RUTHFULLY YOURS

Olivia Pierson’s Western Values Defended: A Primer, is just what its title says it is, a primer for those unread in what those values are that need to be upheld and defended. It is a short book, just a general survey of the Western values that are rooted in ancient Greece but which came to fruition in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. It is only 71 pages long, but it is loaded with ideas which most people are not familiar with.

An Amazon review best describes Pierson’s opus: “Olivia Pierson is the author of To Love Wisdom – Gateway to the Heroic for the Young – is an introduction to philosophy for young people aged 10-13 and Western Values Defended: A Primer – a punchy and relevant overview of the greatest gems of Western civilization, and how they came to define the daily character of individual liberty in the West. She writes about politics, history and culture on her website oliviapierson.org. A reader wrote, “An exceptionally well-written defense of Western liberal philosophy and culture! At a time when Western values are overwhelmingly menaced, Ms. Pierson systematically explains just what Western values are, and why they’re so overwhelmingly important. The West today is massively under assault from the forces of socialism and religion, and Ms. Pierson persuasively and passionately explains how we all can — and must! — fight back against the horrifically threatening darkness.”

For any well-read adult who is conversant in the issues covered by Pierson, her book is “old news.” What they must remember is that it is an introduction to those issues. It would make an incomparable text book in elementary and high school as an antidote to the government-mandated multicultural pap being taught in schools today (at least in the U.S.). She introduces the issues in an elegant, compelling style, one which “old hands” on the subjects will find attractive and informative (I learned a few things about some of the issues I’d not encountered elsewhere). It was difficult for me to choose my favorite chapters in Western Values Defended: “Religious Tolerance” (which includes a moving and much-earned tribute to Hypatia of Alexandria, horridly martyred by early Christians because of her mind), “The Emancipation of Women and Sexual Freedom,” “Freedom of Speech and the Press,” “A Commitment to Scientific Inquiry,” or “Capitalism and Innovation.”

David Pryce-Jones’ writings span over five decades. Over that time, he has produced a series of books chronicling unusual lives with implausible loyalties and the destructive and self-destructive movements which attracted them.

Fault Lines
David Pryce-Jones, Criterion Books, New York, 2015, 364 pp., US$25.00

On the question of the underlying motif uniting such diverse individuals as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Unity Mitford and Cyril Connolly, and such varied subjects as the Hungarian Revolt, Paris in the Third Reich, the Arab world and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pryce-Jones said this in an interview with me more than 20 years ago: “I’m fascinated with the question – why do people do the very strange things they do?”

I and doubtless others have wondered how he came upon this fascination. Now, with his autobiography before them, readers will find their wait for an answer to that question well worth it. Pryce-Jones has given us a vivid yet understated portrait of the rarefied world into which he was born in Vienna in 1936, a world of country estates, lavish apartments on broad boulevards and liveried servants – and what happened to it.

It was his great-grandfather, the prominent entrepreneur Gustav Springer, who coined the advice, “Buy to the sound of cannons and sell to the sound of violins,” (often wrongly attributed to one of the Rothschilds – to whom Pryce-Jones is also connected). Wise choices of this kind led his forbears to accumulate a fortune and enter the Continent’s aristocracy. The offspring of an unlikely match between a British man of letters from a landed Welsh family, Alan Pryce-Jones, and a Jewish heiress, Thérèse (‘Poppy’) Fould-Springer, Pryce-Jones grew up in Royaumont, a home adjacent to a famed Cistercian abbey laid waste by the French Revolution.