg3XAf7Pvlb5NIF1ygNr8Bftd0GBAsBDkaGyc60Bb_DwNZ/s1600/Goethe_%2528Stieler_1828%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXjyLt8OLlvUMllKbKOCJ4Etl0jmJVQP4WD5s67q-7VOVT8EK0-O-saxt77SAP2cqBqwdlYRHQJtq9FGAfzH6LjjfXH0jRGayg3XAf7Pvlb5NIF1ygNr8Bftd0GBAsBDkaGyc60Bb_DwNZ/s400/Goethe_%2528Stieler_1828%2529.jpg" width="322" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),<br />
Germany's greatest humanist and one of Stephen Tonsor's <br />
most important guides to comprehending, <br />
confronting, sifting, and testing the modern world.<br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Goethe," Tonsor said -- and once the name escaped his mouth, Caroline saw a lecture coming and escaped back into the library -- "Goethe is like quicksilver. Just when you think you get him, he slips away. That is the quality of all great poets. As you know, Goethe's <i>Faust</i> was</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Western civilization's most brilliant poem after Milton's <i>Paradise Lost</i></span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Because of his singular achievement, Goethe</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">stands in the same relationship to the modern age as Shakespeare does to the Renaissance, Dante does to the Middle Ages, Virgil does to ancient Rome, and Homer does to ancient Greece. To come to an adequate understanding of modernity, one must retrace the steps along the trail blazed by Germany's greatest poet.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"And what should I look for along that trail?" I asked.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The prophet who interprets modernity to itself," he said with assurance. "</span><span style="font-size: large;">The humanist who challenges the assumptions of the twentieth-century. The tragedian who cautions modern man to tame his civilization's Faustian spirit."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Goethe" continued Tonsor, "grasped the modern psyche in all its maddening complexity -- its tangle of complementarities and contradictions, its tensions and frustrations, its desires and aspirations. His integral humanism challenges the reductionist that one always encounters in the ideologue -- whether that ideologue is your Marxist professor who sees man only as a materialistic consumer on the make, or the Gnostic who hates man's very flesh.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Goethe helps modern readers understand that this complexity is both the glory of our humanity and the source of our woe. You see it in</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Faust, who is ever desiring. Because of his desire to know, he mastered all the branches of knowledge and tried to find the key that would unlock the secrets of nature, without success. His infinite desire clashed with his status as a finite creature, someone who was both an angelic beast and a beastly angel, and therefore limited."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Faust," I ventured, "seems to be on a quest like that of Aldous Huxley, who also sought self-transcendence beyond the ordinary boundaries of nature. Like all mystics, he wanted to find out what's on the other side of the door."[8]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"That is a very interesting point you bring up," Tonsor responded darkly, and the tone in his voice made me immediately regret my digression. "Despite what his legions of epigones may think, Huxley's hallucinatory escapades did not unlock the secrets of nature -- they were too personal, too subjective, too silly. Recall that on his 'trip' he grew terrified of his own lawn chairs! Huxley learned the hard way what we all must, that it is not for human beings to see what is on the other side of the door, not in any objective, communal, universal sense. The hippies never learned that private revelation, like copulation, should stay in the dark." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor's unexpected exclamation mark made me laugh.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Egged on now, he continued: "Huxley's friend, Thomas Mann, wrote a scathing private review of Huxley's book. In it he observed that mystical experience does come to some, for reasons we cannot plumb, and each religion tries to order such experiences. But chemical mysticism? For a middle-aged man to encourage young people to experiment with psychedelic drugs is both scandalous and stupid."[9] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The digression into Huxley's experiments with mescaline was working Tonsor up into a lather, and he was practically breathless as he spat out one last insult: "It's obvious that Huxley for all his intelligence turned out to be as dumb as Faust. What a pity. <i>Brave New World</i> is such a fine book." </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Now," Tonsor said, mission accomplished with the insult, "all human beings should be able to identify with Faust's existential frustration. We are not totally at home with the beasts because we have too much reason, too much spiritual aspiration, to live like an animal. Yet we are not totally at home with the angels because we have a body with a body's desires -- too much earthiness, too much libido dominandi. So we are neither the one thing nor the other but something in between -- now pulled up toward Heaven, now pulled down to the dust. The conflicts between the two cause us considerable dis-ease and misery, to the point that we feel alienated even from ourselves. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Caught in a cobweb of desires, w</span><span style="font-size: large;">e can never find any peace.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">We want to love, but are smacked down by selfish desires. We want to be altruistic, but once our motives are unmasked we just play for the crowd's applause. We want to possess the light of knowledge, but at every turn encounter the darkness of unfathomable mystery. It goes the other way, too. We go on a binge of buying at the mall, or of sexual debauchery in the bedroom, and before long we have to stop either because of physical exhaustion or because our conscience pricks us to stop. We are constantly reminded that we are an in-between creature who can never settle, never be satisfied, never be happy.</span><span style="font-size: large;">[10]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Man," I said chiming in, "the biped who walks the Earth not with four legs but with two so that he can look up at the stars. Still, he's an animal. </span><span style="font-size: large;">It's reminiscent of Paul's theology in the New Testament where he writes of the never-ending battle between our animal and spiritual selves --"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"What I do, I do not understand" said Tonsor, breaking in. "For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate."[11] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"And that reminds me," I said, "of a brilliant metaphor that captures man's material and spiritual complexity. I think it was the Catholic humanist E. I. Watkin who pointed out that man's contrary desires are symbolized by the Cross, which is made both of the </span><span style="font-size: large;">horizontal crossbeam that points out toward creation as well as the vertical post that </span><span style="font-size: large;">points up toward Heaven --"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"And down toward Hell," added Tonsor quickly. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"And down toward Hell," I duly added. "So, applying Watkin's metaphor, we could say that </span><span style="font-size: large;">this in-between creature, man, belongs exclusively to neither the horizontal nor the vertical; that the two principles are hardly ever harmonized; so the resulting tension between them creates constant dissatisfaction, conflict, and misery."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes, Watkin's metaphor captures the reality of the human condition," said Tonsor in his definitive way. "The Christian would point out that the horizontal clash with the vertical is ultimately reconciled by Christ's death and resurrection: the great <i>consummatum est</i></span><span style="font-size: large;">[12]</span><span style="font-size: large;"> -- </span><span style="font-size: large;">It is accomplished -- which gets us back to Faust's striving soul, his <i>T</i></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>ätigkeit</i>: a</span><span style="font-size: large;">ctivity, exertion, movement. One could see Faust as an allegorical figure for modern man, never resting, feverishly chasing down the false remedy, vainly trying to quench unquenchable desires."</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," continued Tonsor after a brief pause, "Goethe's genius commands our attention still, for he early comprehended the psychological and historical implications of modernity. By that I mean Goethe understood modernity's relationship to man's inner conflict. He observed that modernity has dramatically expanded the possibilities of our horizontal experience but not of our vertical existence. The past five hundred years have seen spectacular developments in the horizontal possibilities of our lives, brought about by a succession of world-historical events -- the Age of Exploration, Commercial Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and French Revolution. Each promised man a more satisfying life on the horizontal plane of his animal existence. Each stoked the flames of his desire -- for more territory, more purchasing power, more command over nature, more self-knowledge, more economic growth, and more self-determination. But where during the past five centuries were the corresponding ethical or spiritual advances? The existential gap between monumental material advances on the one hand, and perceived spiritual stupor on the other, perfectly frames the modern problem that so many of our elite thinkers experience. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Thus in <i>Faust</i> we see a profoundly important truth: None of the spectacular material advances of the past five centuries really satisfies the longing in the human heart. Not a one. We fulfill one desire only to feel a stronger desire take its place. There's no end to it, only frustration. The only remedy to the addiction to desire comes in the final scene of the play, when Goethe pulls the curtain back and surprises his audience with what is really going on. It is the rather traditional Christian rendering of the Final Judgment. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Now, this interpretation is controversial -- it goes against the usual glosses on <i>Faust</i>, that it all takes place within the bounds of nature. But if you think about it, the Prologue in Heaven is above and beyond nature. The Final Judgment is above and beyond nature. The paean to the Virgin Mary at the very end is above and beyond nature. The two wagers Mephistopheles makes -- first with God and then with Faust -- only make sense in an afterlife that is above and beyond nature. What is at stake is Faust's eternal soul. If Faust loses the wager, he forfeits his soul and goes to Hell. If he wins the wager, he is assured of salvation and goes to Heaven. I defy anyone to explain the meaning of the play strictly in terms of nature, without reference to the transcendent above and beyond nature. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"To reinforce this point, look at one of the most telling structural elements of the tragedy: the link between the end of Faust I and the end of Faust II. Both direct our attention to Faust's lover, Gretchen. During the last critical moments of Part I, when we wonder if Gretchen's soul will be damned for drowning her newborn, she is assured of salvation. This corresponds to what happens during the final critical moments of Part II, when Faust's soul is hanging in the balance: Gretchen offers intercessory prayers from Heaven on behalf of Faust's soul. It is at this point that the play pivots -- pivots from being a human tragedy on Earth to a divine comedy in Heaven. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"With this pivot Goethe is making a profound statement to modern man. Scientific discovery is not enough. Enlightenment rationality is not enough. Romantic desire is not enough. Technological progress is not enough. Utopian dreams are not enough. To cope with tragedy, modern man needs to learn that progress on Earth is chimerical, often illusory. M</span><span style="font-size: large;">en pursue their technological wonders and utopian schemes without truly understanding the costs -- because we are limited. With every step forward something good is left behind. Tragedy always stalks progress. </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzdXqnfYuG_5xh_-PdxXTcbyVvECvtlJUknA1Uf7NK2g4G0-hauEfOUUA6Isl6-axXQSD6-AtIxl_bH4neYYSZsBM0zQLs7QfsvU6m4QHhUxdVZL3MAqjEwvZ3l0lIYTnFaAjD0OR1yx__/s1600/220px-Mephisto_by_Mark_Antokolski%252C_marble_%2528GTG%252C_after_1883%2529_by_shakko_09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzdXqnfYuG_5xh_-PdxXTcbyVvECvtlJUknA1Uf7NK2g4G0-hauEfOUUA6Isl6-axXQSD6-AtIxl_bH4neYYSZsBM0zQLs7QfsvU6m4QHhUxdVZL3MAqjEwvZ3l0lIYTnFaAjD0OR1yx__/s400/220px-Mephisto_by_Mark_Antokolski%252C_marble_%2528GTG%252C_after_1883%2529_by_shakko_09.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mephisto, by Mark Antokolski (1884)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Given man's complex anthropology and the developments of the last five centuries, we can now better appreciate </span><span style="font-size: large;">Goethe's Devil, Mephistopheles. He is not like the medieval Devil who is alien to you and me. Rather, Goethe's Devil reminds us ... of us ... because he is us. Goethe's genius was to pull Mephistopheles out of the breast of his very own readers, that part of ourselves that is lured by the excitement of material possibilities: the physical sensations, recurring pleasures, and unleashed animal desires. And as the representative of the animal in us, Mephistopheles makes a bargain with God. Mephistopheles</span><span style="font-size: large;"> wagers that he can get Faust to feel so completely satisfied with his earthly nature, that the good doctor will forget his spiritual origin that connects him to God. Mephistopheles wagers that Faust will busy himself so completely on the horizontal plane that he will neglect, abuse, and forget the vertical plane. Mephistopheles wagers, in other words, that Faust will become thoroughly modern -- and dehumanize himself.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Now you see why Goethe's <i>Faust</i> is so prophetic: Modern man has been seduced by his growing material power to dehumanize himself.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"You will note that the nature of this wager is quite different from that found in the Book of Job. In the Old Testament, Job must lose all things on the horizontal plane in order to gain what is necessary on the vertical plane. By contrast, in Goethe's Faust the protagonist will gain everything he wants materially but lose it all spiritually -- until the very end. At the end it is clear that Faust cannot save himself. Despite all he does, he cannot save himself. It is only God's mercy that saves him." Tonsor paused, looked me straight in the eye, and enunciated each word slowly: "Is this not a very spiritual message for post-Enlightenment Europe?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Mephistopheles represents something else that would resonate in the husk of a Christian culture. When called upon to explain who he is, he declares, <i>Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint</i> -- I am the everlasting 'No,' the spirit who always denies. My purpose is to undo the work of creation. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"But, as we see at the end of the drama, Mephisto is the one who is denied. He fails because he does not fully understand what a man is. No matter how intense are the earthly, sensual desires of a man; no matter how tempting the wealth and power and worldly successes he might achieve; they can never leave a man entirely satisfied. There is always the desire for more. And perhaps that is what makes Faust always raise up the earthly thing to the heavenly plane. It's because m</span><span style="font-size: large;">an, in his maddening in-betweenness, nevertheless has conscience, imagination, and the spark of the divine. He has the capacity to combine his contradictions and make something better of them. </span><span style="font-size: large;">So, for instance, Faust cannot just have sex with Gretchen and be content with the physical satisfaction of the act; he has to raise the experience to a higher level and fall in love with her!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"For all these reasons, one can with justification say that Faust defines the modern human being.[13] And the word "Faustian" defines the civilization we call Western. </span><span style="font-size: large;">It was Oswald Spengler who, reading Goethe, discerned the distinctive character of Western culture: It was Faustian because of the way it inspired the striving soul to engage in unceasing efforts to conquer nature -- including human nature. But it's a roll of the dice. For when the godly myth of love is displaced by the demonic myth of power, there is a near certainty that the consequences will be disastrous. And yet that precisely is the mythic displacement which characterizes the modern world."[14]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor's words hit me like a blast of wind. But there was no time to linger. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Caroline, who had checked out a book, was emerging from the library. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">As the game clock ran down to zero, Tonsor wasted no time wrapping up: "Make no mistake: Goethe was no orthodox believer -- he did not give a full act of faith to the God of the Christians. But his Faust teaches us what the loss of Everyman's faith in the transcendent would mean to the Western spirit, much as Nietzsche would do, even more forcefully, several decades later. With the arrival of the modern age -- which supplanted the Age of Faith and along with it medieval scholasticism and Renaissance Platonism -- Western man crossed a threshold that has given him abundance on the horizontal plane of his bestiality, yet poverty on the vertical plane of his spirituality. Grasp this existential fact, and you have the key that unlocks so much that has vexed man during the last five centuries. As the years pass, the distance between modern man's seduction by the horizontal and his memory of the vertical only widens. It is that existential gap that goes far to explain why modern man in his dissatisfaction chooses to be distracted by his newfound Promethean capabilities -- whether to use the state to extend his power, or to use violence to eliminate the other, or to use ideology to justify his exquisitely refined hypocrisy."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>IV.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">At this final thought Tonsor offered Caroline his physical support so that she would not slip on the ice -- just as</span><span style="font-size: large;"> he'd offered me his intellectual support so that I would not slip on ideology. </span><br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">As the couple said goodbye, I hurried down William Street toward the bus stop, aware of the cold wind on my face and feeling that Goethe might have correctly diagnosed my poverty and misery. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">_____________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] This advice parallels that of Fr. James V. Schall, at URL https://home.isi.org/students-guide-liberal-learning?utm_source=Intercollegiate+Studies+Institute+Subscribers&utm_campaign=5e15c982d3-IR+Weekly+August+24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3ab42370fb-5e15c982d3-93104597&mc_cid=5e15c982d3&mc_eid=dc3cbdd0a3. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Ann Tonsor Zeddies conversation with GW, East Grand Rapids, MI, June 17, 2017.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] Caroline Tonsor conversation with GW, Chelsea, MI, July 7, 2017.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, </span><span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>Götz von Berlichingen</i>, Act 1, 1773.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">[5] Eckermann was to Goethe as Boswell was to Johnson. See Johann Peter Eckermann, <i>Conversations of Goethe</i>, December 6, 1829, trans. John Oxenford, Kindle ebook ed., loc. 6636.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">[6] Matthew Arnold, "A French Critic on Goethe," <i>Mixed Essays</i>, quoted by Helen C. White, "Matthew Arnold and Goethe," <i>PMLA</i>, vol. 6, no. 3 (September 1921): 438.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">[7] Paul A. Bates, ed. <i>Faust: Sources, Works, Criticism</i> (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969).</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">[8] Aldous Huxley, <i>The Doors of Perception</i> (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954.)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">[9] Thomas Mann letter to Ida Herz, March 21, 1954; from <i>Mann's Letters, 1948-1955 </i>(Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 1955), p. 332; in Donald Watt, ed., <i>Aldous Huxley</i> (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 394.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">[10] Reminiscent of Tonsor's interpretation of <i>Faust</i> is </span><span style="color: #1c1c1c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Rüdiger Safranski, <i>Goethe: Life as a Work of Art</i></span></span><span style="font-size: large;">, trans. David Dollenmayer (New York: W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2017), ch. 33.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[11] Paul, Romans 7:15, New American Bible translation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[12] John 19:30, Latin Vulgate translation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[13] Cf. A. N. Wilson, "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: They Gave Us Goethe and Bach," <i>Independent</i>, July 12, 2008, at URL http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/a-n-wilson-dont-lets-be-beastly-to-the-germans-they-gave-us-goethe-and-bach-866386.html. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[14] </span><span style="font-size: large;">Stephen J. Tonsor, </span><span style="font-size: large;">"The Use and Abuse of Myth," <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity: The Collected Essays of Stephen J. Tonsor</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 184.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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</style>Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-67846411323346062022017-08-07T00:30:00.000-07:002017-12-06T09:22:40.588-08:00Tonsor: Conservative Movement: Revolution on the Right<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">I.</span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Among the reasons I chose to study history at Michigan was the opportunity to attend a Big Ten university. I'd heard Michigan referred to as a "public ivy" -- that is, it combined the excellence of an ivy league education with the extracurriculars of a Big Ten university. Its academic rankings had long been stellar. Michigan was consistently recognized as one of the top public universities in the world. It and Berkeley were consistently ranked the top two public universities in the U.S. And its history department was consistently regarded as one of the top five in America. I figured I'd need the university's elite status to win a good academic post in a tough job market.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidZdwG3I7J75BS_FR3YcS2Lox0aMi_wT78OVh90ctY4C9YCJ9Zy08Re9itKuflxMh9hgSux3C-bla_tC8gB9VYvqZRcWPjS8v9pcikp6Uf3EP0fTqY94jxREHJ2j4lgenT9XDtl9IrTl6U/s1600/rn_g_boschembechler3_ms_600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidZdwG3I7J75BS_FR3YcS2Lox0aMi_wT78OVh90ctY4C9YCJ9Zy08Re9itKuflxMh9hgSux3C-bla_tC8gB9VYvqZRcWPjS8v9pcikp6Uf3EP0fTqY94jxREHJ2j4lgenT9XDtl9IrTl6U/s320/rn_g_boschembechler3_ms_600.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Bo Schembechler coached at Michigan from 1969-1989.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">Besides Michigan's elite academic status, and besides the opportunity to study with Stephen Tonsor, I'll admit that there was another reason I wanted to go to Ann Arbor. An advisor back in Colorado had said, "If you can go to a top 10 university <i>with</i> a top 10 football program, then it's the best of both worlds. Football Saturdays will be a good way to blow off steam while you're trying to get through a tough course of studies." How prescient that advice proved to be. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">It happened that Michigan had the winningest program in college football -- it was the best of the best -- ahead of such storied programs as Notre Dame, Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio State. I'm not ashamed to admit, as a lover of college football, that its elite status held no small appeal. In the Bo Schembechler era, I had chosen to become a "Michigan Man." The famous fight song, <i>The Victors</i>, branded the Michigan Man as "the leader and the best." So the football legacy was just one more element in the total Michigan package. </span></div>
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<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">Monday, October 12, 1987, was Columbus Day. I was feeling cranky. Over the weekend my Wolverines had lost to rival Michigan State under a gloaming sky. Not only did we lose the Paul Bunyan Trophy to our rival in East Lansing, but we also tumbled out of the AP poll, from 12th into college football oblivion. (We would have to wait until we beat Alabama in the Hall of Fame Bowl to end the season ranked a respectable 18th nationally, but that was ten weeks in the future.) </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkrbGC3OCAP51zdRfIaNyACHe2VZ-iBMw3aBny38zJHtNCXhj05CAnCHQwUzjo3vVhubFp4Nt3wm7YhfnM7LltrdUcByVG78m1c85hq-Uv3nBtsV0I8gohMIsYmaWc1cCdRDXvkZZBlSni/s1600/michigan_football_stadium_umphotog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkrbGC3OCAP51zdRfIaNyACHe2VZ-iBMw3aBny38zJHtNCXhj05CAnCHQwUzjo3vVhubFp4Nt3wm7YhfnM7LltrdUcByVG78m1c85hq-Uv3nBtsV0I8gohMIsYmaWc1cCdRDXvkZZBlSni/s640/michigan_football_stadium_umphotog.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: x-small;">America's largest collegiate arena, Michigan Stadium -- the Big House -- as it appears today.</span></td></tr>
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</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But Tuesday was a new day that changed my mood and filled me with anticipation. Ronald Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, announced that he was running to be the 41st president of the United States. Bush made the announcement in my hometown of Houston, Texas, and I was happy that he was a candidate. My family lived in the 7th Congressional District when Bush first ran for office. I had met him as a ten year-old boy at a little airport on the outskirts of the Bayou City. It was on a Sunday afternoon in May. In the south Texas heat, he had his suit jacket slung over his left shoulder when he approached my dad and me to talk. He was tall and when he shook my hand he looked me in the eye. I liked this man, George Bush, and I grew to respect his sense of duty and commitment to public service.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">II.</span></b></div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">These two events -- Michigan's football game and Bush's campaign announcement -- set the stage for my conversation with Stephen Tonsor on October 15th. When the bus delivered me to the central campus, a light dusting of frost was melting on the Diag. My advisor was scheduled to hold office hours but I arrived a little early at Haven Hall that morning. As I scanned the bulletin board on his door, I discovered a <i>New Yorker</i> cartoon I hadn't seen before. It showed three people looking out of a high-rise window down into a cramped courtyard below. One was the cigar-smoking realtor, and the other two were a couple trying to decide if the apartment was right for them. Many floors down, in the dark narrow courtyard, grew a pathetic little tree. The realtor was trying to close the sale: "You got a tree in this yard. It ain't every house got a tree in its yard." I could see why Tonsor, with his Teutonic love of nature, found amusement in a cartoon that took a swipe at the sterility of modern urbanization. </span></div>
<div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_tMCzRjwAaucFXauS7oGXoigpN1QLfknon0aXnb4ggFBt9HDN-aH_dJ0xWwonZPb8sWsRqK-0IfLENBM4w4o92MV5aeoL2Z1uwUPFmg-Tl8jPuhOMabUkRbn4SL72pOpz1IImktYhgNM0/s400/sbTrzSfRag.jpg" width="400" /></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">On assignment for LIFE in 1950, Alfred Eisenstaedt took <a href="http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/08/21/the-happiest-photo-ever-made/">"Drum Major,"</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">arguably the most famous photograph ever taken at the University of Michigan.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The picture has been called the photographer's Ode to Joy.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">After Tonsor arrived he invited me to sit down and asked how things were going. Wondering if he followed Michigan football, and probing whether we could lighten the relationship a bit, I responded that I was unhappy that the Wolverines had lost the Paul Bunyan Trophy to our rival up in East Lansing. Before I could finish the thought, he waved my words off. "College football -- huh! Why do you waste your time? The sport is a throwback to the most primitive hominids. The very idea of throwing <i>pigskin</i>! Why, it was probably invented by the missing link. It would be well to ban the sport from higher education. I never had one of these gladiators in my classes who excelled -- not one.[1] And too many weekends this time of year, throngs of hooligans trespass onto my property and throw beer cans into my yard." He became so agitated he was veritably rocking.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">I felt dressed down, a little ashamed to be grouped with so lowly a creature as "the missing link." It would not, of course, change my behavior because I loved football. But since there wasn't much I could say after that outburst, I tried to laugh off my professor's contempt and move quickly to the second and more serious topic at hand. It turned out that the two topics were related because each settled its contests with a clear winner and a clear loser. Michigan's most famous football player, Gerald R. Ford, liked to say this about sports and politics: "Every morning I read two sections of the newspaper. First I read about the heroes -- the athletes in the sports section. Then I read about the villains -- the crooked politicians in the front section!"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">III.</span></b></div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I am a relatively new Republican," I revealed to Tonsor. "So I was pleased with the announcement yesterday that Vice President Bush is running for the White House. Do you think he has a good chance? Not since the 1940 election has a party captured the Oval Office more than two elections in a row."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor's expression behind his glasses was Sphinx-like. I wondered if my support of the vice president disappointed him.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I soon got my answer. "I have a love-hate relationship with American politics. Rough-and-tumble doesn't even begin to describe the spectacle. Coleridge observed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.' Look at the folly in Washington, DC. Our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, are such little people and have made a swinish mess. It gives me no pleasure to say it, but even our President stoops low to conquer.[2]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I am amazed that so many people who are attracted to politics think they can be morally pure in that arena. Politics in a democracy is still politics. It's about getting the power, the votes, to enact one coalition's agenda. To achieve such a majority usually requires horse trading. So politics in our democracy is a cauldron of compromise. There is no moral purity in it. Looking for purity in the political process is like looking for purity in a sewer. It's necessary to civilization, but it's still a mess!"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I was obviously striking out trying to find suitable topics for conversation this day. It was not my finest Dale Carnegie moment.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Now, Bush," he said. "Bush will face fierce competition. He is conservative but not <i>a</i> conservative like Ronald Reagan, which makes a difference."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">My brow furrowed and Tonsor explained that lots of people are conservative, but that does not make them <i>a</i> conservative -- a movement conservative, that is. The indefinite article alters the meaning.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"What unites most people on the right, whether they are movement conservatives or the conservative Everyman," said Tonsor, "is the willingness to submit to reality." Chuckling he added, "Irving Kristol mordantly observed that 'a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.' Apparently not mugged enough!"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I laughed and was happy to feel the mood lighten. I'd never make the mistake of bringing up football again. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Modern politics make strange bedfellows, Mr. Whitney. The New Deal coalition I grew up in relied on an alliance between the intellectuals and the labor unions. It held solid from 1932 to 1948, and then again in 1960 and 1964. Something similar has happened on the right.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The modern Right -- the Reagan Right -- consists of various factions that are in productive tension with one another. I see the cultural conservatives in the mix if not at the center. These are highbrow intellectuals. They tend to be Roman and Anglo Catholic. They read T. S. Eliot and William F. Buckley. They listen to Bach and Haydn. They write and lecture in an effort to influence the <i>Zeitgeist</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"In productive tension with highbrow cultural conservatives are the working-class and middlebrow populists and party activists who love their country. The political temperament of these patriots is formed in their families, churches, and 4-H. They go by various names -- Everyman, the Forgotten Man, the silent majority, the moral majority. They are Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. They glean their political attitudes from Rotary Club meetings, school board elections, and local newspapers. Their conservative temperament is reinforced by TV westerns like <i>Death Valley Days</i> and movies like <i>Patton</i>. The two factions do not make friends easily -- their cultural tastes often diverge -- yet they will ally with one another against the intrusions of the state and the condescension of liberal elites. Everyman just wants to be left alone and have his rights respected.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The modern Right also includes the anti-communists -- people like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. They can favor a large national security state in order to fight totalitarianism. This puts them in productive tension with the libertarians in the party. They are anti-statists who want free markets to be the spine of the body politic and its political economy. Milton Friedman and the Chicago School are at the center of their work.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The mostly Jewish neocons in Manhattan have been important, but they exist in productive tension with the Protestant evangelicals in their suburban and rural churches. The preservation of the state of Israel is one of their shared concerns.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Finally there is the Establishment, which tends to be conservative but is best characterized as opportunistic. Jefferson warned us to beware this class -- the so-called money men. The monied Establishment is centered in our commercial capital, New York City, and exerts influence in our political capital, Washington, DC. It is rent-seeking. That is to say, these bigwigs hire lawyers and accountants and lobbyists who bend the system -- its laws, tax write-offs, corporate welfare, and administrative rules -- in their favor. It's where the loopholes come from. While both parties court the Eastern Establishment, they'd soon abandon the Republicans if the Democrats seemed more likely to do their bidding."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I opened my looseleaf binder and scribbled out some notes as quickly as I could. By my count, Tonsor mentioned seven GOP factions that existed in 1987:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">cultural conservatives</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">populists</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">anticommunists</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">libertarians</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">neocons</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">evangelicals</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Establishment </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Seeing how furiously I was writing, Tonsor kindly paused for a moment before picking up the thread.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"In their Old Right iteration, the conservatives did not even have a name. When I was your age, there was nothing like a Reagan conservative. Still, right-leaning intellectuals served in an important capacity. They were the loyal opposition to the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. To understand them I recommend that you read Albert Jay Nock -- perhaps his essay on "Isaiah's Job" in the April 1936 number of <i>The Atlantic</i>, or his libertarian take on Thomas Jefferson. Two additional Old Right leaders you might look into are the humanists, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Russell Kirk provides excellent summaries of Babbitt and More in his seminal work, <i>The Conservative Mind</i>. These humanists confronted modernity without altogether rejecting it. They reminded Americans of the need for continuity in an age of change, for virtue in an age of liberty, for duties in an age of rights, for being in an age of becoming, for the spiritual in an age given over to the material -- all necessary elements to a humanely ordered freedom. As eloquent as the Old Right was, as powerful as it was culturally, the alliance rarely succeeded in capturing the imagination of the Forgotten Man in enough numbers to win major elections.[3] Indeed, in their wilderness years between 1932 and 1948, the Old Right lost five presidential contests in a row.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"There is a reason for that. If you look at these prewar conservatives who opposed Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal -- H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Irving Babbitt -- they were of a libertarian cast of mind, disciples of Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill. The worldview of these classical liberals was elitist and agnostic. Without churches, these prewar conservatives did not connect with the lived traditions of God-fearing Americans who made up the vast majority of the nation's electorate.