John A. Graham's Culture Tours

I do not do New Year's Resolutions, but this may come close to it.  I do plan to resume blogging in 2015, after taking off the better part of a year.  I know of no better topic to begin with than a reminder concerning John Graham's 2015 tours.  Go to his website, here and check out the offerings for 2015.  John is offering a new tour this year, concentrating on the highlands, first in Armenia and then in remote Tusheti.  By all means, check it out.  You know you want to go.

Philip Jenkins on the Reformation, both Protestant and Islamic

     2017 will mark the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation. In The Breaking of Images, noted Baylor scholar and author Philip Jenkins gets a jump on the anticipated flurry of commentary. The occasion of his piece is David Motadel's recent review of "The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image-Breaking in Christianity and Islam" by James Noye. As Jenkins notes, "the review, and the associated scholarship, raises important questions about how we conceive of the Reformation, how we teach it, and significantly, how we will commemorate the 500th anniversary of the event in 2017." 

     In this article, Jenkins presents two important conclusions. The first one is certainly at variance with the broadly held perception of the Reformation--that is, of course, if any view of the movement (outside of scholarly circles) could said to be broad these days. My evangelical college students are as oblivious to this era and its implications for their beliefs as they are of any other historical period. That is not to say that I made any systematic study of the Reformation back in my Protestant days either. The Reformation personalities never interested me (and still do not). My understanding was the conventional one--that the movement corrected abuses in the Roman Catholic Church and made the Bible available to the common man.  (My particular sect never devoted much attention to the movement, as we believed they did not go nearly far enough, misguidedly emphasizing "reformation" rather than "restoration.")

     Jenkins (and Noye) would counter these comfortable, self-affirming assumptions with the proposition that "Iconoclasm was central to the Reformation experience, not marginal, and not just a regrettable extravagance."  In other words, the main thrust of the Reformation was the destruction of the images.

"For anyone living at the time, including educated elites, the iconoclasm was not just an incidental breakdown of law and order, it was the core of the whole movement, the necessary other side of the coin to the growth of literacy. Those visual and symbolic representations of the Christian story had to decrease, in order for the world of the published Bible to increase. In terms of the lived experience of people at the time, the image-breaking is the key component of the Reformation. In the rioting and mayhem, a millennium-old religious order was visibly and comprehensively smashed....in effect removing popular access to the understanding of faith and the Christian story."

No doubt my reception into Orthodoxy led me to reevaluate the Reformation, this time from the sidelines. Any deeper insight, however, I attribute to Eamon Duffy's brilliant and magisterial The Stripping of the Altars, simply one of the best corrective works of historical scholarship ever written.  

      Jenkins' first proposition may not trouble Reformation apologists, as I doubt many have ever anguished over the rampage against the images. His second observation, however, will be harder to digest, namely:  "Analogies between the European Reformation and contemporary Islamism are much closer than many Protestants would like to admit." Now before the sputtering starts, let's be perfectly clear about what Dr. Jenkins is proposing.  He is not comparing Protestant theology to Wahhabism, for example.  Nor is he addressing the specific truth claims of either body.  To forestall the expected rebuttals, Jenkins states that "I am speaking very specifically about attitudes to images in religious devotion, and the absolute supremacy of the written text, with the physical iconoclasm that followed from those positions. Could I make that any clearer?"

     Jenkins explains:



"Like Calvinism, Wahhabi Islam urged the destruction of everything that could be seen as a later accretion to the core of the religion, as well as all manifestations of paganism or idolatry.  Since the 1920s, this version of the faith has been the official creed of Saudi Arabia, and variants of it are found among Islam's violent and extreme movements.

For present purposes, it is the Wahhabi tradition that has unleashed the savage destruction of shrines and holy places that has been so widely deplored in the past half-century or so. This includes the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan, the attempted eradication of the glorious shrines and libraries of Timbuktu, and the annihilation of most of the ancient shrines and tombs around Mecca itself. Some Egyptian Islamists fantasize about eradicating all the ruins of pagan ancient Egypt, including the Pyramids themselves. Modern Westerners are rightly appalled by such acts as desecrations of humanity's cultural heritage. But such outrage demonstrates a near-total lack of awareness of the West's own history. Nothing that the Islamists have done in this regard would cause the sixteenth century Protestant Reformers to lose a moment's sleep. They would probably have asked to borrow hammers and axes so they could join in."

     Dr. Jenkins also raises an eyebrow or two at the typical Western reaction to Islamist extremism, most often expressed in the hope (and need) for an Islamic "Reformation." Our progressive interpretation of the Christian Reformation as a triumph of reason and moderation over superstition is, in his estimation, "an extremely distorted view." Jenkins finds the movement to be anything but, instead characterized by extremism, violence and destruction.

     And so, the real take-away from this article is that Islam actually is going through its own Reformation, and has been doing so for the last hundred years or so, "exemplified by the Wahhabis and Salafists.  That's the problem."  The destruction of the Shrine of the Prophet Jonah in Iraq by ISIS is only the most recently manifestation of this particular pathology. Jenkins detects similar motivations between such recent barbarism and the iconoclastic rampages of the European Reformation. 

     Most Reformation apologists will simply refuse to accept any legitimate correlation between the two eras. The Reformers saw themselves as stripping away the corrupting accoutrements of the established church, and in so doing returning to the pure faith. How does this rational differ, exactly, from the motivations of today's Islamists? But there is an even more fundamental unity between the two movements. Both adhere to the "absolute supremacy of the written text, with the physical iconoclasm that followed from those positions." This bibliolatry would not doubt be denied by most heirs of the Reformation. And yet, words do have meaning. The belief and trust in the Bible itself, rather than the Trinity, seeps out from countless hymns, sermons, publications, and the very language of evangelicalism. This is no straw man, as I have observed it up close.

     And so, the Reformation, for better or worse, realigned and reset the Christian faith for many. According to Dr. Jenkins, we may now very well be spectators as Islam undergoes the same wrenching process. 

  

The Kennan Diaries--Part 2

This is the second installment of selections from The Kennan Diaries:  George F. Kennan, edited by Frank Costigliola.  

The first entry from 1936 naturally caught my attention, as Kennan found himself in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. While I might quibble here and there, I found that his observations largely rang true of this proud and idiosyncratic people.  He accuses Georgians of laziness--perhaps the cardinal sin for someone of Kennan's Midwestern Presbyterian background--but it is a noble laziness.  His account agrees with that written by W.E.D. Allen just a couple of years later.  Both men foresaw that the Georgians would outlast the Russians--just like they had everyone else.

