Reviews and News:
The Brown v. the Board of Education decision was an incoherent mess. Paul Moreno argues over at Law and Liberty that a recently published concurring opinion makes it look even messier: “Jackson ultimately went along with Warren’s opinion in Brown, which went something like this: Public education in the 19th century was not what it had become by 1954, namely the key to success in life. Success in education, in turn, depends on high self-esteem, and segregation harms black children’s self-esteem. As Warren put it, segregation ‘generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’ Suffice it to say that each of these premises is open to doubt. But they were widely accepted in 1954, and got the job done. Even so, and even as the public has come to accept wholeheartedly the result in Brown, law professors continue to be embarrassed by its sloppy jurisprudence.”
In defense of Victorian prudery: “Victorians inherited a view of human nature that saw moral traits as radically plastic. This meant that every book, every play, every conversation, indeed, every aspect of one's environment, was viewed as contributing either positively or negatively toward the development of one's character.”
Did the fabled Phoenicians exist? “They were celebrated throughout the ancient world as fearless merchant adventurers—yet they remain as elusive as ever.”
Critics aren’t critical enough, says Ben Yagoda: “I hate to sound like a philistine, but audience-critic discrepancies often occur when a work is less than pleasant to sit through, whether because of The Sorrow and the Pity–like length (a growing problem, pun intended) or grim subject matter. Take last year’s Best Picture winner, Moonlight, which has a 98 critics’ and 79 audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and which I haven’t seen. The Rotten Tomatoes blurb calls it ‘The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.’ I can get that at home.”
Not all contemporary music is atonal. Read Robert Reilly: “The 1960’s symphony audiences were frequently treated to variations on a three-piece program: two great pieces from the standard repertory—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss—and a third, by a ‘contemporary’ composer, which would be nothing less than cacophonous ugliness. New listeners might have wondered, ‘Is this really music?’ and ‘Why is anybody listening to this?’, yet even prestigious magazines like Gramophone or (the now-defunct) Musical America always found something to praise. At the time, it seemed senseless that composers no longer wrote beautiful music, or that we somehow already knew the names of all great composers. Many complained, but Robert Reilly, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, did something. Starting in 1995, his Crisis Magazine monthly columns reviewed hundreds of recordings featuring ignored or forgotten composers, past and present, and included the occasional interview, such as with composers David Diamond and Gian Carlo Menotti. Surprised by Beauty, a selection of these columns, first appeared in 2002. The present ‘revised and expanded’ edition, co-written with journalist Jens F. Laurson, far exceeds the earlier book’s achievement.”
“In the midst of the ‘fake news’ hysteria last year, Google launched a project to help curate reliable information for its readers by identifying articles and sites that need fact-checking.” It’s junk.
Essay of the Day:
In National Affairs, Rishabh Bhandari and Thomas Hopson argue that “identity politics” is a problem on the left and the right:
“Many observers of this problem, especially on the right though increasingly on the left as well, tend to explain it by resorting to critiques of ‘identity politics.’ But identity politics is something we tend to see others doing while failing to recognize that we are doing it ourselves. And because we tend to miss the breadth of its scope and reach, we fail to see not only how central it is to the trouble with our politics but also how it might be overcome.
“Identity politics is not just a problem of the left. It is a way of thinking that pervades our self-understanding. Our rancorous political conversation now consists of three competing theories of identity in America — three stories of how our differing backgrounds should shape our common political life. One of these (espoused by a significant swath of the left but increasingly co-opted by an influential minority on the right) treats politics as a continuous struggle across racial lines, and so conceives of coalitions on racial grounds. Another (advanced more commonly on the right in our time) insists that the principled distinction in our politics is not between racial groups but along the legal line of citizens versus non-citizens. Finally, the third theory of identity (espoused by some elites of both parties, and barely aware of itself as a theory of identity at all) views the other two schools of thought as pernicious and proposes its own form of identity defined by an ideal of cosmopolitan dignity.
“Each of these theories, as practiced, is unstable. And each rejects the other two as un-American without really quite understanding them. It is this problem — our country's conceptual blind spot on identity — that drives so much of our present polarization.”
Photos: Niagara Falls observation point
Poem: Julia Shipley, “The Glass Eye Factory”
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