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Athens, Jerusalem, Gettysburg: Leon Kass on Politics as Moral Endeavor By Emina Melonic

A review of his searching new collection of essays, Leading a Worthy Life

Our present age has been marked by various forms of collectivism. People follow trends. They rarely think or ask questions. The idea of examining one’s life has become foreign, even old-fashioned, and yet the question of what it means to live a worthy and virtuous life persists, despite social pressures to live this or that “lifestyle,” as opposed to an authentic life. That question, seemingly simple, is what drives Leon Kass in his new book, Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times.

Kass, a philosopher and bioethicist, has devoted his life to asking what it means to be human. In this collection of essays, he explores that question in detail. Most of the essays in the book were previously published in a similar form in various magazines, although they have been updated here.

These are not just simple musings by a philosopher. Kass lives what he philosophizes. I saw that when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and attended a seminar that he taught on the Book of Exodus. U of C, as we call it, is all about the “life of the mind.” The approach to learning and arguing there is incredibly rigorous. It was there that I learned how to think critically, how to construct an argument, and especially how to take responsibility for that argument.

That was certainly true of Kass’s seminar. But it wasn’t just that. He is a superb teacher who treats every one of his students with the utmost dignity and respect. He challenged us and yet also encouraged us to be independent thinkers, skeptical of superficial and final pronouncements, and, more than anything else, to free ourselves from the shackles of ideology. In the chapter titled “The Aims of Liberal Education,” he writes that “thinking — all thinking — seeks to liberate us from slavish adherence to an unexamined opinion and an unreasonable trust in our own perceptions and experiences.”

Being the true philosopher and teacher that he is, Kass offers no final answers, which are impossible anyway. To be sure, he makes value judgments, and he challenges groupthink. But the book reveals a man with an open mind that lives in concert with an open heart, always learning, seeking wisdom, and striving to be a good human being in every sphere of his life. What binds the essays together is the author’s rightful insistence to remind us of the dignity inherent in every human being. Knowing and recognizing that dignity — in other words, refusing to engage in the dehumanization of another — should always be a starting point for both contemplation and action.

Philip Ayres: Stalin, Magnified

The dictator was not ‘demonic’, as biographer Stephen Kotin would have it, but pathological, psychopathic, paranoid, criminal and perverse. That is one of a few small quibbles with an author whose magisterial, three-volume work will deservedly be recognised as the gold standard.

Putting Simon Sebag Montefiore’s popular work on Stalin into the shade, Stephen Kotkin’s projected three-volume biography will run to well over 3000 pages, all rooted in primary Russian archival sources and a vast array of Russian-language research publications. Birkelund Professor in History at Princeton University, Kotkin is also the author of the highly influential Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. You read that correctly. The just-published second volume of his Stalin biography is 1154 pages long and covers the period from 1929 to 1941 (collectivisation of agriculture, the Terror, the Nazi–Soviet Pact). The dominant point of view, given largely but not solely via documents flowing in and out of Stalin’s office (the “Little Corner” in the Kremlin), is from his desk: his appointment books, the notes and transcripts of meetings and conversations in there, his speeches, writings, annotations, just about everything that was his or was close to him. This is an interiorised biography, with the ideological motivations and personal complexities seen from inside-out. If being inside Stalin, day in, day out, puts you off, avoid this work.

With so many pages at his disposal, Kotkin can cover the entirety of Stalin’s private and public world, including his powerful influence on art, literature, music and cinema—some of the most interesting sections in this volume are on these subjects. Rather than attempt a comprehensive distillation of the book, which for most of its length is familiarly and compellingly dark, it’s more interesting to focus on surprising and out-of-the-way revelations, and to consider some questions Kotkin leaves up in the air, particularly in relation the Great Terror of 1937-38.

This mammoth work in many ways complicates our view of Stalin, which is good, because human nature is complex, and he was not demonic. Nothing diminishes the murderous nature of his regime, with which we’re adequately familiar. Stalin admired everything about Ivan the Terrible (in many ways his preferred historical model), vastly outdoing him in terror and death-dealing. Whether a Trotsky, a post-dated Lenin, a Bukharin or a Voroshilov could have held the country together through the Great Patriotic War, overseeing the creation of armies and marshals to crush the myriad divisions of Grossdeutschland and its capital into dust … Conceivably not.

