A Russian joke of relatively recent vin­tage comes to mind. “How could you, a Stakhanovite dairy worker, with two Red Commendations to your credit, with the Regional Party Committee foursquare behind you,” a collective farm boss shouts at the terrified girl in his office, “how could you ever become a Moscow hard-currency prostitute?” “I guess I was just lucky,” stammers the errant milkmaid.

In a certain narrow sense, the joke is funny. In another sense, vast and intractable, it reflects, as in a fragment of Hans Christian Andersen’s shattered mirror, all the evil that the world we now live in was lucky to have amassed, along with the money, as it moved from one fairy tale to another at the close of the 20th century. In the new fairy tale, Cinderella still marries the prince, though only because the honorable estate makes it easier to pick his pockets while he sleeps, a gold Patek Philippe right there on the bed table. The prince’s kiss still works a metamorphosis, yet the magic of love turns his beloved into a toad, or at least into a vituperative termagant. And if the Saint George character still fights the dragon, it is strictly in the media circus where the virgin he’s saving works as an usherette.

The trouble with fairy tales is that, like life itself under the conditions of political and economic liberty, they are untrammeled in their reliance on metaphor. Nowadays, we no longer balk at hearing that women are “raped” by the military-industrial complex; whether or not we think him a secret-police factotum, we speak of “President” Putin; it scarcely surprises us to read in a fashion magazine that black is the season’s white. Under some harsher political or economic conditions, we might easily distinguish between an ounce of rye bread and a whole wheaten loaf, between the experience of rape and a vague feeling of frustration, between a murderer and a fellow whose face is just not attractive enough. In today’s lineup, however, thanks to the milkmaid’s luck of the West, a pox-ridden prostitute is a woman of society, an illiterate vulgarian is an award-winning author, and a gum-chewing teenager is the princess of Wales. “Oh yeah?” says the backward, regressive, socially maladjusted loner from the boondocks, “if that’s so, then I’m the emperor of China!” Just wait awhile, is my advice to him. It’s still early days in bedlam. One day, you will be. But are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a Nobel Prize in flower arranging, or else the governorship of Mars?

Thus Tina Brown, the author of the book under review. If the British editor of the gossip monthly Tatler could be made editor of the New Yorker, why shouldn’t a gum-chewing blonde bimbo have had a go at becoming the queen of England? Personally I think that the New Yorker, like Vanity Fair that Miss Brown had famously commanded in the interim, could only have been improved by the ministrations of even the most petty-minded foreigner, much as both these journals might benefit from the insight of one of their office cleaners, but that is hardly the point here. To Miss Brown herself, her appointment was a revolution. Needless to add that Diana Spencer’s good luck in marrying the prince of Wales was a salient feature of the selfsame revolution, rather like the luck of Lenin, who had overthrown the elected government of Russia with hardly a shot fired and then created the myth of Red October to clothe this unforeseen happenstance in historical legitimacy.

I cannot hide the truth that Miss Brown, with her anorexic mind and her carnivorous personality, her wispy tergiversations and her rampant metaphors, is of rather greater interest to me than her subject’s life and eventual fate. As the editor of Tatler, an observer and arbiter of Britain’s social mores, Miss Brown used to specialize in girls like Diana, watching, teasing, and coaching them until they became ripe for revolution; for my part, as a freelance observer of the British cultural scene, I once specialized in girls like Miss Brown, chatting and drinking with them until they gave me something to write about. Miss Brown understands Diana to perfection, if only because she herself is the product of the same bedlam happenstance and the stuff of the same unhinged metaphor that, over the last 20 years, have managed to stand British society on its ear. Well, I understand Miss Brown to perfection, if only because her brand of revolution has robbed me of an adoptive homeland.

“We have put her living in the tomb.” Edgar Allan Poe’s line from “The Fall of the House of Usher” is how the twenty-year-old Diana Spencer experienced the days after the sound of trumpets in St Paul’s Cathedral had faded. When I think of the young, beautiful, newly married Princess of Wales at this time I see her sitting up abruptly in the middle of the night in the Spartan spaciousness of her bedroom in Balmoral and uttering a long, blood-curdling scream . . .

The ellipsis is Miss Brown’s, of course. The metaphor of suffocation, so hopelessly stilted in the hands of so inept a writer, is meant to go on dilating of its own accord, like a Chinese magic-paper ball, in the reader’s brain. Note how the word spaciousness, undercut by Spartan, is a pitch for republican empathy in the hearts of suburban housewives from Peshawar to Caracas. Just how Spartan was that stifling spaciousness, as a matter of interest? Well, “it got on her nerves,” for instance, “that as soon as you left a room at Balmoral, someone behind you would switch the light off,” apparently to save the taxpayer’s nickel in the days when the royal yacht Britannia had not yet been taken away from the Queen through the rabble-rousing of journalists in Miss Brown’s own social circle.

On board Britannia, which spirits the honeymooning couple off to the Greek islands, “there were twenty-one naval officers, a crew of 256 men, a valet, a dresser, a private secretary and an equerry sharing their romantic getaway.” Diana “was bored out of her mind,” comments Miss Brown, “and who can blame her?”

There was no pulling into a port to hit the cafés and shops as they cruised past the playgrounds of the Mediterranean. The royal yacht could not visit foreign soil without being met and fêted by local dignitaries. Aside from the complications of the press, Britannia showing up means the Crown is in Town. In Port Said they had to welcome the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and his wife aboard for dinner.

How perfectly horrid! Truly a scene from “The House of Usher.” Just imagine the Older, Colonially loquacious, unfashionably Dark-skinned couple intruding one Gothic night on an Aryan princess’s dolce far niente. And not even a crummy beach, or a transistor radio playing Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” or a wad of pink bubblegum to stick on the underside of the dining-room table to make it all a little less claustrophobic in the daytime. “She loved the swimming and the sun but the only other thing to do on the boat was read and books had never been her long suit.” Her husband happened to love reading, an obnoxious habit that leads the highbrow editoress of the New Yorker to the conclusion that “the Prince’s pleasures were those of a man twice his age.”

Thus, when it suits the champagne-swilling Miss Brown, royal frugality is distasteful, while in another, more politically astute mood, Miss Brown rather thinks royal profligacy must be curbed. The prince of Wales, aged 32, is much too decrepit for her doe-eyed Diana, but when this elderly bookworm has premarital affairs with other 20-year-olds, she ridicules him as immature. Reading may be a wonderful pastime for all ages when you are editing a national magazine, but equally, it’s a pain in the neck and a colossal waste of time. A dark-skinned Egyptian is unfashionable under one set of rules, yet under another he is the perfect partner for a woman of sophistication and discernment out to cuckold her husband. From Freud at his most absurd to Cosmopolitan at its most suggestive, from Marx at his most fantastic to the New York Times at its most vindictive, we have all seen how the tattler’s dialectic works.

