10 Rules for Prosperity

The Big Bang Theory’s Mommy Issues

Hugh Hefner’s World

Fall 2014

Why Oprah (and you) Should READ DANTE’s

INFERNO

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Your Future. Your Liberty.

Your ISI.

The Intercollegiate Review is the flagship publication of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). ISI prepares students for a lifetime of leadership and provides the education necessary to discover, embrace, and advance the principles that make America free and prosperous. Join the ISI community and learn more about the benefits of your membership:

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Contents 24 NOTES FROM THE CONSERVATIVE UNDERGROUND Campus leaders report from the front lines

34 Arts & Manners

The Big Bang Theory: From Caricature to Complexity

26 STUDENT Voices 5 Lessons from a Faculty Mentor

Peter Atkinson on how a professor can change your life

No-Risk Dating Elisabeth Cervantes considers the costs of the hookup culture

To Change the World

2 PUBLISHER’S NOTE

12 Films That Defined America

3 CAMPUS CHAOS

Liberal Tyranny on Campus

40 The Progressive’s Dictionary

8 Feature Up from Hell

Rod Dreher plays Virgil as Dante speaks to millennials

12 Feature

10 Prerequisites for Prosperity

28 Office Hours

Harry C. Veryser’s blueprint for success

J. Budziszewski answers students’ questions about banned speech, religious conversion, and other campus controversies

16 Feature

Finding Your Place in a Rootless World Wilfred M. McClay on why you should take a second look at staying put

20 Feature

Nationalism: Back with a Vengeance Doug Bandow reveals the trend that’s horrifying elites intercollegiatereview.com

30 Freedom Hall William F. Buckley Jr.: conservative icon

32 God on the Quad Naomi Schaefer Riley explains how to avoid jumping off the “religious cliff” Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

Publisher’s Note

A Genuine Education pu b lish e r

Christopher Long

oo often, the college experience fails to prepare students to fill America’s leadership void. Students frequently tell us that their studies leave them without a strong foundation of knowledge, let alone wisdom, to make sense of an increasingly unraveling world. In this issue of the Intercollegiate Review, you will find four articles addressing some of the liberal studies that are essential to a genuine, well-rounded education: economics, the arts, political philosophy, and American culture. On page 8 Rod Dreher reveals the benefits that a close reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy can still deliver seven hundred years later, while on page 12 Harry Veryser outlines the requirements for restoring a healthy economy. You will also see, on page 16, Wilfred McClay’s exploration of the importance of place in the American experience and, on page 20, Doug Bandow’s piece on the return of violent nationalism. The men who crafted America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution were remarkable not only for the depth of their knowledge in particular subjects but also for the breadth of True liberal learning can their knowledge. They were, in both the truest sense, professionally and personally. Renaissance men. To become the type of leader our country desperately needs today requires cultivating a broad and refined understanding of the many subjects that come together to shape public life, just as our Founding Fathers did more than two hundred years ago. At ISI we strive to deliver precisely this sort of interdisciplinary educational experience that may be lacking on your college campus. As you read the Intercollegiate Review, I hope that you will consider taking your education to a new level in order to come to a better understanding of how true liberal learning can enrich your life both professionally and personally. By doing so, you will equip yourself to lead in whatever profession and avocations you choose. I also hope that as you read this issue you will be inspired to become more involved with ISI. There are many conferences, lectures, and other ways to become engaged throughout the year, and my teammates and I would be thrilled to plug you into our educational and leadership development programs.

enrich your life

Cheers,

Christopher Long President, ISI

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

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John Aroutiounian, Yale University Peter Atkinson, Ave Maria University Meg Campbell, Anderson University Jacob Culberson, Vanderbilt University Amelia Evrigenis, Claremont McKenna College Luke Foster, Columbia University Johnathan Geiger, University of Minnesota–Morris Thomas Zach Horton, Princeton University Samuel Klee, Aquinas College David Ortiz, UNC at Chapel Hill Chase Padusniak, College of the Holy Cross Elizabeth Ridgeway, University of Georgia Amelia Sims, Emory University Arrianne Talma, University of Virginia Isaac Woodward, Rutgers University Nicholas A. Zarra, University of Pennsylvania

The I ntercollegiate R eview (ISSN #0020-5249) is published two times during the academic year by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., 3901 Centerville Road, Wilmington, DE 19807-1938. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc. © 2014. All rights reserved. All student members on the ISI mailing list receive the I ntercollegiate R eview free of charge during the academic year. Nonmembers may subscribe to the magazine at $15/two issues or $28/four issues. Please visit www.intercollegiatereview.com to subscribe or for further information. Direct all correspondence to the above address. Address changes may be sent to update@isi.org. Direct advertising inquiries to Publishing Management Associates Inc., 129 Phelps Avenue, Suite 312, Rockford, IL 61108-2447, 815-398-8569, pma-inc.net. Opinions expressed in the magazine do not necessarily represent the views of ISI or the editors. The responsibility for opinions and accuracy of facts in articles rests solely with the individual authors. For more information on ISI, visit www.isi.org.

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Liberal

Tyranny on College Campuses

A Report from the Field by David Ortiz

iberals on campus respect a variety of viewpoints—as long as they’re not conservative views. As a student on a liberal campus, I’ve had to deal with the chilling effect that radical students and a hostile administration can have on open discourse. So I pay close attention to the plight of my fellow students at colleges across the country. In recent months liberals and their enablers from Rutgers to Stanford have demonstrated that they are tolerant only of viewpoints they deem acceptable—which is to say, their own. Here are five of the most egregious examples of liberal intolerance.

Stanford University: “A Tax on Free Speech” In late February, the Stanford Anscombe Society, a university-recognized student group dedicated to defending a traditional understanding of marriage, appealed to the Graduate Student Council for funds toward a conference. The Anscombe Society reported that the conference would feature “nationally renowned speakers such as Ryan T. Anderson, Sherif Girgis, Professor Robert Oscar Lopez, and Professor J. Budziszewski” to “educate attendees on the public policy issues” driving the marriage debate. The student council agreed to contribute $600. Simple intercollegiatereview.com

enough—until the campus LGBTQ community launched protests against the Anscombe Society’s “hate speech.” Within a week, the student council revoked the funding. Worse, the university suddenly required this officially recognized club to pay a $5,600 “security fee”—you know, to protect the student body against those violent professors and scholars. The Anscombe Society responded in writing to Provost John W. Etchemendy, calling the onerous fee “a tax on free speech.” The story went national—and in the face of harsh public criticism, the administration relented. Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

The director of student activities and leadership e-mailed to say that the university had “found more funds” to pay for conference security. The conference proceeded in early April without incident. This case ended up being a v ictory for intellectual freedom against liberal intolerance— but only because national publications and organizations

shone a light on Stanford’s kowtowing to radical protesters.

Azusa Pacific University: Don’t Hurt Anyone’s Feelings! There was no such happy ending at Azusa Pacific University. For months the well-known scholar Charles Murray had been scheduled to speak at Azusa Pacific about his new book, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead. But at the last minute, university president Jon Wallace rescinded the invitation, citing fears that Murray’s presence would hurt “our faculty and students of color.” Despite holding degrees from Harvard and MIT and having established himself as one of America’s most influential public intellectuals, Murray is still haunted in liberal circles by the controversy surrounding his 1994 book The Bell Curve, which analyzed the role of IQ in shaping class structure in America. Azusa Pacific apparently doesn’t think too highly of its students. Instead of welcoming conversation with a leading scholar and allowing students to make up their own minds, the administration simply excluded views that could possibly hurt some people’s feelings.

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So much for intellectual diversity. As Murray put it in an open letter to the university’s students, “Azusa Pacific’s administration wants to protect you from earnest and nerdy old guys who have opinions that some of your faculty do not share. Ask if this is why you’re getting a college education.”

University of Colorado Boulder: Never Mind about Intellectual Diversity Perhaps not surprisingly, Steven Hayward came under fire from Boulder students and faculty within months of becoming the university’s first visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy. The chairman of the Faculty Assembly, student government leaders, and the student newspaper all attacked Hayward for having the nerve to critique a report about a supposedly racist and sexist climate in Boulder’s philosophy department, and for challenging liberal gender ideology more broadly. The Faculty Assembly chair said Hayward’s comments bordered on “hate speech,” while the Colorado Daily concluded, “Bigotry is not diversity.” The irony here is that the university created the conservative scholar position specifically to generate greater intellectual diversity on campus. But Hayward was attacked as soon as he said something that challenged liberal orthodoxy. Sometimes it seems the only diversity liberalism can handle is disagreement among queer-theory Marxists over the proper amount of foam in a Starbucks cappuccino.

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Brandeis University: Commencement Crusading Brandeis University invited prominent women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be its 2014 commencement speaker. But in the spring the university rescinded its invitation. Her offense? Daring to critique radical Islam for its history of violence and bigotry against women. Never mind that Hirsi Ali has worked tirelessly on behalf of women’s rights in Muslim countries, for which Time magazine named her one of the world’s hundred most influential people in 2005; or that she was forced to flee the Netherlands after Muslim fundamentalists murdered Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a film that highlighted radical Islamic violence toward women; or that the murderers pinned a death threat against Hirsi Ali on Van Gogh’s corpse; or that she has lived under a fatwa ever since. None of that mattered to the Brandeis student leaders and more than seventy-five professors who signed the petition that led the administration to withdraw Hirsi Ali’s invitation. “Islamophobia” was a simple enough reason to prevent the Brandeis community from hearing from an accomplished figure with a fascinating story and keen insights.

Rutgers University: The Triumph of the Left In an odd twist, black women have been two of the most prominent victims of recent liberal attacks on conservatives. While Brandeis was banning Hirsi Ali, Rutgers campus radicals were campaigning to block former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice from addressing graduates and receiving an honorary degree. The pressure campaign worked. After weeks of protests and character assassination—student protesters said that awarding her an honorary degree amounted to “encouraging and perpetuating a world that justifies torture and debases humanity”—Rice declined Rutgers’s invitation.

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When Rice stepped aside, a leader of the student protesters took to the Huffington Post to celebrate their success in “defying” the Rutgers administration and forcing the former secretary of state to “back down.” Citing successful protests against conservatives on other campuses— including the Brandeis campaign against Ayaan Hirsi Ali—the Rutgers student declared, “This is our generation of young people sending a clear and strong message that racism, bigotry, civil and human rights violations receive no honor from us.” When standing up to the forces of “racism” and “bigotry,” the Left won’t tolerate even a figure as impressive as Condoleezza Rice, who rose from segregation in Alabama to reach the highest levels of government and academia.

