Amidst all the discussion of the “new atheism” enunciated by the likes of Sam Harris (Letters to a Christian Nation) and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), knowledgeable refutations of their ancient position are most helpful.  One of the world’s most famous philosophical atheists, Anthony Flew, the author of over thirty works devoted to the denial of God’s existence, recently recanted his position in There Is A God:  How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York:  HarperOne, c. 2007).  Flew’s career, began with a 1950 essay, “Theology and Falsification,” that became, Roy  Varghese says, in the book’s Preface, “the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century” (p. viii).  Thereafter, he set forth what is arguably the past century’s most “systematic, comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism” (p. ix).    

Flew introduces this treatise in a very personal way, noting his recent “conversion” to deism, by stating:  “I have now been persuaded to present here what might be called my last will and testament.  In brief, as the title says, I now believe there is a God!” (p. 1).   He early rejected the faith of his father, “one of the leading Methodist writers and preachers in England” (pp. 4-5), and devoted himself to a fearless search for truth, wherever it led.  As a student at Oxford University, he was influenced by philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein.  He also encountered, mainly in sessions of the Socratic Club, the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, who was, he says, “the most effective Christian apologist for certainly the latter part of the twentieth century.  When the BBC recently asked if I had absolutely refuted Lewis’s Christian apologetic, I replied:  “No.  I just didn’t believe there was sufficient reason for believing it.  But of course when I later came to think about theological things, it seemed to me that the case for the Christian revelation is a very strong one, if you believe in any revelation at all’” (p. 24).  Indeed, he remembers sessions in the Socratic Club, where Lewis presided, as models for bona fide philosophical investigation.

He has, all his life, tried to follow Plato’s injunction in The Republic, going “where the evidence leads.”  Consequently, he discarded his youthful infatuation with “left-wing socialist” solutions to social and economic problems.  He studied and wrote on a variety of subjects, including parapsychology and evolutionary ethics.  At Oxford he embraced the “ordinary language” philosophy of Gilbert Ryle and John Austin and, as a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, became “the unappointed but nevertheless recognized spokesman in Scotland for ‘Oxford linguistic philosophy’” (p. 39).  In time, however, he became distressed with the essential “trivialization” of philosophy when it is reduced to linguistic analysis and determined to tackle some of the great questions of life, including the existence of God.  

In his 1966 publication, God and Philosophy, Flew set forth his “systematic argument for atheism” (p. 49), following the familiar pattern of David Hume, an argument he now considers an unpersuasive “historical relic” (p. 52).  Successive books sought to demonstrate the atheist case, and they elicited powerful theistic responses, including books by Alvin Plantinga, an American philosopher who “asserted that belief in God is similar to belief in other basic truths, such as belief in other minds or perception (seeing a tree) or memory (belief in the past).  In all these instances you trust your cognitive faculties, although you cannot prove the truth of the belief in question” (p. 55).  Another American, the “Thomist philosopher Ralph McInerny reasoned that it is natural for human beings to believe in God because of the order, arrangement, and lawlike character of natural events.  Such much so, he said, that the idea of God is almost innate, which seems like a prima facie argument against atheism” (p. 56).  

Granting the weighty arguments of his foes, as well as following where the evidence leads, Flew continually modified and recast his positions.  He acknowledged that Hume, his philosophical mentor, failed to consistently follow his denial of cause and effect when he turned to writing history, giving “no hint of skepticism about either the external world or causation” (p. 58).  He also came to believe in “free will, human freedom,” rejecting the philosophical determinism that generally accompanies atheism.  It became clear to him that “the causes of human actions are fundamentally, and most relevantly, different from the causes of all those events that are not human actions” (p. 60).  With the great German philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, he concluded that physical factors merely “incline, but do not necessitate” human actions (p. 61).  If man has a free will, of course, it leaves open the possibility that there is a non-physical (a metaphysical) dimension to human nature.  Coming to believe in freedom, he notes, “is fully as radical as my change on the question of God” (p. 64).  

While changing his mind regarding human freedom, he “calmly considered” and defended his case for atheism.  He publicly debated the issue with eminent theists, such as William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, William P. Alston, and Ralph McInerny, before various audiences, some of them in the United States numbering in the thousands.  These  debates also led to close friendships with evangelical Christian philosophers, including Gary Habermas of Lynchburg College.  In England, he debated Richard Swinburne, “the best-known defender of theism in the English-speaking world, whose classic treatise, The Coherence of Theism is one of the finest books published in the past century.  And the more he debated, the more he wrote, the more he thought, the more he questioned the position he’d defended for a lifetime!  

Consequently, in a debate at New York University in 2004, he “announced at the start that I now accepted the existence of a God” (p. 74).  He explained that his position largely resulted from “developments in modern science that seemed to point to a higher Intelligence” (p. 74).  Design seems overwhelming evident in our DNA, which shows, “by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together” (p. 75).  He was particularly impressed with the arguments of the Israeli physicists, Gerald Schroeder, whose “Intelligent Design” position commands respect—especially when compared with the “major exercise in popular mystification” set forth by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene!  

Flew now believes “that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence.   I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God.  I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source” (p. 88).  He takes this position primarily because of recent developments in science.  But he has “also been helped by a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments” (p. 89).  In this he “was persuaded above all by the philosopher David Conway’s argument for God’s existence in his book The Recovery of Wisdom:  From Here to Antiquity in Quest of Sophia” (p. 92).  Conway basically defends the position of Aristotle, who insisted the world makes sense only in the light of an ultimate Being who is omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, immaterial, and good.  This ancient, and essentially deistic stance, now seems sound to Flew.

“Although I was once sharply critical of the argument to design,” Flew says, “I have since come to see that, when correctly formulated, this argument constitutes a persuasive case for the existence of God” (p. 95).  Albert Einstein was ever amazed that the universe seemed fundamentally mathematical, containing laws that are “reason incarnate.”  A Divine Mind must have made a rational world.  Accordingly, Einstein said:  “’I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist.  We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages.”  He finds himself mystified by the unknown, but senses that he could learn it all if only he could decipher the languages.  So it is, Einstein concluded, with “’even the most intelligent human being toward god.  We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand those laws.  Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations’” (p. 99).  

Still more, said Einstein:  “’ Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. . . .  This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God’” (p. 102).  Flew cites similar statements by other great physicists, such as Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and Paul A. M. Dirac.  To these giants may be added current scientists who have similar convictions—Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne, Freeman Dyson, Francis Collins, Owen Gingerich, and Roger Penrose.  Comparing the statements of popular atheists, who claim to root their views in science, with those of truly great scientists, make it clear how ineptly writers such as Sam Harris propound their position.  

Consider, importantly, the question concerning the origin-of-life.  “How,” Flew wonders, “can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self-replication capabilities, and ‘coded chemistry’?” (p. 124).  Asserting that it “just happened that way” makes no sense.  He notes that Harvard University’s “Nobel Prize-winning physiologist George Wald once famously argued that ‘we choose to believe the impossible:  that life arose spontaneously by chance’” (p. 131).  Believing the impossible, however, violates the most basic tenets of logic!  Thus, in time Wald admitted:  “’It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions might be brought into some degree of congruence.  This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—that the stuff of which physical reality is constructed in mind-stuff.  It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create:  science-, art-, and technology-making creatures’” (pp. 131-132).  “This,” adds Flew, “is my conclusion.  The only satisfactory explanation of the origin of such ‘end-directed, self-replication’ life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent Mind” (p. 132).  

This “infinitely intelligent Mind” is the Source of all that is.  With the growing consensus regarding the Big Bang beginning of the universe, Flew was forced to acknowledge that “cosmologists were providing a scientific proof of what St. Thomas Aquinas contended could not be proved philosophically; namely that the universe had a beginning” (p. 135).  Aquinas, of course, took this as a matter of faith, revealed in Scripture.  But the Big Bang theory pushes one to acknowledge that everything began, ex nihilo, in an instant.  If so, one must be at least open to the possibility that an omnipotent Being brought everything else into being.  

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One of the most gifted advocates of Intelligent Design is David Berlinsky, a Princeton-educated mathematician.  He is “a secular Jew” whose “religious education did not take” (p. xi).  But he thinks clearly and was aroused by the vapidity of many atheistic arguments to write The Devil’s Delusion:  Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York:  Crown Forum, c. 2008).  Fully understanding the nature of science, he also knows its serious limitations.  Thus those atheists who declare their faith under the pretense of scientific certainty demonstrate little more than their own confusions.  “No scientific theory,” he insists, “touches on the mysteries that the religious tradition addresses” (p. xiv).  Still more:  “While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought” (p. xiv).  Though he may not accept religious principles, they at least makes sense!

Berlinsky begins by citing and examining a variety of statements by eminent contemporary scientists such as Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, who “is not only an intellectually fulfilled atheist, he is determined that others should be as full as he” (p. 3).  Many of them, spinning endless and often arrogant theories regarding the universe, seem “willing to believe in anything” (p. 4).  But when carefully considered, “Neither scientific credibility nor sound good sense is at issue in any of these declarations.  They are absurd; they are understood to be absurd; and what is more, assent is demanded just because they are absurd.  ‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,’ the geneticist Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, ‘in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories’ (my emphasis” (p. 9).  

Nothing is more central to the scientific enterprise than the awareness of the laws of nature.  But great scientists acknowledge, Berlinsky insists, that:  “We do not know why the laws of nature are true, even though we can sense that the question hides some sort of profound mystery” (p. 37).  Consequently, and with good reason, “Every scientist since Newton has placed his allegiance in the world beyond the world” (p. 46).  In part this is because of “the remarkable, strange, and baffling mathematical results that have appeared in theoretical physics over the past twenty years or so” (p. 46).  To many mathematicians, such as Richard Thomas, “’these things cannot be coincidence, they must come from a higher reason.  And that reason is the assumption that this big mathematical theory describes nature’ (italics added)” (p. 46).  There is a mathematical logos giving structure to the deepest dimensions of creation.  

Thus much may be said in defense of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, given its “most powerful statement” by Thomas Aquinas (p. 64).  We understand things, Aquinas argued, following Aristotle, when we fully understand their causes.  To explain why anything exists, he insisted one must posit an Uncaused Cause.  Amazingly, Berlinsky shows, physicists who embrace the Big Bang theory (tracing back all that is to an instant of singularity) find themselves akin to Aquinas!  “The hypothesis of God’s existence and the facts of contemporary cosmology are consistent” (p. 80).  That God is the First Cause of all that exists is but one aspect of the cosmological argument, however.  He also explains “why the universe exists at all” (p. 83).  “If God is one, he is one absolutely, the Hebrew Bible affirms, because not only does he exist, he must exist.  The five simple words of the declaration in Exodus—’I am that I am’—suggest that God’s existence is necessary.  Being what He is, God could not fail to be who He is, and being who He is, God could not fail to be” (p. 84).  

In a chapter entitled “A Put-up Job,” Berlinsky casts a cynical eye on some of the more popular positions espoused by contemporary physicists.  They are perplexed, as was Fred Hoyle, whose research prompted this declaration:  “’The universe,’ he grumbled afterward, ‘looks like a put-up job.’  An atheist, Hoyle did not care to consider who might have put the job up, and when pressed, he took refuge in the hypothesis that aliens were at fault” (p. 111).  Others have propounded a naturalistic “string theory” that promised to fully explain “all nature’s forces” (p. 117).  But the more it was explained the more convoluted became the explanations!  “Some versions of the string theory require twenty-six dimensions; others, ten; and still others, eleven” (p. 118).  “It was an idea,” Berlinsky notes, with his customary wit, “that possessed every advantage except clarity, elegance, and a demonstrated connection to reality” (p. 119).  

The inadequacies of string theory, however, seemed suddenly resolved by imaging multiple universes, known by physicists as the “Landscape” theory.  This “is simply the claim that given sufficiently many universes, what is true here need not be true there, and vice versa” (p. 123).  Given an infinitude of universes literally everything is possible.  Since “it works by means of the simple principle that by multiplying universes, the Landscape dissolves improbabilities.  To the question What are the odds?  the Landscape provides the invigorating answer that it hardly matters” (p. 124).    To Berlinsky, however, such theories are little better than the ancient Ptolemaic epicycles!  

The fact that Vice President Dick Cheney gave away millions of dollars every year (amounting to 77 percent of his income in 2005) while both his predecessor (Al Gore) and successor (Joe Biden) have been notoriously niggardly in their contributions may be expanded to a generalization:  conservatives routinely share more of their income and personal property, time and blood, than do progressives.  This is demonstrated by Arthur C. Brooks in Who Really Cares:  The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (New York:  Basic Books, c. 2006).   Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, begins his book by contrasting Jimmy Carter with Alexis de Tocqueville.  Whereas Carter, a few years ago, pompously chastised the American people for their selfishness, Tocqueville celebrated Americans’ generosity—mainly evident in voluntary associations and charitable institutions.  “This book,” Brooks says, “is about these two Americas and the reasons they behave so differently” (p. 2).  

People who support charities “behave generously in informal ways as well” (p. 5).  They give blood, offer seats to older people on busses, and live more honestly.  “The worldview and lifestyle of charitable people are usually just more in sync with the right than they are with the left” (p. 11).   For example:  “If liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply in the United States would jump by about 45 percent” (p. 22).  The generally conservative “working poor” give more than the politically liberal upper-income people who frequently refuse to share their wealth.   Thus families in South Dakota give as much ($1300) to charity as families in San Francisco, though “the average San Francisco family enjoys 78 percent more personal income than a family in South Dakota” (p. 32).  

This difference primarily results from religious factors, for religious people give “3.2 times more money per year” than their secular counterparts who earn the same income.  In literally every way religious people prove more generous than non-religious folks.  “Data show that people who were taken to church every week as children were 22 percentage points more likely to give charitably than those who were never taken to a house of worship” (pp. 102-103).  The religious are also much more politically conservative than the secularists, who “give away less than a third as much money as religious conservatives” (p. 49).  Secularists do, however, favor spending other peoples’ money!  “For many people, the desire to donate other people’s money displaces the act of giving one’s own.  People who favor government income redistribution are significantly less likely to behave charitably than those who do not” (p. 55).   Consequently, people dependent upon government rarely share with others.  It’s traditional, intact families that incubate generosity, whereas, conversely, “single parenthood is a disaster for charity” (p. 105).  

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Arthur Brooks followed up his delineation of “who really cares” with a treatise entitled Gross National Happiness:  Why Happiness Matters for America—and How We Can Get More of It (New York:  Basic Books, c. 2008).   That people everywhere always want to be happy is one of the more indisputable self-evident first truths of philosophy.  And, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, all men have an equally “unalienable” right to pursue it.  Furthermore, real happiness, as Aristotle discerned long ago, comes from living rightly, being virtuous.  It comes from living the “good life,” which entails being good.   Happy people, consequently, help make a good society and “the pursuit of happiness is a deeply moral obligation” (p. 16).  Brooks takes it as given that “we may not know much, but we do know when we’re happy.  It is a universally human cognition.  Even more amazing, researchers can measure it fairly well by surveying people about their own happiness” (p. 9).  

Brooks looks first at “the politics of happiness,” wondering whether happiness accompanies certain political positions.  Though Hubert Humphrey once declared “that the Democrats represented nothing less than the ‘politics of happiness’” (p. 21), he erred, for it’s conservative Republicans like the cheerful Ronald Reagan who are most happy.  This surprised the author, for he had always assumed the converse.  But in fact, “people who said they were conservative or very conservative were nearly twice as likely to say they were very happy as people who called themselves liberal or very liberal (44 percent versus 25 percent)” (p. 27).  Still more:  “in a 2007 survey, 58 percent of Republicans rated their mental health as ‘excellent,’ versus 43 percent of political independents and just 38 percent of Democrats” (p. 27).  

Though some on the left would argue that Republicans are happier because they are wealthier, the surveys reveal that “income does not matter in the left-right happiness gap.  But there are two demographic differences between liberals and conservatives that do matter:  religion and marriage” (p. 28).  Culture and faith, not income levels, determine happiness.  This explains why folks in eastern (largely rural) Tennessee “are 25 percent likelier than people living in tony San Francisco to say they are very happy, despite earning a third less money, on average” (p. 116).  Conservatives are more religious, marry more frequently and stay married better than their liberal counterparts.  To be specific, “two-thirds of conservatives are married versus only a third of liberals” (p. 30).   Conservatives are also more self-reliant, whereas liberals depend upon the government and fret about allegedly inadequate entitlements.  

One of the more celebrated sociological studies in recent years was Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone:  The Collapse and Revival of American Community.   Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard, argued that “voluntary association is a key to American quality of life and happiness” (p. 47).  By nature we are social creatures, and social ties naturally increase our happiness level.  For millions of Americans, furthermore, churches provide a wealth of social support and personal satisfactions.  Wanting to give of themselves, they find in their churches suitable outlets.  Their religious ties even seem to have economical advantages, for religious people “do better financially” than secularists.  

“Finally, faith correlates with happiness because many religious traditions uphold the idea of an afterlife, in which many Americans take solace.  The early Roman Christian Vibia Perpetua, martyred for her faith in 203, put it aptly in a vision of her impending death:  ‘Thanks be to God that I am now more joyful than I was in the flesh.’  And still today, afterlife believers are about a third more likely than nonbelievers to say they are very happy” (p. 48).   Rather than being “the opiate of the masses,” religion seems to be an elixir, energizing hope and stimulating creativity.  Nor does the stereotype of “ignorant” believers hold!  “Religious individuals today,” Brooks says, “are actually better educated and less ignorant of the world around them than secularists.  In 2004, religious adults—those who attended a house of worship every week—were a third less likely to be without a high school diploma, and a third more likely to hold a college degree or higher, than those secularists who never attended a house of worship” (p. 51).   

Religious traditionalists generally champion traditional marriages.  Though radical feminists have denied it, the evidence is overwhelming:  most men and women find happiness in good marriages.  “It turns out that it’s being married itself that makes people happier:  If two people are exactly the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely than the unmarried person to say he or she is very happy” (p. 61).   Though more problematic, since secularists with children often have fewer of them and regard them as a burden rather than a blessing, “52 percent of religious, conservative people with kids are very happy—versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.  Kids are part of a happy lifestyle” (p. 70).  

So too freedom (intellectual, political and economic) nurtures happiness.  Indeed Brooks insists:  “Freedom causes happiness” (p. 89).  Consequently, people “who favor less government intervention in our economic affairs are happier than those who favor more” (p. 90).   Neither government spending for others nor hand-outs for ourselves make us happier.  Rather, it’s what we earn for ourselves—and what we freely give to others—that satisfies this most basic of all human hungers.  Politicians manipulating our sinful penchant for envy promise to “level the playing field” with the assumption that such endeavors make constituents happier.  But the data reveal “no link at all between rising inequality and unhappiness” (p. 136).  What makes us happy is the prospect of improving our own standing, doing well without government assistance.  “That is why egalitarian policies always hold out the promise of happiness but never deliver on that promise.  Every movement to stamp out economic inequality has looked toward, as George Orwell termed it in 1984, ‘our new happy life.’  Yet that happiness is always out in the future, never in the present.  Stalin called himself in Soviet propaganda the ‘Constructor of Happiness’—a moniker that would be comical today were it not for the tens of millions of Soviet citizens who died as a result of the repression that accompanied his pursuit of egalitarian projects such as the push to collectivized farming” (p. 146).  

