20th Century Values

Re “Values Took a Beating in 20th Century,” Commentary, Nov. 30: Thanks to James Pinkerton for warning me that the Kristol/Himmelfarb clan has produced another paper doorstop. In the past, I have waded through various screeds by the whole family: dad Irving, mom Gertrude and son William. They impress this reader as incredibly pretentious blowhards who believe society is made up of the other classes (most of us) and the better classes (guess who?). Their work sometimes makes me laugh out loud, but never intentionally; e.g., it’s a real hoot when this over-educated Gang of Three slurs its political opponents as “elitists.”

I used to assume that these goofy right-wing academics just hated the 20th century. But then I reflect that Himmelfarb is pining for a sort of official state morality, enshrined in an absolute monarch and enforced by her official state church. What these folks really hate is democracy.

MICHAEL S. SMITH

Canoga Park

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Pinkerton considers 19th century Britain a golden age of morality. This was a period when rural freeholders were ruthlessly evicted from their lands, children worked 12- and 14-hour days under conditions we cannot imagine and the debtors’ prison was a thriving institution. Rather than the dumbed-down education Pinkerton criticizes, the vast majority got no education whatsoever and the morally superior elite lived lives of fabulous dissolution.

Meanwhile, the chattering classes praised the status quo as a way to ensure survival of the fittest, while even the Malthusian clergy opposed reform, lest overpopulation result from weakening the “positive checks” of war, famine and pestilence. If this was a golden age, let Pinkerton have it. I’m happy to swim in the moral swamp of the 20th century.

CHARLES SCHWARTZ

Los Angeles