01/1997
January 1997
Twenty-Five Years of the Best of IMPRIMIS
Various Authors
Imprimis, which means “in the first place,” is now celebrating its 25th year. Inspired by Hillsdale College’s educational mission, this award-winning monthly speech digest seeks to disseminate ideas. In 1972, the first issue was sent to about 1,000 individuals; today, circulation exceeds 725,000. As always, subscriptions are free upon request.
Over the years, we have received supportive calls and letters from literally tens of thousands of our readers. Their ranks include presidents, prime ministers, cabinet officers, journalists, small business owners, educators, students, and homemakers. What they all share is a belief in Richard Weaver’s dictum, “Ideas have consequences.” From 300 past issues, we have selected some of our favorite authors and excerpts. We hope you enjoy them.
The World’s Most Important Person
Vol. 1, No. 1, June 1972
Leonard E. Read (1898-1983),
Founder and President, The Foundation for Economic Education
What, then, is man’s purpose as I see it? It is to grow, emerge, evolve, or—to use an expressive term—hatch. Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, observed “Man is on earth as in an egg.” This inspired C.S. Lewis to write, “You cannot go on being a good egg forever. You must either hatch or rot.”
[We] seek every means to grow, including tolerance enough to look into every nook and cranny for truth…Truth has a way of seeping through crevices entirely unsuspected. But it is far more likely to enter an open and perceptive mind than one that is closed and intolerant. Indeed, the inquiring mind encourages others to give forth the best that is in them.
Whatever Happened to Free Enterprise?
Vol. 7, No. 1, January 1978
Ronald Reagan,
Former President of the United States
We’ve had enough of sideline kibitzers telling us the system they themselves have disrupted with their social tinkering can be improved or saved if we’ll only have more of that tinkering or even government planning and management. They play fast and loose with a system that for 200 years made us the light of the world—the refuge for people all over the world who just yearn to breathe free. It’s time we recognize that the system, no matter what our problems are, has never failed us once. Every time we have failed the system, usually by lacking faith in it, usually by saying we have to change and do something else. A Supreme Court justice has said the time has come, is indeed long overdue, for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.
What specifically should be done? The first essential for the businessman is to confront the problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management. It has been said that history is the patter of silken slippers descending the stairs and the thunder of hobnailed boots coming up. Through the years we have seen people fleeing the thunder of those boots to seek refuge in this land. Now, too many of them have seen the signs, signs that were ignored in their homeland before the end came, appearing here. They wonder if they’ll have to flee again, but they know there is no place to which to run. Will we, before it is too late, use the vitality and the magic of the marketplace to save this way of life, or will we one day face our children and our children’s children when they ask us where we were and what we were doing on the day that freedom was lost?
Coping with Ignorance
Vol. 7, No. 7, July 1978
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992),
Nobel Laureate and Author, The Road to Serfdom
Even 200 years after Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, it is not yet fully understood that it is the great achievement of the market to have made a far-ranging division of labor possible, that it brings about a continuous adaptation of economic effect to millions of particular facts or events which in their totality are not known and cannot be known to anybody…
If the chief problem of economic decisions is one of coping with inevitable ignorance, the task of a science of economics (trying to explain the joint effects of hundreds of thousands of such decisions on men in many different positions) is to deal with an ignorance, as it were, of a second order of magnitude, because the explaining economist does not even know what all the acting people know; he has to provide an explanation without knowing the determining facts, not even knowing what the individual members in the economic system know about these facts.
The Great Liberal Death Wish
Vol. 8, No. 5, May 1979
Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990),
Journalist and Best-Selling Author, Jesus Rediscovered
I was reading…a long essay by a Yugoslav writer, Mihajlo Mihajlov, who spent some years in a prison in Yugoslavia. He cites case after case of people who, like Solzhenitsyn, say that enlightenment came to them in the forced labor camps. They understood what freedom was when they had lost their freedom, they understood what the purpose of life was when they seemed to have no future. They say, moreover, that when it’s a question of choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body and soul. In other words, fulfilling exactly what our Lord said, that he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all eternity, as those who love their lives in this world will assuredly lose them.
