Viewing passing phenomena from a stable point of truth

Spencer Warren writes:

Listening earlier to the 9 a.m. morning talk program on the biggest Washington, D.C. radio station has driven home for me what is perhaps your greatest contribution to our country and civilization: You teach people how to think.

The host, Chris Plante, always steps up and bluntly tackles race issues. Today the subject is black crime: twelve people were shot last night in one incident on North Capitol Street. All of his callers are black. Most speak in generalities (we must do better, etc.). Some offer the standard victim mantra. A couple address the underlying problem: out-of-wedlock births. (Sadly, they miss the causes: the expansion of welfare to advance LBJ’s Great Society, the loss of low skill manufacturing jobs, the collapse of restraining moral standards, and the failure of the otherwise commendable 1996 welfare reform legislation to ban benefits to mothers bearing illegitimate children, excluded at the insistence of Clinton.)

You teach your readers to focus on what Churchill called “the [permanent] things that govern all the rest.” Those who understand these, he wrote, “are in a much better position to understand the shifts and turns of daily events” than the overwhelming number “who merely indulge their natural impulses as they are evoked by what they read from day to day.”

In writing always about the things that govern all the rest, and uniquely having the moral courage to do so, you shine the light into the cave.

Your admiring friend,

Spencer

LA replies:

Thank you very much, Spencer. I didn’t know that Churchill had said that.

I would add that you have inadvertently described the mission of this site, formulated and placed in the masthead by Jim Kalb when he inaugurated VFR in 2002:

The passing scene and what it’s about viewed from the traditionalist anti-modern Right.

A side point: When Mr. Kalb handed over the site to me in 2003 I changed “anti-modern,” a term to which I didn’t quite relate (we live in the modern world—is it possible for us to be opposed to the modern world as such?) to “politically incorrect.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 11, 2013 12:01 PM | Send