These examples only hint at the growing liberal intolerance on college campuses. The Hirsi Ali and Rice episodes were not isolated incidents: left-wing protesters at Haverford College and Smith College forced two other “controversial” conservative figures to withdraw as commencement speakers—former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau and International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, respectively. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg—hardly anyone’s idea of a conservative—rightly condemned these actions during his own commencement address at Harvard, saying, “In each case, liberals silenced a voice—and denied an honorary degree—to individuals they deemed politically objectionable. That is an outrage and we must not let it continue.” But it does continue. Practically every week we learn of new campus outrages. The pattern is clear: tolerance extends only as far as liberals permit. Opinions, actions, or thoughts that differ from the prevailing liberal orthodoxy are not merely wrong but even hateful and bigoted. And bigotry has no rights. David Ortiz, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes for the ISI Collegiate Network publication the Carolina Review.

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

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Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

up from Hell

Dante’s Lessons for Millennials By Rod Dreher

was late coming to Dante. Never read him in high school or college, and after my formal education ended with my bachelor’s degree, why on earth would I have bothered? As a professional journalist, I read voraciously, but a seven-hundred-year-old poem by a medieval Catholic was not high on my list. And then, a year ago, I stumbled into the Divine Comedy by accident. I was going through a deep personal crisis and couldn’t see any way out. One day, browsing in a bookstore, I pulled down a copy of Inferno, the first book of the Commedia trilogy, and began to read the first lines:

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in some dark woods, For I had wandered off from the straight path. (trans. Mark Musa)

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Well, yes, I thought, I know what that’s like. Like me, Dante (the character in the poem) was having a midlife crisis. I kept reading and didn’t stop until months later, when I slogged with Dante through Hell, climbed with him up the mountain of Purgatory, and blasted through the heavens to see God in Paradise. All made sense after that pilgrimage, and I found my way back to life. I was, in a physical and spiritual sense, healed. That’s the testimony of a fortyseven-year-old writer, late to wisdom. What if I had encountered Dante as a young man and taken the lessons the pilgrim learned on his journey to heart back then? Would I have had an easier time staying on the straight path? Perhaps. At least I would have been warned how to avoid the false trails.

Countercultural Icon Most readers of the Commedia never go past the Inferno, which is a serious mistake. It’s impossible to understand Dante’s teaching without Purgatorio and Paradiso, which tell the reader how Dante, enslaved by his passions in the thicket of despair, finds his way back to light and freedom. Nevertheless, Inferno is the book most relevant to young adults, most of whom will not have yet made the errors of passion that landed the middle-aged Dante in the dark wood. The pilgrim Dante must listen to the words of the damned with skepticism, for they are all liars—and, in fact, the chief victim of the lies they told themselves in life. “Be careful how you enter and whom you trust,” says Minòs, the judge of the underworld. “It is easy to get in, but don’t be fooled!” What’s more, the testimonies of the damned reveal precisely the nature of the deceptions to which they fell victim—and to which Dante himself, like all of us, is susceptible. All the damned dwell in eternal punishment because they let intercollegiatereview.com

their passions overrule their reason and were unrepentant. For Dante, all sin results from disordered desire: either loving the wrong things or loving the right things in the wrong way. This is countercultural, for we live in an individualistic, libertine, sensual culture in which satisfying desire is generally thought to be a primary good. For contemporary readers, especially young adults, Dante’s encounter with Francesca da Rimini, one of the first personages he meets in Hell, is deeply confounding. Francesca is doomed to spend eternity in the circle of the Lustful, inextricably bound in a tempest with her lover, Paolo, whose brother—Francesca’s husband—found them out and murdered them both. Francesca explains to Dante how she and Paolo fell into each other’s arms. How could she have controlled herself? she says.

Love, that excuses no one loved from loving, Seized me so strongly with delight in him That, as you see, he never leaves my side. Love led us straight to sudden death together.

Dante Alighieri (Agnolo Bronzino, c. 1530)

She ends by saying that reading romantic literature together caused them to fall hopelessly and uncontrollably in love—unto death, at the hands of her jealous husband. To modern ears, Francesca’s apologia sounds both tragic and beautiful. But the discerning reader will observe that she never takes responsibility for her actions. In her mind, her fate is all the fault of love—or rather, Love. We know, however, that it is really lust, and that her grandiose language in praise of romantic passion is all a gaudy rationalization. It’s a rationalization that is quite common in our own time, as everything in our popular culture tells us that desire is the same thing as love, and that love, so considered, is its own justification. For me as a writer, there is a more subtle lesson here, one I wish I had learned before writing so many column inches of cruel, clever journalism in my twenties. Dante faints at the end of his encounter with Francesca, apparently overcome by the shock of her suffering in eternity for what he would hardly have considered a sin at all. It’s not hard to suspect, though, that Dante’s shock came at the recognition that the love poetry she read on her road to perdition included some of his own verses. Francesca’s fate is not Dante’s fault, exactly, but that doesn’t mean he is not implicated. The lesson here is to think carefully about the things you say in public, because your words can have unintended consequences. This is not a warning to avoid ever saying anything critical or harsh. Sometimes, harsh criticism, even mockery, is necessary. But it is necessary far less than we think, and, in any case, one should never be deliberately cruel. In the age of social media, this is even more important to keep in mind. Words written or spoken in public can have terrible private consequences. Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF

We all live in a narcissistic, confessional culture in which speaking whatever is on your mind and in your heart is valorized as “honest” and “courageous”—just as calling lust love falsely ennobles it by dressing up egotism with fake moral grandeur.

What Disney Gets Wrong Believe in yourself. Many graduates hear some version of that advice in their commencement address. It’s as common as dirt and shapes virtually the entire Disney film catalogue. The pilgrim Dante hears it as well, deep in the heart of Hell, from his beloved teacher and mentor Brunetto Latini, thrilled to see his pupil passing through. Brunetto suffers in the circle of the Sodomites, though Dante never mentions his old master’s sexual activity. Theirs is a tender meeting, with Brunetto full of praise for Dante’s work. “Follow your constellation,” the old man says, “and you cannot fail to reach your port of glory.” It is terrific flattery, and it comes from a Florentine who was greatly admired in his day as a writer, scholar, and civic leader. Addressing Brunetto with great respect and 10

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affection, Dante says, “You taught me how man makes himself eternal.” It’s enough to make the reader forget that Brunetto is damned. If Dante isn’t talking about sexual immorality, why is Brunetto in Hell? It becomes clearer later in Purgatorio, when Dante meets other Italian artists and learns that art pursued for the sake of personal glory, as distinct from the service of God or some other high cause, is in vain. Brunetto is a vain man, a writer who thought the way to pursue immortality was to serve his own cause in his work— and a spiritually blind teacher who sees Dante’s fame as bringing glory to himself. How much happier would young people be if they began their careers

Tales of Selfish Ulysses Following one’s own constellation can only get one lost—or worse. This is the lesson Dante learns in Canto XXVI of the Inferno, when he meets Ulysses, the great voyager, suffering in the circle of the False Counselors— that is, those who used their words to mislead others intentionally. In the version of the Ulysses myth that informs Dante, the silvertongued Greek cast aside his obligations to his family back home and to his faithful crew, urging them to keep rowing into forbidden waters, in search of discovery. “You are Greeks!” Ulysses exhorts them. “You were not born to live like mindless brutes but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge.” Who among us would disagree with that noble sentiment? Certainly not Ulysses’s crew, whose hearts blazed with desire to follow their courageous captain. Except it was a lie. Ulysses rationalized wanting to indulge his own boundless curiosity by sailing in

Dante’s egotists suffering in Hell would be admired, even heroic figures in twenty-first-century America. thinking not of the fame, the fortune, and the glory they will receive from professional accomplishment but rather of the good they can do for others and, if they are religious, the glory they can bring to God through their service? Dante Alighieri’s early verse was good, but he would today be as forgotten as Brunetto Latini if he had not written the Commedia, which he composed for transcendent ends. Few if any of us will accomplish a feat like that, but what good we may do in this world, and what glory may remain after we leave it, will come only if we serve something greater than ourselves.

uncharted waters, and he led himself and his men to their deaths. Two lessons here stand out for the modern reader. First, selfishness that knows no limits, and that tells itself it is pursuing a worthy goal, can have terrible consequences that affect more than just the individual. Ulysses didn’t think about what he owed the old and worn-out crew that served him so loyally in war. Nor did he think about his own wife and son waiting for him at home on Ithaca. All he cared for was his “burning wish to know the world and have experiences of all man’s vices, of all human worth.” intercollegiatereview.com

Second, excellence and knowledge are fine things, but they do not justify themselves. The pursuit of excellence and knowledge must be bounded by moral and communal obligations that rein in the ego and hamstring hubris. Today we live in an age when science often refuses limits, claiming the pursuit of knowledge as a holy crusade. The world praises as daring and creative the transgression of nearly all boundaries—in art, in media, in social forms, and so forth—inspiring those who wish to pursue this debased form of excellence to be even more transgressive. All these damned souls—Francesca, Brunetto, and Ulysses—suffer hellfire because they worshipped themselves and their own passions. In Dante, egotism is the root of all evil. Yet this intercollegiatereview.com

unholy trio would be admired, even heroic figures in twenty-first-century America for their bold passion and fearless individualism. Love as you will, whatever the consequences, says Francesca. Follow your bliss and navigate by your own stars, says Brunetto. Honor that burning curiosity in your breast and pursue knowledge and excellence no matter what, says Ulysses. For most of my twenties, I more or less believed these things, because that’s how our culture catechizes us. But then, Dante is rarely on the syllabus. Had I read the Divine Comedy as a younger man and taken its lessons to heart, I would still have been eager to pursue romantic love, achieve professional success as a writer, and explore and know the world—but I would

have grasped that these goals can be understood as good only if they are subordinated to right reason, to virtue, and, ultimately, to the will of God. Dante shows us that you can just as easily go to Hell by loving good things in the wrong way as you can by loving the wrong things. It’s a subtle lesson, and a difficult lesson, and a lesson that is no less difficult to learn in the twenty-first century than it was in the fourteenth. But it’s still necessary to learn. Happy is the man who embraces this wisdom at any point in his life, but happier is the man who does so in his youth.

