Summer 1991
Hinduism and the Fate of India
In Essence
E. DigBaltzell and Howard G.On the Bench Schneiderman, in Society (May-June 1991), Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
America's aristocrats, Tocqueville ob- served, are to be found not among the rich, but rather occupying "the judicial bench and bar." Insulated from popular pressures and appointed for life, the jus- tices of the Supreme Court appear to be the cream of that aristocracy. It seems only natural that they would be people of privileged origins, especially c...
upper-class presidents." Still, Americans of more modest origins
may be glad to know, one of the chief jus- tices ranked the authors as among the very greatest, Earl Warren, rose from quite humble beginnings. He was, it seems, a true aristocrat.
Liberalism at Bay "Race" by Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, in The
Atlantic (May 1991), 745 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 02116.
The Democratic Party, which has lost five of the last six presidential elections, has a serious...
Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, in The New Yorker (May 6, 13, 20, Wise Men 1991), 20 West 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson stunned the nation announc- ing that he would not seek another term in the White House. The surprise came at the end of a speech in which he unveiled a limited halt to the bombing of North Viet- nam and proposed peace negotiations. Was his sacrifice made in an effort to end a war that-after prodding by the fabled Wise Men o...
W. R. Connor, in The American Why the Experts Scholar (Spring 1991), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C.
Were So Wrong 20009.
Despite prodigious intellectual labors (and prodigious sums spent to make them pos- sible), Western Sovietologists failed to foresee in any clear way the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and East- ern Europe. Where did the analysts go wrong? Connor, director of the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. savs that it was in
* .,
n...
W. R. Connor, in The American Why the Experts Scholar (Spring 1991), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C.
Were So Wrong 20009.
Despite prodigious intellectual labors (and prodigious sums spent to make them pos- sible), Western Sovietologists failed to foresee in any clear way the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and East- ern Europe. Where did the analysts go wrong? Connor, director of the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. savs that it was in
* .,
n...
Ronald Radosh and Eric Breindel, in The NewExplosive Intelligence Republic (June 10, 1991), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.
Diehard defenders of Julius and Ethel Ro- senberg and other convicted Soviet spies have long dismissed the idea that espio- nage might have helped the Soviet Union learn how to make an atomic bomb. Now comes confirmation that that was exactly what happened, and it comes from an un- expected source: the KGB itself. Radosh, co-author of The Rosenberg File (1983), and Breindel,...
Robert B.Reich, in Corporations Without Issues in Science and Technology (Winter 1990-91), National Countries Acad. of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave., Washington, D.C.
20418.
Does improving U.S. "competitiveness" mean making American-owned corpora- tions more productive and profitable, and boosting their share of world markets? Not so much as it once did, contends Reich, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Govern- ment. With U.S. corporations increasingly employing foreign workers, and f...
Sally Clarke, in The Journal of Eco- nomic History (Mar. 1991), 21 1 Watkins Home, Hall Ctr. for the Humanities, Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045.
Many Americans have come to believe that government interference with market forces always hinders economic growth. Clarke, a historian at the University of Texas, has come up with a case to the con- trary: New Deal intervention in the agri- cultural economy.
To be sure, setting prices and restrict- ing farm production Washington "dis-torted c...
James S. Coleman,
'Correct' SU~~Y~SS~O~
in National Review (Mar. 18, 1991), 150 E. 35th St., New York,
N.Y. 10016.
Whence comes the most serious threat to academic freedom? According to Univer- sity of Chicago sociologist James S. Cole- man, it comes not from craven university administrators or a philistine public, nor even from "politically correct" students, but from the very highest priests of the temples of learning-the professors. "There are taboos on certain topics," he say...
James S. Coleman,
'Correct' SU~~Y~SS~O~
in National Review (Mar. 18, 1991), 150 E. 35th St., New York,
N.Y. 10016.
