stars, superseded among the living only by his own cinematicheirs Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson.

What this tells us is that the hunger for heroism remains.,and when the upper reaches of the culture decide to starve itof genuine nutrition., the lower reaches will step in and offerit a banquet of junk food. I would be the last to deny thatsome of this iunk food^—like McDonald's hamburgers—tastesgood. But O for ""''a littie touch of Harr)' in the night"!

The question is whether we—or rather our children andgrandchildren—will ever get it again. Not, I fear, if the femi-nization of our culture that the women's movement has beenlaboring to achieve should proceed apace. But my guess isthat this campaign has already begun to encounter more re-sistance than It was running into up until ver\' recently. ThisresistaEice is coming perhaps even more from women thanfrom men.

To be sure, the leaders of the feminist movement, havingalready feminized so many other institutions in our society,have set their sights on purging even the armed forces of whata high female official of the Defense Department derisivelycalled "tnacho culture." For this, far from being fired, she waspraised, and it was only when she later denounced theMarines as "extremist'" that she had to apologize and resign.

Yet other women, desperate to marry before their biologi-cal clocks run down, can more and more be heard complain-ing that all the men out there ate either "wimps" or gays. Ithas been said that men are born aggressive and predatory andthat only women can tame and civilize them, which is true.But it is alst) true that if women fail to demand rhat men bestrong, and courageous, and honorable—if, that is,they fail to live by the dictum that "only the bravedeserve the fair"—then they will find no one worthbestowing their favors upon. No doubt they will—human nature being what it is—perforce bestow theirfavors on, or at least resignedly decide to marry, thewimps they secretly despise. But there will be nomore touches of Harry in their nights, or indeed inanyone else's. D

A RemembranceOf Heroes PastGEORGE M A C D O N A L D FRASER

I THINK most people would agree that this is nota heroic age. Occasional individual heroismsthere are, of course, but the present generation is

not in sympathy with heroistn as I understand theword. 1 was a child of empire, so my heroes weremostly people like Drake and Livingstone, Nelsonand Kit Carson, Joan of Arc and Robert Bruce,Hereward and Hartiet Tubman, the defenders otRorke's Drift and the AJamo, the Light Brigade, myown Highland ancestors, and those almost-forgottenfliers of the Great War—Bishop, Ball, Rickenbackcr,McCudden, and others. Service as a foot-soldier inBurma in the Second World War did not alter my

views, for the men of the XlVth Army seemed to be cut fromthe same cloth as my boyhood heroes. They were men ofaction who prized the same old-fashioned virtues, judgedmatters (more or less) by the same standards, shared thesame hopes for themselves and their country, and had thesame unspoken notions of loyalty and personal honor. Butlike my heroes of old, while grateful tribute is paid to themon anniversaries, they and their values belong to the past.

For one thing, they were not politically correct. Indeed,when I think back on that platoon of hard bitten Cumbrians,the)' look as politically incorrect as it is humanly possible tobe. They had hopelessly reactionary views on crime and pun-ishment and discipline, believing in an eye for an eye, andbelieving that you paid for your faults and mistakes, and youmight, with luck, be rewarded for your virtues but shouldn'tcount on it. They expressed no views on human rights, theirown or anyone else's; their concern with the environmentwas limited to wondering how many Japanese it might con-ceal. They had immense pride, which led them to hide rheirfears and to take hardship and pain and even death in theirstride—not without loud and obscene complaint, mind \ou,but without expectation of special treatment or considera-tion; the notion of crying on anyone's shoulder, or of givingway to self-pitying emotion, they would have thoughtshameful. By today's standards they were hard, uncharitable,uncivilized, even un-Christiaii men; they had no compassionfor their enemy, only a deep abiding hatred; they believedthat the only good Jap was a dead one.

They understood that he had the same point of \ iew, and

Mr. Fraser is the author of the Flashman series of novels.

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besides hating they respected and even admired him. It goesv\itliout saying that they were guilty of the only unpardon-able modern sin, being racists (as it that made them differentfrom anyone else since time began), but they were racistswho had a loyalty to their Indian and African and Chineseand Burmese and Afghan and Gurkha comrades which nomodern liberal could even begin to understand.

No, they were not politically correct. But then, neitherwere Drake and Livingstone and Kit Carson—or Wash-

How the Battle of Britain pilots, orthe Ameriean seamen at Midway, or

the Russians at Stalin^rad^ jfot bywithout ^counselin^^ we can only^uess.

ington and Jefferson, or for that matter Abraham Lincoln.And how I wish sometimes that that great and kindly mancould be reincarnated, if only so that he could explain hisviews on race relations to an audience of today's politicallycorrect.