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at the American Conservative. He is currently writing a book titled How Dante Can Save Your Life. Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

10 Prerequisites for

Prosperity

By Harry C. Veryser

ne of the basic tenets of free-market economics is that markets allocate resources more efficiently than government bureaucrats ever could. The countless businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and consumers making eco-

nomic decisions every day draw on a vastly greater range of knowledge, skill, and experience than a relative few government planners could possess. Just as important, top-down management runs counter to the natural organization of society, whose traditions, customs, laws, goods, technologies, markets, and other components evolved over many generations, not from any plan. 12

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The significance of this “spontaneous order” is easy to miss. But defenders of free enterprise must recognize that markets do not stand independent of the broader culture; they are inextricably linked to all the other organizations, associations, and political and legal systems that develop organically over time. In fact, truly free markets can develop only when crucial preconditions are met. Let’s look at some of the most important (and often overlooked) prerequisites for a free, prosperous, and harmonious society.

1. Private Property

Private property rights are a corner stone of a stable and prosperous society. Protections against government seizure of property date back at least as far as the Magna Carta in 1215. Sadly, however, governments in some countries still “nationalize” businesses or even entire industries, taking them out of owners’ hands. Why are property rights so important? For starters, securing these rights eliminates unnecessary uncertainty about the future, allowing people to make reasonable estimations of risk. Moreover, as Thomas Aquinas wrote back in the thirteenth century, “every man is more careful to procure what is for himself alone than that which is common to many or all: since each one would shirk the labor and leave to another that which concerns the community, as happens where there is a great number of servants.” In other words, that which belongs to everyone really belongs to no one. No one will take care of it because no one has an incentive to take care of it. People can reasonably expect to enjoy the rewards of their labor only when property rights are secure. Property rights help establish social order as well. Aristotle made this point more than two millennia ago, arguing that “when every one has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, intercollegiatereview.com

and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business.” Finally, as the Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek pointed out, “The recognition of property is clearly the first step in the delimitation of the private sphere which protects us against coercion; and it has long been recognized that ‘a people averse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom.’ ” In short, without private property, there is no liberty.

The ability to save money is crucial—and yet young people today are racking up debt at historic levels. Sound 2. ACurrency

Virtually all economists agree that inflation—the devaluation of the

monetary unit—is a bad idea. It cuts into savings and distorts production, and in extreme cases (such as in Germany following World War I) it leads to chaos and poverty. Free-market economists have proposed different methods to stabilize the currency, with a growing chorus calling for a return to the gold standard. Whatever the means to achieve it, a sound currency will, first of all, maintain its purchasing power, neither inflating nor deflating. When the currency is inflated, the value of savings drops, which constitutes an unfair tax on savers. With deflation, prices and wages fall—but the debt contracted before the deflation does not. A sound currency will also stabilize interest rates. At bottom, interest rates account for the fact that people tend to value immediate satisfactions over satisfactions put off into the future. That is, they provide an incentive to save or invest money when that money could be used to purchase something today. Under a sound currency, the interest rate reflects nothing more than this “time preference,” plus the premium paid to account for the risk of default. But interest rates creep higher when market participants worry that manipulations of the currency by the central bank (the U.S. Federal Reserve) will lead to inflation, hurting the value of their principal.

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meaning that more supplies and labor are applied toward that good. Conversely, a fall in prices means that a particular item is abundant and there is no need to produce more. Central planning interferes with this vital pricing process. Balancing the needs of suppliers and demanders becomes more difficult; future planning breaks down; risk increases. This is a major reason why communism failed. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan explained, “Without the help of a market pricing mechanism, Soviet economic planning had no effective feedback to guide it.”

The Rule of Law

The rule of law encompasses two categories. First, governments must provide an arena of public safety. One only has to look at areas where clerks serve the public through bulletproof glass to understand that violence acts as a restraint on investment and raises the costs of shopping and insurance. It is essential to create an environment where life, liberty, and property are secure against coercion, governmental or otherwise. Second, government regulation of business and its settling of disputes must be predictable. An economy can never function smoothly if participants in the market cannot anticipate what actions the government will take—if risk cannot be calculated. As Hayek pointed out, there must be some generally enforced rules of operation to ensure future planning.

The Sacredness of Contracts

A contract is a hallmark of a free society, because it is an agreement between two equal parties. In earlier times, the bond between men could be called hegemonic—that is, one party was superior to the other and set the terms of the deal for both parties. This implies a society based on rank, serfdom, or even slavery. Contracts allow productivity to flourish because they provide the

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ability to exchange things today for the promises of things to be done or given in the future. Most productivity takes place over time, and by stipulating that resources will be available at a later time, contracts allow individuals and businesses to plan. “Deferred exchanges,” the economist Harry Scherman wrote, “take place only because of the virtual certainty that they will be completed.” Once the concept of contracts is broken, no one is sure what will happen in the future, and risk increases dramatically. To proceed with the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, courts allowed contracts and bonds to be superseded. This may have solved a temporary problem for labor, but investors then questioned the safety of their commitment, especially in an industry that requires huge amounts of capital.

Free 5. The Movement of Prices

6. Entrepreneurship

Eli Whitney and his cotton gin, Thomas Edison and the lightbulb, Charles Goodyear and the process of vulcanizing rubber—these and countless other inventors and innovators have dramatically reshaped American life. Their impact illustrates the indispensable role of the entrepreneur in a vibrant economy and society. Entrepreneurs enhance standards of living by organizing resources to make new goods and services available to the market. The twentieth-century economist Ludwig von Mises (F. A. Hayek’s mentor) called them “the driving force of the market process.”

7. Family Structure

Declining fertility rates and the disintegration of families are not

Prices freely set in the market play a vital function by “accomplishing priorities, allocations, and rationing,” in the words of the economist Benjamin Anderson. As prices for a particular good rise, more suppliers appear on the scene to overcome scarcity, intercollegiatereview.com

just “social issues”; they have serious economic consequences. The financial health of socialwelfare programs relies on a large number of people paying in and a small number collecting. Today, however, state and city governments face growing financial crises largely because the declining number of people paying in is unable to sustain generous retirement and medical programs. The federal government confronts similar problems with Social Security and Medicare. The collapse of the family has led to other economic problems. As families have collapsed, more people arrive in the workforce without personal stability, responsibility, diligent work habits, a strong sense of how to deal with people, and other basic values the child first learns from the family—values needed to succeed in society and the economy.

and Capital 8. Savings Formation

The ability to save money is crucial in two ways: it produces capital, which is essential to investment and innovation, and it provides economic security to the saver. Unfortunately, mainstream economics disparages savings, favoring consumption (spending) as the key driver of the economy. Young people often don’t learn about the importance of savings. When I participated in a seminar on finance for high school students, my fellow panelists, who were bankers, stressed that students should achieve a high credit rating. They made no mention of savings. Today the average student-debt load of college graduates is the highest in history—nearly $30,000. These debts will take years, even decades, to pay, which will make it much more difficult for young people to form families, buy homes, and so on.

9. Leisure

One of the most overlooked prerequisites for a prosperous, intercollegiatereview.com

well-functioning society is leisure. The vast majority of Americans today scarcely know what the term means and why it is essential to the development of any healthy economy. Leisure is not simply time away from work. It involves moving beyond the workaday world to the world of contemplation. Leisure is not the same as entertainment or diversion. It is an activity—an activity of the mind and soul. Leisure is in many ways akin to play, especially the kind of children’s play that lacks any specific plan, rule, or timeline. Leisure offers the entrepreneur and the manager the opportunity to think about new and better products, services, and ways of doing business, especially in light of collected information and knowledge. The social commentator Eric Hoffer wrote of leisure in The Ordeal of Change: “Archimedes’ bathtub and Newton’s apple suggest that momentous trains of thought may have their inception in idle musing. The original insight is most likely to come when elements stored in different compartments of the mind drift into the open, jostle one another, and now and then coalesce to form new combinations.”

10. Decentralization

The smallest, least centralized units of society are best equipped to handle most of the work society does. Local institutions understand their communities and the people in them in a way that large, far-removed governments and institutions simply cannot. As Hayek put it, “We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used.” In crafting the Bill of Rights, the Founders tried to ensure decentralization. The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are

reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Unfortunately, today’s federal government all too often ignores this stricture, usurping what local governments and/or individuals, families, and the private economy could and should do.

market economy represents the best means of bringing prosperity to the many. But it is crucial to understand the essential cultural, political, and legal preconditions that allow an economy— and a society—to flourish. For a tree to grow to its full height, it needs to be nurtured in a certain environment—one with sunlight, water, mineral-rich soil, room to spread its roots, and so forth. Society functions much the same way: when crucial preconditions are not met, it will not grow to its potential. Harry C. Veryser teaches economics at the University of Detroit Mercy and is the author of It Didn’t Have to Be This Way: Why Boom and Bust Is Unnecessary— and How the Austrian School of Economics Breaks the Cycle (ISI Books), from which this essay was adapted. Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

Finding Your Place in a Rootless World By Wilfred M. McClay

hen I bring up the subject of “place” to fellow scholars and administrators, I often encounter blank stares and gentle skepticism. Why, I’m asked, would people want to talk about . . . place? Why would anyone want to write, or read, or hear about such an abstract, ineffable, ethereal concept? 16

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

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But when I talk to students about place, the response is instantly and energetically favorable. They get it at once. They understand what is at stake, because they feel it in their bones. Living in a mobile, rootless, digitized world, one awash in freedom and choice but unable to satisfy a deeper longing for the defining and nourishing bonds of an authentic rooted community, has taught them that a sense of place matters— especially when you don’t have it, never have had it, and don’t have a clear idea of where to look for it. Much of this change has occurred in the blinking of an eye, historically speaking. Little more than a century ago, the lives of most Americans were confined within a narrow local radius, in what historian Robert Wiebe called “island communities.” The ability of these island communities, and the individuals who comprised them, to communicate with the outside world was limited by the vast distances that separated them and the immense time it took to traverse those distances. Far from being a puzzle or an enigma, one’s place in the world was a given for most men and women. With rare exceptions, the person that one became and the life that one lived were inextricably linked to the geographical location where one was born and raised. Such factors were understood as the structural mold of one’s worldly existence, nearly as hard and fast as biological makeup. But a cascading array of technological and social innovations has, with astonishing speed, rendered those barriers obsolete. We inhabit an ever-shrinking and ever-moreinterconnected world—a world in which it is theoretically possible for every living person to go anywhere that he or she wants to go and to

be made literally, or at least virtually, present to any other person, in ways that would have been barely conceivable thirty years ago and that promise to become ever more vivid and transformative in the future. There is much to celebrate in these developments. They give crucial support to one of the most fundamental, and universally appealing, of all American ideas: the idea of human freedom. We Americans embrace freedom because we believe fervently in the breadth of human possibility and share a deep conviction that no one’s horizons in life should be dictated by the conditions of his or her birth.

