Let's look at the liberal progressive understanding once more: What is needed to fight poverty is "access to affordable housing, child care, health care, support services and meaningful employment." There's certainly no reason for anyone who has those advantages to be poor, but hundreds of thousands of Americans do have them and then become addicts or alcoholics, or mess up in other severe ways. Why? The fine essayist and novelist Walker Percy wrote frequently of the despair that sometimes overtakes modern man in the most comfortable of circumstances. Many of my students at the University of Texas, in one of the best of environments, say privately that they are miserable. Liberal progressivism has little to say to those who are bursting with benefits but have such holes in their souls that they fall into addiction or alcoholism. Compassionate conservatism does offer an alternative, which Daniel and I saw in operation at Rebuild Resources, a suburban Minneapolis home and workplace for people recovering from alcoholism and addiction.

Fred Myers, age sixty-five, returned to sobriety two decades ago through an Alcoholics Anonymous program and then used his background to start Rebuild as an alternative to government antiaddiction programs. He delightedly showed Daniel and me Rebuild's new residential building with its freshly painted white walls, industrial carpet, and rooms for thirty-six people (along with chapel, computer, and exercise spaces.) As we walked, he kept up a running critique of governmental competitors: "They run a program for a few weeks and then dump a guy on the street with no community or family support. The government types say treatment, treatment, treatment. But treatment is a bridge to a support system. AND THESE GUYS HAVE NO SUPPORT SYSTEM."
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It is hard to imagine how a small child, first learning the alphabet, can appreciate the full implications of learning these particular 26 abstract symbols in an arbitrarily fixed order. Yet this lifelong access to the intellectual treasures of centuries depend on his mastery of these symbols. His ability to organize and retrieve innumerable kinds of information, from sources ranging from encyclopedias to computers, depends on his memorizing that purely arbitrary order. There is not the slightest reason in the world why a small child should be expected to grasp the significance of all this. Instead, he learns these symbols and this order because his parents and teachers want him to learn it--not because he sees its "relevance."

The "relevance" argument becomes especially dangerous when it is used to justify teaching different things to students from different racial or ethnic groups, on the basis of those students' immediate emotional responses, or their uninformed sense of plausibility as to what might, for example, be "relevant to the black experience" know whether such statistical concepts as multicollinearity or such economic concepts as dynamic equilibrium will turn out to be among those things which provide a whole new perspective on racial issues? To say that such questions can be answered a priori is to assume at the outset the very competence which education is supposed to produce as an end result.
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I am disheartened by what has happened to feminism and by what I see as the new powerlessness of women. I did not foresee the extent to which feminists---who, philosophically, are universalists and therefore interventionists--would, paradoxically, become both multiculturalists and isolationists. Such cultural relativism (in the presumed service of antiracism) is perhaps the greatest failing of the feminist establishment. Despite our opponents' considerable fears that feminism would radicalize the campuses and the world, most feminists refuse to take risky, real-world positions. By choosing that path, they have lost their individualism, radicalism, and, in a sense, some of their own freedom.

I recant none of the visionary ideals of Second Wave feminism. Rather, it is as a feminist--not as an antifeminist--that I have felt the need to write a book to show that something has gone terribly wrong among our thinking classes. The multicultural feminist canon has not led to independent, tolerant, diverse. or objective ways of thinking. On the contrary: It has led to conformity, totalitarian thinking, and political passivity. Although feminists indulge in considerable nostalgia for the activist 1960s and 1970s, in some ways they are no different from the rest of the left-leaning academy, which also suffers from the disease of politically correct passivity.
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Postmodernists are attacking the entire Enlightenment project on which the natural and social sciences are based. They hold that there is no truth outside of ideology and, indeed, they suggest that the search for truth is itself the prime Western illusion. Truth, they believe, is invented, not discovered. Strip away the political and cultural coverings that that pass as "truth" in each society and the will to power by hegemonic interests will be revealed. The idea that the historian masters facts and recovers past reality is, in the words of the authors, describing the postmodernist point of view, "simply a figment of the Western, capitalist imagination." History is seen as "a useful fiction for modern industrial society, nothing more." As on postmodernist has put it, "History is the Western myth."

