Coulter-legende

The Dolchstosslegende comments thread I was participating on in Ross Douthat’s blog, and the Ann Coulter discussion I’ve had with Alpheus strike me as having important points of congruence—the effects of voicing internal critique on emboldening enemies. I’d like to spell out some of this train of thought at some length, to point out similarities and differences in the two situations.

These questions both turn on the precise nature of the virtues of free speech. One part of the virtue of free speech is its central role in one’s status as a free citizen; you cannot be fully free and not have control over your own speech. I would add, for my own theoretical interests, that you must be free to use persuasive speech upon your fellow citizens in order to be a full citizen. This virtue of free speech is absolute, and admits of no conditions or stipulations.

Free speech is also a practical virtue. Free speech allows for criticism, correction of course, the pooling of collective wisdom, the emergence of the most persuasive argument—which, if not universally the best argument, has the best track record to date. This practical virtue is also absolute, likewise admitting of no conditions or stipulations.

But to say these virtues are absolute is not the end of the story. Free speech and critique does have countervailing flaws—the effect on an audience beyond the community. That is, the virtues of free speech are largely (entirely?) within the context of a civil community—and do not take account of the effects of free speech beyond the civil community. Here, the classic case is one of free speech in wartime. Self-critique, the essential means of self-improvement, is also a revelation of weakness—statements of mistakes of tactics, strategy, etc. This directly informs enemies of the community of those weaknesses—and, furthermore, strengthens their own will to fight, as they perceive themselves to be fighting a weaker enemy. Even within the civic community, such self-critique is damaging: ordinary people desire to be on a winning side, and dislike fighting on a losing side. To engage in self-critique is to risk loss of morale—even panic—within the community. This is known to anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of human nature: avowedly objective analyses disguise partisan points; “positive descriptions” argue for particular policies, while “negative descriptions” argue against them—and both, to the extent they are believed, are to a non-trivial extent self-fulfilling prophecies. Another way to put it is that speech is both informative and persuasive: the informative aspects argue for uncontrolled freedom of speech; the persuasive aspects argue for some self-control.

In early modern Europe, my field of professional study, “self-control” was the keynote. An elite minority self-consciously controlled their speech, for fear of panicking the majority. The switch to an ideology of free speech involved an assumption that the populace as a whole was able and willing to exercise such self-control—to have freedom of speech, but to know when not to exercise it, for fear of the adverse persuasive effects. This assumption has somewhat dropped out in later centuries—but obviously not entirely. The Bush administration has repeatedly harped on the persuasive aspects of free speech, while their Democratic opponents have emphasized the informative ones. (They talk past each other; it is the dual nature of free speech that makes it such a vexed issue.) This does, I think, have some bearing on the two parties’ ideological bearings—Republicans preserve the older aspects of European thought more than Democrats do—but it also is simply a question of who is in power. The Clinton administration, after all, criticized Limbaugh et al after the McVeigh bombing on grounds that essentially emphasized the persuasive nature of talk-radio. The impulses to PCify speech also reflect an acknowledgment of the power of persuasive speech.

The question of self-critique in wartime, again, is where these different aspects of free speech conflict most tensely. A free republic must allow self-critique, even in wartime—but the persuasive aspects of speech can damage that republic as a whole. And critical speech obviously has different goals—some is genuinely meant to improve the conduct of a war, while some is meant to sabotage the conduct of the war. Some meant to do the one may result in the other! A certain suspicion of such criticism is rational in supporters of a war.

There is, also, the question of moral critique of war policy during wartime. A free republic must allow moral critique, even during wartime. At the same time, civic virtue constantly enjoins keeping an eye to the interests and success of the civic community—independent of every other moral value—and provides a constant moral imperative toward silence, that countervails against the moral imperatives toward critique. I do find an acknowledgment of the existence of this moral imperative toward silence too lacking in the left nowadays.

And how does this tie in with Ann Coulter? – well, these dynamics obviously apply within civic communities as well as beyond their boundaries. No-enemies-on-the-left and no-enemies-on-the-right are both attitudes that enjoin a suspension of (moral) self-critique to defend a particular faction or organization against its enemies within the state. If conservatives criticize Ann Coulter, it emboldens liberals and weakens the fighting energy of conservatives. The reverse holds true for criticism of Michael Moore. The silence of the Catholic Church about pedophile priests—the silence of all organizations about corruption within—also reflect the truth that studious silence is often more persuasive and effective (at least in the short and medium term) than rigorous self-critique. The argument for withholding public critique of the conduct of the Iraq War is parallel to the argument for withholding public critique of Ann Coulter’s conduct.