Miss Brown is nothing if not a creature of this consummately contemporary approach to the discovery of truth. “Just babble away!” is how to subdue enemies and influence governments the Tatler way, a far more democratic prescription than stodgy old Carnegie’s. “Babble without fear or favor, babble like a housewife on amphetamines, babble until the cows come home. Don’t worry about contradicting yourself—isn’t everything a contradiction? Forget Aristotle’s excluded middle—if he’s so smart, how come he’s never made the Forbes? Let go of determinate values—remember, everything’s relative! Have no fear of banality—when printed on glossy paper, or backed up with Condé Nast millions, every cliché will look as fresh as a daisy, while the Remy de Gourmonts and the Vasily Rozanovs will stay just where they are, in musty old libraries frequented by tweedy, lonesome losers like the future king of England.

“Above all, remember that political, social and economic power, long sovereign over the corporeal existence of mankind, has come at last to reign over the human spirit, and every kind of literature nowadays is but a projection of this power. A Nietzsche or a Kier­kegaard existed irrespective of whether they were published or by whom, while my thoughts on Prince Charles, as well as Prince Charles’s own thoughts should he decide to publish them, have an immanence strictly proportional to the publisher’s advances we receive.”

I apologize to the reader for saying hardly a word about the wedding dress, the glass coach, the acrimonious divorce, and the tragic accident or political assassination. The great upheaval of modern times is the emergence of figures such as Miss Brown, and all the tragic accidents or political assassinations, including John F. Kennedy’s, cannot compare in their destructive impact on the way we think and feel with the occlusive rise of the tattling immoralist. As for the dresses and the coaches, these have not changed since the fairy tales of our childhood days.

Andrei Navrozov is Chronicles’ European editor.

This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Still, I can’t help suspecting that the current war, which he does support, may help explain his newly aggressive atheism. By applauding Bush’s war, a quasi-Trotskyite venture in “global democratic revolution,” Hitch, as his friends call him, has lost a lot of face among his old comrades on the left. Attacking “religion” was the perfect way to recoup. So Michael Kinsley was probably right to praise his book god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything as a shrewd career move.

However, as Dr. Johnson said of Rous­seau, “A man who talks nonsense so well must know he is talking nonsense.” Is Hitch (or should we, by analogy with “god,” call him “hitch”?) pulling the public’s leg just a bit? When he speaks of religion as belief in a “celestial dictatorship,” he betrays the Trotskyite reduction of all relations to raw power; surely, he is aware that Christians regard God—or “god,” if you like—as a loving Father, not a gigantic bully. But when he says (on page 114) that Jesus’ very historical existence is “highly questionable,” you have to wonder if he is lying, insane, or just full of hitch.

Can he be serious? The most famous and influential man who ever lived . . . never lived? Can anyone really suppose such a marvelous character was invented? That a few unschooled and inartistic writers could have thought up immortal words suitable to Him? That countless martyrs would endure agonizing death to bear witness to One whose reality was in doubt? Tell us another one, hitch. Better yet, say one thing even your fellow unbelievers will find worthy of Jesus, one thing men will quote a year—or two thousand—from now.

The hitchbook is open to many objections, but one of its oddities is its startling profusion of anachronistic indignations. Why should a materialist get so sore about the supposed evils of war, racism, sexism, bigotry, Nazism, “the” Inquisition (was there only one?), caste systems, and Mel Gibson? Did “religion” cause all of these things, and if so, so what? Why shouldn’t they exist in hitch’s universe? Couldn’t they have evolved on other planets anyway? Isn’t hitch guilty of humanism? If we discovered a Mel Gibson on Mars, why should we care? And why does hitch single out Martin Luther King, Jr., as the only praiseworthy Christian? And why, after renouncing communism, is he so forgiving toward communists, including King’s pals?

And why don’t these obvious questions occur to hitch himself?

One reason I’m a Christian is that Jesus predicted books such as this: He warned us that, just as the world hated Him, it would always hate us, too, and so it does, after 2,000 years.

Another reason is more personal. Life has been so kind to me. It has warped me with blessings. I’ve had a few minor complaints lately, but, as a child, I was so showered with love that I can’t disbelieve in God or believe that He is cruel.

Nor can I take hitch seriously, except as a man who appears to be pitifully indisposed to gratitude. He can imagine “religion” only in what a believer recognizes as its most deformed versions, which prove nothing at all about its normal, lovely, and perfect form: the Catholic Faith. He’s looking for reasons to hate it, while never acknowledging even one of the things that make millions of men love it. If I were an atheist, I might write a book in praise of such a gorgeous illusion.

One of hitch’s sneakiest moves is his attempt to pin the label “totalitarian” on religion. Surely, he knows that the essence of the totalitarian is the utterly arbitrary authority of the ruler, who can switch all the rules at any moment.

No Muslim, Jewish, or Catholic ruler has ever claimed the right to do anything so absurd—to be “above” morality. (The U.S. Supreme Court may do so.) It would defeat the whole purpose of having an unchanging Scripture. At one point, hitch himself even seems to admit this, but he plunges on like a fast-talking salesman who hopes you won’t notice the self-contradiction. Safely “audacious,” he treats communism not as a vicious crime (like those of Mel Gibson) but as an amiable, if slightly regrettable, weakness. After all, it’s one he shared until late in his life, something more than a youthful flirtation. But any sense of guilt he may feel doesn’t make him swerve from his mission, which is not to confess but to accuse.

Hitch accuses Christians of “wish-thinking,” but fails to see how the same charge may apply to atheists who think they may ignore and violate the Ten Commandments with utter impunity. The man who fears he is in danger of damnation, on the other hand, would seem to deserve exemption from any such imputation. Me, I’d rather not spend eternity in Hell.

Joseph Sobran is a syndicated columnist.

This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

And on June 28, 2007, by a five-to-four vote, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that most of what Rockford had endured had been unnecessary. In fact, it had violated the Constitution of the United States.

Of course, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. did not directly involve District 205 (though Justice Stephen Breyer cited the Rockford case in his dissent), but the issue at stake was the same: “discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments,” as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion for the majority, which included Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy (though Kennedy only concurred in part and in the judgment). The second district (the et al.) involved in the case, that of Jefferson County, Kentucky, had emerged from a desegregation order in 2000 and promptly did what Rockford would do two years later: voluntarily adopt a race-based assignment plan. The Seattle case was even more perverse than the Rockford one, since the Seattle district “has never . . . been subject to court-ordered desegregation” but “voluntarily adopted student assignment plans that rely on race to determine which schools certain children may attend.” Any such plan, the majority declared, needs to be “narrowly tailored,” and both districts failed on that account.

