Nonetheless, when the day of battle—July 21, 1861—finally arrived, the Union army performed admirably in its initial attack. Sweeping down on the Confederate left flank, by noon it had forced the Confederates into a retreat and seemed to have the upper hand. Yet the Union army stalled during brutal fighting around Henry Hill. As the day ground on, fresh Confederate forces continued to arrive by rail, and by 4 o’clock the Northern lines began to give way. What started as an orderly retreat turned into a rout, with the troops running back to Washington only being outpaced by buggy-mounted senators who had come out to watch the battle.

This first great clash of the Civil War, called “Bull Run” by the North and “Manassas” by the South, disabused Washington of its hopes of a quick war. It set the tone for the grinding, mechanized conflict that was to play out over the next four years and proved that the Confederacy would be a stubborn adversary, despite the Union’s superior manpower and industry. Today, the 165^th anniversary of that battle affords us an opportunity to reflect not only on the war it inaugurated but also on one of the key ways we remember that war: the preservation of its battlefields.

Continue Reading in The Dispatch

Noah Webster on the Limits of Revolution

It pleases me immensely to feature an article by my colleague, Howe Whitman. This piece dives into the life and work of America’s oft overlooked “cultural founding father,” Noah Webster. Webster’s premier achievement, of course, was the compilation of his dictionary, which drove the final nail into the coffin of British dominance by spelling “plough” as “plow,” and expelling the ‘u’ from “humor” and “color.” Let freedom ring. In addition to his lexicographical achievements, however, Webster was a devoted Christian, Federalist, and critic of the French Revolution. Whitman compares Webster to the great British critic of revolution, Edmund Burke, and teases out important differences between the two.

The Compassionate Historian

For many years now, our country has been awash with fights over the ways we recount our history. Efforts like The 1619 Project argue that the American project has been fundamentally propelled by black enslavement and oppression. More conventional historians argue that America’s founding moment came in 1776, when the Continental Congress issued a document declaring “all men are created equal.”

In this piece, Daniel Sonnenfeld masterfully argues that many recent attempts at revising our historical narrative have been rooted in poor methodology. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricœur, Sonnenfeld deems this methodology a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” highlighting the corrosive influence that Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche have exercised over modern historiography. This suspicious hermeneutic leads historians to flatten out historical figures, reducing them to one or two base motivations—like in one recent biography of Winston Churchill—rather than allowing our forefathers to be men of mixed motives and complicated character. In its place, Sonnenfeld advocates the “hermeneutic of faith,” which seeks to understand the past on its own terms, rather than reflexively condemn it on ours.

Envy and Social Justice

This piece is odd, and excellent. As its authors point out, the last comprehensive, interdisciplinary survey on envy as a phenomenon was conducted in the mid-60s. Since then, social scientists have either ignored envy entirely or, when they have addressed it, sought to rehabilitate it, arguing that the age-old vice might in fact possess great social benefit.

The reason for this evident discomfort, Hayward and Denno argue, is that social scientists, by and large, are proponents of the leftist political movement aimed at radical redistribution of wealth. This project relies on an envious electorate: folks are unlikely to support platforms that target the rich if they themselves don’t envy the 1%. Yet, crucially, the closer in status and wealth people become, the more the discrepancies matter. Thus the greater the differences, the greater the envy, making the pursuit of equity—complete equality of means—an inherently envy generating quest.

Ancient Wisdom, Modern Tools

While I was skeptical of this piece going in, it more than proved itself. Rosen provides an excellent overview of the different camps within the AI debate, and illustrates their positions using figures from Jewish folklore: the golem, the dybbuk, and the maggid. I was struck by how far back our speculation about intelligence and our fascination with man-made minds goes. Rosen distills four views on AI development, namely “the ‘Positive Autonomists,’ ‘Negative Autonomists,’ ‘Positive Automatoners,’ and ‘Negative Automatoners.’ ”

The article is adapted from his recent book, Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI, and ends with a memorable quote from Gershom Scholem at the inauguration of the second computer in Israel: “Develop peacefully and don't destroy the world. Shalom."

Bad-faith Interpretation

Phil Wallach takes up the great political problem of our age. For many years the left, and now increasingly the right, have seen the law either as a hindrance to overcome or as an ever-flexible conduit for achieving executive ends.

Wallach examines textualism, a school of legal thought which limits interpretation of statute to the plain meaning of the text, and argues that it is a useful tool for preventing abuse of the law, while also acknowledging its limits. He takes a close look at the executive-power worship of Justice Kagan, provides scathing analysis of Justice Barrett’s babysitter analogy, and calls once again for Congress to reassume its lawmaking powers.

Honorable Mentions:

Russell Kirk’s Revolution of Memory

Michael Lucchese writes to exonerate Russell Kirk, considered by many the godfather of American conservatism, from charges of rejecting the American Revolution. He provides excellent insight into Kirk’s ideas of ideology, cultural memory, and “conservative revolution.”

A Responsible Filibuster

I did not understand the filibuster until I worked on this piece. It’s a terribly complicated issue, largely because it’s so much a matter of Senate precedent and procedure, which is a world unto itself. Christian Fong explains the issues well and makes a compelling case for retaining the filibuster, under responsible conditions.

Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale after his undergraduate years at the university. His thesis, grossly summarized, is that while Yale’s alumni were led to believe that Yale instilled its students with Christian and “individualist” values—meaning a respect for individual rights and free enterprise, as opposed to the collectivism of communism—its curricula in fact inundated undergraduates with agnostic or even atheistic indifference to Christianity and the collectivist attitudes of Keynesian economics.

Yale protected and excused the professors who trafficked in anti-Christian and collectivist doctrine by appealing to academic freedom. This, Buckley argued, was a cover and a fraud: Yale appealed to academic freedom only when expedient, harping on about the “marketplace of ideas” while in truth indoctrinating their students into a progressive view of the world.

As Buckley put it, “I believe it to be an indisputable fact that most colleges and universities, and certainly Yale. . .do not practice, cannot practice, and cannot even believe what they say about education and academic freedom.” For indeed, Yale would never admit Joyce Kilmore to its English faculty, on the grounds that “the textbook used in the basic classes in English at Yale uses a poem by Joyce Kilmer to illustrate everything that is bad about bad poetry, and that an English teacher who thinks Kilmer a good poet could only bring chaos to that department.” Nor would Yale admit to its teaching faculty a professor openly racist toward black Americans.

Yale then, far from being a completely free marketplace of ideas, proclaimed and enforced an orthodoxy—they just didn’t want to admit it. When the orthodoxy was challenged, they appealed to academic freedom. When asked why no great admirers of Joyce Kilmer were allowed to teach, they explained that such a man would be professionally unqualified. When asked why Christian and individualist ideas were hardly represented at Yale, they answered that they in fact were, and would point to the one or two Christian and or capitalist professors as proof of sufficient representation.

Buckley ended his book with a call to action to Yale’s alumni, who, he asserted, possessed both the authority (by charter) and the power (by purse strings) to force change at Yale. Unfortunately, this call received insufficient enthusiasm to make any true and notable change. Yale has refined its orthodoxy over the past 70 years, resulting in an environment quite uncomfortable for Christian or individualist-minded students.

