The Long View

The Preservation of Western Civilization

First Things has dedicated its current edition to a survey of the nation's colleges, with special attention to what they have to offer to religiously inclined students (or at least to religiously inclined parents). The issue provides a numerical score for the academic, social, and religious reputation of a selection of schools. The scores go from 1 to 50. An Ivy League school is likely to have an academic rating of 40 or better, a respectable state school in the high 20s. The social rating tends to vary inversely with the rumor of undergraduate depravity. Religion is scored by friendliness to theological reasoning in class and on campus, as well as the accessibility of religious services and organizations. More interesting than the scores are the narrative accounts of each school, based in part on anonymous comments from students.

As you might expect from a First Things survey, Wheaton and Thomas Aquinas appear among the great institutions of the age. Georgetown is a sump of evils. Notre Dame has its merits, but is not for the eccentric, uncoordinated, or intellectually intense. Any student would be happy at Princeton, though. As if they needed to be told.

The major institutions are covered, but there is a great emphasis on little liberal arts schools that might otherwise go unnoticed. Still, any national survey of such a large universe must be very selective. Many venerable and interesting second-tier schools had to be omitted. Like this one, for instance:

Miskatonic University: Academic: 35; Social: 10; Religious 45

Located in Arkham, Massachusetts, in the heavily forested Miskatonic River Valley of somewhat remote Essex County, Miskatonic University was founded in 1690, making it one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States. Like all the older schools, Miskatonic was created chiefly as a seminary; in this case, for the progressive (Matherite) faction of Congregationalism. However, the school's religious affiliation tended to vary in the school's first three centuries according to the sometimes-florid enthusiasms of the Board of Trustees. After the incident of 1881 involving the terrorist wing of the Unitarian Church, the surviving school became officially nondenominational.

In no school in this survey can there be found students harder working, or more driven, or more possessed by a frenzy of obsessed scholarship that leaves them scarcely a moment of peace day or night (except at the University of Chicago, of course). Campus social life is limited, in part because of the enthusiastically observed curfew. Drinking is forbidden on campus, though students are known to repair to the low dives of nearby Arkham, not invariably to return. Inquiries about the presence of a hook-up culture resulted in disturbing conversations about the uses of actual hooks. The low Social rating accorded Miskatonic in this survey stems solely from the high incidence of research-related fatalities, which render MU students famously uninsurable.

Despite its nondenominational status, Miskatonic University well merits one of the highest Religious scores in the survey. To raise a theological point in class will not elicit a rebuke from the faculty, but an invitation to a vertiginous ascent into realms of often alarming metaphysical speculation. Conventional religious fervor is easy to detect in the student body: A Newman Center, a Hillel, and the associations of several evangelical groups have ample quarters on campus, all of them splendidly fortified. The Administration is generous about making university venues available for worship services and other faith-related events. Curiously, no one ever requests the use of the landmark Riemann Chapel, whose non-Euclidean geometry students find to induce unpleasant dreams.

Miskatonic University is a special kind of school for a very, very special kind of student. However, if your son or daughter can imagine going there, then that is probably where they should go. Their soul will be in less peril than at Gonzaga.

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Ridley Scott is planning to do a film adaptation of Philip Dick's The Man in the High Castle.

I suspect we are going to see a flurry of interest in Alternative History as the anniversary of the beginning of World War I approaches. Since August 1914, there has been persistent uncertainty about whether we are living in a real history or a parody of one.

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Readers in need of quotations from eminent scholars in support of the thesis that Islam is a form of totalitarianism will find useful material in Andrew G. Bostom's piece, Geert Wilders, Western Sages, and Totalitarian Islam. The article was occasioned by the prosecutor's motion for dismissal of hate-crime charges against the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who had criticized Islam and advocated limiting immigration from Muslim countries.