Kennan's entry from 1933 displayed his lifelong pessimism (even at age 28) about the trajectory of his own nation.  He exhibited little patience with the foibles of his countrymen.  Kennan expected the worst, and the broad American culture rarely failed to disappoint.  But an entry from 1939 revealed that he remained at heart, a thoroughly "old" American who sneered at the cheap sentimentality of the British.

 . 

1933

Riga, January

     "America, after all, is too broad and confusing a conception to warrant any genuine loyalty. What have I in common with the average southerner, or the New York Jew, or any one of a hundred types? America is hardly a national conception anymore. It is a sort of international entity. The overflow from the entire world has seeped into a great territory and has drowned out the heritage of my fathers. There it lies now, this human overflow, sprawling out over the continent in all its ignorance and all its sordidness, a society conceived in selfishness and dedicated to the proposition that one man's suffering is no other man's business, incapable of regulating its own public life, waiting stupidly for the advent of catastrophe."

 

1936

The Caucasus, March
    
     "Kutaisi and Tiflis were too much alike to be described separately. They are essentially oriental cities, cities of the Near East. Hot sunshine, dust, overcrowding, intense street life, poverty, disease, and deceit seemed to be their main characteristics.
     The Georgians are a lazy, dirty, tricky, fiercely proud, and recklessly brave people. They never seem to work unless they have to. The Transcaucasus is the spiritual home of the drug store cowboy. The streets are packed with loafers at all hours of the day.
     Transcaucasian filth is the filth of the Orient. Compared to it, Russian filth seems earthy and wholesome.
     The Georgians claim to have acquired their trickiness from their dealings with the Armenians. However this may be (and to the outsider it seems an idle question), Tiflis and the entire Trans-caucasus seem to be rampant with corruption, speculation, and crookedness. It is commonly believed that every cashier in Tiflis makes an average of two or three hundred rubles a month on the side, by crooked means. Many of the state funds flow into channels other than those for which they were allotted. Arrears in the payment of wages are a chronic evil which not even the best efforts of the state have been able to alleviate. The teachers seem to be the hardest hit in this respect.
     The pride of the Georgian is well known. He looks down on all the neighboring races, with the possible exception of the Turk, for whom he has a certain respect as a fighter. The Armenian he hates virulently, and the Russian he holds in contempt.
     Being an intense individualist, he has a typically romantic conception of honor and dignity. He will stand being cursed better than he will stand being laughed at. He considers that it is better not to live at all than to live with besmirched dignity. He is willing to fight at the suspicion of a sneer or a slight.
     As a result of this same individualism, he shows great daring and spirit in an individual, hand-to-hand encounter, but makes comparatively poor material for a military organization. The Caucasian military units (I understand there are two divisions of locally recruited troops stationed in the Transcaucasus) look sloppy in comparison with Russian units.
     Although the Georgian nationalists do not like Stalin, they have every reason to be thankful to him. They are still the only remaining independent people of any importance in the Soviet Union. This is borne out by thousands of little indications by the faces and behavior of the people, even by the number of loafers and beggars in the Tiflis streets.
     The Georgians have never regarded themselves as having been conquered by the Russians, or as being a subject race. The Russians, in their view, simply bribed their princes and grained access to their towns. Russian soldiers, they told me, had never subjugated the country districts. At the present time, the Russians were only a tool in the hands of one faction of ambitious Georgians. To hell with them.
     Since the Kirov murder, Moscow's grasp on the Transcaucasus has begun to tighten up. It is doubtful whether Stalin, in the face of the consolidation of his power and his economic success in Russia, will be willing to tolerate much longer the laziness, the backwardness, the corruption, and the defiant, romantic nationalism of his compatriots.
     Georgia will be a hard nut to crack. But Stalin's nutcracker has cracked hard nuts before, and at the present moment it is stronger than ever. Outside observers who have had an opportunity to study Georgia at close range for a long time feel that this contraction of the Moscow nutcracker, when it occurs, will be the best thing that ever happened to the Georgians...
     The country was rich with the remnants of every sort of old culture: Roman, Greek, early Christian, every pre-historic. It was evident that man had scratched out a scanty existence on these barren, almost biblical hills for many a century.
     We passed a dam and a hydroelectric station, built some years ago by a German firm. Over it stood a statue of Lenin. The outstretched arm pointed downward, and, local wit had it that he was indicating to the faithful where they should look for his soul.
     One wondered whether some day that electric station and the statue of Lenin would not join the rich assortment of historical ruins and mementos which littered the surface and the bowels of those hills--whether, a thousand years hence, the era of Russian domination might not be recorded by historians as merely a brief and minor link in the long chain of the history of the Caucasus. It was difficult to believe that the crude stamp of Soviet Muscovy would leave a mark deeper than the mighty cultural influences of Greece and Rome."


1939

London, June 11

     "Sunday. Stayed home all morning. Lunched downstairs. Anna Freud came over in the afternoon, a middle-aged woman with tired, deep eyes and a sensitive, intelligent face which, once seen, will not readily be forgotten.
     Later we went downtown. We walked around past Buckingham Palace and past a park where the ponds were beautiful and full of ducks and smelled abominably.... Thence to a big movie house, where we saw Goodbye, Mr. Chips and I was disgusted at the sentimentality and romanticism with which the British upper-class loves to surround itself."

The Kennan Diaries: Part 1

I am currently working my way through the recently published The Kennan Diaries:  George F. Kennan, edited by Frank Costigliola.  The journals of interesting people make for compelling reading, and so I expect to finish within a few days.  Born in 1905, Kennan recorded his first journal entry at age 11.  He penned his last 88 years later at age 99, two years before his death at 101 years of age.   

I would venture to say that most Americans today have never heard of the man.  History, however, will be kind to Kennan, I think.  In the realm of foreign diplomacy, commentators and scholars increasingly reference him for insight into the particular crisis of the month.  In time, I believe the writings of George F. Kennan will perhaps be to the 20^th-century what Toqueville’s are to the 19^th. 

Characterized by endless frustrations and set-backs, Kennan’s career in the Foreign Service did not, on first glance, appear particularly successful.  Indeed, in a fit of exasperation, he declared that he was nothing more than a “glorified clerk.”  An intense man, Kennan immersed himself so completely into Soviet Russia during his first posting there that he suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown.  His two ambassadorial postings—to the Soviet Union in 1952 and to Yugoslavia in 1961—ended disastrously.  For all his brilliance, Kennan had a penchant for the injudicious and careless remark, which torpedoed his ambassadorships.