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The thesis of a similar book by a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Peter Schweizer, Makers and Takers, is spelled out in its lengthy subtitle:  Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honestly More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less . . . and Even Hug Their Children More than Liberals (New York:  Doubleday, c. 2008).   This contravenes the liberal mantra, articulated by the popular radio personality Garrison Keillor, who declared that “Republicans are swam developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, aggressive dorks’” (p. 8).  

Keillor represents, Schweizer says, not simply a political stance but a way of life—a worldview.  Careful, scholarly studies reveal that “those on the political left are much more likely to complain about their jobs, their families, their neighbors, their health, and their relative wealth—even when they earn the same as conservatives.  In short, the major surveys show that those on the left tend to be chronically dissatisfied with almost everything in their lives” (p. 21).   In fact, liberals are more selfish, less generous with their money, less hardworking, less honest, and less knowledgeable about public affairs and economics.  Conservatives, on the other hand, are happier, better parents, more charitable, and less angry about things in general.  

The allure of liberalism is easily explained:  it enables one to occupy a moral high ground, to feel good about oneself, simply by demanding the government care for everyone.  “Today’s liberalism is completely wrapped up with the notion of itself.  The legacy of the sixties’ ‘if it feels good do it’ ethos is alive and well” (p. 31).   One study of students in elite universities revealed that “those who were very liberal or radical tended to have a ‘narcissistic pathology,’ which included ‘grandiosity, envy, a lack of empathy, illusion of personal perfection, and a sense of entitlement’” (p. 41).  Thus those on the left frequently refuse to marry, and if they do they refuse to procreate.  In San Francisco, for example, “there are more dogs than children” (p. 32).   Liberal enclaves, such as Vermont and Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, reveal similar trends.   Whereas 65 percent of very conservative respondents highly valued marriage, only 30 percent of the very liberal agreed.  When asked if “parents should sacrifice their own well-being for those of their children, those on the left were nearly twice as likely to say ‘no’ (28 percent to 15 percent) when compared to conservatives’” (p. 34).  Echoing one of their paladins, Hillary Clinton, liberals insist child-rearing is a societal, not a parental endeavor.  “Supporting government programs to ‘help the children’ is a convenient way for liberals to ‘love’ children without demanding anything of themselves’” (p. 40).  

Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, appointed Robert Reich to serve as his secretary of labor, a position which enabled him to recurrently regale the public with laments regarding economic inequities in the nation.  The real problem, he insisted, was the stingy, Social Darwinist, tight-fisted ness of those conservatives who opposed the expansion of the welfare state.  But when forced to release his own tax returns when he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Reich reported an income of more than one million dollars, of which he gave away a grand total of $2,714—some 0.2 percent of his income!  So it goes with our liberal leaders!  As the great Samuel Johnson once quipped, regarding a stingy public figure who spoke grandly of philanthropy, he was a “friend of goodness” rather than a really good man.  

Illustrating Johnson’s observation, Franklin Delano Roosevelt lauded the virtue of charity.  Charitable giving, he said, is a way of loving love for others.  He himself, however, limited his charity to speechifying!  Amidst the depression he declared (in 1936) that fully one-third of the populace was “ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished,” but he managed to give away a meager three percent of his yearly income ($93,000).   His giving pattern has been duplicated by our current president, Barack Obama, who also talks much about the dismal disparity between the rich and poor in America.  In fact, Obama, when still a senator, gave less to charity than President Bush:  “In 2006, Bush made a third less than Obama, but actually gave more to charity” (p. 64).   To Schweizer, it seems evident that “what modern liberals like is a feeling of solidarity and compassion for the poor.  Liberals are often ‘friends of goodness,’ bur fall woefully short when it comes to doing any actual good” (p. 69).  

Liberals do less good, quite frankly, because they are “more envious and less hardworking than conservatives” (p. 81).  They routinely denounce the “greed” and “consumption” of conservatives, but in fact they (like Bill and Hillary Clinton) take advantage of every opportunity and institutional perk open to them in a capitalist culture.  “Time after time, reputable surveys show that liberals are more interested in money, think about it more often, and value it more highly than conservatives” (p. 87).   But whereas 80 percent of Republicans believe hard work and perseverance enable one to succeed, only “14 percent” of the Democrats surveyed thought “that people can get ahead by working hard” (p. 93).  To illustrate this, Schweizer notes that Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush found satisfaction working on their ranches, “Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore prefer to use their leisure time playing—jogging, socializing, shopping, sailing, skiing, and the like” (p. 99). 

Adding to his indictment, Schweizer insists that “conservatives value honesty more than liberals” (p. 105).   Philosophically this follows, since many liberals (as relativists) doubt the reality of truth itself!  Embracing Nietzsche’s famous aphorism (“there are no facts, only interpretations”), liberals (especially of the postmodern variety) uphold epistemological skepticism and moral relativism.  So Oliver Stone entertains “’severe doubts about Columbus, Washington, the Civil War being fought for slavery’” and even wonders (he expects us to believe) “’if I was born and who my parents were’” (p. 125).  “If truth is relative, Schweizer argues, “then honesty is a subjective thing.  As Sidney Hook once put it, ‘The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists’” (p. 106).   

Scholarly surveys demonstrate this dishonest tendency, for “Liberals were more than twice as likely as conservatives to say it is okay to get welfare benefits they were not entitled to” (p. 107).  They were also “two and a half times more likely to illegally download or trade music for free on the Internet” (p. 111).  “More than a third (35 percent) of self-described ‘progressives’ said ‘there are some situations where adultery is understandable.’  Only 3 percent of conservatives agreed” (p. 114).   Lying may be justified, according to Al Gore, under the rubric of “rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith” (p. 124).   Or, to follow the prescription of Saul Alinsky (whose Rules for Radicals influenced both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), “lying for justice” is utterly praiseworthy.  

Added to their dishonesty, liberals are more angry than conservatives.  There is much talk about “the angry white male,” but there’s little evidence that they exist.  Instead, as Peter Wood details in a book on anger, “the left has embraced ‘anger chic.’  It is now stylish to be angry” (p. 139).  Somehow anger is taken to be a sign if sincerity, of deep commitment to social change.  The vitriol vented on President Bush, the students on university campuses who shout down conservative speakers (but never their liberal counterparts), the profanity that laces the language of leftists such as Al Franken, all testify to the endemic anger fueling the liberal agenda.  “Perhaps,” Schweizer says, “this is what Jean-Paul Sartre meant when he praised anger and rage as a form of heroism:  ‘irrepressive violence . . . is man re-creating himself’” (p. 150).  

Still more, though George McGovern declared that virtually “every educated person I encounter in the world is a liberal,” conservatives “actually know more” than their leftist counterparts (p. 157).   The mirage of liberal intelligence is magnified by their dominance in universities and media outlets, but “authoritative studies show that conservatives are actually better informed, more knowledgeable, and better educated than liberals” (p. 162).  Take President Bush, for example.  Though nightly lampooned by Jay Leno as a numbskull, he is demonstrably (on SAT and IQ tests as well as college grades) smarter than either Al Gore or John Kerry.  “Bush’s scores were also higher than those of Sen. Bill Bradley, another liberal often described as learned and brilliant” (p. 165).   In politics, conservatives know far more about their congressional representatives, candidates for office, ballot issues, than liberals.  Though derided by the left, Rush Limbaugh listeners—talk radio listeners—are better educated than those who don’t listen to the radio.  And though accused of being brainwashed by talk show hosts, in fact “talk radio exposure was associated with greater faith in people, lower authoritarianism’” (p. 171).  Conservatives have better vocabularies and score higher on analogy tests.  

Finally, liberals complain more than conservatives and endlessly recite a litany of victimization.  Bill Clinton famously whined when things failed to favor him.  Doing so he followed one of his liberal progenitors, LBJ, who “groused, ‘Nobody loves Johnson’ mere weeks after trouncing Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election!   Since folks who complain are generally unhappy, no one should be shocked to discover that the Pew Research study “found that 45 percent of Republicans reported being ‘very happy’ compared with just 30 percent of Democrats” (p. 188).  Liberals are three times as unhappy with their jobs as Republicans (with incomes make no difference) and equally apt to seek treatment for mental illnesses.  “Another survey found that feminist women do less housework than traditionalist women, but complain more about it” (p. 191).  

Concluding his study, Schweizer declares that liberalism harms both individuals and societies.  It provides a certain solace since it allows one to give “lip service to virtuous ideals” without personally doing anything.  But there is always a price to pay for hypocrisy—the persistent misery that beguiles it.  

# # #

Few autobiographies outlive their subjects.  Nor do journalists generally write literary classics.  So when a journalist’s autobiography rewards the re-reading, subsequent to his death, it may well be regarded a classic.  And I contend that Malcolm Muggeridge’s two-volume Chronicles of Wasted Time provides not only an intriguing life-story but a clarifying wide-angle lens whereby one sees enduring truth regarding his century, the 20^th.   

The first volume, entitled The Green Stick, details his life from 1903, when he was born, until 1933, when he returned from a journalistic stint in the Soviet Union.   As early as he learned to read and write he never wanted to do anything else than use them; both temperament and talent charted his vocation as a writer.  He wrote for the same reason he breathed—it was necessary to sustain his life.  Consequently he wrote copiously.  However, “Surveying now this monstrous Niagara of words so urgently called for and delivered, I confess they signify to me a lost life” (p. 14).  His journalistic success, momentarily satisfying, seemed only to highlight the fact “that I was born into a dying, if not already dead civilization, whose literature was part of the general decomposition; a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny Eng.Lit. vultures, and echoing with the hyena cries of Freudians looking for their Marx and Marxists looking for their Freud” (p. 15).  Vanity of vanity!   “All I can claim to have learnt from the years I have spent in this world,” Muggeridge says, “is that the only happiness is love, which is attained by giving, not receiving, and that the world itself only becomes the dear and habitable dwelling place it is when we who inhabit it know we are migrants due when the time comes to fly away to other more commodious skies” (p. 18).   

Such heavenly hope was not part of his early life, for he was reared by a staunchly Fabian father who devoted himself to “abolishing poverty, illiteracy, war, inequality” and “ushering in the glorious era of everlasting peace, prosperity and happiness” (p. 30).  In due time he became a Member of Parliament, supporting the party agenda, a loyal infantryman in the great war for social justice.  Devoted to the Labour Party and the welfare of the working man (ironically “a notable absentee” at the local political gatherings of the party), his father believed, in the words of Winwood Reade:  “The world will become a heavenly commune” wherein with “one faith, with one desire” men “will labour together in the sacred cause—the extinction of disease, the extinction of sin, the perfection of genius, the perfection of love, the invention of immortality, the exploration of the infinite, and the conquest of creation” (p. 23).    Unfettered utopianism marked the Muggeridge home and young Malcolm embraced it for a time.

His university years at Cambridge (where he studied chemistry, physics and zoology) had little value; he “managed to scrape up a pass degree, but have never opened a book or thought about any of my three subjects from that day to this” (p. 75).    He carefully observed his surroundings, however, noticing how “upper class boys copy the poor ones, decking themselves out in a weird kind of proletarian fancy dress, and speaking in an accent which sounds like a badly rehearsed number in a satire show.  They are the social descenders, who display, in reverse, all the absurdities, and more, of social climbers” (p. 77).   He also noted how “a half-baked” Marxism shaped much collegiate conversation.  Serendipitously, he also discovered, through the mandatory religious observances of the university and by spending his final year in the Oratory House, something of the Christian tradition.  “Perhaps the only good thing I got out of Cambridge was a certain familiarity with the incomparable Book of Common Prayer” (p. 80).   “Despite the agnosticism of my home and upbringing, I cannot recall a time when the notion of Christ and Christianity was not enormously appealing to me” (p. 81).   Jesus is the Answer!  “And this bridge, this reconciliation between the black despair of lying bound and gagged in the tiny dungeon of the ego, and soaring upwards into the white radiance of God’s universal love—this bridge was the Incarnation, whose truth expresses that of the desperate need it meets.  Because of our physical hunger we know there is bread; because of our spiritual hunger we know there is Christ” (p. 82).      

Taking the first opportunity for employment that presented itself, Muggeridge sailed off to India and taught school in Union Christian College, observing the British Empire in its death throes while teaching English literature to docile youngsters eager to get into government service.  Soon back in England he met and married Kitty Dobbs, who proved to be one of the great blessings of his life.  She was one of Beatrice Webb’s nieces, and Malcolm easily flourished in the staunchly pro-Bolshevik circle commanded by Beatrice and her husband, Stanley.   Inhabiting this realm were notables such as George Bernard Shaw.  Wealthy aristocrats, celebrated intellectuals, utopian socialists, the Webbs were “planning our future, and along lines that actually came to pass in a matter of a very few years” (p. 150). 

Now married, Muggeridge needed to find work and found another teaching opportunity, this time in Egypt, teaching in a British school in Cairo.  As in India, he found little challenge in the classroom, but he did write a story about the country that was published by the Manchester Guardian.  This led to an invitation to return to England and begin a career in journalism in 1932.   He quickly found that Guardian writers were to promote the paper’s progressive positions.  Rather than tell the truth they were to push an agenda; “The Guardian was no place for mental honesty” (p. 199).   “It is painful to me now to reflect,” he laments, “the ease with which I got into the way of using this non-language; these drooling non-sentences conveying non-thoughts, propounding non-fears and offering non-hopes.  Words are as beautiful as love, and as easily betrayed.  I am more penitent for my false words—for the most part, mercifully lost for ever in the Media’s great slag-heaps—than for false deeds” (p. 171).  When Muggeridge wrote a novel depicting The Guardian’s inner workings, the paper “got an injunction and threatened proceedings, in consequence of which it was withdrawn and suppressed” (p. 201).  Ironically, “The Guardian’s passionate advocacy of freedom of publication did not extend to books about itself” (p. 201).  

Leaping at an opportunity to report on developments in Russia as a freelance journalist, Muggeridge and family set sail for the promised land in 1932.  Given the fact that Lenin himself had translated one of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s books, given that Muggeridge fully intended to become a Soviet citizen and live out the Marxist dream, the rapidity with which he saw clearly the nature of the USSR is amazing.   Almost as soon as he arrived in Moscow and wandered about he separated himself from the “progressive elite,” the “political pilgrims” from the west who mindlessly believed everything they were told.   (In a recent “Reedings” {#194}, I reviewed Muggeridge’s Winter in Moscow and noted the significance of his disillusioning time in Stalin’s workers’ paradise, so I’ll not repeat similar material found in his autobiography).  In brief:  “In the beginning was the Lie, and the Lie was made news and dwelt among us, graceless and false” (p. 216).  As soon as possible, he fled the USSR, joining fellow passengers on the train when it crossed the border into Latvia when they “began spontaneously to laugh and shout and shake our fists at the sentries.  We were out, we were free” (p. 267).  “How strange, I have often reflected, that a regime which needs thus to pen up its citizens should nonetheless be able to make itself seem desirable to admirers outside.  As though the purpose in taking the Bastille should have been to gain admission there and do a stretch” (p. 267).  

In The Infernal Grove (New York:  William Morrow & Company, Inc., c. 1974) Muggeridge gives us the second volume of Chronicles of Wasted Time.  Freed, both physically and intellectually, from Stalinist Russia in 1933, he found himself in Geneva, briefly working for an agency in the League of Nations.  “Yet, just as, pounding round the red Square, I endlessly asked myself how it came about that the choisest spirits of the age—all the gurus and dancing dervishes of enlightenment—prostrated themselves before a brutish tyrant like Stalin, so, pounding along the Quai Woodrow Wilson, I kept wondering what Pied Piper had been able to lead them to the shores of this sullen Lake, confidently expecting to find there Tennyson’s Parliament of Man and Federation of the World.  In both cases, as it seemed to me, the significant thing was the ready acceptance of fantasy as reality; even a predilection in favour of fantasy, and a corresponding abhorrence of reality.  Why?”  (p. 16).  

Why fantasize of perfecting the world?  “It was the questions of questions” (p. 16), the question that, throughout his life, prodded Muggeridge to marvel at the endless follies of the world’s elites who imagined they could do so.  In fact, “sentimentally virtuous people like Lord Halifax and Mrs Roosevelt do far more harm in the world than recognizable villains.  Solzhenitsyn has provided the perfect parable on this theme with his description of Mrs Roosevelt’s conducted visit to a labour camp where he was doing time.  The estimable lady, who spawned the moral platitudes of the contemporary liberal wisdom as effortlessly and plenteously as the most prolific salmon, was easily persuaded that the camp in question was a humanely conducted institution for curing the criminally inclined.  A truly wicked woman would have been ashamed to be so callous and so gullible” (p. 45).  

Suitably cynical of all things political, Muggeridge spent the ‘30s writing book reviews, novels, and plays as well as doing free lance journalism.  When World War II began, however, despite his age and family, he volunteered to serve his country.  Reflecting on the fact that he was constantly leaving his wife Kitty and the children, he admits to being ever “restless and nomadic.”  However precious his family, he continually dashed off to follow “vainglorious, if not squalid, preoccupations of the moment.  The saddest thing to me, in looking back on my life, has been to recall, not so much the wickedness I have been involved in, the cruel and selfish and egotistic things I have done, the hurt I have inflicted on those I loved—although all that’s painful enough.  What hurts most is the preference I have so often shown for what is inferior, tenth-rate, when the first-rate was there for the having” (p. 133).  

His military service involved various desultory assignments in England and ultimately to positions first in Mozambique and later in France, working in the Secret Service.  He saw, first-hand, that “Diplomats and Intelligence agents, in my experience, are even bigger liars than journalists, and the historians who try to reconstruct the past out of their records are, for the most part, dealing in fantasy” (p. 149).  His account of his military adventures is amusing, though he personally reached an emotional low point and actually attempted suicide while in Africa.  He swam into the ocean off Mozambique, planning to drown.  But he aborted the endeavor and returned to shore, filled with joy at a miraculous sense of light and goodness that deserved his devotion.  While he didn’t understand it fully, “this episode represented for me one of those deep changes which take place in our lives,” a moment for him when he turned “from the carnal to the spiritual, from the immediate, the now, towards the everlasting, the eternal” (p. 185).  

Joining the victorious troops in Paris, in 1944, Muggeridge witnessed the truth of Simone Weil’s phrase, “Justice, that fugitive from the Victor’s camp.”  Working within the intelligence service, he marveled at how many Frenchmen claimed to have worked with the anti-Nazi underground, how many accusations were hurled against alleged “collaborators,” how easily military triumph generates lawless vendettas.  “It was, all things considered, one of the more squalid episodes in France’s history, with, as it sometimes seemed, everyone informing on everyone else” (p. 224).  Inasmuch as he was able to help free some of the falsely-accused, Muggeridge considered this his finest war-time endeavor.  “Looking back on it, I cannot join the chorus of regrets at five years lost; they were just lost years in a lost life, indistinguishable, essentially, from the five preceding and the five succeeding ones” (p. 257).  