Insofar as postmodernists recognize a "new historicism" at all, it is one practiced mainly by literary critics and involves essentially the unmasking and revealing of "hegemonic" relations of power. Postmodernism, in fact, subverts all conventional history writing. It denies that there is a reality in the past beyond that described by language, and this barrier of language forever prevents historians from telling any truth about the past. Because of the impossibility of historical reconstruction and the postmodern subversion of our conventional sense of time, some postmodern literary critics, such as Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, have gone so far as to predict "the disappearance of history," which in turn may mean the end of all things bound up in "historical time," including our ideas of human rights, the structure of the human sciences, and the informational functions of language. In fact, in place of the plot and character of traditional history writing, Ermarth offers an "interminable pattern without meaning," a form of writing that resembles modern music or some modern novels.
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Although it is usually true that our perceptions of individual differences do not penetrate beneath the gross impression of skin color or ethnic type, this tendency may be reversed in the case of people who stand near to us in the range of visibility. While Caucasians may not be able to distinguish Chinese from Japanese in appearance, members of these two groups, needless to say, learn all the cues by which such a distinction might be made. Freud speaks of the "narcissism of small differences." We compare ourselves carefully with those who are like us--yet in some way different. According to Freud, small differences are an implied or potential criticism of ourselves. Therefore we note carefully what the difference is (the way two suburban ladies at a bridge party will scrutinize each other's grooming) and evaluate the situation, usually in such a way that it comes out in our favor. We decide that our apparent "twin" is after all not quite so slick as we are. Schisms within religious bodies seem to illustrate the "narcissism of small differences." To an outsider a Lutheran is a Lutheran, but to an insider it makes a difference whether he is a member of one Synod or another.

A Hindu woman traveling in a southern state was denied a hotel room by a clerk who notice her dark skin. The woman thereupon took off her headdress and showed that she had straight hair--and obtained accommodations. To the clerk it was color that cued his first behavior. The Hindu lady, with her keener sense of "small differences," forced the clerk to alter his perception, and reclassify her.
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The essence of a moral value is neither in its being valid independent of our will nor in its claim that it ought to be done for its own sake. These characteristics refer only to our attitude to such values rather than to their essence. They, furthermore, express an aspect that applies to logical or esthetic values as well.

Good and evil persist regardless of whether or not we pay attention to them. We are not born into a vacuum, but stand, nolens volens, in relations to all men and to one God. Just as we do not create the dimensions of space in order to construct spiritual relations; they are given with existence. All we do is try to find our way in them. The good does not begin in the consciousness of man. It is being realized in the natural co-operation of all beings, in what they are for each other.
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The desire for equality of incomes or wealth is, of course, but one aspect of a more general desire for equality in such matters as social and cultural status. "The essence of the moral idea of socialism," historian Martin Malia wrote, "is that human equality is the supreme value in life." Socialism is thus merely the manifestation in the field of economic organization of a more general yearning that operates across the entire culture.

