Vaclav Havel 1936-2011

The statesman of the Velvet Revolution is dead. Vaclav Havel at age 75.

Hear his reflections on the recent upheavals in the middle east.




Read his 1978 essay, "The Power of the Powerless," from Open Letters, Selected Writings 1965-1990.

Norman Borlaug, 1914-2009

Norman Borlaug died on September 12 at the age of 95. He was one of the nation's great Iowans (and there have been many). When the neo-Malthusians were warning us about a "small planet" and "limits to growth," Borlaug was engineering what became the Green Revolution which unlocked the wealth of the Creator's provision that lay yet untapped within what people of smaller spirit saw as our irremediable collective poverty.

In his Reason.com obituary, Ronald Bailey provides us with the relevant quotations from Paul Ehrlich's 1968 prediction of impending global doom, The Population Bomb.

In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

Borlaug soon afterward proved him wrong, accomplishing precisely what Ehrlich said was impossible. Not only does the Lord provide, he has already provided more bountifully than we imagine or deserve.

The irony in the term "Green Revolution" is that the phrase has been re-embraced by the pusillanimous doom-and-gloomers who see the earth as a paltry and all too delicate resource, and human beings as the recklessly short-sighted and irresponsible tenants who will ruin and squander it if they are not soon placed under strict supervision. They act as though we live in a china teacup, when in fact God has placed us in a mansion which we find to be ever more sprawling with every new room and wing that we discover.

I don't know what Norman Borlaug thought of his creator, but I thank God for creating and cultivating this man who had such confidence in the goodness of God's earth and who set about so intelligently and industriously to unlock greater depths of its goodness. In his honor, I am re-posting what I wrote on October 26, 2007.

"No African Development Without Local Wisdom."

Everyone puzzles over Africa. Much of the world is enjoying runaway economic growth and increasingly widespread prosperity, but that huge and wealthy continent is left largely behind. It's a human tragedy. In today's Wall Street Journal, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and one of the fathers of the 1960s Green Revolution in world food production, Norman Borlaug lays out what is required to save Africa from its chronic development crisis ("A Green Revolution for Africa"). He emphasizes science and agriculture, but the subtext is a political challenge to the African leaders themselves.

He compares the Green Revolution in Asia to that of Africa. He says that small-holder agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa has been especially anemic. Unlike Asia which has a good road and rail network, "African farmlands are generally isolated from motorized transport systems." In addition, population growth "has resulted in progressive -- and now often dramatic -- degradation of the soil resource base, while fertilizer use has hardly increased at all, and is the lowest in the world." Whereas agricultural R&D in Asia has tripled over the last 20 years, in Africa is has grown by only 20%, and in half the countries it has actually declined. This is especially tragic given the "special production circumstances" that put Africa in particular need of research and development investment.

He recommends a "broad and more integrated perspective" that focuses on "transforming staple-food production" and giving greater attention to "post-production market linkages -- especially to grain markets and agro-industrial food processing that offer off-farm employment opportunities." Improvement also requires "[s]ubstantially greater investments in infrastructure -- roads, electrical power, water resources." Without this, "there is little hope for real progress in reversing the alarming food insecurity trends or in making agriculture an engine of economic growth."

Borlaug has been calling for an African Green Revolution for years (e.g. International Herald Tribune 1992; New York Times 2003). He did his great work in the 1960s. He is 93 and he is still beating the drum for this cause. So what's the hold up? There is a important political aspect to all this that Borlaug touches upon at several points, but does not emphasize. Perhaps he is being subtle. Perhaps he is leaving it to the multitude of political leaders, government and NGO officials, journalists and scholars to see the political point and make it explicit. Let me do my part.

These nations are governed by more or less sovereign governments. Implementing many of his recommendations presupposes governments that actually care about their people, i.e. that they are not tyrannies which sadly many of them are. In his opening paragraph, concerning Asia's Green Revolution and the global development agenda, Borlaug quietly underscores the critical role that wise political leadership must play: "Research and development, political courage, effective policies and good governance were the driving forces." African leaders are not known for their"political courage, effective policies and good governance."

One cannot help but wonder why "political courage" should be necessary, at least at the highest levels of power. Why shouldn't crass self-interest and naked ambition not suffice to bring the thug-tyrants of the African continent into line with this program? Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe comes first to mind. It is a marvel, especially in view of the enormous productive power that modern economic and political principles have made possible, that they see their personal security, prosperity, and glory in brutalizing their peoples whom they keep in heart-rending poverty, rather than in securing their peoples' property, enriching their nations' economies and establishing themselves as the fathers and protectors of these accomplishments.