Proponents of neighborhood schools and opponents of busing (overlapping but not identical groups) might think twice before rejoicing, however. While the decision in Parents Involved might well prevent most of what happened in Rockford from happening somewhere else (or from happening here in Rockford again, a few years down the line), none of the justices on either side questioned the idea that government has “a compelling interest in maintaining racially diverse schools.” Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, came the closest to raising the question, declaring that, “as a general rule, all race-based government decisionmaking—regardless of context—is unconstitutional.” But he was careful to make it clear that the “decisionmaking” in question involved the means used, not the goal itself. Even though Justice Thomas handily demolished the “tenuous relationship between forced racial mixing and improved educational results for black children” and declared that the Constitution is “color-blind,” he continued to hold open the possibility that government might have a compelling interest in imposing racial diversity—in, say, areas where de jure segregation previously occurred.

And that brings us to the crux of the issue: What could that compelling interest possibly be? And if there is none, why does the majority on the Court continue to pretend that there might be one?

In a community where de jure segregation did occur, and, in the process, black children or other minorities were deprived of publicly funded educational opportunities that white children enjoyed, the solution is simple, and always has been: End the segregation, and provide the same educational opportunities to all children. Ending segregation, however, is not the same as forcing integration. Here in Rockford, a true neighborhood-school system would mean that some schools would be 95-plus percent white, while others would be 90-plus percent black and Hispanic. Provided with similar facilities, materials, and, most importantly, teachers, students in each school would enjoy similar educational opportunities. Sitting next to a classmate with darker or lighter skin should have no real bearing on the quality of one’s education.

Here in Rockford, opponents of the desegregation suit often argued that those who favored busing were implying that black and Hispanic children could not learn unless they were around white children. It was a rhetorically useful tactic, not because the pro-busing crowd really believed that, but because they could not come right out and say what they really believed: that the only way that whites can be trusted to provide equal educational opportunities to minorities is to ensure that white students get the same education as blacks and Hispanics. Only then, the thinking goes, will whites be concerned with the proper education of differently colored people.

So the government’s compelling interest in imposing racial diversity in public schools comes down to this: You can’t trust white people. Sadly, Justice Thomas, despite pulling back at the last moment, is the only one of the justices who even seems to understand why that might be wrong. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that he received his (by all accounts, exceptional) primary and secondary education in all-black schools at the hands of white nuns.

Imagine what he might have accomplished if only he had attended a racially diverse public school.

Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles.

This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Michael Moore calls his films documentaries, but they’re really sockumentaries. He is cinema’s heavyweight master of the sucker punch. Behind his slovenly, shambling flabbiness, he packs a vicious left hook. That’s politically left, of course. Now, some suckers deserve to be pounded by sneaky lefts. That’s the case in Moore’s latest match, Sicko. Fighting on behalf of socialized medicine, Moore wallops America’s haphazard, systemless healthcare, bloodying his hapless free-market foe again and again. It’s a mismatch: His careless opponent hasn’t bothered to develop his skills and clearly needs a lesson in ringmanship. So you cheer for Moore until the late rounds, when he begins to showboat unforgivably.

Moore’s performance—and there’s no other word for it—is a nearly two-hour series of deft feints. Wearing his baseball cap, nondescript windbreaker, and filthy jeans, he plays the working-class stiff who has somehow got hold of a mike, a camera crew, and the money to travel from Michigan around the world. As he globe-trots, he keeps bumping into people who open his eyes to the horrors and wonders of healthcare. Not surprisingly, the horrors are all in America; the wonders, all in London, Paris, and, most especially, Havana.

In America, he treats us to the spectacle of folks—almost all of them middle-class—who have been financially and physically ruined by America’s patch-work healthcare system. There’s the uninsured carpenter who sliced off two of his fingertips. The price for reattachment? The middle finger, $60,000; the ring, $12,000. He opts for the cheaper and more romantic tip. The other, Moore tells us, landed in a nearby landfill, which we glimpse as his camera cuts to a couple of rats scavenging along the edges of a mountain of garbage. (They don’t find the fingertip, fortunately.) Then we meet an aging couple forced to sell their house and move into their sullen daughter’s home after the husband suffers a heart attack and the wife develops cancer. They have been bankrupted by the unrelenting costs for medical services and drugs not covered by their insurance plan. Elsewhere, a woman tells Moore that her insurance company refused to pay for the ambulance that took her on an unscheduled emergency run to the hospital. Her carrier informs her she needed pre-approval for her late-night transport. When, she wonders, was she supposed to get this pre-approval—en route? An 18-month-old girl dies shortly after she’s taken from Martin Luther King, Jr.-Harbor Hospital in Los Angeles. The doctors on duty refused to treat her. Her mother’s health plan with Kaiser Permanente required the child be treated at a Kaiser hospital. So, after spending two hours at MLK, the girl wasn’t diagnosed and didn’t get the antibiotics necessary to keep her alive. Testifying before Congress, a physician confesses that she feels responsible for killing at least one patient and harming countless more. She had been a handsomely paid claim reviewer for Blue Shield, which granted her bonuses for denying claims above her stipulated quota. Another doctor took to using a stamp to affix his “signature” to his profitable denials. When Moore confronts him with a few of his stamped forms, he mumbles that he doesn’t remember “signing” them. Next, Moore gives us a receding credit crawl of preexisting conditions accompanied by the Star Wars theme. Each condition rules out health-insurance coverage. And, indeed, the calculation behind this kind of corporate preemptive cost cutting is worthy of Darth Vader. A boy is excluded because he is too tall and too thin; a girl because she is too short and too heavy. Moore interviews a woman who had her claim check recalled when her carrier discovered she neglected to report she’d once had a yeast infection. Although Moore neglects to point it out, this is especially galling since it is well known that such infections are usually the side effect of taking a course of doctor-prescribed antibiotics.

Certainly, if these episodes took place as presented, they are unforgivable abuses and cry out for further investigation. But Moore is too intent on landing his next punch to bother himself with checking facts. The denials, for instance. Were these care providers incompetent, stupid, or callous? At what point does an insurer’s legitimate need to guard against unnecessary treatments and outright fraud shade into corporate greed? How many of these patients were foolishly submissive to the professionals? Certainly, refusing to diagnose an ailing infant suggests extraordinary thoughtlessness on the part of the doctors at MLK. Or did they fear they’d be sued for providing unauthorized treatment? There is, however, the mother’s apparent passivity to consider. She waited for two hours to be taken to the Kaiser hospital to obtain treatment for her daughter. If we are going to lay blame, we need to know the full context to apportion it sensibly.

