From the Times: “President-elect Barack Obama’s aides say he is considering making a major foreign policy speech from an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office.” The reasons seem obvious: President-elect Obama likes giving speeches. President-elect Obama has already given several international speeches. President-elect Obama was elected, in part, to restore our relationship with the world. The question is, Which Islamic capital should he choose for his speech? All signs point to Cairo.

At City Journal, Victor Davis Hanson has written a wonderfully concise history of the rise and decline of classical, liberal education in the West, and I highly recommend it for educators, parents, and those who have felt a little slighted by their own educations, from kindergarten through graduate school. Please note that this essay is not about the war between science and the humanities, so all your mechanical engineers out there, please refrain from taunting the helpless English majors out there.

In classical education, everybody gets educated in the history and traditions of Western arts and letters – and then they go on to learn a profession: in mechanical engineering, research science, law, business, teaching. Anyway, Hanson’s summa of the situation is delightful, and he explains the rise of conservative Christian colleges, the splintering of the liberal arts, and how students young and old are still hungry for classical education and are having to seek it somewhere besides the usual liberal arts colleges.

Emory University has just launched its Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, and it’s pretty cool.  You can search the voyages database for specific voyages and expeditions.  You can examine estimates of the slave trade, including seeing statistics and names for four-fifths of the slaves who were actually transported, sometimes as specifically as height and weight.  Most interesting is the number of slaves who were transported by which countries, and their destinations.  Here’s a map representing that, demonstrating that the overwhelming majority of slaves traveled to Brazil.  You can see a bigger map here.

This article at Slate caught my attention, not because it’s about the Bailout, but because it was written by pariah (and now Slate columnist) . . . Eliot Spitzer! The name of the regular column will be “The Best Policy.” I think that’s a hilarious title, and I look forward to reading what the man has to say. In his first column, he says that the Bailout is a bad thing because it repairs fundamentally flawed businesses:

None of the investments has even begun to address the underlying structural problems that are causing economic power to shift away from the United States, sector by sector.

Then he gives examples, including this frightening (personal one):

Our household savings rate has been close to zero—and even negative in some years—not permitting the long-term capital accumulation required for the investments we need; China’s savings rate, by comparison, is an astonishing 30 percent of household income.

But he also praises the U.S.:

We have, indeed, converted virtually the entire world into one integrated capitalist economy, and we must now bear the brunt of serious and vigorous competition. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States was essentially the only nation with financial capital, intellectual capital, skilled labor, a growing middle class generating consumer demand, and a rule of law permitting safe investment. Now we are one of many nations with these critical advantages.

My plan: Save money. Invest it. Wear old clothes. Grow my own food. Work hard. Play affordably. In short, act like my grandparents. That’s how to win in the global market. And welcome back, Governor Spitzer. America is still good for one thing: redemption.

A new study, conducted with 1,020 patients at U.S. fertility clinics, showed that couples were unsure about what to do with their fertilized embryos that would not be used in pregnancy.

Only 7 percent of the respondents said they were “very likely” to donate the embryos to another couple trying to conceive and just 6 percent said they were “very likely” to thaw and dispose of the embryos.

These embryos are either human life or potential human life, depending on who you are, and so it’s not easy knowing what to do with them. For some, to destroy them is just another kind of abortion, a kind of murder. For others, it’s just tossing out garbage. One solution – and this is quite clever – is to put the embryos “back in the woman’s body at a time she’s not likely to conceive.” Some also suggest throwing out the embryos, but having a “ceremony at the time of disposal,” which makes sense, but then also seems a little weird and out of place. About the homeless embryo, one fertility therapist says this:

It’s special. It’s endowed. It has life potential. It’s meaningful … It’s important in some way. It’s kind of like even when you have a stillbirth or you have a miscarriage, sometimes people want to name it and do a ceremony around that.

What do you think?

A recent study on the cost of higher education has found that “college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent.” That’s frightening. I’m telling you what, if educators can think of a way to offer an imaginative, no-frills education to students, and do it with high standards and an affordable price, those educators would be doing something very good for America, and for their own wallets, and for the wallets of their students.

Olivia Judson, science blogger for the Times, suggests that the Bush Administration hated science and it’s time for Obama “to restore science in government.”

The most notable characteristic of the Bush administration’s science policy has been the repeated distortion and suppression of scientific evidence in order to fit ideological preferences about how the world should be, rather than how it is.

This is not a surprise from Judson, of course. Bush didn’t particularly want to champion sex education, neoDarwinism, embryonic (but not adult) stem cell research, and global warming alarmism in his administration. But then Judson, who faults Bush for using his own ideas and proclivities to guide is support of various scientific endeavors, says that people should not be faulted for using their own ideas and proclivities to guide their support of various scientific endeavors:

To claim that scientists are free of bias, ambition or desires would be ridiculous. Everyone has pet ideas that they hope are right; and scientists are not famous for humility [...] Moreover, to downplay evidence that doesn’t fit your ideas, and to place more weight on evidence that does — this is something that human brains just seem to do. Worse, such biases become stronger under certain circumstances.