John Locke argued this point, appealing to the shrewdness of every ruler, in his great Second Treatise on Civil Government (section 42):

This shews how much numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions; and that the increase of lands, and the right employing of them, is the great art of government: and that prince, who shall be so wise and godlike, as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind, against the oppression of power and narrowness of party, will quickly be too hard for his neighbours.

I am not an Africa specialist by any measure, but as a student of politics I find Africa a vivid illustration (all too often a sad one) of many political principles, and of course it draws my Christian concern. You might refer back to two of my previous posts on Africa.

The Last Knight of Christendom

My friend Stephen Clark reflects on Richard John Neuhaus's character and contribution to our political discourse. Neuhaus's funeral is today.

Richard John Neuhaus has gone to his reward, and with him the Christian practice of chivalry has come to its uttermost end.

I met Fr. Neuhaus once, a little over a year ago. I requested a meeting with him, not for any particular reason other than my avid reading of "First Things". Two things struck me about his office: first, that it had not been renovated in several years, and second, that it had a spacious sitting area where the smoking of cigars was obviously practiced.

A friend of mine accompanied me on my pilgrimage, and the two of us proceeded to stumble through the interview like a couple of star-struck teenagers. Nothing in Fr. Neuhaus’ demeanor caused this; he was a smallish man, balding and grey, and as unpretentiously gracious as a mortal can be.

At the end of the interview, Fr. Neuhaus offered my friend and me each an autographed copy of The Naked Public Square, which of course we eagerly accepted.

In the title of this well-known volume lies one of Fr. Neuhaus’ great contributions. Orwell noted in “Politics and the English Language” that public speech typically is littered with dead or dying metaphors. In the half-century since Orwell’s indictment, public discourse has deteriorated yet further into a sloganized slush of referentless meaninglessness: the audacity of tripe.

Into this milieu, Fr. Neuhaus introduced a straightforwardly mixed metaphor: “The Naked Public Square.” This proved to be not only a living and powerful figure of speech, but one whose life-force reached to the farthest corners of Christendom. Where has it not become fashionable to speak of “the public square”? Within his metaphor lies implicit the wrongness of many things that are currently being done in our civic life, and also a positive indication for correcting them.

However, for me the manner rather than the matter of Fr. Neuhaus’ work was his greatest contribution. The deeply cultivated civility of his approach—even to controversial topics about which he had strong convictions—can only be described as chivalrous.

There is a profoundly cultured graciousness in the writings of Fr. Neuhaus that I have found nowhere else in the contemporary scene, either in Christian or non-Christian writers. And this mellifluousness is most surprising because it mainly flowed in a journal of current affairs.

If I may rob from Tolkien, the last of the High Elves has sailed for Valinor; and we shall never again see his like in Middle Earth.

May he rest from his labors. And may his works not only follow him, but may their lingering forms illumine our way in his absence.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine;
et lux perpetua luceat eis ;
cum Sanctis tuis in aeternum,
quia pius es.

What Neuhaus Wrought

Theologian and political theorist Richard John Neuhaus died yesterday. Joseph Bottum made this announcement in First Things, the journal of Christian political reflection that Neuhaus founded. "Fr. Richard John Neuhaus slipped away January 8, shortly before 10 o’clock, at the age of seventy-two. He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering. He lost consciousness Tuesday evening after a collapse in his heart rate, and soon after, in the company of friends, he died. My tears are not for him—for he knew, all his life, that his Redeemer lives, and he has now been gathered by the Lord in whom he trusted."

Douglas Puffert, an economics professor at The King's College in New York, gives us this summary of his life and work.

"Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009, was arguably the leading Christian public intellectual of our time, at least in the United States. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor in Canada, but he moved to the U.S. as a teenager. As a student at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis (Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod), he began his life-long consideration of the relationship between the ultimate concerns of the Kingdom of God and the subordinate but still vitally important concerns of politics and worldly justice. In this he engaged with Luther's "two kingdoms" understanding, with Reinhold Niebuhr, with the American Catholic John Courtney Murray, and indeed with many leading contemporary theologians, philosophers, political activists, church leaders, and Jewish leaders as well as with the broad tradition of Christian social thought.