As in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore expresses concern for the victims he interviews, but it’s clear that he is parading them on screen primarily to further his campaign. He wants the same kind of unfettered healthcare provided in England, France, and Canada—where it’s free, he keeps telling us. He must be kidding. Has he seen the tax bills in those nations? I am not against a single-payer national healthcare plan in principle. It might be possible to devise such a system without making an exorbitantly expensive mess of things, and it could have the virtue of simplifying the nightmarish tangle of forms and bureaucracies that now attend even the simplest visit to the doctor. But it wouldn’t be free. Notably, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s recently elected president, won in part because he promised to revamp his country’s healthcare system, lest it render the entire nation insolvent. Rumblings of the same sort are being heard in England and Canada.

Anticipating objections to socialized medicine, Moore reminds us that socialism is already flourishing within our borders. Consider our state-run institutions, he urges—our public schools and our post offices, both examples of socialism in action. Wait a minute. How many of us are happy with what our tax money buys in the way of education and mail delivery? Do we really want medical care provided with all the dedication on display at a typical post-office window? Interestingly, Moore doesn’t mention that other socialistic marvel, our motor-vehicle bureaucracy. Governmental employees are notoriously careless about efficiency and costs, a fact Moore witlessly demonstrates with the story of a young Frenchman who had been living in America for years without health coverage. When he became ill with treatable cancer, he quickly returned to France, where he knew his therapy would be covered. All he had to do was get a job for a few weeks, and the state would see to his care. After several months of treatment, he recovers. About to leave the hospital, he’s asked if he is ready to return to work or if he feels he needs more time to regain his emotional stability. Oh, but certainement, more time, s’il vous plaît. For such candor, he is awarded a three-month paid holiday. We last see him water-sporting and night-clubbing with an assortment of beautiful young women in Montpellier. Moore evidently thinks this happy spectacle will sell Americans on socialized medicine. And so it might to the Girls Gone Wild crowd. Others may wonder about the long-term consequences of such careless largesse.

Then Moore really stumbles. He rounds up three September 11 rescue workers who are suffering from respiratory and other ailments. Each has been refused medical coverage for reasons that are left obscure. Moore takes them on a boat to the “one place on American soil that offers free universal health care”: Guantanamo Bay. There, members of Al Qaeda and other captured terrorists have, according to the Bush administration, been getting the best of medical attention. When he reaches the base’s harbor, he takes out a bullhorn and requests entrance. A response comes when two combat helicopters fly over Moore’s boat to investigate. Beating a retreat, Moore takes his charges to Havana. On the spur of the moment—wink, wink—he decides to check in to the city’s major hospital. Wouldn’t you know, the ailing Americans are greeted warmly and given instant medical attention. And, guess what? They leave a few days later: one, entirely cured; the other two, well on their way to restored health. There’s no end to the wonders of dialectical materialism.

Is this irresponsible propaganda? Unquestionably. Nevertheless, I want to commend Moore. Despite his outrageous tactics and screwy politics, he has done us a service with this film as he did with the equally irresponsible Fahrenheit 9/11. His stunts may be juvenile, but they call our attention to real abuses and negligence in our healthcare arrangements—abuses that could be remedied, were our public servants really committed to serving our interests.

When it comes to showing up venal and cowardly politicians, few do it as colorfully as Moore. Here, he uses a shot of our senators standing in their Capitol chamber. Above each head, he flashes the amount of money they have taken from the HMO and pharmaceutical industries. Hillary Clinton leads the pack. She has been showered with nearly a million disinterested dollars by civic-minded corporate leaders. (And you were wondering why she so rarely talks about nationalizing healthcare these days.) But there’s more. In a sequence that could have come from a Preston Sturges satire, we watch The Hon. Billy Tauzin (R-LA) addressing his fellow representatives in 2005. He is demanding they pass the Medicare Part II prescription-drug bill. We see Tauzin smarmily entreating his fellow public servants to do the right thing. He is supporting this plan, he assures them, for one reason only. “I love my mother,” he calls out in a quavering voice. He cannot bear the prospect of her not having enough money to buy the drugs she needs in her old age. Then, in a montage of other venues, he soulfully repeats himself on behalf of this legislation: “I love my mother,” he pleads again and again. Such hypocrisy would be laughable but for this troubling fact: The Medicare Part II prescription law was written not by our public servants but by the pharmaceutical industry, and it bars the government from negotiating for lower drug costs and seeks to prohibit access to lower-priced drugs from Canada. Already, it is obscenely enriching the pharmaceutical companies at the expense, physical and fiscal, of the American taxpayers. Some analysts say it could bankrupt Medicare altogether. And, another fact: While Tauzin was campaigning for this law, he let it be known he would be resigning from Congress soon and was looking for other employment. Two months after the bill was passed, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the lobbying arm of the industry, graciously appointed him as its CEO, at an estimated annual salary of between one and two-and-a-half million dollars. The devoted Tauzin no longer has to worry. Should Medicare go bust, he can now afford to pay for Mom’s drugs all on his own.

Oddly, Moore has left out another interesting fact about our public servants. The men and women who fight so hard to guarantee our health, who guard us so bravely against the threat of socialized medicine, are themselves, along with their families, life-long beneficiaries of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan. Paying 25 to 28 percent of the plan’s premium rate, they are entitled to choose from among dozens of private insurers and are free to change plans once per year. Furthermore, they cannot be denied coverage for any preexisting health condition whatsoever, nor can their medical status be grounds for charging them a dime more than anyone else for the same policy. Not quite a socialist’s dream, but, nevertheless, pretty sweet, all in all. This tidbit would have given Moore’s argument for socialized medicine considerably more luster. In fact, it is almost enough to make you turn red, except for this thought: A national health plan devised by Congress would almost certainly be run by the likes of Billy Tauzin.

Pass the Zoloft. It’s free, isn’t it?

George McCartney is Chronicles' film editor.

This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In every discussion of reform, whether it was with professors of education, school-board members, or the secretary of education and his staff, the conversation always ran aground on the following question: “What is your object in teaching a class, running a school, or developing a program?” When I received no better answer than gimmicks summed up in slogans such as “child-centered education,” “back to basics,” “phonics,” or “writing for reading,” I clarified the question by asking, “What sort of person, if you succeed, do you expect to turn out?” A Quaker headmaster informed me that he hoped his students would be themselves; I naturally asked him why parents should pay high tuition to a private school if not to turn their little savages into some kind of civilized human beings.

