Smotherly Love
Sometimes compassion corrupts.
continue readingMeghan Cox Gurdon
Meghan Cox Gurdon is children’s book critic for the Wall Street Journal and a columnist for the Washington Examiner.
Articles by Meghan Cox Gurdon
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Smotherly Love – sometimes compassion corrupts
It would seem the most natural and welcome thing in the world for a mother to express compassion for her children.
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The Youngest Virtue - a reading list of classics on honesty
Honesty, Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is “the youngest virtue.” That sounds puzzling until one remembers that Nietzsche is here, as always, at war with Christianity. The honesty Zarathustra commends to his hearers is not the usual, interpersonal kind. Nor is it, exactly, intellectual honesty, which usually means fairness in argument. It is existential honesty: willingness to face the specter of meaninglessness, to entertain the possibility that nothing justifies or underwrites our lives. Even most unbelievers, Nietzsche thought, had convinced themselves that the universe contained a structure of moral meaning, expressed in natural law, and that to live accordingly was a universal human duty and conferred intrinsic human dignity. Nietzsche denounced this recourse to “metaphysical comfort.” Our existence has no meaning, no purpose, no value, he insisted, except what we endow it with through our self-creation. This austere ideal may be a rare and beautiful form, perhaps even the ultimate form, of honesty, but it is not my subject here. The works I will consider in this Syllabus have to do with the more common form of the virtue: what we might call, with a bow to the contemporary philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the ethics of communication.
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The American Virtue – a reading list of classics on self-reliance
In his essay “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” Tom Wolfe warns, with characteristic hyperbole, that self-reliance is an endangered virtue: “The notion of a self ... who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior — a self that can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds — this old-fashioned notion ... of success through enterprise and true grit is slipping away.... The peculiarly American faith in the power of the individual to transform himself from a helpless cipher into a giant among men ... is now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche wrote an obituary in 1882.”
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From Jesus to Jeffrey Sachs –a reading list of classics on justice
“Classics on justice” calls to mind, in the first place, Plato and his philosophical successors. Let us look, however, in a different direction. Every human being, however unphilosophical, has an imagination; nearly everyone’s imagination is strongly affected by other people’s suffering; and when that suffering is extensive and preventable, nearly everyone feels an obligation to help. This is the theoretical basis – a quite sufficient one – for the literature of protest and solidarity. The other political use of imagination, besides sympathy, is hope. Utopias are not perfect worlds, as those who want to discredit them always pretend, merely different and better ones. Where there is no such vision, justice perisheth. It is, then, from the traditions of social criticism and utopian vision – works of moral imagination rather than moral theory – that I have drawn examples of great writing about justice for this first Syllabus.
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