Modern Society Archives - Page 7 of 21

Deep Reading Brain, RIP

Will the generation after yours still be able to read? If we think of “reading” as basic literacy, then the answer is surely “Yes.” But, what if we think of reading as the ability to sit down with a 300 page physical book and concentrate on it and ponder its depths? What if we think of reading in the way it is portrayed in those images of yore, of a person in a room with a book and no distractions, no computers or phones or televisions? Will that kind of reading still exist in the generation after yours?

I first started thinking about this question back in 2009 when I heard a talk by James Bowman. You can read the talk here—highly recommended; it is one of the most memorable talks I have ever heard. Bowman began with the arresting statement, “You might not know it to look at me, but I used to be pretty smart.” He explains:

Intuitively, however, I feel that my time spent online has robbed me of at least some of my powers of concentration, and I believe that a very significant component, if not the principal one, of intelligence is the power of concentration. Or, to put it the other way around, stupidity is the inability to focus, and my ability to focus has become severely compromised.

Bowman, the media critic for The New Criterion, spends a lot of time reading things online. A lot of time. So do you (like right now, for example…). So do I.

Maryanne Wolf has a book about the phenomenon: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. It is the study of the science of the reading brain. People have been doing all these brain studies where they watch which parts of the brain light up and we now know a lot about how the reading brain works. I really wanted to love this book. (More about that anon.)

Wolf begins starkly: “human beings were never born to read.” Reading is an acquired skill, a rather important acquired skill: “the quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.” The way in which humans learn how to read has a radical influence on the way the brain develops, which has a huge impact on the way the brain works.

The young reader can either develop all the multiple deep-reading processes that are currently embodied in the fully elaborated, expert reading brain; or the novice reading brain can become “short-circuited’ in its development; or it can acquire whole new networks in different circuits. There will be profound differences in how we read and how we think, depending on which processes dominate the formation of the young child’s reading circuit

In other words, how we read is rather important in determining the shape of our existence in the future.

Wolf is particularly alarmed by the slow death of “deep reading.” “Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of our attention?” Learning how to read in a digital age does not involve developing “cognitive patience.”

What develops instead is “continuous partial attention.” Look around and you can instantly see that. It more than just having multiple browser windows open simultaneously. It is the loss of an ability to only have one browser window open. You can see it vividly in a college classroom these days. A not insignificant portion of the students have a nearly impossible time focusing on the class; they literally don’t know how to do only one thing at a time and concentrate on that one thing. When I assign books to read, I know in advance that a portion of the class literally has never developed the ability to sit in a quiet room with just a book and read it. They have never had to do that in their lives. The question is whether this will move from being a minority of the class to a majority of the class to almost the entire class in the future.

The science of reading is pretty clear. For example, if you give two sets of students the same reading assignment, but some read it in a physical book and some read it electronically, the students with the physical book have a much higher comprehension. This applies to novels, for example: students with the physical book have a higher ability to do something as simple as remember the plot of the novel in chronological order. Given the choice between reading a physical textbook and an electronic textbook, it is not even close which you should choose if you want to learn the subject.

It is not that you can’t learn anything in an electronic reading environment; it is simply that you will not learn things as deeply or as well. Your attention flitters hither and yon, picking up a bit here and a bit there. This has an effect on cognition; screen readers do not develop the ability for sustained thought and attention.

What are the consequences of this change in the reading brain? Well, this is where I really wanted to like this book. James Bowman pointed to all of the above in his talk back in 2009. Here I have a book published a decade later purporting to be an examination of the science on the matter, and while it confirms Bowman’s autobiographical account, the evidence in this book turns out to be primarily a larger collection of anecdotes with a few studies tossed in. On the question of what the future reading brain will be like, the book has nothing to offer. We don’t know what the next generation’s cognitive pathways will create.

As a result, the book ends with a question mark. We know what the Deep Reading Brain is and has done. We know the Deep Reading Brain is dying off and may not exist in the next generation. Is the development of the Electronic Reading Brain an evolutionary advance or regression? In order to lament the loss of deep reading, that seems to be a pretty important question. Wolf clearly thinks it is a regression; I do too. But it would have been nice if this book had more to offer that simply saying that Wolf doesn’t like the way things are headed.

A Caustic Wit

“The University and other colleges are probably not justified by the existence of any one individual of excellence who may emerge from their course of study but by the fact that every member of the community should be provided the opportunity to develop his or her abilities for their own and the community’s betterment. I have not heard of any preening man being singled out for not achieving the pinnacle of success, so long as he is otherwise conscientious and useful and does not become a financial burden to society.”