Perhaps I have spent too much time reading Plato. After all, a simple society can rear its boys and girls to be patriotic citizen-soldiers or competent matrons without having an explicit theory that stipulates the for what we teach children, but that is only because traditional societies have an implicit understanding of what a good man or good wife and mother is like. An Athenian on his way to fight the Persians at Marathon did not have a refined definition of courage arrived at in a course of dialectic or at the end of an argument with Socrates’ father. He had read or heard the same Homeric poems as his fellows, worshiped the same gods at the same festivals, attended the same meetings of the Assembly and the same courts, where he listened to the wise and the foolish debating the controversies of the day. We are not so lucky.

No young man today, unless he has been locked in a basement or reared by the Amish, is unaware that every virtue extolled by parents and pastors is contemned by the really important people in our society—namely, celebrities. His parents may teach him to be polite and respectful in his speech, but if he turns on the television to learn something about politics—a grave mistake—he will be subjected to the coarse hectoring of Bill Maher and Ann Coulter. He does not need to turn on the TV. Every day in school, he learns the same bad lessons, bad manners, and bad morals. A slave to the indoctrination he has received, he thinks that he (obeying the dictates of the Harvard School of Education and FOX News) is the ultimate judge of all value, whether it is the received wisdom of the Church or the received wisdom that tells grown men to put on a jacket and tie before going to church. Instead of learning from experience, his own and that of his parents and ancestors, he believes only abstract speculations about human equality and the progress of humanity.

We live in a culture gone mad on theory: theories of sex and family, theories of government, and, inevitably, theories of education. A debate has raged for centuries over “the future of education.” Early American liberals such as Noah Webster insisted that a democratic society needs a suitable educational system, divorced from the classical tradition that encouraged aristocracy and elitism. What sort of American democrat could listen to Sarpedon’s admonition “always to be the best” without giving a Bronx cheer? It took over a hundred years, but this appeal began to take concrete form in American colleges and secondary schools between the two world wars.

John Dewey and his students developed the argument to include a soft social-science indoctrination that would liberate American kids from the shackles of race, ethnicity, nationality, region, class, wealth, religion, taste, and anything else their poor benighted parents might have valued. By the late 1960’s, the attack was extended to sex and gender, species and phylum. An old high-school friend—a beautiful and charming woman—once asked me (at an oyster roast) why I could be so concerned about unborn babies when I cared so little about baby seals. This same woman, if she had not been warped by the propaganda inflicted on her by half-educated Ph.D.’s, would have remained a Trinitarian Anglican and a patriotic Southerner. As things turned out, she was only a New Yorker manqué. That is why every school in the nation should have a sign at the entrance: Enter at Your Own Risk or, better still, Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.

The conservative response to the progressives’ takeover of education has been of two types, and neither has been particularly effective. The capitalist response is to emphasize vocational skills, whether at the low level of shop and computer courses or on the high level of mathematics and science. Bill Gates, himself a model victim of American education, thinks that he can do some good by rewarding students for designing innovative technical projects before they have learned anything about who they are or why they are alive. The results are all around us: the technological barbarians who cannot even imagine the moral problems presented by cloning, in vitro fertilization, and the virtual reality in which young people are imprisoned.

Most of us, who are neither angels nor monks, would like to have money; sensible people would like to earn their money by pursuing an interesting and useful career. We all understand that an aspiring physician, lawyer, or engineer must receive specialized training, but what hardly anyone realizes is that money, career, and profession are, in most cases, only marginally connected to the serious purpose of education. The application of businesslike methods to politics or education is routinely disastrous, because the object of statecraft or teaching is quite different from the object of business.

So-called cultural conservatives are aware of the shortcomings in the businessman’s call for vocational education, but their response has been to call for a return to the Great Books, though some of them cannot distinguish between The Great Gatsby and what William Bennett once described as “the published works of Socrates.” If our cultural-conservative leaders had read some of the great books, instead of merely talking about them, they might have read in Plato (who wrote the works Socrates did not) that reading impairs the memory. Plato’s observation—which is truer with every technological step away from simple orality and literacy—might have led them to reflect that books are only means to the ends of a system of education or paideia, to use a more inclusive Greek word, which means nothing more than childrearing. The end, as Calder Willingham expressed it in the title of his beautiful and almost forgotten novel, is a man.

All of the above might have been written 20 years ago, and, indeed, such arguments have routinely been made in Chronicles. All that has changed in 20 years is that these false conservatisms, which used to be limited to movement periodicals and small ideological colleges, have now metastasized into a viral empire of websites and distance-learning programs that feature the usual cafeteria of computer skills and great books. All of these projects will fail; most of them will do more harm than good. Even at their best, they will distract well-intentioned parents, teachers, and students from considering the purpose and function of education.

The same basic questions, however, remain, and, until they are addressed, there can be no significant improvement in education: What is the purpose of education—that is, what sort of a person do we want to result from 20 years of schooling, and what is the curriculum that will produce such people? The traditional answer, “the classical curriculum,” is short enough to appear on a standardized test, though only if it is one of multiple choices on the grid of a computerized test form. But what are the classics, and why should we study them? For most readers, Great Expectations and The Thirty-Nine Steps are classics, but I should be hard pressed to defend the inclusion of these admittedly good novels in a serious curriculum.

Critics, including Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot, have tried to define such terms as classics and culture. For Arnold, the son of a famous headmaster, culture was “the best that has been thought and said.” In his lecture “What is a Classic?” Eliot set out to be more precise and more profound than the Romantic Arnold. For Eliot, maturity is the hallmark of classical literature—maturity of mind, of manners, and of language. Maturity is a quality difficult to pin down. Like the Greek sophrosyne, it implies restraint and the absence of extravagance, but maturity of style is the perfection of the best tendencies in a language. A mature writer is not a child of his own time, but, like Vergil, he possesses a sense of history. It is Vergil who displays all of these qualities and is the benchmark of classicism.

As valuable as they are, both of these essays in definition were on one point misguided in beginning at the wrong end. Do we value Vergil because he is mature or maturity because it is Vergilian? Before answering too quickly, we should consider that civilized men of the West have been Vergilians for two millennia. From one perspective, it does not matter if Homer and Plato, Vergil and Augustine are the best writers, so long as they are ours, the writers who define our civilization. The body of classical literature is not a set of museum exhibits, catalogued, arranged, and dead; it is a living tradition, something handed down from one generation of intelligent readers to the next. The Latin for “hand down” is tradere, from which we derive our word tradition. Naturally, the canon must be open to the new writers—Dante and Racine, Shakespeare and Goethe—who make themselves indispensable, but never to the exclusion of their literary progenitors.

