Some say that modern American society believes in the tolerance of everything, except for intolerance. We are supposed to be intolerant of intolerance. The question of tolerance and intolerance is tied up with the tension between liberty and law, legalism and license; persistent problems for Christianity as for every religion in which not everything is forbidden and not everything is permitted. In the United States today, the concept of liberty is being abused to dismantle law in the name of tolerance. When this development has run its course, a new legalism will have to arise to rescue society from the licentiousness that results when liberty becomes absolutist and knows neither the bounds of law nor those of custom.

From the earliest days of Christianity, the concept of liberty has wrestled with that of law, especially with reference to what theologians call "adiaphora" (defined as things neither commanded nor forbidden). One of the cardinal principles of the Christian faith is Christian liberty: St. Paul wrote, "For freedom Christ has made us free; do not be entangled again in the yoke of bondage" (Galatians 5:1). This religious issue has a political parallel in some of the cherished freedoms of the American Bill of Rights, especially with respect to freedom of expression as guaranteed in the First Amendment. That freedom of expression has been taken so far that the motto of stage and screen may now seem to be those lines from Psalm 12:8, "The wicked strut about when vileness is exalted on every side."

How is it possible to enjoy liberty without degenerating into license? In 1941, Pitirim Sorokin said that the world of entertainment was turning into a social sewer. If we believe in "freedom of expression," how can we avoid it? There are two further questions to be answered here: What is covered as "expression"? and even if we have determined that something is "expression," is every use that we might make of it free? Clearly not. We all know that there are some limits even to speech: for example, we cannot yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Airline passengers are reminded when passing through airport security that the mention of weapons or explosives, even in jest, will be severely punished. However, things that are not speech but may cause controversy and offense have recently been defined as "expression" and protected. The definition of the kind of "expression" that must be freely allowed has been extended to such things as naked dancing and flag burning, to the point where it will now require a constitutional amendment to control activities that used to be handled simply as matters of decency and common sense.

This situation exposes a fundamental problem of our democratic system. Democracy presupposes a kind of community of spirit, purpose, and values, not just people living in the same area and casting ballots or responding to opinion polls. The Austrian sociologist Hans Millendorfer has pointed out that democracy works only when there is a wide consensus on what constitutes the good; that is, when there is a common sense concerning right and wrong. This is the danger implicit in interpreting the American doctrine of the separation of church and state in such a way as to ban all religious considerations from public discourse and reflection. Because so much of the moral substance of the population in a country such as the United States–the consensus, if you will–comes from what people have been taught in church and synagogue, the relentless purging of everything that has a religious background or aspect from public discussion and even from public view in effect bans morality from the public square. When the definition of good has to be established by popular vote (or worse yet, by opinion poll), there is no consensus on principles. In this situation, inasmuch as society needs laws, and laws are supposed to reflect what is perceived as good, we are headed towards what is called the tyranny of the fifty-one percent. In the U.S.A., in practice it would be even worse. It would mean the tyranny of the twenty-six or so percent, as half of the eligible voters never bother to vote.

In Christian circles the issue of liberty with respect to things neither commanded nor forbidden is usually couched in terms of "the weaker brother," a real or imagined individual whose faith could be shaken by seeing someone participate in an activity which, while not necessarily wrong in itself (such as drinking alcohol), he had come to believe to be contrary to his faith, although not to public law. Law cannot and should not be drawn up to attempt to cover every aspect of life; much must be left to individual discretion.

The great religions offer many different examples of a rigorist tradition in personal ethics, a tradition that has sought to prescribe conduct down to tiny details. Within Christianity, the English and American Puritans occupy a prominent place in this respect. However, it is interesting that the man from whom they take their inspiration, John Calvin, was less severe than his followers. It is instructive to read Calvin himself, for there one discovers more flexibility than one might have expected from one’s knowledge of the later Puritan tradition. He articulated the principle, "Spare the weak, but scandalize the hypocrites." In other words, we should not let our good will persuade us to be ruled by those who take offense whenever it suits them.

