The Ramifications of Telling Charles Murray to Shut Up

In our academic institutions, we are encouraged to debate one another and create productive discourse as a means for solving our problems. But is this an effective tool settling differences if the argument is whether or not you should be considered an equal human being? In cases like these, Iris Marion Young recommends activism as a way to bring attention to ideas that can actually prevent productive discourse. However, is it possible for activism to go “too far” thus shutting down discourse altogether? Applying Young’s theory, this paper will explore the roles of both activism and deliberation in the context of a protest at Middlebury College.

Living for the Hour

This chapter investigates how blockade running from Nassau ran wild for most of the year, even with Seth Hawley and Charles Wilkes gone. It argues that the supplies continued to flow through Nassau in great quantities almost to the end of the war. With such an unprecedented opportunity to make money, the chapter looks at people of all sorts who began to take up residence in Nassau. Many of them lived at the Royal Victoria, a hotel that had been a speculative venture by the Bahamian government but was now bursting at the seams and staying full all year. It then presents the two interesting lodgers at the hotel: British naval officers Augustus Charles Hobart-Hampden and Charles Murray-Aynsley. These two, along with fellow officers William Nathan Wrighte Hewett (who would captain the blockade runner Condor) and Hugh Talbot Burgoyne, were granted furloughs to try their hand at running the blockade. The chapter also details the first vessel built expressly for blockade running and would be the first all-steel ship to cross the Atlantic — the Banshee. The chapter also displays some notable British citizens who passed through Nassau and found themselves doing business in the city.

Scottish Literature and World War I

This work is the first book-length study of Scottish Great War literature. Rather than arguing the war exerted a singular influence on the country’s writing, the collection highlights the variety of literary, social, political, and philosophical reverberations of the war in Scotland literature. Part one of the collection presents multi-text case studies of nationalism, pastoralism, Scottish Great War prose, popular literature, women’s, letters to the editor, Gaelic writing, and philosophy. Part two contains essays devoted to individual authors, including canonical figures such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Nan Shepherd, Neil Gunn and John Buchan, as well as peripheral authors such as George A. C. Mackinlay, Charles Murray and Ewart Alan Mackintosh.

Charles Murray and A Sough o’ War

Robert Crawford discusses Charles Murray, an Aberdeenshire-born poet who published most of his verse while living in South Africa. Writing in Doric – with a density and nostalgia intensified by his exilic longing for home – Murray produced A Sough o’ War (1917). Although Murray is, certainly from a modern perspective, unpalatably committed to imperial militarism, he nevertheless produced enduring works with a fervent sense of connection to the Aberdeenshire countryside.

Research Committee Update

Recently I gave each of my five kids a copy of a book that I had been delighted to read, The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead by Charles Murray. I identified with the curmudgeon, hence the title of this column. Murray's book had its origins in postings the author made on the internal website of the American Enterprise Institute where he works, with tips for entry-level staff and interns such as: Excise the word “like” from your spoken English. Don't suck up, meaning don't excessively flatter supervisors. Make strong language count.

The New Aristocracy

This chapter examines how the educational system, transformed into a tool of liberalism, also ultimately becomes the systemic creation of a new aristocracy of the strong over the weak. It describes the emergence of a two-tier system in which elite students are recruited from all over the world so that they may prepare for lives of deracinated vagabondage, majoring only in what Wendell Berry calls “upward mobility.” It argues that liberalism's success fosters the conditions of its failure: having claimed to bring about the downfall of aristocratic rule of the strong over the weak, it culminates in a new more powerful, even more permanent aristocracy that fights incessantly to maintain the structures of liberal injustice. The chapter also considers the economic liberalism of John Locke and the lifestyle liberalism of John Stuart Mill, the views of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam on generational inequality, and the liberalocracy's self-deception.