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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Thursday, March 27, 2003 :::
George Will on Moynihan
The Senate's Sisyphus, Moynihan was forever pushing uphill a boulder of inconvenient data. A social scientist trained to distinguish correlation from causation, and a wit, Moynihan puckishly said that a crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. The barb in his jest was this: High cognitive outputs correlate not with high per-pupil expenditures but with a high percentage of two-parent families. For that, there was the rough geographical correlation that caused Moynihan to suggest that states trying to improve their students' test scores should move closer to Canada.
For calling attention, four decades ago, to the crisis of the African American family -- 26 percent of children were being born out of wedlock -- he was denounced as a racist by lesser liberals. Today the percentage among all Americans is 33, among African Americans 69, and family disintegration, meaning absent fathers, is recognized as the most powerful predictor of most social pathologies.
At the United Nations he witnessed that institution's inanity (as in its debate about the threat to peace posed by U.S. forces in the Virgin Islands, at that time 14 Coast Guardsmen, one shotgun, one pistol) and its viciousness (the resolution condemning Zionism as racism). Striving to move America "from apology to opposition," he faulted U.S. foreign policy elites as "decent people, utterly unprepared for their work."
Their "common denominator, apart from an incapacity to deal with ideas, was a fear of making a scene, a form of good manners that is a kind of substitute for ideas." Except they did have one idea, that "the behavior of other nations, especially the developing nations, was fundamentally a reaction to the far worse behavior of the United States."
Moynihan carried Woodrow Wilson's faith in international law, but he had what Wilson lacked -- an understanding that ethnicity makes the world go round. And bleed. The persistence of this premodern sensibility defeats what Moynihan called "the liberal expectancy." He meant the expectation that the world would become tranquil as ethnicity and religion became fading residues of mankind's infancy.
::: posted by Steven at 1:05 PM
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