The book, while written in a bygone era and focused on an entirely different school, prompted reflection on my own alma mater, Furman University. Furman, while different from Yale in manifold respects, occupies a similar position to the Yale that Buckley wrote about in 1951. While Yale was technically denominationally affiliated until 2005, it abolished mandatory worship in 1927 and welcomed a greater diversity of students—including the Roman Catholic Buckley. Therefore, by the time Buckley wrote, Yale had undergone about 24 years of drift away from any meaningful identification with the Christian faith, though when mandatory chapel was abolished, Yale’s administrators certainly thought it would remain Christian in a tangible way.

Furman disaffiliated from the South Carolina Baptist Convention in 1992, and at the time, university president John E. Johns “said Furman [would] remain true to its Christian principals [sic] despite the doubts expressed by some.” In a very limited way, Johns’s desire to maintain a Christian spirit at Furman prevailed. Compared to schools like Yale, Furman is more tolerant of conservative and biblical Christian ideas, largely thanks to select sympathetic faculty members. Yet, for the past several years, that unfortunately is not saying much. On the whole, the doubts of Johns’s detractors have won out—Furman, like Yale, supports an academic and social orthodoxy generally hostile to biblical Christianity.

This orthodoxy, however, is not hidden behind the veil of academic freedom, as Yale’s was. Furman’s orthodoxy—defined broadly as the affirmation of sexual liberation and Marxist identity politics—is obfuscated behind the mists of “diversity” and “inclusiveness.” Just as Yale’s academic freedom meant “freedom for those who support the orthodoxy” Furman’s diversity and inclusivity mean “inclusion of an acceptable array of diverse opinions.” Positions which could be labeled “discriminatory,” “bigoted,” or “harmful” have been, as a matter of course, excluded from serious consideration and openly condemned.

Buckley called not for the demolition of Yale’s orthodoxy—afterall, he considered academic freedom, as promoted by the university, a hoax. He instead advocated a narrowing of the orthodoxy, a narrowing which would bar atheists and communists from teaching undergraduates. When one considers Buckley’s recommendation in the Furman context, the distance between his era and ours becomes markedly clear.

It is not pragmatically feasible to push Furman back into its Christian era. To do so would likely contravene the wishes of too many of her faculty, administration, and trustees. What Furman needs then, is not a narrowing of her orthodoxy, but a broadening.

Biblical understandings of sex, marriage, and family should not be condemned institutionally as hateful or bigoted, but rather as accepted legitimate contenders in the marketplace of ideas. Students who contend for continuity between the Israelites of the Old Testament and the church today should not be silenced as anti-Semites, but rather seen as adhering to a millennia old theological tradition. Students who defend the political ideas of the founding fathers should not themselves be condemned as racists simply because the thinkers they invoke owned slaves.

What has been in New Haven need not be in Greenville, but it will require concentrated and coordinated effort on the part of conservatives and Christians to force the expansion of the Furman orthodoxy.

Having read the above, one might reasonably ask why Furman would undertake this change. Furman is a private university, and is no longer accountable to any Christian denomination. If the university leadership and professoriate wish to teach a certain set of values, isn’t that their prerogative?

To an extent, yes. Buckley granted a similar argument to his Yale opponents. But his rejoinder to Yale’s apologists is equally prescient for Furman’s situation today. The present course of the university may be acceptable to a majority of faculty and administration, but if it is not acceptable to the alumni, that is a serious problem.

And indeed, Furman has already tasted the power wielded by her alumni. After a series of controversies culminating in the Spring of 2023, a significant proportion of Furman’s donors, convinced of Furman’s “wokeness,” threatened to or indeed did cease donating to the school. The impact of this alumni disillusionment was so significant that Furman’s administration undertook various initiatives to demonstrate the school’s dedication to free discourse and inquiry.

The flagship effort, “On Discourse,” “identifies, amplifies, and strengthens the broad spectrum of efforts across campus to teach and engage the campus community in constructive discourse, debate, dialogue, discussion and conversation with those who think differently than they do,” according to the program’s website. Another result of the controversy was Furman’s ratifying the “Statement on Freedom of Inquiry and Expression,” a resolution based on similar documents adopted by the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

These measures are serious wins for conservative and Christian students on campus. They represent the power that the giving alumni can wield when roused. And yet, they are not long-term wins. In fact, if we heed Buckley, they will ultimately fail to preserve a significant conservative Christian presence on campus.

This is because, as Buckley points out, no matter how many statements a university’s president pushes through, the fate of a university lies in its faculty. Faculty teach students. Students, formed by the faculty, become alumni and donors. Thus in the long run, the preservation of conservative and Christian ideas on campus will require university investment in faculty aligned with those ideas.

Ben and Jenna Storey, AEI scholars and former Furman professors, have written a great deal on how to reintegrate conservative perspectives into America’s college campuses, and recently published a piece entitled “How to Broaden the Academic Tent,” in which they address the very question concerning us here. They offer a range of solutions, including involving more right-of-center PhDs from the professional world in teaching, starting new schools of civic thought on campuses, and expanding the academic pipeline for conservative students interested in pursuing work in universities.

Furman is well situated to take advantage of several of these proposals. Particularly, the Tocqueville Center for the Study of Democracy and Society—which nurtured me and many other students through our time at Furman—has taken the lead in reasserting conservative views and open dialogue between parties on campus, and is poised to blossom into something resembling the schools of civic thought which have already taken root at universities like UNC Chapel Hill and UT Austin.

When Furman commits to hiring more conservatively minded faculty, it will have moved from “talking the talk”—statements on free inquiry likely meant by some to placate the conservatives till the storm blows over—to “walking the walk”—investing institutional resources into long-term bulwarks protecting conservative and Christian perspectives.

This is what broadening the orthodoxy will look like, if it’s to be successful. Yet, like Buckley, I am not advocating for the abolition of university orthodoxy or, if you will, tearing down the walls of the academic tent. Walls are necessary, and good ones should be guarded. While I advocate for the expansion of the orthodoxy among the faculty in the conservative direction, there are areas where I think it ought to be restricted.

At Furman, the walls of the academic tent ought to enclose people willing to engage respectfully in rational discussion and submit their own positions to criticism, and they ought to exclude people who won’t. An excellent example of the latter is the sort of disruptive protests—common on college campuses for years now—wherein students aim to prevent a guest lecturer from delivering a presentation. Students chant, yell, use bullhorns, and generally create a ruckus to silence the objectionable speaker. This should not be tolerated.

The walls should also exclude administrators who actively work against productive dialogue and seek to restrict opinions they deem harmful. I’m thinking particularly of the so-called “DEI officers,” hired in droves following the “race reckoning” of 2020. Furman still employs DEI officers, and their interests are pitted firmly against those of free discourse and stalwart conservative representation on campus.

This dream of broadening the academic tent will not happen naturally: like a cathedral, it will be a marvel of engineering only achieved by careful design, construction, and maintenance. If some of the cathedral’s staff believe deeply that the cathedral’s very existence is a threat to its worshipers and community, and therefore take sledgehammers and bulldozers to its cornerstones, even the best-built cathedral, over time, will not withstand.