"In the 1960s he was "very much a man of the left," as he later frequently put it. He was an activist in both the Civil Rights movement, as a supporter of Martin Luther King, and in the movement opposing the Vietnam War. His first substantial break with much of the political left was over abortion. Early on, before Roe v. Wade, he was convinced that opposing abortion was of a piece with his other political concerns. During the 1970s he grew increasingly concerned over the way that many leftist Christians were elevating politics and political ideology to the level of ultimate concerns and were sometimes, indeed, conflating these with the Kingdom of God (for example, in liberation theology). This led him in 1982 to write a manifesto for the newly founded Institute on Religion and Democracy and to break publicly (on 60 Minutes) with many of his erstwhile political allies.

"His conviction about the distinction between ultimate and subordinate concerns is also reflected in the names of two journals he later founded, This World (late 1980s) and First Things (1990-present). These journals, together with Neuhaus's book The Naked Public Square (1984), have had an immense effect on public discussion of religion and public life. In addition to their direct influence on politicians, church leaders, and opinion leaders, they have encouraged and guided many young Christians (and some older ones) in developing a robustly Christian approach to these matters. Neuhaus and his journals have directly helped to develop a new generation of writers to carry on his vision.

"At seminary Neuhaus became the sort of confessional Lutheran who regards oneself as an evangelical catholic and who sees the Reformation as a very regrettable necessity (and hopefully a temporary one). Partly as a result of Vatican II and the papacy of John Paul II, Neuhaus decided in 1990 that he could no longer in good conscience refrain from joining the Roman Catholic Church. Neuhaus was re-ordained as a priest in 1991. He had already been a friend of such leading Catholic intellectuals as Avery Dulles and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) as well as some bishops, and his influence in the Church subsequently expanded greatly as he advised and admonished American bishops and Vatican officials."

The editors of the National Review give us these reflections.

Watch Neuhaus's lecture, "The Blessing of Mortality," which he delivered at Boston College in 2003.

Samuel P. Huntington 1927-2008

The great Harvard political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, died Christmas Eve. My first exposure to Huntington was as an undergraduate when I read American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981). In that book, he presented America as a uniquely principled nation that, because it was founded moral-political principles rather than on blood or soil, we are always living with an "I v I gap," an ideals versus institutions gap. We aspire to realize certain noble principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, but because we are flesh we always fall sort of them to some degree or another. Sometimes the gap is wider and sometimes not so wide. At times when the gap becomes painfully wide, we throw ourselves into domestic turmoil. The Civil War and the Civil Rights Movements are just two salient examples of such times. This struck me as a theory that does justice to what is admirable in the American political experience while at the same time recognizing American shortcomings, as opposed to constantly accusing the nation of hypocrisy as the they do on the political left.

From one generation to the next, Samuel Huntington helped bring clarity to what is so often the confusion that is political life, both at home and abroad.

Read Robert Kaplan's 2001 article on Huntington in The Atlantic, "Looking the World in the Eye." It gives you a good overview of his education, his professional life, and his publications.

The Economist calls Huntington "one of America's great public intellectuals." His politics, they tell us, were more complicated than today's hard left, hard right, and confused and compromised center.

He was a lifelong Democrat, a representative of that dying breed, the hard-headed cold war liberal. He wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson and acted as a foreign-policy adviser to Hubert Humphrey. He briefly served in the Johnson and Carter administrations (he was a particularly close friend of Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of Barack Obama’s early backers). He was a fierce opponent of the neoconservatives who thought they could transplant American values into Mesopotamia.

But he believed that it was vital to mix liberal idealism with a pessimism rooted in a conservative reading of history. He rejected the economic reductionism that drove the Washington consensus, and insisted instead on seeing people as products of culture rather than as profit-and-loss calculating machines. He also rejected the beguiling idea (some say it has beguiled The Economist) that all good things tend to go together—that free markets go hand in hand with pluralism, democracy and the American way. He felt that America was a living paradox: America’s culture turned it into a universal civilisation but those values were in fact rooted in a unique set of circumstances.

His faculty page biography:

Samuel P. Huntington is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor. He graduated with distinction from Yale at age 18, served in the Army, and then received his Ph.D. from Harvard and started teaching there when he was 23. He has been a member of Harvard’s Department of Government since 1950 (except for a brief period between 1959 and 1962 when he was associate professor of government at Columbia University). He has served as chairman of the Government Department and of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His principal interests are: national security, strategy, and civil military relations; democratization and political and economic development of less-developed countries; cultural factors in world politics; and American national identity. During 1977 and 1978 he worked at the White House as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council. He was a founder and co-editor for seven years of the journal Foreign Policy.