And the difference? – the definition of civic community. The moral argument for such silence is highest as regards our actual civic community; to apply it to conservatives, liberals, the Church, the Mafia, etc., is to swear allegiance and affection to that group alone, and to divorce oneself from the larger community—to declare internal war on enemies within the state. If we are genuinely members of a larger civic order, we must regard our internal opponents as something more than enemies—people to whom we owe more than unflinching omerta. We owe our smaller groups some extra measure of loyalty—conservatives should be less willing to criticize Coulter than Moore, leftists less willing to criticize Moore than Coulter. But at some point we must break—when the smoking gun is revealed, the Republicans have to turn on Nixon. (And the Democrats, to their great and shameful failure, failed to turn on Clinton—which is why I left the Democratic party.) There are no hard-and-fast guidelines—but whatever unflinching silence we give our enemies, we should provide less for our fellow citizens, no matter how deeply we disagree with them.

The 10% solution revisited

Today's edition of a major Texas newspaper, The Austin American-Statesman, includes an op-ed piece (registration required) calling for the elimination of the Texas's "10% rule," which provides that students in the top 10% of the graduating class of any Texas high school are automatically guaranteed admission to any school in the University of Texas system. The op-ed is worthy of notice for the light it sheds on the problems of affirmative action in American education.

Texas embarked on its 10% experiment back in 1998 in response to the 1996 Hopwood v. Texas decision by the fifth circuit court of appeals, which ruled that Texas could not use race-based admissions to achieve diversity in its public colleges. At the time, the policy seemed like an innovative way to create racial diversity (since many Texas high schools are predominantly minority) but without the invidious practice of actually selecting or "advantaging" college applicants based on race. It would also reward students from poor or otherwise disadvantaged school districts who had nonetheless managed to achieve relative to their peers.

In 2003, however, the Supreme Court's Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger rulings (the University of Michigan cases) gave legal cover to the proponents of traditional affirmative action, and calls to replace the 10% rule by a more traditional form of affirmative action have been increasing for the past several years. Recently, the Texas legislature again declined to modify or replace the rule.

The major argument of those who favor getting rid of the 10% rule is that it has not prevented racial diversity at most Texas universities from declining substantially compared to pre-Hopwood levels. As the American-Statesmen op-ed notes, only 2,000 or 48,000 students at UT Austin last year were black. (UT Austin is the flagship of the Texas higher-education system and the school most of those eligible for automatic admission under the 10% rule choose to attend. "10-percenters" from around the state of Texas now make up almost three-quarters of UT undergraduate admissions.)

Now this is where things get interesting. It turns out that the reason that the 10% rule fails to produce racial diversity is not that it fails to guarantee admission to large numbers of black students. The problem is that those black students in the top 10% of their classes don't want to attend Texas colleges. From the American-Statesman op-ed:

The majority of the high achievers in the black community attend Spelman College, Morehouse College, Hampton Institute, Tuskegee, Howard or other historically black colleges and universities whose tuition may be double that of UT. Those colleges may also offer fewer resources for aid. Other promising minority students are recruited by some of the best private universities in the country, including Rice and Baylor in Texas. A few go to Harvard, where about 600 of the school's student population are black. Houston leads the nation in the number of applications to Spelman College.

So the problem is that high-achieving blacks either choose to go to better schools where they can be admitted under more traditional affirmative action policies, or they attend majority-black colleges -- even if it means substantially increased tuition. No one now suggests that the problem is one of racial discrimination by public colleges in Texas. Indeed, UT's Longhorn Scholars program offers special benefits -- free tuition, mentoring, tutoring etc. -- to ten-percenters from 70 specially designated low-income high schools, almost all of which are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic.

The question is: should the University of Texas chase minority applicants further down the ladder of achievement just because Harvard and other elite private schools are doing so? Should less-qualified blacks be pursued for admission because more qualified blacks tend to show a preference for attending traditionally black colleges, even though attending those colleges means higher tuition and less academic opportunity and prestige? (Prairie View University and Texas Southern, two public universities in Texas with traditionally large minority populations, do still manage to attract a significant number of black ten-percenters.)

I am not at all sure that the answer is yes. If the "10% solution" has in some sense failed, it has failed only because many top-flight private schools still set the bar for black applicants much lower than the bar for white applicants, or because many blacks themselves tend to prefer majority-black schools.