Cathedrals need caretakers who believe in their church’s worth and will care for it over time. Likewise, the university of broad-orthodoxy and free discourse, if it will last, must bar from its administration and faculty those who would actively seek to undermine it.

This is a rough and incomplete outline. It provides a bare minimum for the sorts of behavior and ideology that must be excluded for the broad-tent university to function. Trickier questions emerge when we ponder whether particular viewpoints ought to be restricted from open consideration. What should one do about students who promote overtly racist positions? What about faculty? Lines need to be drawn barring truly extreme positions, but as the last several decades have shown us, what society considers extreme can change rapidly.

I won’t go any deeper into this question for now. Suffice it to say that Furman must erect walls which allow traditional conservative and Christian perspectives room to breathe, while keeping at bay the forces pursuing ideological hegemony.

This is what Furman must strive to be: a school dedicated to open discourse and free inquiry which rewards good scholarship. A school where student initiatives and faculty research are funded because they increase the sum of valuable human knowledge and abide by rigorous methodology, rather than because they check an ideological box. Furman should be an environment where conservative, Marxist, and liberal students argue for their positions without fear of reprisal from administrator or professor.

This reality will only be secure when the administration and faculty are dedicated to the premise that truth exists and may be comprehended by people through research, rational debate, and collective consideration. When this principle is affirmed, it clears away all the notions of “harmful speech” and “safe spaces” which have plagued the university for well over a decade, and instead puts faith in the process of debate and discovery to comprehend what is true and good. This is achievable at Furman, but success will require pressure from those invested in this vision—alumni, faculty, and students—over a sustained period of time.

In the second part of this series, I will examine Buckley’s views on religious student culture and how it relates to the student experience at Furman.

Southern Catastrophe, American Triumph

Algis Valiunas has compiled a serious collection of contributions to National Affairs over the years. In this remarkable piece, he examines a series of Southern Civil War historians, culminating in the man he considers the greatest of them all, Shelby Foote. Foote was the author of the gargantuan trilogy The Civil War: A Narrative, and is well known for appearing in Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War. This piece gallops over fascinating territory and pursues a project which I find noble, though I am ultimately skeptical of his conclusion.

Republicans and the Civil Service

This piece is about as timely as National Affairs gets. Amid the chaos caused by the second Trump administration’s showy attempts to reduce the federal workforce, Robert Beschel examines the origins of the merit-based civil service, critiques the administration’s more foolish tactics in recent months, and proposes prudent, targeted ways of reducing waste at the federal level.

Strategic Fusion and the GOP

The Spring issue bears the unique distinction of containing three pieces on the Civil War. This one is the second, and fear not—the third made the list as well. In their article, Jennifer Dresden and Beau Tremitiere chronicle the emergence of the Republican Party out of a coalition of former Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers opposed to the westward expansion of slavery. They trace the political lessons learned by abolitionists as the movement transformed from the apolitical Garrisonians into the fusion-inclined Liberty and Free Soil Parties, eventually culminating in Republican triumph.

Yet their writing is not simply of historical interest. Dresden and Tremitiere see this period, in which a small and politically disfavored interest group used prudent political maneuvering to affect policy, as a strategic guide for Reaganite conservatives and moderate Democrats who are feeling left out in the cold by the rise of the New Right, and the embrace of radical progressives by the Democratic Party.

“Mending Wall” and the Defense of Tradition

This is truly a unique piece. Chris Scalia, son of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, defends his father’s interpretation of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” as expounded in the elder Scalia’s opinion in Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm. While many look on Frost’s poem as a repudiation of tradition, Scalia promotes a wisely nuanced reading, seeing in it “a complex defense of tradition as well as a warning to traditionalists.” Ending with a welcome reevaluation of the tired parable “Chesterton’s fence,” Scalia’s analysis demonstrates not only the immense depth of Frost’s work, but also the enduring usefulness of poetry for political reflection.

The Long Shadow of Ex Parte Milligan

There are parts of the judicial history of our country which send shivers down the spine. The Dred Scott decision is the foremost of these. Also among them is the use of military tribunals to try American civilians in the North during the Civil War. The tribunal, a method of judicial enforcement originally invented during the Mexican American War, was employed by Lincoln and other Union officials to try Northerners accused of seditious activity or speech without turning them over to the civil courts, where conviction was far from certain.

The Supreme Court ultimately overruled the use of tribunals for civilians, but interest in their use revived in the 21st century when the government decided to try terrorists involved in the planning of 9/11 by tribunal. Allen Guelzo narrates this history, and reflects on the lessons it contains for holding government accountable, especially in times of crisis.

Honorable Mentions:

A Targeted Welfare State

Chris Pope provides a detailed survey of the rise of the American welfare state, and critiques the philosophy which led to its establishment.

The Indoctrinologist Is In

Sally Satel takes a look at the havoc DEI initiatives have wreaked on medical training programs, and argues against the notion that physicians should serve primarily as activists instead of professional caregivers focused on restoring health.

Saving Free Markets in America

This piece was a real eye-opener. Most articles dealing with markets and regulation stick close to the economics (which I only partially understand) and make pragmatic arguments favoring free markets: free markets make more money, and therefore are better than heavily regulated markets.

Wilhelm Röpke, the subject of this essay, also argued for free markets and free societies, but grounded his reasoning in the nature of the human soul. Free markets are desirable because they arise organically out of human tendency, which is guided by our nature: we are free but limited, creative, social, self-interested, reasoning, and capable of virtue while simultaneously fallen.

Collectivist models such as communism and national socialism, which Röpke spent his life combatting, misunderstand or seek to alter human nature. These visions must therefore be implemented forcefully, often at the cost of millions of lives. Thus the preservation of free market economies isn’t only about what is most financially expedient, as I’ve long believed, but about what allows humans to remain free and cultivate virtue within society.

The Politics of Unitary Vision

David Corey has once again demonstrated his wide-ranging expertise by comparing two under-considered societies: John Calvin’s Geneva and Woodrow Wilson’s America. Both, he argues, implement the “politics of unitary vision,” one successfully and the other not.

What is this politics of unitary vision? It’s the form of civic order which arises when all individual members of society subordinate their particular wills for the sake of a societal goal. The paradigmatic example of this sort of society is the Kingdom of God, where all its members, though distinct “parts,” constitute a united body.

Societies which attempt to implement this full vision before the second coming of Christ—say, the communists or the Wilson Administration—must eliminate the individuality of its members by force. It is possible, however, to create a society of unitary vision in limited fashion—if it accounts for fallen man’s shortcomings. This, according to Corey, is what Calvin accomplished in Geneva.

The Speech of Freedom

This is exactly the kind of nerdy piece I love. It presents as a run-of-the-mill discussion of political free speech until you crack it open, whereupon you learn that it’s a detailed discussion of the philosophy of speech.

Taylor’s point is prescient: discussions of our right to free speech are bound to go nowhere if we don’t even understand what speech is, what it’s for, and why it should be free. If we are going to truly defend this right, we need a better philosophical foundation than “banning speech is bad.” This is made all the more salient by the rise of the neo-Marxist “violent speech” concept.

Taylor also includes a fascinating discussion of certain events from the life of Fredrick Douglass which are worth reading in their own right. While it may not be usual fare for First Amendment buffs, it should be.