Bibliography:

• The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957)
• The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics (1961)
• Political Order in Changing Societies (1968)
• American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981)
• The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991)
• The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order (1996)
• Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004).

"Assimilation Nation" is a 2004 review of Who Are We? from the May 31, 2004 issue of National Review.

Dith Pran 1942-2008 on the Cambodian Holocaust

In November of 1986 at Boston College, I heard Dith Pran relate his experiences in “the killing fields” of Cambodia under the radical communist Khmer Rouge (as if communist weren’t radical enough). Many are familiar with him as the photojournalist in the 1984 Roland Joffe film, The Killing Fields. He died Sunday in New Jersey of pancreatic cancer at age 65. This is what he told us that day.

The population of Cambodia was 7 million in 1970 when Cambodia entered the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, and by 1978 when the Vietnamese toppled them they had killed 2-3 million Cambodians, one third of the country’s population. They did this for the good of humanity.

Dith became convinced that something was monstrously wrong when the Khmer Rouge began emptying the hospitals. They also emptied the cities, abolished all institutions, even money.

To establish a truly communist society and build a new humanity, everyone whom they did not kill had to become a peasant. Put simply, the people must work the land. To reach this goal they killed off the educated class. Wearing eye glasses was sufficient indication of one's corruption by education. If you were a high official, you and your whole family were killed. Lower officials were also killed, but not their families. People would tell the Khmer Rouges what they used to do as an occupation in the hope of getting their jobs back, but they were put to death unless they were unskilled. Teachers would admit to being so because they could not imagine a country without education. These were not killed right away, but sometimes a few years later. To save his own life, Dith pretended to be an illiterate taxi driver.

Generally, people’s imagination for evil fell far short of the plans the Khmer Rouges executed. Dith said it was as though they were from another planet. But of course they were not. They share the same human nature that we do. What restrains us? What civilizes us? Whatever it is, are we preserving it, or eroding it? This question gets scant attention in our universities. (Obviously, it is a central concern at The King’s College in New York City where I teach.)

The Khmer Rouges came in both male and female form, he said. Both were brutal. People had to pull both plough and wagon. Eighty year olds had to work. Everyone who ate had to work. There was no mercy. They killed children in front of their parents. Husbands and wives were tortured in front of each other. They separated husbands, wives and children. They buried the dead in wells (the only source of water), B-52 craters and trenches.

People played stupid. “The Khmer Rouges has many eyes.” If you said, “I miss coffee” or “I miss noodle soup,” you had an imperialist, capitalist mind. When they gave you your meager food ration and asked you, “Is that enough?,” you were sure to say, “yes.”

Dith said that The Killing Fields is a very accurate account of his experiences although the film is mild compared to what actually happened because American audiences can't stomach anything stronger. I require my Introduction to Politics students to see The Killing Fields (or one of a number of other films of that sort) in order to make them dramatically aware of the stakes that are involved in political life, the dimensions of evil that can proceed from the human heart, and thus how important it is for them to understand tyranny and liberty, wise and unwise political institutions, the importance of political culture and citizen character, the dimensions of God’s amazing common grace, and where we are and in what direction we are moving on the spectrum between the Founding and the killing fields.

Of course, this is just a glimpse at the horror. Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times journalist whose life he saved, wrote The Death and Life of Dith Pran (1980). Dith himself wrote Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs By Survivors (Yale, 1999). Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor with no acting experience who played Dith in The Killing Fields, wrote Survival in the Killing Fields (2003). You may also read Dith Pran's obituary in The New York Sun.

Hal Riney, 1932-2008. Good job.

Hal Riney, one of the greatest American admen, has died of cancer at age 75. Read about him in the NYT obituary.

Politically, he gave us "It's Morning Again in America" for Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984 as well as "A Bear in the Woods." Watch several fine political ads from Reagan-Bush '84 on Creativity-online.com.

William F. Buckley Jr 1925-2008

William F. Buckley Jr died this morning in his study in Stamford CT.

There is an awesome chill that comes over you when someone of his stature and accomplishment for humanity passes from this world into the next. We don't depend on men, but we thank God for good men nonetheless.

NRO announced it here.

Watch a marvelous Firing Line exchange between Buckley and Noam Chomsky in 1969 over whether or not the US actions abroad constitute terrorism. They speak to our times.