And lost in recent discussion have been the 10% experiment's signal successes. Blacks at the University of Texas do roughly as well as their white peers. They do not drop out at higher rates. Students in the Longhorn Scholars program do as well as non- ten-percenters with much higher SAT scores. Perhaps just as important as these measures, no black or Hispanic student at the University of Texas needs to carry the stigma of having been admitted on the basis of anything other than personal achievement. Few other colleges in America can make these claims.

Animals in antiquity

Okay, this isn't exactly politics. Or culture. I'm not sure what it is. All I know is,I find this sort of thing fascinating, because the story of the development of human civilization is also the story of how mankind has taken one species of animal after another under its wing. ("Wing" is a metaphor, of course -- one indication of just how much we've come to identify with the creatures we've brought into our homes and cities over the centuries.)

The Washington Post article linked to above makes it sound like it's news that cats domesticated themselves. This has, in fact, been hypothesized for a long time, and it also seems to be true of dogs. The prevailing theory is that, perhaps a thousand centuries ago, wolves came sniffing around our campfires for the meat left on animal carcasses. A few wolves carried a neotonic genetic mutation that made them retain into adulthood some of the gentleness, playfulness and small size of babies, and so they were welcomed and allowed to stay, especially when they proved to be good hunting companions and guardians of the campsite.

These were the weaklings among wolves. If they had stayed in the wild, they would have been ruthlessly weeded out through natural selection. As it was, they managed to hitch their genetic wagon to a rising star.

The new research (here's another description) basically confirms that the same thing happened for cats. It appears that all domestic breeds can trace their lineage to the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago -- the place and time when humans first mastered the art of agriculture and the first cities and civilizations began to rise. The abnormally cute and affectionate among the local wildcats were welcome to catch and eat the little rodents who squeezed through the cracks in our mud-brick granaries. Like the dogs, the felines have been with us ever since, and they spread, with agriculture, around the world. (I imagine some Mesopotamian Triptolemus bringing cereals to the inhabitants of India or Europe and handing over, along with the dry grains, a squirming kitty: "You'll also want one of these.")

From there, domestication exploded: cows, horses, chickens (the great accomplshment of the Mohenjo-Daro civilization), sheep, goats, etc. But we don't, routinely, let any of these creatures roam free and poop in our houses. That privilege is reserved for the two species that joined the human project when it was just getting underway. (I'm excluding, of course, such perverse phenomena as ferrets -- and sickos who mistreat animals.)

More good news from the Court

At this hour, it appears that American conservatives have won two great and, to some extent, unexpected victories, one in the legislature and the other on the Supreme Court. First, cloture on the immigration bill has been defeated and this means the bill itself is almost certainly dead. Second, in Parents v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County , the High Court has rejected the use of race in school assignment.

The victory on the Supreme Court is by far the more important -- a significant step back from the obsession with racial percentages that should never have resulted from Brown v. Board of Education. This decision doesn't overturn Brown, as some on the left are already claiming . Instead, it begins to return American jurisprudence to the ideals -- enshrined in amendments to the U.S. Constitution -- that Brown was meant to enforce.

Dismayingly but unsurprisingly, the claim that today's decision "undermines Brown" can be found in Justice Breyer's dissent, which Stevens, in his separate dissent, calls "unanswerable." But Breyer's hyperventilations are in fact answered, by Justice Thomas in a sharp concurrence arguing that the Court's liberal bloc is doing little more than updating the arguments of the old segregationists. Here's a taste:

What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today. Whatever else the Court's rejection of the segregationists' arguments in Brown might have established, it certainly made clear that state and local governments cannot take from the Constitution a right to make decisions on the basis of race by adverse possession. The fact that state and local governments had been discriminating on the basis of race for a long time was irrelevant to the Brown Court. The fact that racial discrimination was preferable to the relevant communities was irrelevant to the Brown Court. And the fact that the state and local governments had relied on statements in this Court's opinions was irrelevant to the Brown Court. The same principles guide today's decision. None of the considerations trumpeted by the dissent is relevant to the constitutionality of the school boards' race-based plans because no contextual detail...can "provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make decisions on the basis of race."

Have I mentioned my affection for Justice Thomas?