Kennan’s legacy, however, is to be found in his written word.  He is best known, of course, for the “Long Telegram” of 1946, from which the Cold War policy of Containment evolved.  He advised neither compromise nor confrontation with the Soviet Union, and advocated the strengthening of institutions at home, as well as the rebuilding of Europe (the Marshall Plan was largely his idea.)  Very quickly, however, successive American administrations molded his idea into whatever they wanted it to mean.  And so, Kennan spent much of the last 50 years of his life explaining why the pursuits of particular policies were not at all what he meant.  As a discredited Cassandra, sidelined from any real input into policy, his warnings went generally unheeded. 

The reason Kennan is somewhat back in vogue now is that History has proven him to have been prescient more often than not.  He scorned the notion of an ideological “war on Communism” (as he would later scorn the notion of a “war on terror”).  He was appalled at the arms race and opposed the expansion of nuclear armaments into Europe, advancing the idea of a united and demilitarized Germany.  Kennan spoke out against the Vietnam War early on, and enthusiastically backed Eugene McCarthy in 1968.  He worried that the fall of the Soviet bloc was “too sudden.”  He opposed our intervention into Somalia upon supposedly humanitarian grounds.   Kennan thought the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe to be the worst foreign policy blunder of his lifetime.  This, of course, was before George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.  At age 97, he and Eugene McCarthy met in Washington to speak out against this folly.  To dismiss him as a simple isolationist is to totally misunderstand the thrust of his arguments.  Kennan believed that the best approach abroad was to strengthen those domestic institutions that would bind the American people together and give meaning and structure to our larger society. 

The great irony of Kennan’s career is that he is credited with articulating our Cold War strategy against Soviet Russia, while concurrently pursuing a lifelong infatuation with all things Russian.    Kennan even liked to think of himself as Russian, writing “my Russian self…is much more genuine than the American one.”  In a letter to his sister, he noted that he would “rather be sent to Siberia among them (which certainly would happen to me …if I were a Soviet citizen) than to live in Park Avenue among our own stuffy folk.”  Kennan despised the Soviet government, but as his journals clearly illustrate, this was not from any ideological opposition to Communism (for he was scathing in his criticism of American capitalism and the bourgeoisie), but rather from the harsh paranoid Soviet policies that limited the contact he so desired with average Russians.

His journals are a rare treat, and I will be posted some excerpts, in chronological order. 

1928

Washington, March 17

     "I pace the city like a man who is lost:  across the viaduct, into the muddy paths of Rock Creek Park where the snow has not yet melted, through the lines of white-pillared houses between Sixteenth Street and the Park.  I know this city as I know my own name, and yet there is something which I cannot find.  Somewhere, in one or another of these quiet streets, there must be genuine beauty and life, to solve the riddle.  Somewhere there must be the hidden key of significance, to unlock the meaning of this preposterous, mocking Sunday afternoon!

     Or is there no key?  Does all the life and purpose of this country flow so relentlessly into its workshops and its offices that on the days when these are closed there is nothing left but a vast, senseless desolation of stone and steel and aimless motion?  A world of lost faces, drifting helplessly in the vacuum of their own restlessness?"


Reval [Tallinn], August 5

     Week-end visit to Carlson at Hapsal.

     "I leave Reval in an execrable humor.  I feel physically tired and repulsive; I hate the world, and the world hates me.  I resent Reveal, and all the people in it; it angers me that I should have to visit Carlson when I do not want to.... It was kind and good of Carlson to ask me.  He meant well by it.  Yet what right have these people to force on me their drab world and their rigorous, middle-class standards?  What right have they, to demand, as they will, that I adapt myself to their conventions, that I play up to their weaknesses and their prejudices?

     We sit a long time at dinner, the Carlson and the Britisher chatting, while I sulk.... And what can these people know of that hope and that mystery, sitting here and chatting their foreign-colony gossip?  Their whole lives have degenerated into foreign colony gossip and they would like to pull mine down to their same level.

     The Britisher asks me if I play bridge.  I say yes, but that I do not intend to play it in Reval.  I say that I expect to do some studying and in general to be pretty busy.

     The Britisher laughs.  'That's what they all say', he replies, 'but before long they are playing around and having as good a time as the rest of them.'

       That makes my blood boil.  Damn him, do I look like the 'rest of them?'. Does he think that I, too, have so little strength of character, so few resources within myself, that I will be forced to seek refuge from boredom, as they have done, in the dull pettiness of foreign-colony social life?

     In the morning I feel stuffy and bilious.  Sunshine floods the cool garden, mocking my bitterness.  At breakfast, I sense the hostility.  I am not surprised.  I deserve it.  Before the others are through eating, Mrs. Carlson suggest that I amuse myself as I see fit.  I take the hint and excuse myself.  As I walk away, I can feel the remarks which I cannot hear.  They are all against me.  I am not their kind."


Reval, September 5

     "I was overcome with an unbearable depression.  It seemed to me that America was full of puzzled young men living tragedies, seeking pitifully in the results of their occupations some excuse for the throwing away of their own lives."


Reval, September 6

     "I feel, sometimes, the temptation to escape from the ordinary futile trend of our times by visiting strange places, doing strange things, seeing strange people.  There is always the allure about the place where no American has ever been, and one feels, when one gets there, that one has shaken off the shackles of his own environment, and has elevated himself above his fellow-citizens who stayed at home.
    
     It is a dangerous mistake.  The period of discovery is nearing its close.  Scourged by boredom, nitwits pursue the rare and exotic to the ends of the earth.  There is little that remains unseen, undescribed.  Halliburton's travel lecturers, wealthy professors, they all swarm through the few dim regions that have thus far resisted the twentieth century.  Anybody can travel, who has health and persistence.  Talking movies, radio, radio movies, these will soon destroy the few small fragments of the unusual which have still been
preserved from the profane view.
    
     Where, then, lies the escape from the squirrel-cage?  Where is the opportunity to raise one's self, by sacrifice and hardship, if need be, out of the whirlpool of the commonplace?