In recent centuries, we have grown used to the idea that tradition is in conflict with “objective truth,” and academic intellectuals (unless they are either reactionary or postmodernist) would tell us that the only way to strive for truth is by being objective—that is, by eliminating all the prejudices that come from our personal experience, our ethnic and national identity, and our religion. They might as well ask us to flap our arms and fly across the Grand Canyon. No ordinary mortal can entirely escape the blinders of subjectivity, and those who claim to have done so—e.g., modern university teachers—have simply put on another, more constrictive pair of blinders that prevents them from seeing any good either in patriotism or religion.

The studies that make up humane learning are called the liberal arts, not because they “liberate” students from inherited prejudices (as I have heard claimed by educators), and not even because they are arts practiced almost exclusively by liberals. The artes liberales of the Romans (translating a much older Greek phrase) were the studies appropriate to a free man. While servile or banausic arts were aimed at practical results (making a sword, for example) and gaining money, liberal arts form the character of a citizen in a republic or, in an aristocracy, a gentleman. Plato and Aristotle went further, teaching students to aim at the highest goal, which is the contemplation of the good.

The free man practices and values the virtues of honesty, courage, reverence, justice, and self-restraint not so much because they are good in the abstract as because he shares a general taste for them. It is only within such an ethical and civic context that it makes any sense to speak of pursuing or loving truth. Philosophy, as Aristotle points out, is a dangerous pursuit for people who have not been properly brought up by family and friends, because they will only learn how to justify their vices. Even the paltry bits of philosophy studied by Ayn Rand and her chief apostles hardened them in their selfishness, arrogance, and lewdness. Even if Rand or the Brandens had read a few good books, they would probably have turned them to evil purposes. We need only look at the example of Straussians who spend entire careers twisting and distorting every great political thinker from Plato to Jefferson. What is the result of all their lying? The kind of mad arrogance that overtook Bloom and Jaffa.

I am not arguing for illiteracy—though a glance at the best-seller lists might persuade us that Americans would be better off illiterate. Books, great and good, are the necessary tools of any educational method. It is also true that an American who has not read Hamlet or The History of Henry Esmond, I promessi sposi or Huckleberry Finn, while he may possess many serious intellectual and cultural interests, will be, in a society of educated readers, like the long line of ill-dressed gawkers who watch the beautiful people entering the club from which their lack of beauty and the right clothes have barred them. Schools must needs have a reading list of indispensable fiction, poetry, and drama, but teaching, say, Conan Doyle or Kafka in the classroom would require some justification, such as a desperate need for remediation.

We are so used to the idea of reading fiction and poetry in school that few of us stop to ask why we should spend time on what might otherwise be regarded as entertainment. If you have the patience and stomach for reading literary theory, you will discover a great many mystical statements about literature that no one in his right mind has ever believed. To take only the most banal example, you will hear that students should read modern novels, especially very dirty novels, to learn something important about life. Practical men—businessmen and engineers—with some justification make fun of the whole idea of studying literature in school. Reading stories is all very well for people who have the time, but why can they not pursue their hobby at home instead of watching TV? What possible use could it be to write essays on imagery in the poetry of Dylan Thomas or character development in the novels of Thomas Hardy?

Ancient writers on rhetoric would have no problem in answering the businessman’s objections. Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian would tell him that the object of education is to turn out a good man who can be useful to his neighbors and to his community. There is, they would add, a certain set of books that can be used effectively to teach both sound moral and civic principles and the art of effective writing and speaking. Civilization itself, they would conclude, depends on the process of inculcating these values and techniques, year after year, and generation after generation, into the human beastlings who need to be domesticated. Education, then, occupies a space somewhere between theology and toilet training.

The ancient system had its shortcomings, and nothing could be more foolish than to design a school around Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, much less to pretend to revive an imaginary trivium and quadrivium that more often existed on paper (or, rather, parchment) than in practice. However, the fundamental objectives of education remain, and not just the objectives but the methods that have proved useful and indispensable: the teaching of Latin and mathematics; the study of grammar and rhetoric (which includes logic and composition); and a systematic reading of the books that make us who we are, particularly poetry, drama, and history—and not the pseudo-scientific history written by professors but the history of historians who can write and think: Thucydides and Livy, David Hume and Shelby Foote. This is a far cry from four years spent on the Five Foot Shelf.

The study of languages, live and dead, is essential. The Greeks were mostly content to know their own language, but educated Romans, by the end of the Punic Wars, had to learn Greek. In the Middle Ages, Western Europeans, whatever language they spoke at home, had to study Latin, and a 17th-century Englishman had to make a stab at Greek, speak at least a traveler’s French, and, if he wished to set up for a literary gentleman, make shift to read the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Tasso.

Foreign languages are not everything, and each of us has limited time. But some disciplined study of ancient and modern tongues and the literatures written in them is an absolute necessity: first, because it improves our mental acuity; second, because it is the only way of gaining an acquaintance with the highest standards of “the best that has been thought and said.” Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Eliot were trained in the classics, and Milton learned Hebrew, French, Italian, and Old English. Most poets today do not even know correct English, much less Italian. As one Italian poet told me ruefully, after entertaining a group of American poets, he had no use for American writers: They could speak no language he knew, took no interest in art, philosophy, history, or literature. All they wanted to do, he said, was to scribble postcards in a bar. Today, unable even to scribble with a pen, our poets—once the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind”—drink their coffee in an internet cafe, text-messaging each other the inanities that no one, thank God, will ever read.

Whether we wish to be a poet or merely a president, there are no secrets or shortcuts and no new method of counting people that can tell us anything useful about humane learning. There are only the old methods that taught the men who made our civilization and framed our Constitution. Begin, as they did, with Vergil and Homer. As Mr. Jefferson said, they are the poets “as we advance in life . . . we are left at last with.” Chesterton agreed: “Those who count in any generation will always be talking of Troy.” If few people today talk of Troy, in Greek or in English, it is not because Chesterton has been proved wrong. We barbarians of the New Atlantis can either bemoan our ignorance or decide to join the conversation.

Thomas Fleming is the editor of Chronicles and the president of The Rockford Institute.

This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Murdoch’s News Corporation is a globe-straddling, eye-popping behemoth: It owns FOX News, the Times of London, the Australian, as well as myriad smaller companies too numerous to mention. Murdoch also owns the book publisher HarperCollins. The whole kit and caboodle is worth some $70 billion. If you wanted to prove Balzac’s maxim that a crime lies behind every immense fortune, Murdoch’s bazillion-dollar media kingdom would be a good place to sniff around.