On the Dolchstosslegende

There's some discussion as to whether conservatives should say America was stabbed in the back by a liberal media, etc., in the course of the Iraq War, and whether the comparison to post-WWI Germany is appropriate. I think it's worth pointing out in this discussion that what made the post-WWI German accusation noxious was that it was false--that Jews, Socialists, etc. had been overwhelmingly enthusiastic for Germany and German victory throughout the war, and that the war-weariness they felt in 1918 was no more or less than the war-weariness felt by the entire German people. Most Jews and Socialists in 1919 and thereafter, as most Germans, did not argue the rightness of the German cause in 1914; they simply endured its defeat. This contrasts strongly with America's experience in both Vietnam and Iraq, where much of the political left (and far less of the center and right) has opely attacked the morality of these wars, while they were/are in progress, has expended political capital to end them early, and by the inevitable corollary of emboldening our enemies, arguably have made a small contribution to the deaths of American soldiers on the front lines. Should we not make a true accusation, simply because a false accusation was made in the past? If the American left had been gung-ho for victory in Iraq, then we should refrain from such accusations. But they were not, and we may call them to account on their own words.

Time to ditch Ann Coulter

It doesn't really matter is there is a double standard applied to her, and that she is condemned when people on the left make equivalent comments. She is still uncivil, and the taint of association with her discredits all conservatives. Time to stop associating with her; time to stop lending her a megaphone. Is it worse for the Democratic party to have a man morally responsible for murder and legally responsible for defamation of character as an unrebuked candidate for President? Sure. But that's no reason not to disassociate ourselves from Coulter, permanently.

Follow-up on African Pentecostalism

If religion is the great aligner of international politics - which I think it is - the the US, at core a coalition of dissenting Protestant denominations - has heretofore operated at a disadvantage, for lack of other nations with a similar religious background. The spread of evangelical Protestantism after World War II (and especially in the last generation) to much of Asia, Latin America, and Africa has the potential to create for the first time popular affiliations between a substantial portion of the world and America. If Africa is now 17% Pentecostal - and presumably a higher portion of Subsaharan Africa - that is an extraordinary shift. If the Pentecostal growth is drawn largely from Anglicans, Catholics, etc. this is a less epochal shift; if it is from pagans (or Muslims?), then the importance is greater. I do think we may be watching in this generation the absorption of the last great populations of pagans wordlwide into the separate monotheisms - and, in China, Korea, and Japan, an extraordinary collapse in the numbers of Buddhists. Some implications:

1) The civilizational war with Islam may eventually have a front line in Africa, where Muslim-Pentecostal hostility may drawn in America's Evangelicals. An African nation with oil, Protestants, and Muslims - Nigeria, say - is a prime spot for to spark a new battle in the war.

2) The shift within Christianity from majority Catholic to majority dissenting Protestant (between, shall we say, 1975 and 2025) will also be of extraordinary import for the history of Christianity.

3) If Pentecostalism is particularly suited for the conversion of pagans to semi-Christianity, this could be taken as a dubious comment on Pentecostalism.

4) When will the American black churches evangelize in Africa? Or do they? My sense is that they have no great sense of African mission, but I could be wrong. But if they do start to evangelize more, what will be the effect?

5) I presume the spread of Pentecostalism, etc. is shallow so far, and could be reversed. But if it sticks, it's one of the great stories of our time.

Hudge and Gudge talk immigration

In his book What's Wrong with the World, G.K. Chesterton wrote about two characters called Hudge and Gudge. One was a leftist ideologue, and one was a greedy plutocrat. I don't remember which was which, but it doesn't matter, because Chesterton's point was that Hudge and Gudge, despite their apparently adversarial outlooks, were ultimately similar in their pursuit of policies deleterious to democracy and to the common man.

I've been thinking of Chesterton a lot during the past few weeks, as the Hudges and Gudges in the U.S. Senate (and the Bush administration) have schemed with uncharacteristic energy in pursuit of a comprehensive immigration bill. I don't need to rehearse what's wrong with the bill in either its old incarnation or its new one -- better and wiser heads than mine have already documented all that. What I find chilling is the eagerness of the bill's proponents. I've never seen a group of politicians work so hard to craft a piece of legislation (or so hard to forestall democratic debate on one). Isn't it more than a little troubling that the Senate is never so galvanized as when it's pursuing policies opposed by an overwhelming majority of Americans?

Conservatives ahoy!

Over at The New Republic, some fellow named Johann Hari has written a hit piece on a National Review cruise last November. He went on the cruise, he says, "to find out what conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren't listening."