For Calvin, if a "weaker brother" considered the drinking of alcohol wrong for Christians, it would be uncharitable to drink in his presence, or even to talk about it. However, Calvin makes a very important observation. The people who complain are more often not the weaker brothers, but rather those who consider themselves righteous and who insist that others conform to their standard: the picture of the weaker brother merely furnishes the argument. Thus Calvin, no weak brother himself, recommended that we "spare the weak, but scandalize the hypocrites." An example of the hypocrites of our own day may be found in those who righteously demand the strictest penalties for the use of anything resembling "the N word" (we dare not write it), while themselves ready to use it, as well as a host of other, more clearly abusive terms for their adversaries.

The Lutheran theologian John T. Muller expressed the same idea in a different way, saying that while we must beware of giving offense (i.e. to a weak believer), we must not let ourselves be dominated by someone who insists on taking offense. In twenty-first-century America, the technique of taking offense has been used very selectively to bind the hands and the tongues of all who are terrified at the thought of being found intolerant or politically incorrect. In other words, the concept of taking offense, far from protecting the weak, is being used to dominate others. One good example is offered by the successful campaigns in 2000 and 2001 to get rid of the Confederate battle flag in a number of Southern locations. The people shouting to have it taken down were hardly weak brothers whose self-esteem might be damaged by the sight of it; they were people who wanted to bend the surviving votaries of the defeated Confederacy to their will.

The recent campaigns to subjugate the Boy Scouts are a case in point. The number of active homosexual men who want to be Scout leaders cannot be large. The chance that they are shaken in their commitment to homosexuality because they encounter resistance in scouting cannot be a great threat. Instead, they use their indignation at being deprived of the opportunity to lead young boys as a lever not just to secure entry into Scout leadership, but to force the Boy Scouts to abandon their traditional moral standards. This is the point: the anti-Scout campaign is not a campaign for tolerance of a minority, but for the subjugation of a majority and the elimination of its traditional principles and values. As an aside, if a practicing homosexual male must be accepted by the Scouts, what about the practicing unmarried heterosexual male? Logically, he too must be accepted. This would mean that all sexual behavior is removed from moral scrutiny. What then has happened to the Boy Scout tradition of encouraging "clean living"? This is where the country, or at least the dominant elite, is headed, and it seems that one of its goals is to make everyone else follow.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the Boy Scouts of America have a right to reject homosexual men as Scout leaders, a number of government bodies promptly decided to use the weapon of "offense taken" to punish the Scouts. This happened so quickly that it rather looks as though there was a coordinated plan to subjugate what until now most Americans have found a valuable institution in American life: President Clinton quickly asked the F.B.I. to investigate the Scouts with a view to barring them from meeting in national parks. The reaction that this caused in the thick of a political campaign moved him to withdraw that request. However, other entities were already involved in the same campaign. The Los Angeles City Council has voted unanimously (11-0) to sever all formal ties with the Scouts, and on the other coast, in Broward County, Florida, famous for its problems with butterfly ballots and dimpled chads, the county school board has banned the Scouts from school facilities. In addition, several non-governmental organizations such as United Way chapters joined in the rush to force the Scouts to abandon their convictions and standards.

This campaign rests on certain tricks that we have characterized as "Newspeak" or "strong language." Terminology has been introduced which prejudges the issue and in effect determines the outcome, without any consideration of whether the terminology is proper. Three significant words are "discrimination," " intolerance," and "homophobia." Discrimination is actually a rather neutral word, at least originally: to discriminate means to make distinctions, and life cannot do without it. It is not prudent to be indiscriminate in our choice of what we eat. In this context, "discrimination" has been equated with intolerance and is, therefore, wrong by definition. "Intolerance" has also taken on a very selective meaning. There are many areas where we must be intolerant. The human body cannot tolerate too much beverage alcohol. No one considers it intolerant (in the bad sense of the word) to tell college students to avoid binge drinking. In the sense in which it is being used here, however, "intolerance" means "homophobia," and homophobia is by definition evil and must be abolished.

