Descent of the adversary culture

[Valin]

Power Line

Scott Johnson

Jan. 17 2021

Dartmouth Professor of English Jeffrey Hart opened my mind to the great tradition and more during the four years I was his student. A long-time senior editor at National Review, Professor Hart contributed “The secession of the intellectuals” to NR’s 15th anniversary issue in 1970. Thinking of Power Line’s own 15th anniversary a few years back, I returned to that essay. NR editor Rich Lowry kindly arranged for the publication of the essay online to help us celebrate the occasion.

The essay hit me with the force of revelation at the time. Some of the contemporary references date the piece. The situation described in 1970 has deteriorated considerably over the past 50 years, yet the essay pierces to the heart of the matter and the heart of the matter abides. Making the necessary changes, the essay reads like it could have been written yesterday. Here is the opening:

(Snip)

Professor Hart concludes:

Quote

The antidote, surely, lies in the various modes of recovering a sense of the reality of the world. The foundation, perhaps, should be the recovery of a sense of history. Without the materials of historical comparison, observes Daniel Boorstin, “we are left with nothing but abstractions, nothing but baseless utopias to compare ourselves with. No wonder, then, that so many of our distraught citizens libel us as the worst nation in the world, or the bane of human history (as some of our noisiest young people and a few disoriented Negroes tell us). For we have wandered out of history. And all in the name of virtue and social conscience. We have lost interest in the real examples from the human past which alone can help us shape standards of the humanly possible.” And besides the historical sense, both imaginative literature and rational analysis can be restorative. It is through the imagination, after all, that we form our “images” of the world, and when the imagination operates powerfully those images correspond in an intimate way with the reality. And it also seems to me vital to reassert the claims of rational analysis, that spirit of skepticism which clears away the illusions that veil the reality and corrupt the judgment.

Our friend Kathy Kersten updates the situation described here in her brilliant First Things essay “Adversary culture in 2020.” The essay is published in the February 2021 print edition of First Things. We will return to it when it emerges from the First Things paywall.