The Original Meaning of Religion

This little piece packs a big punch. And I’ll go ahead and give away the ending: Buddhism, humanism, atheism, and Satanism are not protected by the First Amendment. Why? Because they’re not religions.

A religion, according to the definition that would have been assumed in 1789, is a system of worship grounded in the duty we owe to God our creator, responsive to His expectations for our daily conduct. Up until the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court upheld this understanding. It is only in the last 80 years that the Court watered down what is protected by the First Amendment to basically mean “any strongly held belief.”

This is important in light of recent developments. Take for example efforts by the Satanic Temple to enshrine abortion as one of its “sacraments,” thereby protecting it under the First Amendment. Similarly to free speech in Taylor’s piece, what religion is and the reasons for its protection matter—it cannot be watered down to philosophical beliefs or policy positions. If it is, the First Amendment will lose its force.

Civic Thought and Political Science

The last few years have seen an encouraging move by select universities toward a field called “civic thought.” Public universities in Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, and a host of other states have established schools of civic thought, aimed at promoting learning dedicated to strengthening the US and repressing the corrosive influence of certain left-wing ideologies. I’m proud to say that my mentors (now colleagues) Ben and Jenna Storey have played a significant role in the creation of these centers.

In his piece, Stoner outlines the academic boundaries of civic thought. It is a field comprising several disciplines, including history, political science, classics, economics, and law, with the most significant overlap occurring with political science.

The article is largely dedicated to distinguishing civic thought from political science, which he pursues by explaining civic thought’s rejection of the fact/value distinction assumed by the social sciences. Political science concerns itself with the “objective” analysis of political data. Civic thought concerns itself with the flourishing of a particular nation, state, or community. It should make use of political science, but it serves a fundamentally different purpose.

If I may double dip, Hans Zeiger’s piece in the edition, The Education of a Statesman, purses similar themes.

Honorable Mentions:

How the White House Makes Policy

Alright, for the unlikely policy nut who has made it through to this point, here’s your bone. Tevi Troy, a former Bush deputy assistant and presidential historian, lays out the fascinating history of the White House policy process. If you want insight into how the sausage gets made, along with salacious historical tidbits, here you go.

Catholicism and the American Civic Order

This one’s for you, Catholics. Robert P. George lays down the gauntlet on questions of consistency in church doctrine, arguing that Vatican II—which largely accepted American liberal democracy—and the proclamations of popes like Gregory XVI and Pius IX—which seem to explicitly reject it—are completely in accord.

My hopes eroded when I entered the theatre. On screens at the front of the room, a political debate was raging. The images flipped back and forth between the red-clad Capulets and the blue-draped Montagues, each giving campaign-type speeches analogous to American political discourse.

The “Republican” Capulets harped on secure borders and “peace through strength” while their opponents argued for a myriad of Democratic positions. I hoped that this was just a pre-show gimmick, kept from infecting the production I’d paid to see, but alas, the whole show was recast as a battle between American political parties.

There were other amendments to the Bard’s original script: the play was set in roughly modern times with drinking and drugs, raves, Instagram, Amazon, and club music all featuring prominently. The friar was an internet famous pastor, addressing his flock through morning devotional shorts while Juliet, her mother, and her nurse delivered a significant portion of their lines in Spanish, since—obviously—Juliet’s mother was a Hispanic immigrant.

Despite my disapproval of Folger’s production, I’m a great fan of novel adaptations of Shakespeare. Creative Shakespearean productions—setting a play in a different time or place, swapping the gender of characters, perhaps even the recontextualization of a plot— are good things rightly enjoyed, when done well.

So if can I enjoy The National Theatre’s Live Twelfth Night, in all its raucous glory, why couldn’t I appreciate Folger’s politically adapted Romeo and Juliet? The answer lies in the way directors understand and approach interpretation.

Interpretation is always necessary. There are decisions directors must make deriving from the very nature of the genre: Where do the actors stand? With what emphasis do they deliver their lines? What do they hold in their hands? What set serves as backdrop? Afterall, Henry V’s Agincourt speech can be delivered with Kenneth Branagh’s soaring rhetoric, or with Mark Rylance’s grim sobriety, and neither break the script.

Many directors will limit their license to the necessary choices—designing a set, choreographing dances, and choosing costumes appropriate to the play’s original setting and time period. Other, bolder directors might make more sweeping changes.

A good director interprets a play, but does not impose her interpretation by force. She surveys the landscape of a play—its hills, bogs, and flatlands—and decides how to build. The good director doesn't need to remake the landscape, to flatten the hills and drain the marshes, but works with it—her buildings and gardens are the set, the blocking, and the delivery of lines. Like Jerusalem built atop Zion, script and production meet, meld, and soar into the air.

This interpretation is limited by the words on the page. Transgressing the lines usually breaks the play, like forcing a limb in a direction it was not designed to go. This arm-twisting, unfortunately, was the project of Folger’s Romeo and Juliet. While many interpretive choices built with the landscape, respecting the contours of the play, the director also forced an incongruous plotline into the backdrop of the play, which only distracted from the production’s substance. The most obvious example was the dissonance between the familial and political conflicts: the level of violence involved in the families’ feud is not proportionate to our American political moment, and was thus unbelievable.

The political subplot was incongruous because it altered the subject, rather than presenting the subject in a different but consistent light. To present the subject in a different but consistent light involves changing “accidental” features of the story—things like time period or the occupations of characters—while maintaining the plot’s fundamental substance.

While this restriction to the text might seem arbitrary, it springs from an acknowledgement of Shakespeare’s superior ability and the enduring value of his plays. We should not want to produce plays accurate to the script out of a romantic attachment to the past, but because Shakespeare's plays are, on the whole, excellent.

Folger’s production was in many ways an homage to Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. The portrayal of Juliet as Hispanic, the feminization of Mercutio, and the general aura of drugs and rock n’ roll united the two productions. And yet, while Luhrmann’s production doesn’t abide by the director’s rule laid out above, it is vastly superior to Folger’s.

The portrayal of Juliet is a glaring example. At the outset of the Folger production, the Juliet the audience encountered was a stereotypical teenager—screen addicted, rebellious, sardonic, and apparently uninterested in marriage. That Juliet lasted only until meeting Romeo. Then, dramatically, Juliet became the naïve girl of Shakespeare's script—the kind of girl who could fall in love with a family enemy at first sight.

This tension in Juliet’s character persisted for the entirety of the play, with moments of sweet passion and naïveté mixed alongside the Juliet who periodically did a line of cocaine to stiffen her resolve. In the Luhrmann movie, Claire Danes does not suffer from this confusion of character. Her Juliet is believably naïve and love-stricken.

Sonnet writing is another apt analogy for faithful interpretation and production of Shakespeare’s works. The sonnet writer has 12 lines with 10 syllables per line; he must render his verse in iambic pentameter. Aside from these restrictions, the sonnet writer is free to invent as he pleases. The director has a five-act script which depicts particular characters and events. It provides lines for the characters to utter and directions for their interactions. That which it does not provide is the director’s creative ground. It is the space where, like the sonnet, diverse decisions might take the play along many different paths, but only when the fundamental requirements are observed.

