The Week - presidential candidates; Hillary Clinton's family background; other political news

National Review, August 30, 1999

The American Academy of Pediatrics has suggested that children under 2 years old should not watch television. What about adults? Worries about the effects of television preceded the phrase about the "vast electronic wasteland"-T. S. Eliot wrote a troubled letter to the Times of London in 1950. Though many struggle valiantly to produce good content, they must fight the tendency of TV itself to induce a sense of passivity and unreality. No other medium is both so compelling and so cold. A free country cannot ban it, and it is unrealistic to expect anyone who is not Amish to do without it entirely. But television itself is a seductive thing, and tuning in to the Teletubbies or C-SPAN does not entirely eliminate the dangers.

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts must allow homosexuals to be scoutmasters because the group is a "public accommodation" subject to antidiscrimination laws, like a restaurant. The justices also took it upon themselves to explain that "homosexuality" is not immoral-a point established "by decades of social science"-and is compatible with the requirement that scouts be "morally straight" and "clean." The Boy Scouts argue that freedom of association entails a right to exclude homosexuals (and atheists and girls, who have been plaintiffs in other suits). The Court disagreed, partly because the Scouts have a large and broad membership. Apparently, only small organizations may be run on lines other than the state's. Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, applauding the ruling, said "there's no reason to worry" about gay scoutmasters, and maybe there isn't. But there's certainly reason to worry about courts that take such a cramped view of freedom and an expansive view of their own social role.

Think of it as preemptive capital punishment. A pair of researchers, from Stanford Law School and the University of Chicago, have concluded that the legalization of abortion in the Seventies explains about half of the fall in crime in the Nineties. States with high abortion rates back then, they say, have had the most dramatic improvements in crime now, and states that legalized abortion earlier started their improvements earlier too. More extensive comment will have to await publication of the research, but it certainly makes an intuitive, Swiftian sense: 39 million abortions means 39 million fewer people to commit crimes or be crime victims (as also 39 million fewer people to write or read novels, join the police, or enjoy a summer's day at the park). And the mothers most likely to have abortions-teens, blacks, single women-are also most likely to have children who become criminals. On the other hand, crime was skyrocketing in Britain 20 years after legalization, and still is; and an abortion rate four times as high as ours has not made Russia notably safer. Social science may put a eugenic gloss on our abortion policy, but that cannot justify it. Abortion does not prevent crime; it is crime.

What a journey Nirad Chaudhuri made, from the Bengali village where he was born in 1897 to Oxford where he just died, still writing and publishing after turning 100. The entire culture and history of Asia and Europe seemed to be in the head of this last eminent Victorian. His knowledge served truth, not flattery. The people of India in his opinion had been fortunate: British rule had rescued them from decadence. Once independent, the whole continent of India heedlessly squandered a civilizing and universal legacy. Several of his books tell the story in the form of autobiography, and they are masterpieces all. Settling in England, he discovered a country turning its back on everything it once stood for. This was another decadence. With supreme energy and humor, he savaged the tragicomedy of the permissive society and its mass-produced political correctness. A free spirit, a great man.