The Reagan I Knew

An insider’s view of the ascension and denouement of our country’s 40th president, told with the warmth of personal reflection and correspondence.

In this, the 55th and final piece that he wrote before his death, William F. Buckley traces his relationship with Reagan from their first meeting (a speech WFB delivered in the gymnasium of a Beverly Hills school) to their last (Reagan’s final appearance on Firing Line). Buckley shares memories and letters that sketch the growth of a true friendship amid the political circumstances and historical context that marks the “golden age” of modern American conservatism. In their time, Buckley and Reagan were giants of public life. It is refreshing to see political allies with such admiration, love and respect for one another privately, as well.

The final paragraph merits quoting in full:

The Reagan years accustomed us to a mood about life and about
government. There were always the interruptions, the potholes of life. But Reagan had strategic vision. He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That of course is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise. On the other hand it is only a government leader who can put a stamp on the national mood. One refers not to the period of Shakespeare but to the period of Elizabeth. Reagan’s period was brief, but he did indeed put his stamp on it. He did this in part because he was scornful of the claims of omnipotent government, in part because he felt, and expressed, the buoyancy of the American Republic.

Who, oh! who will once again feel and express the “the buoyancy of the American Republic?”

The Reagan I Knew is an inspiring and edifying read for those disparaged by the usual muck and pessimism of political discourse.

Contemporary Worlds (II)

Solzhenitsyn continues:


There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as compact units. For one thousand years Russia has belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in communist captivity. It may be that in the past years Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West, I am no judge here; but as to Israel, for instance, it seems to me that it stands apart from the Western world in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered peoples' approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success, there were no geographic frontiers to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the twentieth century came the discovery of its fragility and friability. We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious, and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.
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KMB's comments:

Solzhenitsyn continues to draw out his basic theme: that the Western worldview is essentially flawed, especially in how it prevents the West from realizing the depth and complexity of world cultures. I have described this flaw as the lack of a “Mythic” or “Epic”-view which other cultures retain, a grand vision that lends the culture / nation / people an identity of cosmic significance. Using Israel as an example, he hints here at the core point that drives his argumentation – a state system fundamentally linked to religion.

But, as Solzhenitsyn further articulates his big idea, we’ll see that by “religion” he means something more than the typical Western view of religion. Not an atomistic unit of belief that can be generalized, personalized and added in as a discrete, exchangeable component of life, but a formative force that constitutes the core of life itself. Take away the religion and the people become shallow, anemic and aimless. Discount the formative role of the religion (as the West does) and you utterly fail to understand the underlying principles that drive the life-task/focus of the people.

It’s worth noting that, even in 1978, Solzhenitsyn includes the Muslim world among the “worlds” that the West cannot adequately comprehend. We arrogantly and ignorantly (though “stupidly” might be a better descriptive) presume to deal with the Muslim world at a political level alone (the level of empty diplomacy and mercurial violence, according to Solzhenitsyn), but those assumptions that seed the Muslim heart and feed its intents are inaccessible to us, “riddles and surprises to Western thinking.” Primarily because we discount the depth and complexity of the formative core.

The Muslim Mythic-view in a nutshell: “Where do we come from? We are born out of the sheer, all powerful will of Allah. What are we about? Submission to and propagation of the will of Allah which is Islam. What is our destiny? To bring all the peoples of the Earth under subjugation to Allah through Islam.” This rubric forms the core of Muslim identity.

But the West doesn’t get that. Instead, we misunderstand it as a political ideology and ascribe it to “radicals.” That basic misunderstanding has infected every aspect of Western relations with the Muslim world, including everything that led up to and everything that has followed the events of 11 September 2001. And all indications portend that it will continue to do so.

The Thin Man

Daschell Hammet established the hard-boiled detective as a fixture in the American imagination. The Thin Man, together with The Maltese Falcon, stands out as representative of Hammet’s novels (originally printed in serial format) and remains an exemplar of the mystery / thriller genre.

The “noire” aspects are surprisingly unsurprising – or perhaps, unsurprisingly so considering how thoroughly the motif has imbedded itself in our popular consciousness. Hammet’s New York is all posh hotel apartments and speak-easies peopled with crusty coppers, sad-sack snitches and leisure-rich lushes. His protagonist Nick Charles married wealth and retired early from the sleuthing racket. He plays the markets with his young wife’s money and routinely requests a cocktail with his breakfast, “just a little something to cut the phlegm.” All nearly too commonplace to capture any attention.