The war over, Muggeridge returned to England and his journalistic career, several decades not covered in this volume (nor in a never published though promised third volume).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

The closest Muggeridge came to giving us a final volume of his autobiography is found in Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, c. 1988), an overview of his life-long spiritual journey, published two years before his 1990 death.  His final message, inscribed on the books’ flyleaf, is a prayer:  “God, humble my pride, extinguish the last stirrings of my ego, obliterate whatever remains of worldly ambition and carnality, and in these last days of a mortal existence, help me to serve only Thy purposes, to speak and writ only thy words, to think only Thy thoughts, to have no other prayer than:  ‘Thy will be done.’  In other words to be a true Convert” (p. 8).  Life’s purpose, the end toward which we must move, is God alone.  “Our business is to find God, the dramatist behind the drama, and, having found Him, to follow Him in the light of the revelation vouchsafed us in the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (p. 78).  

He begins the book with a description of his 1982 entry into the Roman Catholic Church, describing it as:  “A sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant” (p. 13).  Though many factors played a role in his conversion, Mother Teresa of Calcutta looms large in his story.  She appeared on a BBC program he hosted, and he followed up that interview with a film entitled Something Beautiful for God.   Some of the inside shots, taken in near darkness, were “bathed in a wonderful soft light” when processed.  “I have no doubt whatever,” Muggeridge says, “as to what the explanation is:  holiness, an expression of love, is luminous; hence the haloes in medieval portraits of saints” (p. 15).  

Long before meeting Mother Teresa, however, Muggeridge sensed an inner hunger for God.  Things eternal and spiritual ever allured him, though he actually lived a very temporal and carnal life.  Under his father’s socialistic influence, he was “stirred by the prospect of bringing heaven down to earth, and creating here and now a brotherly, peaceful and prosperous society:  to each according to his needs, from each according to his capacity” (p. 26).  But even as a boy he sensed there was something more profound in the New Testament, with its message of a heavenly city, an eternal world, beyond man’s orchestration.  In the Gospels and Epistles one sees, “underlying the chaos of the world and of a spectator’s own mind, God’s order.  Nature itself is speaking to us, if we can only hear it, of His purposes for His creatures and creation” (p. 31).  

As a Cambridge undergraduate, “for the first time” he encountered clergymen,  and attended compulsory chapel services.  While hardly a believer, he was deeply drawn to the beauty and integrity of the Christian way, sensing that “Faith provides a special insight into the mystery that lies at the heart of our earthly existence” (p. 35).  As a teacher in India, he realized that his father and his Fabian cohorts were (while allegedly working for the working man) actually seeking power, the great intoxicant of our day.  He realized that one must either live for power or love and he knew that love was the truly right way.   In marriage he discovered that true happiness “lies in forgetfulness, not indulgence, of the self; in escape from carnal appetites, not in their satisfaction” (p. 55).  He further discerned evil that marks “the separation of the procreative impulse from procreation, the down-grading of motherhood and the up-grading of spinsterhood, and the acceptance of sterile perversions as the equivalent of fruitful lust; finally the grisly holocaust of millions of aborted babies, ironically in the name of the quality of life” (p. 57).  

Becoming a journalist meant, as St Augustine noted of teachers, becoming a “vendor of words.”  To Muggeridge, “both professions are exercises in fantasy; the instruction that teachers pass on to their classes is as dubious as the news and comment that journalists pass on to their readers” (p. 59).   But he was a writer and journalism became his profession.  In that role he observed the development of a death wish, “in the guise of liberalism,” that was slowly destroying Western Civilization.  “Systematically, stage by stage, dismantling our Western way of life, depreciating and deprecating all its values so that the whole social structure is now jumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties.  And all this, wonderfully enough, in the name of the health, wealth and happiness of all mankind.  Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes; ours has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite” (p. 61).   Thus Liberalism, not  Nazism or Bolshevism, “was responsible for bringing down the darkness on our civilization.”  It was a “solvent rather than a precipitate, a sedative rather than a stimulant, a slough rather than a precipice; blurring the edges of truth, the definition of virtue, the shape of beauty; a cracked bell, a mist, a death wish” (p. 61).  Ironically, though Christians should have fought against it, legions of them embraced and supported Liberal agenda, determined to do good and make the world good, denying old-fashioned doctrines such as the Incarnation and Resurrection, scoffing at “pie-in-the-sky by-and-by.”  

In the end, Muggeridge (as did John Henry Newman a century earlier) found himself joining the one institution that seemed to have resisted Liberalism’s solvent, finding “a resting place in the Catholic Church from where I can see the Heavenly Gates built into Jerusalem’s Wall more clearly than from anywhere else, albeit if only through a glass darkly” (p. 134).  Thus he rested his faith in creedal affirmations, such as the Incarnation, believing “that God did lean down and become Man in order that we could reach up to Him” (p. 140).  Still more, he found the Catholic commitment to moral standards quite valuable.  Indeed:  “It was the Catholic Church’s firm stand against contraception and abortion which finally made me decide to become a Catholic” (p. 140).  These two evils “have made havoc both for the young and the old” (p. 140), for by “making eroticism an end and not a means” (p. 141) they violate the natural law and harm human beings.  

Despite his oft-despairing evaluation of the world and its nihilistic bent, Muggeridge ended his life filled with love and hope—love for God and his family, hope for life everlasting.  In his 84^th year, he testified:  “And so I live, just for each day, knowing my life will soon be over, and that I, like Michelangelo at the end of his life ‘. . . have loved my friends and family.  I have loved God and all his creation.  I have loved life and now I love death as its natural termination . . .’, knowing that although Christendom may be over—Christ lives1” (p. 150).  

Few  20^th century writers merit more attention and gratitude than Malcolm Muggeridge.  My words to you are the words one of his mentor’s, St Augustine, heard:  Tolle lege.  Take up and read! 

# # #

“We are all socialists now,” Newsweek Magazine decrees, so we should at least try to understand the prospects entailed in the editors’ celebration.  Joshua Muravchik’s Heaven on Earth:  The Rise and Fall of Socialism (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, c. 2002) is an engaging, historical description of what’s happened wherever it’s been tried.  The title comes from Moses Hess, the 19^th century “Father of German social Democracy,” who said (in A Communist Confession of Faith, 1846):  “The Christian . . . imagines the better future of the human species . . . in the image of heavenly joy. . . .  We, on the other hand, will have this heaven on earth” (p. 338).  This endeavor—what Muravchik calls “man’s most ambitious attempt to supplant religion” (p. 3)—has everywhere failed, and revealingly (given the glossy advertisements) “socialism’s epitaph turned out to be:  If you build it, they will leave” (p. 6).  

Though rooted in the ideology of the French Revolution and its call for equality, the word socialism was first coined by the wealthy English utopian, Robert Owen.  He was an atheistic materialist who detested all religion and believed that a good environment would necessarily produce good people.  Thus he bought land in Indiana, where he launched “New Harmony” to establish “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”  He further determined to eliminate three evils—private property; religion; and marriage—the goal of most socialists (whether totalitarian or democratic) in decades to come.  He then ordered the letters “C.M.” inscribed on one of the buildings, “standing for ‘Commencement of the Millennium’” (p. 55).    Within less than a decade, however, New Harmony proved most unharmonious and the community disintegrated, largely because idle ideologues rather than workers joined it.  

Though Owen’s New World utopia failed, he helped inspire budding socialists such as Friedrich Engels, who (rebelling against his parents’ devout religious faith) joined Owen in assailing Christianity.  Here he was joined by another young German, Karl Marx.  Both men celebrated the skepticism of  David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s atheistic The Essence of Christianity.  Muravchik largely credits Engels for the ideology we call Marxism, though he was overshadowed by Marx’s domineering personality.   Few socialists actually read Marx’s Capital, taking their precepts from Engels’ popular writings.  As Karl Kautsky explained, “’Engels stands as a master of popular exposition; his writings are read by all thinking proletarians, and the majority of those who have accepted socialism have obtained their knowledge and understanding of the Marx-Engels theory from these writings’” (p. 91).  “It was to Engels the popularizer that we can trace many of the catch-phrases of Marxism:  ‘historical materialism,’ withering away of the state,’ ‘dialectical materialism,’ ‘scientific socialism’ and, above all, ‘Marxism’ itself” (p. 91).  

Various thinkers sought to own the Marxist label, but Lenin most effectively grasped it by calling for a “proletarian revolution” to establish a utopia in Russia.  Like Marx and Engels, he was an intellectual with little knowledge of the real workers for whom he struggled to establish a “workers paradise” in Russia.  His Italian contemporary, Benito Mussolini, soared to prominence in the Socialist Party and launched a journal called Utopia.  Though he broke with his leftist confreres following WWI (preferring dictatorial to democratic methods), his Fascism retained salient socialist precepts.  So too Hitler espoused scores of socialist notions and declared that “’National socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order’” (p. 164).  

The totalitarian systems established in Russia, Italy, and Germany manifestly failed.  But softer forms of socialism endure.  Before WWII ended, Clement Atlee led Britain’s Labor Party to victory and began the transformation of his country.  Atlee’s socialism served as a surrogate for his parents’ Christian faith; it was not, he said, “’ just a piece of machinery or an economic system, but a living faith translated into action.  I desire the classless society’” (p. 186).   Atlee implemented the socialism advocated for nearly a century by English Fabians (including George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), who had patiently worked to democratically establish their faith.  At the same time, many new nations, liberated from colonial rule, followed Atlee’s approach, effecting what Daniel Patrick Moynihan “dubbed the ‘British revolution’” (p. 199).   Thus Julius Nyerere subjected Tanzania to the Fabianism he’d absorbed while studying in Edinburgh.  Lavishly supported by Western philanthropy, Nyerere brought into being a nation wherein everyone was reduced to the perfect equality of utter poverty!  And much the same transpired, uniformly, in the rest of the three score new nations who embraced the socialist creed.  

Standing virtually alone in resisting socialism was the United States.  Labor leaders such as the AFL’s Samuel Gompers warned against “’entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that to experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life’” (p. 232).   He decried laws dictating the eight-hour work day, though he supported gaining that objective in other ways, and he “opposed minimum-wage legislation as well as all manner of government social insurance except to cover physical disability” (p. 241).  George Meany also supported the capitalist system that empowered workers by providing them amazing opportunities.   (Gompers and Meany, of course, dealt with capitalists producing goods for market; today’s unions, such as the NEA, increasingly represent governmental employees, making them congenitally more sympathetic with the socialist agenda.)  

Muravchik ends his presentation with an epilogue:  “the kibbutz goes to market.”  He shows how the Israeli kibbutzim, so idolized by various socialists, have failed to realize their dreams.  For a generation, they usually thrived, but as children grew up they almost always rejected the radical demands entailed in bringing about “socialism’s perennial goal of a new man” (p. 329).  So in large numbers they fled to find better lives and traditional family structures in Israel’s booming economy.  Following the pattern of 19^th century utopias in America, the kibbutzim fell apart on the hard rock of human nature.  

A great American historian, Eugene Genovese (who was himself a Marxist for most of his life), says, in a blurb for this book:  “Socialism has been a story of nobility, heroism, and self-sacrifice—and of self-delusion, absurdity, and murderous criminality.  Joshua Muravchik provides a thoughtful account, at once objective and personal, in which he—miraculously-manages to eschew polemical point-scoring and holier-than-thou trumpeting.  This sprightly and moving book combines warm sympathy with tough-minded criticism to help us understand the greatest tragedy of our age.”  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

For a classic study of the phenomenon, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium:  Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York:  Oxford University Press, c. 1961; revised and enlarged 3rd ed. 1970), is irreplaceable.  Apocalyptic themes in Jewish and early Christian sources were picked up and expanded by Medieval enthusiasts, who laid the groundwork for modern socialist notions.  Thus we find a 12^th century monk named Henry gaining hearers by denouncing the clergy for their failure to live up to his ideal of apostolic purity.  He considered himself directly called of God (thus needing no ordination), rejected the authority of the Church, and reduced the Sacraments to symbolic acts of one’s faith.  True believers would necessarily embrace poverty, and “love of one’s neighbour was the essence of true religion” (p. 40).  

Henry was simply one of a great number of preachers who called for a religious revival that would totally transform society.  Invariably, they both praised the poor and denounced the wealthy for refusing to enrich them.  Equally inevitable, it seems, such movements lent themselves to aberrations!  Take, for example, a renegade monk called Jacob, known as the “master of Hungary,” who denounced the clergy as corrupt, the sacraments as vain, and recruited an army of some 60,000 for the Second Crusade.  In the process he freely performed marriage (or divorce) ceremonies as requested.  “He was said to have married eleven men to one woman” (p. 95).  He also praised his followers who killed priests.  His career was mercifully brief, but his fanaticism illustrates fatal currents continually swirling within millennialism.  

Joachim of Fiore (1145-1202) probably serves as the best illustration of Medieval utopianism.  His “revelations” foretold the immanent coming of a “third age,” quite unlike Augustine’s view of a Kingdom of God that could never be realized until Jesus’ Second Advent.  To usher in this new age, various devotees of “the Free Spirit”—including Gnostic Cathars (Albigensians) in southern France—taught a “quasi-mystical anarchism—an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kid of restraint and limitation” (p. 148).  Much like Friedrich Nietzsche, they called for “amoral supermen” who lived in accord with their own inner light.  “The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adept’s attitude towards himself:  he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin.  Although the practical consequences of this belief could vary, one possible consequence was certainly antinomianism or the repudiation of moral norms” (p. 150).  

Free Spirit visionaries flourished throughout Europe, featuring what Cohn dubs “an elite of amoral supermen.”  Basically they identified themselves with God and thus claimed that whatever they said and did was enjoyed His approbation.  Consequently, “What distinguished the adepts of the Free Spirit from all other medieval sectarians was, precisely, their total amoralism.  For them the proof of salvation was to know nothing of conscience or remorse” (p. 177).  As one of them said, “’He who recognizes that God does all things in him, he shall not sin’” (p. 177).  Frequently this led to a “promiscuous and mystically coloured eroticism” manifested in various sexual deviancies.  Still more:  since they denied the legitimacy of private property, holding that all things are common, they condoned theft—especially when taken from the “rich.”  

To establish an egalitarian paradise, preachers such as John Wyclif argued:  “’Every man ought to be in a state of grace; if he is in a state of grace he is lord of the world and all that it contains; therefore every man ought to be lord of the whole world.  But, because of the multitudes of men, this will not happen unless they hold all things in common:  therefore all things ought to be in common’” (p. 200).   One of Wyclif’s admirers, John Hus, said much the same, and both inspired popular revolutionary movements—the Lollards in England and the Taborites (Hussites) in Bohemia.  Fanatical Taborites believed the Millennium was at hand and an “anarcho-communist order” of Paradise was to be established.  “Taxes, dues, rents were to be abolished and so was private property of all kinds.  There was to be no human authority of any sort:  ‘All shall live together as brothers, none shall be subject to another’” (p. 215).  

Out of this soil sprang Thomas Muntzer, who took Luther’s revolt against the Church in thoroughly non-Lutheran directions and helped provoke the Peasants’ War in 1525—a bloody affair costing 100,000 peasants’ lives and prompting Luther to write “his ferocious pamphlet Against the Thievish Murderous Gangs of the Peasants” (p. 248).  Muntzer also played a significant, if convoluted, role in the development of Anabaptism, which carried with it many of the mystical, anarchical themes of the Free Spirit devotees.  Interestingly enough, Friedrich Engels and a host of Marxists have found in Muntzer “a giant symbol, a prodigious hero in the history of ‘class war’” (p. 251).   

Cohn’s research in primary sources enables him to set forth a richly-detailed treatise.   While more suitable for scholars than general readers, The Pursuit of the Millennium reminds us of how perennially we not only long for a perfect world but move heaven and earth to establish it here and now.  

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However anarchical their rhetoric, triumphant socialists unfailingly turn totalitarian.  This is the message of The Coercive Utopians:  Social Deception by America’s Power Players, by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (Chicago:  Regnery Gateway, c. 1983).  They argue that “utopianism, by its inherent logic, leads to coercion” (p. 8).  The book comes commended by one of America’s preeminent philosophers, Sidney Hook, who said:  “I have rarely read a book which has contained such challenging information, and which raises so many troubling questions about the good will and bona fides of many organizations soliciting public support.  The Isaacs’ book should be read by all intelligent laymen who are active in public affairs.”  

Illustrating one of the facts that elicited Hook’s alarm was a 1980 decision of the General Conference of the Methodist Church to financially support communist regimes in Cuba and Vietnam as well as the PLO.  Aligned with the National Council of Churches, which encouraged its functionaries to disguise how the organization’s funds were spent, the Methodists were simply one of the mainline denominations supporting Marxist movements that promised to inaugurate perfect societies.  To one Methodist spokesman, the church’s mission was to establish “’solidarity with the poor and the powerless’” (p. 20).  Church delegations visited Cuba and inevitably found what they hoped for—a wonderful, egalitarian society.  Other representatives visited Vietnam and wrote glowing reports of the communist transformation taking place following the war.  They found grounds for praising Pol Pot’s movement in Cambodia and gave financial support to Robert Mugabe as he began his brutal rule in Zimbabwe.   

Linking arms with radical religionists, environmental utopians sought to restore the planet to a pristine “Mother Earth” condition.  With Earth Day in 1970 the environmental movement began to shape the nation’s consciousness, prodding Congress to pass laws designed to “produce the perfect environment” (p. 49).  To get clean air and water, to protect endangered species, to banish toxics of all sorts, became morally obligatory and justified a massive expenditure of public funds.  Yet “no reasonable standards satisfy the perfection-seeking environmental organizations” (p. 56) and laws passed decades ago are now used to restrict personal liberties in unimagined ways.  “The distinguished sociologist and historian of ideas Robert Nisbet sees environmentalism as a revolutionary social movement.  Indeed Nisbet sees it as potentially the third great social movement of Western civilization after Christianity and socialism, and one, ironically, that strikes at the roots of that civilization.  If environmentalists as such do not ‘hate the system’ they hate what is vital to the system—the development of energy sources, with the most environmentally benign source, nuclear energy, assuming a literally demonic character.  Nisbet sees the reason for the movement’s fascination with the sun as ‘a form of spiritual purification, for there is a renascent primitivism in the envioronmentalist’s characteristic approach to life’” (p. 60).  

Though a concern for the environment had shaped an earlier “conservationism,” the movement that emerged in the ‘70s was largely guided by the New Left.  Its sacred texts included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.  Its causes included the banning of DDT and nuclear power, despite the utter lack of hard evidence that they threatened anything.  The environmentalist agenda, promoted by powerful groups such as the Sierra Club, successfully promoted a “utopian campaign against modern technology” (p. 70) that prevailed politically, despite counterfactual realities.  

