Brothers No More, William F. Buckley, Doubleday, 1995
Mr. Buckley has, in essence, provided us with a morality study,
by contrasting the lives of two men, from their war experience
onward as they meet together the, perhaps typical, experiences of
life, and react to them, sharing some, as close friends will.
Henry and Danny are identical in most respects, the same age,
of similar background and temperament, but opposites in others.
According to my explication of the spiritual significance of sexuality,
Henry is more masculine and Danny is more feminine. For Henry,
therefore, morality is a much more serious matter than for Danny.
On the other hand, one's persona is a much more serious matter for
Danny than for Henry. So, conflict is inevitable, especially in the
more difficult events of their lives, viewed from the perspective of
morality.
In the opening scene, Danny rescues Henry from a potentially
disastrous event seeming to indicate which is the more courageous.
We soon discover, however, that this is a superficial judgment, as
such judgments are so often, and that, as life unfolds, it becomes ever
more clear that the opposite is actually the case. Danny descends
from a famous American family and Mr. Buckley induces us to
wonder if he intends to suggest that that is one of the sources of
Danny's failures of judgment. The prominent family is a political one
and perhaps the most significant one of the twentieth century. Most
conservatives will find no difficulty in guessing and agreeing that Mr.
Buckley holds this family responsible to some extent for some of the
most glaring problems of late twentieth century America. I would
say this is an incorrect conclusion however. This politician was
reacting to grander realities and, were he not elected, another
politician would have found himself constrained to do much the
same. Look at the liberal policies Mr. Reagan imposed, or if not him,
what about Nixon. No, the times define the policies, by and large,
while the actual politicians try to put the right spin on things.
Not to put too fine a point on it, one is driven to wonder if Mr.
Buckley is providing some irony in imagining this family's heirs to be
suffering most grievously from the exact policies that that politician
imposed. It has a nice poetic ring to it, but it seems unlikely. In fact
it would be hubristic to imagine humans to have such power. And
this is precisely what is gained by understanding the ideological
spectrum. Just what the limits of human power are. Most humans
lack any means of understanding these limits, because they cannot
see the forces at work and make the unwarranted assumption that, if
the forces cannot be seen, it must be humans at work. Personally, I
use the generalization that if the forces controlling human events
aren't to be found emanating from humans, one must take it to be
God's work. Thus, since no rational explanation can be given for why
wars start, one must say that it is God's work.
The problem with this book, as with most books on the good
versus evil problem is the subjectivity of it. Masculinism portrays
evil as a horned and clawed beast when actually what is being
referred to is more accurately portrayed as a woman. It, evil, is just
what the western God isn't. This is most succinctly established when
one discovers that the feminine goddess of the moon's name is Sin,
and that name was appropriated and assigned to moral evil.
Actually, if one looks at the different forms of evil in the Mosaic
law and searches for a generalization, he will find that anything that
threatens a man's life in any kind of subtle way is so identified. So,
the great good of western ideology is human life. The subjectivity of
it is coming to bear in the form of overpopulation which must cause
the society to reverse its values in order to deal with it, thus abortion
and euthanasia become good, which will mean weakening western
religion and calling into existence feminism. This analysis reverses
the common notion that feminists cause feminism, and is far more
accurate than that idea.
The piece de resistance of the book and our reason for reading
it at all, is the manner in which justice makes itself felt in the
feminist's life. That is what we call it, justice. In the feminist world
of the Greek's, it was called fate or the gods. There is something
undeniably satisfying about such denouements, we have a poetic
sense that requires tending, and this does the job. Mr. Buckley
demonstrates a keen sense of what is fitting here and presents it in a
most satisfying manner. In fact, Mr. Buckley takes care to see that
the scoundrel is brought to account for every crime we are aware of,
even the one we are sure he managed to evade the penalty of.