"The Global and American Spirit" by Evan Lanning

It’s rare to find a collection of essays that range intelligently over a broad array of subjects, are easily readable and engaging, and fully hold your interest for 238 pages. That’s what author Evan Lanning has managed to achieve with The Global and American Spirit.

Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine. The Constitution and the Anti-Federalists objections to it. Alexis de Toqueville. The controversy over Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. A fascinating survey of the American novel. How about philosophical perspectives in The Grapes of Wrath? Book reviews. An examination of Tolkien’s ideas. 

Lanning seems comfortable and eminently knowledgeable in the worlds of American history, literature, politics, philosophy, and current events. Here are a few of the standout essays.

“Aristotle and Politics” discusses the Greek philosopher’s ideas on the three associations which serve as the basis of community – the household., the village, and the polis – and how they conflict with socialism (proving there’s nothing new under the sun; ancient Greece had its socialism proponents, too). 

In “Cicero and De Oratore,” Lanning considers that convincing oratory doesn’t necessarily happen because of “rational argument, logical dialog, or elegant and adorned prose.” Convincing oratory happens through appeals to the passions and the emotions.

“Integrity and the Constitution” examines the argument between constitutionalist originalists and those who believe the Constitution should be a “living document.”

“The Jefferson Controversy: When Politics Meet History” views the Jefferson / Sally Hemmings issue through the lens of politics and delves into the actual evidence for Jefferson fathering children by his slave.

“The Continuity and Progress of the American Novel” studies how American literature has been shaped by culture, politics, religion, or some combination of the three. Lanning looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, My Antonia by Willa Cather, The Sun Also Risesby Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. 

“Taking Sides in American History” asks, and answers, questions like, did the Great Society fail? Did rock and roll upend American family and social customs? Was the Americanization of the war in Vietnam inevitable? And should America remain a nation of immigrants?

And there’s much more.

Lanning is a field representative of the Leadership Institute, which provides training for conservatives in campaigns, fundraising, grassroots organizing, youth politics, and communications. He lives in Indiana.

The Global and American Spirit is a collection of insightful, well-written essays that directly and indirectly inform many of our contemporary social, economic, and political issues.

Top photograph by Tom Coe via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Out of the Ashes" by Anthony Esolen

Whatever else it did, the election of 2016 reignited the culture wars in the United States. That likely means they had never really gone away in the first place, and were simmering below the surface, ready to erupt when a catalyst came along.

Where you find your own place in these wars will likely determine your response to Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen. A professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island, Esolen takes a rather dark view of contemporary American culture. And he defines culture broadly – politics, the arts, relationships, education, faith and religion, and even our definitions of beauty and truth.

It’s difficult to argue with him.

The book was written before the election, but it’s as if Esolen anticipated “fake news” and “alternative facts,” otherwise known as lying (or “misspeaking,” the clumsy word invented to cover making false statements). That’s his first critique of American culture – we lie about everything, and we believe what fits our own pre-existing or preconceived beliefs.

Esolen goes on. We’ve lost any concept of the idea of beauty. Public education, and higher education, are disasters. Our ideas of manhood and womanhood have been turned on their heads, if not obliterated. Our understanding of both work and play are seriously lacking, and those lacks have consequences. And out ideas of community participation and involvement are talking to our friends (people of like mind) on Facebook.

“So we need to clear out the garbage, admit our errors, and rebuild,” he writes. “When your only choices are repentance or oblivion, you repent.” Of course, we have entire industries that depend upon those errors continuing, regardless of the cliff they may be taking us toward.

This is an easy book to read and a difficult book to digest and accept. He speaks hard words, words that will produce outrage, especially among those who might classify themselves as progressive left.

On schools: “…the schools we have built are monstrosities that reflect the government we have built, a government that has taken in an all-eating life of its own.”

On the current crop of students disrupting universities: “It is also something of a mistake to point at the students and laugh at them for being weaklings. The students hold the hammer and they know it. …In our world of inversions, power is granted to people who claim that they have no power and who resent the greatness of their own forebears. They do not seek ‘safety.’ They seek to destroy. The strong man is bound and gagged, and the pistol is pointed at his head – the seat of reason itself.”

In fact, Esolen argues that high education no longer occurs at most of our colleges and universities. It’s difficult to defend higher education when you take a look at what’s being taught in English and the so-called social sciences.