The environmentalists’ disdain for Western civilization was amplified by anti-American advocates in utopian think tanks such as the Institute for Policy Studies, which endeavored to destroy “public belief in the virtues of key American institutions, particularly those crucial to maintaining American power and influence in the world.  An image of the United States is constructed as a rapacious imperial villain, the greatest single threat to the world’s peace and prosperity” (p. 108).  To make their case, they camouflaged their presentations under the guise of seeking “to preserve traditional American values and institutions” (p. 109).   Thus Derek Shearer, an IPS representative, confessed that because it was imprudent to “’use the “S” word [socialism] too effectively in American politics, we have found that in the greatest tradition of American advertising the word “economic democracy” sells’” (p. 131).  Such folks also claimed to identify with the “workers” whose welfare they championed.  In fact, however, they harbored “’a tremendous elitist contempt for ordinary Americans, hatred of blue collar Americans because they weren’t revolutionaries, contempt for them because they didn’t want to smash and destroy, contempt for their pastimes, contempt for their marriages, contempt because they were Americans.  Yet these elitists wanted to take that away from them, smash it, set up a system based on China or Cuba or Vietnam or Tanzania’” (p. 135).   Equally counterfeit was the pacifism espoused by many of the radicals.  Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth elicited fanatical fever within “peace” movements such as Clergy and Laity Concerned.  Such pacifism, however, was largely a guise of anti-American tirades and generally followed dictates from Moscow, mediated through compliant popular front organizations.

Environmental organizations, along with other utopian groups, skillfully learned to “subvert the constitutional arrangements of the country” by infiltrating and manipulating governmental bureaucracies such as the EPA (p. 221).  Here they saw themselves (though never elected by anyone) as “executors of the will of ‘the people’ as they intuitively understand it.  Utopian bureaucrats thus feel free to reshape, circumvent and disregard the laws they are assigned to administer” (p. 222).  This took place quickly under President Jimmy Carter, who allowed the Natural Resources Defense Council to effectively set the coal leasing agenda for the Department of the Interior.  Federal monies flowed into various “alternative energy” schemes, many of which proved wastefully utopian.   Even more gratuitously, the Legal Services Corporation has “consistently defied its Congressional mandate” (p. 234) and taken upon itself the task of reforming American society (as well as providing a comfortable income for thousands of lawyers).  Taking money from the government, these lawyer-bureaucrats sought (always in the name of “social justice”) to undermine it through class action suits designed to destroy industries they disliked!  As one of the presidents of the National Lawyers Guild declared, as reformers within the system they espoused “anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism” (p. 238).  

Much of this activity goes unnoticed because the media, enamored with environmentalism and hostile to big business, acts “as a filter, screening out most of the information that could damage the utopians in the public view” (p. 251).  Consequently, the nuclear power industry has been consistently misrepresented by journalists determined to destroy it.  When government officials pled for stronger defense policies, TV personalities such as Walter Cronkite dismissed them as alarmists.  Few Americans heard of the genocide in Cambodia, as horrific as Hitler’s holocaust, because it would have questioned the rectitutde of those who had opposed the Vietnam War.  While millions died in Cambodia, the New York Times and Washington Post saw fit to mention it a total of 13 times in 1976!  The next year, when the slaughter reached its zenith, America’s TV networks noted Pol Pot’s slaughter three times—and NBC said nothing at all.  The networks were able, however, to devote 159 reports to human rights violations in South Africa.  Shameful though it was, such media bias elicited no shame in journalistic circles.  (Indeed, as the 2008 election showed, the media now sees itself as cheerleaders for the causes they support.)  

Marianne J. Legato, MD, FACP, is a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and has devoted herself to the study of “gender medicine.”  She has concluded, on the basis of massive (and often quite recent, Nobel Prize awarded) research, that men and women are in fact quite different, fully aware that this truth may offend some in the feminist movement—including a large contingent of Harvard professors who effectively ousted President Larry Summers for daring to suggest it.  Truth to tell, “there is a tremendous risk in categorizing certain behaviors as ‘male’ or ‘female’” (p. xxii) as she does throughout her recent treatise (written with the assistance of Laura Tucker).  Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (Rodale, 2005) makes clear why this is so and offers suggestions concerning how we should deal with the opposite sex.  

Legato’s thesis, set forth in the Introduction, is this:  “Men and women think differently, approach problems differently, emphasize the importance of things differently, and experience the world around us through entirely different filters” (p. xiv).  While processing information, men use only one side of the brain and consider “one thing at a time” (p. xvi).  Women, however, have more gray matter in the frontal cortex of their brains and simultaneously synthesize several strands of information.  Consequently, women have significantly superior verbal skills, whereas men are able to focus like a laser on specific tasks.  

“Men and Women Are Different” declares chapter one, affirming the consensus judgment of common sense.  A few decades ago, Legato says, she and others “assumed that women were, physiologically speaking, simply small men” (p. 2).   Brain studies, however, make it clear just how the sexes differ.  At the moment of conception we are genetically either male or female.  So many sexual differences are “hardwired.  But as soon as we’re born, the environment  works in powerful ways to interact with, and even change, our hardwiring to shape the way we act and interface with others.  . . . .  Treating your daughter like she’s a girl may make her more so” (p. 7).   Though men’s brains are larger,  “women use more parts of their brains when given a wide variety of verbal and spatial tasks” (p. 10).  

Sexual differences naturally explain sexual attraction.  Women want men who will “provide emotional and financial security” and display strength and assertiveness, whereas men desire women who are “young and healthy enough to reproduce; indeed, many of the physical characteristics that men find most attractive in women are ones that connote youth and good health” (p. 19).  Like it or not, looks matter!  Women crave men who are “sociable, approachable, and of high social status.  They also gave high marks to expensive or elegant clothing” (p. 22).  In the dating and mating dance, women initiate (at least 70 percent of the time) the process, though the process is so “subtle” that the man appears to make “’the first move’” (p. 30).  A man initiates a conversation only after a favorable “glance from the woman” (p. 30).  

Legato devotes a chapter to conversational differences between the sexes.  As important as it is to communicate well, men and women frequently fail in this area.  From the moment of birth, girls hear better than boys.  Subsequently, they listen better and talk more fluently.  Studies of the brain simply document the fact that male and female brains significantly differ in their capacity to handle words.  Women also interpret visual cues—i.e. facial expressions, body language—more skillfully than men.  And they also have better memories “for the spoken word” (p. 68).  Consequently, they remember all the details of arguments quickly forgotten by men.  Women love to talk and tell stories, especially about family and home; it’s a part of sustaining friendships.  Men, however, talk mainly to get information, discussing the news or sporting events.

Having explained and justified her position, Legato proceeds to offer advice regarding marriage, parenting, stress and aging.  Some of her views are derived from her studies; others come from her personal experience.  Apart from what she considers scientifically demonstrable, however, she gives no clear moral guidance.  Multiple marriages (including her own)—and affairs between married folks—may be the best way to cope with life.  Despite the lack of a moral compass, however, the book merits reading for its cogent defense of one, simple, guiding truth:  the differences between men and women are anything but social constructions, they are naturally given and inescapable.

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Meg Meeker’s Epidemic:  How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids (reviewed in “Reedings” #135) is a book I recommend to everyone concerned with adolescent sexuality.  She has recently published Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters:  10 Secrets Every Father Should Know (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2006) to emphasize the irreplaceable role of fathers in rearing healthy daughters.  Whereas Epidemic was richly documented and sought to describe alarming developments in the nation, this book is generally anecdotal and filled with the common sense of a practicing physician, wife (married to a physician with whom she shares a medical practice), and mother of four children.  The bibliography duly  refers us to serious scholarly resources, but the text itself targets a popular audience.

A medical doctor, Meeker credits her father (also a MD) with instilling in her the confidence she has needed to succeed in life.  He “was an eccentric man, quiet, antisocial and extremely smart” (p. 3).  He said very little, yet his daughter always knew he loved her.  “My dad protected me fiercely, to the point where I was almost too embarrassed to date anyone.  He was a hunter and he let my boyfriends know that” (p. 3).  It was easier to talk with her mother, but she knew she’d call on her dad, who was “tough” and “serious,” if ever her “life or health” were endangered.  He was thoroughly, unapologetically, masculine.  

In retrospect, ever more deeply impressed by her father, Meeker says:  “When we think of masculine men, we (women at least) envision those with one overriding quality:  a spine of steel.  Nothing makes a woman’s heart melt like a man with courage and resolve” (p. 132).  “True masculinity is the moral exercise of authority.  And your little girl needs it” (p. 47).  Troubled girls rarely have “authoritative” fathers; their dads are almost always absent or indifferent.  Even when she “pushes hard against your rules, flailing, crying that you are mean or unfair, she is really asking you a question:  Am I worth the fight, Dad?  Are you strong enough to handle me?  Make sure she knows the answer is yes” (p. 32).  

All daughters need what Meeker’s dad provided.  Men, she insists, “are natural leaders, and your family looks to you for qualities that only fathers have.  You were made a man for a reason, and your daughter is looking to you for guidance that she cannot get from her mother” (p. 4).  She has written this book to summon men to stand up and assume the role required of them if their daughters are to flourish.  “Men, good men,” she says:  “We need you.  We—mothers, daughters, and sisters—need your help to raise healthy young women.  We need every ounce of masculine courage and wit you own, because fathers, more than anyone else, set the course for a daughter’s life” (p. 7).  In her medical practice, she has talked with hundreds of girls.  She has watched them react to their fathers’ presence.  And she firmly believes that dads really matter.  

They matter because every girl wants a hero.  And she wants, above all else, for that hero to be her dad.  She wants someone who will protect her.  Indeed, Meeker devotes an entire chapter to this theme:  “Protect Her, Defend Her (and use a shotgun if necessary).”  She wants someone who will enforce rules that protect her—especially from the sexual predators (both in person and the media) that prowl about everywhere.  Knowing the ravages resulting from teenage promiscuity—STDs, depression, suicide—dads must resolutely stand guard over their daughters’ sexual behavior.  “Of the fifteen to eighteen million new cases of STDs that occur every year, two-thirds occur in kids under the age of twenty-five” (p. 101).  This need not be!  Strong fathers could prevent lots of it!  For the truth is:  “If you don’t want your daughter to be sexually active in high school, you need to tell her, you need to teach her.  Otherwise, she will be.  Popular culture trains our daughters for a life of promiscuity” (p. 121).  

Dads are also important because they’re their daughters’ first love.  Girls easily identify with their mothers, for they have much in common.  But men are a mysterious and alluring other.  So girls desire to know and love the opposite sex, and they rightfully long to establish ties with their fathers.  Daughters need to know, continually, that they are loved.  Words are important, but actions count for much more.  Setting and enforcing curfews, spending time together (even when little is said), listening to her a mere 10 minutes a day, telling her you love her.  Above all:  stay married to her mother, even when it takes unusual grit and discomfort.  “The most common cause of unhappiness and despair, what crushes the spirit of children more often than anything else, is divorce.  Divorce is really the central problem that has created a generation of young adults who are at higher risk for chaotic relationships, sexually transmitted diseases, and confusion about life’s purpose” (p. 144).  And, ultimately, if you’re a good dad, chances are your daughter will marry a man just like you.  If you’re truthful, she’ll covet a truthful husband.  If you’re a man of integrity, she’ll look for that quality in a man.  

Importantly, dads must realize that they will, like it or not, “teach her who God is.”  In this book, unlike her early one, Meeker reveals her religious commitments.  She insists that girls need God, and they need a dad who will “show her who He is, what he is like, and what he thinks about her” (p. 177).  Irreligious parents reading this book, she says, need to disregard much the media says about religion and realize how deeply children need religious roots.  All sorts of research demonstrate the healthy role religious faith plays in the lives of the young.  Parents who ignore this endanger their kids far more than parents who smoke cigarettes in their cars and homes!  “God is more important than dinner” (p. 182).  “Kids are born with an inherent sense that life is more than what they see” (p. 181).  They simply know that there is “an invisible, real, and wonderful” inner self, the “soul,” that is of ultimate and eternal worth.   Dads “are the first authority figure” in a girl’s life.  “If you are trustworthy, loving, and kind, your daughter will approach god more easily” (p. 190).  Much more than boys, “girls tend to see more similarities between God and their parents” (p. 190).  So dads need to read (C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel, Thomas a Kempis, Pascal and Dostoevsky are recommended) and think and come to conclusions regarding God.  Your daughters especially need to know where you stand—and where you are headed.  

In a land plagued by “experts” who insist kids can be reared by same-sex couples, or by single parents, Meeker’s book is a realistic reminder that both boys and girls (and girls especially) need dads who are committed to and involved in their daughters’ development.  As Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., M.D., professor of psychiatry at Harvard medical School, the author of The Question of God, says:  “No one interested in what children experience growing up in our culture today and the impact that parents, especially fathers, have on that experience, can afford to miss reading this book.”  

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Meeker and Legato certainly espouse politically incorrect views on various issues.  So, as one might expect, Carrie L. Lukas, in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2006), shares and extends their basic positions.  Lukas did her undergraduate work at Princeton, earned a master’s degree from Harvard, and is the vice president for policy and economics at the Independent Women’s Forum.  She declares:  “The modern feminist movement isn’t about women’s equality.  It’s about an agenda designed to benefit a special interest group:  women who will follow the professional feminist’s idea of what a woman should want” (p. ix).  

She insists that men and women are truly different and that romance (drawing together the two sexes in a relationship that is more than sexual) is truly good.  Despite the feminist briefs for “safe sex” and unlimited sexual freedom and the abolition of marriage, most women actually desire lasting, monogamous, marriages.  Despite the hostility to men amply evident in women’s studies departments and feminist literature, despite the inflated rhetoric about female “victims of violence” at the hands of vicious males, most women long for the “right man” to come along.  Despite the approbation afforded divorce, as the first step to take when unhappy in a marriage, the evidence mounts regarding the devastation of splintered unions and fractured kids.

Lukas also insists on facing “fertility facts.”  Increasingly numbers of women remain childless—and age plays a major role in this fact.  It’s simply much easier to get pregnant when you in your 20s than in your 30s.  But women are increasingly marrying (and hoping to conceive) too late to realistically expect to procreate.  The National Association of Women blithely assures the faithful that women can easily conceive in their 40s, but such propaganda is utterly self-serving rather than truthful.  Consequently, “Many women have been led to believe that they can postpone childbearing without consequence and regret that decision later in life” (p. 110).  For many women discover, at the age of 40, having “made it” in a career, that they long for children much more than money and vocational “success.”

In fact, work in the real world rarely resembles the fantasies of feminist literature, portraying a “politically correct TV-land” filled with female “lawyers, surgeons, or impeccably dressed advertising executives” (p. 135).  Most working women in the real world, however, “are working in traditional fields and are motivated by financial need” (p. 138).  Given other options (part-time work or full-time homemaking), only 15 percent of the nation’s women want “to work full-time” (p. 139).  Increasingly, women acknowledge the impossibility of “having it all.”  You can be a successful career woman or a satisfied mom.  Attaining both goals, except for those privileged few (often the professors who write and teach the books assigned in university classes), proves to be difficult if not impossible.  Complicating the picture are the “daycare delusions” promoted by feminists and politicians.  Kids just don’t thrive in daycare, nor are moms happy to be away from them for most of their waking hours.  

All-in-all, Lukas concludes that women have been seriously misled by their self-anointed leaders.  Her book is a wake-up call, designed to embolden women who want to live as they are designed to live.

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In Real Sex:  The Naked Truth About Chastity (Grand Rapids:  Brazos Press, c. 2005), Lauren F. Winner persuasively argues (from a very modern perspective) the case for an ancient virtue.  “Chastity,” she notes, “is one of the many Christian practices that are at odds with the dictates of our surrounding, secular culture” (p. 9).  However unpopular, however, it is perennially right, for it “is God’s very best for us.  God created sex for marriage and that is where it belongs” (p. 15).  

Real Sex, in many ways, is a profoundly personal story, for Winner transparently details her less-than-chaste pre-Christian life.  Coming to faith in Christ, however, led to conviction for sin (while receiving the sacrament of penance in an Episcopal church) and (through many struggles) commitment to chastity.  Her position, importantly, is deeply rooted in the scriptures and traditions of the church.  Neither a subjective personal opinion nor a simplistic citing of selected Bible verses, it’s an ethic grounded “in the faithful living of the fullness of the gospel” (p. 30).  

What’s needed in our day is a faithful explication of this gospel.  Everyone seems to freely talk about sex.  Talk is truly cheap when it’s about sex!  All the talk, all the sex education, all the “liberated” TV and seminar discussions of a “new morality” have de-sanctified and vulgarized what ought to be one of the most precious of human interactions.  “The problem is not that we talk about sex,” Winner says.  “The problem is how we talk about sex” (p. 63).  We need some “straight talk,” refuting the secular lie that “sex can be wholly separated from procreation” (p. 64).  Christians need to carefully consider the ethical ramifications of contraception.  For “if contraception invites us to be carefree, it also encourages us to be people who think we can control and schedule everything including the creation of our families, down to the month, down to the week.  And, most important, it invites us to be people who have utterly separated sex from procreation” (p. 65).  

Talking straight also leads us to reject the lie that “how you dress doesn’t matter” (p. 70).  Modesty and appropriate clothing cannot be severed, though we have, as a society, increasingly failed “to discern why clothes matter, and what clothing is appropriate when” (p. 71).  Winner argues that “casual Fridays” reveal much about our “confusion about clothes.  Professional workplaces have dress codes in part because managers know that how we dress shapes our behavior” (p. 74).  This is powerfully evident in students’ classroom behavior, where casual clothing encourages “a casual attitude, a slouching, an irreverence.  But it is not my students’ fault.  Some of their teachers wear blue jeans to class, so why should students dress up?  They are, as it were, just following suit” (p. 76).  So too, she says, casual dress (e.g. flip-flops) in church leavens a flippant attitude towards God and the holy.  

Christians in earlier eras understood this.  Granted, some preachers erred in their single-minded criticism of women’s fashions.  But both men and women need to take seriously their appearance.  “There is,” she argues, “a certain power in modest dressing, an assertion that though my body is beautiful, I am more than a sex object designed for your passing entertainment.  But the power of dressing is also the power of narrative.  For our clothes tell stories, and it would be naïve and irresponsible to pretend otherwise” (p. 77).  

The “straight talk” Winner desires means the church must stop telling lies about sex!  Despite much rhetoric, it’s not true that premarital sex will “make you feel lousy.”  In truth, it often feels great.  But feelings, of course, are often deceiving!  And the Father of Lies generally “whispers to us about the goodness of something not good.  It makes distortions feel good” (p. 89).  What the church ought to clarify is this:  “premarital sex is bad for us, even if it happens to feel great.  In other words, sexual sin is not subjectively felt” (p. 90).  That women dislike sex, that sex is somehow dirty, are other lies occasionally promoted within Christian circles.  

Supported by “straight talk,” Christians can live chastely.  Winner explains why fornication—and pornography and masturbation as well—must be rejected if one practices chastity.  It takes self-discipline and the support of a strong faith community, but it’s possible to follow God’s will in this area.  And it’s truly what’s good for us.  “That people have sex outside marriage is understandable; we fornicate for the same reason we practice idolatry.  Idolatry carries in it the seed of a good impulse—the impulse to worship our maker.  Idolatry is that good impulse wrongly directed to disastrous ends.  Like idolatry, fornication is a wrong reflection of a right creational impulse.  We were made for sex.  And so premarital sex tells a partial truth; that’s why it resonates with something.  But partial truths are destructive.  They push us to created goods wrongly lived.  To borrow a phrase from Thomas Cranmer again:  they are ultimately destructive to our selves, our souls and bodies” (p. 121).  