What is homophobia? Etymologically, it would mean "fear of the same," but of course that is not what it actually means. Homophobia is a new word coined to apply to any and all criticism or reservations about homosexual conduct. In other words, we must call virtually everything that has been said by religious or philosophical authorities on the subject homophobic, because prior to the present wave of homosexualization (a term coined by the child psychologist Dr. Christa Meves), from antiquity to the present, most voices have ranged from mildly cautioning statements (e.g. Plato in the Symposium, 206c-d) to prohibition (the same author in The Laws, 638b-d) to the most severe denunciations (e.g. Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:24-27). Branding every criticism of homosexuality as homophobic condemns virtually every important position taken on the topic by moral, religious, and political leaders from antiquity to the second half of the last century.

By the adoption of this word, society has been led to think that any criticism of homosexual behavior is per se wrong. This is a victory of what A.-A. Upinsky, to whom we have frequently referred, called strong language over true language. As Upinsky wrote, true language informs; strong language manipulates. Thus the words "choice" and "reproductive freedom" have been used with great success to make the general public tolerant of abortion. If abortion were regularly called what it is, prenatal homicide, it would be much more difficult to garner public approval for it.

The blows struck against the Boy Scouts have been presented as blows to "discrimination," by which is meant "intolerance" and "homophobia." It is important to see what is happening here, both in order to recognize the direction in which society is being moved, and also in order to recognize the sweeping implications for all private organizations with ethical standards that do not meet the currently reigning standards of political correctness, of what Charles Murray called "ecumenical niceness." Clearly the goal is not to just keep the Scouts out of parks, but to force them to abandon one of their strong moral convictions. The long-term result will be to prevent private associations of every kind to hold any standards that conflict with the reigning governmental views of political correctness.

After their sweeping victory in Roe v. Wade (1973), the pro-abortionists did not need to try to change the convictions of the pro-life forces; they had already been rendered legally impotent. When we come to the homosexual activists, however, a different goal is in view, namely, not merely to render the opposition impotent, but to force it to abandon its principles. The target is not freedom for themselves–they already have that, almost to excess, as the Gay Rights parades and gay bathhouses prove–but to force others, the Scouts, to abandon their moral and spiritual convictions.

What can be the motivation of United Way chapters, of the Los Angeles City Council, of the Broward County school board? It is not their desire to destroy the Boy Scouts, but to change them. In other words, here we have public entities and non-governmental organizations seeking, by economic pressure, to make a very large group of citizens give up their principles. Unless we in the general public realize what is going on and where this is headed, we will probably look on bemusedly until, all of a sudden, similar measures are adopted against other bodies that still think, for example, that homosexual conduct is wrong.

We now have government bodies and other agencies seeking to force the Boy Scouts as an organization to abandon their convictions, even if those are based on religious faith and correspond to thirty centuries of human experience and wisdom. Is not this a feature of totalitarianism: the government tells you what you may not think and what you must think?

The ominous nature of this development ought to be evident, but for the present it is unsuspected, at least in the media analysis. If governmental agencies are permitted to apply economic pressure to private organizations to abandon their strongly held convictions when they run counter to newly discovered axioms of the State, will this be limited to the Scouts? Churches, too, receive a favor from the State in the form of tax exemptions. If the Scouts can be successfully pressured to change their "discriminatory," "intolerant," "homophobic" views without arousing a storm of public indignation, why shouldn’t the State also apply economic and other pressure to every organization holding views that it considers "intolerant" or "homophobic"? This will immediately bring all traditional religious bodies under attack. Because Scouting is not a religion, the churches have not yet awakened to the fact that this possibility is very likely soon to become reality. There is nothing in the nature of religion that should permit churches to hold principles forbidden to other private bodies such as the Boy Scouts. In the name of stamping out "intolerance," tolerance will be denied to all who persist in holding the principles of the Bible or any other non-politically correct set of values.