The first thing to note about that quotation is how much it would be nice if College Presidents and PR departments talked like that. Most students, by definition, will not become the Best in the World, but all too often colleges talk as if their only goal is to produce more graduates who become internationally famous.

The second thing to note is the source. Kitty Kielland’s The Woman Question: In Answer to Pastor J. M. Faerden. That particular paragraph is demolishing the argument that women don’t need higher education because women are incapable of rising to the summits of success. There are, Pastor Faerden suggests, no female Beethovens or Mozarts, no famous historians. (Why historians? I have no idea.) Kielland suspects that women would be capable of rising to those heights, but the clever thing about her argument is that it bypasses it entirely by noting that not all educated men rise to great heights. She was too polite to note that Faerden is a good example.

The book was written in 1886, but until now, there has never been an English translation of the Norwegian text. Christopher Fauske just remedied that rather surprising fact. Kielland is not a name most people recognize, but they should. Kitty’s brother, Alexander, wrote what was for a time considered one of the Greatest Books in Western literature, Skipper Worse. (It is in the Harvard Classics five foot bookshelf of the great works of the West.) A few years back, Fauske translated the novel, and in doing the background work on Kielland, he discovered this book which his sister wrote.

(Side note: At present, Amazon does not have a decent English translation of Skipper Worse for sale. You can get the Fauske translation here. It was a rather good novel: review here. The Woman Question is on Amazon—you can click on the picture of the cover above to go there.)

Kitty Kielland was also, once upon a time, a well-known name in the art world, being one of the first generation of female painters showing they could create art every bit as amazing as their male counterparts. Undoubtedly in part because of her annoyance at the implicit barriers to female artists, she took her complaints to print. Faerden was displeased by Kielland’s arguments, so he proceeded to criticize them. Kielland replied in devastating fashion in The Woman Question.

The book was obviously written in an impassioned haste full of snark. Most amusingly, there is no Pastor J. M. Faerden. It is actually M. J. Faerden; the initials were reversed on the title page. The argument is episodic, reading like many of my students venting about something that really annoys them, jumping from arguemnt to argument, each new argument adding to the indignation of the last argument.

Two of the arguments really intrigued me. First:

In any case, the position of the housewife is that of the manager, and think how easy this work is for her because of inventions which more and more simplify housework. What a difference there is from our grandmother—yes, our grandmothers. How could they not look contemptuously at how things now are in a home we find ourselves comfortable in? They respected the fact that everything was spun, woven, knitted, and sewn in the house, that they themselves baked the bread, brewed the beer, and molded the candles. Who knows if there won’t be even more differences some few decades in the future, even greater simplification and family happiness?

I have read that exact argument many times in writings from the feminists of the 1960s. Managing a house in the age of electricity and indoor plumbing and refrigerators and dishwashers and gas or electric stoves and ovens is a rather different thing than doing the same job in the 19^th century. But Kielland wrote that passage in 1886, not 1966. Yeah, there were a few innovations in homelife in the decades that followed her. As Robert Gordon documents at length in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the half century after Kielland wrote was the biggest revolution in managing homelife in the history of the world. Just about every appliance you regularly use in your house came into being in the “some few decades” Kielland foresees. Kitty Kielland is a prophet.

Second:

The author does not deny our time contains specific “moral hazards for the growing family,” but he believes this is in large part due to modern literature. While no one seems to think any book of modern literature is appropriate as a confirmation or birthday present for young people, that cannot be the standard by which literature is judged. And is it books that promote immorality or is it, in our case, the exact opposite? Is it not the immorality of society that shapes literature, mainly to be a scourge of chastisement?

Ah, yes, those immoral books of the 1880s. The year 1886, for example, saw the publication of Henry James’ The Bostonians and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But, the most striking thing about that remark is comparing it to our age. Which is more likely to be considered immoral these days: a modern book or a book from the past? The Pastor Faerdens are still among us, they just switched sides in the literature wars.

Kielland’s The Woman Question is not a Great Book, but it is a fun book. As Fauske notes: “Her verve and confidence, scathing wit, and indignant ability (and willingness) to point out stupidity and hubris brought me back to the text again and again.” Exactly so. The Kiellands, both Kitty and Alexander, deserve to be better known these days than they are. Let us hope Fauske keeps going with the translations.

Rooting for Team Human

The Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels, 1960-1966 opens with Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade. (N.b., that is not a typo in the first name—it really is Poul.)