As archives and witnesses in formerly Communist lands have become available to historians, we better understand the significance played by Western intellectuals promoting the Soviet agenda.  In Double Lives:  Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (New York:  Enigma Books, 2004; completely revised and updated), Stephen Koch details the tangled web of espionage and subversion spun by one of Lenin’s and Stalin’s premier agents, Willi Munzenberg, a German communist who “covertly directed propaganda operations in the West” (p. 5).  He mastered both the arts of spreading propaganda and enlisting fellow travelers, shaping public opinion through various “Popular Front” mechanisms to garner support for the Soviet position.  

“He wanted to instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility” (p. 15).  He did so by co-opting public opinion in democratic countries and then denying he’d actually done so.  “He organized in all the media:  newspapers, film, radio, books, magazines, the theater.  Every kind of ‘opinion maker’ was involved:  writers, artists, actors, commentators, priests, ministers, professors, ‘business leaders,’ scientists, psychologists, anyone at all whose opinion the public was likely to respect” (p. 15).  

He shrewdly manipulated scores of left-leaning intellectuals, fellow travelers whom he disdainfully called the “innocents.”  He played upon man’s hunger for righteousness, for an inner sense of making the world a better place.  “More than perhaps any other person of his era, he developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century;  the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is politics” (p. 20).  Thus the “lost generation” of the ‘20s—writers and artists such as Lincoln Steffens and John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht and a cadre of Hollywood screenwriters and wealthy donors cultivated by another Soviet agent, Otto Katz—were Munzenberg’s primary targets.  

Hemingway, an “unchallenged celebrity” in the ‘20s and ‘30s, was as important to Munzenberg as Andre Gide (the French novelist).  His literary style, providing a model for scores of writers, elicited an acclaim from all quarters.  He became “the most influential moralist of the Word in his era,” and, consequently, “all three of the principal leaders of the Hollywood Popular Front—Lillian Hellman, Dashiel Hammett, and Dorothy Parker—were writers whose prose vulgarized Hemingway’s style” (p. 309).  Hemingway’s prominent role in supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War opened the door for Soviet apparatchiks looking for propaganda opportunities.  He was not himself a communist, only one of the “useful idiots” so easily manipulated by Munzenberg’s men.  

Since the Bolsheviks saw America as a serious threat to their endeavors, it was necessary to awaken a “worldwide anti-Americanism,” to “instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people” (p. 41).  Alienated intellectuals, looking for righteous causes, were easily massaged by Munzenberg’s ministrations.  The celebrated Sacco-Vanzetti case, for example, was almost wholly his creation, and he worked through a committee led by Gardner “Pat” Jackson, a prominent liberal of the day who persuaded Marion Frankfurter, the wife of Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor who later became a Supreme Court Justice, to rally support for the accused killers.  When Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, Professor Frankfurter wrote an impassioned defense of them that appeared in the Atlantic and was widely circulated to assail the injustices of the American judicial system.  

During the ‘20s and ‘30s Munzenberg also promoted pacifism in the West, seeing it as a way to weaken (and if possible disarm) the democracies that might oppose the USSR.  Communists, of course were not pacifists!  They relished “class war” and attained their dictatorial goals through violence.  But they knew how “peace” and “non-violence” appeal to idealists, so they frequently worked through “innocents” intent on making the world a paradise through good intentions.  Bolsheviks such as Munzenberg thus easily found cooperative mouthpieces for their cause among Quakers and like-minded liberal Christians who made opposition to all war an item of faith.  

The world changed dramatically when Hitler seized power in the ‘30s.  Munzenberg fled his native Germany and found refuge in Paris, where he continued his subversive activities, promoting the Soviet agenda.  The Reichstag Fire in Berlin, for example, generated an enormous propaganda war as various factions (both Nazi and Communist) were blamed and political advantages gained in the aftermath.  Sitting in exile in Switzerland, Thomas Mann, the great German novelist, concluded that “’in the final analysis the origin of the fire may itself remain as mysterious and elusive as the intellectual and subjective line dividing National Socialism from communism.  As I see it, the unconscious meaning of the trial lies in its exposure of the closeness, the kinship, yes even the identity of National Socialism and communism.  Its “fruit” will be to push to absurdity the hatred between the two camps and their idiotic determination to annihilate each other, when in fact there is no need for such enmity.  They are kindred though divergent manifestations of one and the same historical situation, the same political world, and are even less separable than are capitalism and Marxism.  Symbolic outbreaks like the Reichstag going up in flames are, we sense, even if we cannot prove it, their joint work’” (pp. 132-133).  

In England, Munzenberg’s apparatus drew wealthy, privileged students into the “Cambridge Conspiracy.”  Similar work was done in “every country of interest to the Bolsheviks” (p. 180).  In America, recruiters targeted Ivy League colleges.  Elite, gifted youngsters easily adopt an “adversary” or “counter-cultural” stance regarding the “establishment” that enables them to live so comfortably.  This adversary culture appeals especially to “vigorous intellectual and artistic” youngsters who relish a radicalism that seems to represent “freedom and truth.”  They want to “tear aside the bourgeois façade” and stand strong for “the deepest truth” ever known (p. 189).  Thus young men in England such as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, Americans including Alger Hiss and Michael Straight (whose family owned the New Republic magazine) were recruited for the communist cause.  Young women too played an invaluable role.  Ella Winter served as Felix Frankfurter’s secretary at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, “guided the steps” of her first husband, the famous muckraker, Lincoln Steffens, and ultimately became “one of the most trusted party agents for the West Coast,” working with special effectiveness within the Hollywood community.  

Given their elite standing, these youngsters naturally enjoyed easy entry into the highest realms of government, academe, the media and arts.  And they were ordered to ever support the Soviet cause and undermine Western democracies.  They were, of course, never to admit this.  Willi Munzenberg’s widow, Babette Gross (an invaluable source for this book) remembered these agents’ approach:  “You do not endorse Stalin.  You do not call yourself a Communist.  You do not declare your love for the regime.  You do not call on people to support the Soviets.  Ever.  Under any circumstances” (p. 249).  Rather:  “You claim to be an independent-minded idealist.  You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break.  You believe in open-mindedness.  You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here on our own country.  You are frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman” (p. 250).  But in fact, all of these agents took their orders from Moscow!  

In time Munzenberg, along with virtually all veteran Bolsheviks, fell from Stalin’s favor.  He managed to avoid execution through various shrewd maneuvers, but he died (hanged under mysterious circumstances) soon after German forces invaded France in 1940.   Double Lives reads much like a mystery novel, but it deals with some of the most historically significant currents of the 20^th century.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Martin Amis is both the son of a highly acclaimed novelist and himself an accomplished writer.  In Koba the Dread:  Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York:  Hyperion, c. 2002), he ponders the incredible slaughter of millions of innocent Russians by Joseph Stalin and the equally pernicious failure of Western intellectuals to discern and denounce it.  His famous father (Kingsley) was for years a “fellow traveler,” supporting the USSR until he became disillusioned with Stalin.  Troubled by this, Martin tries to look back and summarize the enormity of the Stalin’s genocide and simultaneously fathom the complicity of his English enablers.  

Most of Amis’s information comes from the path-breaking historical work of Robert Conquest (a family friend) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who have documented how ruthlessly Stalin followed this prescription:  “’Death solves all problems.  No man, no problem’” (p. 57).  Murder, on a mass scale, marked his regime and explained his lengthy reign.  But the value of this work is not its information, which has been widely available for decades.  What Amis provides, in a non-systematic way, is insight into the support Stalin enjoyed around the world, for it was his “ideology” that justified his atrocities.  Thus the same intellectuals who staunchly condemned the Nazis often defended the Bolsheviks.  

As Orlando Figes explained it, “’the Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment—it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx—which makes Western liberals, even in this age of post-modernism, sympathise with it . . . even if we do not share its political goals; whereas the Nazi efforts to “improve mankind,” whether through eugenics or genocide spat in the face of the Enlightenment and can only fill us with revulsion’” (p. 85).  In fact, the Bolsheviks were far worse than the Nazis.  “Nazism did not destroy civil society.  Bolshevism did destroy civil society” (p. 88).  Thus Germany, her basic institutions and traditions intact, recovered quickly following WWII, whereas Russia still welters in the wasteland created by Lenin and Stalin.  

One mark of that growing wasteland appeared early as Russians quickly failed to reproduce themselves.  “Since 1917 the Bolsheviks had systematically undermined the family.  Divorce was encouraged (to achieve it you were simply obliged to notify your spouse by postcard); incest, bigamy, adultery and abortion were decriminalized; families were scattered by labor-direction and deportation; and children who denounced their parents became national figures, hymned in verse and song” (p. 154).  Cultural chaos so quickly consumed the land that within two decades the regime decreed abortion illegal and Stalin suddenly appeared as a champion of traditional family life!  Then the Germans invaded and WWII began and Stalin revoked many of the restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church, appealing to the ancient religion in his war with the Nazis.  

He did so, however, with a severely depleted military.  Amazingly, his brutal purges in the ‘30’s led to the following reductions:  “3 of the 5 marshals; 13 of the 15 army commanders; 8 of the 9 fleet admirals and admirals Grade I; 50 of the 57 corps commanders; 154 of the 186 divisional commanders; 16 of the 16 army political commissars; 25 of the 28 corps commissars; 58 of the 64 divisional commissars; 11 of 11 vice commissars of defense; 98 of the 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviet” (p. 175).  That the officer corps, generally the least political of the public servants, would be so savagely dismembered bears witness to the nature of Stalin’s tyranny.  “One soldier likened the purge to ‘a Tartar massacre,’ but even this understates the case.  As Roy Medvedev put it:  ‘Never has the officer corps of any army suffered such losses in any war as the Soviet Army suffered in this time of peace” (p. 175).  

Thanks to the American and British armies, of course, the Axis powers were defeated and Stalin laid claim to much of Eastern Europe as well as reestablished his dictatorship following WWII.  And strangely enough, Amis says, Stalin proved to be “an extremely popular leader” (p. 212).  Millions were sent to their deaths in the camps, millions were deliberately starved, but the leader remained popular!  He did so by manipulating public opinion.  He, like Hitler, mastered all the means of propaganda, the “hypnotic power of mass ideology” (p. 213).  “The love for Stalin:  it is very nearly the saddest story of all” (p. 213).  

But why Western intellectuals joined the Russian masses, loving Stalin, remains a mystery to Amis.   He describes, but fails to explain this phenomenon.  I suspect he lacks the philosophical and theological acumen to rightly diagnose the powerful allure communism posed for intellectuals who had abandoned the principles of Western Civilization.  But he does at least divulge the disillusionment many, like him, now share as they reflect upon the past century.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One of the few journalists to clearly see—and honestly report—conditions in Stalin’s Russia was Malcolm Muggeridge, whose novel, Winter in Moscow (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdman’s Publishing Co., c. 1987; first published in 1934 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, London), was based upon his observations as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1932 and 1933.  Reared in a socialist home, married to the niece of Beatrice Webb (an eminent socialist who routinely praised and defended the Bolsheviks), Muggeridge arrived in Russia with great expectations, confident he’d find the dreams of himself and his father fully fulfilled.  He even considered becoming a Russian citizen and devoting the rest of his life to the socialist cause.  But he’d barely arrived before he was overwhelmed with the reality of what had happened, the misery of the “workers’ paradise,” the illusions of Marxist slogans.  So instead of writing an encomium to the endeavor, he drafted one of the most searing indictments of the Soviet system written in his era.  In his introduction to this edition, Michael D. Aeshliman notes that “A.J.P. Taylor, one of the finest English historians of our time, wrote in 1965 that this novel was ‘probably the best book ever written on Soviet Russia’” (p. vii).  

The novel is loosely structured around a corps of English visitors’ and journalists’ activities in Russia.  Representative of the thousands of “political pilgrims” who toured the country was a woman, a devout feminist, who was delighted “to find that so many things she believed in had been put into practice—co-education, sex equality, humane slaughterer, family allowances, communal kitchens” etc. (p. 24).  Another, an Anglican clergyman, “by nature mild and gentle,” who had no faith in either the Thirty-Nine Articles or the Virgin Birth he officially upheld, sought a better world in Russia and agonized over the “intolerance and cruelty” so amply evident under Stalin’s rule, but he took comfort in the fact that every home “had its wireless, and its gramophone, and its shelves of revolutionary literature” (p. 38).  Coming to Russia for a brief visit, knowing what they wanted to see and seeing what the tour guides chose to show them, they generally returned home with glowing testimonials for the communist system.  

Western journalists too gave Stalin support.  They were epitomized by a man Muggeridge called “Jefferson”—clearly the celebrated, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who (while millions of peasants died) merely acknowledged that there was “’a shortage of some districts’” that might in “’certain very rare’” cases be called “’a famine.  But, as I said in a piece I sent a few days ago, you can’t make omelettes without cracking eggs’” (p. 90).   Years later, Muggeridge would say that Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism” (p. xix).  Evaluating another journalist, who solemnly praised Duranty, Muggeridge said:  “The old man embodied in himself the character of his age.  He was the decadence of European civilization getting a last sensation out of the establishment of Asiatic barbarism in Russia.  Lines on his face traced out a record of the world to which he belonged.  Co-education in creases round his nose.  Votes for women wrinkling his forehead.  Pacifism the slobber of his lips” (p. 93).  He was, in short, “bloated, inflated, but with no core” (p. 93).  

One of the characters, Wilfred Pye, representing Muggeridge, “had a simple mind” and went to Russia intent on finding the truth.  “Obviously, Pye thought, I must see where people eat; how they eat, and what they eat” (p. 127).  He’d always sided with the poor and dispossessed, and Bolshevism seemed to him a fully admirable movement.  “It was the future; hated by all save the far-seeing and the pure of heart; hated by all save Pye and his great English Liberal newspaper” (p. 128).  To him the helpless were always righteous, the impoverished were always victims, and the pursuit of justice required the transformation of society.  He was proud of standing up for the “weak and oppressed, [and] when he looked at a map it was not countries he saw, but wrongs sprawling across five continents” (p. 128).  

Arriving in Russia expecting to find a paradise, Muggeridge had to do little more than stroll about Moscow to see its refutation.  “He saw hunger everywhere” and wondered how the Dictatorship of the Proletariat could feed him and Western journalists while allowing masses of Russians to go hungry.  Determined to see more of the country, he traveled extensively and discovered, to his horror, that famine was everywhere and, worse yet, “it was organized from within” (p. 138).  Peasants were dying in what had once been the bread basket of Russia, and it was clearly an officially-orchestrated starvation of the people.  As Pye analyzed it, he realized that:  “Marxism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’s religion, is the most urban religion that has ever existed.  It was born in underground printing presses, in dingy lodgings and cafes and hotels.  Its prophets were wanderers from one European capital to another whose dreams, like themselves, were rootless” (p. 138).  In the deepest sense, the Bolsheviks warred against the “earth; with the nature of things and people; with life itself, that their embodiment involves” (p. 139).  In the service of an abstract ideology, Marxists easily denied both God and Reality and sought to destroy all created goods that challenged their agenda.  

Muggeridge rapidly discarded his illusions in the face of the monumental evils he witnessed.  One of his characters finally concluded:  “Every tendency in himself, in societies; the past and the future; all he had ever seen or thought or felt or believed, sorted itself out.  It was a vision of Good and Evil.  Heaven and Hell.  Life and death.  There were two alternatives; and he had to choose.  He chose” (p. 226).  He chose to deal honestly with reality rather than blind himself with ideological rhetoric, to tell the truth rather than toe the party line.  Walking about the decaying city of Moscow, he realized that the “litter of ideas in his own mind was the litter of ideas outside. Rootless, unreligious ideas.  What a blight they had been!  Piling up into shadows whose darkness cloaked a reversion to savagery.  Piling up into a Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (p. 232).  Under the Bolsheviks utopia had triumphed, consummating “all the dingy hopes that have echoed and re-echoed over Europe for a century” (p. 234).   

When he tried to publish what he saw in Russia, his articles were disbelieved and he was called a liar.  The Guardian fired him and when he returned to England he was blacklisted and virtually unemployable!  Only celebrations of Stalin were allowed!  But Winter in Moscow was published and remains for us one of the few truthful descriptions of what life was really like in those years.  

Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life:  The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death (New York:  Bantam Books, c. 1975) was my first introduction to a scholarly investigation of near-death experiences.  Moody earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1969 before going to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist.  The book takes a tentative, but respectful attitude towards the subject that makes it compelling.  

We human beings have forever pondered death’s mystery.  “There is a graveyard in Turkey which was used by Neanderthal men approximately 100,000 years ago.  There, fossilized imprints have enabled archeologists to discover that these ancient men buried their dead in biers of flowers, indicating that they perhaps saw death as an occasion of celebration—as a transition of the dead from this world to the next.  Indeed, graves from very early sites all over the earth give evidence of the belief in human survival of bodily death” (p. 13).  In accord with this ancient inclination, when Moody, rather inadvertently, began to hear reports from people who claimed to have “died” and lived to tell of it, he was motivated to study some 150 such accounts.  

The people he studied (mostly through personal interviews) came from remarkably different “religious, social and educational backgrounds” (p. 15).  Nevertheless, they had remarkably similar “experiences” (p. 21).  Crafting a composite of such experiences, summing up his findings, Moody urges us to envision the following:  

     A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor.  He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel.  After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.

     After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a “body” but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind.  Soon other things begin to happen.  Others come to meet and to help him.  He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before—a being of light—appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life.  At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace.  Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives.

     Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so.  In the first place, he can find no human words adequate to describe these unearthly episodes.  He also finds that other scoff, so he stops telling other people.  Still the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life (pp.  21-23).  

Though there is a commonality to the reports, some of the book’s statements are most memorable.  In the section on “ineffability,” for example, one woman said:  “’Well, when I was taking geometry, they always told me there were only three dimensions, and I always just accepted that.  But they were wrong.  There are more.  And, of course, our world—the one we’re living in now—is three-dimensional, but the next one definitely isn’t.  And that’s why it’s so hard to tell you this.  I have to describe it to you in words that are three-dimensional.  That’s as close as I can get to it, but it’s not really adequate’” (p. 26).   Recounting his out-of-body experience, a “young informant” said:  “I was sort of floating about five feet above the street, about five yards away from the car, I’d say, and I heard the echo of the crash dying away.  I saw people come running up and crowding around the car, and I saw my friend get out of the car, obviously in shock.  I could see my own body in the wreckage among all those people, and could see them trying to get it out.  My legs were all twisted and there was blood all over the place” (p. 37).  Most of the witnesses say they entered into another body, different from but decidedly resembling their earthly body.  It’s a “spiritual body,” weightless and time-transcending, but still a body!  “A person in the spiritual body is in a privileged position I relation to the other persons around him.  He can see and hear them, but they can’t see or hear him” (p. 46).  

Virtually all the people encountered a bright, warm, loving being of light.  Some think it was an angel.  Others think it was Jesus.  Subsequently, they all considered loving others and gaining knowledge the great purpose of life on earth.  Many who had little interest in such things come back to life with a deep determination to spend the rest of their days loving and learning, activities that will flourish in the hereafter.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Howard Storm’s My Descent into Death:  A Second Chance at Life (New York:  Doubleday, c. 2005) is a fascinating near-death account.  A university art professor, a “self-sufficient” Stoic with no religious inclinations, Storm was in Paris in 1985 when he suffered a life-threatening perforation of his stomach, much like a burst appendix.  He’d hoped for artistic fame.  To become a “great artist” he’d been willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone.  “I didn’t believe in life after death.  When you died, it was like having the switch turned off.  That was it, the end of your existence, finished, just darkness” (p. 23).  