     It lies in depth, rather than breadth.  Our civilization is like a body of water which, lacking profundity, spreads out over its own banks and floods the countryside with a thin sheet of stagnant water.  Like a glutton reaching for new and rare morsels, heaving undigested those which he already has, it fastens with fleeing, uncomprehending curiosity on one thing after another, strips each of its coverings, gapes idiotically at it, and finally discards it again in a library or museum.  Always something new, for God's sake, something new.

     Yes, the solution lies only in depth.  There is nothing new under the sun, in the ordinary sense excerpt ourselves.  It is not farther away from all that we are familiar with, that we are going to make discoveries, but rather deeper down in our own selves, about which we know everything, and understand nothing.
 

 Reval, October 20

     "That's why I am probably always going to be a considerable radical." [After commenting in letter to sister about how much he despised the "boundless optimism" felt by many Americans about their "perpetual prosperity."]

 

1931

Berlin, May 30
    
     "I rejected the communists, I said, because of their innate cowardice and their intellectual insolence.

     They had abandoned the ship of Western European civilization like a swarm of rats, when they considered it to be sinking, instead of staying on and trying to keep it afloat.  Abandoning the ship, they had grasped at a theory for economic adjustment, possibly right though somewhat antiquated, and had hoped by means of this theory to cross at a bound the gulf across which the rest of mankind had been struggling through centuries of slow and painful progress.  They had credited their own intelligence with powers far greater than those of all previous generations, had laughed at all the things which have stirred and troubled men for centuries, had called all their forefathers and most of their contemporaries hopeless fools.  I was not a religious man, I said, but this impertinence struck me as a form of sacrilege, cultural and intellectual sacrilege, if you will, as a tremendous blasphemy against all the previous struggling and suffering and sacrificing of the human animal.  I felt that it must some day be punished as all ignorant presumption and egotism must be punished.

     I tried to make it clear that this applied to communism only in its international aspect.  As a purely Russian phenomenon it might have a different meaning; for Russia it might be a constructive necessary development in a certain sense.  For us in the West, though, it could only be regarded as a Untergangserscheinung, a sign of retrogression."


1932

Riga, May 7

     "I returned from London on the George Washington, as I recall.  There were several hundred Rotarians on board.  I find this entry in a notebook:  Several hundred Rotarians on board.  I seek their company, somewhat shyly, not because if affords me any pleasure or profit, but because I want to find something in their way of thought to which I can attach myself.  After all, if I am not an American, then I am nothing at all.
    
     It strikes me that while they are all nice people, there is not a real lady or gentleman among them.  These are the people whose interests I am supposed to defend.  I am not sorry to do it; they are good naïve people, most of them--kind and generous.  They work hard at home and deserve their place in the sun.  But they are children, and it is a bore to have to protect children from their environment when you cannot discipline them and teach them to protect themselves.

     Also from the notebook:

     Golf is a game for people who like walking but are afraid of being left to their own thoughts.

     Bridge is a game for people who don't even like to walk."

My Dad

My dad was born 100 years ago today.  Anyone who lives long enough to say this of a parent must themselves consider the lengthening shadows of their own mortality.  But he has now been gone for almost 29 years, and a day does not pass that I do not think of him.  He was my hero.

My dad was born in the Texas Hill Country, on his grandfather’s farm, about 3 miles up Gann’s Creek from where it empties into the Lampasas River at the village of Maxdale.  The second son of Henry and Lillie, he was given the name “John L Henry” after his maternal grandfather and his own father, who himself was named after a favorite uncle.  For those unfamiliar with our state, the Hill Country is a rugged region in central Texas, characterized by rocky hills of cedar and live oaks, idyllic valleys watered by clear running streams, and home to deer and sheep and goats.  It is, frankly, the best part of our state—not necessarily for just the aesthetics, but rather for the quality of its citizens.  They are a straight-forward people who look life head-on, yet seem to appreciate the simple joys of living.  Hill Country folk tend to look west, rather than east, back to the Old South.  Slavery never tainted the region, and the defeatism and class divisions that weigh so heavy in the South find no home here.  From what I can gather, it was an egalitarian culture, with few of the very wealthy or the desperately poor.  Differences in circumstances were measured in number of acres owned, but most everybody lived much the same.  Today it is increasingly home to the elite, who want a ranch hangout or deer lease within easy driving range of Austin or San Antonio.  But back in the day, it was more of a hardscrabble place, where farmers and ranchers had to work hard to pull a living from the rocky soil.  Except for my college years, I have never lived there.  But I have spent my entire life going back there.  In his youth, my son called it "the Old Country." I like that.

My grandparents, Henry and Lillie, were grade school sweethearts, living on either side of the Lampasas River.  They were a perfectly yoked team, you might say, complimenting each other and making a happy home for their offspring. The stories that came down in our family—and those I’ve added from the cousins now long gone—all speak to the good times of a bygone era.  Decades ago, after our family had been gone from this region for many years, I sought out my dad’s kin.  Once these cousins learned I was the grandson of Henry and Lillie, then all doors opened for me, for it seemed that they were everyone’s favorite cousins.

I get the idea that they were interested in the larger world around them, and not just obsessed with getting the crop laid by, as important as that was.  A town aunt enabled my granddad and his sisters to receive an excellent education at the Wedemeyer Academy.  The sisters went on to graduate from college.  My granddad took a keen interest in politics—perhaps too much so.  He was on the school board for the little rural school down the road from their last farm.  My grandmother came from humbler means, and worked in a department store to help support her widowed mother and unmarried sisters.  Quite by chance, I discovered an article she submitted to a journal in 1916.  During the 1920s, they owned a victrola and would occasionally dance around the parlor together at night.  Lillie was a joyous Christian, faithful to her church.  She usually sang while she worked.  She could play the musical instruments available to them—piano, organ, violin, accordion, French harp, etc.  She bobbed her hair in the mid 1920s.

My dad had a lifelong love affair with horses.  My granddad and his sisters sold the farm when my dad was five.  But even at this young age, my granddad would place his son on old Star, the gentle mare that the family had for so long, and then my dad would ride down to Maxdale.  There, one of the men at the general store would bring the mail out to him, and then the little boy and Star would trot back home.  Within a year or two of his death, I remember my dad racing across our big hay meadow on his quarter horse, lariat in hand, after a steer that had peeled away from the corral.  And so, of my dad’s 71 years, at least 66 of them were spent on horseback.