Whence comes the most serious threat to academic freedom? According to Univer- sity of Chicago sociologist James S. Cole- man, it comes not from craven university administrators or a philistine public, nor even from "politically correct" students, but from the very highest priests of the temples of learning-the professors. "There are taboos on certain topics," he say...
the 1620s, the Montagnais at Tadoussac, near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, "were using large quantities of clothing, hatchets, iron arrowheads, nee- dles, sword blades, ice picks, knives, kettles, and preserved foods that they purchased from In this engraving from Theodore de Bry's Historia Americae the French." similarly, the MO- sive Novi Orbis (1596).Indians vrevare to test the immortal- hawks, near what is now Albany.
ity of a .Spaniard holding him under water.
had no practical...
Steven L. Gortmaker,
For TV Charles A. Salter, Deborah K. Walker, and William H.Dietz, Jr., in Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter 1990), Inst. for Social Re- search, P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48016.
Many parents are sure that TV is rotting their children's minds. The average Ameri- can youngster spends more than 15 hours a week in front of the TV set, so that would mean a lot of wasted brainpower. Not to worry, say Gortmaker, acting chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Harvard's S...
Steven L. Gortmaker,
For TV Charles A. Salter, Deborah K. Walker, and William H.Dietz, Jr., in Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter 1990), Inst. for Social Re- search, P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48016.
Many parents are sure that TV is rotting their children's minds. The average Ameri- can youngster spends more than 15 hours a week in front of the TV set, so that would mean a lot of wasted brainpower. Not to worry, say Gortmaker, acting chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Harvard's...
Christopher Lasch, in New Oxford Review (Apr. 1991), 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, Calif. 94706.
The New Age movement "invites a mix- ture of ridicule and indignant alarm," Uni- versity of Rochester historian Christopher Lasch observes, but the discontents it ad- dresses are "supremely importantw-and hence deserve a better response than the New Age one.
The movement's central teaching is "that it doesn't matter what you believe as long as it works for you." Actress-author...
Archibald R. Lewis, in Speculum (Oct. 1990), Medieval Acad. of America, 1430 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.
When did today's split between the Islamic world and the West occur? During the
14th and 15th centuries, said the late Uni- versity of Massachusetts historian Lewis. The attitudes "that these two great world civilizations formed" then toward each other "still govern much of how they inter- act today." the mid-14th century, while Western Europe was falling on hard...
John S. Rigden and Sheila
Tobias, in The Sciences (Jan.-Feb. 1991), New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E.63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Every year nearly 500,000 students gradu- ate from high school and go on to college with the intention of majoring in science or engineering. But every year only 200,000 college students complete one of those majors. After taking introductory sci- ence courses, most of the students initially oriented toward science change their minds. Meanwhile, of the undergraduates w...
John S. Rigden and Sheila
Tobias, in The Sciences (Jan.-Feb. 1991), New York Academy of Sciences, 2 E.63rd St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
Every year nearly 500,000 students gradu- ate from high school and go on to college with the intention of majoring in science or engineering. But every year only 200,000 college students complete one of those majors. After taking introductory sci- ence courses, most of the students initially oriented toward science change their minds. Meanwhile, of the undergraduates...
pointing with his gloved hand.
Variations on virtual-reality technology already have been used to help physicians position beams of radiation for cancer therapy and to aid biochemists seeking to attach drugs to protein molecules. But vir- tual-reality researchers have more exalted goals in mind. One scientist told Wheeler that the technology's main aim should be to take people to "absolutely unreal" places. He envisions, for instance, people acting as variables in mathematical equa- tions...
railroad expansion and the development of portable, steam-powered grain thresh- ers. "The destruction of the native prairie grasses enabled the thistle to exploit an ecological niche," Young notes.
Farmers themselves also helped the wind witch to spread. They often unwit- tingly sowed Russian thistle seeds along with their crop seeds, and grain shipments railroad were contaminated. "In addi- tion," Young writes, "the same steam threshermen who so disliked the spiny weed...
Rick Henderson, in Reason (Apr. 1991), Reason Foundation, 2716 Ocean Park Blvd., Ste. 1062, Santa Monica, Calif. 90405.
When the Carter administration set out in 1977 to combat destruction of U.S. wet- lands, there was not much question about
' what lands were to be protected. Wetlands were areas so often flooded or saturated with ground water that they would nor- mally support "vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil condi- tions." Only "aquatic areasu-swamps, marshes,...
Gregory Hayes, in Hu-The Mozart Myth manities (Mar.-Apr. 1991), National Endowment for the Hu-
rnanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C.