Despite Hari's heroic efforts to paint the NR crowd as comically loathsome and ignorant, the resulting portrait is a rather innocuous one. His slices of life aboard ship are only even moderately amusing if you think mainstream conservative ideas are so stupid that they're automatically funny. The most outrageous examples of right-wing behavior he's able to come up with are (1) someone calling Pinochet a hero -- this is wrong, but it's also incorrect to call him, as Hari does, a "fascist" -- and (2) several people suggesting that he flee his native Europe in the face of a Muslim demographic invasion.

It may just be that Hari is no Matt Labash (who built a career at the Weekly Standard by sneaking into left-wing venues for the purpose of penning mocking exposes). Then again, it may be that a collection of well-heeled conservatives isn't prone to be all that extreme either in their views or in their behavior.

And this is one of the divisions between right and left that always fortified me in my allegiance to conservatism. As a denizen of academe, I can attest that faculty cocktail parties -- where upscale liberals think conservatives aren't listening -- routinely feature the kind of ideological absurdity that Johann Hari apparently could only dream of overhearing.

Over the years, I've sort of compiled a mental checklist for my own private drinking game. To take only the more extreme items on the list, there's the expression of desire/willingness to see leading conservative die or be assassinated (glug), the gleefully nasty stereotyping of "average Americans" (glug) or "Christians" (glug), and the explicit disclaimer of emotional identification with the United States or the simple declaration that one is ashamed to be an American (glug-glug).

Less commonly, there's the stated desire to see the U.S. defeated in foreign conflict (glug), the espousal of a bizarre conspiracy theory (glug) or -- and this is my favorite -- the angry attack on some innocent cultural phenomenon as hyperconservative or reactionary propaganda (glug). At the last such party I attended, I could barely refrain from laughing as a tenured professor at an elite college heatedly denounced The March of the Penguins as "anti-woman." (Fortunately, I think the drink I took covered my laughter rather well.)

I don't mean to imply that all liberals are deranged or that one never hears cringe-inducing sentiments aired among conservatives -- I'm really only saying that it's a little odd for The New Republic to go looking to cast stones. After all, what if National Review decides to send its own undercover writer on one of TNR's cruises?

Oh.

African Pentecostalism

This article has some stunning claims:

The U.S. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says Pentecostalism is growing globally, with a quarter of the world's 2 billion Christians thought to be members of these faiths that emphasize speaking in tongues, divine healing, prophesy and a strongly literal interpretation of Bible stories. In Africa all churches are booming, but Pentecostalism is overtaking traditional Catholic and Anglican faiths brought by European colonizers over a century ago. Pentecostals and charismatics now account for 147 million Africans, 17 percent of the continent's people, compared with 5 percent in 1970, the World Christian Database says.

More on this later, but it supports a thesis I've mentioned before about the importance of the global spread of Evangelical Protestantism.

Love letter 2 Clarence Thomas

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Morse v. Frederick (aka the "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case) was pleasurable on several levels. Foremost, of course, is that the decision reached represents a fair approximation of justice and common sense. Beyond that, though, it's always nice to see two things punctured: the pomposity of the Court and liberal myths about Clarence Thomas.

The text of Frederick's banner, and the exegesis to which the Court felt compelled to subject it, took care rather nicely of the Court's pretensions to lofty dignity. Roberts's opinion for the majority shouldered the burden more gamely than Stevens's dissent (in which Souter and Ginsberg joined). Stevens felt compelled to protest, over and over, that the banner was "silly," "nonsensical" and "obtuse," a lame attempt to garner cheap notoreity. Compared to, say, a John Edwards stump speech, I actually found "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" to be a model of sober and self-effacing clarity, so I suppose there may be some method in Stevens's argument that this sort of expression ought to be protected by the First Amendment.

The really interesting opinion in the case, though, was Thomas's concurence, written and subscribed to by him alone. The two great myths about Thomas are that he is (1) a half-wit and (2) the intellectual shadow of Antonin Scalia. The two myths are mutually reinforcing, but the first is far and away the more transparently false. Read any opinion by Thomas -- there used to be a popular canard that he never wrote any -- and you find yourself in the presence of an exceptionally rigorous and lucid thinker, even by the standards of the judiciary. He is also a bold jurist, far bolder in fact than Scalia or any other conservative on the Court. His concurrence today is vintage Thomas, arguing that Tinker v. Des Moines -- the controlling opinion in school free-speech cases since 1969 and the starting point for all the other opinions in Morse -- was badly decided and ought to be jettisoned. He joins with the majority ruling, he says,

...because it erodes Tinker's hold in the realm of student speech, even though it does so by adding to the patchwork of exceptions to the Tinker standard. I think the better approach is to dispense with Tinker altogether, and given the opportunity, I would do so.