The family moved around a bit after leaving Maxdale, first living on Lillie’s aunt’s place, then near Henry’s uncle.  In about 1928, they purchased a farm of their own in the Harmon community. They raised a number of crops--vegetables, cotton, grain—and had some cattle, dairy and otherwise, as well as hogs and sheep.  The family, at that time, consisted of four boys and an only daughter.  The four boys were a handful, as the saying goes.  I once talked with a woman who went to school with my dad, and whose two sisters married my granddad’s cousins.  I think she had been a little sweet on my dad.  She more or less characterized the oldest brother as the proud one, my dad as the smart one, the third son as the mischievous one, and the fourth son as the good one—and she had them pegged. 

My grandmother doted on her oldest son, which caused him to hold himself aloof from his brothers.  This attitude insured that he would be the brunt of pranks instigated by my dad and his next younger brother.  What one wouldn’t think of, the other would.  Sometimes they would enlist the services of the good-natured fourth brother, though they could just as easily turn their attentions to his discomfort, as well. These stories are legion in the family, but two of them stand out as favorites—and both concern my oldest uncle’s courting days.  One night, my uncle had a female guest over to the house.  The other children were instructed to stay out of the way, and leave the front parlor to the young couple.  My dad and his next younger brother climbed up the ladder into the attic.  They took a cat with them as they went.  There they opened the stovepipe coming up through the attic from the parlor.  As it was warm weather, there was no fire in the store, so it seemed a perfect opportunity to stuff the cat down the stovepipe.  The courting downstairs quickly broke up amidst the screeching cat and the soot.  My dad shimmied down the ladder and out the back door as quick as he could.  His partner, however, was rolling on the floor of the attic, convulsed with laughter.  By the time my uncle had composed himself enough to effect an escape, it was too late.  My granddad was waiting at the foot of the ladder, belt in hand.  Another story had the two brothers sneaking off to the barn as the older brother was preparing to ride off to visit a neighbor girl.  Before their brother could leave, they got a water hose and gave his horse an enema.  The results were as you would expect when my uncle mounted his horse and spurred her on.  And then there was the story I learned only in recent years.  My grandparents and the younger children had gone into town.  Left at home alone, my dad and his younger brother gave each other Mohawk haircuts, stripped down to nothing or next to it, then spent the day galloping around the neighborhood bareback, whooping and hollering as the wild Indians that they were.

My dad was the entrepreneurial one of the bunch.  His father gave him an acre out of the corner of the place where he could raise whatever he wanted and keep the profits for himself.  From this patch my dad raised enough cotton to purchase an old roadster in his teenage years.  My dad wanted to go to Texas A&M and become a county agricultural engineer.  He graduated high school in 1932, but my granddad talked him into working for a year first.  My dad said that by the time that year was up, he knew that there would be no college in his future.  My granddad was, in fact, deeply in debt.  My dad told me once that he never knew they were poor.  The family lived modestly, but Henry and Lillie enjoyed life and each other, so much so that their children never contemplated the fact that they might be poor. 

In the fall of 1933, my dad, his next youngest brother and my granddad went out to the High Plains to pick cotton.  A cousin made good out there and there was work to be had.  My granddad and uncle returned home, but my dad stayed on a while in the Panhandle.   He returned to central Texas just before Christmas, 1933.  He pulled up to the farmstead and received a shock.  The place was empty—no stock in the barns, no chickens and turkeys pecking around the yard, no furniture in the house, no farm equipment of any sort.  My dad’s own personal horse and saddle were gone as well.  At some point, their kindly German neighbor, Mr. Falkenberg, stepped over and explained what happened.  After the stock market crash of 1929, agriculture prices dropped precipitously, and then leveled off.  My grandfather thought that this would be a good time to expand, while prices for equipment and stock were low as well.  The big mercantile establishment (really a bank) in Lampasas outfitted him in new farm equipment and stock.  Of course, the leveling off after the drop in prices turned out to be just a plateau before they plummeted to new depths.  My granddad was never able to pull out of the hole.  Finally, just before Christmas of 1933, the Lampasas firm arrived on the farm and repossessed everything, including my dad’s personal horse and saddle.

I have often thought about this day, my 19-year old dad standing there in the yard of their lost farm, and how it affected him.  I know this: It marked him, as the old country saying goes.  This, and the events that soon followed, marked him for life.

My dad found his family living in a nearby town.  My granddad was able to keep his old truck, and was earning a bit of money here and there by hauling for hire.  Money had to be found somewhere, for my grandmother, at age 44, was expecting their sixth child.  She had not had a child in ten years, though there had been two miscarriages along the way.  Their doctor warned her about becoming pregnant again.  My grandfather tried to borrow money for a hysterectomy, but to no avail.  And so, in late February, she gave birth to my last uncle.  Their regular doctor was unavailable, and Lillie refused the expense of going to the hospital in Temple.  Complications set it and her condition deteriorated.  At last, they took her to the hospital anyway, but it was too late and she soon died.  Her body was taken to her grandparent’s home, from where the funeral was held, followed by burial in the family plot under the live oaks, not 300 feet away.

Times were desperate.  Family members stepped in to help, as much as they could, but my grandfather resisted the breaking-up of the family.  My dad and his next younger brother took action to help the family and provide for their younger siblings still at home.  In April 1934, my dad joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era government assistance program.  Half of his salary would be automatically sent home for the benefit of his family.  Within the last two years, my aunt--the sole surviving sibling--told me with tears in her eyes how it was my dad’s money that had fed them during these tough times.

The Corps transferred my dad to a camp in East Texas, where he was stationed for two and a half years, with temporary postings in the Pecos Mountains and in Oregon as well.  He learned the skill of land surveying in the CCCs.  This would be the profession he would follow for the rest of his life.  Some might say he was a self-made man, and of course, in some sense he was.  But he never loudly made this claim himself.  He never discounted the assistance and training he received from the government during the mean years of the Depression.  In later life, somewhat awash in prosperity, he never complained about having to pay taxes.  He would say, “If I hadn’t made it, I wouldn’t have to pay it.”  My dad was a citizen, in the best sense of that word.  And he remained throughout life, a good Democrat (though with one slip.)

While stationed in East Texas, my dad met my mother.  He saw her at work in a field as he drove down a country road.  Today, my nephew owns that very same pasture.  I cannot think of two people as different in background and temperament as my dad and mother.  And yet, they made a good team.  He could put things together and make things happen, while she would see that they hung on to some of it.  In her own way, my mother was a great woman, but this is not her story I’m telling today. 