But that belief all changed in a moment!  His wife rushed him to a hospital, but it was a week-end when most of the staff enjoy their leisure, so he lay, untended for some 10 hours.  Lying there, he confesses to giving up on life:   “Saying to myself, ‘Let it end now,’ I closed my eyes.  . . . .  I knew that what would happen next would be the end of any kind of consciousness or existence.  I knew that to be true.  The idea of any kind of life after death never entered my mind because I didn’t believe in that kind of thing.  I knew for certain that there was no such thing as life after death.  Only simpleminded people believed in that sort of thing.  I didn’t believe in God, or heaven, or hell, or any other fairy tales.  I drifted into darkness, a sleep into annihilation” (p. 9).  

What followed was not “annihilation” but a “descent” into another realm of Reality, a descent that totally transformed Howard Storm.  He was aware of moving about the hospital, seeing others while being unseen.  He saw himself, looking like a “wax replica of me” (p. 112), lying unconscious under a sheet in the bed.  Leaving the hospital, he encountered various people, taking a journey, feeling deep despair and hopelessness.  He was surrounded by creatures who “were once human beings” (p. 17) who jeered and screamed and attacked him.  Immersed in darkness, he experienced some of the horrors of Hell.  

All alone, lying on the ground, under lethal attack, something inside him urged him to pray, to ask God for help.  As a child he had prayed, as taught in Sunday school.  But for years he had never even though of praying.  But his world had changed!  So he tried to remember how to pray, cobbling together fragments from the Lord’s Prayer, the 23d Psalm, and “God Bless America.”  

    To my amazement, the cruel, merciless beings tearing the life out of me were incited to rage by 

my ragged prayer.  It was as if I were throwing boiling oil on them. They screamed at me, “There 

is no God!  Who do you think you’re talking to?  Nobody can hear you!  . . . .  But at the same 

time, they were backing away . . . .   I realized that saying things about God was actually driving 

them away.  

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

I was alone in that darkness for time without measure.  I thought about what I had done.  All my life I had thought that hard work was what counted.  My life was devoted to building a monument to my ego.  My family, my sculptures, my painting, my house, my gardens, my little fame, my illusions of power, were all an extension of my ego.  All of those things were gone now, and what did they matter?  All those things that I had lived for were lost to me, and they didn’t mean a thing (pp. 19-21).                     

Fortunately, his prayer (however feeble) delivered him.  He also remembered a song, “Jesus Loves Me,” and began singing the bits of it he remembered.  He suddenly knew how much he needed such love!  

“For the first time in my adult life I wanted it to be true that Jesus loved me.  I didn’t know how to express what I wanted and needed, but with every bit of my last ounce of strength, I yelled out into the darkness, ‘Jesus, save me.’  I yelled that from the core of my being with all the energy I had left.  I have never meant anything more strongly in my life” (p. 24).  Then came the Light, brilliant and beautiful!  But “it wasn’t just light. This was a living being, a luminous being approximately eight feet tall and surrounded by an oval of radiance.  The brilliant intensity of the light penetrated my body Ecstasy swept away the agony.  Tangible hands and arms gently embraced me and lifted me up.  I slowly rose up into the presence of the light and the torn pieces of my body miraculously healed before my eyes.  All my wounds vanished and I became whole and well in the light.  More important, the despair and pain were replaced by love.  I had been lost and now was found; I had been dead and now was alive” (p. 25).  

The Light was Jesus.  “I was unconditionally loved and accepted.  He was King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Christ Jesus the Savior.  Jesus does love me, I thought” (p. 25).  Never before had he been so loved.  

Still more:  “This person of blinding glory loved me with overwhelming power.  After what I had been through, to be completely known, accepted, and intensely loved by this beautiful God/man of light surpassed anything I had ever known or could possibly have imagined.  I had called out to Jesus and he came to rescue me” (p. 26).  Jesus delivered him.  

In the presence of Jesus and the angels, Storm then went through an honest “life review,” presenting the often painful and disgraceful aspects of his past.  He realized how all of us, in time, will be judged.  The truth about us will be revealed.  Storm realized that only God’s love will save us.  But unless we live in that love and live rightly we will not fare well in the Judgment.  Full of questions, Storm  wondered “what happens when we die,” He learned:  

When people die, they don’t know that they have died.  The world looks the same to them, and they feel completely alive.  Whatever trauma a person experienced in dying is only a vivid memory.  The suffering is gone and the person feels physically better than he or she ever did in life.  

     There is disturbing confusion, however, because the individual cannot interact with other people or his surroundings.  No one can hear or see him.  Nothing responds to her touch.  Most people are not ready to die and can’t accept the fact they have died.  Some people are ready and are relaxed and eagerly anticipate the reunion with loved ones who have preceded them.  This is the condition that makes their transition beautiful and advances them toward heaven. 

     After death, you will be receptive to God’s love or you will not, depending on how you have lived your life.  Only God knows what is in a person’s heart.  How we judge people has little to do with how God knows us.  We judge people by their actions, and God knows us by our intentions.  God knows every deed, every thought, and every motivation that we have.  If we have loved God, loved the one that God has sent to us, loved our fellow person, and loved ourselves, we are drawn toward God.  If we have not loved God, God’s son, our fellow person, or ourselves, we are repulsed by God’s love.  There is nothing in between.  Every person knows inside whether or not he or she has lived lovingly.  God knows (pp. 49-50).  

Hopefully, Storm says, while still on earth we will come to terms with God’s will and walk His way.  We need to ever remember, he says, that:  

This life that God has given us is a precious gift. We are to use it wisely because this opportunity to prepare ourselves for heaven is given only once.  No one will ever be given this exact opportunity again.  God does not bestow the gift of life on us frivolously or arbitrarily.  We are given this life opportunity to prepare ourselves for our continuing spiritual growth in heaven.  Failing to use our life opportunities wisely and lovingly is a rejection of God.  Throwing one’s life away is a rejection of God and is not preparation for heaven.  The choices we make in this world determine whether we are candidates for heaven or not.  In each of us we know whether we are going to heaven or not.  If you don’t know the answer, you are in big trouble and need to ask God to show you the way immediately Fortunately God wants us to come HOME, and God has sent us someone to show us the way home. His name is Jesus (p. 59).

Jesus is the answer!  He alone is the “way, the truth, and the life,” the “resurrection and the life.”  Faith in Him brings us eternal life.  That Storm met Jesus in his near-death experience has made all the difference in his life.  And though he wanted to stay with Jesus and the angels, he was sent back to earth with a mission.  So he awakened in the Paris hospital, discovering that against all odds he had survived 10 hours with a medical problem that should have killed him much earlier.  Surgeons finally operated and the perforated stomach mended.  Somewhat miraculously, he managed to leave the Paris hospital and fly home to the U.S, where he soon found himself in another hospital, fighting double pneumonia, a collapsed lung, hepatitis, and a horrendous fever.  This resulted in a weeks-long, excruciating time.  Again his life was at risk.  And yet the realities he’d earlier encountered were sustained.  

Several times during this period, when I was awake, believing that I would die soon, an angel came into the room.  The room would fill with radiant white light, and the most beautiful figure of a luminous angel would appear by my bed. This happened only when I was awake, and I was amazed by the angel’s appearance.  The angel would assure me that I was going to live and that God was watching over me.  I would immediately feel better physically and emotionally. The angel never came when someone else was in the room and always left before someone arrived.  A nurse would often come into the room immediately after an angel had departed.  I would be sitting up in bed, tears running down my face, and I would tell her that an angel had just been in the room.  The nurses would always laugh and tell me to get some rest; I knew they didn’t believe me.  I also knew that the only reason I was alive was because the angels were helping me heal (p. 93). 

Storm suffered much pain in the hospital, but he discovered that prayer often brought more comfort when drugs (which he generally refused to take so as to stay alert to what was taking place).  In praising Him, in vowing to serve Him in any way possible, he found peace.  He also began to read—especially the Bible, which became a fountain of truth.  Rightly read, listening for God to speak through His written Word, tells us what we really need to know.  The writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton became a special blessing.  In time he visited Merton’s grave in Kentucky.  While praying there, a young man came into the cemetery and gave him a copy of Merton’s poems.  He read, appreciatively, a poem.  He then noticed that the young man was gone.  He asked a friend who was with him if he had seen him, and he had.  A bit later, “when I was looking at photographs of Thomas Merton, I saw a picture of him when he was in his early twenties.  He looked just like the young man in the cemetery!” (p. 119).  Given his awakened sensitivities to the eternal world, Storm says:  “I believe the spirit of Thomas Merton had visited me and consoled me at his grave.  He reassured me that he understood my struggle of living in limbo between heaven and earth” (p. 119).   Just as he discerned Merton’s presence, so too he senses angels, God’s special messengers, in our world.  He finds God speaking to him through nature and other people as well.  Indeed, rather than astounding us with their glory and power, “Angels sometimes appear to us as people” (p. 137).  

After regaining his health, he attended United Theological Seminary and received a Master of Divinity degree.  Much that he studied, however, he had already learned from Jesus and the angels in his near-death experience.  He began to tell his story and attending church, finding a home in a United Church of Christ.  Before long, his university work became less and less interesting, and he embarked upon a pastoral ministry in that denomination.    

In her laudatory introduction to this book, Anne Rice says, “This is a book you devour from cover to cover, and pass on to others.  This is a book you will quote in your daily conversation.  Storm was meant to write it and we are meant to read it.”  That’s high praise from a highly successful writer and recent convert to Christ.  And she sums up nicely my commendation as well.  There are some underlying theological issues I could criticize (Storm is, after all, a minister in perhaps the most liberal of American denominations), but as long as one simply listens to his story it is most persuasive and edifying.  

# # #

It’s always wise, when hearing politicians speak, to disregard their promises and heed their past performances, to ignore rhetorical flourishes while examining historical actions, to dismiss their theatrics while looking for evidence regarding their character and integrity, to look for a record of leadership, decisiveness, and action.  Thus I’ve found three books about Barack Obama that help put his political career in context.  All three are, in various ways, critical of him, so they must also be read critically.  

Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man:  Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (New York:  Free Press, c. 2008) provides a probing analysis of the man.  (He may prove a poor prophet, however, in declaring Obama “can’t win”!).  Steele has longed pondered questions of race in America and written some fine books, including The Content of Our Character and White Guilt:  How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.  He sympathetically identifies with Obama inasmuch as he too has a black father and white mother (though his parents preserved an intact family in Chicago).  Like Obama, he went through an intense struggle as a young man, aching to racially define himself.  He too espoused radical views in his college years and invested several years thereafter to “community organizing.”  So he’s deeply sympathetic with Obama and openly admires the candidate’s “remarkable political talent” as well as the fact he is “elegant as well as eloquent” (p. 12).  But Steele finally finds Obama a deeply flawed man who ought not be trusted with this nation’s leadership.

Barack Obama “embodies a great and noble human aspiration:  to smother racial power in a democracy of individuals” (p. 8).  He exemplifies the best hopes of the Civil Rights movement launched by Martin Luther King, Jr.  This explains the excitement that has accompanied his rapid rise to prominence.  “It doesn’t matter that he sometimes goes along with race-based policies, or that he made his own Faustian bargain with affirmative action” (p. 8).  What matters—especially to multitudes of Americans encumbered with “white guilt”—is the fact that at last there has appeared a person who will signal the end of the long saga of injustice derived from slavery.  There has been, since the ‘60s, “a moral evolution away from racism so transformative that” millions of us desire “to see a truly qualified black person in the White House” (p. 11).  

To evaluate this particular black person, however, we must take seriously Obama’s personal quest for his father, an obsession that permeates his autobiographical Dreams from My Father.  This has been, Steele notes, the “lifelong preoccupation for Obama” (p. 17) that explains his “determination to be black, as if blackness were more an achievement than a birthright” (p. 18).  Hungry for a heroic sire, his youthful fantasies began to crumble in his 20s when he met his half-sister, the daughter of his father’s first wife, who shattered his dreams.  He was forced to admit that “the man Barack had always pictured as a formidable patriarch” was in fact “a figure of pathos, a man of some talent beset by petty weaknesses and the sort of arrogance that covers an inner faithlessness” (p. 22).  

Yet he would not detach himself from his father’s blackness—he wanted to don his racial identity, and that meant embracing his Kenyan ancestry.  But it also meant, strangely enough, mingling an African  identity with one crafted by African American writers such as Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois.  Steele understands Obama’s hunger.  “For racially mixed blacks, the search for ‘authentic’ blackness is also a search for personal credibility and legitimacy” (p. 28).  Still more:  it’s a hunger to belong to a people, a  community, that grants worth and purpose to one’s existence.  “The ache at the center of Dreams from My Father is this seemingly permanent ache of not belonging” (p. 34).  Thus some men (such as Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright) embrace varieties of “black nationalism.”  Steele himself felt its lure, but in time he saw that “kitschy images of ‘blackness’” would never help him “build a successful life in the modern world” (p. 37).  He understood, while working in the community in East St. Louis, IL, what Obama failed to learn later in Chicago, that he was indulging in a “gesture of identification—the act of going along with something that we may not entirely believe in to show our identification with our group and our militant disregard for mainstream society.  It is a way of belonging” (p. 37).  

This belonging “demands a solidarity (transparency) very similar to what totalitarian societies demand.  It expects many gestures of identification—a liberal politics and a Democratic Party affiliation among them” (p. 38).  Finding his identity in his blackness, rather than relying on his own abilities, Barack Obama fell into trap, a double bind that makes him a “bound man” (p. 38).  He could (like Tiger Woods) have developed his skills and entered the mainstream of American society.  He had that option.  But “Obama’s racial quest springs from a personal angst, not from an oppression in society” (p. 44).  This was markedly evident when he attended Occidental College, where he carefully chose to associate with black activists, “’Marxist professors and structural feminists’” (p. 45).  He particularly dissociated from “blacks like himself—blacks from integrated backgrounds and good preparatory schools who are at ease in the American mainstream” (p. 47).  Indeed, he spoke harshly of a fellow student who chose assimilation rather than segregation.  Obama “needs to ‘be black.’  And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity.  For Obama, liberalism is blackness” (p. 52).    Thus in Chicago he joined “a South Side black church with a ‘Black Value System,’ focused on ‘Black freedom,’ the ‘black community,’ and the ‘black family.’  In this church, the adjective ‘black’ is a more consistent theme than any of the nouns it modifies.  It is invoked as an atavism, a God-given specialness that is thought meaningful in itself” (p. 53).  

Having examined Obama the man, Steele then considers the society within which he functions.  Throughout American history, blacks have mastered the art of “masking.”  In earlier times it took the form of a smiling, compliant, entertaining Louis Armstrong.  “Today, racial victimization is the face we blacks want broader America to see because it entitles blacks and obligates whites” (p. 68).  This is the mask the two Obamas effectively wear.  As victims, blacks have found both “bargaining and challenging” useful strategies, emboldened by “a largesse of moral authority that whites simply can never have” (p. 74).  Bill Cosby effectively negotiated “the classic bargainer’s deal” with The Cosby Show.  Challengers, like Al Sharpton and petulant rap singers, militantly assert that “whites are incorrigibly racist until they do something to prove otherwise” (p. 77); they make militant demands and exact payments.  

Then there are, Steele explains, “iconic Negroes” like Oprah Winfrey, bargainers who embody “the highest and best longings of both races” (p. 86).  “Iconic Negroes are absolution for whites and redemption for blacks” (p. 87).  “Barack Obama,” Steele insists, “is nothing if not an iconic Negro” (p. 98).  His amazing rise to prominence is largely attributable to this fact.  “What white Americans deeply long for is a bargaining relationship with black America” (p. 104).  They dislike being called racists and want to be granted moral legitimacy as tolerant people.  “It is Barack’s Obama’s extraordinary good luck that the arc of his life and political career has intersected with this great hunger” (pp. 104-105).  But the source of his success also renders him a “bound man.”  He’s in a bind because he’s succeeding while betraying the very people he claims to represent.  It’s difficult to follow the “one sacrosanct admonition:  whether bargaining or challenging, you must never ever concede that only black responsibility can truly lift blacks into parity with whites” (p. 110).  Neither blacks nor whites want to mention it, but “black responsibility is the greatest—if not the only transformative power available to blacks” (p. 111).  When Bill Cosby recently asserted this truth, liberal wrath rained down on from all sides.  Unwilling to join Cosby in telling the truth, Barack Obama is a “bound man.  He cannot be himself without hurting himself politically” (p. 118).  Though both blacks and whites find him an attractive solution to this nation’s racial injustices, he “cannot serve the aspirations of one race without betraying those of the other” (p. 126).  

Thus, Steele thinks, “it was masking, not convictions, that brought Barack Obama forward in American life.  He is decidedly not a conviction politician.  His supporters do not look to him to do something; they look to him primarily to be something, to represent something.  He is a bound man because he cannot be two opposing worldviews at the same time—he cannot grant whites their racial innocence and simultaneously withhold it from them” (p. 133).  In the final analysis, he lacks substance; he lacks a fixed compass; he lacks presidential character.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

In The Case Against Barack Obama:  The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2008), investigative reporter David Fredosso tries, like a prosecutor, to set forth evidence that will convince a jury (the American electorate) that Obama ought not be elected President.  Ample notes (largely drawn from Chicago newspapers and national periodicals) carefully document his presentation.  He urges us to calmly compare Obama’s rhetorical claims with his deeds.  What the record shows, he argues, is that Obama has done little more than speak and write and display an attractive persona that lacks much substance. 

  Fredosso first considers Obama’s claim to be a “new” kind of politician, a reformer intent on constructive change.  His speeches certainly move the multitudes, but his activities in Chicago prove the contrary.  He has never supported reform nor wrought change.  He has always worked, hand-in-glove, with the entrenched political machine, ever endorsing Mayor Richard M. Daley and supporting (even as a United States Senator) the notoriously corrupt Strogers (father and son) who helped run the political machine in Cook County.  The inner circle of Obama’s campaign staff are veteran Chicago operatives (including a handful of enormously wealthy women).   His campaign finance manager, Penny Pritzker, is a billionaire who inherited, among other things, her family’s Hyatt hotel chain.  (In her role as a banker, incidentally, she advocated the sub-prime lending strategy that bankrupted the Superior Bank, a strategy that now stands revealed as a prime reason for our nation’s financial troubles).  And Mayor Daley’s hand deftly moves the Obama campaign via his veteran publicist, David Axelrod.   