full flourishing as human beings as it was in the times when we had far fewer choices. Many of us sense that the national-scale or global-scale interconnectedness of things may be coming at too high a price. Instead of a world of variety and spontaneity, we occupy something standardized, artificial, rootless, pastless, and bland—a world of interchangeable airport terminals and franchise hotels and restaurants. Moreover, the pattern of ceaseless movement forms a powerful obstacle to a life of active self-government and responsible civic engagement, the kind of life that thinkers since the time of Aristotle have regarded as the highest expression of full human flourishing. The recovery of “place” in our personal and public lives would therefore appear to be of central importance. That’s especially true if we think of the word place as referring not only to a geographical spot but also to a defined niche in the social order: one’s “place” in the world. When we say that we have “found our place,” we mean that we have achieved a stable and mature personal identity within a coherent social order, so that we can answer the questions “Who are you? Where did you come from? Where is your home? Where do you fit in the order of things?” Hence, it is not surprising that a disruption or weakening in our experience of geographical place will be reflected in similar disruptions in our sense of personal identity. This isn’t just an aesthetic question; it’s an existential one. But we shouldn’t make a fetish out of place either. Young people who are just beginning their adult life need to have room to find their own way. That’s an important part of being an American, the freedom to follow your own dreams. Liberal education

Recovering our sense of place is crucial in our mobile, rootless, digitized worlD.

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But it is obvious that something is now seriously out of balance in the way we live. The technological wizardry and individual empowerment have unsettled all facets of life and given rise to profound feelings of disquiet and insecurity in many Americans, especially the young, who have never known anything different. Accompanying this disquiet is a gnawing sense that something important in our fundamental human nature is being lost in this headlong rush, and that this “something” remains just as vital to our

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

is education for liberty, and a crucial part of that liberty entails being free to look at the world around you with fresh eyes and see (and seize) possibilities beyond the narrow confines of the world you were born into.

Beware “Citizens of the World” So what are spirited, conservativeminded American college students to do with all this talk about the importance of place? In making plans for after graduation, should you eschew a job opportunity in a new city, or a faraway law school or medical school or graduate school, or a season of travel and experimentation, in favor of moving back to your hometown and embracing an identity rooted in the world into which you were born? Will you betray the ideal of a place-centered life if you pursue personal ambitions that take you away from your roots? My answer would be no. Thinking of moving as a betrayal of the concept of “place” is, in fact, a good example of a danger to which many thoughtful young people are sometimes prone: the danger of being taken in by abstractions and granting them a kind of binding ideological power. But there is no inconsistency here.

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

The thing that needs to be affirmed is attachment not to the abstraction of “place” but to the integrity and value of particular places, to each of the places in which one finds oneself in the course of one’s life—in both senses of the word finding, first as an accident and then as a discovery. We should not be afraid to move when life’s circumstances indicate the need for it. Indeed, the example of the biblical Abraham suggests a rich and long-standing tradition in the West wherein faithful people are willing to uproot themselves and move elsewhere in obedience to a sense of calling. It is also a great American tradition. But that tradition will take on a different aspect in a society in which all is fluid and nothing is stable, in which the concrete sense of place has been lost, in which the movement from X to Y involves exchanging one form of empty placelessness for another, a trade of one abstraction for another, with the principles of utility and ease of exit being the only ones that matter. When I bought my first house, the advice I got from every quarter was “buy with resale in mind.” This struck me then, and now, as very sound and yet very dangerous advice—dangerous not to the wallet but to the soul. People in their twenties should be trying out life’s possibilities and trying to find the work and life for which they were made. That is the right time for it. But the point of a journey is to arrive at some place. We are not “citizens of the world,” a vacuous term whose grandiosity conceals its lack of any real content. Instead, if we are to be citizens at all, we must be citizens of this place, of our particular town and neighborhood and state and nation. What I advocate is a freshly conceived balance, in our own lives and in the larger life of our society, between rootedness and possibility, and the recognition that we cannot long sustain the one without the complementary energy of the other. This is a balance each of us has to find

in his or her own way, but the general outlines are not hard to discern. It means that as you move ahead with your life, you should try wholeheartedly to embrace the spirit of the places where you find yourself. Do this for even the humblest places, and for even the most transient periods of your life. Be fully present to them, in body and spirit. Make yourself a part of them. Turn off your phones and computers, turn off your anxieties and vanities, set them aside, walk outside, open your eyes, and look around. Although many American college students now choose to study abroad, few get much out of the experience. They never leave the American bubble, preferring to run around in gaggles and groups, rarely venturing out in a deep, quiet, and attentive way into the foreign culture. They might as well have spent a semester at Disney World. You face a similar risk after college even if your ventures do not take you to a foreign country. If you fail to ground yourself in the community around you, you will miss out on that place’s unique particularities. So take it all in, every aspect of your places. Learn everything you can about their architecture, street names, history, local politics, ethnic and cultural peculiarities, flora, fauna, and so on. Don’t treat the places you pass through as if they were disposable containers or machines for living in, and as if you were merely a tourist passing through. Treat them respectfully, as you would handle someone else’s heirloom, and they will reward you in turn. Learn to be resident in them, fully and consciously. In doing so you will be forming a habit, one that, if it spreads and is shared, can not only transform and uplift your own life but also ennoble the world.

Wilfred M. McClay is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma and the coeditor (with Ted McAllister) of Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America.

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Intercollegiate Review 路 Fall 2014

Nationalism: Back with a

Vengeance

B y D o u g B andow

e are supposed to be living in the postmodern era, freed from the traditional petty concerns of national interest and, even worse, national-

ism. A new era of peaceful globalism was supposed to have dawned. Then came Turkey’s fusion of Islam and nationalism under its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan; Sri Lankan leader Mahinda Rajapaksa’s use of militant Buddhist nationalism to defeat the Tamil insurgency and construct an authoritarian state; China’s increasingly assertive territorial demands in the South China Sea; the election and reelection of Hungary’s conservative nationalist Viktor Orbán; Moscow’s seizure of Crimea in the name of ethnic Russians; India’s election of Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi; the Scottish independence movement; and more. Far from being dead, nationalism is back with a vengeance. 20 Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

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The Persistence of Nationalism Historical fashion varies over time. Early peoples organized themselves by gathering with those who looked alike and talked and acted similarly. But multiethnic empires also emerged as the strong dominated, even subjugated, the weak. Then, a century ago, the most important European multiethnic empires—Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian—collapsed. That process unexpectedly led to horrors beyond imagination, as the resulting Saisonstaaten, or “states for a season,” as some Germans called the new countries, were absorbed by their rapacious and more powerful neighbors. A similar collapse began in 1989 as the Soviet Empire dissolved. Western commentators were quick to proclaim the triumph of liberal democracy; Francis Fukuyama famously suggested that we had reached the “end of history,” with liberal democracy representing the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.” Of course, the move from totalitarian communism to democratic capitalism did not progress so smoothly. Although most in the West do not share Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s view that the fall of Soviet communism was a geopolitical catastrophe, the process was painful, difficult, and messy for the peoples involved. The communist collapse and its aftermath raised a fundamental question: how best are polities ordered? The overwhelming response—or at least the answer that politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, journalists, academics, and other elites pushed hardest—was that in a “postnational,” globalized world, internationalist and multinational systems were the answer. Indeed, the United Nations was offered as the answer to humanity’s problems. Never mind that the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, had failed to deliver on

its promise to bring international peace and harmony in the wake of World War I. Never mind, too, the inherent limitations of any organization made up of self-seeking and often authoritarian governments. European leaders responded to the breakup of the Eastern bloc by expanding an international organization of their own: the European Union (EU). An idea that had been discussed since the end of World

the Sea Treaty, Congress balked out of concern for national sovereignty. Meanwhile, European peoples grew less accepting of the EU and its grand ambitions. In 2005 French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed European constitution. In response, the Eurocratic elite reissued the constitution as a treaty, which did not require popular approval. Only Ireland put the document to a vote. The Irish voted no, to the outrage of Eurocrats across the continent. They debated whether to sideline Dublin as a secondclass EU member or make the Irish vote again until they got it right. The EU leadership chose the second course, and Ireland then ratified the treaty. Although the Eurocrats triumphed with that strong-arm measure, they have not been able to stamp out opposing views. On the contrary, the economic crisis that erupted in 2008 has only strengthened popular dissent and nationalist sentiment. When several countries turned to the EU for bailouts, Europhiles pressed for even more centralized fiscal and political power: giving Brussels control over national budgets and continental borrowing through Eurobonds. Nations requiring bailouts were forced to accept humiliating and painful economic reforms, essentially transferring control of economic policy to a European “troika.” In Greece, one of the countries bailed out, the anti-EU Left achieved substantial electoral gains, becoming the main political opposition, while the Golden Dawn gave a hard rightwing edge to antigovernment protests. In France, Marine Le Pen moved the nationalist-populist National Front to the center of the country’s politics. Similar currents reached even the stolidly bourgeois Germans, with the government resisting proposals to turn the country’s debt rating over to its profligate neighbors, the constitutional court limiting power

Federalism—expanding local autonomy and reducing central control— seems the best means of resolving intractable territorial disputes.

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War II, this political and economic union became a reality in 1993. It suppressed traditional national differences: it established an unelected executive for the entire union and gave a European Parliament control of the budget, but left the new entity without a military, the normal signature of a sovereign state. Soon enough the EU installed a unified currency, the euro, on the assumption that it would force additional monetary and fiscal cooperation, as well as further political consolidation. Despite these victories for internationalists, concern for national sovereignty did not disappear. In fact, opposition to transnational organizations grew. Although American administrations routinely attempted to use the UN to their own advantage—winning Security Council approval for military operations and economic sanctions, for instance— Washington resolutely resisted unfavorable UN decisions. American administrations also refused to fund UN operations with which they disagreed. Even when successive administrations pressed for acceptance of UN initiatives, such as the Law of

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

transfers to Brussels, and the Alternative for Germany party rising to challenge the EU. Euroskeptics won increasing representation in other national bodies and the European Parliament. Secessionist sentiments have threatened to transform Europe’s structure. Belgium became so bitterly divided that it went without an elected government for 589 days in 2010 and 2011, and the largest party in Flanders favors splitting the country. In Spain, the province of Catalonia announced a referendum on self-determination, while Scotland scheduled a referendum on whether to separate from the United Kingdom, once the world’s globe-spanning empire. These and other secessionist movements expand nationalistic feelings by promoting new, smaller, and more unified sovereign states.

and military capability. Although he probably is as interested in power politics and geopolitical interests as in ethnic solidarity, nationalism offered him a means to advance Russia inter nationally while strengthening himself politically.