Jean Raspail’s harsh work, The Camp of the Saints, is based on a vision he had while vacationing in the south of France. A flotilla of rusting ships come from Bangladesh and deposits one million starving, sick, dying, miserable refugees on the French Côte d’Azure. Society cannot deal with them, government cannot deal with them, the church cannot deal with them. Europe gasps, temporizes, and is submerged. The few Frenchmen and others who try to hold off the advancing hordes are killed–not by the invaders, but by the French air force, which briefly takes action against the resistance, not against the invaders. The idea takes hold. Hordes of unarmed Chinese, old men, children, women with babies, swarm across the Soviet frontier. One Soviet commander commits suicide rather than use deadly force. In North America, Mexicans flood the United States. The underprivileged minorities who serve as gardeners, waiters, garbage collectors, and otherwise do the menial and domestic work of the well-off in Europe and America, revolt. European and American civilization, which has been the heartland of Christianity, is submerged.

Reading Raspail and beholding the Europe and the church he describes, one would say that it was rightly so. Except for the few resisters, who were eliminated by their own rulers, no one in Europe, Russia, or North America realized soon enough what was going on or possessed enough sense of survival and self-protection to take any action. Raspail says that this is not racism, for in it the villains are not the miserable hordes of invaders, but the enfeebled elites too weak to resist being overrun. Science fiction, or prophecy? Who can say? On February 18 one sole ship landed in the south of France, bearing not one million but nine hundred miserable refugees. The ship, towed back out to sea, sank. What is France doing with them? As I write these lines, I have heard that they are being treated as refugees and given medical care. That can be done with nine hundred. What of ninety thousand? Or nine hundred thousand? One afternoon in Chicago in 1997, at a ceremony in which Mssr. Raspail was given the T. S. Eliot award, this editor asked him if he predicted that this would really happen. Ça commence déjà. "It is already beginning," he replied.

Small states and little enclaves have a hard time surviving in our fallen world. Although surrounded by larger and much more powerful neighbors who frequently engaged in wars of conquest against each other, Switzerland has succeeded over a period of seven centuries, gradually expanding from the three forest cantons to include the present twenty-five. It was briefly subjugated by Napoleon, but restored by the Congress of Vienna, and has managed to avoid entanglement in any of the wars that convulsed Europe since then.

How has this been possible, especially for a confederation with four different languages and two rather evenly divided major religions? In part it is due to Switzerland’s geography, with so much of the land mountainous. Nevertheless, the rich cities, Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Bern, Lausanne, and the smaller towns as well, are located in the plains and could easily be attacked. The distinctive mentality of the Swiss has certainly been important. It has proved very difficult to make the Swiss submit to anything they do not agree with. Since the days of Napoleon, it has happened only once–in 1998, when a strange coalition of American public officials and politicians and representatives of Jewish organizations forced Switzerland into a humiliating payment of reparations that even to this day the Swiss think were extorted, without reference to the truth.

The other small state that, until now, has succeeded in surviving, despite being surrounded by larger and supposedly more powerful neighbors, is Israel. The Israelis, we might note, were not particularly pleased by the anti-Swiss campaign, perhaps thinking of the similarity to their own position, surrounded by others whose greedy eyes are not on their money, but on their land, all of it. Israel, like Switzerland, has more than one language and more than one religion within its borders–Hebrew and Arabic are spoken, and the Muslims exist alongside of the Jews and small numbers of Christians. Israel, like Switzerland, has universal military service. Unlike Switzerland, however, the Israelis have been forced to fight three times since the establishment of the state fifty-odd years ago.

During the past few years, Israel and its Palestinian neighbors have been engaged in a so-called "peace process." The results so far have been anything but satisfactory for either side. Despite numerous concessions, some already made, some promised, Israel has not been able to secure any meaningful compromise from her Palestinian neighbors. The last United States president, Bill Clinton, put great pressure on the last Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, to offer the Palestinians compromise after compromise, including partial control of Jerusalem, something that Israel had said until then it would not even discuss. Now Israel has a new, older, and tougher prime minister in Ariel Sharon. Storm clouds are gathering. Outside the borders, Israel’s often resentful Arab neighbors are growing both stronger and more restive. Saddam Hussein, the hated enemy of two American presidents, has called for three hundred thousand volunteers to train for the "liberation" of Jerusalem. Inside the borders, the Palestinians are carrying on a campaign of relentless pressure.

