In these very divisive times we see people
passionately aligned to entrenched ideas they do not understand promoting
actions that run counter to the good of our nation. It matters little whether they are promoting
anarchy or raging against the immorality
of our times. Actions that stem simply from emotional response to real or
perceived issues will lack the ability to properly address those issues.
Over the past years I have tried to find a
balanced understanding of how we have managed to get to this place in our
history. For those of us that believe in
God and absolutes in regard to morality, virtues and values our current
environment causes us great concern. It
is easy to find books and materials that are simply the extension of a strong
emotional belief and seek to paint history with current emotional brushes. But there are some writers that I believe can
explain what has happened and why it is happening based upon a more balance
historical understanding. That is where
Gertrude Himmelfarb comes into the picture.
Her writings focus mainly on the Victorian
era. Where many have painted those times
with a brush dipped into preconceived ideas, she goes back and reviews for us
some of the writings and personalities that paint a very different picture.
This month’s selection is The Roads to Modernity: The British, French,
and American Enlightments (2005). While
this is not your end of the day quick read, it does bring into perspective the
enlightenment and its relationship to the founding of America. If you are interested in the ideas and philosopher’s
that our founding fathers looked to then this book is for you. I
believe her emphasis on virtues as the basis of character and action represents
the keys to unlock a future of hope.
Reviews:
About the Author
The following is taken from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Himmelfarb
Gertrude Himmelfarb (also known as Bea Kristol) 1922-
Gertrude
Himmelfarb received her undergraduate degree from Brooklyn college in 1942 and
her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1950. She also studied at the
Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and at Girton College, Cambridge
University. She is married and has two children and is a political commentator
and editor of The Weekly Standard.
Himmelfarb is best known as a historian of Victorian England. But
she puts that period in a larger context. The
Idea of Poverty opens with an
extended analysis of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, who helped shape the
debates and policies throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Victorian Minds features such eighteenth-century
"proto-Victorians" as Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham, concluding
with the "last Victorian," John Buchan, whose novels depict a
twentieth century imbued with Victorian values. The Moral Imaginationranges
from Burke to Winston Churchill and Lionel Trilling, with assorted Victorians
and non-Victorians in between. On
Looking into the Abyss has
modern culture and society in the forefront and the Victorians in the
background, while One Nation,
Two Cultures is entirely
about American culture and society. The
Roads to Modernity enlarges
the perspective of the Enlightenment, both chronologically and nationally,
placing the British Enlightenment in opposition to the French and in accord with
the American. Most recently, The
Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot and The People of the Book focus on attitudes to Jews, Judaism,
and Zionism in England from their readmission in the seventeenth century to the
present.
And so with scores of essays demonstrating
that Victorian "values" – "virtues," she calls them – were
not unique to that time and place. "The Victorian Ethos: Before and after
Victoria," is the title of one essay;[13] "Victorianism
before Victoria" are the opening words of another.[14] The
word "Victorian" today has a disagreeable and crabbed connotation,
conjuring up repressive sexual and social mores. Himmelfarb humanizes and
democratizes that concept.. In an interview after receiving the National
Humanities Medal, she explained that the Victorian virtues – prudence,
temperance, industriousness, decency, responsibility – were thoroughly
pedestrian. "They depended on no special breeding, talent, sensibility, or
even money. They were common, everyday virtues, within the capacity of ordinary
people. They were the virtues of citizens, not of heroes or saints – and of
citizens of democratic countries, not aristocratic ones."[15] Himmelfarb
has argued "for the reintroduction of traditional values (she prefers the
term 'virtues'), such as shame, responsibility, chastity, and self-reliance,
into American political life and policy-making".[16]
