Submitted by Alfred J. Lemire, Oct 17, 2007 20:24

Keith Gessen and perhaps Kate Taylor have the advantage of this writer . What were the "canonical books" in the pamphlet by Prof. Jeffrey Hart that Keith Gessen saw while a student at Harvard? One gets not even one book title here. Ms. Taylor lists a few of the books in the "liberal" version of Mr. Hart's pamphlet, but one suspects her named selections do not properly indicate the nature of the new n+1 list. Ms. Taylor writes that Mr. Gessen was "woefully susceptible" in 1993 to "absolutist systems." What does she and perhaps he mean by "absolutist"? Which systems? She writes that he "took Mr. Hart's warning" about the books "liberal ideologues" (Hart's description) would assign to be read "seriously. But "not so seriously as to actually read the books on his list, but enough to view much of what was assigned to him in college as just so much fashionable theory." Did Mr. Hart describe the books the Harvard professors would assign "fashionable theory," or is that how Mr. Gessen interpreted the pamphlet, or is that Ms. Taylor's notion? Mr. Gessen, according to Ms. Taylor, did not regard the warning, or advice, seriously enough to read the "canonical" books Mr. Hart listed in his pamphlet. One can then conclude that he was ignorant of the books and their intellectual freight and merit then and likely is ignorant now. Ms. Taylor writes that Mr. Gessen has "long since shed his conservatism." Hunh? Based on what Ms. Taylor has written, Mr. Gessen's "conservatism," if it existed at all, was unthought, unfelt, and wholly superficial, an accident of his life, as easy to shed as a borrowed T-shirt. If he were any kind of conservative AND a college student, he'd have felt sufficient curiosity, at the least, to read some of the books Mr. Hart listed. But he allegedly ignored the list, which, one imagines, reflects at least one person's understanding of conservatism and the tensions most conservatives feel between, to be coarse about the distinctions, Reason and Athens and Faith and Jerusalem. One of the key claims of Benedict XVI is that Christianity joins both Faith and Reason, Athens and Jerusalem, and he sees much of contemporary society abandoning both elements. It is not a bad idea to list some works that have importance: one cannot understand one aspect of the 20th century without having read "Mein Kampf" and the works of Eric Hobsbawm, Michel Foucault, and likely Nancy Chodorow help one to understand the thinking of many people today. But Thomas Frank? The man's writing of Kansas smells of his fanaticism and ignorance: Mr. Frank's writing leaves readers knowing less than they knew before they read his work, other than that he tells people nothing that is true about Kansas. What has happened to liberalism? Too often, as in the Rush Limbaugh "phony soldiers" matter, one finds liberals ignoring what people say or do, relying instead on what they think others say or do. (Mr. Limbaugh did not say about Iraq war critics what an intern at Media Matters claimed and others accepted uncritically.) Too often, one finds liberals supposedly comfortable in relativism asserting, with absolute ferocity, their absolute conviction that they are absolutely correct and others absolutely wrong, the others being, invariably, "absolutists." Odd.

Note: Comments are screened, and in some cases edited, before posting. We reserve the right to reject anything we find objectionable.