Prudence

Nationalism took a more aggressive form when Russia engineered the breakaway of Crimea from Ukraine. The collapse of the Soviet Union left substantial numbers of ethnic Russians scattered throughout the newly independent nations. At the time, Moscow was too weak to defend its own geopolitical interests, let alone assert itself on behalf of ethnic Russians outside its borders. But Vladimir Putin restored both state authority

These varied and controversial moves toward greater ethnic unity may be natural reactions to the almost fevered demand by elites in distant capitals for greater diversity of subject peoples combined with increased authority for central governments. Ethnic or cultural unity does make it easier to form a cohesive polity; by itself, however, nationality offers no independent grounds for sovereignty. The presence in a given territory of a majority with a particular immutable characteristic offers no principled justification

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for joining other territories with similar national majorities. Shared ethnicity cannot supplant consent—in a fair vote, many C rimeans might have decided that they preferred to relate to Moscow from afar rather than underfoot, for instance. Consent is particularly important where territories contain substantial national, ethnic, and other minorities. In practice, national and ethnic homogeneity becomes less likely the wider the boundaries are drawn. As such, nationality almost always fails as a basis for sovereignty. Attempting to create ethnic-based nations after World War I merely shifted conflict downward. For instance, at the Paris Peace Conference Woodrow Wilson was surprised to learn that three million Germans lived in Bohemia, which he supported transferring to the new nation of Czechoslovakia. These Germans had as much justification in seeking inclusion in Germany as the Czechs had had in separating from Austria-Hungary. It would be better to rely on

prudence to order societies. The more diverse the population, the better the case for a looser federal arrangement with weaker central power. Such arrangements seem the best means of resolving some of today’s more intractable territorial disputes. There is no obvious reason to link Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia together, as Belgium currently does, especially given the continental market the EU has created. Of course, saying that separation would be legitimate is not the same as saying that it would be the most practical or prudent course. Maintaining a single nation, with a looser federation, could lessen tensions between Flanders and Wallonia by reducing transfers from and controls over the other. Sometimes differences are cultural and economic rather than ethnic. For example, Thailand has been forced to the breaking point as the urban elite, an establishment representing the court, business, bureaucracy, military, and wealthier classes, has refused to

accept election victories by parties representing the rural poor. In May the military staged yet another coup to remove from power a government reflecting the fifth straight populist victory. Federalism, by expanding local autonomy and reducing central control, might allow the contending factions to coexist without constant political and even violent conflict. The dramatic return of nationalist sentiment may horrify elites who seek to empower supranational organizations, but the fact is that such nationalism is a common popular impulse that cannot be ignored without great peril. Perhaps the greatest danger is to persist in pushing forms of transnational governance that have failed so many times before and sparked bitter opposition, nationalist fervor, partisan conflict, and even war. Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is a graduate of Stanford Law School.

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Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

ISI students are leading the conservative counterculture on campuses around the country. Here are four groups making an impact.

CONFRONTING LIBERAL INTOLERANCE

Rutgers’s Ratio Christi

national controversy erupted last spring when a vocal minority at Rutgers University challenged the Board of Governors’ decision to invite former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to give the 2014 commencement address. When Rutgers’s Debate Union staged a public debate on the matter, it quickly became apparent that most attendees supported the #NoRice campaign. It was left to our ISI-affiliated group, Ratio Christi, to line up during the Q&A time to defend freedom of speech. Soon after, I appeared on Fox News’s Kelly File to discuss this episode of liberal intolerance and the broader problem of one-sided discourse on college campuses. To my surprise, my reception on campus the

24 Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

next day was overwhelmingly favorable. By the end of the week, dozens of people who had disagreed with our group’s position gave positive feedback. Even though Rice gracefully declined the invitation, the campus culture in general felt that the loudmouth minority had overreacted. The conservatives on campus were now seen as the voices of reason while the protesters were seen as troublemakers. —Isaac Woodward ’14

Drawing the Battle Lines

The University of Georgia’s Arch Conservative

t the University of Georgia, the new quarterly journal the Arch Conservative fills the need for an articulate voice

to speak out against the shenanigans of the campus Left. That begins with exposing the preposterous policies of the Student Government Association. The Arch Conservative has called student leaders to account for votes in favor of a biased and redundant Women’s Center (the campus has three other centers focused on women), gender-neutral bathrooms, and an increase in mandatory student fees to more than $1,100 per semester—a jump of 247 percent in a decade. The Arch Conservative picked up national attention when National Review Online ran its cover story about what happened when an anonymous hacker posted profane messages to the Facebook accounts of the Black Affairs Council and LGBT Resource Center. The administration responded swiftly and appropriately—working with law enforcement to launch an investigation, reaching out to the groups that had received the vile messages to condemn the attacks and express support, and contacting those who had been victims of identity theft. But as the Arch Conservative revealed, campus radicals still organized public demonstrations, leading to increasingly groveling responses from the administration and student government. —Elizabeth Ridgeway ’16

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Standing Up for Truth Columbia University’s Crown & Cross and John Jay Society

t’s been a year of victories and defeats for conservatives at Columbia. A group of us founded a Love and Fidelity Network–resourced Anscombe Society to challenge the hookup culture. But when we sought recognition as a campus student group, existing campus groups voted us down. Why? Because we believe that sexuality’s fulfillment is found in marriage between one man and one woman. That defeat only emboldened us to start the Columbia Crown & Cross, a journal of Christian thought. The Crown & Cross has won recognition from Columbia as a student group

Cross Crown & ’s Journal Columbia

ning

Christ’s Crow

ght tian Thou of Chris

glory

ook of isaia e in the B gendered graC prison of guilt esCaping the

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and been admitted to ISI’s Collegiate Network of student newspapers. In addition, conservatives at Columbia now have a home through which to affect campus culture: the John Jay Society, a newly chartered ISI Society that hosts weekly student debates. —Luke Foster ’15

tHE VANGUARD UPenn’s Statesman

n August 2013 some of my classmates and I founded The Statesman to broaden the University of Pennsylvania’s intellectual life by challenging the campus’s monolithic leftist agenda. In our first year we have been proud to forge a conservative community founded on intellectual inclusivity. Perhaps more important, we have exposed the Penn community to previously ignored viewpoints on issues ranging from immigration reform to gun control to market-driven health care reform to racial-preference policies. The Statesman is also bringing conservative speakers to campus. Last year we hosted Sam Katz, a former Republican candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, and this year we’re

running a series of intimate seminars with scholars like Harvard legend Harvey Mansfield. Resolute in our values and confident in our mission, we are the vanguard of a conservative resurgence at Penn.

Feb/Mar

2014 Volu

me I Edition

—Aidan McConnell ’16

C h a n g e C ampus C u l t u r e ISI Societies are groups of conservative students and professors dedicated to bringing true intellectual diversity to their campuses. They receive ISI grants of up to $10,000 to help fund on-campus educational activities, and members receive preferred status when applying for ISI fellowships, conferences, and other events. To find out about joining or starting an ISI Society, visit societies.isi.org. Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

Student voices

Lessons from a Facult y M entor By Peter Atkinson

ne thing I’ve learned during college is that the best education often happens outside the classroom, when a professor becomes a mentor. I have been privileged to benefit from the counsel of renowned Catholic political thinker Michael Novak, who has been remarkably generous with his time. But my experience is hardly unique: many of my friends—at my own college and others— tell me how faculty mentors have shaped their educations and lives. Here are five ways an academic mentor can change your life:

They show us the importance of flexible goals According to the Washington Post, only 27 percent of college graduates work in the field within which they majored. A true education shapes the whole person. Mentors show us how to use that education to be flexible in our goals, rather than rigid in our adherence to a career path. Novak’s come example is instructive: After twelve years he left a Catholic seminary for New York with only his suitcases and an unfinished novel. But his initial theological training informed his political theory and made him one of the most prominent political writers of our day.

sacrifice my ideals for a paycheck. But witnessing a professor’s genuine happiness while working in his field convincingly argues for the worth of fighting for what is noble, not just for your pocketbook. Without such examples, such a life remains abstract.

that undergraduate education is a time to learn and read and grow.

They can lead you to new opportunities Job opportunities often come from people, not résumés. I had the chance to speak with the political and cultural commentator Mary Eberstadt when she visited my college to give a lecture. She invited me to a luncheon in Washington, D.C., which then led to numerous job offers and writing opportunities. Scholars who care about their field often want to help students contribute to that area.

They teach us to value friendoften ship most of all But the most important from , not . benefit from having a faculty mentor is the friendship with that particular person. Beyond the They help reset priorities opportunities, the lessons, and the During my freshman year, I took up helpful admonitions, the most signifithe suggestion of a professor to enter cant gift the mentor gives is himself. an essay contest with a $500 prize Mentors are useful, but more and write on Francis Bacon and C. S. important, they will influence your Lewis. The only problem was that I life by their example and their witdidn’t know anything about Bacon. So ness to what truly matters. I asked another professor to quickly explain his thought. The professor admonished me, “Your desire to be Peter Atkinson is a 2014–15 ISI Honors published is coming before your desire Scholar and a senior at Ave Maria to know.” It was a crucial reminder University.