Now, that’s where I see the light in our darkness. There’s an image I love—if the whole world were to be covered with concrete, there still would be some cracks in it, and through these cracks green shoots would come. The testimonies from the labor camps are the green shoots we can see in the world, breaking out from the monolithic power now dominating ever greater areas of it. In contradistinction, this is the liberal death wish, holding out the fallacious and ultimately destructive hope that we can construct a happy, fulfilled life in terms of our physical and material needs, and in the moral and intellectual dimensions of our mortality.
Idea Fashions of the Eighties: After Marx, What?
Vol. 13, No. 1, January 1984
Tom Wolfe,
Journalist and Best-Selling Author, Bonfire of the Vanities
What I want to talk about today is something that my confreres in the world of literature and journalism resist: the notion that ideas can become articles of fashion which are adopted with no more foundation than styles in clothing. I see this as the key to the intellectual history of the United States in the 20th century. Just in the last decade we have seen a tremendous change in styles of ideas.
The 1960s fashion I have called “radical chic” actually continued well into the 1970s; it didn’t die with the end of the war in Vietnam. In 1974 I attended a conference at a university in the Great Plains, a conference called “America in the Year 2000.” It was held in a typical student activity center, one of these great butter-almond-colored buildings with expando-flex interior walls like accordions that are pulled back and forth by a night watchman in green balloon-seat twill pants. Here come the students in for the conference on “America in the Year 2000.” They seem to me very lively, they are laughing, they are chattering to one another. Their veins are pumping with Shasta and Seven-Up. They are wearing blue jeans and bursting out of their down-filled Squaw Valley ski jackets. And no sooner do they settle down into their seats than the keynote speaker of the conference, a young historian in a calfskin jacket and hair like Felix Mendelssohn’s, looks down, and he says: “America is a leaden, life-denying society.”
Mind, Not Money, Drives the Economy
Vol. 13, No. 4, April 1984
Warren T. Brookes (1930-1992),
Syndicated Columnist, Detroit News
We are learning that all economic activity is, as Schumpeter correctly defined it, the practice of technology, the use of our unfolding knowledge and intelligence to convert seemingly useless matter into increasingly useful and valuable products, to generate wealth where none existed before. True economics, like true metaphysics, is anti-entropy, the constant imposition of order, utility, and organization on an otherwise chaotic and seemingly depleting material world…
In the economy of mind, everything is going micro not macro, individual, not collective, toward dynamism, not equilibrium. The revival of classical supply-side economics, with its emphasis on the micro-incentives and rational responses of the individual in the marketplace, its drive for reduction of centralized bureaucratic interference in this marketplace, is thus a logical result of our times and our technology—not merely an economic fad of electoral politics.
Adam Smith is becoming more, not less relevant. The markets are becoming more efficient with each passing year and each new generation of informational technology—and infinitely more difficult either to manipulate or to regulate.
The Authentic Revolution
Vol. 13, No. 5, May 1984
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick,
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
The character of any society depends on what its people honor most. To paraphrase St. Augustine, what men and women love is ultimately what motivates, guides, and structures the life of the individual, the institutions, the government, the nation, the whole. Distinguished political philosophers through the ages have understood this basic principle of societies: what men love, what they seek, what they believe is worth devoting their lives to, depends finally on the education they receive. Nothing is so important to a society. Plato, Aristotle, and most other thoughtful students of society have understood this—all, perhaps, except Karl Marx, who called it all “superstructure.”
The reason that nothing is so important to the life of a society as education is that everything else—the supporting webs of values, beliefs, and goals—all derive from education. There are many other important endeavors in the society; production is important, as is governing; but the most important endeavor of all is education.