In 1932 Stalin adopted “socialist realism” as the plastic-arts and literary aesthetic of the USSR, an ideological widening, and Kotkin reveals the process. As a prelude, Stalin disbanded the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. This was around the time Maxim Gorky returned permanently from his preferred residence in Fascist Italy. The self-styled “proletarians” were mutually hostile zealots fixated on “the correct line”, excoriating one another for the slightest imagined deviation, and mostly under-achievers (Demyan Bedny was typical). In contrast, many non-party writers, like Mikhail Bulgakov, were publishing brilliant work. So Stalin set up a new Union of Soviet Writers, open to non-party as well as party members, and the other arts were supposed to be organised similarly. Stalin wanted Gorky, denounced by the “proletarians” as “a man without class consciousness”, to head the new union.

Review: John Marshall, a Man ‘Without Precedent’ A lifelong Federalist, the Supreme Court chief justice served besides presidents who saw him as an enemy of their values. Fergus M. Bordewich reviews ‘Without Precedent’ by Joel Richard Paul.

No man did more to shape the judicial landscape of America than John Marshall, who led the Supreme Court for more than three decades and hand-crafted scores of decisions that affect us still today. When he was appointed chief justice in 1801, the court was an orphan branch of government with little authority, holding its sessions in spare committee rooms and boarding houses. Marshall’s tenure would transform it.

In “Without Precedent,” Joel Richard Paul, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings Law School in San Francisco, has crafted a scholarly but highly readable and often entertaining chronicle that embeds Marshall among the leading lights of the nation’s founding generation, humanizing him along the way.

Marshall’s modest origins hardly hinted at the illustrious career that was in store. Born in 1755, the future chief justice grew up on what was then the Virginia frontier, the eldest of 15 children who lived packed into a two-room log cabin. His father worked as a farmer and surveyor. In contrast to the tutored sons of Virginia’s elite, young John was largely self-taught. He received only a single year of formal education and later six weeks of training in the law under the eminent legal teacher George Wythe.

As a rifleman during the Revolutionary War, Marshall endured the horrific winter at Valley Forge, where he came to know George Washington. Washington sensed Marshall’s natural intellect and appointed him a military judge advocate. After the war, Marshall established a law practice in Richmond and was elected to the Virginia legislature, where he soon became the star of its Federalist minority.

Review: Alone at the Summit Raised on an Idaho mountain by survivalists who kept her out of school, the author went on to earn a Ph.D. at Cambridge. Susan Wise Bauer reviews ‘Educated: A Memoir’ by Tara Westover. By Susan Wise Bauer

“Perhaps I’m simply hoping to find an answer that doesn’t exist—why some learners latch onto knowledge thirstily while others don’t; why a child with every opportunity for learning turns away in boredom, while another with nothing but an encyclopedia and the Book of Mormon catapults into the Ivy League. Without ever meaning to, “Educated” suggests something startling: Our children’s intellectual achievement may have almost nothing to do with the opportunities we provide them, and everything to do with some inborn drive that we can neither influence nor create. ”

After growing up with a bipolar survivalist father, a damaged and treacherous mother, and an unstable, abusive older brother, Tara Westover finally developed the inner resources to walk away and adopt a new life.

Raised with absolutely no schooling until age 17, Tara Westover earned a scholarship to Cambridge University and a Ph.D in intellectual history and political thought.

These two stories are interwoven throughout “Educated,” Ms. Westover’s new memoir.

The author grows up on an Idaho mountain, one of seven children given no vaccinations or schooling (four of them don’t even have birth certificates). Her father claims to be a prophet, but sinks slowly into out-and-out mental illness—stockpiling ammunition, hoarding food and awaiting imminent apocalypse. Her mother suffers a traumatic brain injury in a car accident and never returns to normal functioning: Sometimes she protects young Tara from her violent older brother Shawn; sometimes she ignores Shawn’s attacks.