In 1993, asked why he thought that Hitler had never attempted to invade tiny Switzerland, a Swiss army sergeant replied, Die Deutschen wissen, wir verrecken am Platz–"The Germans know we will die on the spot." Israel, too, is a tiny state, and its soldiers also are prepared to die on the spot rather than surrender or flee. What may they do before dying? It is widely assumed that Israel, unlike her neighbors, has a nuclear deterrent. If that is so, it works only as long as the neighbors have nothing comparable.

Surrounded on three sides by hostile Muslim populations in two continents, Asia and Africa, with her back to the Mediterranean Sea, Israel is in a precarious situation and surely has not been helped by the botched peace process. Would an iron-clad alliance with "the only essential nation," the United States, be a guarantee of survival? Perhaps it would deter a military attack if it were given, a possibility not even under discussion by either side.

The Swiss five-franc coin, the écu, is not milled, but bears these words on the rim: Dominus providebit, The Lord will provide. Whether Israel owes her present existence to divine Providence or primarily to the determination and courage of her people, for the future there is no doubt that a good dose of reliable divine protection would be very reassuring.

From time to time preachers and the occasional politician speak of America’s "Christian heritage." For many, this is or was a precious possession, the loss of which will have terrible consequences for the country and for the world. Another group, smaller in number perhaps but more highly visible in the media and in educational institutions, rejoices in the disappearance of that heritage and sees, as the slogan goes, "our strength in our diversity." The Soviet revolution of 1917 dramatically extirpated Russia’s Christian heritage, yet today a confessing Christian, Vladimir Putin, is the head of the diminished successor state of the U.S.S.R., Russia. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Vice President Al Gore spoke of being "born again," and his successful opponent George W. Bush has made his own Christian faith openly, if not ostentatiously, evident. Will this lead to a recovery of the heritage in either great power, or in both? If so, will the consequences be beneficial or harmful?

The United States have never had an established national church; the First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly forbids this. In several European nations, there was an established church, and in some, there still is. The largest continental power that was Protestant was Prussia, a state that officially ceased to exist after World War II. As we think about the value or danger of a closer association between church and state, it may be helpful to look at the history of Prussia. During the 19th century, as Lincoln was defeating the Confederate States and creating the basis for the United States as a continental power, the Protestant kingdom of Prussia was replacing Catholic Austria as the dominant power in the German-speaking world. In 1871, the King of Prussia, Wilhelm I, became the German emperor.

Now, after the reunion of Germany, although the heartland of East Prussia and much of the rest of what was formerly Prussia remain lost to Poland and Russia, Germany is observing a "Prussia Year" and remembering some of the Prussian virtues. Several of the kings of Prussia and the first German emperor were genuinely and sincerely devout Protestant Christians. Wilhelm II, who involved Germany in World War I and lost his throne at the end, was only a cultural Protestant.

The stern Protestant virtues and sense of duty and responsibility exhibited and cultivated by several Prussian monarchs gave Prussia a power and influence out of proportion to her size. Leaving aside the question of responsibility for World War I, when the German ruler was still formally a Protestant Christian, we may observe that in World War II those same virtues contributed to Germany’s ability under the non-Christian Nazi tyranny to hold much of the rest of the world at bay for half a decade. In other words, one may suspect that the public virtues cultivated by the Protestant monarchs lent themselves to hideous abuse under Hitler.

Now Germany is free of tyranny, both Nazi and Communist. In the aftermath of Germany’s total catastrophe in World War II, a new Grundgesetz (constitution) was adopted embodying some active reflection on both natural law and the Christian tradition that Hitler had spurned. In the rich and powerful Bundesrepublik of the beginning third millennium, both are losing influence. In the "Prussian Year" 2001, some fresh attention is being paid to forgotten Prussian virtues and even to one of the members of the old royal house.