In times past, anyone who was serious about education understood it as a process that began in the family and continued through the schools. The whole educational experience, from the family through the schools, constituted a seamless web, from which each person could derive a sense of identity and purpose, a sense of the goals we are to seek, the means that are acceptable for seeking those goals, the skills which one could bring to bear.
The Courage to Affirm
Vol. 14, No. 8, August 1985
Russell Kirk (1918-1994), Historian and Best-Selling Author, The Conservative Mind
This word “ideology” does not mean political theory or political principle. It means political fanaticism: obsession with rigorous and merciless political dogmas. The ideologues are the men whom the historian Burckhardt calls “the terrible simplifiers.”
Coined in the first years of the 19th century, this word “ideology” signifies the notion that mankind can be governed by abstract political formulas, regardless of a people’s historical experience, and notwithstanding the complexity of human affairs. Ideology is the negation of politics as the art of the possible. The ideologue sets up a sham religion and promises salvation—not salvation through grace in death, but salvation here and now, through violent revolution. The ideologue cries, “Follow me, and I will lead you to the Earthly Paradise!” But no Earthly Paradise exists, or can exist. It is entirely possible, nevertheless, to contrive an Earthly Hell. Once in power, the ideologue becomes the humanitarian with the guillotine. For this ideologue, in the line of George Orwell, is the man who “thinks in slogans and talks in bullets.”
The ideologue affirms a set of fanatic abstractions. But the friend of the permanent things affirms faith in the long experience of mankind, under God. He has the courage to affirm that much in our civilization is worth sacrificing for.
The Road Away from Serfdom
Vol. 17, No. 2, February 1988
Dick Armey,
Majority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives
What makes gold precious is that there is so little of it to be had, and the same goes for any other resource, whether it is water, energy, concert pianists, or life itself. We are limited in all that we do and all that we seek. Yet [liberal economist John Kenneth] Galbraith and many of our government representatives would have us believe otherwise. They play upon our resentment of those richer or more successful than ourselves, a resentment articulated many years ago by Thorstein Veblen in his highly influential book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, which painted the upper strata of our society as indolent, selfindulgent, and hoarding.
The modern redistributionists don’t carry their dog-eared copies of Veblen or Galbraith in their back pockets, but they don’t need to; they’ve already been given the intellectual framework from which they can operate. Their first task is to convince us that we’re not running our economy or our lives well enough on our own. We need their help, they argue. “Look at the terrible shape America’s in. The problems are too big for individuals to solve. Let us help.” And they offer us, simply, more government—more government along Keynesian lines with many instruments of what I refer to as “government by deception,” not the least of which is deficit spending, in which the true costs are hidden from the people who, of course, pay the bills, or through another instrument, corporate taxation, which is sold to the voters as if it had nothing to do with their own incomes.
Why We Need a Core Curriculum for College Students
Vol. 19, No. 5, May 1990
Lynne V. Cheney,
Former Chairman National Endowment for the Humanities
Good teaching is crucial to the success of any curriculum, and it can take a multitude of forms. But teachers who inspire their students to intellectual engagement are themselves always engaged. They do not agree with every book or idea they discuss, but they approach them generously, demonstrating that neither agreement nor disagreement is possible until there has been the hard work of understanding. Learning is not a game for them, not simply an intellectual exercise, but an undertaking that compels mind and heart. Recalling his great teachers, Leo Raditsa of St. John’s College in Maryland recently described I. A. Richards: “He conceived reading as the cure of soul,” Raditsa wrote, “and he included his own soul.”
Freedom and the High Tech Revolution
Vol. 19, No. 11, November 1990
George Gilder,
Author, Wealth and Poverty and Microcosm
If Gorbachev and his generals could get the message, perhaps we can now dare to pass it on to American college campuses and faculties, which unlike Moscow, are still benighted by the shades of Karl Marx. Let us send them instead an image of sand and glass.