What motivates productions like Folger’s, which so violently gore the landscape of a play? While the answer may be multifaceted, I think it’s predominantly an attempt at relevance. It is endemic for institutions like The Folger Shakespeare Library to become concerned with relevance. Shakespeare, and a library dedicated solely to his study, do not conform to our progress-oriented society. As such, their executives worry that they at best have nothing to contribute, and at worse are part of the problem, being institutionally devoted to a “dead white man.”

But to worry about Shakespeare’s relevance is to miss the point. His works did not rise to ultimate prominence arbitrarily. Their pages contain the great enthusiasms and devotions of human life—love, triumph, loss, hilarity, conspiracy, loyalty, patriotism, and war. In this, Folger fails to grasp its own value. A story of teenage folly, reckless love, and family division is exceptionally relevant.

Yet it is not a good parallel to the American political scene. Americans are not divided over past insults, stolen influence, or any of the causes of inter-family hostility. They are divided over the philosophical foundations of our country’s governance. Most Americans don’t deeply hate specific members of the opposite party whom they know personally, seeking them out to fight in the street. Instead they disdain “libtards” or “MAGA bigots” whom they’ve likely never met.

In the end, the Folger production acknowledged the unfitness of Romeo and Juliet as an allegory for American politics in the show’s final scene. In Shakespeare's play, upon discovering the bodies of Romeo and Juliet, the warring families bury the hatchet. Capulets and Montagues see the fruit of their enmity and repent, as foreshadowed in the prologue:

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

In Folger’s production, upon discovering the bodies, the families retrieve firearms and try to kill each other. This was apparently meant to warn simultaneously against gun violence and civil war, but I’m not entirely sure how. What are Americans supposed to conclude from an ending like that? “Don’t let your daughter marry a Democrat, or we’ll all kill each other?”

Many Shakespeare plays would be suitable for prompting reflection on our politics—Richard II for instance—but none of these are about American politics, nor should they be made to be.

It was an incoherent conclusion to an incoherent show. The Folger director sought to comment on the present political moment through Shakespeare when she should have let Shakespeare comment on the universal movements of the human soul.

Top Five:

The Four Causes of Liberalism

Brad Littlejohn doesn’t miss, and this piece is no exception. In his 29-page beast of an article, Littlejohn examines the debate over liberalism which has been raging since the publication of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed in 2018. Littlejohn uses Aristotle's “four causes” to establish a working definition of liberalism, which he then compares with how people use the term in practice. 

Littlejohn argues that many of liberalism's detractors and proponents alike view it through a sort of Hegelian lens, casting liberalism as an independent force within history which either will reign supreme on the last day or needs to be destroyed at its roots, depending on who you ask. This is the kind of thinking that spawns the “right and wrong side of history” rhetoric. Littlejohn rejects both of these conclusions, arguing instead for the prudent employment of liberal means—free speech, checks and balances, religious toleration—without making them ends in themselves. 

Rather than using liberal tenants to promote the “unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals,” our society should employ liberal means towards ends which promote actual human flourishing, in the manner many of our founding fathers envisioned.

The Democrats and Democracy

Coming in a close second for this roundup is Andrew Taylor’s piece on the weaponization of the word “democracy.” Taylor, a politics professor at NC State, describes the “new democracy agenda” of the Democratic party. This agenda paints left-leaning positions on the economy, campaign regulations, gun control, abortion, Puerto Rican statehood, climate change, public protest, the filibuster, the electoral college, the supreme court, criminal justice reform, and a host of other issues as being inherently “democratic,” while painting opposing views as populist or authoritarian. 

This is not the way things used to be. Previously, Taylor tells us, Americans understood that democracy was the method by which we governed ourselves, and the issues voted on at the ballot box were the product of legitimate disagreements between democratically governed citizens. But no more. Now, the fact that a significant portion of Americans call for “cuts to taxes and immigration rates” isn’t a sign that parts of the democratic platform are unpopular, but rather a disturbing indicator of the anti-democratic attitudes of the populist mob. 

Obviously, this new idea of democracy doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and Taylor is just as adept at dismantling it as he is at describing its features. 

Origins of the Modern Euthanasia Movement

Medical killing is a topic rapidly picking up steam in public discourse, making this article as timely as it is incisive. Aaron Rothstein is a neurologist with a fair amount of experience engaging the public on matters of bioethics. The medically inclined among you may be interested in his podcast, Searching for Medicine’s Soul. 

His article teases out many of the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the modern embrace of euthanasia, including the patient-autonomy movement, philosophical dualism, and declining religiosity. Rothstein also provides a useful synopsis of statistics and recent reporting on the topic. 

Rothstein doesn’t posit much by way of a solution, but it’s fair to assume that solutions aren’t his aim. This article will prove excellent fodder for thinking over the appeal and philosophical force of euthanasia for the modern mind. 

The Regulatory Pendulum 

Working on an article that opens one’s mind to a topic previously unconsidered is one of the great thrills of editing. Fortunately, there were several such articles in this batch and while it’s hard to pick a favorite, this one ultimately took the win. 

Attentive observers of American politics will certainly be aware of the immense growth of the administrative state over the past four decades. Presidents have passed more and more executive orders to accomplish their aims, and the unelected bureaucrats staffing executive administrations create rules at will, often encroaching on law-making territory constitutionally delegated to Congress. 

Former U.S. attorney general Jeff Rosen argues, however, that the situation has worsened during the last few administrations. Not only has the executive branch claimed more and more administrative power for itself, but in doing so it has created a “regulatory pendulum” which swings with more force every time a new administration comes into office. 

The increasing velocity of the pendulum is illustrated by a change in the way current presidents view past president's executive orders. For example, “In the first six months after President George W. Bush replaced President Bill Clinton, Bush revoked only six executive orders.” By contrast, during Biden’s first month as president, “the administration issued at least 32 executive orders or directives — far beyond what any of the last seven presidents issued. Fourteen of these revoked, in whole or in part, 34 of Trump's orders, including all six related to the regulatory process and a host of others….” 

This article shares some important themes with Taylor’s piece on democracy. If your opponent’s regulations are “undemocratic” and thus illegitimate, it’s a no brainer to eliminate them all when you come to power. This shift towards using executive power as the primary method of lawmaking is dangerous, and Rosen makes a compelling case for moving back towards a constitutionally faithful model of government. 

A New Energy-security Paradigm

It’s hard to be level-headed about energy policy in this day and age, but Christopher Barnard manages it here. The president of the American Conservation Coalition, Barnard advocates an “all of the above” approach to shoring up our national energy security while making the case that continued production of American fossil fuels is the best way to move towards a more sustainable future. 

Barnard points to countries like Germany as a cautionary tale, which—after both shutting down its nuclear power plants in reaction to the Fukushima disaster and making an abrupt push towards producing exclusively green energy—has ended up relying on dirtier natural gas and oil from adversarial countries like Russia—a move which proved seriously misguided after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

While great advancements have been made in clean-energy technology, that tech is clearly not advanced enough to permit any western country to transition entirely away from fossil fuels, especially if that country is also averse to using nuclear energy. While impassioned demonstrations of environmental conscientiousness may please the liberal public, when they’re enshrined in policy they both fail to achieve their carbon neutrality goals and weaken a country's energy security. 