I would not quarrel with most of the points raised in this article, but let me comment on this opinion-survey finding:

Specifically, the World Public Opinion.org/ University of Maryland poll (released February 25, 2009) indicated the following about our putative Muslim ally nations of Egypt and Pakistan: 81% of the Muslims of "moderate" Egypt, the largest Arab Muslim nation, desire a "strict" application of Shari'a, Islamic law; 76% of Pakistan's Muslims — one of the most important and sizable non-Arab Muslim populations — want this outcome.

There are several reasons for the popularity of Shari'a, but one of the major ones is the fact that it is public and predictable. In societies where political systems tend to be very arbitrary, Shari'a law is favored because some law is better than no law. Shari'a does what written constitutions are supposed to do.

This consideration would seem to have no application in Western countries, until we remember the increasingly whimsical behavior of Western judiciaries on social issues. Wilders' own prosecution is an example.

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Not enough historical irony for you? See what Charles Upton has to say about the cooptation of Sufism by the demons of globalization.

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I was as surprised by the securitization crisis as anyone, but I was dimly aware before the meltdown in the Fall of 2008 that the paperwork for the securitized loans was not all it should have been. Today, of course, we see the real-estate foreclosure system seizing up across the country. Here's a report by Thom Weidlich of Bloomberg on what went wrong:

Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc [MERS is] a company that lets banks electronically register their sales of home loans so they can avoid trudging down to the county land-records office… "MERS is the central device by which the banks have tried to opt out of the legal system and the real-property record system," U.S. Representative Alan Grayson of Florida said in an interview… Attorneys general of all 50 states opened a joint investigation into home foreclosures Oct. 13, saying they will seek an immediate halt to any improper practices at banks and mortgage companies… Merscorp, based in Reston, Virginia, was created by industry leaders in 1995 to improve servicing after county offices couldn't deal with the flood of mortgage assignments… Under the MERS system, a borrower who takes out a loan agrees to allow the company to act as the lender's nominee, or agent, on the mortgage or deed of trust securing the property…. About 60 percent of newly originated loans are on the MERS system… MERS played a key role in the bundling of mortgages into securities that reached a frenzy before the economic decline of 2008…

"It is axiomatic the same entity cannot simultaneously be both an agent and a principal with respect to the same property right," Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, wrote in a law-review article about MERS this year. Peterson wrote that courts should look to the actual economics of the transaction, which some have done, finding that MERS has no standing in proceedings to seize delinquent borrowers' homes…. New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur M. Schack, a trial- level judge in Brooklyn, is particularly vexed…[h]e has pointed out what he sees as a potentially serious conflict: The same person, as an "employee" of MERS -- with duties owed to the entity selling a mortgage -- assigns that mortgage to a bank at presumably market value, and then the same person, as the bank's employee, swears an affidavit in the foreclosure case.

The MERS device is the sort of edgy thing you might do in good conscience in a rare transaction involving sophisticated parties who understand the risk. It would be useful to learn where the people went to school who perceived that level of uncertainty as tolerable for the lynchpin of a national financial system. But why did it happen?

"MERS probably served a necessary purpose given the volume of securitization that went on," Talcott Franklin, a lawyer in Dallas who represents investors in mortgage-backed securities.

From this we might infer that the volume of securitization was itself unnecessary, and indeed inadvisable.

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Multiculturalism has failed, the Chancellor said, and the pope straightaway created a new institute for the conversion of Darkest Europe. Accusations of verbal hate-crime can now turn you into Dreyfus, at least if you speak Flemish or Dutch. In America and France, meanwhile, the damnedest things are happening. Not all the latter are to my liking, to put it mildly, but this ensemble is, I think, a short answer to the argument that there is no such thing as Western Civilization. Only the hypothesis of its existence makes current history intelligible.

Alas for the Obama Administration. No, it is not incompetent; neither is it particularly maladroit in presenting its case to the public. The problem is that, in its own understanding, it is not just post-American but post-Western: not at all a worldview likely to be helpful at the beginning of an era characterized by the consolidation of a sense of Western identity. The identity is likely to be a neo kind of thing, like most of the putatively ancient national identities concocted in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that is the way of it.