The sand comes in the form of a silicon microchip inscribed with a logical pattern as complex as a street map of the United States, switching its traffic flawlessly in trillionths of seconds. The glass comes in the form of fiber optic threads as thin as human hair and as long as Long Island, fed by laser diodes as small as a grain of salt and brighter than the sun. Each system, in place today for AT&T between Chicago and the east coast, can send the equivalent of a thousand Bibles a second across the land and indeed could transmit the entire contents of the Library of Congress down one fiber in eight hours. Using copper technology, by contrast, it would take five hundred years.
This image is not some far-off dream. It is here now and will be gathering momentum for the next decade. Together the two technologies made from ordinary sand—fiber optics and silicon chips—will form a global network of computers and cables, a world-wide web of glass and light that leaves all previous history in its wake. Consisting of technologies that defy the normal constraints of time and space, this vision also transcends the materialist superstitions that have governed most of human history. For thousands of years, the route to power was the control of land and armies. Today when you can put “worlds on a grain of sand,” control of specific territories declines in importance. What matters is not the control of lands but the liberation of minds.
Reagan was Right: Government is the Problem
Vol. 19, No. 12, December 1990
Charlton Heston,
Actor, Director, and Author, In the Arena
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, said that. I am a Scot myself. He was bloody right. For more than half a century, the shining Republic created by the blood of the Continental Army and a few great men has been nearly nibbled to death by the Democratic ducks in the Congress and a warmly cooperative Supreme Court.
There is now no aspect of American life, public or private, that the federal government does not invade, instruct, and finally coerce to its will. Farm and factory, home and school, university and research center, club and playground—all are overlaid with a spidery network of laws, guidelines, restrictions and Draconian penalties that stifle the spirit, the energy, the creative capacity of what was once the freest nation on earth.
Teaching the Virtues
Vol. 20, No. 11, November 1991
Christina Sommers,
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Clark University
Author, Who Stole Feminism?
Not very long ago, I published an article called “Ethics Without Virtue” in which I criticized the way ethics is being taught in American colleges. I pointed out that there is an overemphasis on social policy questions, with little or no attention being paid to private morality. I noted that students taking college ethics are debating abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, DNA research, and the ethics of transplant surgery while they learn almost nothing about private decency, honesty, personal responsibility, or honor. Topics such as hypocrisy, self-deception, cruelty, or selfishness rarely came up. I argued that the current style of ethics teaching which concentrated so much on social policy was giving students the wrong ideas about ethics. Social morality is only half of the moral life; the other half is private morality. I urged that we attend to both.
A colleague of mine did not like what I said. She told me that in her classroom she would continue to focus on issues of social injustice. She taught about women’s oppression, corruption in big business, multinational corporations and their transgressions in the Third World—that sort of thing. She said to me, “You are not going to have moral people until you have moral institutions. You will not have moral citizens until you have a moral government.” She made it clear that I was wasting time and even doing harm by promoting bourgeois morality and bourgeois virtues instead of awakening the social conscience of my students.
At the end of the semester, she came into my office carrying a stack of exams and looking very upset. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “They cheated on their social justice take-home finals. They plagiarized!” More than half of the students in her ethics class had copied long passages from the secondary literature. “What are you going to do?” I asked her. She gave me a self-mocking smile and said, “I’d like to borrow a copy of that article you wrote on ethics without virtue.”
The New Segregation
Vol. 21, No. 8, August 1992
Shelby Steele,
Author, The Content of Our Character
There is a real anti-black sentiment in American life, but it is no longer as powerful as we remember it to be. Our memory makes us like the man who wears a heavy winter coat in springtime because he was frostbitten in winter. Every sharp spring breeze becomes a correlative for the enemy of frostbite so that he is still actually living in winter even as flowers bloom all around him. Not only do subjective correlatives cause us to reenact the past, they also rarely bring us the power we seek through them because they are too much based on exaggeration. Worse, they cut us off from the present and its many opportunities by encouraging the sort of vision in which we look at the present only to confirm the past.