Lawmakers, according to Barnard, need to spurn the near-religious demand to eliminate fossil fuel production and focus national resources on achieving American energy dominance in fossil fuels, renewable energy, and nuclear power alike. 

Honorable Mentions: 

Reclaiming Sovereignty in Financial Regulation

Did you know that American banking regulation is dictated almost entirely by a group of international financial regulators based in Switzerland? Neither did I! This is another one of those eye-opening pieces. If it sounds like something out of a Bond film, that’s because it kind of is. 

Real Education Equity 

This is the kind of piece National Affairs is known for: effectively aiming at bipartisan appeal on an issue of immediate importance. While the right and left don’t agree on why public schools in low-income areas are in trouble, they can agree that they are. Petrilli attempts to offer both an explanation and a set of solutions which deal with the challenges of educating low-income students without compromising educational standards.

The American Museum of Natural History has loomed large in my imagination for many years. I visited while in middle school, and I found within its walls the consummation of my childhood tendency to collect and catalogue artifacts of the natural world. Since my first visit in middle school, I have longed to return, and on a hot Friday in June, I succeeded. Hopping a train into Manhattan, I walked to the museum and spent as much time as I could manage wandering its halls.

This return, like all long awaited fulfillments of nostalgic wishes, had mixed results in meeting my expectations. The dioramas, dinosaur skeletons, and tribal weapons of war were as thrilling as ever—if not more so. Yet aspects of the museum which I noticed for the first time gave me pause, and were stuck in my mind for some time after I left. I will discuss some of these things here.

In Praise of Dioramas

The wildlife dioramas of the American museum are of a quality to put most other pretenders to the title to shame. A museum diorama is a three dimensional display of a scene, which in the case of the American museum involves specimens collected from a particular environment, mounted, and placed in a display case which features a brilliantly painted backdrop made from sketches of the area where the specimens were collected. Take for example these mountain gorillas:

The mountains standing behind them are depictions of actual mountains from the region of the Congo where the mountain gorillas live. The vegetation surrounding them has been carefully fabricated to mirror the real thing. Everything about the display is precisely crafted to create a completely engaging visual, and in so doing transports the viewer to the land on display.

I think it is easy to class dioramas as an outdated sort of thing—they were originally used as a tool of conservation evangelization, a role into which photography and film making have largely stepped. There are also bound to be objections to shooting and mounting animals. But I think dioramas, at least dioramas of the quality produced at the American Museum, retain their unique value, even in the world of Animal Planet and Discovery Channel.

The diorama’s primary virtue is one of scale. I have seen three mounted Kodiak brown bears in my life: one in the Denver Museum of Natural History and two in a diorama at the American Museum. Each time, I’ve been struck completely dumb by their size. Those bears are huge. When they stand on their hind legs, I’m dwarfed by a good two to three feet.

I confess, when I see stuffed black bears, there’s a part of me that thinks with full confidence that I could take one of those things and live to tell the tale. When I see a mounted grizzly, I think something similar, but with less conviction. I’m under no such illusion when gazing on the Kodiak brown bear.

One of the most beautiful dioramas was in the hall of North American Birds. The American Egret, a bird once hunted to the edge of extinction for its plumage, was shown nesting forty feet off the ground in a bald cypress in southeast South Carolina. I have seen egrets plenty of times, but never with the intimacy afforded by the diorama. This unique perspective, unachievable for the average bird watcher, is another of the diorama’s particular virtues.

There are countless examples of artists harnessing elements of the natural world in order to increase the beauty and power of their work. Dioramas however, are of that unique breed of work, like the cutting of gemstones or designing of a garden, when the artist seeks to tease out and magnify the beauty already inherent in nature.

Museum of “Natural” History?

One of the most surprising aspects of the museum’s collection are the anthropological artifacts and displays. Along with the halls of North American Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians, and Ocean Life, there are halls of Asian, South American, and Pacific Peoples. These halls also contain dioramas, these of naked tribesmen and armored Samori going about their daily lives. Much like the animal dioramas, no detail is omitted.

The Central American hall is filled with artifacts of Aztec and Maya life—the same sorts of things one would find in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Pottery, weapons, idols, manuscripts. The Northwest Coast display consists of an entire hall of totem poles, which were sawed into thirds and shipped back to the museum at the turn of the century. Needless to say, the indigenous peoples of the Northwest are not particularly happy about this.

At the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences where I visited growing up, there were no naked tribesmen or Maya pottery. That museum, which grew out of a collection of agricultural and geological specimens in the late-nineteenth century, is primarily dedicated to the study of the natural world, human society excluded. They’ll happily tell you about the human genome, but if you want to see Cherokee arrowheads, you’ll have to go across the street to the history museum.

The inclusion of so many anthropological specimens at the American Museum betrays the museum’s original philosophical orientation. The ideas of Social Darwinism, encouraged and enabled by American and European colonialism, wrote the script for early collection interests. To the turn-of-the-century collector and scientist, the whole of Africa—and any other non-European land—was a subject for study and collection, including the indigenous peoples.

The ideas of Social Darwinism take the principles of adaptation and competition that Darwin developed relating to plants and animals, and apply them to human societies and races. This brand of thinking saturated the educated minds of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The language used to justify the slaughter and removal of the American Indian is language of natural process; of weak races being supplanted by strong ones and of the inevitability of such change. This was the mindset which pervaded and justified the colonization movements of the late-nineteenth century, the eugenics programs of the early-twentieth, and, of course, the Nazi claim to Aryan superiority and perpetration of the Holocaust.

The key indicator of Social Darwinist influence at the museum isn’t so much in what is on display, as much as what is not. There are no Rembrandts or Titians. There is a notable and complete lack of the Greco-Roman. If one wants to see those sorts of artifacts, one must visit the MET. The nearest the anthropological displays come to touching the people of Europe is in the hall of Asian Peoples, where the Armenians are given their due.

This is a divide characteristic of the twentieth century: art is something made by Europeans—it is high, noble, and capable of forming your soul. The statues, jewelry, and pottery of native people are not art, but cultural curiosities. During the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, native objects were something one brought back from travels abroad to entertain one’s friends with. At the turn of the century, this attitude became methodized in the form of anthropology.

The museum is becoming uncomfortable with this legacy—it certainly cannot coexist comfortably with progressive New York convictions. Signs of tension were particularly present in the Northwest Coast display. The exhibit has been overhauled in recent years to expose the legacy of theft and oppression which accompanied the collection of the artifacts, and new displays promote native voices explaining the artifacts, and decrying the robbery of their culture.

Walking through the exhibit gave me a feeling slightly reminiscent of watching a man saw off the tree branch on which he is sitting. The museum is obviously unwilling to give up their artifacts, but also can’t ignore the conditions under which they were obtained. The result is an odd mix of self-loathing and self-preservation.

The American Museum is itself an artifact. Many of its exhibits and its organizing principles are old, and serve as windows into the past. The repudiation of Social Darwinist ideas is an absolute necessity, and I am glad that the museum does not traffic in them in the same way that it used to. But I am also glad that the museum still displays its cultural exhibits—they provide a window into what has been, and hopefully a warning of what could be.