Job opportunities people résumés

They remind us that careerism kills vocation As I near graduation—and thus the possibility of unemployment—it’s easy to slip into “careerism,” to

26 Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

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Student voices

nO-RISK

dating

By Elisabeth Cervantes

SEXUAL FREEDOM IS SOMETHING WE ALL dESERVE,

WHY DOES IT SEEM TO LEAVE US SO

UNSATISFIED? a little TV, had sex and went to sleep. Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls. “We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she said, adding that “we literally can’t sit down and have coffee.”

met a girl a few summers ago I will never forget. We were working as waitresses trying to get through college. Bright and bubbly, she was always smiling and throwing herself into her work. She was the picture of independence. But the glimpses of her I would see some mornings—sullen, lonely, isolated—are what struck me most. During those times, she would come into the restaurant as if burdened with a grave secret. Often she wasn’t even scheduled to work but would sit in a corner booth at sunrise and eat breakfast alone. Her face was so different from what I had grown accustomed to: it was burdened and weary. I soon learned from a coworker that this was what she would do after hooking up with some unnamed guy. It started to make sense. On college campuses we often hear how we should pursue freedom— especially when it comes to free expression of our sexuality. But if this intercollegiatereview.com

is a freedom we all deserve, why does it seem to leave us so unsatisfied? We have reached a point at which sex is strictly a business transaction. Consider this account from the New York Times: At 11 on a weeknight earlier this year, her work finished, a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania did what she often does when she has a little free time. She texted her regular hookup—the guy she is sleeping with but not d ating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched

This is the modern dating phenomenon. We have no time for relationships, but we still seek out sex. The desire for intimacy with another soul remains, but it is being stifled in an arrangement free of any commitment. If we were really made to seek out sex for its own sake, would that girl have spent her mornings the way she did, with such lifeless eyes? “Our bodies and hearts are designed to work together,” J. Budziszewski reminds us in his book On the Meaning of Sex. But we are unwilling to admit this and another truth: that we can never completely abandon our humanity. We might strike at the root of the problem by acknowledging that we seek out—we long for—something more than sexual satisfaction. If my generation continues to plunge into the hookup culture, we will inevitably feel dissatisfaction, restlessness—and emptiness. Elisabeth Cervantes recently completed an internship at the San Diego Union-Tribune. Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

office hours

J. Budziszewski Navigating Today’s Insane Educational System

the nature of the good and true demands it. For example, we don’t coerce faith, because as St. Hilary of Poitiers said, God does not desire unwilling obedience; we don’t repress the expression of false opinions, because debate helps us find our way to the truth. Notice, then, what true toleration requires: not suspending judgment but judging more adequately.

Tolerance and diversity are words usually used by the Left in academia to squash freedom of speech, especially among conservatives. How would you define the true role of tolerance? —Luciana E. Milano, Harvard University

The liberal rationale for toleration grounds it on an incoherency: supposedly we put up with some bad and false things because we suspend moral judgment about the good and true. But if we really suspended judgment, it would be hard to see why anything should be tolerated—or why anything shouldn’t be tolerated, or, if we are going to be tolerant, which things should be tolerated and which things shouldn’t be. Actually, the nonjudgmentalist wants only his opponents to suspend judgment. He rams through his own moral judgments by pretending that they aren’t moral judgments. By contrast, the classical rationale for toleration grounds it on a paradox: we put up with some bad and false things because 28

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

For undergraduates who have to make the tough decision of choosing a major, what do you recommend: a preprofessional degree or a humanities major? —Meg Campbell, Anderson University

A professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, J. Budziszewski is the acclaimed author of more than a dozen books, including On the Meaning of Sex, The Line Through the Heart, How to Stay Christian in College, and the forthcoming Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’ “Treatise on Law.” His website is www.undergroundthomist.org. Budziszewski’s insights and crystalline prose make him must-reading for scholars and students alike—as he demonstrates here in the IR ’s Office Hours.

How good if we learn how to produce wealth; how terrible if we think wealth is the only thing that matters. How helpful if we acquire the ability to bring information to the attention of others; how dreadful if we use this skill to manipulate and deceive. How fascinating if we are able to delve into the properties of matter and energy; how narrow if we intercollegiatereview.com

imbibe the false ideology that matter is all there is. In a sane educational system, the acquisition of theoretical and practical skills such as business, marketing, and the sciences would be integrated with the study of the nature of the good life and the meaning of being human. Everyone would study the liberal arts at the same time as preparing for a profession. What can you do? Not every thinking person should pursue a liberal arts major, but every thinking person should pursue the liberal arts. Desire wisdom. Choose courses wisely. Identify good books. Arrange for some quiet in your life. Find a few wise mentors. Seek out sane fellow seekers. Then go to it.

What role should philosophy play in the regular college student’s life? —Johnathan Geiger, University of Minnesota– Morris

Philosophy is clear and systematic thought about the big questions behind the little questions that fill up the foreground of our lives. Most people hold opinions about the big questions without even noticing that they hold them. They do business as though wealth were all that mattered, do science as though matter were all there is, live as though there were no God—even though they may view themselves as holding no opinions about these things. intercollegiatereview.com

THE

MEANING OF

SEX

The Line Through The hearT Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction

J. BUDZISZEWSKI

J. Budziszewski

Author of What We Can’t Not Know and The Line Through the Heart

budziszewski_meaningsex_dj_wrk01.indd 1

4/6/2011 8:12:56 AM

Everyone wonders about such big questions at least sometimes. If you never learn any philosophy, you will still “philosophize” in this sense, but you will probably philosophize badly. It’s better to learn to do it well.

Can natural law, which claims certain objective truths, be reconciled with political law in a pluralistic society like America? —Peter Atkinson, Ave Maria University

budziszewski_linethroughheart_wrk01.indd 1

10/31/2008 7:22:44 AM

rhythm are to tuneful melody. So natural law isn’t less important because of pluralism, but more.

Did you receive any blowback from your peers in academia after your conversion to Catholicism? —Amelia Sims, Emory University

Blowback about my faith began earlier than that. No one worried when I was a young scholar who denied that there is a rationally

“Not every thinking person should pursue a liberal arts major, but every thinking person should pursue the liberal arts.” If pluralism means anything, it means that we don’t all have to play the same melodies on the keyboards of our lives. Some of us marry, others remain single. Some of us do paid work, others raise children. But all tuneful melodies have certain things in common. By throwing away the principles of harmony and rhythm, you don’t expand the diversity of melody; you merely substitute noise. The natural moral law is to a well-lived life as the principles of harmony and

discernable difference between good and evil and argued that we aren’t responsible for our actions anyway. Problems began several years later, when I gave up these views and returned to Christian faith. I don’t think the hostiles even noticed, much later, when I converted from evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism. To them these are just two different varieties of craziness that ought to be repressed. The undeclared religion of the modern university is

practical atheism. You are allowed to believe in some kind of God, but not the kind of God who makes a difference to anything. You are allowed to have some kind of faith, but not the kind of faith that interacts with reason. What threatens practical atheists is the classical Christian view that God matters to everything, and that sound faith expands the possibilities of reason itself.

What is the most dangerous instance of selfdeception in academia today and what have been its results? —Elizabeth Ridgeway, University of Georgia

Intellectuals today work harder than ordinary people to develop rationalizations for their selfdeceptions. For example, the ordinary person who lies may tell himself that his lie wasn’t really a lie, but the intellectual may tell himself that there isn’t any objective truth, so that no lie is really a lie. Self-deceptions ramify for the same reason that other lies ramify. To cover up one lie, we have to tell another; to cover up that one, we have to tell a third; and so it goes. The same thing happens when we lie to ourselves. The worst selfdeception is antirealism, the lie about lying itself. It is the most difficult to withdraw from, because it undermines the very foundations of rational thought.

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

Freedom Hall

W illiam F. Buckley Jr . C onservative Icon

n 1950 the literary critic Lionel Trilling famously wrote that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in the United States, and that the “conservative impulse” could express itself only in “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Just a year later the twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley Jr. published his first book. That book, God and Man at Yale, launched its author into the national spotlight—and more important, it launched a movement. As Austin Bramwell observed in the Intercollegiate Review, “Without it, one could fairly say, the conservative movement would not exist today.” For the next fifty-seven years Buckley was the preeminent spokesman for conservatism in America. He was the founding president of ISI in 1953; he hosted the long-running television talk show Firing

30 Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

Line, where he shaped political discourse in America while grilling guests ranging from Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, to Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, to Christopher Hitchens and Ron Paul; he wrote a widely syndicated column and dozens of books (fiction and nonfiction); and, most important, he founded National Review, which brought together the disparate strands of conservatism and paved the way for the Reagan Revolution. Bill Buckley, more than anyone else, made conservatism an intellectual and political force that transformed America. That is why George Nash, the leading historian of the American conservative movement, called him “arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century.” Buckley’s wisdom is as relevant today as ever, as these examples demonstrate. intercollegiatereview.com

Obedience

mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

—Up from Liberalism

e must do what we can to bring hammer blows against the bell jar that protects the dreamers from reality. The ideal scenario is that pounding from without we can effect resonances, which will one day crack through to the latent impulses of those who dream within, bringing to life a circuit which will spare the republic.

—Letter to Henry Kissinger

Laws and Mores

Confronting Statism

ll that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.

—The Jeweler’s Eye

ndicated radio host

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n political and le, China with Lee Edwards, s it all in this

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W I L L I A M F. BUCK LE Y JR. t he m a k er of a mov e m en t

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he best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.

—Windfall: The End of the Affair

Understanding Buckley: Where to Start .