Her immediate family was poor, though it had not always been so.  Her great-grandfather had been prosperous, a gin-owner with close to 800 acres of land.  But there were many grandchildren, and so this turned out to be of no great advantage to my mother’s father.  He compounded things by marrying—at age 16—the daughter of one of his grandfather’s sharecroppers.  My mother’s father was a quiet man, peculiar in the peculiar ways of his very peculiar family.  His new bride was of a different sort—domineering, opinionated, stubborn, and not a little crazy.  The well was poisoned early in her relations with her mother-in-law, and with six children in nine years, their lives never rose above the bleakness of a Southern sharecropper’s life.  Unlike my dad’s family, there are no stories of good times or amusing anecdotes—only the struggle to live. 

My mother’s mother doted on the two youngest children, and more or less ignored the others, including my mother.  My mother’s next youngest brother was best of the lot, and the only one who emerged from that family seemingly unscathed.  He was a prince of a man, who died all too soon.  The others—including my mother—carried the scars of their upbringing.  She was not particularly self-reflective, and was often deeply suspicious of those outside her immediate family circle.  She did not understand people that were different from herself.  Looking back, this is such a contrast with my dad’s open and easy manner with everyone.  Only after his death did I fully realize the extent that he had moderated her inclinations.  But like I say, they were a good team.  And if I am still living and blogging in five years, I will tell her story more fully, and (I trust) more sympathetically. 

Her mother never liked my dad.  As my mother was packed and leaving home to make a life with with my dad, her mother followed her daughter out to his roadster, telling my mother that if she left with that man, then not to ever come back.  He was twenty-two, she seventeen.  The newlyweds returned to Central Texas at first, but my dad soon discovered that conditions were even worse there than in East Texas. And so, they did return to my mother’s home—my dad with no visible prospects.  My mother’s mother worried about this no-good son-in-law.  Her solution was to sew him a cotton-picking sack.  He took one look at it and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know I’m not going to do that.”  He realized that there was no future in it, as they say.  His mother-in-law took it that he was too good to pick cotton.  She quipped to a kinsman, “I don’t know what John is going to do.  We already have a President and a Governor.”  No, she never warmed up to him, not even when she died in the house he built her, cared for by the daughter she ignored.  I doubt she would have changed her mind had she lived to see him end up supporting the better part of her family, at one time or another, for the rest of his life.

My dad got a job as a surveyor with an engineering company based in Tyler, Texas.  Soon, he was managing their operations in Arkansas.  My dad always had on-going side ventures.  He built or remodeled a couple of houses in Arkansas, moving his dad and sister and youngest brother into one and renting the other.  He purchased a Lion gas station and grocery story.  My mother ran the store and pumped gas while he was surveying.  Back home in East Texas, he starting running a few cows on my mother’s family place (actually owned by her grandmother.)  One by one, he also started buying out all the heirs.  By the time he was 29, he and my mother owned the entire 200 acre farm that her great-grandfather had given her grandfather.  Other farms have come and gone, but this one—known simply as “the Old Place”—is sacrosanct. 

In 1946, my dad and mother moved back from Arkansas.  In that year, he founded his own land surveying business, with this August marking our 68th year in operation.  He was a hard worker and his company grew quickly.  The 1950s and 1960s were the period of greatest expansion, with surveying crews working in a number of states.  His largest project involved surveying a pipeline route from the outskirts of Philadelphia to the outskirts of Chicago.  My dad gained a reputation as a fair man who treated everyone with respect.  He enjoyed poking fun at pretense, and always dressed in plain work khakis, or in later years, jeans.  He commanded great loyalty from his co-workers and never asked them to do anything that they did not see him do first.  He was my great example of how one is to treat their fellow man.

My dad loved his work, and he pursued it relentlessly.  But at heart, he was a cowboy.  And so, our lives revolved around the farms, cattle, and the feeding and care of same.  In 1962, he purchased his last farm, which we simply referenced as the “the big place.”  He spent the last 20+ years of his life, working on this ranch, first part-time, and then full-time in his “retirement.”  Unlike most, this was a real working ranch.  Most of the time I spent with my dad was in going back and forth to these farms, feeding or just checking on the cattle.  For someone who grew up around cattle all their life, I know as little about them as anybody.  I was never interested, and it simply never “took” with me.  I did, however, relish the time spent with my dad and the conversations we would have along the way.  I would have been happy with far fewer cows and more of my dad.  This is not to criticize him, for he could not have been anybody else than who he was.  He and my brother were closer, I would think.  But for the last ten years of his life, at least, I was the one who was with my dad more.  And in the last year of his life, after my brother's death, I think we came to understand each other better than we ever had.

On occasion, I have had people tell me that I remind them of my dad in some way.  This is getting more and more infrequent as time passes, as there are fewer people living who knew him.  Any commonality is probably accidental at best, as I can never be the man he was.  But I would always smile and thank them, not admitting that this was, in fact, the greatest compliment I could ever receive, nor could I admit that I would always choke-up a bit inside, as well.

Memory Eternal, Dad. 

 

 

Thoughts on Ukraine

Sometimes history picks up speed, as is currently the case in Ukraine.  Wise prognostications one day may be made foolish by the next morning’s headlines.  Even so, I want to voice a few thoughts, as we try to sort through breaking news.

In light of Russia’s invasion of Crimea (an act that I in no way condone), we will hear a lot about territorial integrity and respect for national borders and that sort of thing.  That is all well and good.  Borders are—or should be—real and tangible things, essential for any peoples self-understanding as citizens of a particular nation state.    Even a brief review of this region’s history, however, reveals Ukraine’s borders to be less sacrosanct than some.  The nation has been downright geographically amorphous.  Ukraine has, quite literally, been all over the map:  sometimes part of Poland, sometimes part of Lithuania, sometimes the heart of Russia, and occasionally—briefly—on its own.  The boundary and size of each configuration have shifted and slid between the Baltic and Black Seas.  In short, Ukraine’s borders are no more etched in stone than those drawn in 1919 on a map of Europe by Woodrow Wilson—on his hands and knees in a Versailles drawing room.

The current configuration of Ukraine is a construct of the Soviet system, and not anything rooted in much of any historical precedent.  Peoples were uprooted from where they had lived since time immemorial and transplanted elsewhere.  In their remaking of the world, the Soviets shifted borders and people at will, with little regard or concern for what had been.  This problem persists throughout the former U.S.S.R., whether Russians in the Baltic Republics, or in Georgia with its break-away regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, each a construct nurse-maided by Soviet internal politics.    

