Recent stories of note:
Up from Bolshevism
Daniel J. Mahoney, Claremont Review of Books
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s death. The despot’s embalmed body still rests on public display in Moscow, though the current head of the Kremlin “loathes Lenin and all his works,” as Daniel J. Mahoney reminds us in the Claremont Review of Books. Putin’s hatred for his fellow authoritarian points to the complexity of Russia’s intellectual history, a history inscrutable to most of the West. Fortunately, the historian Paul Robinson has penned two new books on the subject: Russian Conservatism and Russian Liberalism, which, in Mahoney’s words, “will remain the authoritative books on their subjects for the foreseeable future.” Mahoney’s review shows the extent to which Westerners have typically misunderstood Russia’s political thought.
A new book rebukes the “luxury beliefs” of America’s upper class
The Economist
At some point during the national psychosis that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, Minneapolis’s city council voted to disband the municipal police department. A few weeks later, it was revealed that those same councilmembers were earmarking hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for their own private security—safety for me, but not for thee, the council seemed to be telling its constituents. Such hypocrisy has come to define the political beliefs of much of America’s ruling class in recent years. Consider the way this class rails against monogamy as outdated, even as most of its members come from nuclear-family backgrounds. These positions are often most harmful to the people they purport to protect. Rob Henderson dubbed them “luxury beliefs” in 2019, writing that America’s affluent now wear these costly beliefs to signal their social status, paying no attention to the damage that comes should the ideas actually be enacted. Henderson has now written a memoir dedicated to exploring these luxury beliefs, Troubled, which The Economist affirms is much more than an “angry culture-war screed.” Look forward to a full review in these pages from Steven McGregor.
How to revive your gothic chapel
Hermione Eyre, Apollo
Some months back, stained glass was the cause of outcry in France when President Macron announced that many of Notre Dame’s storied windows would be replaced with modish, present-day works. If any more proof of this plan’s foolhardiness is necessary, one needs only to look across the Channel. Just south of Edinburgh, in the county of Midlothian, sits the fifteenth-century Rosslyn Chapel, originally called the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew but renamed when it came under the patronage of James Alexander, Third Earl of Rosslyn. The Rosslyn line has since admirably restored much of the chapel to its gothic glory. But not every decision has been so graceful: the family recently unveiled a new stained-glass window created by the Pop artist Joe Tilson. It is an unfortunate addition. Tilson—who was by the Rosslyn family’s own admission “not conventionally religious”—contributed a brightly colored but unimaginative pane to the chapel. The abstract, geometric design may complement the architecture, but it leaves little for the viewer to contemplate. The surrounding windows and stonework portray rich biblical scenes and saint legends; Lady Helen Rosslyn, who commissioned Tilson’s window, bafflingly calls these depictions “abstractions” the meaning of which no one is “quite sure”, and claims therefore that Tilson’s anti-meaning design fits right in.