If you like fun, short science fiction novels this is not to be missed.

“Short” is an interesting adjective—one of the things that happened in the 1960s is that science fiction novels started to become long. They eventually became very very long. Try to find a recent great science fiction novel that is under 600 pages (and being part one of a trilogy does not count). It can be done, but it is hard.

The High Crusade also fits into the genre called “Space Opera”—an odd term indicating a multiple-planet, multiple-alien races all fighting in some grand battles full of lots of over-the-top melodramatic moments. The “opera” part is curious since operas are not like that. But, you know what is like that? Soap operas. Hence the name.

Here is what makes The High Crusade stand out. The story takes place in 1345—yes, 1345, not 3145. An alien race lands its space ship in Merrie Olde England, where it encounters Sir Roger, a Baron, who had just mustered his army to go off to fight the dastardly French. Out of the massive spaceship comes hideous figures using their ray guns to slay the valiant Englishmen. The battle ensues, and Thanks Be To God, the Englishmen with their bows and swords win the day against the vastly outnumbered aliens.

Then it gets really interesting. Having just defeated these horrid creatures who are obviously the French, Sir Roger leads his army onto the Ship, commanding the lone surviving alien to take them back to his homeland of France where the English army can join (and win) the war. The alien complies, flying the ship home, which to the surprise of the English, but not the Reader, is not France at all, but a distant planet.

Commence the Story Proper. What happens when a 14^th century English Army ends up on a planet populated by an alien race which rules an interstellar empire? The ship which landed on Earth was a scout ship, seeking new planets to conquer. Obviously our 14th century Heroes are doomed in a war against these empire builders and their advanced technology.

Ah, Dear Reader, you have sold Humanity short. Sir Roger does us proud. Like I said, a very fun story, complete with a subplot worthy of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere! Space Opera meets Soap Opera. Settle in for a Rollicking Good Time.

Once you have enjoyed reading this tale, you can sit back and ask: Should you feel guilty for enjoying this book?

Crime Number 1: Was it OK to root for the Humans? Here we have a tale where the Humans come up against another species (the Wersgorix) and the humans merrily engage in a war against them. The Wersgorix aren’t nice, to be sure—they did just land a scout ship on earth and started incinerating humans, after all. They also have captured a whole bunch of planets and formed their Empire. So these aliens are Bad Guys. But, in a war between Humans and Wersgorix, which side is in the Right?

Let’s be Honest. You, Dear Reader, are not at all troubled by this question. Obviously you are on Team Human. Why? It’s pretty obvious. You are Human. (Sadly, the Wersgorix do not read this here blog—that is just the kind of race they are, those Wersgorix. Is it OK to curse the Wersgorix?) Since you are human, you root for humans. When a Wersgor soldier shows up, you do not root for it to destroy humans. Well, unless you are one of those nasty traitors to the human race. But, you aren’t like that, right? You would not betray all the humans to the Wersgorix, would you?

The question of whether it is OK to root for the Humans because you are Human is intriguing. Does that rule generalize? If it is OK to root for the Humans in their battle against the Wersgorix, what about in their battle against the flesh-eating wolves or malaria-bearing mosquitoes?

Crime Number 2: Was it OK to celebrate the triumph of human ingenuity against outside threats? Sir Roger and his army win the war not because they have superior weapons; they don’t. They win because they have superior minds. Humans are clever, very clever. Faced with an obstacle, humans figure out how to solve it. Are 14^th century humans up against a technologically advanced Empire? Why did you think the humans had the disadvantage? Which would you rather have on your side: ray guns or human minds?

If it is OK to celebrate the triumph of human ingenuity in the war against the Wersgorix, what about in the war against the planet? The planet is a hostile place. Most species discover they can only live in a small ecological niche on the planet. But humans? Is it not amazing that humans can live anywhere they want? Is it not amazing that humans constantly figure out how to conquer the environment? Is it wrong to think that is amazing and root for human ingenuity when the environment puts up obstacles?

The surprising thing about The High Crusade is how much it celebrates Humanity. If you want to feel good about your species, this is a great story. Does anyone still write stories showing how amazing humanity is?

Apathy in the Face of Evil

Blood Meridian is a hard book to recommend to people. It is brilliant and unforgettable. It is violent and gruesome.

Those things are not separable.