Owned by the Bancroft family, Dow Jones is the century-old company that publishes the Wall Street Journal, the Ottaway dailies, and Barron’s. The Journal also owns its share of Pulitzer prizes and is deservedly regarded as the best brand name in financial journalism. Like FOX News, its editorial page is a neoconservative megaphone that barks and bellows for globalism, free trade, and open borders. For years, the page whipped Bill Clinton like a red-headed stepchild, and it gained a richly deserved reputation for slugging crackpot leftist Democrats upside the head. No wonder leftist crackpots everywhere loathe it.

To mute the tocsin about “meddling,” Murdoch agreed to establish an independent panel to keep an eye on things, lest he turn the Journal’s newsroom into an arm of its insane editorial page. How that will shake out remains to be seen, but, in any event, the worries over Murdoch’s owning the Journal fall into two categories: legitimate and ridiculous.

Murdoch already uses his media power to influence public officials, domestic and foreign—which is a legitimate cause for worry. In 2003, Congress considered a regulation that would have required Murdoch to sell some properties. As the New York Times reported, one man who was behind the new rule was Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), an alleged conservative. Then Lott changed his mind. HarperCollins had paid Senator Lott $250,000 in advance royalties for his unheralded book, Herding Cats. Before that, Murdoch’s publishing house had offered a $4.5 million advance to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, which precipitated such vehement reproach that Gingrich returned it.

The most scandalous of Murdoch’s monkeyshines occurred in China. When he publicly proclaimed that modern media “proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” the Chinese Reds banned private ownership of satellite dishes, which threatened Murdoch’s Asian broadcasting venture, Star TV. No problem. HarperCollins published Deng Xiaoping’s biography, which, according to Joseph Kahn of the New York Times, included “mainly recycled propaganda about Mr. Deng.” Murdoch schmoozed with Deng’s handicapped son as well. He “chartered a jet to ferry a troop of disabled acrobats that the younger Mr. Deng had promoted to perform abroad.” And Star TV dumped the BBC because the Chicoms didn’t like its newscasts. That should worry journalists everywhere.

On the other hand, the relentless, daffy propaganda that Murdoch might “meddle” in the Journal’s newsroom is ridiculous. Whether Murdoch is already prone to wander from office to office depends on which of his editors you listen to. The fear of Murdoch’s vaticinated meddling runs something like this, from leftist Eric Alterman of Media Matters for America:

On the day the takeover bid was announced, I appeared on CNBC’s “Kudlow and Company” and heard the claim, made over and over, that a Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal might somehow even out the balance of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, etc.

The point is misguided in myriad directions simultaneously. First off, those papers all have objective-seeking journalists doing the news, not liberals as Kudlow was implying.

This, of course, is a jug of pink moonshine, but it’s typical of the leftists for whom objectivity means a sinistral view of the world.

Murdoch’s critics might not want to gabble about “meddling” and ethics, either. Murdoch may be unethical, but he’s no more so than his competitors. The same worrywarts said nothing when the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulz­berger, flatly declared that “diversity,” as opposed to accuracy, is the “most important issue facing the paper.” That bit of interference—which was also unethical—led to Jayson Blair’s plagiarism and fabrication fiasco. Indeed, the newsroom’s managing editor, Howell Raines, admitted that he overlooked Blair’s transgressions because Blair is black. The worrywarts said nothing when the Pulitzer Prize Board refused to revoke, and the Times refused to return, Walter Duranty’s award, which he won for his flatly mendacious reportage from Stalin’s Soviet Union. Or how about this: The Times hatched a real-estate deal with the state of New York to condemn and seize a property, subsidized by taxpayers to the tune of $79 million, for its 52-story corporate headquarters. No worries there.

And what might they say if they saw Donald Graham “meddling” in newsroom decisions the way his mother did during the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate and Pentagon Papers stories? Katharine Graham rightly participated in decisions about those stories, and, should such a story present itself to the Journal, Murdoch might rightly participate as well.

In the abstract, it is absurd for Murdoch’s critics to argue that someone who paid five billion dollars for a company cannot run it the way he sees fit. (Then again, liberals aren’t much on private-property rights, as we know from 50 years of editorials from the New York Times.) But no man needs this much money or power. Observed James B. Ottaway, a Dow Jones director and a former owner of the Ottaway chain,

I am opposed to Rupert Murdoch’s buying Dow Jones to boost his personal prestige, political power, and global media business control. . . . [Murdoch’s] taking over Dow Jones . . . would add to already too much concentration of American and global media ownership, and political influence on American society and government decision making.

One wonders why Ottaway sold his papers to Dow Jones, for that, too, concentrated media power in fewer hands. Nonetheless, Ottaway and others made an even more salient point: Wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of 99 percent of their readers, the Bancroft Family had neither good reason nor the need to sell Dow Jones.

Ottaway wrongly believes Murdoch’s News Corporation differs substantially from the other massive media plantations that dominate the landscape. The truth is that News Corporation is the same, only bigger. The sad tragedy of American journalism has been the near-complete eradication of locally or family-owned, small-town dailies. A few gargantuan media companies own many of them—most notably, that hideous Gorgon of anti-American corporate leftism, Gannett. Gannett’s journalistic crimes aside, it suffices to say that the owners of a paper in Iowa should not live in New York, anymore than the owners of the Baltimore Sun should reside in Chicago or Denver or wherever the Tribune Company’s directors and major stockholders live. Most of them have no interest in or knowledge of the communities their papers “serve.”

This is the irony of the news media’s operation in the free market. With complete freedom to expand, a few companies such as Gannett devoured local dailies by the bushel. So consumers from Portland East to Portland West get their news from faceless, nonlocal media conglomerates that hire nonlocal editors and writers, whose political, religious, and cultural beliefs, which surface in stories and editorials, are often hostile to the community’s. Given that starting a daily newspaper is financially impossible for anyone but Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, the only alternative for locals is a newspaper on the web. Of course, media giants create those, too. A few large corporations control too many newspapers and dominate the media landscape. Strangely, the liberals who despise Wal-Mart are not discussing the gigantism and raw power that Murdoch’s insidious accumulation of media properties means. Perhaps they do not care, which might be why they don’t complain about Tribune or Gannett. The selective criticism reeks of hypocrisy. Liberals don’t oppose concentrated power or influence peddling; they oppose only Murdoch.