An occasional voice whispers to the author that this world is not normal—one of her grandmothers; a boy she meets in the nearby small town; her brother Tyler, who leaves home when she is 10. And so she makes her first effort to step outside of her parental realm, by telling her father that she wants to go to school. His rejection of this request is simple: “In this family, we obey the commandments of the Lord. You remember Jacob and Esau?”
Educated: A Memoir

By Tara Westover

Random House, 334 pages, $28

But Tara, like Tyler and another of her brothers (Richard, who hides behind the sofa to read the encyclopedia through from beginning to end), is irresistibly drawn toward learning. Dodging her father’s rages, alternately encouraged and slapped down by her mother, she teaches herself enough math and grammar by age 18 to enroll at Brigham Young University. Championed by one of her BYU professors, she is eventually admitted to a study-abroad program at Cambridge. The professor who directs her reading there is so impressed by her abilities (“pure gold,” he calls her) that he helps her apply to graduate school after she finishes BYU; Cambridge accepts her to read for a doctorate.

Meanwhile, her family life grows more erratic and terrifying. A visit home to Idaho ends with Shawn threatening to kill Tara with a knife, and Tara fleeing in a borrowed car, leaving her belongings behind. But both parents insist, afterward, that the horrific scene never happened: CONTINUE AT SITE

Daryl McCann Roger Scruton and Enlightened Patriotism

In the West, you can hold to the tenets of Christianity and still advocate for secular democracy, just as those agnostic about the Christian faith need not sign on as postmodernists. Under Islam’s absolutism no such manifestations of personal belief and intellectual inquiry are allowed. As Scruton observes, that’s the difference between us and them.

Ten important European thinkers attached their name to the October 2017 Paris Statement, a manifesto condemning the tyranny and utopianism of “false Europe” and calling for the re-emergence of “real Europe”, an entity Christian in character and taking the nation-state as its hallmark. False Europe, while denying the Christian roots of European civilisation, “trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form” and requires from the European peoples—in the way of multiculturalism and unrestricted immigration—“a saintly degree of self-abnegation”. Europe’s civilisational suicide, according to the Paris Statement, continues to take place under the auspices of the “ersatz religion” of universalism. One signatory to the Paris Statement was Sir Roger Scruton (above), the great English philosopher.

Scruton’s The West and the Rest: Globalisation and the Terrorist Threat, published in the immediate aftermath of September 11, begins by asserting that Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis had accrued “more credibility” than ever. Although Western civilisation found itself under attack, little serious thought went into addressing a central problem: “What exactly is Western civilisation, and what holds it together?”

Individual self-determination, as I noted in “Standing Up for the House of Freedom” (Quadrant, September 2017), goes a long way towards answering the first half of that double-headed question, but what of the second part? As Scruton writes: “If all that Western civilisation offers is freedom, then it is a civilisation bent on its own destruction.” The glue that holds together a society based on Western principles—the Western nation-state, in other words—is a form of enlightened patriotism. Much of Scruton’s writing, in The West and the Rest and subsequent to that, is an attempt to clarify the uniqueness of the correlation between national identity and individual sovereignty in the West.

‘Wallis in Love’ Challenges a Royal Love Story Andrew Morton’s biography of Wallis Simpson upends the accepted wisdom about her marriage; ‘a story of bitterness, disappointment and ultimately failure’By Ellen Gamerman

Wallis Simpson is buried on the grounds of Windsor Castle in England, next to Edward VIII, the king who abdicated the throne to be with her.

But their seemingly towering romance—he threw it all away for her!—crumbles in the hands of biographer Andrew Morton. “She lies next to a man she came to despise,” he writes, “buried in a land owned by a family she hated and in a country she loathed.”
‘Wallis in Love’ is scheduled for release on Tuesday.

Mr. Morton’s book out on Tuesday, “Wallis in Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy,” upends accepted wisdom about this couple, describing a relationship based on mutual exploitation. Mrs. Simpson pursues Edward in hopes of becoming queen, not realizing the havoc her two divorces will wreak on her quest. Edward dreads becoming king and finds a solution in his adoration of this American woman, whose past disqualifies him from the royal job.

Two days before their wedding in 1937, Mr. Morton writes, Mrs. Simpson met with the man she really loved, Herman Livingston Rogers. Mr. Morton describes her seemingly offer to have Rogers’s baby and pass it off as Edward’s. His evidence for this claim is based on brief notes about the matter by Mrs. Simpson’s onetime ghostwriter, Cleveland Amory.

“It was a story of bitterness, disappointment and ultimately failure,” Mr. Morton said during an interview from Pasadena, Calif., where he lives when he isn’t in London.