The apparent difficulty of requiring equality of wisdom and intelligence was solved in a satirical story by Kurt Vonnegut in 1961, even before the plethora of civil rights laws seeking equality by race, ethnicity, sex, age, disability, and so on and on. Americans would achieve perfect equality by forcing persons of superior intelligence to wear mental handicap radios that emit unsettling noises every twenty seconds to keep them from taking unfair advantage of their brains, persons of superior strength or grace were to be burdened with weights, and those on uncommon beauty must wear masks. Thus, social reality can be made to conform with the envious man's and the law's wishes.
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How artists encounter their world is illustrated in the work of every genuinely creative painter. Out of the many possible examples of this, I shall choose the superb exhibition of the paintings of Mondrian shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1957-58. From his first realistic works in 1904 and 1905, all the way to his later geometrical rectangles and squares in the 1930s, one can see him struggling to find the underlying forms of the objects, particularly trees, that he was painting. He seems to have loved trees. The paintings around 1910, beginning somewhat like C&eacut;zanne, move further and further into the underlying meaning of tree--the trunk rises organically from the ground into which the roots have penetrated; the branches curve and bend into the trees and hills of the background in cubistic form, beautifully illustrative of what the underlying essence of tree is to most of us. Then we see Mondrian struggling more and more deeply to find the "ground forms" of nature, now it is less tree and more the eternal geometric forms underlying reality. Finally we see him pushing inexorably toward the squares and rectangles that are the ultimate form of purely abstract art. Impersonal? To be sure. The individual self is lost. But is this not precisely a reflection of Mondrian's world--the world of the twenties and thirties, the world in the period of emerging fascism, communism, conformism, military power, in which the individual not only feels lost, but is lost, alienated from nature and others as well as himself? Mondrian's paintings express creative strength in such a world, an affirmation in spite of the "lostness" of the individual. In this sense his work is a search for the foundation of individuality that can withstand these antihuman political developments.
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If evil people cannot be defined by the illegality of their deeds or the magnitude of their sins, then how are we to define them? The answer is by the consistency of their sins. While usually subtle, their destructiveness is remarkably consistent. This is because those who have "crossed over the line" are characterized by their absolute refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness.

We come now to a sort of paradox. I have said that evil people feel themselves to be perfect. At the same time, however, I think they have an unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature. Indeed, it is this very sense from which they are frantically trying to flee. The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense. At one and the same time, the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness. Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality, like the psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own consciousness.
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The crucial point of which our people are still so little aware is, however, not merely the magnitude of the changes which have taken place during the last generation but the fact that they mean a complete change in the direction of the evolution of our ideas and social order. For at least twenty-five years before the specter of totalitarianism became a real threat, we had progressively been moving away from the basic ideas on which Western civilization has been built. That this movement on which we have entered with such high hopes and ambitions should have brought us face to face with the totalitarian horror has come as a profound shock to this generation, which still refuses to connect the two facts. Yet this development merely confirms the warnings of the fathers of the liberal philosophy which we still profess. We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism. And now that we have seen a new form of slavery arise before our eyes, we have so completely forgotten the warning that it scarcely occurs to us that the two things may be connected.

How sharp a break not only with the recent past but with the whole evolution of Western civilization the modern trend toward socialism means becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background of the nineteenth century but in a longer historical perspective. We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and the Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.
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Such being the reasons which make it imperative that human beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions without reserve; and such the baneful consequences to the intellectual, and through that to the moral nature of man, unless this liberty is either conceded, or asserted in spite of prohibition; let us next examine whether the same reasons do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions--to carry these out in their lives, without hindrance, either physical or moral, from their fellow-men, so long as it is at their own risk and peril. This last proviso is of course indispensable. No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an exited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. Acts of whatever kind, which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled by the unfavorable sentiments, and, when needful, by the active interference of mankind. The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concerns himself, the same reasons which show that opinion should be free, prove also that he should be allowed, without molestation, to carry his opinions into practice at his own cost. That mankind are not infallible; that their truths, for the most part, are only half-truths; that unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil, but a good, until mankind are much more capable than at present of recognizing all sides of the truth, are principles applicable to men's modes of action, not less than to their opinions. As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. Where, not the person's own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.
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That two brilliant social policy analysts operating out of a shared religious tradition could engage in the argument contained in these pages tells us several important things. What they agree on--the urgency of assisting the poor, the importance of community, the value of work, the centrality of citizenship and responsibility--suggests grounds for potential consensus. What they disagree on or, more precisely, where their emphases differ--notably on the extent to which the causes of poverty are primarily individual or social--points to why consensus is so difficult to achieve.

One last point. Mead cites Ron Sider, the thoughtful and forceful evangelical thinker who has declared that if the affluent "do not fee the hungry and clothe the naked, they go to hell." Mead's view is more nuanced, but he notes that "it is a chilling prospect that few in government have dared to question." At the least, to use the language of social science, Sider's view certainly broadens the range of incentive to which politicians and policymakers might respond.
[End of quote.]

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