[4]</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"World War II changed the world. And as more and more people grew weary and wary of the active-state liberalism of the New Deal, there arose the second iteration of the Right. It is the current postwar conservative movement and it has been led by estimable thinkers -- Friedrich von Hayek, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley Jr. It also includes one of my mentors, Frank Meyer, as well as one of my closest friends, Henry Regnery, whom Caroline and I go to visit in Chicago and in Three Oaks. These intellectuals began a movement in the 1950s when <i>National Review</i> gave them an intellectual commons to discover each other and to debate in common cause. In the early days they were a scattered elite, mostly libertarians, anticommunists, and cultural conservatives who sought to expand freedom, security, and virtue respectively. Their aims did not fit well with the programs of the liberal cognoscenti. So they had to swim upstream against the current of liberalism which dominated America's elite.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"As George Nash points out in his <i>Conservative Intellectual Movement in America </i>-- a fine book, by the way -- the philosophical right was in search of a political man to match. A man who could shake up the Republican status quo and wrest the party from the Eastern Establishment. They found their man in Goldwater in 1964. Well, he lost. After we licked our wounds, we went back to work to change the climate of opinion. The conservative movement made steady inroads in the national conversation in the late 1960s and early 1970s due to a series of shocks to the nation for which the New Deal coalition had fewer and fewer credible answers. Assassinations, urban riots, campus unrest, failure in Vietnam, the Warren Court, energy crises, Watergate, stagflation, malaise, the Berger Court -- all this disorder made the average American anxious. By 1980 an alliance of intellectuals, politicians, and right-leaning citizens was strong enough to put Reagan in the White House and to keep him there in 1984. Vice President Bush will argue that he can best extend Reagan's legacy of ordered freedom. As I say, he is not a conservative, but he is conservative enough and a good man, congenial and competent."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">IV.</span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Now that you are living in Michigan, you should also know about the so-called Macomb County Democrats who have been seminal to Reagan's victory. Macomb County is less than an hour's drive away, north of Detroit. Its bedroom communities are home to the factory workers who man the assembly lines of the Big Three. To understand them culturally, you have to remember that these voters are the children of the Forgotten Man of the 1930s. They are registered Democrats, socially conservative, and mostly Catholics, and they feel abandoned by what was once the New Deal coalition. I understand these people, because my family was also working class and put their hopes in FDR. But as the New Deal Coalition kept moving left, especially during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, there was increasing distance between liberal elites and the children of the Forgotten Man. As a result, they voted with their feet. They have realigned themselves with the Republicans and cast their lot with the GOP.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Perhaps you're familiar with Stanley Greenberg's study of Macomb County Democrats that came out a couple of years ago [1985]. He is a Harvard Ph.D. and a liberal pollster who tries to explain the recent electoral shift in American politics, which reflects a deeper cultural shift in American life. The important point is that the electoral realignment could occur because first there was an intellectual realignment. An elite coterie of conservative thinkers articulated the frustrations and aspirations of the Forgotten Man, and politicians took note. These conservatives -- in places like Sharon, Connecticut; Mecosta, Michigan; Woodstock, New York; and Three Oaks, Michigan -- helped bridge the cultural divide with Macomb County. That's one reason 1980 and '84 came about, because of an impressive new political coalition that has put, and kept, a conservative in the White House.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"So George Bush's task is to be populist connect with Macomb County. As Macomb goes, so goes the GOP. If he and the conservative elite can connect with the voters in Macomb County, the right will do just fine in American politics in 1988. Maybe conservatives will, too."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">In my head I recast Tonsor's formulation to make it more alliterative: If conservative <i>philosophers</i> can connect with right-wing <i>politicians</i>, who in turn can connect with ordinary <i>people</i> in places like Macomb County, then the right will do just fine in American elections.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After listening to Tonsor's magisterial overview of the American right, it occurred to me that I now had another reason to be grateful for choosing Michigan. It was blind luck, but I was discovering that I had a front-row seat to the conservative intellectual movement in America -- not just in Tonsor's Haven Hall office, not just in the nearby Earhart Foundation on Plymouth Road, but also in Mecosta (Russell Kirk), Three Oaks (Henry Regnery), North Adams (Philadelphia Society), Hillsdale (the college), and Midland (Mackinac Center for Public Policy). Each of these men and institutions was contributing to the change in the climate of opinion that was transforming American politics in places like Macomb County. I was witnessing a realignment as profound as that which occurred in the 1930s, when the New Deal coalition arose. Now the New Deal coalition was unraveling, and the new Reagan coalition was taking its place. To be a witness to this "revolution" was invigorating tonic indeed for a newly arrived Michigan Man.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">_____________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, May 18, 1985, p. 5; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2]Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, July 25, 1987, p. 4; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] Tonsor seemed to use the term, "Forgotten Man," mostly in the way that Yale professor William Graham Sumner used it in his seminal 1876 article by that title, to refer to ordinary citizens who are forced to pay for government reforms that benefit a minority to which they do not belong. Franklin Roosevelt redefined the term in one of his early fireside chats. By "Forgotten Man" FDR referred to the vast majority of people who were left behind when capitalist oligarchs enriched themselves at the workers' expense.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Mark C. Henrie, "Traditionalism," <i>American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia</i>, ed. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), pp. 870-71.</span></div>
Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-85017581210715343092017-08-07T00:00:00.000-07:002017-08-16T14:45:43.565-07:00Tonsor: Intellectual History: The Romantic Garden II<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After Tonsor finished his lecture on Romantic gardens and landscapes, he packed his satchel with the notes and books he had brought to class. I remained in my seat -- motionless, ruminating, processing all that I had just heard. It felt as though my mind had been stung by the proverbial torpedo fish, likened to Socrates because he paralyzed his interlocutors with probing questions and dazzling intellect.[1]</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">As my professor left the lectern and approached and asked, knowing he was being ironic, "Did the lecture convey anything of interest to you, Mr. Whitney?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"It certainly did," I said. "It was the best lecture I've heard you give. I'm still taking in what you said during the last 90 minutes. I've read a good deal about landscape architecture but have never heard the things you taught us today. Landscapes will never look the same."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Landscapes frame our lives, do they not? As you know, with paintings it behooves us to pay attention to the frame because the frame interprets the picture. It's the same with a man. You cannot understand all the dimensions of a man until you know the landscape he grew up in." </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"What was the landscape like where you grew up?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbAH0fjI7rY5RprN8r2gqamlF7stJXLEUy-3NUwRzQYTJY_REJwuKAGjWZ7yHmGjh7Sikr9U2bMspKq4mFJ48JI9-5f-VYYJAljULUpATcZvvUYIaxx2b8REf6RgGH28oLRbV2zqB9ICun/s1600/Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbAH0fjI7rY5RprN8r2gqamlF7stJXLEUy-3NUwRzQYTJY_REJwuKAGjWZ7yHmGjh7Sikr9U2bMspKq4mFJ48JI9-5f-VYYJAljULUpATcZvvUYIaxx2b8REf6RgGH28oLRbV2zqB9ICun/s1600/Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Saul Steinberg's famous cover, <br />
"View of the World from Ninth Avenue"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">"It was the landscape of central Illinois, in the Great River country. Of course, Saul Steinberg and the East Coast cognoscenti would laugh at my saying there's anything remarkable about it. They disparagingly call it 'flyover country.' But for people who have eyes to see, it's the very heart of America's heartland. And it's not just flat cornfields either. Interspersed with the cornfields are upland woods of oak and hickory; bottomland forests of silver maple and sycamores; and the topographic transitions between them that separate the glaciated tableland on top from the riparian floodplains below. There is even the occasional island of tall-grass prairie that makes one marvel at how hardscrabble pioneers ever tilled the soil. What pulls the entire scene together is the panoramic vastness of the Illinois prairie peninsula. The sense of space is liberating!</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"This past July, when Caroline and I were driving back to my hometown of Jerseyville, I started looking at the different kinds of lines in the heartland landscape. The most dominant lines reflect the checkerboard pattern of township-and-range surveys bequeathed by Thomas Jefferson. His vision for the Old Northwest gives us those long, straight roads that follow the original survey lines. Other lines are sinuous, usually where roads follow the meandering of rivers or the curve of lakes. Still other lines characterize the way farmers grow things to conserve the soil. Most apparent are the lines of trees, windbreaks to shelter the farmhouse and barns and fields from blizzards. More subtle than the windbreaks are the lines among the crops. There are the furrows made by the plough, of course, like a Rembrandt etching that follows the contours of the land. Then there are lines separating the ocher-green of ripening corn from the dusk-green of maturing soybeans from the yellow-green of flowering milo; </span><span style="font-size: large;">lines separating crop from the spring-green of grass in the creases of the hills</span><span style="font-size: large;">; </span><span style="font-size: large;">lines separating crop from stubble; </span><span style="font-size: large;">lines separating crop from the fallow earth</span><span style="font-size: large;">. I suppose only someone who grew up on a farm cares about such things, but it's the frame that interprets me."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"I'm no farmer," I said, "but on my road trips I try and understand the landscapes I drive through. There's no such thing as a boring road trip, even across the Great Plains --"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor's eyes smiled and he interrupted: "You mean where the earth ends? Once, when my family was driving across the Great Plains, my son asked if we were going to the end of the earth. I said, 'No, it's not the end of the earth, but it's what the end of the earth would look like!'"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">He laughed in little puffs and I with him, saying I'd experienced the same thing with my family. "They think I'm weird because I love driving across Kansas. W</span><span style="font-size: large;">hen I studied geography, one of the things I most enjoyed was analyzing landscapes not just for their utility but also for their beauty and sublimity. One of my favorite Willa Cather passages, from <i>My Antonia</i>, captures the feeling: 'I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh easy blowing wind; and in the earth itself as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide; and underneath it herds of buffalo were galloping, galloping --'"[2]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Yes," said Tonsor in laconic affirmation. "I'd add Walt Whitman to your collection of favorite passages. He was quite smitten with the prairie lands of the Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas country. After visiting the Colorado Rockies he told a reporter that 'much as the grandeur of the mountains impressed him, the impression of the plains will remain longest with him.'[3] In <i>Specimen Days</i>, which is his travel log out West, he wrote: 'As to scenery ... while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone, and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but that the Prairies and Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America's characteristic landscape.'"[4]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">"Whitman got it right!" I said. "Just about anything west of the Hundredth Meridian is magical. As for Kansas country, especially in a place like the Flint Hills, both landscape and sky are sublime. Who cannot feel overwhelmed by those towering cumulonimbus clouds on a hot summer afternoon during the monsoon season. I always carry a 35 mm. camera in the car to try and capture the sublimity of those moments. Speaking of which, where did you learn about Romantic landscapes and English gardens?"</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"My earliest experience of the romantic landscape, believe it or not, was also in the Illinois country. West of Champaign, along the Sangamon River, is a remarkable park on the old Allerton estate. Nowadays it's managed by the University of Illinois. But around the turn of the century, an eccentric artist and philanthropist named Robert Allerton transformed acres of prairie outside his mansion into gardens and forests. There's not only the requisite herb patch and bowling lawn, but also a parterre garden and various flower plots, all surrounded by woods and meadows that overlook the Sangamon River -- the same Sangamon River that Abraham Lincoln knew.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Given your interest in landscape architecture, you will want to make the trek to Allerton not just for its natural beauty but also for the remarkable sculptures it contains. Perhaps in your art classes you have seen a photograph of Emil-Antoine Bourdelle's 'Death of the Last Centaur' or of Carl Milles's 'Sun Singer.' Experiencing the vistas in person leaves one alternately feeling the satisfaction of classical beauty and the awe of romantic grandeur. I'm sure this morning's lecture had its origins in the many happy hours I spent exploring the park."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRl2At-F802su-M7plUGnpj3IXA3_UBhDY3wKZvX-g63YBIiJJyr7_j4yFTxmwWO9FfjQA1ptX2f7xMT9x-dB_LNwlH1-KyIMFpDmZjq5dQOHz_0yJ66Ycc3l7N_eBecJY0STzbBQbaeGn/s1600/Centaure-5-8-2012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRl2At-F802su-M7plUGnpj3IXA3_UBhDY3wKZvX-g63YBIiJJyr7_j4yFTxmwWO9FfjQA1ptX2f7xMT9x-dB_LNwlH1-KyIMFpDmZjq5dQOHz_0yJ66Ycc3l7N_eBecJY0STzbBQbaeGn/s640/Centaure-5-8-2012.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Death of the Last Centaur," by Emil-Antoine Bourdelle, Allerton Park, Monticello, IL<br />
Photo at URL http://www.iloveallertonpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Centaure-5-8-2012.jpg</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">Later that week I was having lunch with Tonsor and Caroline and the subject of Allerton Park came up.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Oh, the old Allerton estate!" said Caroline, delighted by the very name. "When Stephen and I were in college we used to bicycle in the park. There was something special about leaving the cornfields behind and making your way through the dark brooding forests to 'The Sun Singer.' Stephen was quite taken by the drama of the setting."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"On one of my road trips back to Colorado, maybe I'll stop at Allerton," I said to be polite, doubtful that I would ever really get around to visiting such an out-of-the-way place.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"You should," said Tonsor authoritatively. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc8HIWV3OS3bAwYXzq_wmjxxtD_wyTUjOGsMYpJAoXVynwCS8HmzpUJa_Vn8CBHmSFmy3dSvx8_5FZMYh1dbTiHrLftx9HEG1AfS2POWlSKO1fM2vIRPGYp9ICkEgagSynQEG4-XOrjyj7/s1600/IMG_6033.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc8HIWV3OS3bAwYXzq_wmjxxtD_wyTUjOGsMYpJAoXVynwCS8HmzpUJa_Vn8CBHmSFmy3dSvx8_5FZMYh1dbTiHrLftx9HEG1AfS2POWlSKO1fM2vIRPGYp9ICkEgagSynQEG4-XOrjyj7/s400/IMG_6033.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"The Sun Singer," mixed media, by Caroline Tonsor.<br />
From the title page of a chapbook that Caroline Tonsor<br />
made for Stephen Tonsor (2009)<br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It would be three decades before I would finally make the trek to Allerton Park and experience the work of Bourdelle and Milles in surroundings of haunting beauty.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">__________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] For the original reference to Socrates as a torpedo fish, see Plato's dialogue <i>Meno</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Willa Cather, <i>My Antonia</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] For Whitman's observation see Robert R. Hubach, "Walt Whitman in Kansas," (Topeka: Kansas Historical Society, May 1941), pp. 150-54; at URL https://www.kshs.org/p/kansas-historical-quarterly-walt-whitman-in-kansas/12865. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Walt Whitman, <i>Specimen Days</i> (1879).</span></div>
Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-88153605303749817782017-08-05T14:00:00.000-07:002017-10-25T11:10:06.005-07:00Tonsor: Intellectual History: Is a "Liberal Conservative" an Oxymoron?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_oLmMMWHxmP7GLRDxNZRQmUCw9Vhpn8_YYf-WSFmPqhcWl78Ivug_gj61EIkembhD0CsjMvSVD1Qt2Auru8sf8xMwJuFPWdI1_sQCeIum_gLLzjjBW_MPLnh7-pnfJ5qAz8ilnYydxCW8/s1600/Winslow_Homer_-_The_Fog_Warning_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_oLmMMWHxmP7GLRDxNZRQmUCw9Vhpn8_YYf-WSFmPqhcWl78Ivug_gj61EIkembhD0CsjMvSVD1Qt2Auru8sf8xMwJuFPWdI1_sQCeIum_gLLzjjBW_MPLnh7-pnfJ5qAz8ilnYydxCW8/s320/Winslow_Homer_-_The_Fog_Warning_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Winslow Homer, "The Fog Warning" (1885)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">After the trip to Washington, DC, where I thrilled at seeing the U.S. Constitution in a bicentennial celebration at the National Archives, I returned to Ann Arbor intellectually stimulated by the experience and eager to resume my history apprenticeship. There was snap in the morning air when I set out to meet Tonsor during office hours. I spied him crossing the Diag in front of the Undergraduate Library (aptly called "the UGLI" because it looked like an IBM punch card). It was the first time I saw him wearing a hat. It looked reminiscent of a boater's hat from a Winslow Homer painting -- or the hat worn by the Paddington Bear. Yes, that student I'd met the first day of class had spoken perceptively: there was something ursine about Tonsor.</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">As our paths converged, I hailed my professor. He said hello in that expectant way of his, and then caught me up about the latest Trollope novel he was reading. When we reached the fourth floor of Haven Hall, there was a young man waiting outside his office; he was wearing a Red Wings cap. Tonsor greeted the undergraduate, showed him into the office, and put his hat down on the table. I remained standing outside the office, and what I saw next was unlike any interaction I'd ever witnessed between a professor and his student -- or between <i>any</i> two people. The student sat down but did not remove his cap. Tonsor also sat down and, annoyed that the student did not have the manners to remove his cap, put his hat back on his head. It was a ridiculous scene: The professor sitting stock still with his boater's hat on, staring down a hapless student whose felony was to keep his Red Wings cap on. Finally the chastised student got the hint and took his cap off, at which point Tonsor took his hat back off, and the two began conversing as if nothing had happened. It was very strange. If my professor had lived in the Middle Ages, he no doubt would have been called Stephen the Irascible. When my turn came to go into his office, I made sure to remove my ivy cap before crossing the threshold!</span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1Ym7WKN2bZaP72pu0csp4MTJkpDKA-XgWcIdlVa5SatBZurDRXU0SliFb6U4OrKlJEzEwldqcgL0lFSOGa7BfCioSPtGOS52XYjXp6wSA5XAbe-COsJgGLZ0nycLMwar7OOlftzRHJKLt/s1600/01-UGLI-Technic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="103" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1Ym7WKN2bZaP72pu0csp4MTJkpDKA-XgWcIdlVa5SatBZurDRXU0SliFb6U4OrKlJEzEwldqcgL0lFSOGa7BfCioSPtGOS52XYjXp6wSA5XAbe-COsJgGLZ0nycLMwar7OOlftzRHJKLt/s320/01-UGLI-Technic.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rendering of the Undergraduate Library (UGLI)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Come in, Mr. Whitney. You have not yet told me about your trip to Washington."</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The organizers kept us busy," I said, taking a seat where Red Wing boy had just been dressed down. "The highlight was seeing the Constitution on its 200th birthday, and the Declaration of Independence, too. Your lecture on liberalism was in my head as I walked around Washington, DC, taking in the sights of the 'Imperial City.' I also thought about something you said after the first class, when you referred to yourself as a 'liberal conservative.'[1] I need help understanding what that means because it seems like an oxymoron."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"This is true," said Tonsor. "It's an important question, and we don't have time to do it justice before class starts. But consistent with the sound practice of intellectual history, we can at least start with definitions in their historical context. There is not one liberalism but many, and its American permutations differ in significant respects from the liberalisms found elsewhere, or that developed previously. So one has to qualify what one means by 'liberal' and 'liberalism.'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The same must be said of 'conservative.' There are many hyphenated conservatives nowadays -- traditionalist, economic, anti-communist, evangelical, neocon. Moreover, the American permutations differ in significant particulars from conservative thought elsewhere, or that developed previously. One has to specify what one means by 'conservative.'</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"To define the term, 'liberal conservative,' I start with the observation that modern man lives with tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions -- oppositions that arise from our civilization's conflicting sources of intellectual and moral authority. In our shorthand way, we call those conflicting sources Christendom, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. As you know from class, they have a complex and overlapping relationship to one another, something like that of a child to a parent. They are continually clashing, continually generating conflicting ideas and discourse in our public affairs. As a result, the liberal conservative must be discerning. For he believes in freedom as well as in order. He believes in individualism as well as in community. He believes in the equality of all men as well as in hierarchy, natural aristocracy, and excellence. He believes in private enterprise, competition, and the market mechanism as well as in those human, moral, and cultural values that cannot be defined by the competition of interests in the marketplace.[2] These contradictions bring to mind the Walt Whitman verse which I recited to your class: 'Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large. I contain multitudes).'[3] No thriving society has ever existed that has not embraced the dynamic tensions that exist among opposing sets of values. Personally speaking, I will even say this: My behavior would be less honorable and my world more impoverished were I to abandon any one of these contradictory ideals."[4]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">My synapses were lighting up like the Las Vegas Strip. If I understood him correctly, then Tonsor was blowing up all my preconceived notions. Not only was he stretching my understanding of what a liberal and a conservative were; but he was also, unexpectedly, grafting the one onto the other the way a gardener creates a new subspecies. Often the result is a new plant that is stronger than the originals. Before I started reading his work and listening to his lectures, I had little idea that Tonsor's liberal-conservative pairing could be so fresh, so undoctrinaire, so creative in approach -- and I wondered how widely known this remarkable teaching was. I would later learn that Russell Kirk, in his influential <i>The Conservative Mind</i> (1953),<i> </i>would devote a section of his book to a prominent group of thinkers he called "liberal conservatives" -- foremost among them Tocqueville -- and the type would prove highly influential in Tonsor's intellectual development.[5]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-olFRxFl5TNf6V1ov5bbnUOXBwvwHqBDltle2qnD_lY4iHwL75uVTJMq2xX4OyG40g4LHjwzTsVLKNsKsVbS-vaTR1tCVigRejIzcG2hxUgfNHlIYv8klu3GJcKSriBzrB4m7-IdFc05p/s1600/Tonsor+and+Kirk.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="417" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-olFRxFl5TNf6V1ov5bbnUOXBwvwHqBDltle2qnD_lY4iHwL75uVTJMq2xX4OyG40g4LHjwzTsVLKNsKsVbS-vaTR1tCVigRejIzcG2hxUgfNHlIYv8klu3GJcKSriBzrB4m7-IdFc05p/s640/Tonsor+and+Kirk.png" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Stephen Tonsor (left) and Russell Kirk in 1977, courtesy of Annette Kirk</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">But to extend the biological metaphor, it seemed that Tonsor lived in an estuary of ambiguity; he was anchored neither to land nor to sea, but inhabited the richness that is found where salt water mixes with fresh, feasting in an ecosystem where nature most flourishes. It struck me how this strain of thought repositioned conservatism. It had nothing to do with the popular conception of of stalwarts fighting a rearguard action to defend the status quo, or promoting a politics of nostalgia that would return Americans to some golden age. Not at all. Rather, at the true heart of the conservative body of thought was the willingness to embrace the tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions of the human experience -- life as it really is experienced -- and subject it to critical analysis in light of abiding principles.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor continued speaking and my neurons continued lighting up. "Going all the way back to Aristotle," he said, "you see the development, in free societies, of the liberal-conservative pattern of thought. It was passed on, generation after generation, within a remnant. Then in the modern age, the liberal conservative emerged out of a powerful genealogy that includes Burke, John Adams, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, and Jacob Burckhardt.</span><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOouRaMc24szXeoXf4YaW7YHUPfRNcpKuEtn2Cxlj5cBai_GFWlIf1a3g9l6M8AGpm3yzEDav_3mh5sL6gJV3nnLv-9rTd6Y5lKvdqLUFYf-2H1sWSf175_XlqkcxfRGBkqi8LyKuXPxoV/s1600/img697.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOouRaMc24szXeoXf4YaW7YHUPfRNcpKuEtn2Cxlj5cBai_GFWlIf1a3g9l6M8AGpm3yzEDav_3mh5sL6gJV3nnLv-9rTd6Y5lKvdqLUFYf-2H1sWSf175_XlqkcxfRGBkqi8LyKuXPxoV/s320/img697.jpg" width="269" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">When George H. Nash's classic treatment of <br />
postwar conservatism came out in 1976,<br />
Tonsor earned a spot on the dust jacket<br />
as one of the nation's top 25<br />
conservative thought leaders.<br />
His photograph is in the lower left corner.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Now, you may ask yourself: What is peculiarly <i>conservative</i> about the liberal conservative? Well, much of conservative thought is derived from the West's religion, from Christendom. The conservative is a tough-minded realist who understands that human beings are imperfect and imperfectible; that they are usually self-interested and often irrational. He thus values the historic reality of those statesmen, charters, and institutions that act as a check on man's <i>libido dominandi</i> which --"</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor saw my brow furrow. "<i>Libido dominandi</i> comes from St. Augustine. It refers to man's disordered love of overreaching power. The liberal conservative is conservative in his belief that freedom is not enough. Freedom is only viable if it is ordered -- ordered by virtue. Virtue promotes order in the soul and order in the society. Although freedom and virtue are in inner tension, they complement each other. The more a man can govern himself by an interior law, the less he needs the government to impose an exterior law. Thus freedom thrives, paradoxically, when it grows out of a tolerable order. Let me be clear on this point: freedom is not freedom if separated from order.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"You may also ask yourself: What is peculiarly <i>liberal</i> about the liberal conservative? Well, the liberal -- at any rate, the classical nineteenth-century liberal -- derives much of his thought from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Think of the French physiocrats, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman. This type, the classical liberal, appreciates the spirit of freedom in man's nature, the restlessness to throw off oppression and improve his estate. Historically the classical liberal often had to struggle against the <i>ancien regime</i> and thus was a bit more eager for social, economic, and political reform than is his conservative friend. As John Cardinal Newman acknowledged, 'In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to aim for perfection is to have changed often.'[6]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"Newman's words suggest that the liberal believes freedom itself is as much a part of human nature as it is of the divine economy. Said his sometime friend, Lord Acton, 'Liberty is so holy a thing that God was forced to permit evil that it might exist.'[7] He understands that liberty is a worthy civilizational goal that has been hard won and easily lost. That's why he celebrates the organic growth of ordered liberty through time-tested constitutions, institutions, and laws. And it is why he frowns on revolutionary fixes and the do-your-own-thing behavior that soon results in anarchy or licentiousness. It is a faux freedom that cannot last.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"To tie these definitions together with your recent visit to Washington, DC, I would say that the liberal conservative today climbs onto the shoulders of giants -- of Aristotle, Burke, John Adams, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Jacob Burckhardt, Jacques Maritain, and John Courtney Murray -- thinkers who were alive to politics as a form of conversation, of rational deliberation. Our American constitutions -- both written and unwritten, and at the state and federal levels -- seek to maintain a political order in which citizens can agree to disagree in a community of civil discourse, arguing and deliberating over the questions of how we shall order our lives together -- without resorting to civil war.[8]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">"The liberal conservative thus values the virtue of prudence. He supports the prudent statesmen who can keep our state and federal constitutions balanced on a tightrope. On the one side is a government strong enough to enforce the rule of law as well as smother any incitement to mob rule; on the other side is a government weak enough that it cannot become its own self-interested, devouring tyrant -- because the governors will surely devour a people's freedom if given opportunity to do so. This perennial challenge in the human condition is what the framers of the U.S. Constitution debated. Their success is without parallel in world history. Indeed, at risk of oversimplifying because they possessed an extraordinary range of views, the founders turned out to be a great generation of liberal conservatives."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor slapped his knees to indicate that office hours were up -- we had to walk across the Diag to our class in East Engineering. But I was dazzled by my professor's lambent intellect. He had just given me the rudiments of an interpretive method by which to order a conservative political philosophy <i>and</i> the practice of intellectual history. I would eventually coin a term for Tonsor's method: "the hermeneutic of dynamic tension." He was teaching me about the unresolved opposites (in ideas, values, beliefs, institutions) that were nevertheless held together in the force fields of culture.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">When we got settled in class, I noticed three words still on the blackboard: "Learn or die."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">____________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2; letter in GW's private possession, courtesy of Alfred S. Regnery.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative," in <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 235.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," in <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 247.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Tonsor, "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative," in <i>Equality</i>, p. 235.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[5] Tonsor began adulthood as a war veteran and Truman Democrat. (See "Why I Am a Republican and a Conservative, in <i>Equality</i>, pp. 231-32; also my first of two interviews with his brother, Bernard Tonsor, July 1, 2014, in Jerseyville, IL.) So when did he begin defining himself as a "liberal conservative"? The seed was likely planted in high school when, thinking he was bound for the seminary, he was introduced to Aristotle's Golden Mean through the synthesizing works of Thomas Aquinas. When he resumed undergraduate study after World War II, he took philosophy courses that confirmed him as an Aristotelian thinker for the rest of his life. (GW correspondence with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, January 26, 2015.) The seed was watered when his dissertation advisor, Joseph Ward Swain, encouraged Tonsor to read Lord Acton in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Acton was "at the center of [his] world." ("Joseph Ward Swain," <i>Equality</i>, p. 316.) The seed was no doubt fertilized when Gertrude Himmelfarb's seminal study, <i>Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics</i>, was published in 1952 by the University of Chicago Press. But germination seems to have occurred when Tonsor encountered the work of Russell Kirk in 1953. He was employed by the U.S. Forest Service as a fire lookout in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, and he describes the remarkable experience of discovering <i>The Conservative Mind</i> on a mountaintop. (See "Joseph Ward Swain," <i>Equality</i>, p. 316; "Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative," <i>Equality</i>, p. 303; "Russell Kirk," <i>Equality</i>, pp. 317-20; and "Conservative Pluralism: The Foundation and the Academy," pp. 1-2, no date, typed lecture in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery). Tonsor describes the effect <i>The Conservative Mind</i> had on him using a powerful figure of speech: "I dipped my hand in the holy-water fount of Russell Kirk and said, 'Home at last!'" Tonsor tells us that it was when reading Kirk's important book in 1953 that he discovered he was already a conservative: "The event," he later reported, "was not a conversion experience, but a moment of self-revelation" ("Why I Too Am Not a Neoconservative," <i>Equality</i>, p. 303). It is not a stretch to think that he already was defining himself as a "liberal conservative" around this same time. Further evidence is that in graduate school he was a great admirer of Tocqueville, who is explicitly treated by Kirk, in <i>The Conservative Mind</i>, as a liberal conservative. So the process of changing from a Truman Democrat to a liberal conservative probably occurred due to numerous influences between about 1949 and 1954. His later letters to Henry Regnery reveal that he continued to refer to himself as a liberal conservative as late as 1987 (Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[6] John Henry Newman, <i>An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine</i> (1845), chapter 1, section 1, part 7.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[7] Acton quoted in Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in <i>Equality</i>, p. 256.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[8] Matthew Rose, "The Liberalism of Richard John Neuhaus," <i>National Affairs</i>, issue no. 28 (summer 2016); at URL http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-liberalism-of-richard-john-neuhaus, accessed October 24, 2016.</span><br />
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Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-3910052012926710332017-08-04T15:00:00.000-07:002017-08-14T05:31:57.009-07:00Tonsor: Introduction: Move to Ann Arbor III<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">I.</span></b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<span style="font-size: large;">On the third morning of my journey, I woke up to a dream set in ancient Athens. It was about Aristophanes, the comic playwright. In the dream he was not the brilliant Aristophanes encountered in the Penguin paperback, but the absurd Aristophanes ridiculed in Plato's <i>Symposium</i>. There Aristophanes is carousing at a dinner party. He's drunk and hiccuping and prodded by his friends to deliver a speech about love. After a few minutes of goofy antics he gets over the hiccups and tells the famous myth of how every soul splits in half and then spends the rest of its life longing to reunite with its other. The story is supposed to explain why we fall irresistibly in love with our "other half" when we finally find that special person.[1]</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSpGMlh0AmsSozVN9TEPTaGHIUDSw64b5Y1RHcwWbPflsv4XojsQm5sPG4J4kq6yxpZAUMUR0kFJL2iEtUGx7PDWogcgTikG5-BZZZP-WvbNLTo0GUIOtPzTamBmF2vQsTQtnP9whrNoRy/s1600/aristophane.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSpGMlh0AmsSozVN9TEPTaGHIUDSw64b5Y1RHcwWbPflsv4XojsQm5sPG4J4kq6yxpZAUMUR0kFJL2iEtUGx7PDWogcgTikG5-BZZZP-WvbNLTo0GUIOtPzTamBmF2vQsTQtnP9whrNoRy/s400/aristophane.jpg" width="281" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aristophanes -- Image at URL<br />