But let not familiarity breed contempt. The Thin Man displays the kind of power and artistry that characterizes the rich beginnings of genre fiction. Hammet begins the narrative in medias res and ends just as abruptly. As the mystery unfolds, the laconic Charles tries as hard as he can to stay out of it, despite the fact that the players in the drama are his friends. Hammet off-sets Charles’ world-weary reticence with the exuberant curiosity of his wife Nora. The tension between the foils plays well to draw out Hammet’s big idea – that life doesn’t come with any real resolution, just theories and guesswork.

On one level, The Thin Man is a fun, easy read and a good entry point into the world of suspense fiction. On another, it shows us how the highborn notions of philosophy are filtered into the popular psyche, in this case, the relativistic vision that forms the framework for postmodern multiculturalism. And with a 1933 copyright, it also shows how long the idea has been settling in with us.

A World Split Apart (I)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,
Thursday, June 8, 1978

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates.

Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said...

A World Split Apart
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The split in today's world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom -- in this case, our Earth -- divided against itself cannot stand.
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KMB's comments:


Solzhenitsyn develops this point more in the next section, but let’s begin here with what I think is a key component (though not the entirety) of what he is driving towards. We’re familiar with the concept of worldview. I want to expand the way we think about the concept so I’m going to trade the term for another that I hope more precisely gets to the heart of things: Mythic-view.

“Worldview” is too small a term (in one sense) to get at what Solzhenitsyn means because the nature of the split involves cosmic universals. Likewise, the term “meta-narrative” seems too small because “narrative” sounds academic and bland. “Meta-Epic” might be better, emphasizing the grand importance into which it ties the society it owns. Solzhenitsyn’s divide has to do with a Mythic or Epic view of a people’s origins, destiny, and power / history. Or to put it a different way, it has to do with the way a people answer the questions: “Who are we and where did we come from?” “Where are we going?” and, “What are we about and what do we do while we’re here?”

What Solzhenitsyn saw in 1978 (earlier, in fact) was a West that had rejected the Mythic-view that drove its ascendency, and with it, rejected the idea of Mythic-view itself. Without a Mythic-view the West was (and is) steeped in the material and relativistic. As such, the West also dismisses or ignores the Mythic-view within other major cultures and relates to them in purely material, relativistic terms. Thus “the split is a much profounder and much more alienating one.” As a result, the West interprets world events in primarily political terms, and responds with either diplomacy or arms proliferation.

Here’s a sketchbook example:

Beginning with the “Lost Generation” and continuing on through the Beatniks, Hippies, Slackers, GenXers, etc, Westerners have been on a quest to “find themselves.” In other words, the West is chiefly characterized by confusion about origins, destiny and power: “Who am I, where am I going and what am I about? I don’t know.”

That hasn’t happened elsewhere. Russians, for example, have a strong Mythic-view that shapes their lives. “Who are we? We are Russians, an ancient, glorious people. Where are we going? Towards further greatness. What are we about? Furthering Russian greatness.”

I may be oversimplifying somewhat, but generally speaking, strength, fortitude and the unrelenting march toward greatness pervade the Russian consciousness and the majority of Russians give themselves over to those things that promote actualization of that Mythic-view.

The Soviets leveraged that aspect of the Russian psyche to amass power and were successful until everyone inside Russia, even some who had ascended in the Party, realized the exploitation. Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher galvanized Western resistance in a way that challenged the Soviets at that fundamental level, the Mythic level. They did use a combination of diplomatic, economic and militaristic means as tools, but the focal point of the resistance was moral. At a time when the West in general had rejected a Mythic-view, Reagan and Thatcher personally retained a deep Mythic sense and rallied the West around it by drawing us into their grand (Mythic / Epic) vision of the Evil Empire behind the Iron Curtain in mortal conflict with the Shining City on a Hill.

To recap: The Soviets ascended to power by exploiting the Russian Myth and then, when history had moved such that they could no longer credibly prop themselves up on it, they collapsed under pressure from a source that drew its strength from a another Mythic-view.

However, though the Russians dealt periodically with exploitation of their Mythic-view by losing confidence in it, they never gave it up. In the last ten years, strong leaders have risen in Russia that have bolstered in the national Myth; hence, recent tensions between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and Europe.

In the eyes of the West where the Mythic is rejected, these recent plays are misinterpreted as being about political power. Some see it as primarily a problem surrounding natural resources, namely oil and natural gas. Others see it as a play to rebuild the Soviet Union. But I would submit that both views grow out of the split Solzhenitsyn identifies. Russia’s actions are only superficially about political power. Fundamentally, they are driven by the Mythic-view that Russians hold of themselves.