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THE PROBLEM IS NOT WITH THE NEW REPUBLIC

12/8/2014

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 Ross Douuthat “The Old Journalism and the New” in the  New York Times for December 7 2014 laments, as many of us do, what is happening at TNR under the ownership of a  28 year old techy whiz kid from the Facebook circle. Douthat:

 

“The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art. … It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine, which unlike many of today’s online ventures never left its readers with the delusion that literary style or intellectual ambition were of secondary importance, or that today’s fashions represented permanent truths.”

 

But that is only part of a much bigger question: Why is it so rare to find places where literary values and intellectual engagement are of prime importance?  Many of us went into academia hoping for just that, but found, all too often, a climate that would not foster such values and engagement.  I was lucky both at Princeton and at the National Humanities Center where the climate was benign, but I don’t imagine my experience is typical.

 

Consequences?  A genuine liberal education for undergraduates  can only be sustained, I believe, when  there is a genuinely liberal-arts intellectual life among the faculty.  That, like the old TNR, is now increasingly under pressure from those who claim to know better, and maybe from neglect on the part of those who really should know better.    

 

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Robert Kennedy, Eric Garner and  Aeschylus 

12/5/2014

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“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote, … “in our sleep  pain that cannot forget , falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair … comes wisdom  through the awful grace of God .”  Kennedy knew those words by heart; he;d lived them since his brother's deathj.

 

It’s not a quotation, just a paraphrase of Aeschylus by a twentieth century writer , Edith Hamilton, whom many classicists treat with contempt.  In the Greek the “wisdom” is just learning (mathos), learning a lesson, learning to accept what life brings, learning what loss feels like. And “in our despair” is just pathos, suffering, experiencing things over which we have no control.   But the words ring true, now, as they did on that evening in Indianapolis when Martin Luther King was shot and Kennedy  spoke ex tempore in a slum close to going up in flames, saying,

 

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white r they be black. … Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.”

                                Evan Thomas Robert Kennedy. (pp. 366 f.) 

The words rang true then; they still do. 

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