Much the same must be said of Obama’s years in Springfield as a state senator.  There he linked up with Emil Jones, the senate president, who quickly envisioned for Obama a route to the U.S. Senate.  Jones incarnates “the patronage system” (p. 28) that distinguishes Chicago politics—using tax money to distribute grants and subsidize all sorts of programs (and relatives) that perpetuate one’s career.  To boost  Obama, Jones took important legislative bills drafted by other senators (especially when they funded  powerful unions, such as the Service Employees International) and gave them to Obama.  This was called “bill-jacking” by disgruntled legislators, but it enabled Obama to claim responsibility for a litany of bills in the senate.  In fact he simply benefited from Emil Jones’ largesse and ambitions.  And once he entered the U.S. Senate Obama repaid his benefactor by earmarking millions of dollars for some of Jones’ pet projects.  In 2007, Obama also “earmarked $1 million for the University of Chicago Medical Center.  The vice president of this center is his wife, Michelle Obama, who received a pay raise of nearly $200,000 at just the time when Obama became a senator” (p. 96).  

In Washington, D.C., Fredosso shows, Obama has followed the Illinois pattern.  He is “still not a reformer.”  For example, he talks much about education.  He declares, in grandiloquent terms, his resolve to make things better for kids.  In The Audacity of Hope, he lamented that students in a Chicago high school were denied opportunities to take science and language classes because there wasn’t enough money.  But the school’s teachers averaged $83,000 a year!  Chicago’s public schools spend over $10,000 a year on every student!  Money is not the problem!  Yet Obama blatantly refuses to identify and work to reform the real problem:  ineffective teachers and administrators and negligent parents.  And that’s because he has ever cultivated a close alliance with the Chicago Teachers Union and enjoyed its lush and fervent support.  

Since I consider abortion this nation’s gravest sin, I was most interested in Fredosso’s documentation of Obama’s record as a resolute abortion rights’ advocate.  Running for President, he has made every effort to obfuscate the issue, but facts are stubborn things and he is clearly the most pro-abortion candidate ever to run for President.  He supports partial birth abortion.  He has promised (when speaking to Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund in 2007):  “’The first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act’” (p. 203).  Thus his very first act—the thing he apparently thinks most important for him to do as President—will be to “effectively cancel every state, federal, and local regulation of abortion, no matter how modest or reasonable” (p. 204).  He wants tax monies to subsidize abortions—thus increasing the millions of dollars Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers rake in from public coffers and then in return lavishly support politicians such as himself.  

Obama is also one of the few Democrats (in the party devoutly committed to abortion on demand) to oppose saving the lives of babies who survive abortions.  When an effort was made to enact legislation, identical to the federal “Born Alive Infants Protection Act,” in the Illinois state senate, only Obama spoke against it.  When the same bill was subsequently introduced, he both spoke and voted against it.  Though all abortions end a human being’s life (and are thus forms of infanticide), allowing living babies to die most graphically illustrates this reality.  In his recent book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama danced around the issue and hoped to convince readers otherwise, but (as Fredosso’s many pages of documentation Fredosso prove), Obama cannot escape the fact that he endorses all forms of abortion.  

Fredosso examines Obama’s radical associates in Chicago, his financial ties with Tony Rezko, his religious affiliation with Jeremiah Wright, and various other activities—aspects of his career that I’ll not address but certainly of concern to anyone trying to see how exactly the man has acted during his brief political career.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Jerome R. Corsi’s The Obama Nation:  Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (New York:  Threshold Editions, c. 2008) is even more harshly critical of the man.  Obama supporters have savagely attacked Corsi, mainly engaging in ad hominum attacks.  As an active member of the Constitution Party he certainly represents a political fringe, and he has in the past defended dubious positions.  In this book he looks for and mainly presents only the negative items he thinks disqualify Obama for the presidency, so one must carefully check his assertions.  Yet he earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, rigorously researches the documents, and has published a great deal on various subjects.  His text is studded with footnotes citing a wide variety of sources (including accurate citations of Obama’s own books) and I did not find Corsi significantly differing, in factual matters, from the other sources.   What stands out is Corsi’s animosity.  As he puts it, he fears Obama’s election would establish an “Obama Nation” wherein “leftist politics, driven by the cult of personality” would result in an “abomination” (p. x) for this country.  

Corsi is especially helpful in sorting out Obama’s biography—filling in the gaps, identifying the persons, exposing the errors, documenting the fabrications, explaining the issues so often blurred in Dreams from My Father.  He delves into the senator’s father’s life, interviewing his relatives in Africa and finding articles in Kenyan and British sources that present him in a much less favorable light than does his son, who fails to mention, for example “how many wives his father had, or how many half-brothers and sisters he has from different mothers, whether the women were married to his father or not” (p. 21).  Corsi further examines Obama’s continued involvement in Kenyan politics, actively supporting one of the presidential candidates (a radical socialist and fellow Luo tribesman) in the 2006 election.

He digs into Obama’s Indonesian years, interviewing people who knew him, locating TV documentaries and newspaper sources found only in Jakarta.  Since both his father and his stepfather were  Muslims, and since young Barack attended a Muslim school for two years as well as a Catholic school for another two, Corsi notes those influences.  But he concludes that young Obama seemed almost oblivious to religion of any sort, no doubt following his mother’s example.  He refuses to question Obama’s claim to be a Christian.  He locates some of Obama’s Honolulu high school associates, explaining that the man he calls “Ray” in his autobiography is actually Keith Kakugawa—a  half African-American, half Japanese man who identifies himself as “mixed race,” and claims to have never been the “prototypical black guy” who prominently appears in Dreams from My Father. 

Corsi also helps us understand what Obama’s career as a “community organizer” in Chicago involved, providing a perspective rather different from Obama’s own account.  He was hired by Jerry Kellman, who ran a Saul Alinsky-inspired organization in Chicago that wanted to “’convert the black churches of Chicago’s South Side into agents of social change’” (p. 129).  This ultimately led Obama to contact Jeremiah Wright and join his congregation.  Obama’s many connections with Tony Rezko are clear, if not well publicized by the major media.  Rezko, one of Obama’s first clients when he began his career as a Chicago lawyer (the man Hillary Clinton accurately called a slumlord) “helped bankroll Obama in five election runs” (p. 153).  A FBI informant “often saw Obama coming and going at Rezko’s offices” and the two apparently talked frequently on the phone.  One Chicago journalist called him Obama’s “’political Godfather’” (p. 154). 

In return for supporting various Democrats in Chicago, Rezko received, within a decade, “more than $100 million” from state and local governments to “rehabilitate thirty buildings in Chicago” (p. 160), supposedly to provide housing for the poor.  The work he did, however, was so shoddy that most of the buildings soon proved uninhabitable.  Eleven of these buildings were in Obama’s district, but “there is no record that Illinois state senator Obama ever so much as placed a speech in the record objecting to the public-housing practices perpetrated in his district by Tony Rezko, let alone calling for investigation of Rezko and his business practices” (p. 164).  Indeed, the friendship flourished, and the Rezkos recently helped the Obamas purchase their current home in an up-scale section of Chicago.  Now the taxpayers’ money is gone and the decaying buildings are empty and Rezko has been sentenced to prison.   Though Obama claims to have had only passing connections with the convicted felon, the proven connections between the men should give voters pause.  

Corsi also devotes many pages to William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, who were close to Obama in the past two decades.  In his opinion, all these associations (and particularly their cumulative weight) raise too many red flags for voters wanting a good President.  This is particularly true because he thinks in this case “the candidate is the message.”  Obama has done very little, though he certainly makes alluring promises.  The facts, Corsi insists, render Obama’s rhetoric (however impressive) self-promoting and vacuous.    

# # #

In 1883, William Graham Sumner, a Yale professor, noted:  “As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X.  Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X . . . .  What I want to do is look up C.  I want to show you what manner of man he is.  I call him the Forgotten Man.  Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct.  He is the one who never is thought of . . . .”  This forgotten man, Sumner concludes, “works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays. . . .”  

Sumner’s phrase serves as the title for Amity Shlaes’ recent work:  The Forgotten Man:  A New History of the Great Depression (New York:  HarperCollinsPublishers, c. 2007).  For too long, she argues, fans of Franklin Delano Roosevelt have forged the story of the Depression to portray him in heroic terms.  But in truth he effectively prolonged it.  Following a decade of genuine prosperity (the 1920s) the stock market crashed in 1929.  Yet this event in itself “did not cause the Depression.  It was a necessary correction of a too-high stock market, but not a necessary disaster” (p. 5).  What caused the Great Depression was the loss of faith in the free market and consequent government intervention—begun by Herbert Hoover and continued by FDR—that acerbated and deepened the nation’s economic woes.  (In the last presidential debate, incidentally, Barack Obama declared we were in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and John McCain replied that Obama’s economic proposals would, like Herbert Hoover’s, exacerbate it.  Though Obama probably exaggerated the gravity of the crisis, McCain was surely right in identifying Obama’s announced economic agenda as a rerun of Hoover’s.)  

To set the stage, Shlaes portrays the positive aspects of the “Roaring ‘20s.”  Presiding over the prosperity of the nation was President Calvin Coolidge, a “country lawyer” committed to limited government and individual liberty.  Aiding Coolidge was his Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, whose tax policies “reduced the national debt from $24 billion to $16 billion” (p. 37).  Unemployment dropped to “5 percent in the year he was elected.  From there it dropped to 3.2 percent in 1925 and then into the twos and ones” (p. 39).  On the other hand, his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover—the “Great Engineer”—envisioned and agitated for a more activist government.  Of Hoover, Coolidge quipped:  “’that man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad’” (p. 38).  

Despite the nation’s prosperity, discontent flourished in “progressive” circles.  Illustrative of this was a 1927 USSR-bound “junket” of intellectuals, including:  Rexford Guy Tugwell, a Columbia University economist who would significantly shape the New Deal; Paul Douglass, a University of Chicago labor scholar; and Stuart Chase, an economist deeply influenced by Henry George and his “single tax” proposals, who wrote a book entitled A New Deal in 1932.  Joining them were labor union officials, ACLU lawyers, and noted socialists.  They called themselves an “unofficial American trade union delegation” and endeavored to cultivate friendly ties with Joseph Stalin and his Communist regime.  They were not, of course, Stalinists themselves.  But as idealistic “progressives”—or, in some instances, “radicals”—they longed for a more egalitarian world, a society favoring workers rather than dollars.  Thus, Tugwell lamented:  “’Life in the 1920s was often frustrating for those of my political persuasion—political progressives or radicals’” who were “’all but regarded as social misfits’” (p. 61).  

When the market crashed in October 1929, these “misfits” were poised to make radical changes in the country.  Though hardly himself a radical, the recently elected President, Herbert Hoover, shared their conviction that dramatic governmental action was needed to rectify the economic downturn.  He had written a book entitled American Individualism, but it was hardly a defense of what earlier generations had understood by that term.  Indeed he “disdained laissez-faire economics” and refused to make a fetish of private property (p. 34).  Within a month he poured $423 million into a “public buildings program” designed to “boost the economy” (p. 91).  He then urged Congress to provide national programs for all sorts of folks.  Former President Coolidge later protested “these socialistic notions of government” (p. 94), but within a year (Shlaes argues) Hoover managed to seriously damage the economy “on three fronts: by intervening in business, by signing into law a destructive tariff, and by assailing the stock market” (p. 92).  The 1930 protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed despite the opposition of one thousand of the nation’s premier economists, proved especially disastrous, shutting down international trade at precisely the moment it was most needed.  Playing the populist, blaming Wall Street for the nation’s woes proved popular—especially as FDR picked up on the litany—but did little more than provide an outlet for anger.  

When Roosevelt won the 1932 election, he reminded the nation that, as the Harvard historian  Frederick Jackson Turner had declared, the endless opportunity of the western frontier had ended and it was now “time for the ‘princes of property,’ the wealthy, to share their resources.  Growth would not provide for the poor; only redistribution could” (p. 135).  So he brought to Washington D.C. a corps of “reformers,” his Brain Trust of elite university professors committed to economic experiment and change.  The currency was instantly inflated by discarding the gold standard—“an act of social redistribution” whereby $200 billion was transferred from creditors to debtors.  Within two years of his election, income tax rates for the wealthy soared to 75 per cent, quickly quenching most all entrepreneurial activity.  He launched a host of federal agencies—the “alphabet soup (quipped Huey Long) of CCC, WPA, NRA, AAA, WPA, et al.—designed  to provide employment and infuse cash into the system.  

Naturally these populist endeavors placated the populace.  FDR enjoyed great popularity as a spokesman for the people, a leader who was getting great things done.  He appealed to the masses with soaring, utopian rhetoric, declaring:  “’We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world’” (p. 299).  Unfortunately he, like Hoover, abjectly failed to deal effectively with the depression.  Massive governmental intervention paralyzed the economy, doing nothing to restore it to health.  His fireside chats persuaded the folks that he cared for them, but his economic policies insured their prolonged suffering.  “Where the New Deal was faltering economically, it was gaining politically.  Roosevelt’s radio voice was succeeding” (p. 210).  His popularity fueled his love of power and prodded him to propose “packing” the Supreme Court with justices more amenable to his agenda—a rash act that ignited his opponents and stalled some of his momentum.  

Joining the opposition was New York’s venerable Al Smith, who’d run as the Democratic presidential nominee in the 1928 election.  Addressing a large crowd in the nation’s capital, “Smith argued fiercely against Roosevelt’s ‘arraignment of class against class’; of the brain trust he said ‘the young Brain Trusters caught the socialists in swimming and ran away with their clothes.’  Most outrageous of all to Smith was the rise of professors, the way Roosevelt had ignored others—himself, especially included—and constructed such a revolution with the brain trusters” (p. 265).  The brain trusters themselves, such as Raymond Tugwell, began departing FDR’s administration following his re-election in 1936.  Their ideas had been tried and found wanting.  Unemployment endured.  Stocks had not regained their value.  By 1938, it was becoming apparent, even to Democrats, that government intervention had sucked the life out of the private sector.  

The economy recovered, quite simply, when the nation was plunged into WWII.  “Roosevelt hadn’t known what to do with the extra people in 1938, but now he did:  he could make them soldiers” (p. 381).  

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Jim Powell anticipated many of Amity Shlaes’ positions in FDR’s Folly:  How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (New York:  Crown Forum, c. 2003).  The author is a historian who studied under Daniel Boorstin and William McNeill—two of the greatest 20^th century American historians—at the University of Chicago.  He is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and is thus openly aligned with its libertarian, laissez faire economic philosophy.  

Powell begins by noting that despite FDR’s many initiatives during his first two administrations, “the medium annual unemployment rate was 17.2 percent” (p. vii).  Living standards for the American people regained pre-depression levels only after WWII.  The President did, however, triple taxes during the ‘30s.  He imposed “higher personal income taxes, higher corporate income taxes, higher excise taxes, higher estate taxes, and higher gift taxes.  . . . .  Ordinary people were hit with higher liquor taxes and Social Security payroll taxes” (pp. ix-x).  Amazingly, in 1942, FDR informed Congress:  “’No American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than 25,000 a year.’  The Treasury Department submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee a memorandum calling for a 100 percent tax on incomes over $25,000” (p. 245).  Everyone paid more.  No one prospered.  But government expanded, federal employees proliferated, and FDR garnered powers unimagined by the nation’s Founders.  He failed to end the Great Depression, but he radically altered the nature of the United States.

To set the stage for his analysis, Powell asks, in his first chapter, “How Could Such Bright, Compassionate People Be Wrong?”  Among those bright people was Stuart Chase, the author of A New Deal (1932) and one of the “progressives” who had visited the USSR in 1927.  Fondly remembering his visit to Stalin’s paradise, Chase declared that communists possessed a “’burning zeal to create a new heaven and a new earth’” and wondered “‘Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?’” (p. 3).  Though Roosevelt himself had little interest in any ideology, he surrounded himself with folks like Chase and easily “absorbed the spirit and tactics of class warfare” (p. 6) whenever it suited his purposes.  Thus, in dealing with the nation’s agricultural problems, he relied on Rexford Tugwell, who had for years advocated the central-planning, collectivist socialism promoted by Scott Nearing.   

When he became President in 1933, Roosevelt basically followed Herbert Hoover’s agenda, confident that government spending would end the depression.  To provide his New Deal for the American people, various federal agencies were chartered to dictate policies and provide financial subsidies for farmers and businessmen, labor unions and power companies.  Taxes soared (despite tax revolts around the country), the dollar was devalued, and the banking industry was significantly changed.  “The New Deal,” Powell says, “was the American version of the collectivist trend that became fashionable around the world,” quite similar to developments in Europe, such as Mussolini’s Fascism, wherein, as Mario Palmieri said, “’Economic initiatives cannot be left to the arbitrary decisions of private, individual interests.’”  Rather than encourage free enterprise,  “’The proper function of the state in the Fascist system is that of supervising, regulating and arbitrating the relationships of capital and labor, employers and employees, individuals and associations, private interests and national interests. . . .  More important than the production of wealth is its right distribution, distribution which must benefit in the best possible way all the classes of the nation, hence the nation itself.  Private wealth belongs not only to the individual, but, in a symbolic sense, to the State as well’” (pp. 76-77).  

But despite all its supervising and regulating, despite all the subsidies hurled at the helpless, the New Deal failed to bring the nation out of the depression.  Powell details, with both statistics and anecdotes, the abject failure of FDR’s central planning experiments.  Unemployment persisted.  Incomes languished.  Poverty deepened.  Tragically, “New Dealers assumed that individual rights, private property, and economic liberty were obstacles to recovery, but they are essential” (p. 166).  Despite the ugly aspects of the Industrial Revolution, living standards for ordinary people had soared to unimaginable heights in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, while FDR’s New Deal, suffused with frequently primitivist socialist ideology, sought to harness (or reverse) the economic growth of free enterprise capitalism.  

“The Great Depression,” Powell concludes, “was a government failure, brought on principally by Federal Reserve policies that abruptly cut the money supply; unit banking laws that made thousands of banks more vulnerable to failure; Hoover’s tariffs, which throttled trade; Hoover’s taxes, which took unprecedented amounts of money out of people’s pockets at the worst possible time; and Hoover’s other policies, which made it more difficult for the economy to recover.  High unemployment lasted as long as it did because of all the New Deal policies that took more money out of people’s pockets, disrupted the money supply, restricted production, harassed employers, destroyed jobs, discouraged investment, and subverted economic liberty needed for sustained business recovery” (p. 267).  

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The foremost 20^th century critics of socialism—and of central planning in any guise—were the Austrian economists Friedrich A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.  Surveying, at mid-point, the ravages of collectivism, Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom (Chicago:  Phoenix Books, c. 1944), a durable manifesto that warns, in the words of David Hume:  “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”  Still more, citing Hilaire Belloc:  “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself” (p. 88).  Though Hayek was (by training and profession) an economist, his real concern was philosophical, and he championed, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, the preeminent good of human freedom.  He knew, however, as Lord Action perceptively observed, that “’at all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous’” (p. vi).  

Economic freedom fueled the industrial revolution that birthed the modern world and lifted millions of men and women into an unprecedented affluence.  Economic inequities, however, prompted various socialists to propose utopian solutions—including Marxist-inspired central planning endeavors in Russia (Communism) and Germany (Fascism) that precipitated much misery.   (Hayak clearly shows why both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were thoroughly socialistic in a chapter entitled “The Socialist Roots of Naziism”.)  Parallel developments in Great Britain and the United States, while not blemished by the harshly dictatorial and genocidal policies of Stalin and Hitler, have (inasmuch as they weakened or destroyed economic liberty) set those nations on a similar “the road to serfdom.”  This is because “the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people” (p. xiv).  Whenever people surrender themselves to the State, begging politicians to care for them, they will in time be enslaved to its policies.    

