The American Enterprise articles from September 1998

The American Enterprise archives from September 1998

Science to a higher power. (science merges with theology)
September 1, 1998... Science is knowledge. And knowledge, as Francis Bacon first urged us to believe, is power. The equation must have seemed doubtful, even slightly mad, when Bacon pronounced it in the early seventeenth century. In the twentieth, it is a...

Paul Johnson. (author of "A History of the American People")(Interview)
September 1, 1998... The man who chronicled Modern Times and other epochs and peoples sounds off on witch-burning, Bill Clinton, and his famously fat books. Paul Johnson is the most prolific and best-selling historian of our era. An English Catholic and former...

Cities need leaders. (civic responsibilities of business leaders)
September 1, 1998... When entrepreneur Richard Riordan became Mayor of Los Angeles in 1993, he confronted a city still smoldering from the previous year's riots. Yet the Mayor saw the collapse of Los Angeles's business elite as perhaps his greatest long-term...

A city where business and philanthropy flourish. (Grand Rapids, MI)
September 1, 1998... Looking for a city with a tradition of community involvement, creative local philanthropy, vibrant cultural institutions old and new? Try Grand Rapids. The home town of President Gerald Ford, the city proposed by Chicago Tribune publisher...

The phony war between science & religion over evolution.
September 1, 1998... How did we get into our present doleful predicament, where the best scientific understanding of how we and the world came to our present state seems to be utterly at odds with the deepest beliefs of many of our most moral and religious...

Not a chance: life cannot have formed by accident.
September 1, 1998... Many people today believe that life on earth originated as a result of random accidents. Most of us vaguely recall having heard of scientific experiments involving mixtures of inanimate materials that are said to be similar to the "PREBIOTIC...

The materialist superstition.
September 1, 1998... The continued prevalence of the materialist superstition was manifest in a recent Time cover story titled "In Search of the Mind." The magazine authoritatively declaimed that "consciousness may be nothing more than an evanescent by-product of...

The conservative critique of social engineering.
September 1, 1998... The West began the twentieth century enamored of scientific progress--a.k.a. "man's mastery over nature"--and the comprehensive improvement, even the radical transformation, of society. Today, modern men and women have been chastened. We know...

Aliens in the cosmos: or, the curious affair of Carl Sagan and E.T. (extraterrestrial)
September 1, 1998... Humans cannot help but hope and fear, and we clearly have longings that elude earthly satisfaction. With the decline of belief in a providential God, our attention remains fixed on the sky, but less on a heaven unseen than on planets and forms...

The science of faith: medicine for body & soul.
September 1, 1998... He practices medicine at perhaps the nations top hospital and is internationally renowned for his development of an operation that allows men whose prostates are removed to retain sexual function. But a key component of the care that urologist...

The future of biotechnology: promises and problems.
September 1, 1998... We live in the early years of a technological revolution based on advances in molecular biology and genetic engineering. The biotech industry is one of the country's most innovative sectors. The Human Genome Project, a 15-year multinational...

The ethics of cloning.(Transcript)
September 1, 1998... This January the Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut, who led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep, gave a talk on the moral issues raised by the technology at Calvin College. Demonstrating the mutual dependence of science and ethics, he carefully...

Fleeing science and reason. (anti-science attitudes in late 20th-century America)
September 1, 1998... American pre-eminence in science and high technology is a major reason the twentieth century will go down in history as the American Century. So it is astonishing, as well as dismaying, that some of our cultural custodians feel morally...

The trap of scientism. (inappropriate use of science in moral arguments)
September 1, 1998... Our faith in science, although dying for two decades, remains strong enough that we often succumb to the lure of scientism. Scientism is the effort to disguise as science things that have little to do with science, in the hope of making them...

I.Q. and the left. (left-wing use of I.Q. in political arguments)
September 1, 1998... It is a curious fact that leftists believe I.Q. exists in the presence of environmental toxins and somehow disappears in the presence of educators. That is to say, the Left's use of I.Q. depends entirely on which agenda is being promoted at...

Why NASA must go.
September 1, 1998... This is the way the future was supposed to be: Nuclear-fueled rocket ships would take off like airplanes and fly into orbit, docking with silver donut-shaped space stations. From there, well-groomed astronauts would embark on robot-piloted...

It's not too late to become a spacefaring nation.
September 1, 1998... Napoleon's power ended at the water's edge, and throughout history control of the sea has been decisive. Space is likely to be as critical in the next millennium as seapower was in the last two. Recognizing the need for spacepower...

The race to the moon. (the men who worked in Flight Operations Division)
September 1, 1998... Whatever its flaws, in its early years the Apollo program did operate far differently from the typical government bureaucracy. Some of the men responsible for that are profiled in Apollo: The Race to the Moon, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly...

Science for the smart, English for the dumb? (public preference for science over humanities)
September 1, 1998... Erin Sharp published a half-dozen poems and several essays before she was graduated from high school. Her English teachers showered her with praise and awards. When she chose to go to Cornell University, her career choice was clear--medicine....

Vanishing unions. (labor unions)
September 1, 1998... Are America's unions committing suicide? The organized labor movement as we know it started shortly after an 1842 Massachusetts court decision declared that strikes were not criminal conspiracies. Over the next 80 years, the unions could...

Alaska + Hawaii = Puerto Rico. (dangers of statehood for territories outside contiguous US)
September 1, 1998... After four decades of statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, what do we have to show for it? The Iditarod, countless bad puns about getting lei'd, and a sweatshop Betsy Ross stitching a fifty-first star for Puerto Rico. We can't say we weren't...

The leatherneck behind "JAG." (television producer Donald P. Bellisario; television drama)
September 1, 1998... Donald P. Bellisario doesn't fit this town's typical mold. Hollywood has few ex-Marines and fathers of seven running prime-time network series. Bellisario, 63, brings an unusual approach to the military as the creator and executive...

In Praise of Commercial Culture.
September 1, 1998... In Praise of Commercial Culture By Tyler Cowen Harvard University Press, 278 pages, $27.95 Capitalism has proven to be the most materially productive economic system ever devised, and thus left-wing criticisms of capitalism have become...

Architecture: Choice or Fate.
September 1, 1998... Architecture: Choice or Fate By Leon Krier Andreas Papadakis, 224 pages, $39 Anybody who is distressed by the "fiasco of suburbia" that has become the everyday setting of American life will find illumination in Leon Krier's compelling...

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World.
September 1, 1998... The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World By Thomas M. Disch The Free Press, 256 pages, $25 Science fiction writer and poet Thomas M. Disch begins his book on the cultural impact of science fiction by...

Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology.
September 1, 1998... Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology By David H. Gelernter Basic Books, 166 pages, $21 In his spottily argued but nonetheless intriguing book Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology, Yale computer scientist...

This Perfect Day.
September 1, 1998... Ira Levin's gift is no longer what it once was, to judge from his recent Son of Rosemary and his Sliver a few years back. Still, we are permanently in Levin's debt. For decades he produced some of the most exciting and intelligent page-turners...