https://updownnsideways.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/aristophane.jpg</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">This was one of my "eureka dreams." Ever since childhood, I've had dreams that take a common English expression and amplify its meaning in an allegory. In this case the </span><span style="font-size: large;">expression was, "I gave my heart to [name of the person]," or "I left a piece of my heart back in [name of the place]." The interpretation of the dream was pretty straightforward. T</span><span style="font-size: large;">he soul represented the heart. If I left a piece of my heart behind in Colorado, then the pining, the longing, the sweet sadness I'd occasionally feel was simply my heart's way of expressing the desire to go back "home" and be whole again. Symbolically, the comic Aristophanes was there to tell me not to get down but to laugh and enjoy my new adventure</span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But enough of the amazing work of dreams!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After shelving the dream, my first thought was: Today will be a day of firsts. This morning I'll cross into Michigan for the first time. (It's true, I'd never stepped foot in the state, not even for a plane change.) This afternoon I'll see Ann Arbor for the first time. This evening in my new apartment I will go to bed as a Michigander for the first time.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Then my second thought propelled me to act on the first: I regretted having checked into a cheap hotel, for the bedsheets smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and one-night stands. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I got up and walked out to the balcony to take in the early light of day. Sometime during the night the thunderhead had moved east and the cold front had passed through, leaving crisp Canadian air in its wake.</span></div>
</div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Standing on the balcony </span><span style="font-size: large;">amid the gathering rush-hour of Chicagoland,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">I glanced back to the west, toward I-80, the road taken. </span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">I had crossed my Rubicon a thousand miles ago. Done. So I looked toward the sunrise, toward I-94 east, and felt happy that I was within four hours of my new home.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">After clearing the congestion of Chicagoland and settling in to the reality of the road, I enjoyed the distinct change in landscape. To my left and to my right were mile after mile of forests as the highway traced the curving shoreline of Lake Michigan. </span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">To keep my mind occupied I reviewed the two Tonsor essays I had thought about thus far on the trip. The first was published in 1975. Tonsor was 51 years old and the context was the eve of America's bicentennial. As a nation we were drawing in a deep breath after much tumult -- the civil rights struggles, urban unrest, Vietnam War, student protests, and Watergate. Remarkably for a conservative writer, Tonsor's essay reflected an unexpected optimism about America's "revolutionary society."[2] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">The second essay was published in 1964. Tonsor was 40 or 41 years old and the context was the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the launch of the Great Society by his successor, Lyndon Johnson. In the presidential election of '64, Tonsor's candidate, Barry Goldwater, had been trounced. It looked as if the nascent conservative movement had reached a fork in the road -- it would gain strength or die out. In this uncertain political environment, Tonsor's essay argued that it was imperative to uphold the integrity of history amid the temptations to propagandize.[3] </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">If the first essay surprised the American in me, and the second essay affirmed the historian in me, then the third essay troubled the conservative in me. Deeply. Titled </span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">"The Haunted House of the Human Spirit," the editorial for <i>Modern Age</i></span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"> had been published just two years earlier, in 1985, when Tonsor was 61 or 62 years old.[4] It was springtime for conservatives. Reagan had been reelected in a landslide and it was "Morning in America." The question of conservatism's fate seemed to have been answered. The so-called Reagan Revolution had revved the economy into full recovery. W</span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">ith Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and Pope John Paul II all at the helm, </span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">America and Western Europe were once again asserting themselves vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Together these leaders were ushering in a new era of conservative ascendency throughout the West. I along with my conservative-leaning friends were feeling optimistic about the future.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRlFg0jMTVt-ZnhyphenhyphenLcnzBWEHQCQE0ddt0Ez-dUy-Uv81PbPy11gxdSwzryz1nz9yZxR4EFyd0mu_pKmB-QjS2WR0H-tnif3hEaCftkn28Pe5YWSajanN8OGnv9MmpiABvOk78jKgN7b_uS/s1600/trump-no-reagan-on-taxes_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="371" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRlFg0jMTVt-ZnhyphenhyphenLcnzBWEHQCQE0ddt0Ez-dUy-Uv81PbPy11gxdSwzryz1nz9yZxR4EFyd0mu_pKmB-QjS2WR0H-tnif3hEaCftkn28Pe5YWSajanN8OGnv9MmpiABvOk78jKgN7b_uS/s640/trump-no-reagan-on-taxes_0.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">America's 40th President, Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Image at URL</span><br />
http://c3.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/styles/original_image_with_cropping/public/uploaded/trump-no-reagan-on-taxes_0.jpg?itok=d4pZQPSa</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">To my dismay, Tonsor's 1985 essay did not share the conservatives' giddiness -- not at all. In fact the editorial expressed deep skepticism about what was happening to the conservative movement. Tonsor actually saw it in ignoble retreat. How so? Because of</span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"> all the conservative scholars and humanists who had abandoned higher learning to work in politics in Washington, DC. They had utterly betrayed their calling as humanists whose duty was to teach the rising generation. </span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">The dour professor urged the remnant of conservative humanists who still held redoubts in the academy to hold fast; do not be seduced by power. Politics, even Reagan's sunny politics, were only a temporary fix, not the cure. The real war conservatives had to fight was upstream of politics, in the culture. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">So the remnant's task was to prioritize the culture and remain true to their civilizational mission. As true humanists they must be guardians of the language, for our words comprise the deep taproot of the culture, the source of our embedded values and beliefs.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">Another thing that struck me about "The Haunted House of the Human Spirit," besides the thoroughgoing pessimism it expressed, were the writers Tonsor cited. They were not the usual arrows in the conservative quiver: not Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas. Rather, Tonsor made his argument to the remnant by citing Martin Heidegger, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Carl Orff -- modernists all. I wondered why.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">At the time, all of this was very confusing to me. As the mileposts on Interstate 94 swept me closer and closer to Ann Arbor, I seriously began to wonder if I had made a terrible mistake. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"></span>
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">Had I crossed the wrong Rubicon?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhayKchD9R6HMCf4HfofAs0eYPKLspn-qrS-efEpdE7RXXmF5sxhxi14iq6BWXAzTUIyxa8CO6bFdq1yhV1Op7lMLmH8jdTUjk-uo_sLaaP_mGXMMNTFIb4blaTatNzEfCaJx8eZYJe9Eyr/s1600/p1921696259-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhayKchD9R6HMCf4HfofAs0eYPKLspn-qrS-efEpdE7RXXmF5sxhxi14iq6BWXAzTUIyxa8CO6bFdq1yhV1Op7lMLmH8jdTUjk-uo_sLaaP_mGXMMNTFIb4blaTatNzEfCaJx8eZYJe9Eyr/s640/p1921696259-5.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Forest typical of Michigan's Lower Peninsula<br />
Image at URL http://kimkozlowski.com/img/s/v-3/p1921696259-5.jpg</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">___________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] Plato, <i>Symposium</i>, 189a-193d.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The United States as a Revolutionary Society, <i>Modern Age </i>(spring 1975): 136-45.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Tradition: Use and Misuse," <i>Modern Age</i> (fall 1964): 413-15.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Haunted House of the Human Spirit -- an Editorial," <i>Modern Age</i> (fall 1985): 290-92.</span><br />
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Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-88069872147650526862017-08-03T20:02:00.000-07:002017-09-12T09:07:31.934-07:00Tonsor: Introduction: Move to Ann Arbor II<div style="text-align: center;">
<b style="font-size: x-large; text-align: center;">I.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large; text-align: center;">Nothing against Nebraska -- in fact, I really like the state -- but I was eager to get back on the road. After adjusting to the U-Haul's ugly engine roar, I turned my attention to Stephen Tonsor's 1964 review of two books, one by a Marxist, the other by a Jesuit. The review turned on the use and misuse of tradition,[1] and if that sounds boring it was not. The essay put the professor's mordant sense of humor on full display.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">With lacerating wit Tonsor laid into one Barrows Dunham, a Marxist philosopher who had gained notoriety in 1953, during the McCarthy era. When called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Dunham refused to name names. As a reward for this act of civil disobedience he was fired by his employer, Temple University, later that year.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">What with that kind of experience Dunham presumably had something interesting to say. But </span><span style="font-size: large;">trying to read him, according to Tonsor, was "equivalent to taking a transcontinental auto trip with a talkative but senile Marxist." Why? Because "Marxism has had its great scholars and at its best has created a viable intellectual tradition." Alas, "Mr. Barrows Dunham does not belong to this tradition. His work falls into the pressed-flower school of Marxian hagiography." The line made me laugh. And in case the reader had missed how Tonsor really felt, he pressed the case further: Dunham's work is "stupidly presented." His "research is slight and largely at the level of third-rate Marxians and second-rate popularizers. His 'Bibliographical Essay' presents the image of an unscientific, ancient, and fuddled mind."[2] Well.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">II.</span></b></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Problematic as the pressed-flower method was, to Tonsor an even more serious problem was Dunham's willful distortion of what Marx called "the opium of the people": religion. Everything had to fit into the Procrustean bed of dialectical materialism, which warped the historic reality of Christianity:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"The account Dunham gives of Jesus will serve to illustrate the point [that Dunham's social history is only vulgar Marxism]. Jesus is presented to us as a 'social revolutionary,' 'the leader of an armed movement of national liberation.' His message was not eschatological, his mission not redemptive. He was simply anti-imperialist, a sort of proto-Castro. St. Paul is the counter-revolutionary theologian and the real founder of modern Christianity. Pauline theology ... describes, not realistically but imaginatively, the state men must inevitably be in so long as the wealth and power of a few derive from poverty and impotence among many.' Even for one who purports to have read the New Testament, these conclusions are astonishing. More conclusively, they demonstrate an ignorance of biblical scholarship.... No well-read student of Christianity, Marxian or otherwise, would today come to such absurd conclusions."[3]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor also had a real problem with Dunham's abuse of the past. As he explained, a writer appropriates tradition for one of two purposes. Either he is a political hack, a propagandist who weaponizes the past in order to manipulate the present to his purposes. Or he is a historian who seeks to understand continuity, development, process, and the present configuration of ideas and events. Dunham's propaganda was an object lesson in weaponizing the past -- at least it could teach students what not to do.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor then contrasted Dunham's propagandistic treatment of social dissent with Vernon Bourke's historical study of free will. Tonsor praised the Jesuit's careful exploration of the idea of free will in Western thought down through the centuries. It was a methodological masterpiece that teased out eight different views of will and traced their development into the modern age, and it clearly gave Tonsor much pleasure to read. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Significantly, Tonsor's concluding paragraph addressed a question that had long nettled me. Conservatives complained of ideologies, but could Christianity be considered just another ideology? Was the Catholic humanist just fooling himself? Here is what Tonsor said:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"It is interesting to explore the Western intellectual tradition with a Marxist and a Jesuit respectively. For those who argue that dogmas are all alike in their antipathy for rational inquiry, the experience will be an enlightening one. Certainly there is a great and apparent difference between those who conceive of disciplined inquiry as little more than a weapon in the arsenal of the social revolutionary and those who conceive of truth as God's own to be cherished and loved for His sake. Of the two positions it would be difficult to say which is the more revolutionary. It is easier to point out which is the more barbarous."[4]</span></blockquote>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>IV.</b></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I wanted to meditate further on Tonsor's work, but my attention was drawn to a terrific thunderhead whose cauliflower top spread over half the state of Iowa east of Des Moines. For more than two hours the open landscape offered a stunning panorama of the storm's development. When I finally caught up with the lightning-laced cumulonimbus, somewhere in the prairie parkland </span><span style="font-size: large;">east of the Quad Cities, I gripped the steering wheel tight. U</span><span style="font-size: large;">nderneath the storm's fury, torrential rain reduced movement on Interstate-80 from a canter to a trot. I was relieved when later that dark afternoon I could check into a motel in Lansing, Illinois, near the Indiana border. I hardly noticed how seedy it was.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8CvCl8XdEx_4lDXgFNeCf3kK3QBFuwQJlMHV7uOlXFXU5bpNqFbwVR48qQD6YiMjzAdg_e1LO7sBNdix7NuaNOuJvamTGupwCn18kpiJLNBel2DhW4yErPaBnmOQLkd1SjtSFMYgBywvX/s1600/ethereal-sky-lightning-and-green-stormclouds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8CvCl8XdEx_4lDXgFNeCf3kK3QBFuwQJlMHV7uOlXFXU5bpNqFbwVR48qQD6YiMjzAdg_e1LO7sBNdix7NuaNOuJvamTGupwCn18kpiJLNBel2DhW4yErPaBnmOQLkd1SjtSFMYgBywvX/s640/ethereal-sky-lightning-and-green-stormclouds.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image at URL<br />
http://www.theimagestory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ethereal-sky-lightning-and-green-stormclouds.jpg</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">___________________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Tradition: Use and Misuse," <i>Modern Age</i> (fall 1964): 413-15.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[2] Tonsor, "Tradition," p. 413.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">[3] Tonsor, "Tradition," p. 414.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Tonsor, "Tradition," p. 415.</span></div>
Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-64996135247509844882017-08-02T21:05:00.000-07:002017-09-18T07:17:41.969-07:00Tonsor: Introduction: Move to Ann Arbor I<div style="text-align: center;">
<b style="font-size: x-large;">I.</b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><b style="font-size: x-large;"></b></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The calendar flipped to Sunday, August 2, 1987. The thought</span><span style="font-size: large;"> that it might be my last Rocky Mountain sunrise, after 15 years of living on the Front Range, made a</span><span style="font-size: large;"> wave of grief well up in my throat. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimKA70vRBH6Em4hgHxN8nqE1g4-Gg0E_JHz7TxepHtDZDdfJfQF9DTEDnzpd7MYFiHPf5BfL_2PCjjDb3ikbuP8T9AuXJ9Jq9JzCNmH2E5aTC6EBeGTAGkDme53kEeDKVaH131fDASQMhH/s1600/6233031404_3c5c7477c8_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="413" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimKA70vRBH6Em4hgHxN8nqE1g4-Gg0E_JHz7TxepHtDZDdfJfQF9DTEDnzpd7MYFiHPf5BfL_2PCjjDb3ikbuP8T9AuXJ9Jq9JzCNmH2E5aTC6EBeGTAGkDme53kEeDKVaH131fDASQMhH/s640/6233031404_3c5c7477c8_b.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunrise, Rocky Mountain National Park, southwest of Fort Collins</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: large;">A sweet intoxicant, these Colorado sunrises. </span><span style="font-size: large;">T</span><span style="font-size: large;">he emerging light on the pinkish granite of the mountaintops recalled some verse composed by a Colorado College poet, Katharine </span><span style="font-size: large;">Lee Bates. In 1893, in a bloomer, she </span><span style="font-size: large;">ascended the pink summit of Pikes Peak. Though exhausted, she took in the view and was inspired to write, </span><span style="font-size: large;">"Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies...."</span><span style="font-size: large;">[1]</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Oh beautiful indeed: What on earth was I thinking -- to trade the Rockies for the Rust Belt? To make matters worse, several of my newest neighbors in Fort Collins hailed from Michigan. They reported that the economic hardships there had given rise to a mordant assessment of the future: Would the last person out of Michigan please turn off the lights? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">No matter. </span><span style="font-size: large;">I decided to swim against the current, betting that my future would be better if I continued my education not at a land grant school but at a public ivy. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij83AR-y83UfvVMrBFdVytuYirUHPxvkwQOy33CN3-Ct3ChYbpZgamdN8Aaz3gwlV6M-KJPBjcqM_vG0123BvZx0OHh5dp2z3Wl1diBPWXpstVQimEnVNjORfTzwMKr53Xbxrr6oUFFb-d/s1600/3672491618_28a6707039.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij83AR-y83UfvVMrBFdVytuYirUHPxvkwQOy33CN3-Ct3ChYbpZgamdN8Aaz3gwlV6M-KJPBjcqM_vG0123BvZx0OHh5dp2z3Wl1diBPWXpstVQimEnVNjORfTzwMKr53Xbxrr6oUFFb-d/s640/3672491618_28a6707039.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Colorado State University -- the Oval</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Now, I do not want to convey the wrong impression. I had received an excellent education at Colorado State; my history, literature, and German professors had been first rate, and I think of many of them fondly to this day. But Michigan was ranked one of the top universities in the world and, given the difficult job market for new Ph.D.s in European intellectual history, I'd need the cache Michigan boasted. It was time to go.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The day before, a few family and friends helped me pack a 20-foot U-Haul for the long-awaited adventure. It struck me as funny to look at that truck and realize, once the cargo door was shut, that my entire material existence -- mostly books, too many books, as my sore arms attested -- could be squeezed into a few hundred cubic feet.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The sun was still hanging low over the High Plains when I climbed into the cab of the truck to begin the 1,244 mile journey from university housing at Colorado State to university housing at Michigan. The plan the first night was to lay over in Lincoln, Nebraska; the second night, in the south suburbs of Chicagoland; and the third, in my new home in Ann Arbor. I felt excited, nervous, and crazy all at once. I stood at the edge of my personal Rubicon -- it was Interstate 25. Once crossed, was there no turning back?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">When my emotions are in a high boil, I try and settle by taking on an intellectual puzzle that focuses my mind on something besides limbic turmoil. For the three-day drive to Michigan I set myself the task of reading a troika of essays by Stephen Tonsor, the man who would soon become my graduate advisor. I picked three pieces that were published roughly a decade apart from one another -- 1964, 1975, 1985 -- to see what changed and what didn't in Tonsor's interests and insights. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The night before setting out on the leg between Fort Collins and Lincoln, I read "The United States as a Revolutionary Society."[2] Somehow it just felt right to start with this essay. Tonsor's piece promised to deliver a first-rate intellectual puzzle. It was audacious for a conservative to argue in 1975, on the eve of America's bicentennial, that our nation renewed itself through periodic social revolutions. Such a line of thought was more likely to come from the typewriter of Tonsor's most famous student radical, Tom Hayden of SDS, than from a stick-in-the-mud right-winger. Why did he write it?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">To get to Ann Arbor I had to go through a place called Lincoln. The 16th president's namesake on the Nebraska prairie made me wonder how social revolution might be linked to Lincoln's presidency. There was abundant material with which to work. Lincoln will forever be associated not only with the liberation of four million Blacks; not only with abolishing the institution of chattel slavery on American soil; not only with atonement for the Founders' sins; not only with the greatest uncompensated transfer of "property" in U.S. history; but also with the far-reaching alteration of the Constitution. Did Tonsor believe that the three great Civil War amendments were accelerants to the fiery social upheavals to come -- farmer unrest, labor unrest, anarchist terror, women's suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, and the Sixties' protests?</span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjRo3NSMlLDVc0A3lMZ0JkjE3rbKFK0SS2Yrf8L5_otr727bORYyAdAnuy1UwwmLBxEI2e2QIx-xIo6oQB16obzAIb_A02aDaix1EYrqERxMNiA6SqyBNa1lgOjCftaeT9HwpTWRfR_4SS/s1600/Civil-War_Union-Leaders_abraham-lincoln-portrait_Corbis-E.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjRo3NSMlLDVc0A3lMZ0JkjE3rbKFK0SS2Yrf8L5_otr727bORYyAdAnuy1UwwmLBxEI2e2QIx-xIo6oQB16obzAIb_A02aDaix1EYrqERxMNiA6SqyBNa1lgOjCftaeT9HwpTWRfR_4SS/s640/Civil-War_Union-Leaders_abraham-lincoln-portrait_Corbis-E.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Was the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln,<br />
a key figure in furthering America's legacy of periodic social revolutions?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Juxtaposed to this last point was a counterpoint. My journey would take me through some of the most conservative parts of the fruited plain, the lonely vastness of the Great Plains as well as the rural Midwest straddling the 98th Meridian (more or less the line from Mitchell, SD, to Grand Island, NE, to Hutchinson, KS). Would Tonsor's intellectual history of America crash head-on into the reality of the historical geography I was traveling through?</span><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>III.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">As the serrated knife-edge of the Front Range faded in my rearview mirror, I needed to shake off the emotional detritus that had settled over my spirits like a High Plains dust storm. My questions about Tonsor's essay provided the needed distraction.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor wrote that his was a "rather daring thesis." Really? Daring to whom? Not to the historians in his department. At Michigan Tonsor was surrounded by Old Leftists, New Deal liberals, and New Leftists who would not view his thesis as daring at all. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJtCwmtLkbQmHdOinfNEQXnnappH8J732Kd0c1JgRG3Pr2pBhCnt5uPURW4nMW2gjOLOTWwzokckOU18BSpugRNbMlRgJEd6qTxcwmPXsFMUib42JMFjbPIgX7YuZzyS1C_x_97mtI0cLa/s1600/EdmundBurke1771.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJtCwmtLkbQmHdOinfNEQXnnappH8J732Kd0c1JgRG3Pr2pBhCnt5uPURW4nMW2gjOLOTWwzokckOU18BSpugRNbMlRgJEd6qTxcwmPXsFMUib42JMFjbPIgX7YuZzyS1C_x_97mtI0cLa/s320/EdmundBurke1771.jpg" width="267" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edmund Burke's view of the American Founding appealed to<br />
traditionalist conservatives. <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">The Burkean view was that</span><br />
it was "a revolution not made, but prevented."<br />
(See http://www.mmisi.org/ma/29_04/kirk.pdf)<br />
Tonsor thought this a gross simplification of the Revolution.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: large;">Then it occurred to me: In <i>Modern Age</i> Tonsor was writing not to the typical academic historian but to his friends in the Philadelphia Society[3], about as conservative a professional audience as one could find. Most members of Philly Soc viewed the Founders as reluctant revolutionaries</span><span style="font-size: large;">. Indeed, the Constitution they framed reinforced conservative practices and institutions in the new republic, including the most backward and ugly of them all -- chattel slavery -- so odious that the word "slaves" is not even mentioned in the document; instead the Framers made an oblique reference to "all other Persons." Tonsor, I realized, was writing a corrective to the conservative boilerplate he heard at Philadelphia Society meetings.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">"It is important," averred Tonsor, pushing the point, "that we demonstrate clearly the truly revolutionary character of the events of 1776 and their continuing impact on American society." </span><span style="font-size: large;">To back his testimony, Tonsor called two witnesses who were not usually brought in for a conservative's defense:</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Charles and Mary Beard. These prominent progressives believed that</span><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNAmUIWLAdW8gupSL5iabezz6s-WEGQs7bqqsF848uLDAOANfdoFIE-gTSXgfWVjK-4kV75X1vHLQL2WCEWR0Am9_aG8KFiYr-BZ7Zq1UnaHtJwg0uAIjApmdgla6dF63Rw9UBIqclHhee/s1600/beard-mary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNAmUIWLAdW8gupSL5iabezz6s-WEGQs7bqqsF848uLDAOANfdoFIE-gTSXgfWVjK-4kV75X1vHLQL2WCEWR0Am9_aG8KFiYr-BZ7Zq1UnaHtJwg0uAIjApmdgla6dF63Rw9UBIqclHhee/s320/beard-mary.jpg" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Ritter Beard (1876-1958)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">"the American Revolution was more than a war on England. It was in truth an economic, social, and intellectual transformation of prime significance -- the first of those modern world-shaking reconstructions in which mankind has sought to cut and fashion the tough and stubborn web of fact to fit the pattern of its dreams."[4]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">Even more startling was Tonsor's next assertion, aimed I think directly at his conservative friends who, he believed, did not have a sound grasp of our nation's historical DNA: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"But even without the Beards' respected view we know that there was a genuine revolution because we live out its enduring consequences and its continuing ramifications. Indeed, <i>one of our least admirable contemporary attitudes is our retreat from the novelty and the implications of our revolutionary heritage</i> and our search (a vain one to be sure) into what we think to be the quiet reaches of the past for a golden age of tranquility. Surfeited on change we imagine that at some golden moment in some imagined American Camelot men were free of the necessity to choose and to change; the necessity that the original revolutionary transformation of our society has imposed on all of us. While the Left sees insufficient change ... <i>the Right rejects those changes which necessarily follow from the principles of the revolution.</i>"[5]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">The Right got it wrong, for the ability of American society to absorb revolutionary change, argued Tonsor, was written into America's very political institutions and charters: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"in the final analysis, it is our basic institutions and the founding instruments of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution which have perpetuated our values and given our system its elasticity and its dynamism."[6]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">Tonsor believed the Founders were reluctant rebels -- in fact, he conceded that "Few, if any, revolutions have been so conservative in their inspiration" -- but rebels they were:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"... [O]nce those liberties and historical rights were taken seriously, once they had become the central principle of a new polity, they changed and transformed the whole texture of American political and social life. It was, indeed, as though the American Revolution had salvaged the great vital principle that stood at the heart of the English historical experience and had given it new life and meaning.... </span> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">"Sometimes an act of conservatism is a truly revolutionary action. The concrete realization of specific liberties, no matter how partial or incomplete, was in the instance of the American Revolution the great device by which liberty permeated the totality of American life in the years that were to come. That process has not ended and I would like to remind you that success as well as failure exacts a price."[7]</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">That such passages flowed from the pen of a "conservative" historian vexed me. I wasn't sure how to square the essay with the reputation of its author. But as there was no internally logical flaw in the argument, I counted myself fortunate to have encountered the piece early in my graduate education. The Michigan professor was not just correcting some mistaken notions that conservatives held about American history; he was issuing a warning to those conservatives, a warning not reflexively to condemn the revolutionary tradition in our heritage.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>IV.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Already from his essay I surmised three things about my new graduate advisor. First, Tonsor was going to call history exactly as he saw it. He wasn't afraid to cite the work of progressives when it had merit. He certainly was not going to worry about what his conservative friends would think if he did so. The scholar should have the courage to follow the evidence where it leads, regardless of the political stripe of the people supplying the evidence. Indeed, sifting through the merits of different perspectives is the only way to get closer to the truth.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Another thing that surprised me about Tonsor -- surprised me in light of what I expected a conservative to be -- was his unvarnished realism, his lack of sentimentality, when investigating the past. There was no golden age. Not even America's founding constituted a golden age. </span><span style="font-size: large;">He loathed the conservative tendency to conjure one into existence in order to go off on all that has gone wrong in the present. I suspected that Tonsor was an Augustinian Christian -- i.e., he believed that human nature is a constant, always and everywhere subject to the same venal and mortal sins. So the good old days were not that good. The temptation to fall for a politics of nostalgia -- to create the myth of a golden age, no matter how understandable in a Time of Trouble -- is a perverse form of ignorance. It was more benighted even than the poor mass of humanity staring at the back wall of Plato's cave. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Third, America was at least as revolutionary as it was conservative, and the two impulses were in dynamic tension with one another. It seemed Tonsor was saying that the dynamic tension was not such a bad thing. It beat traditionalism, which is the dead faith of the living, and it beat neophilia, which is the love of change for its own sake. Both traditionalism and neophilia lead to cultural despair. The truth about modernity reveals itself somewhere between these two extremes. Thus the historian should embrace the dynamic conservative-revolutionary tension that has shaped our institutions and worldview. It is the historic reality.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Again: In this essay there was no blanket dismissal of progressive scholars, no argument for some mythical golden age, no blind eye to the benefits of our nation's revolutionary heritage. The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that Tonsor was not just correcting conservatives in general, but rebutting Russell Kirk in particular. Kirk's <i>Roots of American Order</i> was also written in anticipation of America's bicentennial, having been published one year earlier, in 1974.[8] Without saying as much, Tonsor's essay amounted to an assault on Kirk's thesis.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2QyHsQvQUa6Kb1EGwFY5o-Rr_HBX-sIGLqpwCC1lXQDTBOok5thOXDzIF9YssuS3_951hw6aolhszjmAaIHt3M41qUtvZQVM_J3ce0-91GK_Le3gSXgo1qC0X0pResuF3T1Dw51wlFA5n/s1600/kirk_opt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2QyHsQvQUa6Kb1EGwFY5o-Rr_HBX-sIGLqpwCC1lXQDTBOok5thOXDzIF9YssuS3_951hw6aolhszjmAaIHt3M41qUtvZQVM_J3ce0-91GK_Le3gSXgo1qC0X0pResuF3T1Dw51wlFA5n/s320/kirk_opt.jpg" width="260" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Russell Kirk (1918-1994)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">I must confess that the implicit attack on Kirk gave me mixed feelings. Tonsor had expressed deep admiration for Kirk in the 1950s. By the 1970s they had irreconcilable differences on the meaning of the American Revolution. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I also had mixed feelings because <i>The Roots</i> was one of my favorite books, combing as it did the sands of ruins for the glories of Western civilization. It was the history of just that civilization that I wanted to teach. From my jejune perspective, Kirk's book was Whig history at its finest. Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London -- all would have a salutary influence on the American founders. Kirk's world-historical view of America appealed to me. It was big. It was unapologetic. It was compellingly argued. And it was one of the reasons I wanted to pursue the formal study of history in a graduate school close to Russell Kirk. His home up in Mecosta, Michigan, was in the middle of the Lower Peninsula's stump country. After reading Tonsor's essay, Mecosta suddenly seemed a world apart from Ann Arbor. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">During the drive to Lincoln I did not get around to Tonsor's view of our sixteenth president and social revolution. There was not really enough material in the essay to answer that question. I did ponder the idea, expressed in a history seminar back at CSU, that the three Civil War amendments were both the cause and effect of significant changes in our way of thinking. The war started the process of transforming Americans' view of each other and their government. Thus serial social revolutions were not unthinkable after 1865.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>V.</b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">By the time the U-Haul was rolling into the parking lot of a cheap motel on the west side of Lincoln, I was asking myself: Was Tonsor the conservative people made him out to be? It would not trouble me if he were not conservative; intellectual integrity eschews party lines. What I liked about "The United States as a Revolutionary Society" was that it showed Tonsor's determination to steer clear of ideology. His goal was not to defend an -ism but to practice good history. His conservative bona fides notwithstanding,</span><span style="font-size: large;"> he did not trim his sails to please his right-wing friends at <i>National Review</i>. </span><span style="font-size: large;">That was important to me. Given my need to please people, I was fortunate to have the role model I thought I had found in Stephen Tonsor.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I climbed down from the truck's cab, noticeably stiff and cranky. Lincoln felt oppressively humid, closed in by gray. I had been watching a blanket of stratus clouds unroll over the landscape for several hours. But it didn't matter. I had grown too dull and hungry and exhausted to think anymore.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">__________</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[1] Gleaves Whitney, <i>Colorado Front Range: A Landscape Divided</i> (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1983), p. 3. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The United States as a Revolutionary Society," <i>Modern Age</i> (spring 1975): 136-45.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[3] Stephen Tonsor, along with Russell Kirk, was among the founders of the conservative Philadelphia Society, a professional association that formed during Republican nominee Barry Goldwater's star-crossed pursuit of the presidency in 1964. See http://phillysoc.org/. Tonsor delivered the third lecture at the first organizational meeting of the society. Also see http://phillysoc.org/tps_meetings/1964-organizing-meeting-in-indianapolis/. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[4] Charles Beard and Mary Beard, <i>Rise of American Civilization</i> (p. 296); quoted by Tonsor, "Revolutionary Society," p. 137.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[5] Tonsor, "Revolutionary Society," p. 137; my emphasis in italics.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[6] Tonsor, "Revolutionary Society," p. 145.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[7] <i>Ibid</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">[8] See especially the two books by Russell Kirk with which I was familiar when I headed off to Ann Arbor in August 1987: <i>The Roots of American Order</i> (Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University Press, 1974); and <i>The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot</i>, 7th ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1986).</span>Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-5530363185861330222017-07-31T14:30:00.000-07:002017-09-05T10:49:37.621-07:00Tonsor: Introduction: Second Call -- The Tragedy of Lord Acton<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
In late July, shortly before loading a 20-foot U-Haul and moving to Ann Arbor, I phoned Tonsor again,
seeking his advice about which professors to look up once I was at Michigan. Then I broached a topic from our
first conversation that I hoped to resume: Lord Acton as a giant of modern
intellectual history and cultural criticism.<br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Professor Tonsor, our last conversation sparked me to read an essay in which Acton said that liberty is more about morals than about politics and</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> --"</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Tonsor jumped right in: “Acton said that liberty is so holy a thing that God Himself was forced to permit evil that liberty might exist.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[1]</span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> Think of it this way, Mr. Whitney. Animals live in the realm of necessity.