And only because of his alleged ideology. Well, then, here is a news flash: Murdoch isn’t the conservative the liberal Pecksniffs think he is. No conservative would put naked women on Page Three of his newspapers, or produce ribald television programs such as Married With Children, or jump into bed with the Chicoms. Nor would a conservative donate money to Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. Murdoch has done it all. His London tabloid, the Sun, endorsed leftist Tony Blair. His FOX News Channel is a shill for the Bush administration. Murdoch uses, and will continue to use, his billions to wield power in politics and government. In short, like William Randolph Hearst, he is a public menace.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Dr. Brown was a mentor to many. The word pops up repeatedly in articles mourning his passing and celebrating his life and accomplishments. Knowing that one occupies that place in the lives of others is likely to make a man prideful, even arrogant, but not Harold O.J. Brown. As calls, e-mails, and visitors poured in while he lay dying, he expressed disbelief that he could really mean so much to so many.

“Ahem, now that we’re colleagues and friends, don’t hesitate to call me Joe, Mr. Wolf,” he said to me on the phone, after I had started working for Chronicles. I remember hearing students call him Joe when I met him, that August day when I was registering for classes at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I had approached his office cautiously, hoping to meet the great evangelical theologian. Rounding the corner, I heard loud laughter and saw a handful of students gathered around his doorway. There he stood, in an office jammed full of stacked papers and books, an ancient bicycle shoved against one wall. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Wolf. Care to join us on a mountain-climbing adventure?”

“Joe’s an excellent mountain climber,” a student told me later. “He’s into fencing, coached crew at Harvard—rides his bike to class every day from the train.” I couldn’t find the time to go; now I wish I had.

I never heard him ask a student to call him Joe; that’s what his friends called him. “It’s difficult not to say Dr. Brown,” I told him, “because you’re my mentor.” The next time he called Chronicles, he left me a voicemail, which began with a chuckle: “Ahem, this is Joe, Harold Ogden J., Dr. Brown, your former professor and current colleague and overall mentor.” I think he still preferred Dr. Brown.

Dr. Brown knew that one of the hallmarks of our Sensate Culture (the title of his last book) is a crisis of authority. Besides Cicero, Augustine, Luther, Althusius, Pitirim Sorokin, and a host of others, he was fond of citing Hannah Arendt: “Power is the ability to force compliance with one’s demands; authority is the ability to command voluntary obedience.” In The Sensate Culture, Dr. Brown wrote,

The very idea of education presupposes that the educator or teacher knows or can do something that the learner does not know or cannot do; it also presupposes a willingness on the part of the learner to be instructed and to learn. These presuppositions are implicit in what we mean by the word authority.

We all had a lot to learn from him. Dr. Brown was awarded four degrees, including his Ph.D., from Harvard and pursued postdoctoral studies at Marburg and the University of Vienna. He was also a licensed minister in the Congregational Church as well as the Evangelical-Reformed Church in Switzerland. He taught at Trinity for 17 years, then was appointed the John R. Richardson Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary, a position he held until his death. He also served on the masthead of Christianity Today and edited the Howard Center’s Religion and Society Report.

Dr. Brown possessed encyclopedic theological knowledge, but his love for pure doctrine came because he was, at heart, an evangelical (as well as self-consciously Reformed and catholic). “Heresy not merely undermines one’s intellectual understanding of Christian doctrine,” he wrote in Heresies, “but threatens to sink the ark, and thus to make salvation impossible for everyone, not merely for the individual heretic.”

Theology, Dr. Brown insisted, “is, to a large extent, a reaction against heresy.” The Church proclaims Her truth, based on revelation, and men “take it out of context” or perceive it to be “inadequate or unsatisfying.” Thus, for him, heresy has a “positive side,” for it stimulates careful theological discussion and formulation. And that formulation, in turn, guards and preserves the “faith once delivered to the saints.”

The greatest example of this was the Council of Chalcedon (451), which simply and clearly defined orthodox Christology (Our Lord possesses two Natures, human and divine, united in one Person “inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably”) and excluded the heresies of Nestorianism (two distinct natures and persons) and monophysitism (one composite nature and person). Such quibbles! And yet, “Chalcedon inaugurated a millennium of comparative unity among Christians . . . ” That stability, that theological unity, breathed life into the Middle Ages, whose culture was humane and anything but sensate.

Beginning with his first book, The Protest of a Troubled Protestant, Dr. Brown encouraged dialogue between Catholics and Protestants, not as a squishy ecumenist, but as a last-ditch effort to stave off the darkness that is enveloping Christendom, an attempt at stimulating the same debate that produces sound formulation and leads to true Christian unity—and civilization. He sided with the Reformation, in part, because he thought the late-medieval synthesis was disordered—an emphasis on the wrong tradition. (He also thought Luther’s doctrine of the Real Presence amounted to monophysitism.)

But it was his love of sound doctrine that made him a respected colleague to so many Catholics and a guide to so many more troubled Protestants. That love overflowed in action, causing him to fight abortion tooth and nail by founding the Christian Action Council (Care Net) with Dr. C. Everett Koop. It also produced in him the humility, loyalty, and generosity that, combined with his knowledge, gave him the authority of a mentor.

Rest in peace, Herr Doktor.

Aaron D. Wolf is Chronicles' associate editor.

This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Counting People and People Who Count
by Thomas Fleming

Domesticated humans.

VIEWS

Sex, Propaganda, and Higher Education
by Tom Landess

Inside the opinion mill.

The Faces of Men
by Jack Trotter

Education and masculinity.

Virtual Education Reality
by William Barr

Facilitating democracy.

NEWS

Italy's Push for Euthanasia
by Alberto Carosa

An end to "pointless suffering."

REVIEWS

The Redeemed Imagination
by Jack Trotter

Gerald J. Russello: The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk

plus

Catharine Savage Brosman on Diane Sutterfield's The Thirteenth Tale

Andrei Navrozov on Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles

Michael J. Ard on Humberto Fontova's Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Oxford: Left Implosion
by Jason Jewell

Letter From the Upper Midwest: Diversity Through Sport
by Sean Scallon

Letter From Saudi Arabia: The Year of Teaching Dangerously
by Harry Nicolaides

VITAL SIGNS

THE COURTS: The Coming Slap in the Face
by Kenneth Zaretzke

CONSERVATISM: Whispers From Kirk
by Gerald J. Russello

COLUMNS

THE BARE BODKIN
by Joseph Sobran

HERESIES
by Aaron D. Wolf

Harold O.J. Brown, R.I.P

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
Sicko
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

AMERICAN PROSCENIUM

CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY

The Retreat by Andrew Huntley
On Looking at a Green Man Carving by Tina Brown-Warren

ON THE COVER

Cover and inside illustrations by Melanie Anderson.