HART Page

socialist Fairlie prescribe in 1978? The Big Redistribution will only deflect Avarice toward contemptible black-market humbug. Without its Christian moral hardpan, civilization has naturally dispersed like a blown-on dandelion head: into wind-caught selves. Upshot: either New Left permissiveness or repression. Moreso, because self (soul) is a Christian idea. Before BC became AD, particularly before St. Augustine, there was no intricate soul, no secret person with value and distinctive attributes. People and rock had just about the same spiritual relationship with God (or gods), give/take an occasional burnt offering. “ . . . Sin in Christian theology was part of its tremendous redefinition of human personality over the centuries. Since that redefinition, none other has taken us much further.” Further? Backwards: now soul is Psyche, a pagan demi-goddess. It can hardly commit sin, let alone generate the dynamics of expiation. Fairlie has hoped, by refurbishing sin, by making it a sublime (if secular) thought-construct, to nudge socialist responsibility awake. The attempt is great-hearted and elegant: it has eccentric drama to it: rather like a late 1700’s pre-fab ruined monastery with live-in pre-fab ruined monks. Yet only his immaculate prose and clear intelligence will prevent the book from being, at essence, not much more than old-fanglish social gospel. A Salvation Army tract.

Ah, but HF can write: he hits the 1-3 pocket, strike, time and again. Appreciate this handsome sentence re abortion, re Woman’s-Right-To-Control-Her-Own-Body. “Most unwanted pregnancies are themselves the result of a woman having lost control of her own body—to impulse, whim, passion or lust —and the demand for non-therapeutic abortions is a demand only to remove the consequences of having previously forfeited control over her own body, which she now imagines she may reassert with surgical assistance from someone else.” Palpable hit. In unvarnished fact: HF is a social conservative. (As for economic good sense: he’d have trouble getting tenure at Wool-worth’s.) But forbid him certain words —capital, price, wage, redistribution— HF would fit on the masthead of NR. And do it honor.

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socialist Fairlie prescribe in 1978? The Big Redistribution will only deflect Avarice toward contemptible black-market humbug. Without its Christian moral hardpan, civilization has naturally dispersed like a blown-on dandelion head: into wind-caught selves. Upshot: either New Left permissiveness or repression. Moreso, because self (soul) is a Christian idea. Before BC became AD, particularly before St. Augustine, there was no intricate soul, no secret person with value and distinctive attributes. People and rock had just about the same spiritual relationship with God (or gods), give/take an occasional burnt offering. “ . . . Sin in Christian theology was part of its tremendous redefinition of human personality over the centuries. Since that redefinition, none other has taken us much further.” Further? Backwards: now soul is Psyche, a pagan demi-goddess. It can hardly commit sin, let alone generate the dynamics of expiation. Fairlie has hoped, by refurbishing sin, by making it a sublime (if secular) thought-construct, to nudge socialist responsibility awake. The attempt is great-hearted and elegant: it has eccentric drama to it: rather like a late 1700’s pre-fab ruined monastery with live-in pre-fab ruined monks. Yet only his immaculate prose and clear intelligence will prevent the book from being, at essence, not much more than old-fanglish social gospel. A Salvation Army tract.

Ah, but HF can write: he hits the 1-3 pocket, strike, time and again. Appreciate this handsome sentence re abortion, re Woman’s-Right-To-Control-Her-Own-Body. “Most unwanted pregnancies are themselves the result of a woman having lost control of her own body—to impulse, whim, passion or lust —and the demand for non-therapeutic abortions is a demand only to remove the consequences of having previously forfeited control over her own body, which she now imagines she may reassert with surgical assistance from someone else.” Palpable hit. In unvarnished fact: HF is a social conservative. (As for economic good sense: he’d have trouble getting tenure at Wool-worth’s.) But forbid him certain words —capital, price, wage, redistribution— HF would fit on the masthead of NR. And do it honor.