Customer Reviews

New Threats to Freedom

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This eminently insightful compilation begs to be read, if for no other reason than its star value alone. Where else are you going to find everyone from Shelby Steele to Christopher Hitchens to Michael Goodwin all in the same volume with up-to-the minute relevantly readable essays? I couldn't stop reading one piece after the other, on into the night.
This volume is not "luminous" in the dreamy buzzword sort of way, but quite illuminating if you're not given to cowering in the face of reality. Avoiding the trap of clinical coldness, these pieces radiate strong arguments against the cultural/political insanity of the moment and in favor of exerting a gritty muscular truth against the delusional madness that surrounds us and imagines it can have it's way.
But through all of the smoke of battle, life, charm, and wit still manage to wonderfully assert themselves. My favorite gems were "The Rise of Antireligious Orthodoxy" by Mark Helprin (who manages to open with yet another one of his engaging Hudson River boyhood memories) and Mark T. Michell's "Ingratitude and the Death of Freedom". All in all, I heartily recommend this riveting collection.

"Reason" in the headline refers to the libertarian magazine Reason, which I've subscribed to in the past but have let lapse because it annoys me so much. Not because I disagree with what its writers and editors have to say, but because what they describe is so maddening. I suppose it's a form of denial. (One of its editors, Michael C. Moynihan, is a contributor to this volume.)

This book is a bit similar. I selected it because of the Christopher Hitchens essay, and he did not disappoint. I found much to agree with in the other essays, as well.

However, I did notice a bit of a rightward slant: Bruce Bawer, Christina Hoff Sommers, Michael Goodwin, Christine Rosen -- and the editor himself, Adam Bellow. None, of course, is Glenn Beck, and there's nothing wrong with right-libertarianism.

However, I think this book may be preaching to the choir. It might have been more useful to assemble a volume that spoke of the Bush administration as much as it did of the Obama administration, and that might have spoken more to the left-libertarians among us. They are less likely to be perusing this volume, I feel. Similarly, I see Republicans more than Democrats picking this one up. A different editorial approach might have made that less likely.

Still and all, a worthy volume.

I haven't finished this quite yet, but I am breezing through it steadily. I would urge people of all political opinions to read this; it's not too narrow a viewpoint so as to exclude anyone from appreciating at least a few of the chapters, each written by a different writer. My particular favorite (so far) is been Christopher Hitchen's essay. For anyone concerned with how cavalierly this country is forgetting the core values of any good free democracy, there is indeed something in this book that will intrigue and stimulate you

For the most part, or should I say, initially, I enjoyed reading New Threats to Freedom. The essays are intelligently written and go at a variety of issues from unusual perspectives. As a piece of literature it was a delight to read. However, while the essays addressed different themes, after reading several it was impossible not to note a decided slant. Several of the essayists lost the point they were carefully guiding the reader towards by decending into juvenile name calling. By the time I finished reading this book I felt like I was witness to a hostile high school debate tournament where the team had challenged itself to present intelligent arguments to counterpoint the perspective of the prevailing intelligencia, at this point in time, spearing the liberal left. The feeling of bitterness at being sidelined comes through loud and clear. This is unfortunate. What could have served to broaden people's minds (it was how I initially approached the book) and lend another perspective became a lightly veiled attack launched by highly educated and intelligent people with a bone to pick.
Nonetheless, I see some value in the book, but that mostly in the reparte; that is, I enjoyed reading intelligently written essays but was glad that I was not in a room (classroom, dinner table) with any of them.
The book would have benefited a great deal from a more balanced perspective.

"New Threats to Freedom" is a collection of essays from mostly prominent conservative or libertarian authors, who take turns skewering liberal policies and proposals, like the obsession with equality of outcome. There's no denying that the authors are generally successful, and some of the incidents they cover, like Yale University Press's caving in to demands not to publish the controversial Mohammed cartoons in a book on the matter, are quite serious blows to classic liberalism. Yet, the danger to classic notions of American freedom and openness comes from the right as well as the left, and those threats are for the most part ignored. Richard Epstein does criticize Republicans as well as Democrats, but for being insufficiently market-friendly. This is not to say that any compilation of perceived problems needs to be "fair and balanced," but when I ordered this book from the Vine program, I hadn't expected it to be so one-sided. It's all in the labeling; if I happen to watch Fox News, I know what to expect. That wasn't the case with this book.

With a title like "NEW Threats to Freedom," I expected some outside-the-box thinking from the authors whose essays appear in this book. The first third of the book was rather disappointing on this score. There was way too much facile Obama-bashing and preaching-to-the-choir hand-wringing of the kind that has become tediously familiar on certain talk radio and internet sites. I almost gave up. Toward the middle of the book, however, things improved and I felt there was some genuine creative thinking going on. By the end, I found the level of writing and analysis above average for a book of this type. Some of it, in fact, was outstanding. So I can recommend the book to the open-minded reader in spite of what I see as some of its defects.

