RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/book-review-reclaiming-common-sense-pushes-back-against-intellectual-cultural-elites/

Our intellectual and cultural elites have become unmoored from common sense; a new book charts a course for restoring it.

Robert Curry’s Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World is a companion volume to his earlier Common Sense Nation. Both books are apologias, defenses against certain attacks by our intellectual and cultural elites on the foundations of American life, which the American Founders understood in terms of “common sense.” As Curry elaborates, “While Common Sense Nation addresses the challenge to the American founding by presenting anew the Founders’ understanding of what they were establishing”—an understanding rooted in Scottish “common sense realism”—“Reclaiming Common Sense takes up . . . the challenge to the foundation of the founding”—commonsense rationality itself. Ultimately, he wants to “restore a trust in common sense and an understanding of its crucial role in our lives” as human beings and as American citizens.

A good catch-all term for the elites’ alternative to common sense is “political correctness,” an ideological party line much akin to the Newspeak of Orwell’s 1984 that tries to prohibit not only honest questions but even acknowledgement of facts in plain view. Who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes? And pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! From denying basic biology in favor of infinitely fluid “gender identity” to condemning commonsense measures against Islamic terrorism as “Islamophobia,” there is no fact so obvious it won’t be discounted whenever it should cross or inhibit whatever agenda du jour elites deem “progressive.” Political correctness is, in short, a “war on common sense.”

But what exactly is common sense? It turns out to be much harder to describe and explain common sense than just to have it. Describing and explaining it, however, becomes necessary when what would be taken for granted in a healthy social situation comes under relentless assault by deconstructionist, fundamentally nihilistic “intellectuals” and ideologues (not to be confused with philosophers) who because of their pedigrees and because of their fearsome passion may intimidate and undermine the confidence of people not prepared to handle the onslaught. In such a context, which we face today, we need a few insightful, bold, and eloquent people to step into the breach and put up a reasoned defense—people like Robert Curry.

Our intellectual and cultural elites have become unmoored from common sense; a new book charts a course for restoring it.

Robert Curry’s Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World is a companion volume to his earlier Common Sense Nation. Both books are apologias, defenses against certain attacks by our intellectual and cultural elites on the foundations of American life, which the American Founders understood in terms of “common sense.” As Curry elaborates, “While Common Sense Nation addresses the challenge to the American founding by presenting anew the Founders’ understanding of what they were establishing”—an understanding rooted in Scottish “common sense realism”—“Reclaiming Common Sense takes up . . . the challenge to the foundation of the founding”—commonsense rationality itself. Ultimately, he wants to “restore a trust in common sense and an understanding of its crucial role in our lives” as human beings and as American citizens.

A good catch-all term for the elites’ alternative to common sense is “political correctness,” an ideological party line much akin to the Newspeak of Orwell’s 1984 that tries to prohibit not only honest questions but even acknowledgement of facts in plain view. Who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes? And pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! From denying basic biology in favor of infinitely fluid “gender identity” to condemning commonsense measures against Islamic terrorism as “Islamophobia,” there is no fact so obvious it won’t be discounted whenever it should cross or inhibit whatever agenda du jour elites deem “progressive.” Political correctness is, in short, a “war on common sense.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/01/27/the-forgotten-failures-of-the-great-society/

Amity Shlaes has written a powerful book. It is the most interesting and substantive account of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s “war on poverty” to date — and just in time. In Great Society: A New History, she notes that “just as the 1960s forgot the failures of the 1930s, we today forget the failures of the 1960s.” Shlaes has written 510 pages of argumentation, with detailed description and telling digression that traces the arc from the unbridled hopes of the early Sixties to the enormous administrative expansion of the “second New Deal” to the missteps in implementing it that became all too apparent in the Seventies.

The book opens with the roles played by socialist author Michael Harrington, famed for writing The Other America, a book on Appalachian poverty, and Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society in forming the ethos of the ’60s. And then, by way of largely but not entirely biographical accounts, it shows how figures such as United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther, Los Angeles mayor and Great Society critic Sam Yorty, Johnson-administration anti-poverty czar Sargent Shriver, policy intellectual Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and economist Arthur Burns shaped the Great Society and its aftermath. The advantage of such an approach is that it doesn’t neglect the “great men” of the time, while adding depth. Shlaes tells us that LBJ and Nixon conducted themselves as if they were “domestic commanders in chief.” But the book also incorporates the broader social and economic currents that centralized American life.

Walter Reuther was of a then-familiar type that many today find difficult to understand. As the militant leader of the United Automobile Workers, he wanted Scandinavian-style socialism for America, but he was also an ardent anti-Communist. In the early 1960s he hoped for a youth movement to help his cause. To that end he sponsored a conclave at the UAW’s retreat in Port Huron, Mich. It was there, with Michael Harrington in attendance, that Tom Hayden wrote the Port Huron Statement. Inspired by the direct action of the young black integrationists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who courageously insisted on being served at segregated southern lunch counters, the Port Huron Statement made the case for what it called “participatory democracy.” But Hayden’s aim, as he acknowledged, was to advance radicalism by “call[ing] socialism liberalism.”