Take Lvov, for example.  The second city of Ukraine--and something of a gem, by all accounts-- has a relatively brief history as anything “Ukrainian.”  For centuries, this Polish and Jewish city known as Lemburg prospered within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  In the fall-out following the First World War, the city was lumped into Poland, and with good reason.  But 1939 changed everything.  First the Germans came through going east, and then they came through again, retreating, in 1944.  The Soviets took Lvov for their own and added it to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.  Now in control, the Soviets shifted Poland west, adding a hunk of Germany on one side, and taking another hunk away from Poland on the east.  Lvov and the surrounding territory then became part of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1945.  The Jews, of course, had been eliminated, and the Polish residents were relocated to what had just become western Poland, whose German residents in turn had been dispatched further west into East Germany.  Only then was Lvov repopulated with Ukrainians and Russians.  The most anti-Russian (and alarmingly, the most Nazi sympathetic) elements of the victorious opposition spring from this region.

Then there is Kiev itself.  The capital of Ukraine was also the capital of what was known as Kievan Rus for over 300 years.  This memory of Rus is the very wellspring of Russian culture, spirituality and identity itself.  I cannot conceive that Russians could ever be totally unconnected to Kiev—as well as much of what is now “Ukraine”, for that matter.

I remember when the Soviet Union broke-up in 1991.  Looking at the new maps, I was surprised to see that Crimea was attached to Ukraine.  This peninsula has been a lot of things to a lot of people down through the centuries, but it was never Ukrainian.  Crimea and its Russian population was attached to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine only in 1954, for reasons solely pertaining to internal politics and policy. 

Well, what to make of the ousted Yanukovych and his backer, Vladimir Putin?  No one laments the parting of Viktor Yanukovych, a classless act if there ever was one.  Nor should anyone regard it as particularly newsworthy that the ruler of Russia is (was, and probably always shall be) an autocrat.  We should pause to remember that Yanukovych, as bad as he was, assumed that office by an election.  He lost his position--however undeserving--as a result of a revolutionary coup.  A commentator in recent months noted that the U.S. and Russia have changed positions in the world.  We support revolutionaries and insurgents world-wide.  The Russians, for better or for worse, are the voice of conservatism, supporters of the status quo.  And if Vladimir Putin was as all-powerful as we sometimes portray him to be, then Yanukovch would not be in exile.

The Russians have always been concerned with maintaining definable, defensible borders.  Not every country is blessed with having an ocean boundary on each side. 

Few Americans have studied Russia closer, or understood Russians better, than George Kennan.  In the years following the adoption of his Containment Policy, he grew increasingly frustrated with the widespread misinterpretation of what he wrote.  The containment Kennan had in mind was against Soviet Russian militarism, not an ideological war against something called “global communism.”  They were communists, to be sure, but he knew that they were Russians first.  Despite Soviet rhetoric, their actions were first and foremost about securing Russia, not advancing world communism.  That is not to say that this Russian concern does not border on the paranoid, for it often seems that way.  Their concerns are rooted in geography and history, and remain largely the same as they have always been.

This is a rough neighborhood.  Despite whatever new arrangements it might make with the EU and/or the US, Ukraine will have to come to some accommodation with Russia.  The same holds for Georgia and the other former Soviet republics.

In discussing Russia, most American commentators and politicians do not have to reach back for their old Cold war rhetoric, for they never abandoned it to begin with.  To cast this as simply a morality tale, with the forces of progress, freedom, democracy and Western-style economics arrayed against a backward, autocratic, revanchist and resurgent Soviet system is, well, to misunderstand events as they are unfolding.  The situation is far more complex than all that.

I once respected George Will as a commentator.  That was a long time ago.  A recent column dressing-down Putin comes off as particularly shrill, silly and disjointed.  He ridicules Vladimir Putin and reduces him almost to buffoonery, in his words “a small, strutting Mussolini.”  I saw the same smug condescension when Putin saved President Obama from his Syrian disaster, and then again later on in the scorn heaped on his letter to the New York Times.  I thought Putin right on both counts.  I do not do so in this instance.  But, while we may not approve of all of his actions, Vladimir Putin is nobody’s fool.  Resorting to Cold War ad hominem attacks just highlights our own naiveté in the realm of foreign diplomacy.

So, what can we do?--beyond praying for peace, not much.  So what should we do?— beyond praying for peace, even less.  Like I say, it is a tough neighborhood.

         

     

    

 

 

A Few More Reasons to Appreciate John Lukacs

I have recently finished reading Democracy and Populism:  Fear and Hatred (2005), by one of my favorite writers, John Lukacs.  I believe this is my fifth book by Lukacs, and I could do much worse than to devote myself to reading the remaining twenty-five or so.  He has much to say about democracy and a host of isms:  populism, nationalism, progressivism, capitalism, socialism, patriotism, Darwinism, communism, liberalism and conservatism.  There is much here to offend ideologues across the political spectrum; but Lukacs is pushing ninety now, and long past caring.  A few selections, as follows:

On the Enlightenment, 1789 and misreading of history:

…much of the entire (and so largely French) Enlightenment had become boring.  Or at least irrelevant: because of its mechanical and rationalist philosophy of human nature. But here we come to the mistaken view that many conservatives adopted during the twentieth century and that they have even now.  This is that the rise of nationalist anti-liberalism meant a great historical reaction against 1789….And this is the enduring mistake of many conservatives, who despise the “Left” more than they distance themselves from “extremists” on the “Right.”

Two hundred years after 1789 “Right” and “left” still retain some meaning, but less and less.  And much of the same applies to their once offsprings, conservatives and liberals.  For, if conservatives have a fatal inclination to accept populists and extreme nationalists for their allies on the “Right,” the liberals’ misreading of the latter is as bad, if not worse.

Such a misreading of history…is replete with the –alas, still enduring—myopia of liberals about history, indeed about human nature….people are moved by (and at times even worship) evidences of power, rather than by propositions of social contracts.