In the Oscar-winning 1984 film Amadeus, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1 756-9 1) was made out to be a silly genius, in dramatic contrast to his rival Antonio Salieri, a pi- ous mediocrity. The portrayal, writes Hayes, a pianist and harpsichordist, was only the latest variant of the mythic Mo- zart, a popular creation that has overshad- owed the man...
Robert Kenner, in ~rt& An-tiques (Mar. 1991), Art & Antiques Associates, 89 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10003.
Dutch painter Piet Mondrian's abstract ar- rangements of right angles and primary colors can be seen on everything from bedsheets to bathroom tiles. But Mondrian (1 872-1 944) himself remains a somewhat mysterious figure. Art historians have por- trayed him as having made an orderly ar- tistic progression from landscape painter to grid maker, but to tidily portray him thus, says...
Scholar (Spring 1991), 1811 Q St. N.W., Washington, D.C.
20009.
The financier was one of the large figures of the 19th-century novel. In his savage sat- ire, The Way We Live Now (1874-75), for example, Anthony Trollope tells of the sud- den rise of financial speculator Augustus
WQ SUMMER 1991
130
Melmotte, a "hollow vulgar fraud" whom a corrupt society chooses to venerate, and of his fall after being unmasked at the height of his success. Today, observes Princeton historian James,...
picted," James says. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gats(1925), bond traders fre- quently appear-but "we never under-stand what they do or how they do it."
The main reason for the decline of the financier novel, however, lies elsewhere. "The classic format was concerned with change and with the decline of an old standard of behavior," James says. "The fi-nancier becomes a scourge to punish the greed and immorality of an old elite that can no longer remain...
taking over the government."
Just before the 1989 coup attempt, Eduardo Cojuang- co, an influential and wealthy crony of Marcos,
if they have repented of their offenses," Land6 says. "But indiscriminate forgive- ness of those who, having plotted against the state, show no remorse and make clear their intention to repeat their offenses at their first opportunity, is hardly in the pub- lic interest." After the first (July 1986) mili- tary coup attempt against Aquino failed, the...
surprise by
the June 1989 massacre in
Tiananmen Square. And af-
ter obligatory denuncia-
tions of the "barbaric" lead-
ership in Beijing, Taipei
then continued on its new course.
Since Tiananmen, the au- thorities in Beijing have been unable to regain con- trol over China's economy, and there have been reports of widespread disaffection among members of the Peo- ple's Liberation Army. "Should the political lead- ership in Beijing lose con- trol not only of the econ-omy but...
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MUSIC AS CULTURAL PRACTICE 1800-1900.
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MUSIC AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION.
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A HISTORY OF THE ARAB PEOPLES
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Essays
John Stratton Hawley
induism-the word, the conception are not altogether clear.
and perhaps the reality One heard of the "goodly habits and obser-
too-was born in the vances of Hindooism" in a Bengali-English
19th century, a notori-grammar written in 1829, and the Rever-
ously illegitimate child. end William Tennant had spoken of "the
The father was middle- Hindoo system" in a book on Indian man- class and British, and the mother, of ners and history written at the beginning...
induism-the word, the conception are not altogether clear.
and perhaps the reality One heard of the "goodly habits and obser-
too-was born in the vances of Hindooism" in a Bengali-English
19th century, a notori-grammar written in 1829, and the Rever-
ously illegitimate child. end William Tennant had spoken of "the
The father was middle- Hindoo system" in a book on Indian man- class and British, and the mother, of ners and history written at the beginning of course, was...
Of all the world's religious traditions, none has been more closely scrutinized for its fis- sures than "Hinduism." Put simply, it is now fashionable to argue that there is no such thing.
Two prominent scholars, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Robert E. Frykenberg, have been instrumental in establishing the idea that it was not just the history of Hindu- ism that was invented by outsiders but its very identity. It is worth looking at the work of Smith and Frykenberg to see whether the idea...
"But it isn't a Hedgehog, and it isn't a Tortoise" [said the young Painted Jaguar]. "It's a little bit of both, and I don't know its proper name."