Biological Evolution

While the museum’s Social Darwinism may have fallen out of favor, the biological principles of evolution have not. These principles are of course exercised in the examination and categorization of animals, but the degree to which they are applied to humans was unnerving.

The first point at which I noticed this tendency came in the Ocean Life exhibit. The hall is large and open, famously boasting a Blue Whale as its centerpiece. One of the walls displays groupings of mounted sea life, which are organized according to where they fall on the evolutionary map. Those vertebrates which have developed into air breathing mammals, like dolphins and turtles, branched off in a particular direction all their own. Amongst these creatures was a human, clad in snorkeling gear.

Shortly thereafter, I walked through an exhibit focused on human origins. The part of the exhibit which was most interesting and surprising to me was a TV screen which played recordings of various scientists commenting on the bounds of science in dealing with life and its meaning. It featured Francis Collins, a scientist and Christian who played a fundamental role in the human genome project, amongst other scientists of differing religious and philosophical convictions.

The video was dedicated to assuring the audience that, while science does claim to explain the origins of human life, it cannot account for the things which give life its meaning, like religion and philosophy. While I appreciated this attempt to recognize the epistemological bounds of science, I found the video dishonest about the extent of the claim being made about human origins.

Science and religion are not separate spheres. They both make claims about the fundamental nature of reality, and on the matter of human origins, they are at odds. The video presented morality and meaning in an existential fashion, as if humans could simply utilize the tools of philosophy to create meaning for themselves, while being themselves nothing more than very evolutionarily advanced animals. Yet for most religions, and certainly the Christian religion, this claim makes no sense.

Christian morality rests on the notion that humans are fundamentally different from animals, being specially made in the image of God and endowed with moral power and agency. The museum, through the video playing in the exhibit, was positing that the cathedral of Christian ethics could still stand without its bedrock foundation—God’s special creation of man with a particular purpose and function distinct from that of baboons, lemurs, and gorillas. This however, is a lie. When the foundation of a cathedral is knocked out, everything it supports comes crashing down. There are no floating cathedrals.

For me personally, this opens up questions which have long been closed in my mind. I have always taken an old-earth creationist stance, with an understanding that humans were somehow created in God’s image. Perhaps we did evolve from lesser organisms but were then endowed with the rational and moral capacity which makes us image-bearers. This of course makes chapters 2-11 of Genesis hugely problematic. I tended to think that they could be read in a “mytho-historical” sense, still true in certain principles but not in detail. Real history begins with Abraham.

As I’ve spent more time studying Scripture, this mytho-historical reading appears more and more dubious. It reads against the grain of Scripture and requires a carveout from good exegetical method. I don’t dismiss the reality of the story of Jonah, the exodus, or Jesus’ resurrection simply because the prevailing scientific or historical narrative casts doubt on their believability. Why should I for the first eleven chapters of Genesis?

This debate was hashed out by William Lane Craig and Peter Leithart a few years ago on First Things. Craig, in his book In Quest of the Historical Adam, cobbled together a scientifically kosher version of the Genesis narrative. He argued that Adam was a historical figure, but that most of the details of the Genesis narrative like the fruit, garden, and snake fell more on the “mytho” side of mytho-history. In his response, Leithart dismantled Craig’s proposition, pointing to Craig’s lack of real criteria for determining what really happened and what sprang from the imagination of Genesis’ author.

It’s quite likely that I’ll return to this topic in a future post. My thoughts are not sufficiently honed for any extended discussion or suggesting a solution. Returning to the museum, however, the idea that humans are just another blip on the evolutionary map, and that our intellect, imaginative power, and moral sensibility are merely the odd outcome of a roll of the dice is both patently absurd and deeply disturbing. The fact that a significant proportion of scientists take that notion for granted is even more so.

The contrast between the foundational project of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History is striking and illustrative of this problem. The MET is dedicated to humans and their achievements. It collects, studies, and displays beautiful artifacts of human creativity. One of the most unique products of our divine nature—art—is prominently displayed, meant to be admired and to form the souls of its admirers. While this could be said of a few of the displays at the Natural History Museum, the general attitude towards humans is one of minute scrutiny and categorization—people are under the microscope.

Conclusion

As I wrote above, the most fascinating part of the museum is its own antiquity. Within its halls, one not only learns about genes and birds but about America in the latter part of the nineteenth century. One can trace the countervailing forces which drove it into existence and which have buffered it in recent decades.

The study of the natural world is good and necessary. Public education about the natural world just as much so, if not more. Yet all museums are organized according to presumed principles, and as the Museum of Natural History demonstrates, those principles are not always good and just. They should be interrogated.

Like with any childhood favorite rewatched in adulthood, I saw many things through new eyes. While the moments of cheesiness became more pronounced, that which made the film good likewise displayed itself with renewed prominence: there is an actual developmental arc to Ben Stiller’s comical and at times unbearable character; the few women in the movie are generally positive characters, even though one is Stiller’s ex-wife; the acting is often really quite good.

What struck me the most, however, was the prominent role of masculinity as a theme throughout the plot and dialogue. Night at the Museum is not a super serious movie and it may come off as strange to see it treated so seriously here. But its comical nature is the point. Even in this unserious and farcical film, the writers take for granted a positive vision of manhood in which being a man means taking decisive action for what is right, fulfilling one’s obligations no matter what, and looking after the wellbeing of those around you.

Larry the nightwatchman is a somewhat deadbeat dad whose son doesn’t want him to come to career day. He’s been involved in multiple failed schemes and only lands his position at the American Museum of Natural History by a desperate plea to an employee at a staffing agency. On his first night on the job, Larry discovers the museum's secret: due to an enchanted Egyptian tablet, at night, all of the wax figures, stuffed animals, and humanesque artifacts come to life. This is a startling revelation for Larry, who spends a significant part of the film wanting to walk away from his new-found responsibilities.

Notions of masculinity and of what it means to be a man are prominent throughout the dialogue. Cecil (Dick Van Dyke), one of Larry’s predecessors in the night watchman job, upon meeting Larry remarks “firm handshake… says a lot about a man.” When Larry is tied down by a bunch of miniature diorama cowboys who intend to ram his head with a diorama sized train, the cowboy Jedidiah (Owen Wilson) tells Larry to “quit whining, and just take it like a man!” Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) makes some thumos-inducing comment just about every time he opens his mouth, culminating in “you gotta finish the job this time. You can’t quit. I’m made of wax Larry… what are you made of?”

Now, I’m not arguing that these lines, or the characters who speak them, are always healthy examples of manliness. Jedidiah the cowboy has to learn how to live with his diorama compatriot Octavian the Roman without getting in a brawl. Both act out in attempts to prove themselves which are inevitably futile. What I am arguing is that Night at the Museum is undergirded by a firm understanding of what it means to be a man. This foundational understanding allows the movie to portray men who fall short—Larry by being a deadbeat father and a quitter; Jedidiah and Octavius by always getting into fights to prove themselves—and to show those characters growing and maturing in their understanding of what it means to be men.

Over the course of the movie, Larry learns that being a man means holding a job, setting a good example for his son, fulfilling his responsibilities, and looking after the well-being of those around him, especially when things become difficult. When it comes to be that he and he alone can take action to save the museum, Teddy’s searching “what are you made of” prompts Larry to step up, unite the museumfolk and lead them to victory. He’s not alone in this either: Jedidiah and Octavius learn to harness their fighting spirit in the pursuit of a just cause—putting a stop to thieves in the museum—rather than just fighting each other for the sake of vainglory.

