“The fact of the matter is that we can no more choose our culture and its languages than we can our parents. A trendy academic recently urged his peers to make a careful selection among what he called our ‘cultural baggage.’ We should not deceive ourselves, however. If our culture and its traditions are baggage, …
They Feel Good All Over
“Like most modern tyrannies, the dictatorship of the politically correct has freely used and abused the rhetoric of virtue in its effort to enforce conformity and silence dissent. This is part of what makes it so seductive. How gratifying to know that one is automatically on the side of Virtue simply because one espouses the …
The Idols of Pluralism
“Properly understood, pluralism is simply another name for polytheism. When we say ‘pluralism,’ what does the plurality refer to? The answer is, to a plurality of authoritative voices, the Babel of competing divine voices, all saying what we ought to do. Because this situation creates a potential for civic trouble, the powers that be impose …
No Such Thing As Art In General
“Art is a discipline rooted in a specific culture.” [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), p. 24]
Free the Goldfish!
“Creativity is possible only as the final stage in a long, rigorous absorption of the teachings and discoveries of the past. The last thing we need for the future of our country or of our young people is one more lunatic smashing goldfish bowls in order to free the goldfish” [E. Christian Kopff, The Devil …
Trying to Fit In
“In the nineteenth century, secular education was established because many Christians were fatally persuaded of the myth of neutrality. They were told that there were many areas of life that could be studied apart from any reference to the authority of Scripture. They accepted the pluralistic nature of American public life, not as a social …
Intellectual Carnage
“There is perhaps no more dramatic index of the disaster that has befallen liberal arts education in this country than the contempt in which the new academic orthodoxy holds this constellation of ideas about the nature and goals of higher education. It would be difficult to overstate the resulting intellectual carnage” (Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals, …
Doublethink
“Perhaps Marcuse’s ability to reconcile liberty and dictatorship has come of age, and Orwell’s characterization of such thinking as ‘doublethink’ does not bring the flash of recognition that it once did” (The Shadow University, p. 96).
Deconstructing Nehushtan
“There is another sense in which we can ‘burn incense’ to a work of art. We can overmystify it, ascribing to it supernatural or religious functions The passage on the destruction of the serpent image says that ‘it was called Nehushtan.’ The Hebrew is rather ambiguous here, but the King James Version, in what scholars …
What Does and Does Not Constitute “Movie Reform”
“If a man were to rent a video, and it turned out to be a poor movie, it is not ‘movie reform’ to rewind and try again” (The Case for Classical and Christian Education, p. 33).