Mr. Morton argues that the king’s 1936 abdication was, in the end, a one-sided decision. Edward’s marriage to Mrs. Simpson was forbidden due to her two divorces and living ex-husbands, but his abandonment of the throne to be with her was far from a given.

“The man who ostensibly loved her was making decisions about her future without any kind of sensible conversation,” Mr. Morton said in the interview. Not long after the abdication, Edward is described singing in a bathtub. Mrs. Simpson, however, is portrayed getting snubbed by British and American elites and exiled to a semi-royal life.

MY SAY: ON RACING AGAINST HISTORY: THE 1940 CAMPAIGN FOR A JEWISH ARMY TO FIGHT HITLER

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.by John Greenleaf Whittier .

Many years ago, I was at a gun show in Connecticut with my husband who collected modern handguns. I was bored and hot and annoyed when my husband spotted a hand stitched pillow in one of the booths which read “Jew Learn to Shoot!” Impelled by the famous quote of my idol Zeev Jabotinsky, I went to speak to the owner. He explained that his father, a passionate Zionist taught him to shoot as a young boy, something that he used to good advantage as a sharp-shooter in the United States Army during world war 2. We engaged in a long discussion about the trapped Jews of Europe who could not defend themselves The subject still haunts me especially as I read:

Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler by Rick Richman

The following are reviews of this wonderful book by David Isaac and Richard Baehr, and a column on “Ritchie’s Boys “and the book by Matti Friedman. Please read them and by all means read the book.

David Isaac

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/racing-against-history-the-1940-campaign-for-a-jewish-army-to-fight-hitler-by-rick-richman-reviewed-by-david-isaac.html

Why wasn’t there a Jewish army in World War II to fight the Nazis? No group had more motivation to do so. Well, it’s not that they didn’t want one. Rick Richman’s Racing Against History skillfully recounts the efforts by three major Zionist leaders to raise a Jewish army in America to fight Hitler. Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion, representing the center, right, and left of the political spectrum, came to the United States on separate missions with the same goal in 1940.

Ritchie’s Boys and the Men from Zion By Matti Friedman

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/02/01/ritchies-boys-and-the-men-from-zion-by-matti-friedman/

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/

A second new book, Rick Richman’s Racing Against History, examines a more radical option—Zionism—by describing three visits by Zionist leaders to the United States in the desperate year of 1940. Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Vladimir Jabotinsky stepped off ocean liners in New York that year, hoping to sound an alarm about the fate of Jews in Europe and to encourage the creation of a Jewish force to fight in the war. This was tricky, because the United States was still neutral, and American Jews weren’t sure how much they could help without endangering their own fragile position at home. Arriving separately and often at odds with each other, the three Zionist politicians addressed rallies, met important people, gave interviews, and wrote down their impressions, leaving material that Richman ably mines for this concise and illuminating account.

The Ritchie Boys practice their German-language prisoner interrogation skills on mock prisoners at Camp Ritchie. (Courtesy of NARA.)

Of the three leaders in Racing Against History, Weizmann was the most careful in his public utterances. He grasped the danger of the perception that world war was being waged for Jewish interests and preferred the quiet maneuver. He privately lobbied Chamberlain, the British prime minister, to accept “Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources” and was politely turned down. He privately lobbied for 20,000 permits to Palestine for Jewish children from Poland and was politely turned down. In America, he wrote, even mentioning what was happening to Jews in Europe might be “associated with warmongering.” American attitudes, he found, had “no relation to the grim realities which today face humanity at large and the Jews in particular.”

American Jewish thinkers of the time, Richman reminds us, included rabbis such as David Philipson of Cincinnati, who regarded the Jews as a universal people and the Land of Israel as “an outgrown phase of Jewish historical experience.” In an autobiography, the rabbi wrote: “Every land is the homeland for its Jews—the United States for me, as England for my English Jewish brother, France for my French Jewish brother, and so in every country.” Those lines, Richman notes, were published in 1941, with Europe under Nazi occupation.

In this volume, the sharpest contrast to Weizmann’s style is offered by Jabotinsky, who was outspoken about his impatience:

The old fallacy, the curse of our past, has been revived: that there is no Jewish problem; that all our troubles can be cured en passant by general measures of progress, and there is no need to worry about any special remedies. The allied victory will ensure democracy and equality . . . and that will be enough for the Jews.