Human beings also live in the realm of necessity – we have to bend to gravity and
answer the need for food and water – but we live in the realm of freedom, too.
A person’s dignity, a person’s nobility, resides in his using freedom to act
morally. A person can only act morally if he is taught the difference between
right and wrong and is free to choose between good and evil.</span><span style="text-indent: 48px;">”</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKcYxBMVc5H7Jipms8YGuuvd6jZCD34FDexKWrefwtRDxjLG9o1aGP1OBTLqHOlDatctrIfVpsIbTflDG-bD91OY7M5wT2SeU4bnByLGe-4Vud8B-_BuYqLqRI7dahzd3PZd4TVVRiqChk/s1600/Picture_of_John_Dalberg-Acton%252C_1st_Baron_Acton-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKcYxBMVc5H7Jipms8YGuuvd6jZCD34FDexKWrefwtRDxjLG9o1aGP1OBTLqHOlDatctrIfVpsIbTflDG-bD91OY7M5wT2SeU4bnByLGe-4Vud8B-_BuYqLqRI7dahzd3PZd4TVVRiqChk/s400/Picture_of_John_Dalberg-Acton%252C_1st_Baron_Acton-2.jpg" width="272" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lord Acton (1834-1902)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"></span></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Tonsor paused. I could hear him breathing now. </span><span style="text-indent: 48px;">“</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It follows that a primary aim of education is to learn how to exercise liberty within the bounds of the moral life.[2]</span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> A primary aim of politics is to preserve liberty as the organizing principle around which the other values in society must be ordered.[3]</span></span></span><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> And a primary aim of historical research is to chart man's enduring efforts to decrease the realm of necessity and increase the realm of liberty. In Acton's mind it all coheres.</span></span></span><span style="text-indent: 48px;">”</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">That pr</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">écis, I thought, was brilliant. The man speaks in perfectly formed paragraphs.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12pt;"></span>
<span style="text-indent: 48px;">“Acton thought the historian should be a hanging judge?" I ventured.</span><br />
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“The most severe hanging judge,” said Tonsor, punching the word <i>severe</i>. “He was fond of saying that a man’s life must be measured against its low-water mark, the one act of evil that outweighs all good.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[4]</span> Let a man criminate himself. History is better written from private letters than from public chronicles.[5]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
“Acton’s reputation as a hanging
judge was undoubtedly helped by the fact that he had a better nose for gossip than almost any other Victorian.[6] Gossip was the oxygen the Victorian Age
inhaled. It should be said that historians in every age have inclined their
ear to gossip. Take Suetonius, Procopius, or Boccaccio. People read such authors to be titillated
by Eros and to satisfy their curiosity about the mechanics of sex.”<br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It was reassuring for me to hear references to authors with whom I was familiar (but it surprised me to hear him speak of the mechanics of sex). As an undergraduate back in Colorado, I
had read Suetonius, the Roman author of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Lives
of the Caesars</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, a masterpiece of gossip parading as history, a smutty
collection of the scandals surrounding the first eleven Roman emperors.
Likewise I was familiar with Procopius, the Byzantine historian who wrote not
just official chronicles of the Emperor Justinian but also the sordid </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Secret History</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, which is full of
invective against the members of the royal family. No one knows how true these
accounts are, but they are good reads to slip into a stack of monographs – like
the mayonnaise between slices of dry bread.</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Tonsor continued: “The people who
are drawn to the salacious details in Suetonius and Procopius are the same
people who read </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">TV Guide</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">. You will
not find them grappling with Acton. Yet he is the model of rectitude when it
comes to historical research and writing."</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH9IiZPIXEKOUSAFnJ0aJ6yCUHeCgv4Pe-3pSHmMhC6LJSRFwVbFXBCCj9Kgi5pglFchA6KGPebua5FnvZL4fLQYBRItv4vC-CmXKjBlTLTy4w0y7YvdXczqEEEeNy2QReSiaoyc-NHI0I/s1600/cambridge-university-library-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH9IiZPIXEKOUSAFnJ0aJ6yCUHeCgv4Pe-3pSHmMhC6LJSRFwVbFXBCCj9Kgi5pglFchA6KGPebua5FnvZL4fLQYBRItv4vC-CmXKjBlTLTy4w0y7YvdXczqEEEeNy2QReSiaoyc-NHI0I/s400/cambridge-university-library-1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Cambridge University Library</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<i>TV Guide</i>? I smiled at Tonsor's sarcasm -- he brandished his weapon of choice skillfully.<br />
<br />
“During Acton’s lifetime," he continued, "the
discipline of history was flowering because of the archives that were opening
up all over Europe. Acton himself took part in this flourishing. He donated a thousand
boxes of his own notes and research to the Cambridge library. <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I’ve gone through a good many of the documents to examine everything from his morals to his methods.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[7] </span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It’s staggering to trace all the directions his mind
went. When it came to advising historians attempting to write history, Acton's advice was, Don’t! Instead visit Purgatory!<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[8]</span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> It was his way of getting scholars to understand the arduous
journey they were about to embark upon. I hope, Mr. Whitney, that you have also prepared for the journey."</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I had, but did not feel like saying so since Tonsor had served on the committee that admitted me. </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Perhaps in the pause Tonsor sensed I was at a bit of a loss, so he continued to dilate on Acton's advice: “History done well requires almost
superhuman talent and effort. In the first place, Acton charged researchers to be open to evidence
that does not fit the thesis; to turn over every last stone and get multiple
perspectives if they want to know what really happened in the past. In so many
words he cautioned against what the social scientists call ‘confirmation bias’;
his notes recall a scene in Dante’s </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Paradise</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">,
in which St. Thomas Aquinas warns the Pilgrim that 'opinion -- hasty -- often can incline to the wrong side, and then affection for one's own opinion binds, confines the mind.'[9]</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTXwYWlhx1i7a7nBLKnbGNjyteHgc9J9DUtAK_lH95QaGqhYFcj4lW_Q7VIPVXir3dTuV4WxnD8BLbphUIob5I0xA4Pq0Td4acBGR4QzFlL_GLB0ZHmAH1BK41sPwMjdz2pGgSh5Xk2jqK/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTXwYWlhx1i7a7nBLKnbGNjyteHgc9J9DUtAK_lH95QaGqhYFcj4lW_Q7VIPVXir3dTuV4WxnD8BLbphUIob5I0xA4Pq0Td4acBGR4QzFlL_GLB0ZHmAH1BK41sPwMjdz2pGgSh5Xk2jqK/s320/maxresdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">One of Gustave Dor<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small; text-align: start;">é</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">'</span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">s exquisite prints made for Dante's Divine Comedy</span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
“In the second place," Tonsor continued, keeping my mind on the stretch, "Acton charged historians to make out a better case for the other side than they are able to make out for
themselves.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[10]</span> Cultivate the ability to drive the prosecutor’s case into a corner, and with
equal skill to drive the defense’s case into a corner. Transpose the
nominative and accusative and see how things look then![11]<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Acton did not suppose that the
strenuous effort to understand both sides would lead to the exoneration of
murder, injustice, and deceit. Not at all. Out of his elementary sense of
decency and justice, he demanded that the historian administer a fair trial.
But a trial there must be.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[12]</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“So,” I asked, “how did Acton
square the scientific view of history then emerging with his insistence on
moral judgment in historical writing?” I was not idly asking the question to linger on the phone. As an apprentice historian, I really needed to
understand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“You mean the old fact-value
debate,” said Tonsor firmly, “the modern divide between objective facts that can be
universally verified and subjective values that vary from person to person and
from culture to culture. For Acton, the distinction was not so cut and dried.
When it came to historical narrative, it was not ‘either-or’ but ‘both-and.’ </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Both</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> the facts uncovered in the
archives, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">and</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> the moral assessment of
human behavior. They were both the stuff of history, properly understood. Acton
approached history this way because, like most Victorians, he believed in a
universal natural law that could be apprehended by reason and enforced by
conscience. This belief enabled him to sidestep differences in doctrine
presented by the Axial Age religions. The main thing was to understand the
ethical commands common to them all. The prohibition against murdering the
innocent, the obligation to follow one’s informed conscience, the Golden and
Silver rules – these universal commands to man’s conscience formed the basis of
his moral judgments. It is probably accurate to infer that Acton’s moral reasoning was more informed by Kant than by Jesus.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[13]</span></span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIMthQmOfW6dTsGqHvMyO8DzgFH6ViuCJfsJxCaLG87TolNPTvrFiZUf8fGUBs97tEiQeDwsK6ykUDM0679XYsVJQr_FZoODV5fvx9L46YMRRnVSVgY4GO3gNoHOe7u9FvWFQSqUusKK1Y/s1600/slide_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIMthQmOfW6dTsGqHvMyO8DzgFH6ViuCJfsJxCaLG87TolNPTvrFiZUf8fGUBs97tEiQeDwsK6ykUDM0679XYsVJQr_FZoODV5fvx9L46YMRRnVSVgY4GO3gNoHOe7u9FvWFQSqUusKK1Y/s320/slide_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Karl Jaspers's term, "Axial Age," describes the brilliant spiritual leap</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">humankind took around the world some 2,000-2,500 years ago.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
“So," I pressed, "Acton would regard the
universal commands of conscience sort of like ‘value facts’? In other words, because
the Golden Rule is universal among the world’s major religions, it is
tantamount to a fact? By extension, if I am pulling all of this together, it
means that the most basic requirement of freedom is the right to obey the
commands of conscience, to do what one ought. Or, as John Adams said, liberty
is a power to do as we would be done by.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[14]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
“Yes,” Tonsor said with emphasis.
“To do as we would be done by.”<br />
<br />
“Now,” Tonsor continued, “nobody ever
accused Acton of being a saint in his personal life. Goodness is as far from
sanctity as cleverness is from genius. Acton was personally cloaked and choked
by the moral law as one might be squeezed into a suit of armor two sizes too
small.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[15]</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
I did not know exactly how to
understand the analogy, but I went on to ask whether
Acton struggled with the Church.<o:p></o:p>
<br />
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<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE1g4BjT8az3UpHaqlUXwC5_I3jl06C3xjZRcoAmwsD-cbFms26vEZHZrLgskM-RO8pbNmyAUQWdztfgbka3Pr6B3dLPfK4l60vjDJEKLb5q71yTNchl-cpowBR11Upiv9ZDR79ho7kwML/s1600/Popepiusix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE1g4BjT8az3UpHaqlUXwC5_I3jl06C3xjZRcoAmwsD-cbFms26vEZHZrLgskM-RO8pbNmyAUQWdztfgbka3Pr6B3dLPfK4l60vjDJEKLb5q71yTNchl-cpowBR11Upiv9ZDR79ho7kwML/s320/Popepiusix.jpg" width="228" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Pio Nono (Pope Pius IX): no fan of Acton's</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
“Indeed! And the Church with Acton!
In Acton the hierarchy confronted a petulant son, especially when it came to
the doctrine of papal infallibility. Acton had a mischievous side -- he enjoyed tweaking the lion in his den, so Pio Nono was no fan of his. Acton was especially disliked by
Ultramontanist toadies who prostrated themselves before the pope and scurried
at his every twitch. Acton was a devout Catholic, to be sure. But he was not passionately
Catholic. I’ll take
the thought a step farther. The absence of religious enthusiasm may have been
what made Acton tolerable to be around. He was the one you wanted to sit next to at dinner
parties.<o:p></o:p>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
“And yet, despite his cosmopolitan
ease in conversation, despite his wit at soirees, Acton was probably a very
lonely man. He didn’t suffer fools. And his absolute moral stances, his
implacable judgments, invariably separated him from other men. A liberal
Catholic, he was too liberal for the Catholics and too Catholic for the
liberals. He criticized his mentors. He broke off friendships. He quarreled
bitterly with the Church hierarchy. Technically and morally, he was probably
right in most of his quarrels. But whatever satisfaction he derived from being
right must have been offset by the isolation he inflicted on himself from being
self-righteous.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[16]</span> <o:p></o:p>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
“Acton is the prophet who foresaw
our times. He anticipated the dangers of statism. But ironically he is now a
setting star – passé and remote. This, it must be said, is a tragedy of his own
making. It’s a mystery why he never wrote his planned magnum opus, The History
of Liberty – <i>the</i> book he was meant to
write. Everyone around him waited years for the work to appear, but it never
did and posterity is the worse for it. The History of Liberty has been called <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">‘</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">the greatest book never written.’<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[17]</span></span><br />
<o:p></o:p>
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</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeQfyi37oX-KShKRA2rKVku10kcKifHT5cbc3IhiwB968ToMIvN105HOxeQzoY8McIvxnDzUVLwfSTOlD_n-2nH37RKIMhT8M24qU_vf-hY2v_0soNgAQTQEea8y7ZwvKfxuPlH1S388IR/s1600/4af7ecffe4c4d7f5d464254e3930b25b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeQfyi37oX-KShKRA2rKVku10kcKifHT5cbc3IhiwB968ToMIvN105HOxeQzoY8McIvxnDzUVLwfSTOlD_n-2nH37RKIMhT8M24qU_vf-hY2v_0soNgAQTQEea8y7ZwvKfxuPlH1S388IR/s400/4af7ecffe4c4d7f5d464254e3930b25b.jpg" width="263" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">"The greatest book never written"</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“The irony is that Acton had
already written it in his head. He had penned thousands of pages of notes
brimming with material for the book. I’ve seen the material myself.</span><span style="font-family: "cambria"; text-indent: 0.5in;">[18]</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> But, reaching the end of his life, he realized he would not compose the work
and donated all his research to Cambridge, all his notes that fill literally a
thousand boxes. He had to settle on the hope that some enterprising scholar
would eventually come along after his death and compose the history of liberty
he failed to write. Those boxes are a feeble commemoration of a brilliant mind,
a sad testimonial to the tragedy of wasted labor.</span><span style="font-family: "cambria"; text-indent: 0.5in;">[19]</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> Socrates, Jesus, Mohammad, Charlemagne – they could pull off going unpublished;
Acton could not.”</span><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
I listened in silence to this
remarkable lesson on Lord Acton and tried to be comfortable with the pause that
ensued. But my mind would not be still. What with his dizzying erudition,
Tonsor had given me much to ponder. I had never heard a teacher speak in
this manner before.<o:p></o:p>
<br />
<div>
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<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteTextCxSpFirst">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">Notes</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "cambria";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[1]</span> Stephen J. Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i>, ed.
Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), pp. 255-56; Acton's view is line with that of Edmund Burke, who said as much when he wrote, in 1790, “It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.” Thanks to Professor Bradley Birzer for reminding me of Burke's quotation.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[2]</span> Stephen J. Tonsor, Introduction, <i>The
Legacy of an Education</i>, by James C. Holland (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton
Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Occasional Paper no. 11,
1997); Kindle edition, loc. 11.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[3]</span> Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i>, pp. 255-56.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[4]</span> Gertrude Himmelfarb, <i>Lord Acton: A Study
in Conscience and Politics</i> (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study
of Religion and Liberty, 2015), Kindle edition, Ch. 8, loc. 4138. Himmelfarb's book was particularly helpful in reconstructing Tonsor's and my first conversations on Lord Acton.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[5]</span> Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, at URL <a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/search/title/2254?q=criminate">http://oll.libertyfund.org/search/title/2254?q=criminate</a>,
accessed August 26, 2016.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[6]</span> Himmelfarb, <i>Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 1, loc.
104.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[7]</span> Himmelfarb, <i>Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 1, loc.
125.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[8]</span> Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg (Lord), “Advice to Persons about the Write
History,” at The Imaginative Conservative, at URL <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/06/advice-to-persons-about-to-write-history.html">http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/06/advice-to-persons-about-to-write-history.html</a>,
accessed August 26, 2016.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12.0pt;">[9] <i>Paradiso</i>, Canto 13: 118-20, trans. Allen Mandelbaum.</span></span></span><o:p></o:p><br />
<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[10]</span> Acton quoted by Stephen J. Tonsor, “Faculty Diversity and University Survival,”
in <i>Tradition and Reform in Education</i>
(La Salle: Open Court, 1974), p. 155.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[11]</span> Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg (Lord), “Advice to Persons about the Write
History,” at The Imaginative Conservative, at URL <a href="http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/06/advice-to-persons-about-to-write-history.html">http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/06/advice-to-persons-about-to-write-history.html</a>,
accessed August 26, 2016.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[12]</span> Tonsor,
“Faculty Diversity and University Survival,” in <i>Tradition and Reform in Education</i>, p. 155.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[13]</span> Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Legacy</i> by Holland,
loc. 23.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[14]</span> John Adams, <i>Works</i>, vol. 10; quoted in
Russell Kirk, <i>The Conservative Mind: From
Burke to Eliot</i>, 7<sup>th</sup> ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway
Edition, 1985), p. 100.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn17">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[15]</span> Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Legacy</i> by Holland,
loc. 23.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn18">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[16]</span> Himmelfarb,
<i>Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 1, loc. 125-148.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn19">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[17]</span> L.