Public Policy and Some Personal Reminiscences
Vol. 21, No. 9, September 1992
Thomas Sowell,
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace
Author, A Conflict of Visions
More black males passed the difficult entrance examination for Stuyvesant High School in 1938 than in 1983, even though the black population of New York was much smaller in 1938. As for the masses of students in the Harlem public schools at that time, their test scores were lower than those of students in affluent neighborhoods, but not dramatically lower like today, and they were very similar to the test scores of white students in other working class neighborhoods, such as on the lower east side of Manhattan…
What is relevant to public policy is that none of the educational successes of the past was a result of the kinds of policies and programs that are today being actively promoted in Washington or the media. That is, we had none of the socalled “prerequisites” for quality education. We did not, for example, have racially integrated student bodies. Nor did we have racial role models: Virtually all the teachers were white. I was taught more about a Dutchman named Peter Stuyvesant than about Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. DuBois. There was no “community input.” It is also very doubtful that we had “adequate funding,” since there never seems to be any in education…
Certainly we did not have small classes and there were no teacher’s aides. More importantly, there were no security guards. I was 42 years old when I first saw a security guard in a public school. Today, there are national conventions of public school security guards. No one asked us if we preferred innovative and “exciting” teaching, rather than “rote memory.” The Bible says: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” In the educational literature of today, it is “by their excitement ye shall know them.” When they proclaim a new program to be “exciting,” people who ask, “Does it work?” are regarded as party poopers.
Three Cheers for Capitalism
Vol. 22, No. 9, September 1993
Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr.,
Editor-in-Chief, Forbes
Capitalism works better than any of us can conceive. It is also the only truly moral system of exchange. It encourages individuals to freely devote their energies and impulses to peaceful pursuits, to the satisfaction of others’ wants and needs, and to constructive action for the welfare of all. The basis for capitalism is not greed. You don’t see misers creating Wal-Marts and Microsofts.
Think about it for a moment. Capitalism is truly miraculous. What other system enables us to cooperate with millions of other ordinary people— whom we will never meet but to whom we will gladly provide goods and services—in an incredible, complex web of commercial transactions? And what other system perpetuates itself, working every day, year in, year out, with no single hand guiding it?
Capitalism is a moral system if only because it is based on trust. When we turn on a light, we assume that there will be electricity. When we drive into a service station, we assume that there will be fuel. When we walk into a restaurant, we assume that there will be food. If we were to make a list of all the basic things that capitalism provides—things that we take for granted—it would fill an encyclopedia.
Who Counts the Most Important Things of All?
Vol. 23, No. 7, July 1994
Gary Bauer,
President, Family Research Council
Washington, D.C. cannot tell you how many children were hugged or how many husbands and wives said, “I love you,” today. It cannot tell you who did a fine job at work or who surmounted a difficult personal obstacle or who did a good deed today. It cannot tell you how many families will pray over their evening meal or get down on their knees before God and ask for forgiveness and strength tonight. And yet without these things this nation would surely fall. These are the things that make America what it is. These are the things we must fight to preserve. Our military power is unmatched. Our navy controls the sea. Our air force controls the skies. We are the only remaining superpower in the world. But we are faced by an enemy within: the moral breakdown of our society. Our economic strength is also unrivaled. We have just experienced a decadelong stretch of prosperity such as the world has never seen. Our standard of living is the envy of all. But we are in danger of spiritual starvation.
So, you say, “What can I do?” The real answer is to fight for the things you care about. For most Americans, life isn’t executive orders, congressional legislation, agency regulations, or judicial decrees. It’s a helping hand and good neighbors. It’s bedtime prayers and lovingly packed lunch boxes. It’s hard work and a little something to put away for the future. No government commands these things. No government can replicate them. They are done naturally, freely, out of love, concern, and commitment.