Jabotinsky wanted a Jewish army raised immediately and said so, even though the mainstream American Jewish leadership called him a “militarist” and published a pamphlet warning against his views. In the pages of the Forward, editor Abraham Cahan mocked him as a “naïve person and a great fantasizer.” There was no need for Jabotinsky’s Jewish army, Cahan thought, and the Jewish problem would be solved not by a Jewish state but by an allied victory and democracy: If “true democracy exists, there is no place for anti-Semitism.” In other words, the way forward was to be American citizens and soldiers, like the Ritchie Boys.

Recent events in Europe and America would seem to suggest that anti-Semitism does, in fact, have a place in democracy; the English-language descendant of Cahan’s own Forward, for example, recently printed a bizarre op-ed by a Jewish supporter of an anti-Jewish boycott expressing sympathy for some of the views of an American neo-Nazi. The old idea of “Jewish warmongering,” about which Weizmann was so careful in 1940, is still current, as evidenced by the flap in September over a tweet by Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent, suggesting just that. And though the Zionist plan succeeded and there is a Jewish army, the normalization of the Jews has failed to materialize and their existential fears continue. Both the Ritchie Boys and the three Zionist leaders profiled in these books might be surprised how much the questions of their times remain unresolved 70 years later.

1940: American Inaction and the Tragedy of European Jewry By Richard Baehr

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/1940_american_inaction_and_the_tragedy_of_european_jewry.html

1940: American Inaction and the Tragedy of European Jewry By Richard Baehr

During 1940, three of the most significant Zionist leaders in the world – Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and David Ben Gurion , all visited the United States , hoping to gain a measure of American Jewish support or US government support for the creation of a Jewish army to help fight the Nazis. Rick Richman’s new book, Racing Against History, provides an interesting and very carefully researched history of these visits, the leaders’ goals, what they accomplished, and what prevented greater success. Richman’s book is a fascinating look at a moment in time, different seemingly from our own, but with some of the same issues.

Many fewer people are aware today of Jabotinsky than of Weizmann or Ben Gurion. Richman provides an illuminating portrait of this exceptional Jewish leader and his work, which will serve as an introduction for many. Nearly 40 years after Jabotinsky’s death, Menachem Begin became the first Israeli Prime Minister whose politics were rooted in his vision.

In World War 1, the British had allowed the creation of a Jewish legion, 15,000 strong, that had fought on their side in various places, with Jabotinsky having a leadership military role. Weizmann, a highly respected British chemist with many British government contacts, parlayed the Jewish help for Britain in the war to gain support for creation of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine, laid out in the Balfour Declaration, and eventually leading to the British mandate for Palestine between the wars.

Eugene Schlusser Living in Fear in Post-War Germany

As one tyranny replaced another, Natalie Makarova was allowed to work with the immigration authorities processing refugees. She may have hoped to make some contact there or gather information that might help the family to get out of the country. Even the faintest possibility had to be followed through.

The following are two extracts from Escape from the Sun: Surviving the Tyrannies of Lenin, Hitler and Stalin by Eugene Schlusser, published last May by Australian Scholarly, $39.95. Each extract is briefly introduced by Eugene Schlusser.

I believe my father Paul learned of his sister-in-law Zinaida’s arrest in Berlin in October 1947. She was accused of spying for the CIA. As my mother Natalie later described it, he then became almost “schizophrenic” with fear.

Paul, now close to desperation, made a drastic and in many ways an inexplicable decision. He resigned from Schanzenbach & Co to take work with the US Occupation Forces. Did he hope that this could give him contacts to help with an escape from Europe? Family lore, often repeated, was that he had been dismissed because he was a foreigner. This was a fabrication, designed to dis-inform every­one as Paul tried to hide his increasingly desperate state. The strain was telling on his health. His blood pressure was high and he seemed to be tired all the time. As medication was not available, he tried water and steam baths to assist with his breathing, cleanse the skin and above all reduce his blood pressure. He improvised a sauna in our living room and tried to replicate the Russian banya. After a period in the sauna he would lie exhausted on the living room sofa trying to get his strength back with an afternoon sleep. We would be sternly instructed to remain quiet, speak in whispers and above all not slam any doors.

It is unclear what information father kept from mother, but she also felt the increasing stress. We all felt it. Loud voices of frustration came from the kitchen more frequently. Their tone of voice revealed their state of mind.