It’s a post-Civil War tale of The Kid (never named) as he joins a marauding band of scalp hunters in the borderlands between Mexico and what will eventually become part of the United States. Led by John Glanton, this gang commits atrocities everywhere it goes while it hunts down assorted bands of Apaches and Comanches committing comparable atrocities wherever they go.

One lesson: if you are in charge of a small town in this country and you decide to hire Glanton to rid you of the threat of a murderous tribe threatening to rampage through your town, just know that the cure is as bad as the disease. But, that lesson doesn’t have a lot of relevance to you, Dear Reader.

Instead, let us turn to Judge Holden, who summarizes the fundamental message of the book thus:

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is it once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes.

Judge Holden celebrates the degeneracy of man. He is, after all, the devil.

Holden is without a doubt one of the most terrifying villains in literature. Larger than life, he rides with Glanton’s gang as they move from atrocity to atrocity. All the while, he offers a commentary on the world, recording every thing he finds in his leather notebook right before destroying those things.

Why keep this record of things he will destroy? “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent….In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”

Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on his earth, he said.
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
I don’t see what that has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.

From the beginning until the end, the Judge hovers over the book, finding that thread of order by destroying everything around it. The Judge is the ruler of this world. Do you doubt it? Recall: Satan offered the world to Christ, but Christ turned down the offer.

You read Blood Meridian and you know you would never want to meet the Judge face-to-face. You close the book in a bit of relief that he is just fictional. Except he isn’t fictional at all. Blood Meridian is a work of fiction, but it is, as they say in Hollywood, based on a true story.

The source is Samuel E Chamberlain’s autobiography, My Confession. Chamberlain tells of joining a marauding gang of scalp hunters led by John Glanton. A surprising number of the horrific events in the novel are right there in this autobiographical tale. You want to think that McCarthy is making this all up, but the violence was very real.

The biggest shock of My Confessions is the second in command in Glanton’s crew is none other than Judge Holden. Chamberlain deftly sketches the nature of Holden in two paragraphs. The only way you could tell that the following two paragraphs are from the true autobiography and not the world of fiction is the difference in style. The description of Holden fits either one.

The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size called “Judge” Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Fronteras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged with the crime.
Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was “plum centre” with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anywhere he had the advantage and strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight, and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his department towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did.

So much for your sigh of relief that Holden is purely a work of fiction.

Holden is evil; there is really no other word for him. He has all the beguiling charm of evil; a perfect example of Milton’s Satan Problem in which the evil character in Paradise Lost is the most fascinating person in the tale of the revolt in Heaven and on earth. When Holden is on the scene, you cannot look away.

What do you do when you face evil? McCarthy’s brilliance as a novelist comes in the fact, that when you read the novel, you know exactly what you do, because McCarthy put you in the novel. You are The Kid.

You don’t think you are The Kid because you haven’t joined a gang of people committing one atrocity after another. After all, you haven’t scalped anyone lately. You just go along with the flow of things, not really doing anything particularly bad. Exactly like The Kid.

A fortune teller with a pack of Tarot Cards entertains Glanton’s Gang one night in the desert. The Judge points the fortune teller in the direction of The Kid, who draws a card. Four of Cups. The novel does not explain the significance of this card, but fortunately we have Google. Four of Cups is the card indicating apathy or disillusionment. You don’t really notice it that much when just reading this story of horrors, but as soon as you step back and isolate the Kid, you realize that Apathy is indeed the right description. Here we have someone surrounded by sadistic evildoers and The Kid just floats along.

The Kid knows what is happening is evil and wrong. He is himself the violent type, but we see throughout the story he has the remnants of a moral code which keep him from going that far, as if he is thinking that as long as he hasn’t actually scalped anyone lately, he isn’t that bad. As the Judge himself says to The Kid, “There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.”

In the face of evil, The Kid was apathetic. The Judge again: “For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?”

If I had to name one novel from the last 50 years that is the best description of the age in which we live, Blood Meridian is it. Our problem, the problem of our generation, is that we are perfectly happy to isolate wrongdoing in an individual here and there and sometimes we are even willing to say this or that person is evil. But, we do not want to face up to the fact that the degeneracy of man is all around us. We do not like to acknowledge that human depravity is very real and omnipresent. We have no ground on which to stand. And so, we roll with the times, and every now and then we do something that seems a bit kind, like abandoning a wounded man in the desert rather than shooting him, as a way of convincing ourselves we aren’t that bad.

What if Blood Meridian is right. What if the world in which we live is every bit this bad. What if Judge Holden is real and walks among us. Those aren’t really even questions; you know those things are true. And you, like me and so very many others, draws the Four of Cups and just keep on going.