This stands in stark contrast with the representations of masculinity commonly found in the last ten years of cinema. Consider some examples: in the original three Star Wars movies, Luke Skywalker undergoes a very typical zero to hero transformation, beginning as a naive and adventurous boy in the desert and ending as a mature and experienced Jedi Knight. He develops many of the positive masculine character traits that we can locate in Night at the Museum, including courage, wisdom, leadership, self-control, and a willingness to sacrifice his needs and interests in the service of others. By the end of the original trilogy, Luke is a man that other men can respect. A man that young boys can and should look up to.

Luke, portrayed by Mark Hamill, is a character much beloved in the public imagination, and so it was an exciting prospect for audiences when his return was announced for the movie, The Last Jedi. Sadly, what viewers got was not an older, wiser version of the gallant and swashbuckling space adventurer, but rather a washed up, cynical old man who is uninterested in helping with the struggle presently afoot in the galaxy. The young (female) main character of The Last Jedi, Rey, instead of learning the ways of the force from Luke, must more or less nag him into helping her, and after learning very little from Luke, cuts her losses and leaves. Rey goes on to prove that she did not need the guidance and training of the old Jedi, as over the course of the rest of the trilogy she becomes a very talented and cunning warrior, without having much need of a teacher at all.

Consider also the series of Thor movies produced by Marvel over the past fifteen years. Thor is inherently a very stereotypically masculine character: the muscle-bound defender of his lands from monsters and demons. In the first installment of the Thor series, this is the Thor that Marvel gives us—strong, mysterious, and well… manly. Over the years though, Thor has become more and more of a joke character, never maturing in his understanding of the world or his place in it, but becoming ineffective, depressed, and seriously overweight. While there is some ebb and flow to his character, he never has a lasting moment of redemption or recovery of his original state. 

The story arcs of Luke and Thor are the opposite of Larry’s arc in Night at the Museum. Instead of maturing and becoming better men over time, they begin as ideal pictures of what a man should be and decline away from that model without finding a respectable alternative. Viewers of The Last Jedi can bear witness to the explicit nature of Luke’s character assassination. The script writer not only knocks Luke down a couple notches in competence and confidence, he keeps him there for practically the whole movie. There is a very clear message being sent throughout the film: the Luke you once knew, the valiant and wise man, was a lie. He was a lie and in his place we need a woman like Rey to step in and do the job he was unable to do.

While this merits many more words and much deeper analysis, that is not the main point of this post. If you want more on the subject, The Critical Drinker is a YouTube channel I recommend. I certainly don’t agree with all the man’s takes, but he analyzes many of the problems with gender in modern filmmaking with insight and humor.

The point of this diversion into Thor and Star Wars is to draw a marked contrast between the understanding of masculinity we get in Night at the Museum and the understanding we get in modern Disney/Marvel films. In Night at the Museum, there is an implicit understanding of true manhood as a good thing—something virtuous and worth striving for. In more modern Hollywood works, there is an explicit understanding that men are generally a problem which need to be derided or simply passed over. Hollywood feminism demands as a foundational principle that the elevation of women to a place of equality with men means the removal of traditional notions of masculinity. In its place, they are not offering a better understanding of manhood, but simply the consistent elevation of female characters.

This matters because the culture we consume molds and shapes our assumptions. Even when we don't register it, movies and other media have a significant impact on our perception of ourselves, others, and reality as a whole. As a child, I gained the notion that a strong handshake says a lot about a man from Night at the Museum. I looked up to Teddy Roosevelt and wanted to be the kind of man who encouraged other men to fulfill their responsibilities and act with courage. Taken with Owen Wilson’s “quit whining and take it like a man,” I caught a glimmer of the fact that sometimes being a man means experiencing suffering with endurance and without complaint. Even from a comedy like Night at the Museum, I was starting to piece together what it meant to be a good man.

Boys and girls both need positive role models. They also need to learn what they should expect from the other sex. When girls see the invincible and emotionally impenetrable Captain Marvel smacking down all the men around her in conversation and outperforming them in feats of strength, they’re being given a bad and unrealistic example: the strong female character just takes the traits often attributed to toxic men and gives them to women instead. That’s neither compelling nor inspirational. 

When boys don’t see men who stand for what’s right, who fight against indelible odds, who serve and protect those around them, who will they emulate? It’s possible that they will emulate the unserious male character’s of the kind described above. It’s also possible that they will emulate powerful but evil characters. Either way, a world filled with such men is a grim one.

The media we consume needs strong examples of what it means to be a good man. It also needs strong examples of what it is to be a bad or faulty man, and to show the damage and suffering that can come as a result of that (think Goodfellas; Wolf of Wall Street). This need is not just limited to The Lord of the Rings or Band of Brothers. Even the slightly silly Night at the Museum can influence a child toward a true understanding of good and bad men, as it did for me. 

The writers of Night at the Museum were unashamed to have one character encourage another to “be a man.” Being a man was not seen as something to be deconstructed, mocked, and repressed. Hollywood feminism can do nothing but mock and demote men because it has no alternative for what a man should be. When there is no good model of manhood for characters to strive for, the only thing left to do is to beat men down, gut them, and leave them for dead. This cuts off the possibility that men could ever be redeemed, or mature into better versions of themselves. 

The assault on men is not merely an assault on manhood alone, but an assault on gender itself, particularly the differences between genders. There can’t be good men because the idea of any inherent difference between a good man and a good woman is taboo, and challenges the notion of gender as a completely malleable construct which we control. This attack on gender not only turns men into jokes, but also the women who are “promoted” to take their places in movies. Because this assault will inevitably come into conflict with the natural reality of manhood and womanhood, it cannot achieve the aims of its commanders. Rather than abolishing bifurcated gender, it will simply produce worse men and women.

AH

My experience with Substack has resembled my experience with many other technologies: it sat in my periphery while I ignored it and everyone else used it, until it became too significant to ignore any longer. I tend to do this with most new things (AI, Google Drive, AirPods), and while I’m sure this attitude has occasionally been useful, I’m equally sure that it’s led to some missed opportunities.

So, here I am. And here you are! Why, as Nathan Sasser asked in his Substack, am I inflicting this on you? Because the informal nature of Substack provides a space for me to try new ideas or concepts which are either still in their infancy or, while being highly interesting, are perhaps not interesting (or new) enough to make their way into a formal publication. Ideally, it will provide a space for you to respond as well, should it please you.

With that purpose in mind, this Substack shall know no bounds of genre or topic. I have some ideas as to where this will go, but I intend to be open to where interest and curiosity take me. Just to give you an idea of what you’re getting into though, topics will probably include movies, theology, Anglo-Saxon poetry, country music, Walker Percy, church architecture, and more.

Well, that’s all for now. I make no commitment to regular posting. Substack told me when I signed up that such a lack of commitment is ill-advised, as irregular posting will probably lead to stunted readership and subscriber growth, but life being what it is, I think it better to leave that door open and accept the risks.

AH

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