T  , the wit, the charm, the sailing adventures, the spy novels— all of these have become part of the William F. Buckley Jr. legend. But to consider only Buckley’s charisma and ceaseless energy is to miss that above all he was committed to advancing ideas. Now, noted conservative historian Lee Edwards, who knew Buckley for more than forty years, delivers a much-needed intellectual biography of the man who has been called “arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century.” Edwards’s concise and compelling book reveals how Buckley did more than any other person to build the conservative movement. Once derided as a set of “irritable mental gestures,” conservatism became, under Buckley’s guidance, a political and intellectual force that transformed America. As conservatives debate the ideas that should drive their movement, William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement reminds us of the principles that animated Buckley, as well as the thinkers who inspired him. The four most important intellectual influences on this great molder of American conservatism, Edwards shows, were libertarian author and social critic Albert Jay Nock, conservative political scientist Willmoore Kendall, former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, and realpolitik apostle James Burnham. Having dug deep into the voluminous Buckley papers, Edwards also illuminates the profound influence of Buckley’s close-knit family and his unwavering Catholic faith. Edwards brilliantly captures the free spirit

“if you wa n t to understand not only the rise of the modern conservative movement but also how conservatives can regain their footing during these perilous times, you must read William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement.” —Mark Levin

Available at isibooks.org

(continued on back flap)

2/19/2010 9:39:56 AM

intercollegiatereview.com

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

God on the Quad

College’s

By Naomi Schaefer Rile y

“Religious Cliff”

n the spring of 2014, the Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club decided to drop its sponsorship of a Black Mass, the satanic ritual in which people dress up as members of the clergy and defile a communion wafer, which Catholics believe to be the consecrated host—that is, the body of Christ. The event provoked such outrage among campus Catholics that even Harvard president Drew Faust was forced to condemn the ritual—if not quite ban it officially from campus. The Black Mass was ultimately held across the street from Harvard Yard at a Chinese restaurant, much to the chagrin of the campus Left. According to the report on the event in the Harvard Crimson, “Four individuals in hoods and one man in a white suit, a cape, and a horned mask were active in the proceedings, as well as a woman revealed to be wearing only lingerie.” They didn’t use a communion wafer. It was a surprising victory both for people of faith and for people

32 Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

of no faith who believe that faith deserves some respect. But members of the Cultural Studies Club could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. It is hardly uncommon to see the rituals and beliefs of religious students mocked, or even barred from campus. Whether it is a professor berating a religious student for supposedly irrational views or an administration banning a Christian group for not electing leaders who engage in homosexual behavior,

antireligious bigotry seems to be the last acceptable prejudice on campus. But these news stories tend to obscure some other important truths about religion on campus. First, people who graduate from college are more likely to be religious than those who don’t. Religion has become the domain of the educated and the upper classes, as Charles Murray noted in his recent book Coming Apart. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Murray compared two representative towns, intercollegiatereview.com

working-class Fishtown and upperclass Belmont: “Suppose we define ‘de facto secular’ as someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year. For the early [General Social Surveys] conducted from 1972 to 1976, 29 percent of Belmont and 38 percent of Fishtown fell into that category. Over the next three decades, secularization did indeed grow in Belmont, from 29 percent in the 1970s to 40 percent in the GSS surveys taken from 2006 to 2010. But it grew even more in Fishtown, from 38 percent to 59 percent.” Some Belmont students go to religious colleges, but many more go to secular ones. The truth is that religious life on many secular campuses is thriving among students, even if it is frowned upon by the faculty and administration.

ampus Crusade for Christ, for example, has 25,000 staff members in 191 countries and $490 million in annual revenue, according to a 2011 article in Christianity Today. Its 1979 “Jesus Film” has been translated into 1,100 languages and watched literally billions of times. And Campus Crusade (now known as Cru) is only the tip of the iceberg. From Chabad and Hillel to the Newman Society and Catholic fellowships, intercollegiatereview.com

from Muslim Student Associations and Buddhist groups to Jain societies and Hindu groups, there is no end to the ways that students can find their religious selves on campus. Many of these organizations have mastered the art of appealing to young adults. They have professionalquality music blasted through excellent sound systems. The sermons are all tailored for young adults. These

in mobilizing young people, they have also made it more difficult for young people to enter grown-up, multigenerational religious institutions afterward. Sociologist Christian Smith says that even at Notre Dame, where he teaches, students who attend daily Mass get used to what he calls a “gourmet liturgy” and have trouble finding the same level of religious experience after graduation. One pastor told me that leaving college is like “jumping off a religious cliff.” Indeed, more than one religious leader has complained that college seems to turn young adults into spiritual consumers rather than spiritual producers. There are plenty of reasons why twentysomethings don’t seem to be attending religious institutions in the numbers they used to. They’re marrying later—a milestone that used to bring people back—and there is no longer a social stigma associated with not going to church. But one reason is surely that they are not used to being part of a regular religious institution—one with old people and children, one that can sometimes be boring, one that experiences tragedies as often as celebrations. As college students plan the same level their next steps after graduation— both per. sonal and professional—they might think about how they can see religious institutions as more than sources of entertainment. Leaving the coddled world of higher education should challenge you to consider your role as a responsible adult in a religious community. To borrow a phrase: Ask not what your faith can do for you, but what you can do for your faith.

Many college students have trouble finding of religious

experience after graduation

religious groups offer social activities and even service activities with a particular audience in mind—the eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-old set. Religion on campus is easily accessible in a figurative sense but also in a literal one. Religious services are across the street or a couple of blocks away, and there are bound to be other people there you know. Kosher meals are available with the swipe of a cafeteria card. Holiday celebrations are full of fun, good food, and none of the drama of extended family. But the truth of the matter is that while these groups have succeeded

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a New York Post columnist, is the author of God on the Quad and Got Religion? As an undergraduate, she was editor of the ISI Collegiate Network publication the Harvard Salient. Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

TELEVISION

arts & manners

From Caricature to Complexity By peter Augustine L awler

he highly rated CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory compensates for its lack of refinement (it has a laugh track!) with its brains.

The show began with characters who were more like caricatures of four types of physical scientists: the theoretical physicist (Sheldon Cooper), the experimental physicist (Leonard Hofstadter), the astrophysicist (Raj Koothrappali), and the aerospace engineer (Howard Wolowitz). Their research shares in common a lack of concern with human or other forms of life. As an engineer, Howard is interested in meeting very basic animal needs; in one memorable episode, he ingeniously (and creepily) uses a robotic hand to replace his own for personal 34

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

satisfaction. Leonard, the experimental physicist, is emotionally needy and will do almost anything to have an intimate relational life with a pretty girl. The astrophysicist, Raj, is a highly erotic metrosexual who turns the whole cosmos into a romantic tale that has room for appreciating designer dogs and The Good Wife. Sheldon, the theoretical physicist, is different: he understands himself as a mind stuck in an alien body. The world, for him, is the home of the human mind, and he longs to be liberated from physical constraints to be fully at home. He is intellectually very erotic but physically (so far) not at all—especially telling on a show whose humor depends largely on sex jokes. But these stock characters became more fleshed out as their relationships with women developed. Most of the show focuses on relationships with girlfriends and (eventually) wives—Leonard’s romance with Penny, the “hot” waitress/ actress; Howard’s courting of and marriage to Bernadette, a microbiologist; and even Sheldon’s pairing with the neurobiologist Amy, who at first seems identical to Sheldon in her indifference to the animal part of her being but who gradually gets more open about her sexual and relational needs. As important as the girlfriends and wives are to the show, perhaps the most interesting developments involve mothers. Howard initially connects with Bernadette, with whom he seems to have little in common (he is Jewish while she is Catholic, frequently wearing a cross around her neck), only when they discover that they both

have overbearing mothers. Howard’s relationship with his monstrous caricature of an infantilizing Jewish mother (we never actually see her morbid obesity but cringe every time we hear her shouting) makes it tough for him to become a maturely relational husband. Still, family means enough to him that he wants children, although his wife (whose parents are colder than his mom) doesn’t. Sheldon’s and Leonard’s mothers show up in many fewer episodes, but they are crucial to the show in that they represent different extremes when it comes to understanding the world. Leonard’s mom, Dr. Beverly Hofstadter, is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist; she delights in accounting for human behavior as the measurably mechanical. She understands herself as pure brain and asocial bodily mechanism, and so she complacently takes responsibility for her own sexual satisfaction. Unimpressed with her son’s mind, she hasn’t bonded at all with him, but Sheldon becomes her intimate confidant—one brain relating to another. Meanwhile, Sheldon describes his mother, Mary, as “a kind, loving, religiously fanatical, right-wing Texan.” What that description misses is Mary’s astute—if incomplete—understanding of human behavior. In many ways she understands her son better than he understands himself. She never thinks for a moment that her son’s behavior can be excused by Asperger’s or some other antirelational disorder. She makes no excuses for his arrogance, awkwardness, or rudeness, and she even coaxes him to apologize to his former boss to get his job back after he intercollegiatereview.com

is fired. Mary accepts Sheldon just as he is, while trying to help him be as good as he can be. Sheldon and his mom are the two theologians in the show. Mary believes in a kind, loving, and morally judgmental God, and she does pretty darn well

acts truthfully as a loving and attentive mother. The other is pretty much a morally monstrous deformation of the social animal Mr. Darwin describes. Dr. Hofstader’s ignorance of who she is as a relational being is much more extreme

The fundamentalist

Christian mother possesses a wisdom about human nature that her physicist son lacks. in living as a creature made in his personal image. Sheldon, by contrast, at one point exclaims that his time is best used employing his “rare and precious mental faculties to tear the mask off nature and stare at the face of God.” Not only is the world the home of the human mind; understanding it points beyond nature itself to the mind behind it. And Sheldon can’t help but think that God is something like him—a brain with a face. We have almost come to expect television to portray believing Christians as ignorant and closed-minded. The Big Bang Theory follows the typical form, allowing Mary to be fanatical and politically incorrect in speech. But the conventional “text” often barely obscures the genuinely subversive “subtext.” Mary possesses a wisdom about human nature—about the being who is neither mind nor body nor merely a mixture of the two—that her genius son and the hyperaccomplished Beverly Hofstadter lack. Mary and Beverly are polar opposites when it comes to parenthood. Only one of them thinks and intercollegiatereview.com

and much less benign than Sheldon’s. Sheldon has spent his seasons on the show getting more attuned to what it means to be relational; Beverly is incurable, it would seem. Walker Percy reminds us that the physicist can explain everything but the physicist, the irreducible person open to the truth about being. Like the physiciannovelist Dr. Percy, The Big Bang Theory outs scientism for what it is, while displaying a respectful appreciation for what scientists really do and really know.

So we also see clearly the limits of what Mary knows. She doesn’t understand her son insofar as he is a physicist, and she knows nothing of the genuinely joyful greatness of scientific discovery. Mary has a vice characteristic of fundamentalism: she willfully diverts herself from reflecting on what the physicists really do know about the intelligible order of nature, and so part of who her gifted and wonderful son is remains beyond her grasp. The Big Bang Theory ultimately points to the limited but real wisdom that comes from understanding two partial truths—that of the personal, judgmental, loving God and also that of the “God of nature” the scientists seek to understand. The show leads us to think about how to put together the two explanations of “the Big Bang”—one based on faith in a personal Creator and one based on scientific discovery of the impersonal laws of nature—to account truthfully for both nature and human nature. We learn from our Declaration of Independence that “Nature’s God” is also a living, relational, creative, judgmental, and providential God. And we students of the whole teaching of The Big Bang Theory have reasons to believe that must be true.

TELEVISION

arts & manners

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College and blogs at National Review’s Postmodern Conservative.