Is L’affaire GameStop a Morality Play?

Where were you when you heard the news about GameStop?

When it showed up in your Twitter feed, you were probably shocked. Senator Cruz agreed with Representative Ocasio-Cortez, with both saying that what Robinhood did was unacceptable. Clearly, it must be really bad.

Then Senator Hawley joined the fray in an article over at First Things titled “Calling Wall Street’s Bluff.” The narrative quickly became that of a good, old-fashioned morality play, in which the “Elites” are attacked by a ragtag bunch of “Ordinary People” and the ordinary people win, raiding the castle and carrying off some ill-gotten loot. The Elites are unhappy. Fortunately, our elected representatives are here to stick up for the regular folks. Congress is scheduling hearings. Janet Yellen is launching her own investigation.

Truth be told, as the whole story was unfolding, I laughed. It was so fun and crazy—a real-life video game revolution. The names themselves are priceless: Reddit and Robinhood and WallStreetBets vs. Melvin Capital and Wall Street. Coming soon to Netflix. (That is not a joke: Netflix really is planning a show. So is MGM.)

Alas, sober reality is not nearly as exciting as all of the foregoing makes it sound. Not everything in life is a morality play. Sometimes it is just a bunch of technical details that really don’t lend themselves to a story with good guys and bad guys. Sometimes there are good guys and bad guys on both sides. So, before rushing off to change policy and enshrine the ordinary people as heroes for beating the dastardly elites, let’s pause and look at the details.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

What Has Reason to do with Faith?

“From Faith to Reason” was the title of my first year collegiate Comparative Literature course. We started with Dante’s Inferno and ended with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

The message was clear; Western civilization used to be based on Faith, but then came the Enlightenment and now Faith is Dead, Long Live Reason.

Fortunately, the teacher for the course was obviously bored and lousy, so I didn’t really absorb the lesson.

Over the years I have seen that story line repeated innumerable times. You can imagine my surprise when I started actually reading the Great Books and the history of the West to find out that it is an absolute canard that the West moved from Faith to Reason at any point in its past. Western Thought has always been a blend of faith and reason, a melding of Athens and Jerusalem.

Samuel Gregg’s Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization is the latest attempt to beat back the myth that faith is no longer important. This is an argument that oddly needs to be repeated time and again; Gregg provides some clues as to why the point needs repeating.

The starting place for Gregg’s argument is that contrary to the popular story, the Enlightenment was not devoid of religion. My favorite example is Newton’s Principia, which easily wins if you had to pick the single most paradigmatic Enlightenment work. Newton invents calculus to demonstrate that a clean mathematical model of a heliocentric solar system shows that the same force causes celestial motions and apples falling to the ground. Before Newton, there is some doubt about how best to describe planetary motion; post-Newton, the debate is over. Newton closes his book with a long explanation of how all this demonstrates the amazing nature of God.

But Newton is not the only incredibly devout member in the pantheon of the Enlightenment. Many, probably most, of your own list of Enlightenment greats were quite religious. (Not Hume and Voltaire, obviously.) Gregg documents the breadth of the interactions of faith and reason throughout Europe. The Enlightenment’s ties to religious thought runs deep; it was religion, after all, that provided the argument that the world was sensible and follows predictable patterns because it was created by God. Without the idea of a reasonable God behind the whole thing, there is no reason to think the world itself is reasonable.

While the Enlightenment itself was a manifestation of the interaction of reason and faith, Gregg argues there were two outgrowths of the Enlightenment that proved to be hostile to faith. Prometheanism and Scientism both have their roots in the Enlightenment, but did not fully develop until the 19^th century.

Prometheanism is Gregg’s term for the view that humans can be created anew simply by changing the external structures which surround them. There is no innate human nature, no stamp of original sin. Fix the society and people will thrive. All the pathologies we see about us are purely the result of societal structures corrupting people from the moment of birth. In a Promethean world, faith is the enemy; it is a legacy of all those old structures which cause modern societal ills. Reason is the hero; if we just reason out the good society and have the will and power to impose it, then people will conform.

The second misbegotten manifestation of the Enlightenment is Scientism, the belief that the scientific method can discover all that can be known. Physics and metaphysics are divorced and only the former contains actual knowledge. Metaphysics is mere fantasy. The ultimate expression of scientism is the oft-repeated phrase, meant to be a conversation stopper, “Scientists say X” or “My opponent is a science denier.” Science attains the status of Holy Writ and so there is no need for any other source of authority, no need for faith.