M. Phillipps, <i>Europe Unbound</i> (London,
1916), p. 147n.; quoted by Himmelfarb, <i>Lord
Acton</i>, Ch. 1, loc. 114.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn20">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[18]</span> Caroline Tonsor interview with GW, Chelsea, MI, March 15, 2017. Ms. Tonsor spoke of a different era when it came to research. She said that the "Xeroxed documents" from the Cambridge University library arrived in Ann Arbor on a continuous roll that she had to divide up with scissors. See the resulting monograph and detailed references in Stephen J. Tonsor, “Lord
Acton on Döllinger’s Historical Theology,” <i>Journal of the History of Ideas</i>, vol. 20, no. 3 (June-September
1959), pp. 329-52.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn21">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[19]</span> Himmelfarb,
<i>Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 1, loc. 114.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-18541841662291176782017-07-31T14:00:00.000-07:002017-09-05T10:52:30.280-07:00Tonsor: Introduction: First Call -- To hone one mind against the gritty stone of another<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This book by George Nash is <i>the</i> history<br />
of the movement <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">in which</span><br />
Stephen J. Tonsor played a central role. <br />
On the dust jacket of the first edition (1976), <br />
Tonsor's photograph is in the lower left corner. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">My first conversation with Stephen
Tonsor occurred on a mid-April morning in 1987. I was living in Fort Collins,
Colorado, and had recently received the acceptance letter to study history at
the University of Michigan. So I was eager to introduce myself to the man who
was to be my graduate advisor for the next five years plus. With some
nervousness I placed a long-distance call to his home from my crowded kitchen
table: nervous not just because of the anxiety produced by a major life
transition, but also because of what my colleague Gregory Wolfe said about the
Michigan professor. “Tonsor,” he warned, “is old-school German. He can be a mite
prickly and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Remind me to tell you what he said at
the Philadelphia Society last year.”</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Although I had braced myself for
possible unpleasantness during this initial phone call, the conversation with
Tonsor went well. The handshaking over the phone soon done with, I told Tonsor that
I had received a Weaver Fellowship and was honored to be in a position to study
under his direction. I'd be moving to Ann Arbor in the late summer. </span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">He had enthusiastic words for my future home. "I occasionally spend a few weeks away from home, and I must say that rediscovering Ann Arbor after a short stay elsewhere is always a very pleasant experience for me. It really is a marvelous and unique community. It is so manageable. I am able to walk nearly everywhere I wish to go. It is vibrant and filled with elegant shops and restaurants. Even the bookstores continue to proliferate. I have the feeling sometimes that Ann Arbor is like Athens must have been in the years between Aristotle and the closing of the pagan schools by Justinian. Great university towns always have a very special character."[1]</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">After this happy thought, I asked Tonsor who the most influential historian in his
life was. His answer made me appreciate his way with words, his way of seeing
things.</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“To hone one mind against the
gritty stone of another,” Tonsor observed, “is the surest path to intellectual
excellence.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[2] </span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">It’s against the gritty stone of Lord Acton, Tocqueville, Parkman, Burckhardt,
and sometimes Dawson that I’ve learned the most.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lord Acton: a giant in intellectual history</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
“It was in graduate school, under
the wise direction of my dissertation advisor, that I discovered Lord Acton.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[3] </span>It
may sound funny to put it this way, but I had an experience similar to that of
Marx, who locked himself in a dank room and refused to come out until he had
read everything Hegel had written. After three weeks he emerged into the light,
rubbed his eyes, and proclaimed, ‘I am a Hegelian.’<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[4] </span>More
than a century later, I retrieved material from the Anderson Room at Cambridge, read Lord Acton for days on end, and emerged an apprentice of
Acton’s thought. I liked the cut of his jib compared to that of most historians
who are over-educated stamp collectors.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Tonsor gave a deep-throated chuckle
– it was the first time I heard him laugh. “You probably do not know this,” he
said, “but Lord Acton’s family on his mother’s side claimed they were related
to Jesus. Apparently there was a Semitic ancestor of the Dalbergs
who became a Roman soldier and was stationed on the Rhine.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[5] </span>If
you are going to fabricate a lineage, you might as well start with the Father
Almighty. But tell me, Mr. Whitney, what have you read of Acton?”<br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Trying to ingratiate myself in this
first conversation, I replied that I’d found it difficult to lay hands on
Acton’s books. (That’s because he didn’t write books, but I didn’t know it yet.) I noted, nevertheless, that I had looked up one of Tonsor's articles about Acton in </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Journal of the History of Ideas</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, and that it was</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> at the top of my "to
read" stack by my desk.</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“That article is not very good,”
Tonsor said. “But Acton, on the other hand, Acton I hope will soon be in your
‘re-read’ stack. Recur to his essays often and he will repay you generously. He
is one of the most important Liberal historians and moralists you will
encounter, indispensible today because he was the first great modern thinker to
aim his firepower at statism. Acton’s resistance to Leviathan did not
discriminate. He was opposed equally to authoritarian, socialist, and
democratic regimes<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[6]</span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> –
anywhere the state had become a ravenous, ungovernable beast. Nor was he a
friend of nationalism which, in his day, was everywhere coopting the state and
leading Europe down the road to ruin. The nation, said Acton, is responsible
to Heaven itself for the evil acts of the state.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[7]</span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In these opening words on Acton, I was
processing two things that didn’t square. First was Tonsor’s dismissal of his
own early article. Was it false modesty or did he mean it? Second was a word that
Tonsor used; it seemed incongruous for a conservative to lavish high praise on his
“Liberal” idol. I asked for clarification.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgGzN469t7jwPmc1fBKzFjYZcW5rGMJ1SJY8sEwlaSqkyKEMTfmn3Ir9CpCWHQsPdJJzx7QdYBdLoR2HBn7wItFYPI7x-1bBCv7X8nyJI4Ya1bCtRcWX4lLq1WuL-nPoahEq-fl_djdppV/s1600/Jean-Le%25CC%2581on_Ge%25CC%2581ro%25CC%2582me_-_The_Christian_Martyrs%2527_Last_Prayer_-_Walters_37113.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgGzN469t7jwPmc1fBKzFjYZcW5rGMJ1SJY8sEwlaSqkyKEMTfmn3Ir9CpCWHQsPdJJzx7QdYBdLoR2HBn7wItFYPI7x-1bBCv7X8nyJI4Ya1bCtRcWX4lLq1WuL-nPoahEq-fl_djdppV/s320/Jean-Le%25CC%2581on_Ge%25CC%2581ro%25CC%2582me_-_The_Christian_Martyrs%2527_Last_Prayer_-_Walters_37113.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Making a stand for the right to follow one's conscience.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
“Acton,” said Tonsor, “was a Liberal
in the most original and meaningful sense of the term: that of upholding the
individual’s right to follow his conscience. A Liberal in Acton’s mold believes
that the claims of conscience are superior to those of the state. This
philosophical principle is derived from our Judeo-Christian heritage and it informs the
Liberal’s politics. Political rights, he taught, proceed directly from
religious duties, and these are the true basis of Liberalism.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[8]</span> Hardly a liberal today professes it anymore, at least not in the U.S. where all
the liberals have become statists, but in Victorian England it was a commonplace,
a Whig’s article of faith. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“In addition to his intellectual
significance, Acton was one of the most fascinating human beings of the last
century. As one of his biographers, Gertrude Himmelfarb observed, he was an
anomaly in many worlds – a Catholic in poor standing with the hierarchy, a
politician without portfolio, an historian who didn’t write books, and for most
of his adult life a scholar without academic rank.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[9]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I took note that Tonsor used the
old-fashioned “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">an</i> historian.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“Like every giant he aroused the envy
of lesser men who were eager to pick the meat off his ribs. Nevertheless, he
remains a colossus of intellectual history and cultural criticism. It’s been
said of Acton that he knew everyone worth knowing and read everything worth
reading.[10] Even
those who suffered harsh treatment at his hands climbed atop his shoulders to declare
his genius.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[11]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“I<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">ntellectual achievement <i>and</i> s</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">ocial skills</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">,” I offered. “A rare combination in
the academy.”</span><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“Nothing illustrates your point
better,” said Tonsor, “than his conversational style. At the dinner table Acton
could speak with his children in English, with his wife in German, with his sister-in-law
in French, and with his mother-in-law in Italian.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[12]</span> He was said to possess the most powerful memory of his generation. A friend
reported that he could retain two octavos a day.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[13]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Two what? I asked myself. Since we
weren’t speaking in person Tonsor couldn’t see me stretch the phone cord to the
corner of the kitchen to grab my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American
Heritage</i> dictionary and look up “octavo.” It means 16 pages. I had the
feeling that urgent searches were going to be the new normal for the next few
years at Michigan.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Eager to say something meaningful,
I ventured that I wanted to find out what led up to Acton’s profound remark
that “Power corrupts –”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
Before I could finish Tonsor
interrupted. “Let’s get the quotation right, Mr. Whitney. What Acton said to
Mandell Creighton was, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.’<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[14]</span> How
right the pessimistic Acton was. Our weary old world has furnished innumerable
examples of corruption, especially since Machiavelli released government from
the restraint of law.[<span style="font-family: "cambria";">15]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Acton always looked for the cloven hoof.<br />
Pope Sylvester II and the Devil.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
“Acton always looked for the cloven hoof. History, he said, is the disclosure of guilt and
shame.<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[16] </span>Because he had searched out the dark corners of man’s past, nothing surprised
him. It was said that speaking with Acton was the nearest one could approach
divine omniscience.<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[17]</span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> Tonsor expressed mirth at this aper</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">ç</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">u, and I heard him laugh in little gusts
and voiceless puffs.</span><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
After a moment Tonsor interrupted
the pause. “Small talk eludes me, Mr. Whitney. I loathe chitchat. What is more,
too many academics drown their students in a deluge of verbiage and cant. But I
hope you will come to visit regularly during office hours. As I said at the
beginning of this phone call, conversation is one of the most important aspects
of education. To hone one mind against the gritty stone of another is the
surest path to intellectual excellence.”<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[18]</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Thus the phone call ended and the
teaching began. I found this unusual first conversation with my “prickly”
advisor gritty enough. Already we were talking about a great nineteenth-century
historian, the first principles of a European Liberal, and what it all meant to
an American conservative. Scarcely did I realize how this brief sketch of Lord
Acton would parallel much of what I would learn about Tonsor himself – a difficult
man who was a contradiction to his age. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2jPmXpbpwr0O8-7gqswg-fnMDnklH8FANJLZH1_wEwCeVu1pJITvBYdRrYsbJe82fnRyTvNqEfzTbQYn2QqTfyiM04Cqiyto32rnZA4j10y_OFXSGN9nD8A8x4UfcY7nb5Sw0lFveFEIQ/s1600/Stephen-Tonsor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2jPmXpbpwr0O8-7gqswg-fnMDnklH8FANJLZH1_wEwCeVu1pJITvBYdRrYsbJe82fnRyTvNqEfzTbQYn2QqTfyiM04Cqiyto32rnZA4j10y_OFXSGN9nD8A8x4UfcY7nb5Sw0lFveFEIQ/s400/Stephen-Tonsor.jpg" width="307" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stephen J. Tonsor about the time he was first studying Lord Acton.</td></tr>
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<br />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[1]</span> Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, June 16, 1980, pp. 2-3; letter in GW's possession courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, Introduction, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Legacy of an Education</i>, by James C. Holland (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton
Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Occasional Paper no. 11,
1997); Kindle edition, loc. 34.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[3]</span> For the reference to Swain’s admiration for Acton, see Stephen J. Tonsor,
“Joseph Ward Swain,” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Equality,
Decadence, and Modernity</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 313:
“Swain was a devotee of Lord Acton.”<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[4]</span> The story is also told in Lloyd Kramer, lecture 13, “Hegelianism and the Young Marx," in <i>European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century</i> (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2001).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[5]</span> Gertrude Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton: A Study
in Conscience and Politics</i> (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study
of Religion and Liberty); Kindle edition, Ch. 1, loc. 170. Himmelfarb's book was particularly helpful in reconstructing Tonsor's and my first conversations on Lord Acton.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[6]</span> A.
Walter James, “John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1<sup>st</sup> Baron Acton,”
Encyclopedia Britannica Online, accessed August 26, 2016.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[7]</span> This paraphrase of Acton is a slight modification of the direct quotation in James, “Acton,”
Encyclopedia Britannica Online, accessed August 26, 2016.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[8]</span> This paraphrase of Acton is a slight modification of the direct quotation in James, “Acton,”
Encyclopedia Britannica Online, accessed August 26, 2016.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[9]</span> Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 8, loc.
3922.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[10]</span> Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 1, loc.
104 <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[11]</span> Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 8, loc.
3932.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[12]</span> Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 1, loc.
114.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[13]</span> Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 1, loc.
104. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn13" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[14]</span> Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Ch. 9, loc. 4880.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn14" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[15]</span> Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 8, loc.
4005.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn15" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[16]</span> Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Acton</i>, Ch. 8, loc.
4138.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div id="ftn16" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[17]</span> Andrew Dickson White, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Autobiography</i>,
vol. 2, p. 412; quoted by Himmelfarb, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord
Acton</i>, Ch. 8, loc. 3932.</div>
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<div id="ftn17" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-family: "cambria";">[18]</span> Tonsor, Introduction, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Legacy</i>, by James C. Holland, loc. 34.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
<br />
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS SERIES ON STEPHEN J. TONSOR:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
If you’ve not had a chance yet, please make sure you check out Gleaves Whitney’s series of essays, reminiscences, and vignettes regarding his graduate school advisor, Stephen Tonsor.</div>
<div style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Though more or less forgotten now (as so many of the greats of the last century have been), Tonsor once stood rather high within conservative thought.</div>
<div style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Whitney’s relationship with his mentor was not always calm, but it was certainly always sharp. He is now on a long and fascinating journey exploring exactly what that relationship meant and what his advisor signified to him and to the republic.</div>
<div style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Don’t miss this excellent series Whitney is writing. There’s nothing he does that is not critically important, but, even by his always exacting standards, Whitney is producing some thing innovative, artistic, and moving.</div>
<div style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
~Bradley Birzer, professor of history, Hillsdale College; on his Stormfields blog, September 15, 2016</div>
<div style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Gleaves, your reflections on Tonsor are what you were meant to write, I think. They are quite beautiful, sometimes disturbing, always interesting.</div>
<div style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
~John Willson, professor emeritus, Hillsdale College; in a Facebook post to GW, October 24, 2016.</div>
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I listened to a podcast where you spoke about Tonsor. I liked his fierce intellect before, but now I'm even more intrigued by his life and career.</div>
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~Seth Bartee; Ph.D. in intellectual history, Virginia Tech; in a Facebook message to GW, November 16, 2016.</div>
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Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-46465005034902255682017-07-31T13:57:00.000-07:002017-08-07T19:48:31.497-07:00Tonsor: Introduction: Prologue and first encounter<div>
<i><span style="font-size: normal;">At the start of a new academic year, I am inaugurating this series on the most critical phase of my education as a historian.</span><span style="font-size: normal;"> Three decades ago I began graduate school in the history department at the University of Michigan. It turned out to be intellectual boot camp. This and subsequent posts are creative reconstructions of the many fascinating conversations I had with my graduate advisor. They are reimagined from my notes, his public essays and private letters, the articles and books that we read together, and interviews with people who knew him. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to learn a lot from Stephen Tonsor. He had a fierce intellect. Under his influence I learned not only about history, not only about his civilizational mission to confront modernity, but also about myself.</span></i><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>I.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Long's Peak from a meadow below Twin Sisters.</td></tr>
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The old family cabin where I was spending the weekend was at an elevation of 10,000 feet. It stood astride a spur of the Storm Pass Trail that led hikers into Rocky Mountain National Park. I timed my stay to occur in late September because, at that time of year, Colorado delivers spectacular autumn days. Over the Continental Divide the sky was the fathomless blue of gothic stained glass. The aspen trees had turned into a shimmering luminescence, as though each were made of cascading yellow diamonds. In my 360-degree view from the long slab of granite in front of the cabin, I had a panoramic view of Long's Peak, Twin Sisters, and Estes Cone -- all cloudless and serene. Surely this day, September 27, 1986, I was witness to earth's greatest crescendo of yellow and blue.</div>
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That morning I set out on a short hike to a meadow frequented by elk. After taking some photographs of a fine bull, I returned to the cabin and split lodgepole pine logs into firewood to help my relatives prepare for the coming winter. The languid afternoon hours were cut short when the sun dropped behind the granite wall of Long's Peak, and the rapid cooling hastened my retreat inside to build up the fire I had banked that morning. My back muscles ached from swinging the axe, but my mind felt invigorated by the physical work.<br />
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<b>II.</b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aspen trees in late September</td></tr>
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This particular Saturday evening was dedicated to something I had planned all week. Sitting by the fire, I took out the journals I'd thrown into my backpack -- old copies of <i>Modern Age</i> and <i>Intercollegiate Review</i> that a former English professor, Loy O. Banks, had given me. In 1984-1985, I had completed my Fulbright year in West Germany and had spent a summer in Oxford. Now it was time to consider graduate school in earnest. Was a historian out there who would be a good fit?</div>
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As the evening closed in, I felt the disconnect between the mountains and the monographs -- a gap between the enchantment of the setting and the chore of the articles. Was I really in the mood to focus on the task at hand? But as I slowly turned the pages and scanned for "great ideas," I was not disappointed. A number of writers seemed to embrace not just a scholarly but a civilizational mission. One passage in particular resonated. It was from 1958: </div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The historian must look beyond facts to meaning, purpose, and direction. Meaning, purpose, and direction -- they are not apt to emerge in the parochial study of one culture, one civilization, or one religious tradition. It is only when the historian makes the comparative method the tool of his studies that he can move beyond the provinciality of national, class, and religious prejudice. The meaning of Western civilization emerges only when it is confronted by another civilization. It is in these dramatic historical confrontations that the meaning of culture, civilization, and religion emerges. It is in these confrontations, too, that cultures and civilizations are enriched and expanded. It is through this process that every period of crisis is a period of hope, that the periods of cultural dissolution can be, and frequently are, periods of great innovation and harbingers of a new cultural era. We have been grievously and justly broken, but if such eyes as mine are worthy to foresee the divine meaning, the divine purpose, then we have been broken only to be made one.</blockquote>
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I read the passage a second time. My thought became suspended in the rarified atmosphere of a civilizational as well as a continental divide. The author was comfortable with contrast, paradox, and tension. Turning back to the top of the essay, I was keen to know who wrote this historical manifesto. His name was Stephen Tonsor.[1] When the piece was published, almost three decades earlier, Tonsor was a 34-year-old instructor at the University of Michigan. He described the transcendent purpose of civilization as ultimately a quest for truth, goodness, beauty, even love -- the qualities that most dignified and humanized <i>Homo viator</i>, man the pilgrim. Here was a historian who wrote with the conviction that a civilization, although existing in time, was actually the vestibule of eternity.<br />
<br />
With Tonsor's essay in my hands, my mind strained to recall what I had written about truth, goodness, beauty, and love on a sheet of paper that I kept folded in my collection of Great Books back in Fort Collins. It had been prompted by a class in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks that I had taken with Dr. Jan Benson:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Truth is about being. It is knowing what really is.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Goodness is about doing. It is acting in a way that helps others and yourself thrive.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Beauty is about attracting. It is moving irresistibly toward good things. Think of how we gaze at a sunrise. Beauty thus serves to feed the soul as hunger serves to feed the body.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Love is about connecting. It is uniting our soul with what is true, good, and beautiful.</i></blockquote>
As the fire burned down and my energy waned, I picked up the journals at my feet. The photocopy of a manuscript had slipped out of one of them. Curious, I picked it up and saw that there was no author's name on the front page. But the title, "Conservative Pluralism," led me to a surprising and serendipitous find: </div>
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"The summer of 1953 was an exciting summer. My wife and I and our two small children spent that summer, as we had spent the previous two summers, atop a 10,000 foot peak in the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho as employees of the Forest Service watching for forest fires. One cannot imagine isolation much more complete. And yet, in that isolation, we heard the echoes of the great events transpiring in the world below the serene altitude we inhabited....</blockquote>
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"One day that summer I hiked four miles and four thousand feet down to the road to meet the ranger and pick up a month's accumulation of mail. My mentor, Joseph Ward Swain, a distinguished historian of antiquity, had clipped various articles and reviews which he thought might be of interest to me and had sent them on. Among those clippings and articles was a review which had appeared in the Sunday <i>New York Times Book Review</i> of May 17, 1953, of a book by a young historian at Michigan State University, Russell Kirk."[2] </blockquote>
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This manuscript, whose opening scene was a fire lookout on Ruffneck Peak, was written by Stephen Tonsor. Not just any manuscript but this manuscript fell to the floor at my feet. Was it coincidence? Fate? Providence? I could not know what it meant at the time. Yet September 27, 1986, would be my first encounter with the mind of Stephen Tonsor. And these two men, Stephen Tonsor and Russell Kirk, would soon cross my path and I would walk with them for a crowded hour. Indeed, they and the tension between them would be decisive in my intellectual formation over the next several years.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stephen Tonsor on how he discovered <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Russell Kirk --</span><br />
in the Rocky Mountains</td></tr>
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_____________________<br />
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[1] Paraphrase of a passage from Stephen Tonsor's review of Christopher Dawson's book, <i>The Dynamics of World History</i>, in "History and the God of the Second Chance," <i>Modern Age</i> (spring 1958): 200-01.<br />
[2] "Conservative Pluralism -- The Foundation and the Academy," typed manuscript. The manuscript itself is not dated, but Tonsor's letters to Henry Regnery on September 8, 1981 (p. 4) and September 25, 1981 (p. 1), referred to the lecture by title and event organizer, the "Presidents' Club," and indicated that the lecture would be delivered on September 25, 1981. Letters are courtesy of Alfred Regnery.</div>
Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-78272399628547292142016-12-13T12:09:00.000-08:002017-01-02T08:43:07.508-08:00Tonsor #n -- An Azalea Blooms in WinterOne mid-February day after class, Tonsor invited me to walk back to the house and enjoy lunch with him and Caroline. The weather was fine and he was in good spirits when we reached 1505 Morton Avenue. "It's wonderful to see the sun shining through our south windows again. Earlier this morning it was so very cold and gloomy." Pointing to a table in front of the large living room window, he drew my attention to an unexpected sight: "Look at that azalea. Last Saturday it was in bud, and now it has bloomed. I like the way the sun is pouring through its purple splendor. The Germans would call that color <i>rosarot</i>."[1]<br />
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"Yes, <i>rosarot</i>," I said, impressed by his poetic expression and by the precision of his German. I added, "I grew up in that azalea's natural habitat -- in Houston and New Orleans. In fact, every March Houston hosts the Azalea Trail through the River Oaks neighborhood. It's one of the most pleasant ways to explore the city."<br />
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Tonsor did not respond, but his tenderness toward the azalea blossom prompted me to ask if he missed the rural life.<br />
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"Good Lord, no," he bellowed. "Growing up in southern Illinois in the 1920s and '30s, I know the rural life. It is not the pastoral scene that you people from the city think it is. The rural life can be brutal. It can be stultifying. It can cause one's mind to become slow and dull. That said, I have always liked to garden, even as a child pulling weeds for my grandmother.[2] Usually by the end of May I will have spaded and planted until I am quite pleasantly tired. If we are having a good spring with plenty of rain, then by Memorial Day there is already enough spinach, shallots, bib lettuce, and Romaine for the whole family. It is a beautiful thing -- the seeds come up fast, the plants thrive, and there is such a large quantity of salad coming in that we must use it as quickly as possible.[3] Today's bright sun is making me look very forward to spring. '<i>O Sonne! O Gl</i><span style="font-family: "cambria"; font-size: 12pt;"><i>ück, o Lust!</i>' as Goethe would say."[4]</span><br />
<br />
Caroline emerged from the kitchen with a greeting and a plate, saying, "Stephen does need his garden. I think it's therapeutic for him after the cold winter and hectic academic schedule. His spirits can get down if a long winter or rainy weather keeps him from his plot of earth."[5]<br />
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Tonsor moved a book off the dining room table and said, in a more wistful register: "I do find myself thinking back on my childhood in southern Illinois from time to time. A few years ago I was reading <i>Farmer Boy </i>by Laura Ingalls Wilder to my grandson, Alex, and we enjoyed the experience very much. It's a book about her husband's childhood on a New York farm. What a distant and strange world it was to him, and yet how familiar most of it was to me. Every once in a while I would stop and explain what was happening on the farm."[6]<br />
<br />
The azalea blossom and the talk of gardening and farming made me think of warmer months ahead. I said that I looked forward to my first Art Fair next summer, to which Tonsor protested:<br />
<br />
"Huh! For a whole week in July, Caroline and I cannot even use our city because it is taken over by that misnamed Bacchanalia! There is nothing 'fair' about it. As for the art, don't even bother trying to see it, what with the milling throngs of sweating people in the streets, more than 500,000 of them. They have the manners and sanitary habits of Italians -- or at least of Neapolitans. They leave behind mountains of stinking garbage and refuse. Worse, for three consecutive nights last summer, drunken celebrants rioted by the campus. The whole thing is sick and disgusting. But," he added with mock appreciation, "the merchants love it!"[7]<br />
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Caroline frowned: "It's not as bad as Stephen says it is. You can meet the most interesting people -- people you'd never expect to be artists -- and talk with them about their work and --"<br />
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"No, they are not interesting at all," he interrupted. "Art Fair is just a carnival for over-aged hippies with long fingernails and bad breath."<br />
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Caroline and I laughed at his rant. "I hope," she said, "that Stephen will tell us what he really thinks of Art Fair!"<br />
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Tonsor looked backed over at the azalea in the sunny front window, as though wishing to be tending his garden.<br />
_______________<br />
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[1] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, February 15, 1986, p. 1; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
[2] Bernard Tonsor interviews with GW, Jerseyville, IL, July 1, 2014; and June 26, 2015.<br />
[3] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, May 31, 1985, p. 1; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
[4] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "<i>Mailied</i>"; at URL https://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/pommeren/Gedichte/mailied.html. The line means, "O sun, O joy, O delight!"<br />
[5] Caroline Tonsor's observation of a tendency to "get down" is backed by much evidence. In letters to his close friend Henry Regnery, written in the 1980s, Tonsor frequently confessed that he was either tired, overwhelmed, anxious, or depressed (e.g., in Tonsor to Regnery, May 31, 1985, p. 4; Tonsor to Regnery, May 19, 1986, pp. 1-3; both letters in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery). The latter letter begins, "It is difficult to write a letter when one's life is engulfed in constant commotion and uncertainty.... My depression was deepened by the wet, cold weather. I cannot work in the garden and as the days pass I am becoming quite desperate." On May 18, 1985, he wrote Regnery: "... I felt disappointed that I could not get into the garden" (p. 1). On August 18, 1984, he began a recap of a list of scholarly chores with, "Most of last week I led a dog's life" (p. 2). Additionally, his oldest daughter, in a moving Veterans' Day tribute to her father, has provided sympathetic insight into his struggles stemming from the years he served in World War II's Pacific Theater and won three Bronze Medals: "He was in the [Army] Signal Corps, made the Leyte landing with MacArthur, and heard the first reports of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It changed his life, enabling a poor boy from a small farm town to attend universities, travel the world, and make use of his tremendous intelligence. It also made him wake up screaming for many years. He had to listen to the radio all night to be able to sleep. I don't really know what he did in the war, but I will always remember the man he became" [Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Facebook post, November 11, 2015]. <br />
[6] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, June 16, 1980, p. 4; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
[7] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, July 25, 1987, p. 1; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-58764847383233134252016-12-12T23:39:00.001-08:002017-09-20T05:22:50.843-07:00Tonsor #19 -- Bryn MawrAt the conclusion of the fall semester in 1987, I accepted my brother's invitation to spend the holidays with his family in New Jersey. After the feasting and festivity of Christmas Day, I wanted to do some networking on the East Coast. Since I was within an hour of the headquarters of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Bryn Mawr, I headed out for the City of Brotherly Love to visit the organization that had conferred the Richard M. Weaver Fellowship on me. I'd arranged a meeting with the man who had led ISI in some capacity for 35 years, E. Victor Milione. He had served as executive vice president and then as president of ISI from 1953-1988. We arranged to meet on Monday, December 28. As I drove into town, waves of sleet and snow were rolling eastward across the Delaware River Valley, and I thought of George Washington's treacherous crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emanuel Leutze, "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1851)</td></tr>