Hegel…understood that human history did not move like a pendulum, that actions and reactions of ideas—indeed, historical movements—did not quite follow the laws of physics. That recognition was correct; but his conclusions were not. According to his well-known dialectic, Thesis was succeeded by Antithesis, and then from the eventual struggle and confluence of the two a Synthesis was bound to come. But that scenario was too intellectual, idealistic as well as mechanical….What came after 1870 was the emergence and the powerful attraction of two new enormous movements, nationalism and socialism, that turned out to rule most of the history of the twentieth century—indeed, most of the world even now.  They were not “syntheses”…

On Marx and Marxism:

That was but a consequence of Marx’s greatest failure, which was his profoundly mistaken concept of human nature (a concept not entirely different from that of capitalists, Progressives, liberals, economists, etc.): homo oeconomicus, Economic Man—when it became more and more evident that history was formed, and politics dependent upon, how and what large masses of people were thinking (and desiring, and fearing, and hating). That is: during the increasing intrusion of mind into matter.

We must not kick a man when he is down. Marx was an unattractive man but—at least intellectually—he was taking the side of the downtrodden and the poor, especially of the industrial workers (though not of peasants). Moreover, most of his critics miss the vital points, the inherent weakness of the Marxist body of dogma….we ought to look at Marx historically, not philosophically. Marx and Marxism failed well before 1989—not in 1956 and not in 1919 but in 1914. For it was then that internationalism and class consciousness melted away in the heat of nationalist emotions and beliefs….Marxists would never understand—let alone admit—this. They were (and many still are) thinking in categories of class consciousness instead of national consciousness. Marx…entirely failed to understand what nationalism…was. His heavy, clumsy prose droned and thundered against Capitalism and against the State. Hardly a word about the Nation; and of course, not even the slightest inkling…that State and Nation are not the same things.

This brings us to what is perhaps the fundamental Marxist (and also economic; and often liberal) misreading of human nature….what governs the world (and especially in the democratic age) is not the accumulation of money, or even of goods, but the accumulation of opinions.

On Liberalism’s embrace of Darwinism:

Liberalism, in its noblest and also in its most essential sense, had always meant (and faintly, here and there it still means) an exaltation, a defense of the fundamental value and category of human dignity. Darwinism suggests that there was, there is, and there remains no fundamental difference between human beings and all other living beings. In sum: either human beings are unique or they are not. Either thesis may be credible but not both; and this is not merely a religious question.

It is amazing how unquestioningly and enthusiastically American Protestants embraced Darwinism.  This ought to tell us something about the shallowness of their religious beliefs, together with their belief in the progress of democracy.

On Not Suffering Fools Gladly:

The Rev. Shailer Matthews, dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, a celebrated public theologian (and an imbecile)…

On Patriotism, Nationalism and Populism:

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a “people,” justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion.

…the phenomenon of populism which, unlike old-fashioned patriotism, is inseparable from the myth of a people. Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seems to belong to his tribe.

On the Misreading of Communism:

In 1917, wrote William F. Buckley… “history changed gears” – whatever that means.  It is nonsense. The Russian revolutions…were the consequences of a great European war, not the other way around….What matter was not ideological but national. What happened in Russia was Russian….Those were years of mud and ice, smeared and streaked with blood.

Yet Lenin (and Trotsky…) were despicable (and not merely deplorable) murderers and rulers, as was Stalin, if not on occasion, worse. Moreover, compared with Stalin they were fools, without an inkling of statesmanship, without much comprehension of human nature, without the slightest understanding of nationalism—all of these matters that Stalin felt, and learned, and then possessed.

Communism and Communists became more than scapegoats; they were, often thoughtlessly and automatically, attributed as the main sources of anything that was evil.

What was common in the beliefs of just about all of them…was their mistaken view of history—more precisely, of the evolving history of the world. Such a view, at least to some extent, has been shared by myriad other people too who were not necessarily Communist sympathizers: a view which, though badly tattered, remains widespread even now. It is a view inseparable from the general idea of progress, of evolution, of democracy, amounting to the progress of mankind…

There was (and is) Tocqueville’s great maxim: that while the prime sin of aristocratic age was that of pride, that of the democratic age is that of envy….And envy is but one, though widespread, democratic manifestation of the hidden existence of hatreds and of fears. One of the manifestations of the latter was American anti-Communism, the popular substitute for patriotism.

“A beacon on the summit of mountains to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light till time shall be lost to eternity, and the globe itself dissolves, nor leave a wreck behind.” There is something strangely unhistorical and profoundly pessimistic in this vision. And disturbing: for the fate of mankind indeed seems catastrophic if Americans do not free themselves from the thought that they are the last hope of earth.

A misreading of the world after 1945. The-well-justified-American concern should have been with Russian power, not with Communist ideology.

On the New Barbarism:

…Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed playing the role of president, or George W. Bush, who enjoyed playing soldier. Here was the duality of the American character: stunning transformations of personal and sexual and civilizational behavior, involving the dissolution of families, including millions of people who identify and see themselves as “conservatives.”

History is not governed by logic: but we must at least consider that this strange duality cannot exist much longer: that sooner or later the very political structure of democracy may undergo a deep-going and at least for a while irreversible transformation, including mutations that may have already begun.

A symbolic and symptomatic example of the confusion of state and nation and people is the cult of the American flag—a cult more sacrosanct than in many other countries.

A new barbarian feudalism is bound to come in the future: but not yet.

One of the fundamental differences between extremes of Right and Left is this: in most instances hatred moves the former; fear the later.

And the endless pursuit of justice that may lead, and indeed often leads, to the worst of human disasters.

Meanwhile, liberalism and social democracy have, almost inevitably, altered Protestantism, with its reminder of sin first diminishing, then evaporating. But…here and there a radical and nationalist populism…has merged with the reappearing remnants of a fundamentalist Protestantism…a kind of near-fanatical spirituality which, however-because of its shallowness and individual permissiveness-is ephemeral. Among the Eastern, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches of eastern Europe the nationalist and populist characters of the different national churches remain largely what they have been for almost one thousand years.

 

On Woodrow Wilson:

Since not only the importance of ideas but the very importance of events must be judged by their consequences, let us recognize that the then-great revolution maker, the effective destroyer of an old order, was Wilson, not Lenin. That Wilson’s character was unattractive, that his personality was pallid and cramped, that his mind was immature, that the very workings of that mind were strange, that even the otherwise trenchant observation of his postmaster general (“a man of high ideals but of no principles”) was inaccurate, since those very ideas were less than mediocre and customarily superficial—all this is but another example of the iron, even more than of the unpredictability, of history.  “National self-determination” and “Make the world safe for democracy” transformed the history of the twentieth century more than anything else….American foreign policy—indeed, America’s view of the world—have remained Wilsonian ever since…