The particular creeds generated by the combinations of Prometheanism and Scientism are obvious. Marx’s materialism with its inevitable historical laws eventually resulting in the perfect society as the material conditions are altered. Nietzsche’s observation that there is no longer such a thing as Truth with a capital T; that if all is relative, then the Will to Power is all there is.

The current manifestations are also obvious. Authoritarian Relativism with its claim that since everything is relative, and there is no Truth, there is no reason for the Enlighted Few to refrain from imposing their views on society. Liberal religion with its endless appeals to mere sentiment. Jihadism, with it assertion of truth immune to reason entirely. As Gregg’s title says, the Struggle for Western Civilization is the fight between those who believe in Reason and Faith and those in all these other movements which seek to destroy that union.

Gregg’s book is thus a call to arms, which makes a couple of features of the book so jarring. The chapter pointing to the problems arising from Marx and Nietzsche is entitled “Faiths of Destruction.” But, there is a third malevolent figure discussed in this chapters: John Stuart Mill. Marx, Mill and Nietzsche; you would be forgiven for thinking one of these three is not like the others.

From the first chapter to the last, Gregg asserts that freedom and liberty are the most important innovations in the West. You would naturally enough think that Mill is one of the heroes of the story. Instead, Gregg notes that Mill had no love for faith, that in Mill’s ideal world there is an inherent relativism. Mill’s ideal society did not privilege any particular view. As Gregg explains:

The notion that people might have good reasons to believe that a religions revealed truths (dogmas) might be true or that religious institutions like Oxford and Cambridge had a responsibility to explain their religious beliefs to their students was plainly foreign to Mill. Nor did he seem conscious that his own insistence that such things have no place in any institution of learning sounds itself rather dogmatic.

This is, as I said, terribly jarring. Is Gregg arguing that Oxford and Cambridge have a responsibility to teach religious truth as fact? Does Gregg reject the idea of the university being the marketplace of ideas? After all, one of the things he decries is higher education imposing its authoritarian relativism on the community.

Then a chapter later when Gregg turns to Jihadism and the discussion of Islamic terrorists who murder in the name of their faith, he begins the discussion by noting that Muslim terrorists are not the first people who rejected reason in favor of a blind fideism. The earlier example of this type of evil threat to Western Civilization? The Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, you know, made some snide remarks about the Roman Catholic Church’s reliance on Aristotle for working out theology. Is Gregg really suggesting a link between Martin Luther and Osama bin Laden?

Gregg really tips his hand in the penultimate chapter “A Way Back.” The way back from the cliff over which Western Civilization is heading is Vatican I, in particular the decree Dei Filius. Now Gregg is obviously free to argue that the “faith” in Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization is, at its heart, the Roman Catholic Church. But, it does seem odd that if the struggle is as fierce as Gregg believes it to be, that Gregg does not do a bit more to make Protestants feel welcome on his side.

After all, his best example of the prominence of faith in the Enlightenment itself was the role of the Scottish clergy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Clearly Protestants have played a huge role in the integration of reason and faith. Indeed, there is a pretty direct line from Martin Luther’s emphasis of the priesthood of all believers to Enlightenment ideas that the people should be able to elect their rulers. Since Gregg clearly applauds the latter, it is staggering that Luther is lumped in with modern terrorists.

Even still, Gregg’s book is an important addition to the literature defending the notion of Western Civilization against its very obvious enemies. Gregg’s constant return to the idea of God as logos, God as the source and embodiment of reason, makes it hard to evade his argument that reason and faith have been co-mingled for two thousand years in the West. The attempts to rip religious influences out of the West are nothing short of an attempt to destroy the West itself.

One final note on the book. I read the book with a student reading group. There was a remarkable split in the way the students reacted to the book. The history and classics majors thought the book was a quick read. The students with other majors thought the book was incredibly dense and hard to read. I didn’t notice it when I was reading it—I too thought it was a quick read—but hearing the students who found it dense talk about it, it was immediately obvious why. Gregg assumes the Reader has a high degree of familiarity with the important names and events in the history of the West. It would be nice if Gregg’s assumptions about what is common knowledge were correct. But sadly, Gregg’s thesis that the struggle for Western Civilization is being lost is made remarkably obvious by the fact that some very smart, very curious students who are happy to think and argue about important ideas, the exact type of people Gregg would love to reach and that anyone would want to hire, have been miserably failed by the modern education system.