THE bOOKLESS VS THE BOOKLESS (via Ed Driscoll):

Not Much Left: LOSING OUR DELUSIONS (Martin Peretz, 02.18.05, New Republic)

I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking in the early 1960s, the high point of post-New Deal liberalism, who pronounced conservatism dead. Conservatism, he said, was "bookless," a characteristic Galbraithian, which is to say Olympian, verdict. Without books, there are no ideas. And it is true: American conservatism was, at the time, a congeries of cranky prejudices, a closed church with an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled swells. William F. Buckley Jr. comes to mind, and a few others whose names will now resonate with almost nobody. Take as just one instance Russell Kirk, an especially prominent conservative intellectual who, as Clinton Rossiter (himself a moderate conservative) wrote, has "begun to sound like a man born one hundred and fifty years too late and in the wrong country."

At this point in history, it is liberalism upon which such judgments are rendered. And understandably so. It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. The most penetrating thinker of the old liberalism, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is virtually unknown in the circles within which he once spoke and listened, perhaps because he held a gloomy view of human nature. However gripping his illuminations, however much they may have been validated by history, liberals have no patience for such pessimism. So who has replaced Niebuhr, the once-commanding tribune to both town and gown? It's as if no one even tries to fill the vacuum. Here and there, of course, a university personage appears to assert a small didactic point and proves it with a vast and intricate academic apparatus. In any case, it is the apparatus that is designed to persuade, not the idea.

Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really. What's left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs (some dubious, some not) that Republicans aren't funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country.

Those pronouncements were silly when they were made, but it's shocking to hear someone repeat them now. Consider only this: it was in the early '60s that this speech was given. Awfully hard to argue that it's devoid of ideas or that those ideas haven't animated the past quarter century.

Meanwhile, Mr. Peretz ignores the most obvious fact about Reinhold Niebuhr: his politics flowed from his firm belief in Original Sin. A Left which thinks religion a mere superstition has no access to that wisdom and, because it is the Truth, nothing much to say to us about the human condition and the kind of ploitics we need to practice.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 18, 2005 8:21 PM