A philosophy for the thumbs of both feet

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, political philosophy

My mother used to love to read the columns of Wm. F. Buckley. Of course, she had to do so with a dictionary by her side. Due to her influence, and his, I picked up a huge vocabulary. As tricky as it is to read Buckley, his writing is at least accessible once you determine the meaning of some of the obscure words. When I find a text harder than usual to read, I check it with the venerable Gunning Fog Index, which estimates the "grade" of education (12 = high school graduate) needed to comprehend it.

I have found a book for which this test is not meaningful: Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, by Bernard-Henri Lévy. Soon after beginning my reading, I looked for a page or two to which I could apply the Fog Index. I soon found that page-long sentences abound, that the author can rip off a 100- to 300-word sentence about as easily as most of us manage to append a direct object to a simple subject and verb. The problem here is not one of vocabulary; one simply cannot keep track of where a sentence is going, let alone a paragraph.

Second problem: Lévy refers to events and ideas that are so little known to Americans (his expected audience) as to make the bulk of the book wholly meaningless. So I'll cut to the chase. After elaborating the decline and morbidity of the traditional Left (AKA "liberalism" in the U.S.), he finds that what calls itself leftism is poorly-disguised fascism, a fascism of radical liberationism that sees no value in social compact of any kind, that delights in the politics of dialectical napalm, that is becoming the standard-bearer of a newer and more virulent anti-Semitism, and that destroys human rights in a vocal effort to "support" them.

Though he takes his conclusion through seven arguments, it is his last that is most telling: that certain ideas are superior to other ideas, and that a genuine respect for personal rights, and complete intolerance for those persons and ideas that would trample upon them—particularly fascism from either "wing"—, are prerequisites for the survival of civil society. And in that, he is quite correct. There, I've saved you quite a slog!