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

arts & manners

To Change the World POPULAR CULTURE

By James R. Harrigan

oung people have long wanted to change the world. The present generation is no different, though its members may be even more eager to make their mark. Recent polling data by Net Impact indicates that nearly two-thirds of the millennial generation fully expect to “make an impact” in the world. A shocking 37 percent of these expect to do so within five years of their college graduation. A more sober-minded contingent of 28 percent suspect that it will take them six years or more. Young people intent on changing the world can take solace—and find some instruction—in the stories of two men who were still in their twenties when they made their names in the mid-twentieth century. Born just five months apart, these men both served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946. After World War II, each attended college, the first graduating from the University of Illinois in 1949, the second from Yale in 1950. The first became a copywriter for Esquire magazine and, angry over being denied a five-dollar raise, set off to start his own magazine. The second joined the CIA in 1951, the same year he published what would be the

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

first of many books. Two years later he set in motion his plans to found his own magazine. This is where the similarities end between Hugh Hefner and William F. Buckley Jr., founders of Playboy and National Review, respectively. Hefner started Playboy on a shoestring budget of $8,000, which he acquired in small amounts from forty-five people, including his mother and brother, each of whom loaned him the princely sum of $1,000. His was a purely entrepreneurial effort, and he got off to a fast start after acquiring the rights to nude photos of Marilyn Monroe for $500 from a Chicago calendar printer. Buckley headed a much more ambitious campaign, raising some $300,000 to begin publication of National Review.

And where Hefner had Marilyn, Buckley offered a Mission Statement. National Review, he said, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” In short, Buckley’s National Review would confront the new, prevailing liberal orthodoxy that Hefner’s Playboy would both reinforce and foster. The real question is this: Who had the bigger impact? There is no way to quantify this, of course, but numbers do tell part of the story. National Review claims to be, and undoubtedly is, “America’s largest circulation and most influential journal of Republican and conservative opinion.” Its 2012 circulation was just under 167,000. In 2005, three years before his death, Buckley intercollegiatereview.com

claimed that the magazine had lost some $25 million over the previous fifty years. Playboy never found itself in such straits. In 2013 its circulation was 1.5 million, including eighteen international editions. Hefner repurchased Playboy Enterprises in 2009, and in 2012 alone the company made a $38.9 million profit. Playboy is, in short, ubiquitous. National Review consciously plays to a niche market. We live in Hefner’s world, while Buckley’s legacy, National Review, still stands athwart history, yelling Stop.

defense; it is accepted as given— so much so that most politicians debate not whether to act in defense of gay rights but how. Politics, one comes to see, is a lagging indicator of what is happening socially, exactly as pop culture is a leading indicator. And how could it be otherwise? The American system is designed to reflect the popular mood in some ways and to trail well behind it in others. The very structure of government yields this result because it was meant to. The House of Representatives was designed to mirror the popular will most closely, but even there a two-year election cycle filters the popular

hat lessons are we to draw from the oddly parallel lives of Hugh Hefner and William F. Buckley Jr.? is a One lesson is that pop culture is a leading indicator of what is happening of what is to come socially and politically. Hefner surely is a pushed the envelope, but the American people were will significantly. Senators serve ready to have that envelope six-year terms. The presidential pushed. Nearly ten years after term splits the difference at four he started Playboy, Hefner was years, and the Supreme Court charged with selling obscene changes at a glacial pace. As a literature, but by then the result, politicians rarely change magazine was an established the world in any meaningful success and the jury was unable way. They react to changes. to come to a verdict. The verdict Millennials who want to had already been rendered change the world would do by the American public. well to remember these truths. The second issue of Playboy Simply put, politics isn’t everywas perhaps even more conthing. Bill Buckley understood troversial than the first, as it this: he wrote novels, appeared included a defense of homofrequently on late-night televisexuality in the form of Charles sion talk shows, and hosted his Beaumont’s short story “The own long-running TV proCrooked Man.” Here, too, we gram on which he interviewed live in Hefner’s world. After scholars, novelists, poets, and decades of presentation in the athletes as well as politicians. popular media, homosexuality And most of those who have no longer requires much of a

Politics

culture

intercollegiatereview.com

made the biggest difference did so by shaping cultural attitudes. Think of the impact not only of Hugh Hefner with Playboy but also of Rachel Carson, author of the seminal environmental manifesto Silent Spring, or of the creators of sitcoms like

lagging indicator socially; pop leading indicator. Will & Grace, Modern Family, and even The Simpsons. They all left a mark on society to which politicians could only react. To redeem our time, we can’t limit our vista to policy battles, partisan debates, and electoral horse races. Aristotle reminds us in the Politics that “everyone does everything for the sake of what they believe to be good.” That leaves the whole of human life on the table as “political.” Those who would change the world should take that lesson to heart.

POPULAR CULTURE

arts & manners

James R. Harrigan holds a PhD from the Claremont Graduate School and is a fellow of the Institute of Political Economy at Utah State University.

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

arts & manners

Films That Defined America

By Anthony Sacramone

very culture has deeply embedded myths, and cinema has often been the medium through which America’s myths have been transmitted. Here are twelve films that have reflected America back to itself through the decades, for better and worse.

1. Birth of a Nation (1915, silent)

he first blockbuster, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was both celebrated as a great artistic achievement and denounced as racist for its vicious depiction of African Americans and homage to the KKK. President Woodrow Wilson’s praise of the spectacle as “history written with lightning” served to dignify the film, despite the fact that Wilson may never have said it.

2. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

an one man stand against a world of lies? Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), a former Boy Rangers leader, appears to be in over his head in the corrupt world of congressional politics, but that won’t stop him from filibustering a bill that would reward graft. Denounced as anti-American upon its release (but banned in fascist and Communist countries), Frank

Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

Capra’s fable came to canonize the lone voice that speaks truth to power regardless of the odds.

3. High Noon (1952)

ill Kane (Gary Cooper) thinks he has laid down his marshal’s badge until he learns that a gunslinger he put in jail is out and headed to town. Rather than abandon his community, Kane decides to stay and fight—only no one wants him to: neither his Quaker wife (Grace Kelly) nor the cowardly and spiteful townsfolk. So Kane must stand alone against injustice. Written by a former Communist Party member who had refused to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, High Noon is generally read as a parable of the McCarthy era. (Ironically, the film was banned in the USSR for its celebration of “individualism.”)

4. The Searchers

(1956)

than Edwards (John Wayne) is a Civil War vet with a secret who returns home to Texas only to set out on a hunt

for his niece (Natalie Wood) kidnapped by Comanche. The true motivation for Ethan’s relentless pursuit—racism, revenge, or both—has had critics arguing for decades. Is Ethan an American soldier of unflagging integrity or as disruptive to community as any Indian raid? Some see him as a distant relative to such ’70s antiheroes as Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver).

5. The Graduate

(1967)

enjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has a new college degree and no ambition. Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a family friend, offers to help stimulate him, but the ensuing affair proves a dark business. Only when his clueless parents and the equally unaware Mr. Robinson push Benjamin into a relationship with the Robinsons’ daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), does he finally see the light—to Mrs. Robinson’s horror. Benjamin must now decide what, if anything, is worth fighting for. Director Mike Nichols’s final two-shot of Elaine and Benjamin, freed from their plastic world, has elicited the same question for decades: Freed to do what? intercollegiatereview.com

arts & manners 6. The Godfather

(1972)

poor Italian immigrant comes to a powerful patron for justice when the American legal system fails him. Is Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) an empathetic savior, a symbol of American capitalism serving a distinct clientele—or just a thug with Old World manners? Francis Ford Coppola’s film singlehandedly elevated the B movie gangster flick to a work of art.

7. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

oing time for statutory rape, R. P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) plays crazy to get moved to the state mental hospital for an easy ride. But he soon finds himself superintended by the forbidding Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who demands docility. So the anarchic McMurphy plots mutiny with his fellow “inmates.” Based on Ken Kesey’s muchbanned book, Cuckoo’s Nest is a Polaroid of a generation that refused to play by the rules of a “rigged game”—but that could not foresee the unintended consequences of making everything up as it went along.

8. Network (1976)

seasoned TV newsman (William Holden) watches

intercollegiatereview.com

as an obsessed producer (Faye Dunaway) and ruthless exec (Robert Duvall) turn the UBS network into a funhouse of live crime scenes, astrological folderol, and jeremiads by a mad prophet of mass-entertainment doom (Peter Finch). The Oscarwinning screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, considered edgy in the ’70s, underestimated the reality-TV depths to which the tube would ultimately sink.

9. The Right Stuff (1983)

“

for one, don’t intend to go , to sleep by the light of a Communist moon,” says LBJ in this adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s history of the early years of the Space Race. The United States, determined to beat the Soviets into orbit, puts would-be astronauts through humiliating fitness drills as the pilots fight to be more than just space monkeys. But the best flier of them all—Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard), the man who broke the sound barrier—is never even considered because he lacks a college degree. Are PR and a manufactured image of the “ideal American” more important than courage and skill?

10. Malcolm X

(1992)

atch Malcolm Little (Denzel Washington),

a small-time hoodlum, transform into Malcolm X, herald of the Nation of Islam’s black nationalism. Then watch Malcolm X become disillusioned as his mentor, Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr., in a remarkable performance), proves to be less than divine. A trip to Mecca leads the controversial civil rights icon to broaden his vision of race relations—and invoke the ire of his former coreligionists. This Spike Lee “joint” gave Washington his first lead actor Oscar nomination for bringing to life the man who, in very American fashion, crafted a unique identity by any means necessary.

11. Team America: World Police (2004)

ho better to illustrate America’s role in the war on terror than the guys who brought you South Park? Trey Parker and Matt Stone manage to both mock and celebrate the United States as world policeman as they take on jihadists, North Korean dictators, and Hollywood leftists. Conservative, anarchist, or just plain adolescent, Team America captures the more extreme aspects of Bush-era USA in puppet-populated amber.

12. The Dark Knight

(2008)

s Batman (Christian Bale) a Christ-like figure willing to endure public scorn to save his people or a vigilante with a messiah complex who spies on his fellow citizens 24/7, telling himself it’s for their own good? The film made a bid for all-time box office champ, demonstrating Americans’ love of supermen—and craving for security. Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

The Progressive’s Dictionary

40 Intercollegiate Review · Fall 2014

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Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Published on Aug 28, 2014

Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2014

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute's magazine for conservative college students

Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2014

Published on Aug 28, 2014

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute's magazine for conservative college students

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