Stand for these things. Believe in these things. Insist that the politicians who ask for your votes defend these things without shame or embarrassment. Teach your children these things. Inspire them to love what you love and to honor what you honor.
A Cultural Renaissance
Vol. 23, No. 8, August 1994
Jack Kemp,
Former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Just what is the relationship between free market economics and cultural values—between doing well and doing good? To some, capitalism and the prosperity it creates has held the promise of secular salvation, a utopia of affluence. To critics, it is seen as a Darwinian struggle where only the fittest survive. Neither vision has matched reality. Democratic capitalism has not built a “New Jerusalem,” nor has it returned us to the “law of the jungle.” It promises, instead, three extraordinary things: liberation from abject poverty, freedom from political tyranny, and release of the individual conscience from oppression. No human system has ever kept its promises more faithfully. Democratic capitalism has been history’s sharpest weapon against poverty, oppression, and tyranny.
Free markets have generated unequaled living standards for unrivaled numbers of men and women. As economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, “Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalists’ achievement does not consist in providing silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.” Yet capitalism’s accomplishments run deeper. Its enduring appeal is not its toasters, televisions, and transistors, but its respect for individual innovation, creativity, and upward mobility.
Capitalism—unlike socialism—has never been a utopian vision. It has never promised to build the Kingdom of God on earth. But it has succeeded in allowing people to stand upright and dignified in the kingdoms of this world. Yet for all its successes, capitalism cannot stand alone. It depends on a system of values and morality it reinforces but does not create—on moral and cultural habits that determine its appeal, its power, and its success.
The Moral Foundations of Society
Vol. 24, No. 3, March 1995
Margaret Thatcher,
Former Prime Minister, Great Britain
Free societies demand more care and devotion than any others. They are, moreover, the only societies with moral foundations, and those foundations are evident in their political, economic, legal, cultural, and, most importantly, spiritual life. We who are living in the West today are fortunate. Freedom has been bequeathed to us. We have not had to carve it out of nothing; we have not had to pay for it with our lives. Others before us have done so. But it would be a grave mistake to think that freedom requires nothing of us. Each of us has to earn freedom anew in order to possess it. We do so not just for our own sake, but for the sake of our children, so that they may build a better future that will sustain over the wider world the responsibilities and blessings of freedom.
A New Vision of Man: How Christianity has Changed Political Economy
Vol. 24, No. 5, May 1995
Michael Novak,
Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Author, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
In Plato’s Republic, citizens were divided in this way: A few were of gold, a slightly larger body of silver, and the vast majority of lead. The last had the souls of slaves and, therefore, were properly enslaved. Only persons of gold were truly to be treated as ends in themselves. For Judaism and Christianity, on the contrary, the God who made every single child gave worth and dignity to each of them, however weak or vulnerable. “What you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” God identified Himself with the most humble and the most vulnerable…
It is true that virtually all peoples have traditions of compassion for the suffering, care for those in need, and concern for others. However, in most religious traditions, these movements of the heart are limited to one’s own family, kin, nation, or culture. In some cultures young males in particular have to be hard and insensitive to pain, so that they will be sufficiently cruel to enemies. Terror is the instrument intended to drive outsiders away from the territory of the tribe. In principle (though not always in practice), Christianity opposes this limitation on compassion. It teaches people the impulse to reach out, especially to the most vulnerable, to the poor, the hungry, the wretched, those in prison, the hopeless, the sick, and others. It tells humans to love their enemies. It teaches a universal compassion. It teaches people to see the dignity even of those who in the eyes of the world have lost their dignity, and those who are helpless to act on their own behalf.