Prince Philip of Prussia, great-grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, currently a student of theology in Kiel, is a serious Christian like some of his ancestors, but unlike them, he has no throne, and his faith or lack therefore has very little influence on what is happening in Germany. Germany today has a much smaller percentage of confessing Christians than the United States, despite or perhaps because of the fact that the two churches, Protestant and Catholic, enjoy a measure of state support. Does the voice of a Hohenzollern prince still command any respect in democratic and increasingly post-Christian Germany? Prince Philip is doing something that we could hope to have more of our own Christian political figures do: he has emphasized something that American politics tends to overlook, the fact that easy access to abortion–"reproductive freedom," as its advocates call it–violates the most fundamental principles of justice and actually deprives the state of every right to consider itself just: "In this decisive point we are very far away from the [old Prussian] idea of a state based on justice. State funded and promoted abortion is a sign of a state based on injustice." Prince Philip is right; his Germany is very far away, and our United States are even farther.

There have been several great turning points in world history. Are we at one today? Many signs would tell us so. Some refer to these as crises; Carl Gustav Jung spoke of axis times, when the world history seems to be turning as the earth turns on its axis. The late Russian social historian Pitirim A. Sorokin called these times shifts, seismic shifts, like those that cause earthquakes. Sorokin, in his monumental work Social and Cultural Dynamics, saw nations and cultures as what he called sociocultural supersystems. The characteristic of a supersystem is that it is an integrated culture. All of the various elements, religion, philosophy, law, medicine, industry, the military, crafts, education, in short, all of the elements of society, are interrelated. To some extent they move together. It is difficult even to adjust one without affecting the others. It is impossible to change one entirely. A transformation in religion will affect philosophy, law, and the arts. When one element really is transformed, the entire system is transformed.

There have been several seismic shifts in a reigning supersystem. Four concern us particularly here. Two have been; the third is yet to come. Some would say that we are already experiencing the first tremors. The first of the two that have been is the Hellenistic world of Greco-Roman civilization. We may say that it began half a millennium before Christ with the great philosophers, dramatists, artists, and political leaders of Hellas. It endured for almost a millennium, well into the fourth century of our Christian era. During its last two hundred years–let us say from A.D. 312 to A.D. 529–it was being superseded by the second great supersystem, the system of medieval Christianity. In A.D. 312, Augustus Constantine triumphed as the first Christian emperor. Christianity was no longer religio illicita. In A.D. 529, the Emperor Justinian, the last emperor to rule both halves of the Empire, closed Plato’s Academy in Athens. The monastery of Monte Cassino was founded. The age of the philosophers was past; the age of the monks began.

The second supersystem, like the first, lasted almost a millennium. It too developed and evolved; it was not the same in A.D. 1200 as in A.D. 600, nor the same again in A.D. 1500. The fifteenth century foreshadowed what happened in the sixteenth.

In 1492, two great events signaled the change that was under way. The Italian seaman Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, and the Spanish conquest of the Americas began. That same year, the Moors–and the unconverted Jews–were driven out of Spain, and the Spanish were freed to turn their full force on conquest and control: The Hapsburg Emperor Charles V ruled the greatest empire the world had yet known. In religion, in the year 1516, Pope Leo X, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, signed a concordat with the French king, ending, as he thought, the centuries of struggle between the monarch and the papacy and setting the stage for a new dawn in Christian culture. He was dispensing indulgences, and in gratitude money was flowing in from the far corners of the "Empire," no longer the Roman Empire but the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They were being sold by a Dominican monk. An Augustinian monk was incensed, and Ninety-five Theses were posted on a church door in Wittenberg. The age of peaceful church reform was over. The Middle Ages were over. The age of revolution had begun. That was the second. Are we, like that Pope, standing upon what seem solid foundations that will begin to crumble, and a new culture will emerge? We cannot say. We may not see it, but time will tell.

