The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (47 page)

13
. See Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(New York: Scribner, 1958).

14
. Megan McArdle, “Should We Raise Tax Rates on the Rich?”
The Atlantic,
August 9, 2010.

15
. William Voegeli,
Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State
(New York: Encounter Books, 2010), p. 133.

16
. Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(New York: Prometheus Books, 2000), p. 380.

17
. For a further discussion of Smith’s fundamentally moral case for capitalism, see Yuval Levin, “Recovering the Case for Capitalism,” Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute (January 11, 2011).

18.: Science

1
.   James H. Fowler and Christopher T. Dawes, “Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout,”
Journal of Politics
70, no. 3 (July 2008): 579–94.

2
.   David M Amodio et al., “Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism,”
Nature Neuroscience;
published online, September 9, 2007; accessed October 17, 2011, doi:10.1038/nn1979.

3
.   Alok Jha, “Brain Type May Dictate Politics,”
The Guardian,
September 10, 2007.

4
.   Editorial, “Left Brain, Right Brain,”
Los Angeles Times,
September 12, 2007.

5
.   Douglas R. Oxley et al., “Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits,”
Science
321, no. 5896 (September 19, 2008): pp. 1667–70.

6
.   Ibid.

7
.   Zeev Sternhell,
The Birth of Fascist Ideology,
trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 56.

8
.   Kathleen Maclay, “Researchers Help Define What Makes a Political Conservative,”
University of California–Berkeley press release, July 22, 2003;
www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml
.

9
.   John T. Jost et al., “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,”
Psychological Bulletin
129, no. 3 (2003): pp. 339–75.

10
.
www.criticalreview.com/2004/pdfs/cardiff_klein.pdf
.

11
.
www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ironshrink/201004/conservatism-thought-disorder-in-need-cure
.

12
.
www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,1,5376455.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
.

13
.
www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2007/09/liberal_interpretation.html
.

14
. See the excellent reporting by Daniel Engber of
Slate
magazine on the burgeoning field of neuropunditry. For example, Daniel Engber, “Jeffery Goldberg, Neuropundit?”
Slate
(June 18, 2008).

19.: Youth

1
.   Jean Twenge et al. “Egos Inflating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory,”
Journal of Personality
76, no. 4 (August 2008).

2
.   I discuss this extensively in
Liberal Fascism
.

3
.   Paul Farhi, “Dean Tries to Summon Spirit of the 1960s,”
Washington Post
, December 28, 2003, p. A05.

20.: Ounce of Prevention

1
.   In fairness, many of Franklin’s famous aphorisms for his
Poor Richard’s Almanack
were simply deliberate rewrites of ancient expressions. The phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is often attributed to Franklin but in fact is traceable back to Henry de Bracton’s 1240 classic
De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae
(On the Laws and Customs of England). That in itself was an updating of what must be a prehistoric concept of nipping a problem in the bud, or “meeting the malady on its way,” as the Roman poet Persius (A.D. ca. 58) put it.

2
.   See Russell’s more recent paper “Preventing Chronic Disease: An Important Investment, but Don’t Count on Cost Savings” in
Health Affairs
28 no. 1 (January/February 2009): 42–45. From the abstract:

Over the four decades since cost-effectiveness analysis was first applied to health and medicine, hundreds of studies have shown that prevention usually adds to medical costs instead of reducing them. Medications for hypertension and elevated cholesterol, diet and exercise to prevent diabetes, and screening and early treatment for cancer all add more to medical costs than they save. Careful choices about frequency, groups to
target, and component costs can increase the likelihood that interventions will be highly cost-effective or even cost-saving.

      Also see David Brown, “In the Balance,”
Washington Post
, April 8, 2008.

3
.   Ibid.

4
.   Ryan Tracy and Stephanie Gleason, “New Flare-up in Light-Bulb Wars,”
Wall Street Journal,
July 9, 2011.

5
.   Michael McGerr,
A Fierce Discontent
:
The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920
(New York: Free Press, 2003), p. 196.

6
.   Tocqueville,
Democracy in America.

21.: The Catholic Church

1
.   Martin Kramer,
Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America,
(The Washington Institute for Near East Policy Publications, 2001), p 52.:

The idea of “Islamic reformation” perfectly fit the agenda of presenting Islam in Western categories. It first surfaced in journalistic usage. “Islam is now at a pivotal and profound moment of evolution,” wrote the journalist Robin Wright in 1992, “a juncture increasingly equated with the Protestant Reformation.” Islam was experiencing a “new spirit of reform,” she wrote in 1993, addressing some of the same issues—such as the relationship between church and state—central to the 16th-century Christian Reformation. “The reformers’ impact is not mere academic,” she wrote in 1996. “By stimulating some of the most profound debate since Islam’s emergence in the seventh century, they are laying the foundations for an Islamic Reformation”

     Kramer adds that the “Reformation trope” soon became a staple of academic discussion of the Middle East, as one academic or another waited for the Muslim Reformation as if it would coincide with a Times Square ball drop. As Kramer notes, this Reformation trope was not new in the field of Orientalism; it was simply making a comeback. Earlier generations of academics had assumed the “inevitability of the Reformation” without considering the possibility that they were imposing their own parochial assumptions on a very different culture at a very different time with—importantly—a very different theology.

2
.   See Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Martin Luther’s Conservatism,”
National Review
, November 25, 1983.

3
.   Deborah Sontag, “The Holy Land, in an Edgy Mood, Awaits the Pope’s Visit,”
New York Times
, March 19, 2000; w
ww.nytimes.com/2000/03/19/world/the-holy-land-in-an-edgy-mood-awaits-the-pope-s-visit.html;
accessed July 29, 2011.

