Really Bad Ideas. - Review - book reviews

Commonweal, Oct 8, 1999 by Edward T. Oakes

I do not mean to say that Wilson never speaks in propria persona; indeed, like a liberal Paul Johnson writing for the Manchester Guardian, he freely dispenses his opinions (anyone associated with the Oxford Movement is a "bigot," Stalin could have learned his interrogation techniques at the Vatican, and so forth; the tedium of these opinions no doubt being partly a function of their sheer predictability). But prescinding from the fact that only the truly devout come in for this kind of treatment, his editorial problems really begin only when the time comes for him to dispense approval: You cannot indiscriminately salute Spencer, Arnold, William James, and the Catholic Modernists without prompting the reader to wonder how all these ideas could ever begin to cohere in one system.

While reading this book I happened by chance to be reading Dostoevski's novelistic screed against liberalism, The Devils. "Let the nihilists and the Westerners howl and call me a reactionary!" he wrote a friend after he had started work on the novel: "To hell with them!" Needless to say, in his slapdash treatment of the man who can perhaps claim to be the greatest novelist of the human race, Wilson rises to the bait and abuses Dostoevski in just those terms. But even more oddly, the author (trained as a literary critic!) scarcely engages the novelist at all. Indeed, one sign of the unsatisfying approach of this book can be gleaned from the telling fact that Spencer and Swinburne get a chapter each, but none is devoted to either Dostoevski or Nietzsche, both of whom defy the potted-summary mode adopted by this superficial assemblage of disconnected essays, essentially a work of journeyman scholarship by a literary journalist.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches in the religious studies department at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.