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I found Milione alone in a darkish office on the Main Line; the space felt more like an old-fashioned law firm than a salient for the defense of Western civilization. He was an elfish man with bright eyes and a quick intelligence, and we were able to talk for more than one hour about his philosophy at ISI and about my graduate advisor and his place in the conservative movement in America.<br />
<br />
From my opening question about the evolution of ISI, he became quite animated: "At ISI we throw ourselves into the battle of ideas. Whether it is the mission of the university, or the American experiment in ordered liberty, or the contest between faith and unbelief, or the crises of the twentieth century with its totalitarian threats and nihilistic philosophies -- we confront these challenges at the level of ideas. We must win the battle of ideas.[1]<br />
<br />
"What exacerbates the crises nowadays is the tendency to forget. What with all the glittery distractions that bombard us, we tend to forget the historic foundations that made our civilization possible. But imagine what would happen if we forgot -- I mean really forgot -- if teachers quit teaching and preachers quit preaching; if no one played Bach; if no museum exhibited Michelangelo. Why, in just one generation we'd devolve into barbarians tearing down the intricate edifice of our civilization with all its beauty and strength. So the central task of our time is what the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson called "enculturation." Our aim must be to encourage each new generation of young people to learn, better than their fathers, that our heritage must be studied, understood, nurtured, and transmitted."[2]</div>
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"Now, your graduate advisor Steve Tonsor understands how important enculturation is. He's been a great ally of ISI. I've worked with Steve for some three decades now. He is unpredictable, which makes him interesting. You never know what is going to emerge from that fierce intellect of his!"</div>
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"You're not talking about his Philadelphia Society address last year?" I asked with bemusement.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">E. Victor Milione (1924-2008)</td></tr>
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"That was a corker," Milione chuckled, "but the surprise doesn't end there. Take his view of America. Here we sit, just a few miles from Independence Hall. Steve's take on the American Revolution has the most interesting way of combining opposing ideas. On the one hand, he argues that the rebellion changed everything. Like Gordon Wood, he see our Revolution as the first major break with the pattern of rule by monarchs and hereditary nobles. They had governed according to principles derived from divine right, reason of state, and traditional and customary usage. Rejecting those principles, America's revolutionaries substituted in their stead republicanism and a rational politics based upon the self-interest of the citizenry.[3]</div>
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"On the other hand, Steve argues for the Founding's continuity with what came before. Along the lines of Russell Kirk, he maintains that by 1776 the American Revolution was already centuries old. I commend to you the essay he wrote on the American Bicentennial -- I just had occasion to reread it myself. In the piece he argues that the War of the Revolution was waged in the name of a conservative appeal to rights won and cherished -- rights that many of the American colonists believed had been usurped and violated by London. They were fighting to restore their traditional rights as Englishmen. It is difficult to believe that those articulate spokesmen of the American cause were insincere when they appealed not just to the revolutionary break from Britain, but also to the ancient, hard-won rights of free men.[4]</div>
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"In fact, I remember Steve telling me that it was precisely this <i>conservative</i> devotion to liberty which made, and still makes, the American Revolution the most <i>radical</i> political movement of the modern era.[5] How many scholars can pull off combining 'conservative' and 'radical' in the same thought?" Milione wondered, laughing.<br />
<br />
"How is life in Ann Arbor? Last I heard, there were not many conservatives in that particular grove of academe."<br />
<br />
"It's been intense, like intellectual boot camp. Maybe I'm lucky, but the professors I have at Michigan are really good. A few graduate students from the East Coast confess they haven't had much contact with conservatives in higher ed. I guess for them, talking to Tonsor is like a visit to the circus, where they can gather around the biological rarity at the freak show. I get the feeling that he is avoided by the more liberal students. They don't enroll in his classes."<br />
<br />
"What a shame -- the loss is theirs. We conservatives who sit around the fireplace, sipping Scotch and smoking pipes and talking about Russell Kirk, are characters, yes, but extremists, no. Steve once told me about the time the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, went to the University of Michigan to give a campaign speech. It was when he ran as a write-in candidate for president in 1964. Rockwell began by saying that everywhere he spoke, fights broke out. I don't think the cultural conservatives could be accused of inciting any riots! Our weapons of choice are ideas." </div>
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"Yes -- Professor Tonsor certainly holds his own. When challenged, he gives as good as he gets. Since arriving in Ann Arbor, I've been slowly navigating his view of conservatism, doing frequent soundings as I go. He defies stereotypes, but his political philosophy seems to fit best in the 'liberal conservative' tradition that Russell Kirk writes about in <i>The Conservative Mind </i>-- especially the section of the book that is devoted to Cooper and Tocqueville and that tips its hat to Burke and Acton.[6] What confused me at first is that this term, 'liberal conservative,' is not one that I've encountered outside of Kirk or outside of my conversations with Professor Tonsor.[7] He outright told me that the 'liberal conservatives' are his kind of people.[8] It seems that his vision of conservatism differs from that of the traditionalist wing in that he more readily accepts, rather than rejects, the tension between the two sources of authority in Western civilization -- classical Christendom and the modern Enlightenment. You can see it in the way he grafts what is conservative in the American <i>Founding</i> to what is liberal in the American <i>Revolution</i>. It's really quite brilliant the way he pulls the opposing ideas together."</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoVSLjFJWmulRnugXH8hoi8oBHYb8-x6-8MeNhlnXGj1qexAHLQnLKlWeYNfMnhBgKfFZcZrm0Yvhu36k8EWjlaPlyRUEHIy2uEWr_r6oA72kZpuSNCiZMEVaX-pVJ7CS3wDscBfT-wWDC/s1600/Meyer_Frank.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoVSLjFJWmulRnugXH8hoi8oBHYb8-x6-8MeNhlnXGj1qexAHLQnLKlWeYNfMnhBgKfFZcZrm0Yvhu36k8EWjlaPlyRUEHIy2uEWr_r6oA72kZpuSNCiZMEVaX-pVJ7CS3wDscBfT-wWDC/s320/Meyer_Frank.jpg" width="258" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">SJT's mentor in political philosophy, Frank Meyer</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"And you can bet Steve is brilliant enough to pull it off," Milione said. "I see Steve as a fusionist influenced by the work of his late mentor, Frank Meyer.[9] About the time Steve was becoming a self-conscious conservative, around 1955 or 1960, the house that conservatism built was in disarray. There were cracks that went right through the middle of the foundation. Off in one wing were the libertarians -- Nock, Hayek, Chodorov -- who championed freedom as the highest good, and along with it minimal government and the sanctity of the individual. Off in another wing were the traditionalists led by Kirk, Weaver, and Nisbet, men who championed the need for transcendent order, especially in the revolutionary modern age when so much was in flux anthropologically, philosophically, ethically, and spiritually.[10]</div>
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"Frank had a vision. He wanted to pull these two factious wings of the conservative house into a well-integrated family. He made the case that freedom needs order if it is not to devolve into anarchism or libertinism, and that order needs freedom if it's not to devolve into authoritarianism or antiquarianism. Frank saw America's founders as the original fusionists because they believed in the need to leaven a manly freedom with an organic moral order. While our nation's founding documents are relatively silent on the subject of virtue -- the notable exception being the Northwest Ordinance with its Article Three -- they do present freedom as the ultimate <i>political</i> goal. But freedom needs a complement -- the helpmates of religion, morality, and knowledge -- as that same article declares. Our founders taught that citizens must use their freedom to choose virtue in the public square. And because the exercise of virtue requires man's free will, it should not be compelled by government or by force. Indeed, by definition virtue cannot be compelled because, obviously...."[11] Milione looked at me intently.</div>
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"Yes," I jumped in. "There is a passage in <i>Mere Christianity</i> in which C. S. Lewis writes: "If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give us humans free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."[12]</div>
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"Lewis nailed it!" Milione said with enthusiasm: "Unfortunately, Frank didn't succeed in renovating the house that conservatism built. He had a pugilistic personality and got in fights with Russell Kirk and other leaders in the movement. We conservatives, like any big sprawling family, were as fractious at the end of his life as we were when he started his fusionist project. Nevertheless, Steve's political philosophy is heavily indebted to Frank. I think Frank's fusionism is a good way to understand Steve as a 'liberal conservative,' since the former is preoccupied with political freedom and the latter is concerned with the organic moral order. They are a necessary unity in any free society."</div>
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"It's courageous of him to use the word 'liberal' in his self-description since the word has become a term of opprobrium," I said. "But I think the reactionary in him wants to reclaim the old idea of liberal, Lord Acton's idea of liberal. And it explains why Professor Tonsor quotes Walt Whitman's lines in "Song of Myself" where he speaks of containing multitudes and even celebrates the fact that he contradicts himself.[13] He is radically open to every good experience or tradition that shapes the character of a man and a civilization. Professor Tonsor is quite insistent that the conservative must discern the inevitable tensions that arise among powerful ideas. It's a messy process; it doesn't allow for the tidiness of the ideologue's design. The civilizational mission of the "liberal conservative" is in the very label, with its tension. It is to work for the organic accommodation of opposites -- freedom and virtue, liberty and order, natural aristocracy and equality, the individual and community, the profit motive in the free marketplace and those values that cannot be commodified. I see Professor Tonsor as the champion of a method of political philosophy and historical interpretation that one might call the hermeneutic of accommodating opposites. He comes the closest to saying as much in his essay on "The Conservative Search for Identity."[14]</div>
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"Yes, that's one of Steve's seminal essays. As I recall, Frank commissioned that essay in a 1964 collection, <i>What Is Conservatism?</i>[15] That's where Steve grapples with paradox, tension, and opposites, just as Meyer did. And to bring it back to this place, Philadelphia: For as much as he is a champion of order, Steve never loses sight of the freedom at the center of the American experiment. By putting liberty at the center of the American political order, the American revolutionaries served notice that they would not be distracted or deflected from its pursuit by other political, social, and economic objectives. Whatever the merits of equality or social justice, ethnicity or nationality, established religion or high culture -- if any of those pursuits interfered with liberty, or deflected the citizenry from the pursuit of liberty, they were eventually rejected. As a result, over the past two centuries, the world has witnessed the way in which liberty has permeated and revolutionized every aspect of American society. From the way in which we greet strangers to the way in which we pray, the most common and ordinary activities of our daily lives have been transformed by an ever greater participation by free men and an appeal to the sanction of their opinion.[16]</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVPV_C2BVi4heUvkUrB_Zd08AREE8RIfj8fZUI0Rk0dGtrblQUleeMo3wUPdaRsE9EwMgYzHyyWBlkWk9Ahg1uwqE2ecClM3AShZeAdOgQozKrJHUh3eJzY-9r6Xw4EqgDTdtsKBAOJxmq/s1600/page_1_thumb_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVPV_C2BVi4heUvkUrB_Zd08AREE8RIfj8fZUI0Rk0dGtrblQUleeMo3wUPdaRsE9EwMgYzHyyWBlkWk9Ahg1uwqE2ecClM3AShZeAdOgQozKrJHUh3eJzY-9r6Xw4EqgDTdtsKBAOJxmq/s320/page_1_thumb_large.jpg" width="197" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Frank S. Meyer's most read essays</td></tr>
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"Especially modern notions of the state have changed as a result of the American experiment. Under the impetus of the idea of liberty, the state stood on the sidelines of the public arena and left the game to be played by individual men, voluntary associations, and corporate groups. Most Americans have believed that what the state necessarily does poorly, individuals and voluntary associations can do better. Ideally, the supreme achievement of revolutionary liberty is 'the withering away of the state.'[17] That was the idea that launched Ronald Reagan on the road to the White House," Milione added, laughing with irony. "I think we will need a succession of Reagans if we are ever to see <i>that</i> happen."<br />
<br />
As my visit with Milione wrapped up, he did something as gracious as it was unexpected. He led me to a room with stacks of books that ISI had either published or carried under its banner. "It's Christmas. Why don't you take some books back to Ann Arbor?"<br />
<br />
He gave me a largish box and told me to fill it with the books I needed for my library. Due to Vic Milione's kindness, I got to celebrate a second Christmas in a place called Bryn Mawr.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
Late in the afternoon, as I was leaving Philadelphia and approaching the Delaware River, the snow and sleet stopped. I pulled into a filling station to warm myself up with hot chocolate. As I stood waiting for the drink to cool, I kept feeling the pull of a nearby phone booth. There was a question I had to ask....<br />
<br />
"Professor Tonsor, I am just leaving Philadelphia after having a great visit with Vic Milione, who sends his regards. I have just one question. I think I know the answer but I still have to ask it. You and I have talked about the West's 'inner dialogue' that informs your liberal conservative worldview. It's the dialogue between its two sources of authority -- classical Christendom in which our faith and morals are rooted, and the modern Enlightenment in which our science and our secular peace in a pluralistic world are rooted, preeminently in America. When these two sources of authority clash and cannot be reconciled, you stand with...."<br />
<br />
That's the call I wanted to make and the question I wanted to ask. But I hesitated. And then the moment passed, and I was back in the car crossing the Delaware. On the drive back through the bare ruined choirs of the Jersey countryside, I hardly noticed the scenery.</div>
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_______________________</div>
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<div>
[1] T. Kenneth Cribb, "William F. Buckley Jr. and E. Victor Milione," <i>Intercollegiate Review</i> (fall 2008); at URL <a href="https://home.isi.org/william-f-buckley-jr-and-e-victor-milione">https://home.isi.org/william-f-buckley-jr-and-e-victor-milione</a>.<br />
[2] Cribb, "Buckley and Milione," <i>Intercollegiate Review</i>; at URL <a href="https://home.isi.org/william-f-buckley-jr-and-e-victor-milione">https://home.isi.org/william-f-buckley-jr-and-e-victor-milione</a>.<br />
[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, Introduction, <i>America's Continuing Revolution: An Act of Conservation</i>, ed. Stephen J. Tonsor (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975), p. ix. Tonsor was credited by the president of AEI, William Baroody, with "conceiving and guiding the project ... a crucial factor in its success."</div>
<div>
[4] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>America's Continuing Revolution</i>, p. ix.</div>
<div>
[5] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>America's Continuing Revolution</i>, p. ix.</div>
<div>
[6] Russell Kirk, <i>The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot</i>, 7th ed. (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1985), pp. 185-224.<br />
[7] Confirming my hunch that the term, "liberal conservative," is rarely used are two volumes that thoroughly assess the postwar conservative movement in America. One is the great compendium of the movement, <i>American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia</i>, eds. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006); and George H. Nash, <i>The Conservative Intellectual Movement in American since 1945</i> (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008). Neither has an entry or section devoted to the term, "liberal conservatism." I believe Tonsor's use of the term was influenced by his first encounter of it in 1953, when he was exposed to Kirk's <i>The Conservative Mind</i>.</div>
<div>
[8] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
[9] SOURCE?<br />
[10] Various articles in <i>American Conservatism</i> flesh out the line of argument. See, e.g., "Milione, E. Victor" (by Lee Edwards); "Meyer, Frank S." (by Kevin Smant); "Fusionism" (by E. C. Pasour Jr.); "Libertarianism" (by David Boaz); and "Traditionalism" (by Mark C. Henrie).</div>
<div>
[11] Smant, "Meyer, Frank S.," <i>American Conservatism</i>, p. 571.</div>
<div>
[12] C. S. Lewis, "The Shocking Alternative," <i>Mere Christianity</i>. Thanks to Darrin Moore for this reminder.</div>
<div>
[13] Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," quoted by Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Conservatives Search for Identity," <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity</i>, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 247.</div>
<div>
[14] Tonsor, "Conservative Search for Identity," <i>Equality</i>, pp. 247-49.<br />
[15] There are two editions. Stephen J. Tonsor, "The Conservative Search for Identity," <i>What is Conservatism</i>, ed. Frank Meyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964); republished (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2015), pp. 161-84.</div>
<div>
[16] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>America's Continuing Revolution</i>, pp. ix-x.</div>
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[17] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>America's Continuing Revolution</i>, p. x.</div>
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Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-86989798701798998492016-11-16T14:11:00.000-08:002017-01-04T07:43:07.515-08:00Tonsor #18 -- Marx and Marxism<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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As the November gloom set in over Ann Arbor, as the days grew shorter, as low clouds were drawn across the sky like a gray wool curtain, I found it necessary to fight a hibernation instinct I didn't know I had. I was not psychologically prepared for the onset of bleak days because, for the prior fifteen years, I had lived along the Colorado Front Range where the late fall and winter are reliably sunny.<br />
<br />
Adding to the gloom of the autumn was the persistent cough I'd developed after Halloween. It was diagnosed by one of the U of M doctors as adult-onset asthma. Michigan's climate, combined with the stress of grad school, was taking a toll.<br />
<br />
Shortly after Thanksgiving I made the trek to Tonsor's office, wondering how Michiganders survived such dark weather and short days. "I feel as if I'm in internal exile," I told him, and to my surprise he laughed. Raising my arms as if to plead to the gods, I asked, "When will these dark clouds go away?"<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNS-d50SV83s5irAiKZzCOLJHH8ESvk4wi4g21Od2m4QnLXwttxzc-lCVzSA2cJ5GDIhwueSfw4cZoTWFtlSzbWRDDq7jL_bQjL_m8NI_ypCXTNV-q7HATxQaw_LOf8de-vEYR9j8xZy9b/s1600/4248124-fog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNS-d50SV83s5irAiKZzCOLJHH8ESvk4wi4g21Od2m4QnLXwttxzc-lCVzSA2cJ5GDIhwueSfw4cZoTWFtlSzbWRDDq7jL_bQjL_m8NI_ypCXTNV-q7HATxQaw_LOf8de-vEYR9j8xZy9b/s320/4248124-fog.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The "bare ruined choirs" of mid November</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Tonsor reached for a book at the same time that he began quoting lines of verse:<br />
<br />
"That time of year thou mayst ... behold<br />
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang<br />
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,<br />
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."<br />
<br />
I had taken enough English literature as an undergraduate to recognize Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs," but I could not locate the lines. Seeing that my memory was flailing, Tonsor opened a tome and said, "Sonnet 73." Handing me the open book, he added, "Or perhaps it is the resignation in Rilke's 'Autumn Day' that better captures the mood: <i>Herr: es ist Zeit.... / Legt deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenurhen....</i> [Lord, it is time ... to shroud our sundials in shadows....][1] In any case, Mr. Whitney, the clouds will keep you indoors, reading your books. Think of how much more history you will learn at Michigan than at Berkeley or Boulder!<br />
<br />
"But for your question about the cloud cover, I must introduce you to a former student of mine, Tony Sullivan. He works at the Earhart Foundation and he is an avid weather watcher. Tony will tell you about the jet stream moving south out of Canada this time of year, steering everything from Alberta clippers to Panhandle hooks through our region like roaring freight trains. Even when no front is present, the cool westerlies that flow over Lake Michigan pick up moisture and feeds the clouds that cover the Lower Peninsula. The gloom is reinforced by moisture flowing down from Hudson Bay this time of year. But -- when Hudson Bay freezes over in December, and parts of Lake Michigan freeze over in February and March, we will actually get more sunny days because the surface ice doesn't conduce to cloud formation. That's why it's cloudier now, but will be sunnier later in the winter. I assure you: You will learn the patience of Job and get through these months."<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg12lklSAy7X0vZFiXbujzAIYO2Pka43tk24IUSzPzokRj1f96Q1YzndiCGE1LcERwDP1Nvv_5bOdoCmAasOzKhkx9Yszw13Fp3it_ada5yqNVGFwi66cXEhDzbzYfz0qcYUuTkOrtFSgNh/s1600/pen3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg12lklSAy7X0vZFiXbujzAIYO2Pka43tk24IUSzPzokRj1f96Q1YzndiCGE1LcERwDP1Nvv_5bOdoCmAasOzKhkx9Yszw13Fp3it_ada5yqNVGFwi66cXEhDzbzYfz0qcYUuTkOrtFSgNh/s400/pen3.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Huron River in the late fall</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
As a former geography major, I very much appreciated that my graduate advisor could talk about Michigan's weather and climate. He knew and loved nature just as I did. It was a point of connection outside of the books and course of study.<br />
<br />
Cloud cover aside, on this day I was looking forward
to Tonsor’s lecture on Marxism. Not only would it be enlightening, but I
thought it might give me insights to push against the cultural
Marxism then regnant in grad school. Not that the Marxists in our department felt smug. Somebody had posted an apocryphal Antonio Gramsci quotation on the
bulletin board outside the main office:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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“The old world is
dying and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.” ~Antonio Gramsci<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Later another bloke came along, inserted a caret, and wrote "Reagan" next to "monsters." Yawn.<br />
<br /></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">U of M's <a href="https://ssd.umich.edu/article/disability-law-setting-precedent-authors-guild-vs">Angell Hall</a> across State Street</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
By 1987 Marxist proclamations of proletarian triumph at the end of
history became the butt of jokes. That catchy line -- “The last capitalist we hang will be the one who sold us the rope” -- just didn't sound clever anymore. Ever
since President Reagan had the temerity to speak of the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire
that was destined for the ash heap of history, Marxists had been playing defense. Reagan, cheerfully playing offense, poked fun at the
last remaining Marxists who were hunkered down on American campuses. It's why they hated him so. "How do you tell a Communist?" the Gipper joked. "Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. How do you tell an ex-Communist? It's someone who <i>understands</i> Marx and Lenin."<br />
<br />
I embraced Reagan's determination to defeat Soviet communism. In 1984-'85, I had won a Fulbright scholarship to then-West Germany, and had traveled to Berlin/East Berlin with many questions about Soviet communism. The experience at Checkpoint Charlie and my walks along the River Spree, where I saw crosses of all the Germans who were murdered trying to flee the oppression of East Germany, seared me. I was openly anti-communist, which drew me to the like-minded Stephen Tonsor. But our shared conviction would be the source of a brewing battle royal in grad school.</div>
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I knew from our talks that Tonsor was feeling vindicated by the exhaustion of Marxist
theory and practice. His insights into Marx and Marxism generated some of his best content
as a historian and some of his finest rhetoric as a teacher. From my notes and revisions, the following are the highlights of his lecture to our class.<o:p></o:p></div>
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From Tonsor the intellectual historian and biographer:<br />
<br />
“Let’s get one thing out of the way at
the outset. Both Marxism and capitalism are dedicated to the revolutionary
transformation of society.[2] No
other economic system more efficiently satisfies man’s material wants than
capitalism. If a society wants pornography, the free market will deliver it
with greater efficiency and in greater quantity than any other system. So Marx
was correct in discerning the revolutionary forces unleashed by capitalism. It has
transformed the world and it has displaced traditional society and its institutions.
One need not be a dialectical materialist in order to understand the scope and
the meaning of the changes; nor need one believe that all historical changes
result from changes in the ‘mode of production’ in order to agree with and
appreciate the insight of Marx.”[3]<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQfOalGNXh8SrbumqMuzucVBvGA5qpSLuxucriZxz8xKmrr80oSBB-i_c-8uFIVoJ4us6G8Tkh9oqeR4FI-WTxjRfn30HHtZdJXbX1U0x75svyYhS0MOoq9H6EpqqqqwXARf3wqrcjeZZF/s1600/Camille_Pissarro_-_The_Factory_at_Pontoise_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQfOalGNXh8SrbumqMuzucVBvGA5qpSLuxucriZxz8xKmrr80oSBB-i_c-8uFIVoJ4us6G8Tkh9oqeR4FI-WTxjRfn30HHtZdJXbX1U0x75svyYhS0MOoq9H6EpqqqqwXARf3wqrcjeZZF/s320/Camille_Pissarro_-_The_Factory_at_Pontoise_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Camille Pissarro, "The Factory at Pontoise" (1873)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
“To understand the modern age, you have to understand the
profound impact the Industrial Revolution had on European society. The image of
the factory tended to replace all other images of community.[4] In
a significant sense, Marx was furnishing Europeans with a moral critique of the
Industrial Revolution. He was hardly alone. Every -ism was offering some moral
critique of the Industrial Revolution. Anarchism, liberalism,
nationalism, progressivism, socialism, communism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism,
fascism, Nazism – each decried the breakdown of community in the shadow of the
factory; each offered a blueprint for how to put community back together; and
each tried to answer the question, Who should be in that community?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Both Marx and Engels were under thirty when they wrote the <i>Communist Manifesto</i>, a document whose
revolutionary rhetoric embodied nearly every intellectual current of the age. True
to the theory of its authors that there is an unbreakable link between theory
and practice, the <i>Manifesto</i> not only
reflected history but made it. In the 140 years since its publication, it has
become one of the central documents of our times, inspiring faith, dedication,
contempt, and hostility in nearly equal amounts. To understand the <i>Manifesto</i> is to understand what most of
the shrill and discordant debates, civil wars, and ideological conflicts have been about since.”[5]<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrtIzVdh87v3BcdhOkcqxbrBNeHqNqILPsIZRjF1EdanJ47FuxVV4EGc6CsJE9pAfg4Ea7cYdRe0b1rUReduiJFrp8CEkOQTTRh6mExE2aj1PDHOCaAx9KM267vcga2LzbVMC5QRb8LX3O/s1600/Karl_Marx.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrtIzVdh87v3BcdhOkcqxbrBNeHqNqILPsIZRjF1EdanJ47FuxVV4EGc6CsJE9pAfg4Ea7cYdRe0b1rUReduiJFrp8CEkOQTTRh6mExE2aj1PDHOCaAx9KM267vcga2LzbVMC5QRb8LX3O/s320/Karl_Marx.jpg" width="272" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Karl Marx (1818-1883)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
“There can be no denying that Karl Marx was a genius. But
like most geniuses, he had a complex and contradictory personality. Throughout
his life he saw himself as Prometheus chained to a rock by an angry Zeus. His
abiding personal struggle was to break out of his chains and attain absolute
freedom. This Promethean image also explains his bohemian temperament and why he
found it difficult to live by the rules of conventional society and morality.
It is no surprise that he became a revolutionary. He was descended from rabbis
on both sides of his family, and it has been observed that there must have been
a close connection between the Old Testament prophets’ call for justice –
Judaism’s apocalyptic and chiliastic tradition – and Marx’s secular vision of a
perfected society that comes through a revolutionary ‘day of the Lord.’”[6]</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Karl Marx was unwilling to play second fiddle in any
orchestra. He quarreled with men as much as he quarreled with the gods and the
rulers of society. He could not bear contradiction or defiance – it evoked vituperative
hatred – and the secret of Engel’s long friendship with Marx lay in the younger
man’s willingness to play a totally subservient role.”[7]<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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“As happens to many strong-willed men, Marx would be
frustrated by the reality he hoped to change. The revolutions of 1848 did not
prove to be the turning point for which Marx had hoped. European history did
indeed turn, but it turned to the right. Until 1917, though the influence of
Marx increased, the ‘commanding heights’ in Western society were still held by
political conservatives.”[8]<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
From Tonsor the cultural critic:<br />
<br />
“As with any great statement concerning the human condition, the <i>Communist Manifesto</i> cannot be read without taking sides. Its words will not let us suspend judgment or defer commitment or condemnation. Karl Marx came not to bring peace but a sword.”[9]<br />
<br />
"In the modern age, when Jews have abandoned Judaism, more than a few of them have followed Marx's path. That is to say, they do not abandon Judaism's messianic tradition. Rather, they secularize the messianic tradition and create materialistic substitutes such as Marxism, socialism, Bolshevism, and other justifications for class warfare or for confronting bourgeois culture."<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times";">“Marx maintained that his system was ‘scientific’ rather than utopian. Of course, every charlatan realizes how great an advantage the adjective ‘scientific’ lends to any theory. Marx meant, however, that his system was scientific because it was inevitable, because its coming into being was causally determined. Whereas the dreams of utopians were dependent upon the puny efforts of men for their realization, ‘scientific socialism’ was written into the very order of the cosmos. It was the next sequent event in the womb of time, to paraphrase Hegel. Why this was true is, of course, what the rhetoric of the </span><i style="font-family: times;">Communist Manifesto</i><span style="font-family: "times";"> seeks to demonstrate. To make a socialist future no less certain than tomorrow’s sunrise was no small feat of apologetic art. We are still waiting for the inevitable to take place, and socialism, utopian or scientific, has, now that we have seen its partial realization, lost something of its appeal.”[10]</span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrOdzlQkMQ92sByp-F7Eh8M0YDjVNmPCj_gs4PgcjcmM_mEr40tLKH8WcQ7g0BvAujSMef38goegKP_T1X2Do4K-yvWUMAg1HqgT21TRK3tFHPbJruaf2i_U8vuoOAYFmBi7pO8vmIzbhN/s1600/220px-Gramsci.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrOdzlQkMQ92sByp-F7Eh8M0YDjVNmPCj_gs4PgcjcmM_mEr40tLKH8WcQ7g0BvAujSMef38goegKP_T1X2Do4K-yvWUMAg1HqgT21TRK3tFHPbJruaf2i_U8vuoOAYFmBi7pO8vmIzbhN/s400/220px-Gramsci.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "times";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times";">"When Marx's theory of history showed itself to be toothless -- it had little analytical or predictive bite -- later generations of Marxists shifted the focus. One of the most important shifts was</span><span style="font-family: "times";"> achieved by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who argued that Marxism could transform the culture. Withering away in prison in 1915, Gramsci wrote: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "times";">Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity.... In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.[11]</span></blockquote>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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"With that quotation in mind, ladies and gentlemen, you might go to the third floor of Haven Hall, to the main office of our history department, and take note of the large poster off the elevator proclaiming that the study of history is about -- transformation."<br />
<br />
"You should also be familiar with Leon Trotsky. To young American leftists, he was the most brilliant and attractive of the Russian Revolutionaries -- a veritable brain trust. Yet he was seen by his comrades in the U.S.S.R. as a little too cerebral, a little too critical, a little too global in his imagination. As a result of his criticism of Soviet communism, Stalin had Trotsky exiled and then murdered in Mexico City. He was stabbed to death by one of Stalin's agents, a Spanish communist wielding an ice pick."<br />
<br />
From Tonsor the philosopher and logician (remember, he studied philosophy as
an undergrad):</div>
</div>
<br />
“Marxism contradicts itself. Is it not ironic that the <i>Communist Manifesto</i>, which argues that history is shaped by material economic forces, supplied the decidedly non-material ideas that after 1848 were themselves to become shaping forces?”[12]<br />
<br />
“One can argue convincingly that most of the experience of
the nineteenth century was an attempt to broaden and deepen the meaning of
human freedom, to take man, insofar as possible, out of the realm of necessity
and to place him in the realm of freedom. Thus the German idealist Immanuel
Kant was preoccupied with the problems of freedom and necessity. Confronted with
the reality and necessity of natural causal laws, Kant sought for a realm of
human experience where these laws did not prevail; where man could be the actor rather than the acted upon. That’s the nineteenth-century context of the Marxian
project. When Marxists speak of alienation, they simply mean that man is
prevented from realizing himself by the social, economic, and religious institutions
that he has created. They are like gravity and the other laws of nature in that
they limited man’s freedom. It follows that revolution is needed to break the
chains of the economic, social, and religious institutions that bind him to the
realm of necessity. That, at bottom, is the Marxian project.”[13] </div>
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“It is richly ironic
that history would appoint Friedrich Engels to be Marx’s collaborator. Do you
think Engels was living among the proletariat, suffering at their side, and
singing 'The Internationale'? He was not and did not. Engels was the scion of a
Manchester textile manufacturer and lived off the profits of his capitalist
father. In London he resided in the fashionable Primrose Hill district,
surrounded by all the bourgeois comforts of the day. Perhaps even more richly ironic
is that Marx was supported for much of his adult life by these same capitalist
profits that Engels made available to him.[14] They apparently had no qualms about biting the hand that fed them.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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From Tonsor the wit:<br />
<br />
“Ludwig Feuerbach’s work was to have a great
influence on Marx, almost as profound an influence as the works of Hegel.
Feuerbach’s father had been a professor, and as a young man, Feuerbach studied
philosophy in order to pursue an academic career. But he began to break with
the Protestant religious tradition of his father and of the academic culture at
the University of Berlin. Both his views of religion and his Left Hegelian
philosophy blocked him from getting a university appointment after he finished
his Ph.D. Like many other radicals of his generation, Feuerbach was unable to
find an academic job. So he became a rootless, disaffected intellectual.