Thomas differs from his conservative colleagues in his regular expressions of contempt for bad precedent: contrast Thomas's concurrence in Morse with that of Alito and Kennedy, who are chiefly concerned to make it clear that this ruling should not be seen as undermining Tinker. But their desire (and that of Roberts) to defend Tinker can only be reconciled with a reasonable outcome in Morse through the rather overblown assertion that marijuana use by teens is something really exceptionally bad -- one of that galaxy of singularities that warp constitutional jurisprudence in surrounding space.

I'm by no means a legal scholar, but I've never understood conservatives' devotion to precedent in constitutional law. When liberals talk about the importance of precedent, they're talking to conservatives. They don't quite mean what they say, and they use the sanctity of precedent only to enforce their own constitutional version of the Brezhnev doctrine: new liberal understandings of the Constitution, however radical and however upsetting to previous certainties, immediately acquire the status of precedent and are never to be wholly undone.

The question is, why do conservative judges buy into this? I understand the value of precedent in statute law, but it seems to me that constitutional law, especially where the Supreme Court is concerned, and especially in a republic with a written constitution, is a very different animal. If a lower court misunderstands something, they can be corrected by a higher court. If the Supreme Court misunderstands statute law, then the legislature can correct the problem by rewriting the law. But if the Supreme Court misunderstands the Constitution, and is unwilling thereafter to admit to a mistake, then there is no recourse apart from the incredibly onerous process of amending the Constitution itself. And this process was deliberately made onerous by the founders because the Constitution was not meant to be amended lightly.

I suppose most conservatives are afraid that if they don't maintain a proper respect for precedent, they'll be implicitly buying into liberal notions of a "living constitution." They don't want to cancel, say, Roe v. Wade at a stroke because what they most object to in Roe is the way it cancelled at a stroke all the decades of jurisprudence that came before. All I can say is, this leaves the struggle for the soul of the Constitution awfully one-sided. The appeal for me of a justice like Thomas is that he understands that the plain text of the Constitution (and the founders' usually equally plain ideas about it) should be, and are, sufficient "precedent."

Shifting away from a draft

An interesting webpage -- http://www.wri-irg.org/co/rtba/index.html -- lists what countries depend on the draft, and which on volunteer armed services. What's fascinating is the shift in Europe in the last decade or so--most of NATO (with the partial exception of Germany) has shifted from draft to volunteer. In Eastern Europe, this is explicitly associated with the modernization needed to get up to NATO standards. At this point, virtually all the advanced Western nations have shifted to a volunteer army.

This has some bearing on the occasional mutter to reinstitute a draft in the US. I don't think this is a good idea for a number of reasons--that our military doctrine is based in a great number of details on an army of high-quality volunteers, that a draftee army is very difficult (politically) to deploy overseas--but I am reinforced in this opinion by the fact that the consensus of the West is shifting toward the all-volunteer army.

I do think it's worth increasing the pay of our soldiers, increasing the number of our soldiers, and encouraging a desire by our citizens to serve in the military. But I strongly doubt that reinstating the draft will serve our fighting ability well. If some sort of universal service is deemed beneficial for the character of our citizens, make it exclusively a civilian service.

By way of introduction

To any reader who happens upon this blog: greetings!

This is to be a collaborative blog. We are Alpheus and Withywindle, two friends who are also both conservative academics. One of us is a classicist; the other, a historian. We are interested in our profession, in history and literature, and in modern politics and culture -- and we will write about all these subjects (and whatever else touches our fancy) in this blog.

The title of our blog says something about what we believe -- that, despite Tertullian's misgivings, Western civilization owes its triumphs to the creative tension between the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, and can only flourish (or even survive) by continually returning, in spirit, to Athens and Jerusalem. We expect our writings on this blog to reflect our allegiance to this dual tradition.

Our allegiance to the Western tradition is grounded in intellectual conviction, but it is also a matter of love. We love Athens and we love Jerusalem; we love the current champion of the West, our native land, the United States of America; we love the spirit of academic inquiry; we love liberty; we love the beauties of Western culture and the truths to which it has attained. This blog is an expression of our desire to be advocates of those beauties and those truths -- and their fierce defenders against all enemies.