Redeeming Our Time
Vol. 24, No. 11, November 1995
William J. Bennett,
Former U.S. Secretary of Education
Editor, The Book of Virtues
The last quarter-century has taught politicians a hard and humbling lesson: There are intrinsic limits to what the state can do, particularly when it comes to imparting virtue, and forming and forging character, and providing peace to souls. Samuel Johnson expressed this deeply conservative and true sentiment when he wrote, “How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”
King Lear was a great ruler—sufficient to all his political responsibilities and obligations. He did well as king, but as a father and a man, he failed terribly. The great king was reduced to the mud and ignominy of the heath, cursing his daughters, his life, his gods. Politics is a great adventure; it is greatly important; but its proper place in our lives has been greatly exaggerated. Politics—especially “inside the Beltway” politics—has too often become the graven image of our time.
Transforming America
Vol. 25, No. 2, February 1996
Kay C. James,
Former Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources
The village cannot raise a child. Children do not belong to the community. Children belong to the parents who tuck them in at night, wipe away their tears, feed them, and guide them through life. The village can ultimately complement or undermine the lessons and values of home. If the experience of the past 30 years, current research, and the observations of individuals like former Vice President Quayle have taught us anything, it is that stable, intact, two-parent families are the foundation of a healthy village. As Pope John Paul II notes, “The first and fundamental structure for ‘human ecology’ is the family, in which man receives his first ideas about truth and goodness and learns what it means to love and be loved, and thus what it means to be a person.”
But what would happen to a child who grows up believing in this village —that whole families are not important and that the village will care for him and give him identity?
What would happen to the village if churches taught that truth does not exist—that God is really just the creation of a species of animals desperate to justify their own existence—and that what you believe does not have to impact how you behave? I think that the church would have very little relevance to the lives of the children and that they would seek meaning and significance in marches, cults, and communes.
What would happen to the village if we decided to redefine families rather than rebuild them? Research tells us and experience shows us that we would gradually see the demise of the two-parent family, as well as a rapid rise in the number of outof- wedlock births, abortions, abused and abandoned children, increased criminal activity, and lower educational outcomes.
What Makes for Success?
Vol. 25, No. 7, July 1996
Dave Thomas,
Founder, Wendy’s International
Author, Dave’s Way and Well Done!
Honesty does not come from out of nowhere. It is a product of your moral convictions. But what do you do when your convictions are challenged? It is faith that gives you the strength to go on believing. Though I am a Christian, I respect the religions of others, and I think that they play a vital role in our society. But I don’t support convictions or cults that are negative and lead only to hatred and fanaticism. Faith must be positive.
Live your faith. Don’t wear it on your sleeve; roll up both sleeves and do something about it.
A Special Anniversary Message
George Roche
President, Hillsdale College
Years ago, it was Nobel laureate and long-time Hillsdale friend Friedrich A. Hayek who said, “We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure.” His words ring truer than ever in this “age of information.” We are in constant danger of acquiring too much knowledge and too little wisdom, defending too many political agendas and too few first principles, paying attention to too many 60-second news stories and too few good books and essays.
In its own way, Hillsdale College has taken Hayek’s message to heart. That is why Imprimis was created in 1972, to publish, in a lively and entertaining format, some of the lectures presented in the College’s unique on- and off-campus forums.
The year 1997 marks the 25th anniversary of Imprimis. We have surpassed the 725,000 circulation mark, and now we are setting our sights on adding another 50,000 readers in the coming year. I believe we are growing at such a phenomenal rate because the individuals whom we feature in Imprimis and the faculty, staff, and students at Hillsdale College are living the kind of intellectual adventure Hayek described. Today, when conservatism, or at least conservative rhetoric, is almost commonplace, it is easy to forget how startling— indeed, how risky—it was for figures like Ronald Reagan, Russell Kirk, and Malcolm Muggeridge to publicly champion the free society, with its commitment to individual liberty, the free market, anti-communism, and the Judeo-Christian heritage. It is still risky if one is uncompromising about it, as George Gilder, Thomas Sowell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the other writers whose words are reprinted in this issue well know. We honor their courage. And we pledge that we will continue to share their ideas with our readers in the next 25 adventurous years of Imprimis.
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