Imagine how different world history might have been had all these Left
Hegelians gotten nice, good-paying jobs at a university. They would
have settled for bourgeois comforts and amused themselves playing golf. Instead
they became hostile critics of society. Our world could have been spared much grief."[15]<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times";">Tonsor had another mordant barb that I did not fully appreciate at the time because I did not know the Jewish term he used. "When revolutionary Jewish thinkers fall away from their religion and adopt a left-wing ideology; when they secularize Judaism and transform the messianic tradition into a radical program; it does not seem to occur to them to sit shivah to mourn the loss of their faith."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times";">His last spear thrust made the class laugh. "You would be amazed at how many died-in-the-wool Marxists have struck it rich writing books and going out on the lecture circuit to talk about class warfare. It turns out they make the best capitalists!"</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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From Tonsor the poet:<br />
<br />
“There is always a considerable distance
between the dream of a bright tomorrow and today’s dark reality. In order to be
effectively translated into reality, dreams demand a map of how to get from
here to there. The <i>Communist Manifesto</i>
is such a road map. Today men dream other and more satisfying dreams, and the
map drawn by Marx reveals itself to be filled with traps and pitfalls. What
remains, then, is a great political poem about the mind of the mid-nineteenth
century….”[16]<br />
<br />
Marx's <i>Communist Manifesto</i> -- "a great political poem"? These words were some of the most powerful and unexpected I ever heard Tonsor utter.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * * </div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times";">After class, another student and I went up to the front of the room to ask questions. He was the student who thought Tonsor looked like the Paddington Bear. W</span><span style="font-family: "times";">hen he thanked the professor for a lecture that was critical of Marxism, Tonsor</span><span style="font-family: "times";"> let slip what he really felt about Marxist historiography. With some force he answered: "I have waded around in Marxist sewers for so much of my life that, unfortunately, I now know them too well. The Marxists are resentful ideologues who will not submit to reality. I am thoroughly disgusted with the whole intellectual enterprise. Too bad the Marxist and former Marxist scholars in our universities cannot come down with cholera or at least some disabling disease which would prevent their writing or teaching another damned word. We have had enough. It is time to forget Marxism and get on with the real puzzles and difficulties of life."[17]</span><br />
<br />
Then came my turn came to ask him a question. I was struggling to put the relationship between Marxism and the mainstream of Western intellectual life in the right way. But it proved too big a question to answer on the spot. Kindly
he invited me to join him and Caroline for lunch. By the time we were outdoors headed for Burns Park, he spoke in a burst of prose
that addressed the matter.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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"First let's review the essential insight of the liberal conservative who emerges from the mainstream of Western intellectual life. Recall the lecture in which I mentioned Walt Whitman, who in <i>Song of Myself</i> asked: 'Do I
contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain
multitudes.)'[18] Whitman expressed the profound truth that
the essence of life can be fully encountered only by embracing its opposing forces – its polarities,
oppositions, tensions, and contradictions. We have seen how the Romantics sought the organic accommodation of opposites. The impulse to achieve the organic accommodation of opposites is not really new but has been a big part of the
Western project since the tenth century. Occasionally writers and artists harness these oppositional forces and integrate,
harmonize, or synthesize them. In fact, the organic accommodation of
opposites by a sovereign personality, institution, or society is the measure
of a dynamic, healthy community.[19] It imparts nobility to our civilization.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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"The liberal conservative acknowledges this complex, oppositional reality and cheerfully submits to it. He seeks to achieve a harmony of contradictory principles – the principle of authority
and the principle of liberty; the principle of equality and that of natural
aristocracy; of individualism and of community; of private enterprise and of
cultural, moral, and human values that transcend the market mechanism; of
Providence (God’s sovereignty) and human freedom; of transcendence and
immanence; of sacred and profane; of time and eternity. He resists the ideologue's temptation to abandon the one principle or the other. Rather, he accepts these contradictory ideals, this dual heritage, as fundamental to the human
condition.[20]<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"That’s what our best minds have taught. Take Tocqueville and Acton. Together their
lives spanned the nineteenth century, and together they elaborated the soundest
and most coherent body of modern conservative thought that contemporary
conservatives can draw upon. These liberal conservatives embraced the complexity of reality. They accommodated, in their lives and in
their thinking, the polarities and contradictory principles that characterize
our lives.[21]<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZgzFFnhr-L3_RyoFNoFANYdvb8g7qoJcmQckfz-gSDd9zGIMaSk4c8atGEa93A53o9D7ulqWbAvwLawNnQ5NjITaDvXetLjF_hM26etQeQHEuqsXsGSbs_GGkLDS1k7ZAj_iX5tX_3cB9/s1600/img697.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZgzFFnhr-L3_RyoFNoFANYdvb8g7qoJcmQckfz-gSDd9zGIMaSk4c8atGEa93A53o9D7ulqWbAvwLawNnQ5NjITaDvXetLjF_hM26etQeQHEuqsXsGSbs_GGkLDS1k7ZAj_iX5tX_3cB9/s640/img697.jpg" width="537" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stephen J. Tonsor, pictured in the lower left corner of this 1976 dust jacket,<br />
was one of the more prominent thought leaders in the postwar conservative movement.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"Now, contrast what I’ve said about these liberal conservatives, Tocqueville and Acton, with what I've said about Marx. For the left Hegelians in general and for Marx in particular, the dialectic obliterates opposites. For example, at the end of the dialectical process, reality is not spirit and matter, but <i>only</i> matter. There is social value not in the individual and the collective, but <i>only</i> in the collective. Justice is not satisfied by both freedom and equality, but <i>only</i> by equality. Not both-and, but either-or.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"No question Marxism is an attempt to restore purpose, ends, and values to history. But it does so by flattening human experience, by excluding the vertical element, by excluding Providence. Its hostility to the transcendent is the most telling reason for Marxism's
failure. It is difficult enough to reconcile God’s ways to man in the ambiguities, failures, dilemmas, and ultimate unknowability of history; but it is downright impossible to justify the 'rational' course of dialectical materialism when confronted by the events of this century, what with its violence and irrationality.[22]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Marx’s tragic error, you see, was to turn his back on the accommodation of polarities. His error was to amputate half of each pair of polarities. You can trace the amputation back to Hegel. As the Hegelian dialectic moved forward in time, Reason was supposed to obliterate paradox.[23] What Marx did not see is that man will never eliminate contradictions and
irrationality. In contrast to Marxism, conservatism has learned to absorb the polarities in the human
condition that Marxism can not."<br />
<br />
So, I thought, this was the key, the essential Hegelian and Marxist error, which was to obliterate the nature of reality itself -- a reality which, for the conservative, it is necessary to submit to. It's why I would come to call Tonsor's interpretive principle the hermeneutic of accommodating opposites. My professor wrapped up:<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
"When William F. Buckley Jr. established <i>National Review</i> in November 1955, its founding editorial declared its mission to stand 'athwart history, yelling Stop!' The history Buckley had in mind was Marx's 'History,' left-Hegelian 'History,' the 'History' with a capital "H" that Marxists thought would unfold inexorably until the day of communism's triumph.[24] Conservatives united around a different conception of history that was steeped in irony, polarities, opposites, and unintended consequences. The most fierce anti-communists in the conservative movement were fulfilling their civilizational mission to save the West from 'History.'"<br />
<br />
There it was again, the idea of a "civilizational mission." A good term, that.<br />
<br />
A few paces before turning from Lincoln onto Morton Avenue, I thought I caught a glimpse of Caroline in the kitchen window.[25] What a welcome respite a relaxed conversation over lunch would be after all this talk of Marxism, a gray and cheerless ideology that was as oppressive as the clouds that blanketed the Michigan landscape.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
After lunch, on our walk back to campus, I asked Tonsor about the remarkable number of ex-communists who changed their minds and became pillars of the postwar conservative movement.<br />
<br />
"Ask yourself why that is. Why do men change their minds? It's one of the most fascinating things to know about a person. Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Max Eastman, Will Herberg, my mentor Frank Meyer -- each in his own way changed his mind and went from being a communist to being an anticommunist. The migration from communism to conservatism is one of the most remarkable intellectual migrations in the twentieth century. It came about for many reasons. Partly it was an aversion to their own communist past, partly it was because of Stalin's betrayal, and partly it was due to the devolving Cold War after 1945."<br />
<br />
There was one additional thing that I wanted to know before leaving the topic of Marxism. What did Tonsor think of the fact that so many of his colleagues c. 1987 were cultural Marxists -- indeed, that so many elite history departments in the U.S. were hiring cultural Marxists who idolized Gramsci.<br />
<br />
"I am very worried about the progress of the Marxists in the university. I don't worry about them because of the influence they exercise over students -- which is nil -- but I do worry about the estrangement of the university from the parent society which must follow in the wake of the triumph of the Marxists. It is distressing and there seems to be little or nothing which can be done about it. I shall be an active force for only another four or five years. At this point in my career, I will not be able to do much to counter the Marxists on campus. They are silly people. They will continue to conceive of the university as a teenage gang devoted to adolescent Marxist struggle -- and will damn all who are in disagreement. Never mind that the scholarship -- like Francois Furet's salutary impact on the historiography of the French Revolution -- and the parent society have moved past their stupid ideas."[26]</div>
<div>
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<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[1] My translation of the opening of Rainer Maria Rilke, <i>Herbsttag</i>, lines 1-2; at <a href="http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/rilke/rilke4.html">this URL</a>, accessed November 22, 2016; my gratitude to Ann Tonsor Zeddies for this reminder, via a Facebook post, November 19, 2016.<br />
[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, “Science, Technology, and Cultural Revolution,” in <i>Tradition and Reform in Education</i> (La
Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974), p. 49.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist
Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx (Chicago: Henry Regnery Gateway Edition, 1969), p.
ixx-xx.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[4] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist
Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, p.
xx.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[5] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist
Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, pp.
vii-viii.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[6] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist
Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, pp.
ix-xi.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[7] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist
Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, p.
x.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[8] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist
Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, pp.
xi-xii.</div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[9] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, p. viii.<br />
[10] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, p. xxi.<br />
[11] See the quotation and discussion thereon at URL http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Antonio.Gramsci.Quote.E447.<br />
[12] Many years after I heard Tonsor’s lecture on Marxism, I was delighted to
encounter many of the same observations, including this one in Lloyd Kramer,
Lecture 13, “Hegelianism and the Young Marx,” in <i>European Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century</i> (Chantilly,
VA: The Great Courses, 2001); audio format.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[13] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, pp. xii-xiii.<br />
[14] Kramer, Lecture 13, “Hegelianism and the Young Marx,” in <i>European Thought and Culture</i>.<br />
[15] Kramer, Lecture 13, “Hegelianism and the Young Marx,” in <i>European Thought and Culture</i>.<br />
[16] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, pp. xxi-xxii.<br />
[17] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, August 18, 1984, pp. 3-4; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.</div>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[18] Whitman quoted in Stephen J. Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” <i>Equality, Decadence, and Modernity </i>(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books,
2005), p. 247.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<div class="MsoNormal">
[19] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” <i>Equality</i>, p. 247.<br />
[20] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in <i>Equality</i>, pp. 235, 248-49.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn16">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[21] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in <i>Equality</i>, p. 248.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn17">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[22] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in <i>Equality</i>, p. 249.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn18">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
[23] Tonsor, Introduction, <i>Communist
Manifesto</i>, by Karl Marx, p.
xiii.<o:p></o:p><br />
[24] David Frum, "Unpatriotic Conservatives," <i>National Review</i>, March 25, 2003; at <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391772/unpatriotic-conservatives-david-frum">this URL</a>, accessed November 22, 2016.<br />
[25] Caroline Tonsor to Gleaves Whitney, Grafton, IL, June 26, 2014.<br />
[26] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, February 15, 1986, pp. 3-4; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.</div>
</div>
</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-26804155289932896962016-11-14T15:01:00.000-08:002017-12-06T09:24:28.641-08:00Tonsor #16 -- "Give me a real thought!"I was sitting in Tonsor's office when he returned a short review paper. He had written an "A" on the back page, followed by comments. His handwriting was distinct -- a black, bold, cursive style that was pleasing to the eye.<br />
<br />
As I finished reading his mark-ups and comments with satisfaction, he said, "It's a good paper, Mr. Whitney. But it could be better. Your writing is -- precious."<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2cpnNExctKIHWQG5LT7Y61sb1E20XjNnuFGqSpTsSM82DwyNyZCfUuhGJ1DVxUfBmdXItIcmTRsmffFluTU0w_adsS0MjuIpF8UMnIQb6bYjn8ouKBSTt9cGtl8oImotWdb452uq0imEf/s1600/510LHREZPxL._SX312_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2cpnNExctKIHWQG5LT7Y61sb1E20XjNnuFGqSpTsSM82DwyNyZCfUuhGJ1DVxUfBmdXItIcmTRsmffFluTU0w_adsS0MjuIpF8UMnIQb6bYjn8ouKBSTt9cGtl8oImotWdb452uq0imEf/s320/510LHREZPxL._SX312_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="201" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tonsor was an Aristotelian.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<i>Precious?</i> I had no idea what he meant but my defenses went up. Out of pride I wanted to remind him that I had always earned an "A" in composition classes and rarely got anything less on my history papers; that I had already published a book along with numerous articles; that I had just won a national essay contest that came with a $5,000 prize; that I had been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa; that I had taught expository writing and rhetoric to undergraduates; that I had mastered German well enough to win a Fulbright scholarship to West Germany; and that; and that; and that. Such defensiveness on my part! Such pride! I would not submit easily to his criticism.<br />
<br />
Over the next minute or two, Tonsor spelled out several criticisms mostly having to do with diction. His voice had an edge. After each of his statements, I said, "Okay," to register that I heard what he was telling me. But I was not happy with this litany.<br />
<br />
After five or six of his statements, each followed by my "Okay," Tonsor all of a sudden blew. "Will you quit saying 'okay'? 'Okay' means nothing. It's just a spasmodic reaction, not a real thought. Give me a real thought, Mr. Whitney!"<br />
<br />
I was taken aback by Tonsor's burst of anger, an emotional <i>Blitzkrieg</i> that smacked me without warning. Why this heat? It was the first time he laid into me, and I felt equal measures of humiliation and pique. No teacher had ever spoken to me like that. Gathering myself so as to express a "real thought," I said, "By design I try to write not just as an academic intellectual but also as a public intellectual. It's the only way my work will reach a wider audience. I suppose at this point in my career I am not doing justice to the requirements of either style."<br />
<br />
"I understand," Tonsor assured me, his voice straining to express recovered calm. (I wished he had instead said, "Okay," just to give me the pleasure of hearing him say it.) He seemed to want to back off, yet his fingers moved sporadically across his knees and his head jerked erratically. "Good writing does take time to achieve. I, too, had to bridge the chasm between writing for colleagues and writing for the informed lay public. Incidentally, I also used to compose poetry when I was about your age. It was not very good. But trying to get the essence of an image or emotion into a line of iambic pentameter makes one think hard about language."<br />
<br />
Then, unexpectedly: "Have you ever written poetry, Gleaves?" He asked the question in a soft register. It was the first time he addressed me by my first name. It was also one of the rare times he asked me about my life -- asked not about a book I'd read or a scholar I'd studied or a method I'd explored, but about my life.<br />
<br />
I told him that I had written some verse, most recently in a creative writing class with Loy O. Banks, one of my favorite English professors at Colorado State who had inadvertently introduced me to Tonsor's work by giving me his back copies of <i>Intercollegiate Review</i> and <i>Modern Age</i>. I admitted that, looking back, the "poetry" embarrassed me.<br />
<br />
"Yes," he said. "Doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can plant ivy to hide theirs. But writers? Writers have to endure whatever has left the printer's shop."<br />
<br />
I welcomed the pivot in the conversation. Tonsor shifted from a high emotional gear into neutral, no doubt to disperse the heat with which he had laid into me. The mood shift had the feel of a guilty parent trying to make up to a child.<br />
<br />
Tonsor then launched into a remarkable discourse on rhetoric's place in the liberal arts, signaling that he had left the emotional arena and entered the intellectual one. "No one can use a language well who is estranged from or unacquainted with the poets of the language. What the ancients and the men of the Middle Ages called 'rhetoric' is one of the essential humanistic disciplines. It is essential to the ordinary college students you will someday teach. For them, even though they don't know it, rhetoric is the key to knowledge and understanding, to scientific enquiry and precise description. Without an exact sense of language, without a precise description of things as they are, or as they might be, philosophy, law, and natural science are impossible. Without a poetry which touches the human heart and exactly describes the human condition, religion is dead and the emotions stultified.<br />
<br />
"Western men and women have had a 2,000-year training in the greatest 'rhetoric' there is, the language of the Bible, which mankind can avail itself of. As an educational source, one of the most important aspects of the Bible is the fact that it speaks to all men indiscriminately: high and low, rich and poor, wise and foolish, sophisticated and ignorant, powerful and weak. It does not talk down to them but speaks in the accents of the Divine and in the language of the greatest poetry. The mind of Western man has been shaped by the language of that book. Like the liberal arts, the Bible has been successful in forming a culture because it reaches beyond its ostensible purpose -- in the case of the Bible, conveying the Word of God -- and informs and inspires a whole culture.<br />
<br />
"How startling and saddening it is, when one makes a biblical allusion in a lecture and reads the faces of the audience, that one sees a look as barren as the sandy wastes of the Sahara! One has the impression suddenly that the students are two dimensional, that the depth of the Scriptures is not one of their dimensions.<br />
<br />
"In the absence of the liberal arts, this happens not only in matters of scriptural and religious language, but also in the richly allusive language of great poetry and literature. I have the experience often, when speaking to undergraduates, of walking into a largely unfurnished or badly furnished room. There is no place there for the soul's ease, no appropriate setting for intellectual or social intercourse, no stove with which to cook the simplest intellectual fare. As Gertrude Stein observed, 'When you get there, there is no there there.'"<br />
<br />
I laughed weakly.<br />
<br />
"Instead of the exactly right word, instead of the precise and uncolored definition, instead of the poetic utterance, one hears such phrases as 'like,' 'you know,' or 'I mean.' Such substitutes for language are, as my friend the late Martin Diamond said, 'linguistic black holes' into which the meaning of the language is sucked and disappears. One is tempted to ridicule the poor, literally dumb student who uses such meaningless words, or shout as Jesus did when he healed the dumb man, 'Be thou opened.' But, alas, the only way that we can heal them is by teaching the Bible, the poets, the great literature of the state papers, and the philosophers. The great teacher makes the blind see and the dumb speak, but he can only do so because he too has had his tongue unstopped and his eyes opened.<br />
<br />
"The first and most important function of a liberal arts education is to give amplitude and width to the human personality and to enable that personality to express itself fully, clearly, precisely, and gracefully. Style is a matter of ultimate importance whether one is writing up the minutes of the school board or pitching softball for one of the local leagues. The good news is, style can be learned."[1]<br />
<br />
When I walked away from that first tense encounter with Tonsor, I did not yet know it, but I was embarking on a road that would teach me many things that weren't part of the program. First, the experience confirmed what I had heard, that Tonsor was indeed "a mite prickly," so it was important for me to manage my own emotions when he was not managing his. Second, even when he was acting intemperately, his erudition kept my mind on the stretch -- I could learn from him if I did not let pride get in the way. The bottom line: I had to make my relationship with Tonsor work. After all, when I moved to Ann Arbor, I entirely reordered my life to learn from him.<br />
<br />
_________________________<br />
<br />
[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Why Democratic Technocrats Need the Liberal Arts," <i>Freedom, Order, and the University</i>, ed. James R. Wilburn (Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University Press, 1982), pp. 22-23.Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-614841531973884884.post-65380662461792611522016-11-13T15:18:00.000-08:002017-09-01T11:58:03.877-07:00Tonsor #15 -- Where Did Liberalism Go Wrong?<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>I.</b></div>
<br />
During my five years in Ann Arbor, I awoke every weekday at one minute to six o'clock. The radio was set to come on with the start of the broadcast day at WUOM. Every morning began the same way, with an <i>a cappella</i> rendition of "The Yellow and Blue," Michigan's alma mater. Don't ask me how, but the song astonishingly combined a rousing beer-hall ballad with a haunting monastic chant. Years afterward I would fondly associate the alma mater with my routine of visiting Stephen Tonsor during morning office hours.<br />
<br />
It was an Indian summer morning, soft and humid and gauzy, when I decided it was time to ask my graduate advisor where liberalism had gone wrong. On the bus ride from North Campus to Central Campus, I "filled my mind with the subject," as Tonsor liked to say. As an intellectual historian and cultural critic, he identified mostly with Tocqueville and Acton, giants among the liberal conservatives. That, I got. But I needed to untangle the knot in my head and understand where to draw the line between the "liberal conservatives" whom he liked[1] and the "liberalism" as an -ism that he did not. There was overlap to sort out, and I feared that I did not know enough to offer a "gritty stone" for us to have a good conversation. To be honest, I was hoping he would do all the talking. My hope was not disappointed.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Tonsor welcomed me with that expectant note of his and I sat down in the squeaky wooden chair. As he was putting papers away, I noticed for the first time how musty his office smelled, maybe because of the brief return of warm weather. It was redolent of the back rooms of the antiquarian book stores in Ann Arbor that I frequented. Once his papers were filed, he rotated his chair to face me. He was looking through his glasses with that Sphinx-like expression of his. His hands were on his knees. He breathed in little audible puffs.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>II.</b></div>
<br />
Since he did not like small talk, I got straight to the intellectual problem I was trying to sort out. "Professor Tonsor, when you speak of the liberal conservative who harnesses the spirit of liberty to the spirit of conservation, it sounds so -- appealing. I think I get it. But there is overlap between the spirit of liberty and liberalism, right? In your writings you've had harsh words for liberalism. So first, in your opinion, how do you draw the line between liberty and liberalism. And second, where did liberalism go wrong?"<br />
<br />
Tonsor waggled his head and chuckled. "Do you mean, why did James Burnham call welfare-state liberalism 'the ideology of Western suicide'? Or do you mean: How did our liberal system devolve into the art of running the circus from the monkey cage?[2] Let us count the ways," he said, his eyes growing wider and his right hand gesturing toward the Diag as if that space were a convenient marker for the decline of the West.<br />
<br />
"There's a lot of emotional incontinence you will encounter when discussing welfare-state liberalism, especially on a college campus like this one. Its defenders these days are not a happy lot.<br />
<br />
"There is controversy over when welfare-state liberalism as an -ism first appeared in the U.S. Some of our friends in the South blame Abraham Lincoln for launching our national government on the path to social engineering. As the Civil War was drawing to a close, Lincoln signed the Freedman's Bureau into law to help the newly freed slaves. While it was geographically restricted and only lasted seven years, this new federal agency was unprecedented in its social reach and it inadvertently generated the script for our future welfare state. On behalf of former slaves who were now refugees throughout the South, it provided relief, dispensed medical care, established schools, and redistributed abandoned lands to the newly freed blacks. It passed from the scene during Reconstruction.<br />
<br />
"Historians will argue over whether Lincoln's Freedman's Bureau was the first manifestation of welfare-state liberalism in American. But let's set that aside, because there is much less argument over the identification of progressivism with welfare-state liberalism. Indeed, it seems that welfare-state liberalism's political arc in the U.S. follows Marx's formula: History repeats itself, first as tragedy and second as farce. Progressivism was liberalism's first performance, in the years before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was its more tragic second performance, in the 1930s. Finally the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were its third and most farcical performance of all, in the 1960s. That's when liberalism as an -ism began to unravel. JFK's make-believe Camelot turned out to be the campy preamble to the hell of Vietnam. And LBJ's Great Society revealed itself to be the reign of the most destructive vulgarian in American history. It was as though Johnson were afflicted with the Midas-touch -- turning everything he encountered not into gold but into garbage.[3]<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>III.</b> </div>
<br />
"But I get ahead of myself. As you know, liberalism has a long, complex history that is not just restricted to its most recent American iteration in the current welfare state. To understand liberalism, one must know the deep, rich soil from which it sprang. And that leads us to explore the geographic and historic conditions of Europe at a very early time.<br />
<br />
"One element has been the very geography of Europe, which consists of numerous peninsulas, islands, and mountain ranges that characterize the western extremity of the Eurasian land mass. In previous centuries when only rudimentary military and transportation technology were available, it was difficult for one ruler to establish one polity in a landscape that is so fractured. I am no geographic determinist, but I do believe that the landscape of western Eurasia set the physical stage for the formation of many competing polities, each jealous to preserve its own language, customs, and constitution. This multiplicity characterized Europe, and local sovereignty became the norm. Ancient Greece is a microcosm of what I mean. As Herodotus tells us, there were many hundreds of city-states established on the Balkan Peninsula and the many islands surrounding it. It encouraged seafaring, trade, and exploration to be sure, but also fierce independence to preserve one's local lifeways.<br />
<br />
"Another element has been the various traditions of liberty that were instantiated in this fractured geography. Self-government developed organically, though in quite different ways, in ancient Athens, in the republic of ancient Rome, in Italian communes, in the charters of medieval towns, and in medieval England with its Magna Carta, Common Law, and Parliament.<br />
<br />
"A third element that made liberalism possible was individualism. In world-historic perspective, our civilization's preoccupation with the individual stands out, in stark contrast to more traditional cultures where the emphasis is on the clan and the tribe; on the authority of the chief, and on cultures with an established peck order that rigidly ranks people by caste and status and keeps them there. Many places in the West evolved away from these traditional arrangements. Two factors were at work. On the one hand, our religious tradition is grounded in the sanctity of the individual who is in the <i>Imago Dei</i>. On the other hand, our humanist tradition celebrates the dignity and strength of the individual who might be modeled on Pericles, Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus -- take your pick from Plutarch's <i>Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans</i>. In medieval Europe, by the twelfth century, both these traditions became joined, and Christian humanists acquired the concepts, vocabulary, and symbols to explore what it meant to be an individual.[8]<br />
<br />
"In its modern iteration, individualism is the political and social philosophy that emphasizes the moral worth of each human being. Protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual are taken to be a central task of the liberal project. But it was not always so. "Individualism" was originally a term of derision, a perjorative used by reactionaries against French Revolutionaries. To the European conservative, <i>individualisme</i> signified a social dissolution, anarchy, and the prioritizing of individual interests to the ruin of the community. Also in the nineteenth century, European philosophers developed the notion of solipsism or extreme egocentrism -- the notion that one's own existence is the only thing that can be known or that is real. Observing America in the 1830s, Tocqueville warned that individualism might well deplete the 'virtues of social life' in the new republic. Since individualism always holds this latent threat, it is problematic for liberalism. It is one source of unraveling.<br />
<br />
"A fourth element that makes our civilization unique is its embrace of pluralism, its ability to absorb many different and even contradictory viewpoints within a common culture. The modern age has even tolerated the existence of competing sources of authority, first in Renaissance Italy (when pagan and Christian sources existed alongside each other), then during the Enlightenment (when secular reason existed alongside religious faith).<br />
<br />
"The foundation for our pluralistic way of thinking was laid long ago. Its roots can be found in Hellenistic Palestine where Jew <i>and</i> Greek mixed; in pagan Rome <i>and</i> in Christian Rome; in roots that intertwined Mediterranean culture <i>with</i> Germanic culture beginning in the late classical period. For example, when the Romans abandoned Britain, the oral pagan culture of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes came into contact with the Latin Christianity of the literate Romano-Britains and mixed. You see it in medieval Spain, when the Muslim element mixed with the Catholic element. Later, in the thirteenth century, you see it in Thomas Aquinas probing the truth as set out in the documents of more than a half-dozen cultures -- Hebrew, Hellenic, Hellenistic, Roman, Orthodox Christian, Islamic, and Western Christendom. Do you see the pattern? It's not either-or. It's both-and, both-and, both-and. Always additive. The West, you might say, has been intellectually promiscuous. This intellectual promiscuity is really quite remarkable and found nowhere else on the planet to the degree that it is found in our civilization. It's the basis of our studia humanitatis, our humanities. Once you grasp the intellectual pluralism at the root of our modern culture, you will begin to grasp the development of modernity and anticipate the problems it poses to liberalism.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
"The -ism's intellectual arc is long, indeed. Leo Strauss argued that liberalism arose among the ancient Greeks, especially in Ionia. It was the freedom of thought which philosophers like Xenophanes claimed against the city. That is to say, it was the intellectuals seeking to free their minds from the common bonds of religion, morality, and tradition.[4] That formulation seems apt today, given the American experience with secular liberalism, which does not seem to be working."</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>IV.</b></div>
<br />
"I date the beginning of the long decline in left-liberal ascendancy that gripped American intellectual and cultural life to an event in 1953. Although Stalin died in March of that year, and although the East Germans tried to throw off their Soviet masters in June of that year, I date the decline from May of 1953, with the publication of a book, by a Michigan man of letters, whose name was Russell Kirk. It was the appearance of <i>The Conservative Mind</i> that caused a shock wave to topple many of the givens in American intellectual life. It caused considerable consternation among liberals.[5] Someday I shall tell you about the curious way in which I came upon that landmark work -- at an elevation of 10,000 feet!<br />
<br />
"What I should like to stress now is that, while political liberalism in the U.S. may have been in decline, philosophical and cultural liberalism was not. A single decision of the Warren or Berger court had to potency to undermine centuries of moral tradition.<br />
<br />
"What kept American liberalism potent, especially on college campuses in the sixties, was the alliance between those suffering from a nostalgia for the gutter and the Marxists yearning for universal revolution. The alienated intellectuals of the Old Left and their liberal fellow travelers seemed quaint -- they appealed to idealistic youth. They built up a following on elite campuses like this one. The new adherents to the counterculture and the New Left were the able students of people such as Norman O. Brown and C. Wright Mills. Being bright students, they learned to gaze into the metaphysical and political voids their professors had opened up for them. The unreal, psychedelic politics of the age were mirrored by liberal youth stoned out of their minds by chemical and political elixers. All sense of inhibition and limitation was lost, and our campuses transmogrified into cloud-cuckoo-land."[6]<br />
<br />
Shaking his head he gestured toward the infamous Diag to drive home his point. "Think of that degenerate, Chef Ra, and the Hash Bash he leads every April Fool's Day -- at <i>high</i> noon. So clever, that one."<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijqRYhGzn8Bqa2UfbRKC-mmfbV7qRBZjaJlu1hJ8bWHUBJJ-93RwLCg6tYzqbtqmRs2k5kIAANX7YR39wQ2dUPNKhj2JSdjHdncL6g2AwEold4jGrMB7drUUa6oqHeoyBTl3mbJUji08FW/s1600/EE_FEA_hashbash_17_040216.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijqRYhGzn8Bqa2UfbRKC-mmfbV7qRBZjaJlu1hJ8bWHUBJJ-93RwLCg6tYzqbtqmRs2k5kIAANX7YR39wQ2dUPNKhj2JSdjHdncL6g2AwEold4jGrMB7drUUa6oqHeoyBTl3mbJUji08FW/s640/EE_FEA_hashbash_17_040216.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hash Bash on the Diag</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I didn't know who the man was, but Tonsor's sarcasm in drawing out "C-h-e-f ... R-a" made me laugh. Apparently he had been a fixture at the Hash Bash since 1972.<br />
<br />
Tonsor's next allusion, even if I didn't know what it meant, sounded interesting enough to write down. "I have somewhere said that the unraveling of American liberalism has been the Love-Death music of a dying age written, however, in the style of Offenbach rather than in the style of Wagner."[7]<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>V.</b></div>
<br />