I imagine that when the disputes were not about finances, they were disagreements about Paul’s reasoning, and his plans to get the family out of Europe. Naturally, Natalie worried about his health and the many things he was involved in: his job, his family, the Russian Welfare Society. He had also recently undertaken to help build an Orthodox church in Frankfurt. All this took time, in addition to the long irregular hours he worked. His income had dropped considerably, as his teaching earned him much less than his salary as an engineer. He still had money deposited at Schroders in London but he could not access it.

Review: When ‘The Marshall Plan’ Helped Plot a New Course for the West Economic aid did not cause a Keynesian miracle but was a diplomatic master stroke, convincing wavering nations to reject the Soviets at the dawn of the Cold War. By Paul Kennedy

‘Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” It is difficult to think of any words delivered at any university commencement that had more historical weight than those spoken in the final minutes of George C. Marshall’s speech at Harvard on June 5, 1947.

The venue was carefully chosen as a dignified but noncontroversial place. The speaker was one of the greatest secretaries of state this country ever produced. The words had been crafted and recrafted by some of the most brilliant minds at the State Department and on its Policy Planning Staff. But while key sentences took the high moral ground, there was an urgent political purpose to this declaration by Marshall. He addressed the pressing issue of how to prevent European nations from collapsing into economic ruin and despair, and in some cases suffering a Communist takeover.

Marshall’s speech announced a great act of American statecraft, and marked a significant step away from the prewar, Rooseveltian era of noncommitment in European matters. In this dramatic move, the Truman administration—glumly recognizing it was the only Western country with any money after World War II, shocked by the reports of near-starvation across Europe and desperate to shore up friendly governments—stepped up to the plate.

With an equally frightened American Congress behind it, the government offered huge sums of money to any democratic country in Europe able to come up with a plausible recovery scheme. These countries—and this was a deliberate gesture—could be on either side of the zonal division of Europe established at Yalta; all that was needed was a willingness to produce a rebuilding plan and join in the common effort. America’s aid package was unprecedented in size, threatened no one and therefore ought to have been opposed by no one. Who on earth would want to stop this act of extraordinary generosity? Who could be against the Marshall Plan?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question, because one person would definitely want to stop the scheme: the powerful and increasingly paranoid Joseph Stalin. He feared America’s economic power, was scared stiff of Germans (still) and any future unified Germany, and in fact by this time saw demons everywhere. As Benn Steil details in his brilliant book “The Marshall Plan,” the Soviets had shown ever-greater intransigence throughout 1946 and 1947 in regard to all proposals for the economic rebuilding of Europe and the political reconstitution of the defeated Germany. The exceptions, to be sure, were schemes of theirs that calculated to have all Germany fall into the Eastern orbit. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon By David Solway

When we had lunch together one afternoon a few months back, Canadian psychologist and university professor Jordan Peterson, who has risen to meteoric prominence for his courageous stand against political correctness and legally compelled speech, looked distressingly frail and was on a restricted diet prescribed by his physician. The ordeal the press and the University of Toronto’s administration, which had threatened to discipline him for his refusal to accede to legislation forcing the use of invented pronouns, had obviously taken its toll. (Note: Peterson was willing to address individuals by their chosen pronouns, but was not willing to be forced to do so by law.)

Our conversation ranged over the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, C.G. Jung and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Peterson’s chief secular resources, as well as the Book of Genesis, the Prophetic literature and the Gospel of John, Peterson’s biblical lynchpins. His meditations on these texts have obviously struck a chord with his audience. From Nietzsche’s complex web of ideas, he focuses on the notion of critical strength to combat cultural weakness and the primacy of the individual over the group. From Jung comes the theory of the hero archetype, the feral “shadow” component of the psyche which must be both acknowledged and mastered, and the “animus dominated” feminist on a quest for societal control. He elaborates on the political wisdom of Dostoevsky’s novels The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov, and expands on a favorite quote from Notes from Underground, “You can say anything about world history. … Except one thing. … It cannot be said that world history is reasonable.”

From the biblical wellspring he develops the idea of creative vitality transforming darkness into light, reflects on the Prophetic summons to integrity, righteousness and the Kingdom of God — for Peterson the ground of the higher good and the divinity of the soul — and stresses the concept of the Logos, the principle that imposes order on chaos and seeks to make the unreasonable rational, which he identifies with the spirit of masculinity.