Following the unification of their country under Bismarck in the 1870s, Germans surrendered many of their freedoms to the welfare state he established decades before Hitler.  They simply followed “people of good will, men who were admired and held up as models in the democratic countries” because they sought to satisfy understandable cravings for comfort and security.  The unintended consequences of their “high ideals” and “compassionate” policies would prove highly destructive.   Self-righteously pursuing “high ideals,” enraptured with visions of “social justice,” they abandoned the “basic ideals” of Western Civilization—the commitment to individual freedom and justice shaped by the Greco-Roman, Hebrew, and Christian traditions.  Consequently, in the 20^th century, despite warnings from “some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by De Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism” (p. 13).  

This was done on behalf of perfecting the world.  While most intellectuals had abandoned any hope for eternal life in God’s Heaven, they certainly longed for a heavenly world here-and-now.  In the wake of the French Revolution, they idolized the State as the humanly-designed means to an earthly heaven.  As the great German poet Hoelderlin, noted:   “What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven” (p. 24).  Empowering the State requires collectivism, sucking away the rights and power of the individual.  “The common features of all collectivist systems may be described, in a phrase ever dear to socialists of all schools, as the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal” (p. 56).  As Lenin declared, in 1917:  “The whole of society will have become a single office and a single facotry with equality of work and equality of pay” (p. 119).  In 1848, the year when revolutions rocked much of Europe and Marx and Engels published their “Communist Manifesto,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom” whereas “socialism restricts it.  Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number” (p. 25).  

Whereas collectivists dream grandly of a world following their agenda within which inequity and poverty have disappeared, individualists generally exhibit a down-to-earth humility, dealing realistically with both themselves and the possibilities of political structures.  Thus they support laws that restrict individual wrong-doing, whereas collectivists seek to draft laws to organize everyone into a perfect world.  Similarly, individualists want to punish theft whereas collectivists want to eliminate poverty.  Individualists favor traffic laws that prevent accidents whereas collectivists want to shove everyone into mass transit systems.  

In sum:  “The choice open to us is not between a system in which everybody will get what he deserves according to some absolute and universal standard of right, and one where the individual shares are determined partly by accident or good or ill chance, but between a system where it is the will of a few persons that decides who is to get what, and one where it depends at least partly on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseeable circumstances” (pp. 101-102).  We can take responsibility for our lives, or we can ask the State to care for us and discover, in time, that the State will also order us about.  

That this was taking place in England and America alarmed Hayek.  He was especially concerned with the “end justifies the means” ethics of a growing number of intellectuals, such as E. H. Carr, who defended making “morality a function of politics” and rejected any higher, absolute source of truth and goodness.  Carr further supported what he labeled “’a revolution against the predominant ideas of the nineteenth century:  liberal democracy, national self-determination and laissez faire economics’” (p. 188).  Professors like Carr prospered in Hitler’s Germany, Hayek asserts, and the fact that they hold prestigious positions in England and America should be considered alarms in the night.  As is his classic, The Road to Serfdom!

To better understand this year’s two presidential nominees, I’ve read their books.  John McCain has written four—all co-authored by Mark Salter.  Such recognition of a co-author is remarkable in itself, for most politicians use “ghost writers” who are not credited for the book’s production.  McCain tells the story of his early years in Faith of My Fathers (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 1999).  Beginning with a candor that continually marks him, and noting that Victor Frankl stressed our uniquely human freedom to choose how we respond to various situations, McCain laments that he too often chose “carelessly, often for no better reason than to indulge a conceit” (p. vii).  Indeed he looks back over his life with many regrets!  Fortunately, he often managed to choose wisely, and finds in his story “a balance between pride and regret, between liberty and honor” (p. vii).  

The book’s title reveals its message, for McCain writes proudly about his father and grandfather—both military heroes, four star admirals, indelible prototypes for their progeny.  They were also Christians, following the Episcopal tradition, though they were hardly models of piety.  McCain’s grandfather, John Sidney, was a pioneer of naval aviation who displayed great courage, both physical and moral, and exuded a certain “irreverent, eccentric individualism” (p. 17).  He played a major role in America’s Pacific theater during WWII and stood beside General Douglas MacArthur when the Japanese surrendered on the battleship Missouri.  Senator McCain’s father, John Sidney, Jr. (a “small man with a big heart”), found certain doors closed to him because of his stature and chose to become a submariner, serving with great distinction in WWII.  Moving up the ranks he became, in time, the commander of all naval operations in the Pacific during the Vietnam War.  Though neither man was physically much present in young McCain’s life, since they were off to sea for extended periods, they were both powerfully present in his mind as he determined to follow their footsteps.  There’s no search for personal identity for him—he knows who he is.  He’s a McCain!  And he wants to honor his name.

After devoting one-fourth of the book to his fathers, McCain tells his own story, quite often in self-deprecating ways.  He was an easily-angered “strong-willed child” who tested his mother’s patience.  In time he became what she called a “hell-raiser” in high school and college.  He managed to graduate from elite institutions—Washington D.C.’s Episcopal High and the U.S. Naval Academy—but he laments largely wasting those years in youthful follies.  He’s obviously an intelligent man, but school routines (apart from athletics) were never his forte.  Graduating fifth from the bottom of his class from the Naval Academy, he launched his career as a Navy flyer.  “My early years as a naval officer,” he laments, “were an even more colorful extension of my rowdy days at the Academy” (p. 153).  Apparently the only thing he took seriously was the art of flying—and that he did reasonably well!  

Suitably trained, he went off to war in 1966, and the last half of the book details his years in Vietnam.  He first showed his courage when a fire swept the flight deck of his aircraft carrier.  He then joined the crew of the U.S.S. Orishany, flying missions over North Vietnam.  One-third (38) of his fellow pilots were killed or captured.  McCain himself was shot down during a bombing run over Hanoi.  He was seriously wounded and then survived both his largely untreated injuries and the atrocious conditions and periodic tortures of a prisoner of war.  Yet, while he describes his own injuries and beatings, much of his book celebrates others—his fellow POWs, his companions in prison.  He grants that his father’s position led the Vietnamese to give him special treatment at times.  But he also explains why he refused to trade on his father’s renown to secure the early release that was offered him.  

Though readers such as I easily see him as a courageous “hero,” the image he draws in his book is more of a survivor who, bolstered by the support of his buddies, managed to endure until he was finally freed.  He learned that his individualistic temperament, his “faith” in himself, fared poorly in prison.   “During the worst moments of captivity,” he says, “keeping our faith in God, country, and one another was as difficult as it was imperative” (p. 253).  Now and then—as when McCain took the lead in holding a worship service on Christmas, or when he tells about a Vietnamese soldier whose Christian commitment led him to treat him kindly, or when he mentions praying while suffering—one glimpses McCain’s Christian faith.  But generally he seems to have found his strength in his comrades rather than religion.  

Having read this account, I’ll never again see McCain, moving awkwardly, unable to raise his arms, without remembering the terrible injuries he incurred while serving his country.

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McCain and Salter followed up the first autobiography with a sequel, Worth the Fighting For:  A Memoir (New York:  Random House, c. 2002).  Returning from Vietnam, McCain went through a painful process of physical rehabilitation, determined to resume his naval career.  Few believed it possible, but he did so and rose through the ranks to significant command positions in a few years.  But as the years passed he realized that neither his temperament nor his deteriorating physical condition justified finishing his life as a career officer.  Ever longing to serve his country, he decided (after watching, as the Navy’s liaison officer with the Senate, the political processes in the nation’s capital) to devote himself to politics.  In particular, having studied the Vietnam War—and  knowing that politicians, not soldiers, lost it—he wanted to make sure men such as Jimmy Carter would not continue to undermine the nation’s military forces.  He also saw the positive influence of politicians such as Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Democratic Senator from Washington with whom he often traveled and came to deeply admire) and John Tower (Republican Senator from Texas), both of whom he counted as close friends and mentors.  

So in the early ‘80s McCain resigned from the Navy and moved to Arizona with his new wife, Cindy, determined to pursue public service.  (McCain’s first marriage collapsed after he returned from Vietnam, and he unfailingly blames his “selfishness and immaturity” for that failure, praising his first wife whenever she is mentioned).  He quickly involved himself in the state’s Republican Party and managed to get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982.  In Washington, he supported the conservative agenda of President Ronald Reagan, but he also developed a close friendship with Mo Udall, one of Arizona’s most powerful (and liberal) politicians, who greatly helped him better understand his new home state’s political nuances.  Ever ambitious, when Senator Barry Goldwater retired, McCain campaigned for his seat and successfully won the 1988 election, serving thenceforth in the U.S. Senate.  

McCain recounts his many endeavors and adventures, triumphs and failures as a Congressman and Senator.  He discusses his unsuccessful defense of his friend John Tower, who was denied the first President Bush’s appointment as Secretary of Defense.  Just as Democratic Senators had denied Robert Bork a seat on the Supreme Court, so too they rejected Tower’s nomination in equally spurious ways.   The Kenneth Keating affair also merits many pages in this book, for McCain was one of the “Keating Five” accused of providing favors for one of the chief culprits in the Savings and Loan collapse in the late ‘80s.  Though he was cleared of any culpability, his friendship with Keating in Arizona—and meeting with his emissaries in Washington—led to McCain’s “worst mistake in my life” (p. 246).  

In the process of recording such events, McCain sets forth some of his guiding principles.  He clearly loves his country and has devoted himself to her service.  He cares much for courage, integrity and honor, in politics as well as military service.  So he devotes several chapters to heroic figures who helped shape his personal philosophy.  His favorite film, Viva Zapata! features a heroic leader, fighting for freedom and justice.  He celebrates the baseball legend, Ted Williams, who was both an extraordinary pilot in WWII and the Korean War, as well as being perhaps the greatest hitter in baseball history.   Conversely, he looks at certain foreign relations endeavors, such as Bill Clinton’s general approach to world crises, with the clear-eyed realism of a prisoner-of-war who dismisses as laughable many of the rhetorical and theatrical gyrations of “leaders” who lack the courage to speak truthfully and act courageously.  

At the same time, he openly admits to his many failures in doing what should have been done.  “Were I to catalog all my faults,” he says, “they would run the length of this book” (p. xviii).  Such refreshing candor, for me, marks McCain as not simply a “maverick” but as an honorable  man.

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McCain and Salter have also published two books providing historical illustrations of the traits McCain admires.  Whereas I attentively read his autobiographies, I only skimmed and sampled sections of these books, though I find them important inasmuch as they reveal the values he reveres.  One assumes that Salter did the research and writing, with McCain selecting the subjects and overseeing the process.  In Character Is Destiny (New York:  Random House, c. 2005), we find 34 “inspiring stories every young person should know and every adult should remember.”  For example, we find “honor” illustrated in the honesty of St Thomas More, who was executed by Henry VIII for upholding papal authority.  Then there’s the “authenticity” of St Joan of Arc, who died for her convictions and the “dignity” of Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps.  We should admire and emulate the “diligence” of Winston Churchill and the “cooperation” exemplified by UCLA’s legendary coach John Wooden.

McCain and Salter’s companion volume, Hard Call:  Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them (New York:  Hatchette Book Group, c. 2007), deals with what philosophers label “prudence”—discerning what’s right in order to make the good decisions.  Thus there is a section on “Awareness,” as evident in the coaching career of Branch Rickey, who decided to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues as a Brooklyn Dodger.  “Foresight” marked the career of Winston Churchill in the 1930s, when he heard “the steady drummer” of impending war when most of his peer listened to the sirens of “peace in our time.  Much may be learned about great historical figures in this book.  More importantly, one senses that McCain has carefully considered what it takes to make equally great and difficult decisions.  Assuming McCain ponders the lessons presented in these two books, we have an others-oriented politician who looks to the best examples of the past as he ponders the decisions to be made for today.

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Barack Obama’s first book is his autobiography, Dreams from My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York:  Crown, c. 1995).  Publishers approached him while he was still a student at Harvard Law School, asking him to write his autobiography simply because he was the first African-American president of the Law Review!  Given a significant advance, he began writing the book as soon as he graduated, before he’d done anything other than “community organizing” in Chicago for several years in the late ‘80s.  Thus, as the title indicates, Dreams from My Father is an inner journey of self-understanding, largely defined by his utterly absent but desperately desired father, Barack Obama, Sr., and his determination to self-identify as African-American.  Thus, as Obama, Jr. acknowledges, there is a dreamlike, fictional dimension to the book—individuals’ names are changed and at times seem to be a composite of several persons.  Nor is it a chronological account of his first 30 years. He devotes one-third of the book to a trip to Kenya that is (I’ve learned from other sources) actually a fusion of two trips.  Most of the Kenyan details focus upon his family, moving about the country meeting and trying to understand his father in the light of Africa.  Lengthy dialogues are, as in novels, invented.  

Nevertheless Obama tells the story of his birth in Honolulu to an American woman and Kenyan man who met at the University of Hawaii.  Given the opportunity to pursue a graduate degree in economics at Harvard University, his father soon abandoned his wife and son and moved to Boston, where he began living with another woman, who would follow him back to Kenya and become his third wife (he  apparently never divorced his first wife, a Kenyan).  Then his mother married an Indonesian who’d come to the University of Hawaii, and they moved to his home, where Obama attended elementary schools.  That marriage also floundered, and Barack, his mother and half-sister, returned to Honolulu, where she resumed her studies in anthropology.  (While the Obama speaks respectfully of his mother, who died in 1995, the year this book was published, she is a surprisingly peripheral figure in his story.)  When she finished her studies, she determined to continue her anthropological work by returning to Indonesia, but she wanted her son to get his education in Honolulu.  He then spent his adolescence with her parents, who were in many ways the only stable “parents” he’d ever know.   His generally unemployed grandfather, who seemed to have failed at most everything he attempted while moving about the country, offered a rather constant criticism of the “system” that had failed him.  But his grandmother became a highly successful woman who rose to a significant position in a Honolulu bank and provided the income for the family.  

Obama gained entry to the city’s most elite high school, Punahau, but he seems to have majored in drugs and alcohol and basketball rather than academics.  On his own, however, he read, rather voraciously, writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X and Franz Fanon, whose radicalism shaped his budding race-consciousness.  Though he seems to have encountered little actual race discrimination (the minor incidents he mentions are quite trivial), his reading fueled a “black rage” that seemed to become part of his self-identification as an oppressed African-American (though his Kenyan father was neither American nor in the remotest sense affected by this nation’s history of slavery).  He was also quite taken by an elderly friend (and drinking buddy) of his grandfather’s, a black poet identified only as Frank (in fact Frank Marshall Davis, who was well-know for his advocacy of radical, often overtly Communist causes).  

Graduating from high school, Obama then went to Los Angeles, where he attended another prestigious institution, Occidental College.  Here his main concerns were still extracurricular, especially racial discussions and protest meetings.  He then finished his university studies in New York, graduating from Columbia University.  While there he “decided to become a community organizer” so as to “organize black folks.  At the grass roots.  For change” (p. 133).  After working a couple of years in New York, in 1985 he moved to Chicago and became a “community organizer” as an employee of a Saul Alinsky-inspired organization trying to enlist black churches in social justice endeavors.  Here Obama mastered the “change” rhetoric of Alinsky and became acquainted with Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who led one of the large churches Obama needed to support his activism.  In the first service Obama attended, Wright preached on “the audacity of hope,” and Obama decided to identify with the church after a tearful response to that message.  Disillusioned with his glaring lack of success as a “community organizer,” Obama set off for Harvard Law School, though he says little of those years. 

Indeed, though he has attended some of the nation’s finest schools, they apparently played no role in his formation.  Rather, he recounts, in lengthy detail, his community organizing efforts and his trip to Kenya, seeking to identity himself as his father’s son.  “All my life,” he says, “I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own” (p. 220).  His father, of course, had abandoned him when he was two years old, leaving no actual memories.  He had returned only once to Honolulu for a few days when his son was 12, making less than a positive impact upon him.  So there is a strange, if obviously powerful hunger in Obama’s heart for his father!  In Kenya, talking with his relatives, he began to see his father as he was:  a brilliant but deeply flawed, alcoholic man with whom he could identify but from whom he must diverge.  

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Barack Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope:  Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York:  Crown Publishing Co., c. 2006), sets forth his agenda as a presidential candidate.   Like his autobiography, this book is skillfully written, but it offers glowing rhetoric and pleasing platitudes rather than reasoned positions or specific proposals.  I finished the book with little understanding of his core principles, little appreciation for any philosophical depth.  He demonstrates this in his Prologue, where he says:  “we need a new kind of politics” shaped by “shared understandings that pull us together as Americans” (p. 9).  His central concern is to “begin the process of changing our politics and our civic life.  This isn’t to say that I know exactly how to do it.  I don’t” (p. 9).  Rather, he promises to “suggest in broad strokes the path I believe we should follow” while admitting his views are “partial and incomplete.  I offer no unifying theory of American government, nor do these pages provide a manifesto for action” (p. 9).  N.B.:  there’s no specificity, no substance to such statements!  Since he has, in fact accomplished remarkably little it is understandable that he has little to say about his public life.  His response to Rick Warren’s question as to when human life begins—that answer requires “a level of specificity that’s above my pay grade”—rather characterizes his treatment of a great many issues.  So The Audacity of Hope is largely distinguished by 350 pages of dexterously facile word-smithing!  

For example, he devotes a chapter to “values,” and it’s clear he values them.  But he sets forth is no objective grounding for his values in Scripture or Natural Law.  So it seems one must create his own values and then be true to them.  Perhaps the most cogent of his chapters is one on “Our Constitution,” where he identifies with and indicates he would appoint to the Supreme Court justices such as Justice Stephen Breyer, who considers the Constitution a living document needing continual judicial redefinition.  Of interest to Christians is Obama’s chapter on “Faith.”  He notes that he had virtually no religious instruction or interests as a child.  His mother was, apparently, an atheist with save-the-world utopian aspirations.  His father, though reared a Muslim, had apparently become an atheist by the time he came to Hawaii; his step-father was an occasionally practicing, rather tepid Muslim; and young Barack never really identified with either Islam or Christianity.  Then, dramatically, while attending his first service at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ church in Chicago he found an Afro-centric, black liberationist message that suited his “progressive” concern for “social justice.”  He recalls:  “I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change” (p. 206).  

What struck me in The Audacity of Hope is its real focus:  Barack Obama.  There’s hardly a hint that he’s read anything or consulted anyone.  He seems to decide what he thinks on a purely personal, experiential basis.  His chapter on “Politics” deals not with the Founding Fathers and the American system but with his experiences and their educational value.   He talks about “the world beyond our borders” by describing the Indonesia of his boyhood, apparently convinced that the world and Indonesia are quite alike.  His understanding of Iraq was established by a day-and-a-half visit there.  He insists that racial divisions must be bridged, but it’s clear that racial identity is one of the major (and sensitive) concerns in his own life!  In short:  when I look for the “thoughts” suggested by the book’s subtitle, I found little more than sweeping generalizations, without persuasive specificity, to tell me exactly what they are.