Presidents’ Day 2001 was observed with many eulogies to Abraham Lincoln, including a tribute from the Family Research Council, now headed by Kenneth Connor, a Florida attorney. PBS, the public television channel, ran a two-part series on Lincoln, his life, and his accomplishments. Accurately, but somewhat surprisingly, it referred to the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington mall as a "temple" and spoke of his image seated as if it were on a throne, like an ancient God–quite a contrast to the memorial to his twentieth-century successor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is portrayed as he never wanted to be seen, seated in a wheelchair.

Abraham Lincoln is remembered and honored for freeing the slaves and preserving the Union. If he had never become president, the slaves would probably have been freed a bit later, as slavery was coming to an end around all of Christendom. There would have been no secession, and the nation might have remained more of a federal union. The Northern victory in the war essentially ended the principle of state sovereignty, which clearly was not a fiction in 1860 and 1861, when states not only had independent legislatures, but their own military forces. If Lincoln had not been assassinated at the war’s end, the South would certainly not have been treated with as much savagery as actually became the case, for although Lincoln was willing to use savagery in crushing the South, he would almost certainly have been more conciliatory towards his defeated adversaries than were those who came to power after him.

When in the Course of Human Events is the title of a recently published work by the historian of economics, Charles Adams, subtitled Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littefield, 2000). In a way, it is bizarre that the American ethos virtually idolizes Lincoln today, in an era when we encourage the smallest political units, such as Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, and with reservations, Kosovo, to be independent, and repeatedly suggest to the small state of Israel that it partition itself for the benefit of its dissident Palestinian Arabs. Adams wryly makes the same observation made by PBS, that the Lincoln Memorial looks like a Greek temple and his statue like that of Olympian Zeus.

Much more impressive than these comments, however, is Adams’ extensive documentation of the causes of the conflict and of the way in which it was conducted and carried through to victory by the North. He reviews the campaigns of Generals Sherman and Sheridan against civilian populations. It was Sherman’s "march to the sea" in the late summer of 1864 which permitted Lincoln to be reelected. Sherman commented after the war that according to the principles that he learned at West Point, he was guilty of war crimes and deserving of execution. The Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, after hearing Sherman describe his campaigning, commented, "I did not know that such barbarism still existed."

The North’s crushing victory over the South encouraged belief in America’s "manifest destiny" and our right to play an ever more dominant role in the world. Sherman acted as a grim conqueror again in dealing with the nomadic Indian tribes of the American West.

What can be learned from Mr. Adams’ work? At this point in America’s history it is certainly futile to think in terms of a Southern or other sectional renaissance. We have become, as we are often told, "the sole superpower," "the essential nation," as former Secretary of State Albright put it. We understand that her successor, General Powell, wants to pursue a more modest and less interventionist foreign policy, preferring visits to the Middle East, perhaps, to bombs. Charles Adams has shown us how military superiority, combined with a sense of self-righteousness and perhaps of divine right, enabled the North to crush a smaller, less populated, and less industrialized coalition of hitherto independent states. It would be good reading for our leaders today, that they may remember that while the race is more often than not to the swift and the battle to the strong, might does not necessarily make right, not in 2001 any more than in 1861.

• On February 18, Dale Earnhardt, the most successful figure in NASCAR racing, was killed in the last quarter-mile of a race at Daytona, Florida. He was a North Carolina native, from a small town near Charlotte, where the memorial services and ceremonies that followed his death surpassed anything Charlotte has seen since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. To have such attention paid a private individual seems to tell us something about our society. In addition to being a brilliant racer, in his private life Mr. Earnhardt was respected as a man of charity, integrity, and decency. It seems that in the midst of an entertainment and media culture that lionizes some of the worst figures in public life, there is, nevertheless, a longing for people truly worthy of respect–and a tremendous sense of loss when one disappears. Amidst all of the signs of corruption in society, the reaction to Dale Earnhardt’s death indicates that some healthy elements have survived in the public and in the media.