His solutions are radical. Some aspects of the culture will simply need to be allowed to collapse, while alternatives are developed and nurtured. Some of what he proposes may be politically difficult if not impossible.

Anthony Esolen

Esolen is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (2008) and numerous other books, including Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature (2007); The Beauty of the Word (2012); Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (2013); Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching (2014); Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity (2014); and Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (2016). He has also translated Dante’s The Divine Comedy and On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.

In 2016, Esolen spoke out against what he called Providence College’s “totalitarian diversity cult” in Crisis Magazine and sparked protests and demands for his punishment. The president of the college, a Catholic priest, affirmed his right to academic freedom but publicly criticized his stand on the college’s diversity efforts.

In Out of the Ashes, Esolen looks at culture holistically. It’s not simply a case of one aspect or one area being sick, but all of them. And each affects the others.

The book deserves serious consideration. It is a serious book making its case for fundamental, radical, disruptive change.

Photograph by Brigitte Tohm via Upsplash. Used with permission.

Yuval Levin’s “The Fractured Republic”

Blame it on the politics of nostalgia.

In The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism,

Yuval Levin makes a convincing case why both of America’s major political parties have it wrong. The Democratic Party remains fixated on the good old days of the Great Society – the 1960s – when big government programs run by technocratic experts seemed to be the answer to everything. The Republicans are stuck in the glory days of the Reagan era – the 1980s – with supply-side economics and “it’s morning in America again.”

It doesn’t help clarify or resolve anything that the Democrats see the Reagan era as a betrayal of the Great Society, and the Republicans see the Great Society as the betrayal of the Constitution. Both parties are still stuck in the politics of nostalgia, and it’s a politics that is making America and the world increasingly unsettled and uneasy, if not dangerous.

What the two parties seem not to understand is that America, and Americans, have been changing since the 1960s and the 1980s. And Levin sees three key characteristics of that change: “the weakening of our established institutions, a growing detachment from the traditional sources of order and structure in American life, and an intensifying bifurcation of ways of living.”

Traditional sources of authority – political, cultural, religious, and social – have been diffusing and in some cases atomizing. These changes were not caused by the internet and social media – they were well underway by the time Tim Berners-Lee (not Al Gore) invented the worldwide web in the late 1980s. What the internet did do was to exacerbate and enhance the changes that were underway. The internet “is particularly well suited to our individualist, deconsolidated way of life,” Levin writes. “In some respects, the Internet embodies the kind of society we are in the process of becoming: it is decentralized, personalized, and individualized.”

It may seem paradoxical but it actually makes a strange kind of sense. As we decentralize and continue to “personalize and individualize,” more power flows to the federal government. And the federal government is increasingly ill-suited to deal with the domestic and global problems the country is grappling with, and not only because of the politic standoff in Congress.

Levin writes from a conservative perspective, but that perspective doesn’t blind him to the failures of conservatism and the Republican Party. He offers penetrating insights on all of our major institutions. For my generation, the Baby Boomers, he says the equivalent of this: “There’s no going back to the 1950s. Institutions were still respected and heeded. A belief in the progressive improvement of life was still holding sway. The mainline Protestant denominations were a dominant force in American society.” And none of that is true today. Consider the numerical collapse of the mainline Protestant groups who seemed determined to embrace full extinction.

And to my children, the Millennials, he says the equivalent of this: “Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s bad. Nothing works better for civilization than the family, and to throw out traditional concepts of the family is to seriously risk the eventual collapse of society. You may achieve complete individual freedom at the expense of that freedom.”

Yuval Levin

Levin is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of National Affairs. He also worked on staff at the White House and Congress and is a contributing editor to National Review and the Weekly Standard. He is also the author of Tyranny of Reason: The Origin and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook (2000); Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy (2008); and The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (2013).

The Fractured Republic isn’t only an explanation of what’s wrong; it also offers possible a number of solutions, beginning with building upon those forces that seem to be tearing our society apart. Levin doesn’t see a fundamental problem of inequality in America, but he does see what he calls the fundamental problem of immobility. Levin’s proposed solutions are not prescriptive and one-size-fits-all. Instead, they rely on an individualized and experimental approach.

I don’t think I could find a better guide to the 2016 presidential election than The Fractured Republic. It’s a thoughtful, important, and vital work.

Top photograph by Dawn Hudson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.