To give some examples, first, of the essays I thought fell short, Jessica Gavora argues that single women are a threat to freedom. This certainly seems like an offbeat perspective worth exploring until you realize that the capstone of her argument is that single women look to the government to be their "substitute husband." This is the sort of claim I recall anti-feminists making in the 1970s and 1980s. There is really nothing "new" about it. Similarly, Max Borders' parable about excessive government regulation and homemade barbecue sauce seems very similar to stuff I read in the Reader's Digest thirty years ago. Mark Helprin's piece on the "Rise of Antireligious Orthodoxy" contains a nicely-written attack on the limits of human knowledge that would have made a George MacDonald or a G.K. Chesterton proud. To get there, however, I had to wade through an emotionally-heated stew of red herrings, flogged straw men and beaten horses that for this reader at least was a tough and almost embarrassing slog.

As for pieces I particularly liked, Michael Goodwin's piece on grade inflation in schools stood out. There were a number of good pieces about threats associated with the media, including Robert D. Kaplan's entry about what he calls the tyranny of the news cycle and David Mamet's piece on the fairness doctrine, in which he makes the salient point that speech can either be fair or free, but not both. Stephen Schwartz's carefully-argued piece on Shariah law in the West was probably the most knowledgeable and temperate article on that particular threat that I have ever read. I also enjoyed Ron Rosenbaum's piece on the demons enleashed by internet anonymity.

Unsurprisingly, most of the articles are written from a libertarian perspective, prototypically reflected in Michael Goodwin's piece on the Loss of the Freedom to Fail or Katherine Mangu-Ward's article on The War on Negative Liberty. Although some of the articles hew closer to the center of the political spectrum, the reader will look in vain for articles, say, on the dangers associated with our tolerance of extraordinary rendition and torture or the threats posed by growing income inequality. But one does not expect a moderate exploration of all possible viewpoints in a book like this. To insist that the book comply with some overarching notion of "fairness" would be to make oneself just the sort of threatening presence the authors rail very effectively against.

New Threats to Freedom is a provocative collection of essays about emerging threats to freedom in contemporary democratic society. Bellow's thesis is that the vigorous discourse on threats to freedom that took place during the 20th century has mostly died out with the end of the Cold War and the death of the greatest thinkers of the last century. He hopes to contribute to a revival of this discourse and feels that 21st century threats to freedom are subtler and harder to see, and today's contributors to that discourse less well known. Thus Bellow offers us the opportunity to peek over the shoulders of some of today's greatest thinkers in the United States as they explore their observations regarding freedom, liberty, and happiness. Even if you disagree with most or all of the essayists' views, the book is well worth reading to stimulate reflection about your personal view of the future of freedom in today's global society.

NEW THREATS TO FREEDOM details a number of new threats to freedoms - threats often largely seen as beneficial to society. Innovative thinkers challenge these new threats, offering insights ranging from failed promises of internet freedoms to the rise of behavioral psychology and transnationalism. More than just an outline of threats, it provides keys to intellectual resistance of such threats and will prove a fine acquisition for any college-level social issues collection.

This book contains 30 essays written by people of different political viewpoints. This is an enlightening book that people of all political backgrounds should appreciate. The book is pretty open and doesn't exclude anyone. When you think about it, our freedoms are being taken on a daily basis. Most Americans are so absorbed in sports or other mundane things that they are in complete denial of what is going on. This book might be able to change that.

The theme of this book is, clearly, threats to our freedom. This can be interpreted as America's freedom, Western freedom in general of the freedom of all people throughout the world. Depending on the reader's sensitivities, some of these freedoms may seem trivial (the freedom of ice cream vendors in New York City to sell their wares near city parks, for example) or may seem monumental (back to those same vendors - can you really ban a licensed business from selling his wares just because you don't want to hear your kids whine all day about ice cream?)

The writing is generally high quality but there are a wide variety of styles, themes and issues that make this an uneven read. For example, Stephen Schwartz's essay "Shariah in the West" is mostly an essay about how Shariah is not a threat, but just a media-hyped bogeyman, followed by a few paragraphs about how it might still be a threat. The "Illusion of Innocence" by Shelby Steele had a similar feel and the last essay by Dennis Whittle, "Orthodoxy and Freedom in International Aid" was more about bureaucratic intertia than any outright threat.

On the other hand essays such as Greg Lukianoff's "Students Against Liberty?" was very thought-provoking (IUPUI, the University where I earned my Master's gets a mention on page 139, much to my embarrassment). The placement of a very strong essay by Mark Helprin entitiled "The Rise of Antireligious Orthodoxy" right before a strong essay on multi-culturalism by Christopher Hitchens (well known for his anti-religious books) makes me smile every time. Hitchins makes a strong point that we should never fail to confuse individual civil rights with "group" rights in our efforts to be a free society.