"But what historic forces made American liberalism unravel?" I persisted, eager to put the arc of liberalism's demise into a coherent narrative.<br />
<br />
"Do you want the long version?" he asked.<br />
<br />
"Yes" -- my mind was already on the <i>qui vive</i>.<br />
<br />
"All right, then. Let's review the evidence of the spirit of liberty going back to the ancient world -- to the Hebrews fleeing Egypt for the Promised Land, and to Odysseus leaving Troy and journeying back to Ithaca. By early modern times, that same liberal spirit aimed to free human beings from certain kinds of oppression. This form of liberty approximates what Sir Isaiah Berlin called, in a famous essay published in 1958, 'negative liberty.' It can be summarized in the various freedom-from's you are familiar with:<br />
<ul>
<li>from physical oppression -- curable disease, preventable hunger, material want, and the like --through capitalistic free markets; </li>
<li>from unjust social customs and straitjacket restraints, through an open and upwardly mobile society;</li>
<li>from barriers to their talent and services and products in the marketplace.</li>
<li>from political injustice as did, in very different ways, the English, American, and early phase of the French revolutions did; </li>
<li>from social conflict, by supplanting the religious zeal that arose in the Reformations with civic, secular, and materialistic aims on the Dutch model, as Jefferson and Madison proposed; </li>
<li>from arbitrary aesthetic rules, seen in the avant-garde revolt against classicism;</li>
<li>from hidebound prejudices, recognizing that a diverse people such as the American nation will have a plurality of viewpoints; and </li>
<li>from spiritual ignorance and restraint, by decentralizing ethical and spiritual authority even when it devolves to the most decentralized unit of all, the individual. </li>
</ul>
"Also, historically, the liberal has wanted to free human beings to do certain things. This form of liberty roughly approximates what Berlin called 'positive liberty' and it includes a variety of freedom-to's:<br />
<ul>
<li>to order their freedom as they see fit since as a people they are sovereign;</li>
<li>to be able to reproduce one's kind;</li>
<li>to be able to think and speak freely in the public square;</li>
<li>to elect representatives of their choosing and enjoy self-government under the rule of law;</li>
<li>to exercise the First Amendments freedoms -- of religion, the press, assembly, and petition;</li>
<li>to have access to an education that will develop their potential;</li>
<li>to be able to form and contribute to voluntary organizations in civil society;</li>
<li>to buy and sell and contract one's labor in the free marketplace;</li>
<li>to advance in an open society as far as their talents and energy and ambition will take them; and </li>
<li>to enjoy and benefit from the proliferating variety of the human condition.</li>
</ul>
"Don't be fooled by the apparent seamlessness of these lists. As Berlin pointed out, 'negative' and 'positive' liberty can clash with one other in a pluralistic society. For example, if an individual wants to be <i>free from</i> the constraints of religion, how can his wish be reconciled within a community that feels it is <i>free to</i> assert the faith of a supermajority? These values clashed in the famous Supreme Court case, <i>Engel </i>v.<i> Vitale</i>, which was decided in 1962. Henceforward, government-directed prayer in public schools was seen as violating the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and therefore banned. <br />
<br />
"Late-modern liberalism sometimes asserts negative liberty; sometimes positive liberty. Where it can err is when it takes a good thing -- in this case, the spirit of liberty that resides deep in man -- and disorders it. All modern -isms do that to some extent, of course, but since we live among the liberals, the speck in their eye is what irritates the beam in our own.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV-FBBAmnQGKfFYSsYvKIMEENOldMyTE07KNX-v9FqX-qnAqXBoW7f5Ta-6aXJfX-Y27uSBs7uAgSJszERCtY2sUNFYVUqqIE2AT0QxwFs2-XIojwYj5a3T8fl8EekdkFls_lMckn35Je2/s1600/IMG_6879+%25282%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV-FBBAmnQGKfFYSsYvKIMEENOldMyTE07KNX-v9FqX-qnAqXBoW7f5Ta-6aXJfX-Y27uSBs7uAgSJszERCtY2sUNFYVUqqIE2AT0QxwFs2-XIojwYj5a3T8fl8EekdkFls_lMckn35Je2/s320/IMG_6879+%25282%2529.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Unforgettable classroom teacher: Stephen Tonsor</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
"Now, you know from your Western civ survey that pluralism arose in the West as a result of many factors. To review:<br />
<ul>
<li>The encounters with 'brave new worlds' -- starting with the Crusades and accelerating in the Age of Exploration -- exposed Europeans to unimagined novelties. Suddenly they found themselves amid exotic cultures, strange lifeways, and fantastic worldviews. Reports of the discoveries excited the imaginations of men, but they also acted like acids upon the culture -- corroding certainties, raising doubts, admitting skepticism, reinforcing relativism, and even suggesting the slide into subjectivism. As Shakespeare has Sebastian say in <i>The Tempest</i>, 'Now I will believe that there are unicorns.' The European could now look beyond his local horizon and see that his was not the only world, that the European lifeway was not the only lifeway available to man. Confronted by the proliferating variety of cultures, thinking Europeans began to ponder the human condition in radically different ways. Carried to the extreme, modern man would embrace the new for its own sake -- what Christopher Booker called 'neophilia.'[9]</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Burckhardt identified the Italian Renaissance with a new birth of liberty and with the beginning of the modern age. One reason for this bold assertion is that, with the elevation of the Greco-Roman classics, two different sources of authority -- pagan and Catholic -- now coexisted. It is unusual to find a culture with two quite different cosmologies and quite different sources of intellectual, moral, and spiritual authority. In Christendom, these two different sources had often been integrated by clerics, men of letters working in the long tradition of Christian humanism. But sometimes the two sources were not integrated, and during the Renaissance it was a permissible boundary transgression not to do so. Thus the pagan classics would pose an indirect challenge to the dominant Catholic worldview, for now two different types of human excellence presented themselves -- the hero and the saint. This fundamental bifurcation in the view of human excellence also helped give birth to the new individualism which recognized that man had the freedom to choose in what measure he would be a pagan hero, and in what measure a Christian saint.[10]</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>In the Protestant Reformations, the principle of <i>sola scriptura</i>[11] spurred the growth of religious pluralism. It didn't mean to, but it was the unintended consequence. For once this Protestant principle was unleashed, there was no stopping the devolution of authority from one papacy ... to several countries ... to many regions ... to countless congregations ... to numberless individuals. Henceforward who had the authority to say whether my interpretation of scripture was better or worse than yours? Protestantism's inability to determine exactly what Christian orthodoxy was led to the proliferation of denominations in competition with one another. I am told that today there are several thousand Protestant denominations, each justifying its existence on the doctrine of <i>sola scriptura</i>. How ironic that the search for authentic Christianity would result in such chaos! Not surprisingly, this pluralism led to major religious conflicts from 1517 to 1648, wherein Protestants not only battled Catholics, but also one another, to the death. Imagine the ferocity with which Lutherans killed Anabaptists and vice versa. While religious pluralism came to be identified with spiritual fracture, moral anarchy, and Christendom's demise, it nevertheless led, in time, to liberal political settlements and to a chilly social tolerance; also to the emergence of materialistic, pluralistic, secular societies -- even if at the expense of true community. I am, of course, describing America.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>During the course of the long Scientific Revolution, a series of paradigm shifts radically altered the West's vision away from a geocentric cosmos ordered in a great chain of being. Copernicus demolished Ptolemaic astronomy, Newton demolished Aristotelian physics, Darwin demolished the Mosaic chain of being, and Freud demolished Augustinian psychology. Henceforward, the sciences would become yet a third locus of authority, alongside the pagan classics of antiquity and Christianity's sacred scripture and tradition. But it was not an authority that relied on written texts. No, nature herself now provided the "texts." Science took nature as its sacred text and subjected the world to constant rereading and revision, based on observational methods. Nothing seemed stable anymore. In fact, it was posited that there was a plurality of realities, a plurality of worlds. In contrast to the medieval mind with its naive faith in one great chain of being, the modern mind confronted a dizzying succession of paradigms about reality -- from Newton to Einstein to Heisenberg to Bohr. No science texts were canonical; no thing was fixed; in philosophy becoming supplanted being; and relativism, the absolute. The very structure of the West's scientific revolutions seemed to confirm pluralism.[12]</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>As you know, it's the purpose of History 416 to understand the astonishingly rapid succession of worldviews that has developed -- from the Jesuits' <i>disputatio</i> to the secular Enlightenment, when the philosophes developed sophisticated arguments for variety in unity so long as the glue in that unity was reason. It did not take long before rationalism and empiricism were challenged by the counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism, which in turn were challenged by Positivism, and on and on it goes. So we intellectual historians can demonstrate quite convincingly that our modern age is a cacophony of -isms. Our civilization is quite promiscuous in its willingness to entertain new suitors. We should not be surprised that many of the offspring are less than beautiful --"</li>
</ul>
<div>
All of a sudden with startling rudeness Tonsor's desk phone rang, interrupting his remarkable soliloquy. It's the first time I saw him react to a phone ringing. His reddening face betrayed irritation, and he looked at the black contraption as though it were a mischievous jack-in-the-box. If the window had been open, I am sure he would have pitched the thing down onto the Diag below. To my surprise he ignored the ringing, sort of. While he wouldn't pick up the receiver, he couldn't resist going on a tear about what a nuisance the modern telephone is: "Before you arrived, I got a call from a swindler trying to sell me land in Arizona. I dislike arid climates intensely. Keeping plants alive with a little dab of water after the heat of the day has exhausted them is not my idea of a happy occupation.[13] As for the telephone, H. L. Mencken got it right when he said the telephone is the greatest boon to bores ever invented!" Tonsor drew out "b-o-o-n to b-o-r-e-s" for effect. He slapped his knees and rocked into his next sentence.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
"I think I was speaking of the modern age as an age of promiscuity. Promiscuity, of course, is disordered love. What did liberalism disorder but the love of liberty?<br />
<br />
"Again, we must distinguish between the spirit of liberty in man's nature and the -ism that grew out of the modern project. When liberalism arose as a modern ideology, it often took something good in the nature of man -- in this case, the spirit of freedom -- and disordered it. This tendency to disorder liberty has gone hand-in-hand with numerous intellectual errors.<br />
<ul>
<li>One of liberalism's chief errors is its simple-minded attachment to the Enlightenment. Liberalism, you see, fancies that it has outgrown the Middle Ages and Christendom, which it regards as two sizes too small and quite out of fashion. It is this bias against Christendom and the Middle Ages that betrays the invincible ignorance of our liberal friends -- and their intolerance toward many of the religious roots of our civilization.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>For instance, although modern liberalism is correct to recognize that our civilization is pluralistic, it is foolish to cast off our older philosophical and faith traditions that seek to order the things we value. Liberalism fancies itself to be value neutral -- it provides no way to order the goods in our lives. Yet a hierarchy of value is what we crave. Our nature is not made just to wander aimlessly from good to good to good. That is a false liberty that leads to anomie and despair. Rather it is our nature to seek out a map, search out a destination, and set a direction that we are confident will take us to a better place. How does the undiscriminating liberal, who breezily accepts a pluralistic world, discern what is better? Truly, when the liberal eschews Aristotle's final causes and dodges absolutes, he does violence to man's intelligence. The task is to find ways of ordering values that most people can accept.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Another example, this one along different lines. Liberalism often takes credit for the West's first constitutions. It is shockingly ignorant to assert that the modern constitution owes its origin to the Enlightenment. The roots of constitutional government go back to the Middle Ages. Magna Carta, the charter of English liberties, was actually the outcome of a <i>conservative</i> revolt among the barons to force King John to recognize their traditional rights as Englishmen. They were reasserting the root principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, that the monarch was as subject to the rule of law as all other men were. Also there were a number of medieval communes, little republics whose charters defended the liberties of free men. From your reading of the Federalist Papers, you know that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were familiar with these medieval Italian communes. Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and others have argued that the American Founding was in a significance sense a revolution prevented, not made, since the Founders were contending with London to restore their ancient rights as Englishmen.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Also many liberals assume that rights came out of the modern political tradition. Wrong again. Perhaps they have not read key medieval authors like Thomas Aquinas who wrote extensively on natural rights, or become familiar with groundbreaking documents like the Charter of the Forests, which was actually a <i>conservative</i> law in that it limited the king and restored his subjects' traditional access to woodlands for their livelihood.[14] Nor, apparently, have they heard of the right of asylum and the right of sanctuary, whereby any church afforded protection for combatants, refugees, and fugitives, especially in time of war.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>You have heard me say that freedom is not freedom unless it is ordered. These apparent opposites -- freedom and order -- need one another to work. Sometimes our liberal friends forget the experience of the species. They embrace liberty without a proper regard for what it takes to sustain the freedoms we enjoy. The challenge every generation must face is how to keep liberty from devolving into private licentiousness and its cousin, social anarchy. An apprehension of the natural law, faith, morals -- these are the permanent things that are needed to help us order our lives so that we are fit to live with each other in relative peace. The order in the soul is conducive to the order in society, and vice versa. Value-neutral liberalism does not have a good answer to that.</li>
</ul>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Yet another intellectual error that liberals fall into is to forget that all modern free societies give rise to both a party of innovation and a party of conservation. Both-and. Each gives expression to the permanent things in human nature -- innovation which is the drive to better the human condition; and conservation which is the instinct to treasure what is good. We are motivated by both, and in a free society reform comes out of the perennial tension between these two oppositional drives. Innovation and conservation need each other because they correspond to the fact that each of us, individually, contains multitudes, so it is no surprise that society does, too. And yet, by the late 1940s and early 1950s -- after five terms of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman -- the liberal elite in our nation grew smug and didn't think they needed a conservative intellectual movement to push against. It was liberalism's arrogance -- as witnessed in people like Lionel Trilling, Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. -- that it had no need for conservative ordering and restraint. </li>
</ul>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Lord Acton instructs us otherwise: 'Don't let us utter too much evil of party writers, for we owe them much. If not honest, they are helpful, as the advocates aid the judge.'"[15]</blockquote>
At this observation I wrote a note to myself: For the most part in this conversation, I was witnessing Tonsor perform as a liberal conservative using his hermeneutic of dynamic tension. But in 1987, did he also advocate the need of conservatives for a robust liberal intellectual movement to push against?<br />
<br />
"Now, to understand the genesis of this -ism, you might consult a liberal historian like Arthur M. Schlesinger, who wrote a brief history that explains what liberals are about." Tonsor got up, dug deep into a bookcase, and handed me a dusty paperback called <i>The Vital Center</i>. "It's not very good in its treatment of conservatism, which is confoundingly weak, but at least it takes you inside the riddles of the liberal mind around 1948, when liberalism reached its apogee."<br />
<br />
Suddenly the phone rang again. Still standing, Tonsor picked up the receiver, slammed it back down, and impatiently shook he head as if he wanted to utter an expletive -- but I never knew him to utter expletives.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>VI.</b></div>
<br />
"Liberalism," Tonsor resumed with determination, "originally had the noble goal of protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual. The conundrum is this: Although government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, does government itself pose a threat to liberty? Lord Acton, for instance, saw the necessity of a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power. Alas, liberalism has experienced mission creep. Over the decades it has transmogrified into a succession of grotesque caricatures of itself, each manifesting its own peculiar errors. Let's review them.<br />
<ul>
<li>First came the old liberals who were devoted to -- liberty.[16] Their classical liberalism sought to protect the freedom of the individual. Originally it was associated with the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. Once the idea caught hold, the laissez-faire marketplace revealed itself to be a huge improvement over the mercantile system it replaced, what with its extensive government controls and its assumption that wealth is a zero-sum game. In a mercantile economy, the only way to increase one's portion of a static pie is through colonization, exploitation, and war. Classical liberalism, by contrast, seeks to enlarge the pie by growing the economy. One cannot overstate what capitalism wrought: nothing less than the most revolutionary force in human history since the Neolithic Revolution.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now, free-market economists have taught us valuable lessons -- that there is no such thing as a free lunch, that the profit motive works, that free trade spreads wealth. As I like to say, the free market does a better job fulfilling man's material wants than any other system -- by far. If people want more food, then the free market will provide. But what if they want more pornography? Well, their free market system will give them as much as they can stand. Of course, therein lies the danger. Classical liberals fall into error when they overlook, wink at, or excuse the abuse of liberty. Just because an action is legal does not make it moral. Freedom needs virtue. For freedom without virtue is no freedom at all. Rather we descend into the anarchy of the jungle where might makes right. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The American and British experience with the free marketplace has for the most part been benign because it developed hand-in-hand with periodic great awakenings among the people. These religious revivals tempered our antisocial passions -- greed, selfishness, drunkenness, lust, ruthless ambition -- at the exact moments when our economy was growing faster than any in world history. The nexus of a growing economy and the great awakenings is one of the happy accidents of history. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Classical liberals also fall into error when they assume that human beings are merely <i>Homo economicus</i>. I find myself bemused that so many of my free-market friends do not bother to read Book 5 of Adam Smith's <i>Wealth of Nations</i>. After hundreds of pages explaining and praising the free market in books 1-4, Smith in Book 5 warns against the tendency of the modern industrial economy to reduce men to cogs in a machine, thereby stripping them of their dignity. That's why he defends the role of government, public education, and other services to foster the creation of a humane economy. Wilhelm R<span style="background-color: #faf7ee; color: #2f2f2f;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">ö</span></span>pke, in <i>A Humane Economy</i>, offers an important corrective to seeing man merely as <i>Homo economicus</i>. I have some experience with it. Back in 1948-'49, I lived in the Zurich he describes.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On a related note I should add that, since the early 1960s, I've thought that our education system must do a better job teaching young people that the for-profit sector has a huge impact on the health of the other two sectors, governmental and philanthropic. If the economy is strong, and the tax structure is good, then money will flow into the public treasury and into civil society. Government can then pay for its services without accruing debt, and philanthropic organizations can fulfill their mission to improve the human condition. Alas, it seems that entrepreneurs are almost always vilified by our education system. </blockquote>
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</blockquote>
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</blockquote>
<ul>
<li>After classical liberalism came assertive state liberalism. (It has also been called 'moderate state intervention,' 'quantitative liberalism' by Arthur Schlesinger, and the 'social market economy' by the Germans.) We have already seen how the exigencies of the Civil War led to the creation of the Freedman's Bureau, which was one of the first manifestations of assertive state liberalism. But something else was at work, too, and it is not difficult to understand why this phase of liberalism began to replace the older classical liberalism that prevailed from the late eighteen century to the late nineteenth century. The effects of the Industrial Revolution hadn't been fully realized. Yet the Industrial Revolution grew spectacularly as a result of the laissez-faire marketplace, a marketplace that ironically did not seem up to the task of alleviating the suffering caused by its own growth. Even America's robust civil society seemed overwhelmed by the scale of the needs that arose in the periodic panics that occurred after the Civil War -- the depression of the 1890s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, foremost among them. </li>
</ul>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
No doubt about it: Industrialization and urbanization spread wealth and created an ever growing upper class and middle class. But they also, periodically, spread what the Marxists call immiseration. As the plight of the working classes pricked the conscience of the nation, usually during cyclical economic downturns, the ideology of progressivism arose. The rationale of progressivism was to counter big business with big government. The influence of Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and a bevy of Muckrakers made Washington a more active player in the society and economy. The regulatory state with its alphabet agencies was established to protect workers and consumers. Interestingly, it corresponds to the administrative state that Tocqueville had prophesied would diminish Americans' freedom because no one elected all these new regulators to make the rules we would live by. A degree of social engineering also became a goal of assertive state liberalism. Progressive taxation transferred wealth from the rich to the poor, thereby achieving a modicum of economic leveling and establishing the welfare state. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Already by the end of the nineteenth century, British and American liberalism were beginning to flirt with collectivism.[17] As a result of this flirtation, assertive state liberalism took a great leap forward in 1913 with the progressive income tax; then grew even more in FDR's New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, and LBJ's Great Society. While transferring money from the rich to the poor may have made reformers feel better, it did not address a raft of underlying pathologies: the breakdown of the family, high dropout rates in schools, unwanted pregnancies, drug and alcohol abuse, the erosion of communities. Nor did assertive state liberalism anticipate the extent to which government would become its own self-serving Leviathan. What's wrong with that picture: government lobbying for itself? The consequences have been doleful. It's not just the deficits that mount when we expect too much of government and spend money like reckless teenagers on a spree using Dad's credit card. It's the cynical policy of throwing money at the underclass to keep them quiet. That's not true compassion. One of my former students, Marvin Olasky, who was formerly an atheist and Marxist, is doing important work that shows that civil society is much better than the government at delivering basic social services to those in need.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I should note that Franklin Roosevelt successfully renamed classical liberals -- those who opposed the New Deal regulations of the economy on behalf of the less fortunate -- "conservatives." Nineteenth-century liberalism thereby became identified with twentieth-century conservatism.</blockquote>
<ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Shortly after assertive state liberalism arose, there also appeared aggressive state liberalism (or 'qualitative liberalism,' as Schlesinger calls it). Now government would not just be in the business of regulating industry to protect workers and consumers; not just in the business of transferring wealth from the rich and upper-middle classes to the working and poorer classes. Big government now justified its reach into the culture itself in order to instantiate progressive values. In the New Deal it involved the WPA art projects and writer projects. I have long thought that all the New Deal murals that went up on public buildings in the 1930s were an answer to the Confederate statues that were erected under the influence of the KKK in the 1920s. In any case, beginning with the Great Society it involved disseminating news and commentary on NPR and PBS, promulgating a liberal outlook among the populace; supporting the arts even when that art offended taxpayers; funding the humanities even when they furthered the elite's alienation from ordinary Americans; regulating our schools by mandating who got to go where, depending on their race and class and zip code; striking organized prayer in public schools; permitting abortion on demand. Some liberalism, this. The overreach has been breathtaking. Our Founders tried precisely to prevent a situation in which unelected federal judges could acquire the authority to transform the culture.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Now liberalism is entering a fourth phase, and that newly coined term, 'identity politics,' captures it best. It was inevitable that when liberal intellectuals and Democratic politicians from FDR to LBJ began to open up immigration, expand civil rights, and broaden the franchise, those who felt historically marginalized would demand greater inclusion in the American experiment. Identity politics is a coalition of diverse groups -- second- and third-wave feminists, homosexuals, the handicapped, Indians, Blacks, Latinos, and other non-white, non-European immigrants. This coalition is every bit as statist as previous generations of liberals. It seeks power to change the culture by fiat. Even my work has been influenced by the tam-tam of identity politics. Already by the early 1970s I was 'updating' the American dream and arguing for greater diversity in our universities.[18]</li>
</ul>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I think the primary driver of identity politics stems from America's original sin, black chattel slavery and its derivative, Jim Crow. Racism manifests itself in the enforcement of bigotry. It is the banal oppression of racial inequality everywhere in public and private life."</blockquote>
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Tonsor suddenly reached for a paper on his desk and held it up to his eyes. Impatiently removing his glasses he squinted to read. The black English professor, Shelby Steele, has written something truly perceptive on the topic. I quote: 'Racism is a tyranny and an oppression that dehumanizes -- animalizes -- the "other." It is a social malignancy, yet it carries the authority of natural law, as if God Himself had dispassionately ordained it.... America finds itself in moral trouble,' Steele says. 'The open acknowledgement of the nation's racist past has seriously compromised its moral authority, and affirming democratic principles and the rule of law will not be a sufficient response. Only a strict moral accounting can restore legitimacy. Thus redemption -- paying off the nation's sins -- becomes the moral imperative of a new cultural and political liberalism. President Lyndon Johnson turned redemption into a kind of activism: the Great Society, the War on Poverty, school busing, liberalized welfare policies, affirmative action. This liberalism always projects moral idealism in the form of integration, social justice, and so on, which has the ring of redemption.What is political correctness if not essentially redemptive speech? So liberalism has become a cultural identity that offers Americans a way to think of themselves as a decent people. To be liberal is once again to be good.'[19]</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Grand as redemption is, two challenges may eventually thwart identity politics. One is that each of these diverse groups has its own agenda. For example, the feminist agenda will not always square with the Black agenda (think of their differences over abortion), and the Black agenda will not always line up with the homosexual agenda (think of their differences when it comes to going outside established sexual norms). The Black church is one of the most conservative places in our culture. As each faction competes for limited public resources, there will be strain within the coalition. I predict that liberal America will become balkanized and possibly quite illiberal because it will have trouble articulating a vision of the common good. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Second, identity politics will make whites more aware of threats to their power. As the liberal coalition grows, whites will embrace an identity politics of their own. We have seen some indication of this shift in Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy and in Ronald Reagan's electoral successes. Conservatives will have to remain vigilant in the process. William F. Buckley at <i>National Review</i> has done a fairly good job of policing the movement by keeping out the KKK, the Birchers, the Randians, and other kooks. There will always be silly and even dangerous camp followers just outside the main ranks. But my point here is: Those who rise by identity politics should be prepared to fall by identity politics.</blockquote>
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The question I have about identity politics which remains to be answered is this: Is identity politics getting enough traction in the culture to constitute a third source of authority in the civilization? We've talked about how our civilization came to have two coexisting authorities in tension with one another -- Everyman's ethics and faith that come from classical Christendom, and our elites' science that comes from the modern Enlightenment. In our postmodern culture, one detects in identity politics the fevered canvass of non-Western cultures for a new source of values -- ideological, balkanized, neopagan, statist -- that will erode and eventually supplant both the Christian evangel and the Enlightenment project."</blockquote>
<ul>
</ul>
"It sounds like a book waiting to be written," I ventured. "Instead of Alvin Toffler's <i>Third Wave</i>, Stephen Tonsor's <i>Third Authority</i>."<br />
<br />
"Not by me it wouldn't -- the very thought gives me a crushing headache that would send me to bed.<br />
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"Well, that's enough for today, Mr. Whitney," said Tonsor, slapping his knees. "There is a line of students waiting outside the door and they are in need of my ministrations."<br />
<br />
Closing my looseleaf binder and thanking my graduate advisor for the grand tour of liberalism, I retreated to the warrens of Harlan Hatcher Library to reconstruct the conversation in my notes and further untangle the knot in my mind. It would now be easier to distinguish between the "liberal conservative" who ordered the spirit of liberty according to the permanent things, and the "liberalism" that increasingly sought to harness the state to engineer society. Listening to my professor, I realized that I was more liberal than he. I had seen Germany's social market economy with my own eyes, and it worked beautifully. As a result, the tutorial with Tonsor prompted tensions and still more questions. Foremost among them was this: As the meaning of liberalism shifted through its four phases, did the meaning of conservatism shift with it? For now, I was too spent to pursue the question.<br />
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________________________<br />
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Notes<br />
<br />
[1] Tonsor alluded to himself as a "liberal conservative" in his letter to Henry Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2; in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
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[2] Quotation by H. L. Mencken, <i>A Mencken Chrestomathy</i> (1949).<br />
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[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Unraveling of American Liberalism," book review, but I do not yet have a date or publication data; Alfred Regnery kindly sent a photocopy of the review to me.<br />
<br />
[4] Peter Augustine Lawler, "Liberalism," <i>American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia</i>, eds. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), p. 496.<br />
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[5] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Conservative Pluralism: The Foundation and the Academy," pp. 1-2; unpublished, no date; lecture or manuscript in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
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[6] Tonsor, "Unraveling." Given the stereotypes of the sixties, and given Tonsor's own observations, it is easy to fall into the erroneous assumption that virtually everyone on college campuses was liberal or radical during that tumultuous decade. Yet Todd Gitlin -- a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, a veteran of student protests in the 1960s, and the author of an important book on the period -- argues that the decade was not so much radical as it was polarized. Indeed, conservatives were strong on campus in the early part of the decade. "I was at Michigan for two years in '63 and '65, so I can tell you there was a very widespread right-wing movement." Gitlin quoted by Anemona Hartocollis, "On Campus, Trump Fans Say They Need 'Safe Spaces,'" <i>New York Times</i>, December 8, 2016; at URL <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/politics/political-divide-on-campuses-hardens-after-trumps-victory.html?smid=fb-share">http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/politics/political-divide-on-campuses-hardens-after-trumps-victory.html?smid=fb-share</a><br />
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[7] Tonsor, "Unraveling."<br />
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[8] Tonsor recommended that his students read Colin Morris, <i>The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200</i>, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987).<br />
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[9] Christopher Booker, <i>The Neophiliacs</i>, 1969.<br />
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[10] Tonsor was clear that, even though Jacob Burckhardt was often credited with seeing the rise of individualism during the Italian Renaissance especially, subsequent studies pushed the idea of individualism back several centuries. He cited Colin Morris, <i>The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200</i>, and Walter Ullmann<i>, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages</i>. See Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, May 19, 1986, p. 2; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
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[11] <i>Sola scriptura</i> is Latin for "by Scripture alone." This Protestant theological doctrine holds that Christian Scriptures are the sole infallible rule of faith and practice. The problem comes when passages are interpreted and mean different things to different people.<br />
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[12] Thomas S. Kuhn, <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i> (1962).<br />
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[13] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, July 25, 1987, p. 4; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.<br />
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[14] URL http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item101341.html, accessed October 24, 2016.<br />
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[15] Stephen J. Tonsor, Foreword, <i>Lectures on the French Revolution</i>, by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), ebook ed., loc. 31.<br />
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[16] Russell Kirk, <i>The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot</i>, 7th ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1985), p. 185.<br />
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[17] Kirk, <i>Conservative Mind</i>, p. 185.<br />
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[18] Stephen J. Tonsor," <i>Tradition and Reform in Education</i> (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974).<br />
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[19] Shelby Steele would become a Hoover Fellow just a few years after this conversation with Tonsor. As a Hoover Fellow he wrote, "Why the Left Can't Let Go of Racism," <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, August 27, 2017, at URL https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/why-the-left-cant-let-go-of-racism-1503868512.</div>
Gleaves Whitneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07300703150943646232noreply@blogger.com0