With the death in February of Tom Bethell (1936–2021), the refuseniks of what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls” have lost an eloquent and redoubtable champion.
Over the course of Bethell’s five decades as a writer (of seven books and hundreds of essays), the malodorous certitudes of political correctness have been piling up to Augean proportions. Bethell waded into them one by one—from cultural relativism to Einsteinian relativity—hosed them down, and dressed them in motley for our sport.
Bethell’s doubts about the scientific rigor of Darwin’s theory of evolution began to germinate while he was studying philosophy, psychology, and physiology at Oxford in the Sixties. In his ground-breaking 1976 Harper’s Magazine article “Darwin’s Mistake,” he was the first to confute that epochal dogma root and branch; and having shattered the taboo, he paved the way for the many critiques that would follow.
By far the most readable of these was his own book, “Darwin’s House of Cards” (2018). In a 2017 interview, Bethell pointed out that the natural selection argument is a brazen sorites: “You can’t find a criterion of fitness that is independent of survival. So it’s the survival of the survivors.”
How, but for Bethell’s “Questioning Einstein” (2009), would the average layman know that even the theory of relativity has been guarded with idolatrous zeal by its dedicated priesthood? The dirty little secret of contemporary “science” is that “authority more and more replaces evidence,” a trend that has only accelerated during the current COVID-19 hysteria.
That science is always “settled” when it supports progressive causes (Bethell quipped that the journal Science should be renamed “Science for Liberals”) is more broadly related by him to the besetting irony of modern liberalism. “Question authority” is its brave mantra, even as it demands exclusive and supine obedience to its own authority, and in its thinking displays the most abject intellectual conformism. Bethell and his good friend, the late Joe Sobran (d. 2010), were surely the two most brilliant (and funniest) diagnosticians of liberal mass-mindedness of their generation. (Indeed, Sobran gives Bethell joint credit for the indispensable term “the hive” to describe the way in which liberals instantly communicate the acceptable opinions on every issue of the day.)
Such sunbursts of moral clarity and common sense lighten every page of Bethell’s copy.
On the state-subsidized modern poetry industry: “The market for poetry … consist[s] mostly of other poets. It’s wise for a publisher to anthologize 100 poets in one volume; that way it will at least sell 100 copies.”
“[Moyers] seems to think of democracy as a substitute for socialism, as though all wealth naturally belongs to a common pool and a proper democracy would share it out equitably. ... Lots of people in America are saddled with this unremitting, burning sense of grievance. You have to be both well off and well educated to reach that mental state. ... I suppose Keillor is a liberal of sorts, but his faculty of appreciation, his love of traditional hymns, and the contentment he derives from describing the world, show conservative tendencies. A great gulf separates him from those, like Moyers, who want to change the world, not describe it.”As a journalist, Bethell both “described” the world into which he was born and defended its traditions and truths, all with the same eloquence as he mustered against the spurious dogmas of the Church of Progress. And as a conservative, he never forgot his primary obligation of gratitude for God’s creation. Taught by the Benedictines as a boy in London, he remained a lifelong Catholic, gravitating inevitably to the traditional Latin liturgy.
One hesitates to say this sort of thing in an age of emotional hyperinflation, but for this writer, as I suspect for many conservatives of a certain age, the death of Tom Bethell will be felt like the loss of a beloved old friend. I never met him, alas, but his columns in The American Spectator were my boon companion over half a lifetime. Whenever the latest issue emerged through my mail slot, it was to Bethell that I turned first, though I am otherwise quite capable of deferring my pleasures. And what a pleasure it has been! Bethell’s reading was so wide and his learning so deep that only Northrop Frye, in my experience, could cite more ancient and modern authorities on a single page.
Like the aforementioned Sobran, Bethell had that rare ability to set his readers’ heads oscillating with wonder at the brilliance of his insights, to raise the hairs on the backs of their necks in response to the grandeur with which he evoked the beauty and genius of the Western Tradition, and to make them laugh, all within the span of a single essay, and all in prose of apparent artlessness.