Actually, it wouldn't faze them in the least. They wouldprobably think he was kidding, for the twin pillars of politi-cal correctness are willful ignorance and a steadfast refusal toface the truth if it doesn't fit with what the politically correctwish to believe. At worst this involves them in deliberatelying, at best in suppressio veri and sug^estio falsi. At its mostinnocent, politieal correctness can be touchingly naive: justlast month 1 noticed the slogan on a tray of pop-pies being sold tor Remembrance Day. It read: "Acaring force for the future." Plainly someonewants to think of the army as a sort of humanitar-ian organization taking care of people (which,indeed, can be one of its roles) hut doesn't like tofaee the hrutal truth, that an army's ultimate func-tion is killing people. I take no satisfaction in thattruth, but I know that the day we forget it, for thesake of feeling cozy and comfortable, we are onthe way to suicide.

As for those values I mentioned above—thoseof my long-dead heroes, which were still honoredin my generation^eourage, certainly, is stilladmired but not quite, perhaps, in the way it was.Recently a young Englishwoman, a nursery-school teacher, defended her charges against amaniac who was trying to kill them with amachete. She saved the ehildren; she was a hero-ine, no question-—and her name was coupled inthe press and in public admiration with that of amother who had spent years working to bring to book themurderers of her son. Now I have unbounded admiration forthat mother, and for rhe determination wirh which she pur-sued justice, but I have difficulty putting her in rhe same cat-egory with the young teacher who without hesitation laidher life on the line for her pupils. It seems to me that thedefinition of heroism is being blurred. We have in Britain anannual award ceremony for Children of Courage. Some arechildren who have coped bravely with a disability; othershave done something actively heroic. I'm not minimizing thefortitude of the disabled ehildren when I say that it seemsthere are two different kinds of courage here, and that to

pretend that they are not different is to encourage, howeverunwittingly, the idea of the victim as hero.

That is something which is gaining ground in our culture,the conferment of heroic or semi-heroic status on someonewho has suffered grievous misfortune or loss. We saw aremarkable example of this in the near-hysterical reaction tothe tragic death of the Princess of Wales. No doubt manywere, to use the fashionable word, devastated, and there eer-tainiy was throughout the world a deep and genuine regretfor a young life so dreadfully blotted out; there was also inBritain an unprecedented media-manufaetured eampaign inwhich rhe public, including the Royal Family, was virtuallyblackmailed not merely into mourning, but into mourning inthe way which the media dictated. What C. S. Forester socruelly and accurately described as lower-deck sentimentalityhad a field day, eulminating in the event at WestminsterAbbey. Mr. Blair felt proud. I felt ashamed. Perhaps it wasthe eontrast between the vast carpets of flowers outside thepalaces and the modest, decent tribures laid at the cenotaphson Remembrance Day each November; perhaps it was thereflection that a heroic figure second to none in our centur\',Churchill, received no such monumenral outpouring of griefat his passing—^and wouldn't have wanted it. He might havewondered what change had come over his nation to makesuch an extravagant demonstration possible, and why grief,or the manifestation of grief, should now be regarded assomething noble.

For grieving has become a positive virtue, and theresponse to tragedy, and especially to fatal crime, hasbecome a ritual; the florists' shops must be stripped so that

tributes can be strewn at the scene; there mustbe tears and harrowing inter\'iews for the cam-eras; the tragedy must be denounced as unac-ceptable; swarms of so-called "eounselors'"' mustbe called in to mouth their platitudes; above all,everyone must be seen to be mourning. It is asplendid substitute for actually doing stimerhingto prevent repetition of the tragedy, which alltoo often nowadays is the horrific murder of achild. But of course doing something effectiveabout that would certainly be politically incor-rect. Lip serviee to grief is so much easier.

My generation was lucky. Grieving was not avirtue or a duty then. When a schoolfellow diedthere was a quick word of sympathy from ourteacher, and life went on. No counselors arrivedto damage our young minds by harping on thetragedy or insisting that we "come to terms"with it. Hut eounseling today is a thriving busi-ness. Firefighters are counseled, and sometimeseven awarded large sums in compensation, just

for doing their jobs; when a young policewoman is fatallystabbed, it is suggested that her male colleagues may needcounseling for the trauma they have suffered. How the Battleof Brirain pilots, or the American seamen at Midway, or theRussians at Stalingrad, got by without "counseling" we canonly gues.s.

SO how did the cult of the hero come to be replaced,at least in Britain, by the cult of the victim? How didthe nation that shed its blood in a hundred wars and fed

its seas for a thousand years and endured Flanders and theBlitz and was accustomed to burying its dead with a quick

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salute and carrying on, undergo such an apparent decay of thespirit?

