Last year the Liberty Fund brought out a new printing of one of Robert Nisbet's last books (in fact, I think it was his last), 1988's The Present Age. Looking through my old copy of the first edition it occurs to me that this book is, if anything, even more timely today than it was when it first saw print. Nisbet writes scathingly about, among other things, the pageantry of the Reagan administration, the tendency of spurious conservatives to conflate religion and politics, and the corrosive effects of war and militarization on society. Consider this passage, for example, in light of Abu Ghraib and the Iraq War more generally:
Wars, to be successfully fought, demand a reduction in the taboos regarding life, dignity, property, family, and religion; there must be nothing of merely moral nature left standing between the fighting forces and victory, not even, or especially, taboos on sexual encounters. Wars have an individualizing effect upon their involved societies, a loosening of the accustomed social bond in favor of a tightening of the military ethic. Military, or at least war-born, relationships among dindivdiuals tend to supercede relationships of family, parish, and ordinary walks of life. Ideas of chastitty, modesty, decorum, respectability change quickly in wartime.