There is a forthcoming book by a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Sheldon Roth, M.D. to refute Dr. lee’s specious “diagnoses”….rsk

Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump  by Sheldon Roth M.D.

A highly-respected psychiatrist challenges the media narrative that President Trump is mentally unstable.

The media and his political foes frequently attack Donald Trump with claims that he is mentally unfit for the presidency. Increasingly, his critics label him “unstable,” “crazy,” or “insane.” But these armchair diagnoses have more to do with a dislike of his policies than any real clinical analysis.

In Psychologically Sound, Sheldon Roth, M.D. draws on decades of psychiatric and academic experience to reveal President Trump in a holistic manner—an understandable, stable, even likeable person. What emerges is a complex portrait of a man who has been effective and successful in business and politics, but who also has regrets about failings in his personal life.

Drawing on little-known aspects of Trump’s background, such as his love for the film Citizen Kane as well as or his decades-long friendship with positive-thinking advocate the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, Dr. Roth paints a portrait of a man who is remarkably complicated, often brilliant, comfortingly human, and most importantly, of completely sound mind.

amgreatness.com/2020/01/04/there-are-great-books/

Those classics that are called the Great Books are most closely associated with Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Hutchins.1 When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, he hired Adler to teach philosophy in the law school and the psychology department. Upon arriving, Adler, rather brashly he admits, recommended to Hutchins a program of study for undergraduates using classic texts. Adler had taught in the General Honors program at Columbia University begun in 1921 by professor John Erskine. Hutchins asked him for a list of books to be read in such a program. When Hutchins saw the list, he told Adler that he had not encountered most of them during his student years at Oberlin College and Yale University. Hutchins later wrote that unless Adler “did something drastic he [Hutchins, referring to himself] would close his educational career a wholly uneducated man.”2 Hutchins remained president for 16 years before serving as chancellor until 1951, and the following year, they did something drastic.

In 1952, Adler and Hutchins published the Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes.3 Adler and Hutchins included the 714 authors they considered most important to the development of Western Civilization.4 The influence of their Great Books movement on American culture for several decades was considerable and continues to this day.

Their selection of books from over a half-century ago has held up rather well. For example, I compared them to the 2007 list published by journalist and cultural critic J. Peder Zane. Zane asked 125 leading writers to list their favorite works of fiction.5 Zane found that the 20 most common titles listed by the writers were:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gertrude-himmelfarb-11577837798?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

She was an accomplished historian known for rigorous scholarship, brilliant essays, and her forceful defense of morality in democratic politics. We’re referring to Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died Monday at age 97.

A native of Brooklyn who earned degrees from the University of Chicago, Himmelfarb achieved intellectual fame as a writer with her third book, “Victorian Minds” (1968). The collection of essays on major figures in the British 19th century challenged the prevailing view of the Victorians as incurious moral prudes.

In that book and several subsequent collections, particularly “Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians” (1986), Himmelfarb contended that the old virtues—temperance, chastity, industry—didn’t repress individual creativity. Instead they enabled a century of cultural flourishing and political stability.

She also wrote with insight on the follies of the French Revolution and the assorted non-philosophies known as postmodernism, and she was unafraid to criticize eminent peers when she thought their writings wrongheaded or precious. She memorably found fault with Roy Jenkins’s biography of Winston Churchill for failing to acknowledge what every ordinary person knew: Churchill was a great man.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-winter-army-review-the-mountain-men-11577463400?mod=opinion_major_pos11

Lots of tales are told around roaring fires in ski lodges, stories about the day’s conquest of high bumps and deep fears on the trails, about the defiance of ferocious storms and the wolf winds of winter, about adventures in the back bowls and amid the pines and birches—and, at times, tales of poles broken on the chairlift and comical acts of ineptitude on the bunny slopes.

But every now and then, someone will offer up tales of a different genre altogether—stories that do not fade when the après-ski drinks wear off. These are the ones about the men who went to war on skis and later helped to build the resorts that are by now legendary among amateurs and professionals alike: Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin, Washington State’s Crystal Mountain, New Mexico’s Sandia Peak, Vermont’s Sugarbush, Oregon’s Mount Bachelor, Utah’s Alta.

The Winter Army

By Maurice Isserman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 318 pages, $28

Meet the men of the 10th Mountain Division. Their peacetime achievements are themselves remarkable: Five of them were on the United States ski team in the 1948 Olympics, and a sixth was their coach. All told, five dozen ski areas across North America bear their mark, from selecting the terrain to designing the trails to installing the ski tows, lifts and funiculars. Their postwar achievements—basically building an industry out of an avocation—were set in motion by their unusual training as the nation’s World War II ski troops. It was in such an undertaking that they harnessed their reverence and respect for the mountains and then set out to share their sense of wonder—and their remarkable skills on skis.

Their training and wartime exploits are at the center of “The Winter Army,” a captivating account of the 10th Mountain Division by the Hamilton College historian Maurice Isserman. It is good to have the stories of these men between hard covers, for their heroics occurred three-quarters of a century ago and are in danger of disappearing.