"A Speech to the Garden Club of America," by Wendell Berry

Another sighting of one of our Modern Wise Men. I'll have to find a way to put these nine last lines in Wendell Berry's new poem, "A Speech to the Garden Club," in the New Yorker, over my garden somewhere:

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

Read the rest here.

Joseph Epstein on Irving Kristol

When a thinker as influential as Irving Kristol departs this life, it is remarkable. But when one of our Modern Wise Men writes about it, that is more remarkable still. Here is Joseph Epstein on Kristol:

He wrote with clarity and force, subtlety and persuasiveness, but, unlike a true writer, didn't feel the need to do it all the time. He was a splendid speaker, non-oratorical, casual, off-the-cuff division: witty, smart, commonsensical, always with a point to make, one that one hadn't considered before. I recall once hearing Irving introduced by Christopher DeMuth in a room that had a large movie screen behind the speaker's desk. "I see," said Christopher, "that Irving has brought his usual full panoply of audio-visual aids." "Yes," replied Irving, "a cigarette," which he took out of his pocket and tapped on the desk before beginning to speak.

Irving's reigning intellectual note was that of skepticism. As an intellectual, he lived by ideas, but at the same time he greatly distrusted them. All ideas for him, like saints for George Orwell, were guilty until proven innocent. "Create a concept and reality leaves the room," Ortega y Gasset wrote, and my guess is that Irving would have seconded the motion. In the realm of ideas, he preferred those that existed in the world as it is as against those that had to be imposed by elaborate argument or government fiat.

Read the rest here.

"Looking for an Honest Man: Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist," by Leon Kass

Leon Kass, one of our now 11 Modern Wise Men, in his 2003 Jefferson Lecture:

Everyone has heard the story of Diogenes the Cynic who went around the sunlit streets of Athens, lantern in hand, looking for an honest man. This same Diogenes, when he heard Plato being praised for defining man as “an animal, biped and featherless,” threw a plucked chicken into the Academy, saying, “Here is Platonic man!” These tales display Diogenes’ cynicism as both ethical and philosophical: he is remembered for mocking the possibility of finding human virtue and for mocking the possibility of knowing human nature. In these respects, the legendary Diogenes would feel right at home today in many an American university, where a professed interest in human nature and human excellence—or, more generally, in truth and goodness—invites reactions ranging from mild ridicule for one’s naiveté to outright denunciation for one’s attraction to such discredited and dangerous notions.

Tracing the stories about Diogenes the Cynic to their source, in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, one discovers that the apocryphal story is somewhat embroidered if not incorrect. Yes, Diogenes lit a lantern in broad daylight, but he did not say he was looking for an honest man. What he said was, “I am looking for [or ‘seeking’] human being”—anthrôpon zeto—either a human being or the human being, either an exemplar or the idea of humanity, or both. To be sure, purporting to seek the answer by means of candlepower affirms Diogenes’ badge as cynic. But the picture also suggests a man who refuses to be taken in by complacent popular beliefs that we already know human goodness from our daily experience or by confident professorial claims that we can capture the mystery of our humanity in definitions. But mocking or not, and perhaps speaking better than he knew, Diogenes gave elegantly simple expression to the humanist quest for self-knowledge: I seek the human being—my human being, your human being, our humanity. In fact, the embellished version of Diogenes’ question comes to the same thing: to seek an honest man is, at once, to seek a human being worthy of the name, an honest-to-goodness exemplar of the idea of humanity, a truthful and truth-speaking embodiment of the animal having the power of articulate speech.

Read the rest here.

An addition to our list of Modern Wise Men

Several months ago, we announced our list of the Ten Modern Wise Men. This is a list, in no particular order, of the humanoids we think have reached so high a level of intellectual and moral evolution that they deserve our reverence and attention. Indeed some of them have reached such a high evolutionary level of wisdom that they reject evolution altogether. But that is another story.

Here they are once again:

• Leon Kass
• Neil Postman
• Ken Myers
• Wendell Berry
• Thomas Howard
• George Steiner
• William Barrett
• Anthony Esolen
• Jacques Barzun
• Harold Bloom

Join me in beholding them for just a moment, in silence...

...

...These are men whose every utterance (well, with a few exceptions) we treat with almost sacred reverence. We even post here on this very blog whenever there is a public sighting of one them, or whenever a scrap of stray insight is detected.

Now, every once in a while--in the course of human events--it becomes necessary to add someone else to the list. Of course, it requires something very stupendous to warrant such inclusion, the kind of feat seldom witnessed among mortals. But every once in a while (only several times in a lifetime), someone achieves the status requisite for inclusion in our list.

Today, we announce such an event. The new addition to our list of Modern Wise Men is ... David Bentley Hart.

Hart has been battening on the doors of our Shrine to Wisdom for some time now. Indeed, he has been making a positive nuisance of himself, what with all of his incredibly insightful books and articles. In fact, our board of admissions (that's me) has felt set upon by the level and quantity of wisdom that has been emanating from his general direction.

But he really outdid himself in his recent "Nihilism and Freedom: Is There a Difference."

In consequence, we feel obligated to take the rare and sacred action of inducting him into our Modern Wisdom Hall of Fame.

Now some may ask, "Yes, but has he been properly vetted?" Just imagine, for example, that after after being selected, someone were to find that an inductee owed back taxes, or had employed an undocumented foreign servant, or had claimed to be able to see Russia from his house?

To this question our answer is simply that we do not have a vetting procedure for those selected for our list of Modern Wise Men. We consider that the state of enlightenment they have achieved precludes them a priori from this kind of culpability. We quite frankly wouldn't care if an inductee had never paid taxes, employed a whole army of captured slaves, and claimed to have been able to see Russia from the basement of his New Jersey home: Our inductees are engaged in much more important matters.

So now that we have inadvertently started a whole series of sleazy rumors about someone we started this post to honor, let us welcome the eleventh member our august team of Wise Men.

• Leon Kass
• Neil Postman
• Ken Myers
• Wendell Berry
• Thomas Howard
• George Steiner
• William Barrett
• Anthony Esolen
• Jacques Barzun
• Harold Bloom
• David Bentley Hart
  

Ken Myer's List of Ten Books to Read to Understand the Culture

Ken Myers, one of our 10 Modern Wise Men, has a list of the ten books you should read to understand the culture.

Kindergarchy

Joseph Epstein, one of our Ten Modern Wise Men, has written a funny and compelling case that we are under the rule of children. He basically argues that, unlike the pre-therapeutic generation in which he grew up, we have smothered our children in good intentions.

I'd say the one weakness in his article is that he does not critically examine some of the potential drawbacks of his own parents child-rearing philosophy, but otherwise I think he is dead on right.

10 Modern Wise Men

A list of men who order things rightly and judge them well:

Leon Kass
Neil Postman
Ken Myers
Wendell Berry
Thomas Howard
George Steiner
William Barrett
Anthony Esolen
Jacques Barzun
Harold Bloom

These are people I don't even necessarily agree with, they they are people whose books anyone would do well to read and ponder.