So I suppose it’s not bias (in general) she has a problem with. It’s bias against her. That’s fair. And ridiculous.

It might not be stretching the truth to suggest that the Democrats won the White House for this reason: the current Republican president had a communication strategy that was the perfect one for 1999 and 2000, but decidedly faulty for most of the next eight years. This made a lot of people really mad. When Bush campaigned and was first elected, his communication strategy was terrific: disciplined, focused, unswerving, on-message, reliable, solid, constant, determined, and maybe even masculine. For the next two terms, two towers, and two wars, however, that same strategy made him look stubborn, difficult, evasive, obfuscating, condescending, and incompetent. Obama had a different rhetorical approach, and thus he looked and sounded thoughtful, studious, emotional, intellectual, optimistic, and other nice and happy things. Here’s a brief analysis of what his communication style should be now, specifically regarding TV:

Obama’s predecessors took different approaches. Bill Clinton and his team wanted the president’s positions conveyed in almost every news story. They turned the White House into a 24-hour newsroom and believed that a president’s influence increases when he looks thoroughly involved. An administration must try to make news to keep the power of the bully pulpit alive. If it doesn’t, it cedes ground to political opponents, members of Congress, and, most troubling of all, pundits.

George Bush took the opposite approach. He embraced a diminished public posture. He tried to stick to the message of the day, repeating familiar arguments and viewing sideline debates or events in the news as distractions. The administration consciously did not try to “play” in every story.

Clinton’s approach could seem scattershot, and Bush’s could seem out of touch. “The Clintons were like day traders,” says former Bush counselor Dan Bartlett. “We were more like long-term investors. Neither worked perfectly. In our case it showed discipline, but we were sometimes too rigid and missed opportunities to get the president’s message across because it wasn’t blocked out on the calendar.”

Which route will Obama choose?

Again, I would argue that this is one of the major reasons and catalysts for the blob of general Bush hatred in the world.

Christians believe that ours is The Best of All Possible Worlds, an idea that comes to us from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the man who discovered calculus around the same time as Newton did. In this essay, Michael Dirda reviews a book by the same name, The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil by Steven Nadler. The questions behind that phrase are, Did God make evil? Why does evil exist? If God is good, why do bad things happen? These questions are simplistic, but completely realistic, too.

The attempt to justify the ways of God to men — theodicy, a term coined by Leibniz — lies at the heart of the matter: “Why is there any evil at all in God’s creation?” Essentially, Leibniz’s answer is: Consider the whole [...] As Nadler emphasizes, summarizing Leibniz, “all things are connected and every single aspect of the world makes a contribution to its being the best world.”

That includes what we call evil.

However, Leibniz offers no explanation of just how evil assists the overall goodness of things. (Sometimes he even seems to suggest that it serves to bring the good into greater relief.) We cannot penetrate so far into the Creator’s mind or plan. Still “it is inconceivable . . . that an infinitely good and perfect God could choose anything less than the best.” This conclusion may satisfy a devout Christian philosopher, but it offers scant consolation when we are in pain, or see the wicked succeed and the worthy fail, or when we face death.

True, true, but it’s heartening that this question still fires the imagination of people who write books and review them and read them. That’s enough proof, for now, that the world still has something good in it.

At The University Bookman, Joseph P. Duggan has suggested reading for conservative exiles and all others who might need to be reminded of what, exactly, a conservative is.

These are classic writings that invite readers to think deeply and to learn by contending with the authors’ provocations. They are not, it should be emphasized, indoctrination manuals. They are not right-wing; fascists and Nazis were right-wing but were enemies of conservatism, enemies of truth. These are thoughtful works that may help us become conservative thinkers in the true sense. These are antidotes to ideology and propaganda. In our coming political exile, we will have a long time to read, and re-read, these and other essential works, and to think things over.

Here are some of the books from the complete list that I can second, heartily.

The Roots of American Order, by Russell Kirk. He who fails to learn the history of what happened before he was born will remain forever a child, said Cicero. This, therefore, is adult reading about the mainsprings of our civilization.

Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and America’s Decline, by Robert H. Bork. Profoundly insightful as to the perils of corrosive ideologies, notably those threatening the institutions of marriage and the family. (Bork should write a sequel about the twelve years since Slouching was published. He should call it Sprinting Towards Gomorrah.)

From Under the Rubble, edited by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Essays written by Solzhenitsyn and other persecuted Russian authors envisioning, during the darkest days of the Brezhnev tyranny, a post-communist Russia. Our situation, of course, is not quite like theirs, but they can teach us profound lessons about the moral clarity and strength that we will need to overcome the dictatorship of relativism.

Understanding Media and The Classical Trivium, also by Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature who had profound insight into how new media and new technologies—being extensions of man—change people. The Classical Trivium is an excellent history and interpretation of great tradition of the liberal arts—the arts of being free. Both books can help us recover our equilibrium in a dizzying technological environment.

The complete reading list is here, and would be a suitable syllabus for starting a discussion with intelligent people about the complicated ideas of classical conservatism.