"Nonsense!" said Mother Jaguar. "Everything has its proper name. I should call it 'Armadillo' till I found out the real one. And I should leave it alone."
-Rudyard Kipling, "The Beginning of the Arma- dillos," in Just So Stories (1902).
ipling is one of the most den of being White Men is what hobbles...
t was an amazing spectacle, and
one could have witnessed it almost
anywhere in India. In 1989, from
every comer of the country Hindus
set off on pilgrimages-which in it-
self would not have been so un- usual, except that every person clutched in one hand a single brick. If all those bricks were laid side by side and on top of each other, they would have made an incredible edifice, which was exactly the intention. The thousands of Hindus were on their way to Ayodhya in northem India w...
ACKGROUND BOOKS
INDUISM AND THE FATE OF INDIA
enturies ago, when Muslims classified the
nonbelievers under their rule, they used "people of the Book" to distinguish Christians and Jews from Hindus. That distinction re-mains useful, and any consideration of Hindu- ism must first confront the problem of what I might call the "booking" of Hinduism, the slow solidification of a fluid religious tradition into ink and paper, print on page. This transforma- tion from oral tradi...
Suddenly, with the collapse of communism, Karl Marx is out, Adam Smith is in. But the Adam Smith we know, the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776) and the apostle of supposedly bare- knuckled capitalism, is only half the real man. In this essay, Charles L. Griswold, Jr. describes the efforts of this erudite Scot- tish professor of moral philosophy to imagine how liberal soci- eties could devote themselves to both the pursuit of wealth and the creation of virtuous citizens. As the world rushes...
Chester E. Finn, JK
"Christine borrows $850 for one year from the Friendly Finance Company. If she pays 12%simple interest on the loan, what will be the total amount that Christine repays?"
hat is not the sort of ques-
tion that ought to stump
many people. Yet accord-
ing to the National Assess-
ment of Educational
Progress, in 1988 only six percent of the nation's 1 lth graders were able to solve mathematical problems at this moderate level of difficulty. Six out of 100. After...
"Christine borrows $850 for one year from the Friendly Finance Company.
n the front lawn of Al-
exandria, Virginia's T.C.
Williams High School,
where I have been teach-
ing English for the past
20 years, there is a large sign from the U.S. Department of Educa- tion proclaiming us "one of the outstanding high schools in America." The sign has been there since 1984, when then-Secretary of Education Terrell Bell drove across the Potomac River to present us with one of the Reagan administration's first Excel- lence in Education awards.
Nine months earlier, B...
GRO BOOKS
or all the nation's earnest intentions and
policy gyrations during the last decade, the United States has barely budged out of its deep scholastic hole.
Just wait, the optimists say. Wait for stan- dardized tests to reflect reforms already in place. Or wait for new reforms. Or wait for Washington and the rest of the country to get really serious (i.e. to pile even more billions upon the billions already added to American education). To which remarkably few skeptics respon...
here are two images from my
youth that I shall never be
able to shake. There was that
clear Saturday afternoon in
October when I rode my bi-
cycle downtown to see a show at the Rialto, only to look up at the marquee and see the chilling announce- ment, "20 lanes of bowling." No movie I have ever seen has jolted me more.
The thousands of hours I spent in Allen- town, Pennsylvania's wondrous Rialto The- atre formed the core of my adolescent edu- cation. I learned "lessons" i...
The reunification of Germany has stirred old fears that were buried after the Nazi period. When historian Robert Darnton went to Berlin in 1989, he rediscovered layers of such anti-German fears within himself. He also discovered, as the Wall came down, a changed Germany. East Ger-mans, far from denying their Nazi and communist past, were eager to confront it. The more the Germans challenge their past, Darnton SUE-gests, the less anxious one can be about the German future.
by Robert Damton
always wishe...
Jencks, a prominent Northwestern so-ciologist, and Peterson, a Har- vard political scientist, attests.
The underclass is not really new, Jencks observes. The "lower-class" lives described in Elliott Liebow's 1967 book,
Tally's Comer: A Study of Ne- gro Streetcomer Men, for ex-ample, are "very similar. .. to the lives described in more re- cent writing on the under- class." But has this class of people been getting larger? Jencks's answer (contrary to news media reports) is...
