The Divine Conspiracy Blog

Steven F. Hayward reviews five conservative books.

Found in 1973, a Victorian sex survey.

In 1973, historian Carl Degler was combing the University archives, gathering research for a book on the history of the family. Sifting through the papers of Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, who taught in Stanford’s hygiene department around the turn of the 20th century, he came across a mysteriously bound file. Degler nearly put it aside, figuring it was a manuscript for one of Mosher’s published works, mostly statistical treatises on women’s height, strength and menstruation. But instead, he recalls, “I opened it up and there were these questionnaires”— questionnaires upon which dozens of women, most born before 1870, had inscribed their most intimate thoughts.

In other words, it was a sex survey. A Victorian sex survey. It is the earliest known study of its type, long preceding, for example, the 1947 and 1953 Kinsey Reports, whose oldest female respondents were born in the 1890s. The Mosher Survey recorded not only women’s sexual habits and appetites, but also their thinking about spousal relationships, children and contraception. Perhaps, it hinted, Victorian women weren’t so Victorian after all.

Read more here.

Dennis Prager: Leftism, the Religion.

Leftism, though secular, must be understood as a religion (which is why I have begun capitalizing it). The Leftist value system’s hold on its adherents is as strong as the hold Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have on theirs. Nancy Pelosi’s belief in expanding the government’s role in American life, which inspired her passion for the health-care bill, is as strong as a pro-life Christian’s belief in the sanctity of the life of the unborn.

More.

Michael Barone on tea parties.

Over the past 14 months, our political debate has been transformed into an argument between the heirs of two fundamental schools of political thought, the Founders and the Progressives. The Founders stood for the expansion of liberty and the Progressives for the expansion of government.

It’s an argument that has been going on for a century but was largely dormant over the quarter-century of low-inflation economic growth that followed the Reagan tax cuts. It’s been raised again by the expand-government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders.

Those policies, thoroughly in line with the Progressive tradition, have been advanced by liberal elites in government, media, think tanks and academia. The opposition, roughly in line with the Founders tradition, has been led by the non-elites who spontaneously flocked to tea parties and town halls. Republican politicians have been scrambling to lead these protesters.

Read the rest here.

Theodore Dalrymple on Self-Esteem vs. Self-Respect.

With the coyness of someone revealing a bizarre sexual taste, my patients would often say to me, “Doctor, I think I’m suffering from low self-esteem.” This, they believed, was at the root of their problem, whatever it was, for there is hardly any undesirable behavior or experience that has not been attributed, in the press and on the air, in books and in private conversations, to low self-esteem, from eating too much to mass murder.

Self-esteem is, of course, a term in the modern lexicon of psychobabble, and psychobabble is itself the verbal expression of self-absorption without self-examination. The former is a pleasurable vice, the latter a painful discipline. An accomplished psychobabbler can talk for hours about himself without revealing anything

Read the rest here.

Cathy Young: An Act of Hubris.

While nobody knows what effects the health care reform bill passed by Congress will have on health care in America, the battle around this legislation is very likely to have disastrous effects on the nation’s cultural health. Vitriol, hate, hysteria, and dishonesty and stark political polarization have reached new lows even for our time, with each side in the debate bandying about accusations of murder.

Part of the reason this particular debate has reached such a pitch of intensity is that health care affects people on a deeply personal level; it is a matter not only of privacy on the most intimate of levels but also, frequently, of life and death. The idea of being unable to afford medical care for oneself or loved ones is terrifying; so is the idea of the government poking its nose in one’s health care, and perhaps deciding who has access and who does not.

While the debate is often framed as one between European-style big government and American-style free markets, it is to a large extent a false dichotomy. Government is already more entangled in medicine in America than in almost any other part of the private sector, and there are strong arguments that many of the current problems—including out-of-control costs—are at least partly related to government-imposed market distortions.

At the same time, the life-and-death nature of medicine throws a major wrench into the libertarian paradigm.

More at Reason.

Alan Roebuck: The Protocols of the Elders of Christendom?

The left is in the driver’s seat, and there is therefore one irrefutable argument against the view that a secret cabal of Christian fundamentalists is taking over the country: Conservatism continues to lose. There may very well be secret or semi-secret conservative organizations dedicated to wresting control of the country from the left, but if so, these organizations are failing spectacularly. On average, with exceptions noted, the left is expanding its control over America’s intellectual, moral, social, spiritual, and legal order. That the left is winning does not necessarily mean that conservatism can never come back, but we must acknowledge the current situation.

See here.

The return of Calvinism.

In America’s Christian faith, a surprising comeback of rock-ribbed Calvinism is challenging the Jesus-is-your-buddy gospel of modern evangelism.

Vox Day interviews John Derbyshire about his new book, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.

What Do Philosophers Believe? See here.