I don't know. Tve heard it suggested that loss of empire,and the consequent loss of a heroic spirit, is a partial explana-tion. I suppose you can hardly lose control of one-quarter ofthe human race and one-fifth of the world's land surface, andcommand of its oceans, without a few withdrawal symptoms.But I wouldn't have expected them to be quite so traumatic,or the reversal of national outlook to be so complete. We areeven meant to apologize for the past. Our new prime ministerrecently apologized for the Irish famine. I didn't know he hadcaused it. And since we know he didn't, we can only concludethat he accepts the monstrously dangerous, stupid, and inci-dentally racist concept of inherited racial guilt. This is politi-cal correctness run barking mad. I daresay the NativeAmericans (a term, by the way, invented by TheodoreRoosevelt to describe Americans of European descent) havedemanded that the United States apologize for Sand Creekand Washita and Wounded Knee. But have the Native Amer-icans ever apologized for Fort William Henry and Fort Ven-

ango and the Pontiac Conspiracy? But of course political cor-rectness demands that only one side of the coin be looked at.

Of one thing I am sure: my country needs heroes now^and I don't see any coming up. But it is some consolation thateven in this unheroic age, when my old comrades of theXlVth Army can be pelted and insulted with jeers of "HeilHitler!" at a Remembrance Day parade, and when so much ofmy nation's worthy past is devalued—in such a time it is com-forting to remember that not so long ago there was someonewho was in no doubt what it meant to be British, and stoodfirm when it mattered, at the time of the Falklands. It can'thave been easy; there were faint hearts and dissenting voices,and even some who seemed more concerned for the enemy'scasualties than for our own; fortunately they were not aroundin 1940 to agonize about the human rights of the Luftwaffe.Anyway, she stood firm, as precious few men would havedone; she did not go wobbly. And for that, on behalf of adamfool generation, and in the language of the XlVth Army,I'd like to say, ""Shabash, memsahih.^^ \Vhich being translatedmeans, "Bravo, lady." D

The (Scientific) Case for GodSTEPHEN M. BARR

P ATRICK Glynn, a political jour-nalist and former Reagan Admin-istration official, has given us an

elegantly written and absorbing accountof his return to religious faith and thereasons for it. A major reason was the"significant body of evidence" whichhas emerged from "a series of dramaticdevelopments in science, medicine, andother tlelds" in the last twenty years that"has radically changed the existence-of-Ciod debate."

Gerald Schroeder, an Israeli physicist,has followed a similar path. He writes:"As a scientist trained at the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology, I was con-vinced I had the evidence to excludeI God] from the grand scheme of life."But "with each step forward" he took inhis understanding of science, "some-thing kept shining through."

One may be tempted to object that"The Evidence," as the title of Glynn'sbook calls it, goes back a lot longer thantwenty years. St. Paul knew nothing ofmodern science and yet felt justified inasserting in his Epistle to the Romansthat God's "eternal power and deity,"though invisible, are "manifest in the

Mr. Ban- Is an associate professor of physicsat tlie Bartol Research Institute of theUniversity of Delaware.

things that He has made." Faith doesnot need to wait upon the latest re-search. Nevertheless, Glynn and Schroe-der are right that something importanthas happened in the world of science.

What has happened is that the great

God: The Evidence: The Reconcilia-tion of Faith and Reason in a Postsec-ular World, hy Patrick Glynn (PrimaPublishing, 221 pp., $22)

The Science of God: The Convergenceof Scientific and Bihlicat Wisdom, hyGerald L. Schroeder (Free Press, 226

PP;scientific discoveries which seemed tomany thoughtful people to provide rea-sons for skepticism and even atheismhave been shown to be either mislead-ing or mistaken. To borrow a phrasefrom Ben Wattenberg, the good news Isthat rhe bad news is wrong.

The bad news is old and well known.Copernicus showed that we humans arenot at the center of the universe-—though, as Schroeder points out, theBible never actually said we were. AndDarwin—supposedly-—showed that weare merely the products of chance muta-tions. Glynn quotes Hertrand Russell'sdismal conclusion: the human race isjust "a curious accident in a backwater."

Galileo, besides embarrassing the Ro-man Catholic Church, helped bringabotit the triumph of mechanism overteleology, which, as Glynn notes, "wenthand in hand with the decline of reli-gious faith among the intellectual elite."It was no longer scientifically respect-able to look for purpose in Nature.

What has put these discoveries in adifferent light is more recent develop-ments in the very same branches of sci-ence. From physics and cosmology havecome the "anthropic coincidences." Thisterm refers to the fact, now widelyappreciated by physicists, that many fea-tures of the laws of nature seemarranged so as to make possible theemergence of life. For example, if cer-tain parameters of the "StandardModel" of particle physics were evenslightly different from what they aremeasured to be, either stars would neverhave formed or biochemistry would notbe possible. Many of these anthropiccoincidences are striking indeed, andhave led at least a few scientists to re-eonsider their atheistic prejudices.

Glynn discusses anthropic coinci-dences at much greater length than doesSchroeder. He observes that there aretwo ways out for the faithful atheist.One of them is to argue that the fea-tures of nature's laws which the deistand theist think were arranged mayactually be inflexibly determined bysome deep underlying principles. Whilethis is very likely to be true, it hardlyresolves the issue, since the structure ofphysical law did not have to be basedupon those particular principles. Theother way out is to posit the existence

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