4
.   Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Campus Crusade Changes Name to Cru,”
Christianity Today,
July 19,
2011;
www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/julyweb-only/campus-crusade-name-change.html
; accessed July 29, 2011.

5
.   Bernard Lewis, “Jihad vs. Crusade: Learning the Lingo,”
Wall Street Journal,
September 27, 2001.

6
.   Thomas F. Madden, “Crusade Propaganda: The Abuse of Christianity’s Holy Wars,”
National Review Online,
November 2, 2001.

7
.   Lewis, “Jihad vs. Crusade.”

8
.   Madden, “Crusade Propaganda.”

9
.   Robert Lerner, Standish Meacham, and Edward Burns,
Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), pp. 322–23, 329.

10
. Maureen Dowd,
Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk
(New York: Berkley Books, 2005), p. 388.

11
. Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes,
Seduced by Hitler: The Choices of a Nation and the Ethics of Survival
(Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2001), p. 119.

12
. From Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens, trans.,
Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944: His Private Conversations
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953):

There are towns in Germany from which all joy is lacking. I’m told that it’s the same thing in certain Calvinistic regions of Switzerland. In Trier and Freiburg, women have addressed me in so ignoble a fashion that I cannot make up my mind to repeat their words. It’s on such occasions that I become aware of the depth of human baseness. Clearly, one must not forget that these areas are still feeling the weight of several centuries of religious oppression. Near Wurzburg, there are villages where literally all the women were burned. We know of judges of the Court of the Inquisition who gloried in having had twenty to thirty thousand “witches” burned. Long experience of such horrors cannot but leave indelible traces upon a population. In Madrid, the sickening odour of the heretic’s pyre remained for more than two centuries mingled with the air one breathed. If a revolution breaks out again in Spain, one must see in it the natural reaction to an interminable series of atrocities. One cannot succeed in conceiving how much cruelty, ignominy and falsehood the intrusion of Christianity has spelt for this world of ours. If the misdeeds of Christianity were less serious in Italy, that’s because the people of Rome, having seen them at work, always knew exactly the worth of the Popes before whom Christendom prostrated itself. For centuries, no Pope died except by the dagger, poison or the pox.

13
. Gloria Steinem,
The Revolution Within: A Book of Self-Esteem
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), p. 133.

14
. Dan Brown,
The Da Vinci Code
(New York: Anchor Books, 2003), p. 134.

15
.
Jenny Gibbons, “
Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt”
The Pomegranate
5 (Lammas, 1998).

16
. Brian Levack,
The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe
(Longman, 2006), p. 23.

17
. Laura Miller, “Who Burned the Witches?”
Salon,
February 1, 2005;
www.salon.com/books/review/2005/02/01/witch_craze
; accessed July 29, 2011.

18
. Joseph Klaits,
Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 85.

19
. Thomas F. Madden, “The Real Inquisition: Investigating the Popular Myth,”
National Review
, June 18, 2004;
old.nationalreview.com/comment/madden200406181026.asp
; accessed July 29, 2011.

20
. Jenny Gibbons, “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt,”
The Pomegranate
5 (Lammas, 1998).

21
.
Suprema Congregatio Sanctæ Romanæ et Univeralis Inquisitionis
. The name went through several formulations before this one. According to the “Roman Congregations” entry in the
Catholic Encyclopedia
(available online at
www.newadvent.org/cathen/13136a.htm
): “From its first title of
Romana Inquisitio
was derived the usage of calling this body Congregation of the Holy Roman Universal Inquisition. Sixtus V, in the Bull ‘Immensa’, calls it
Congregatio pro S. inquisitione
and also
Congregatio sanct inquisitionis hæreticæ pravitatis
. Benedict XIV calls it
Romanæ Universalis Inquisitionis Congregatio
(Const. ‘Sollicita’)”.

22
. Thomas F. Madden, “The Truth about the Spanish Inquisition,”
Crisis
(September 2003); accessed June 20, 2011,
www.crisismagazine.com/2011/the-truth-about-the-sp
.

23
. Ibid.

24
. Ibid.

25
. Henry Kamen,
The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 49.

26
. Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Antichrist
(1888). Republished by See Sharp Press (January 1999), p. 91.

27
. For instance, Steven Pinker writes in “A History of Violence,”
The New Republic Online,
March 20, 2007:

[Q]uantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axe marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.… If the wars of the 20th century had killed the same proportion of the population that died in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

For more on the subject, see Lawrence Keeley’s seminal
War Before Civilization: The Myth
of the Peaceful Savage
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Matt Ridley’s brilliant
The Rational Optimist
(New York: Harper, 2010).

28
. John Reed,
Ten Days That Shook the World
(New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), p. 144.

29
. John D. Sutter “Philosopher: Why we should ditch religion,”
CNN Opinion
, March 25, 2010.

22.: Spiritual but Not Religious

1
.   Michael Valpy, “International Man of Mystery,”
The Globe and Mail
, April 10, 2004.

2
.   Chris Colin, “The Bodhisattva of PR,”
Salon
, December 6, 2000.

3
.   Rod Dreher, “Disney’s Curious Aversion to Catholicism,”
Dallas Morning News,
December 23, 2009.

4
.   Charles Krauthammer, “Home Alone 3: The White House,”
Washington Post,
May 14, 1993, p. A31.

5
.   Norman Lear, “A Call for Spiritual Renewal,”
Washington Post,
May 30, 1993, p. C7.

23.: Understanding

1
.   See Gil Hoffman, “6 in 10 Palestinians Reject 2-State Solution, Survey Finds,”
Jerusalem Post,
July 15, 2011; accessed August 11, 2011,
www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=229493
.