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A Slow, Mental March to the Right: An Interview With Myron Magnet
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11238 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1993 |
1,038 Words |
| Author
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Douglas Burton
Douglas Burton is an associate senior editor for the Book
World section of The World & I. |
The man who argues that culture, not economic circumstances, is the key to success or failure is the son of parents who pursued the American dream and saw many of its rewards. Born in 1944 to a physician father and a mother educated to be a teacher, Myron Magnet was the eldest of three children. He grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, a member of the close-knit Jewish community there. He recalls that his mother urged all of her children to become "pillars of the community" and to take an active part in public affairs. All three pursued higher education and joined the professional class.
After attending local public schools, Magnet went to Phillips Exeter, the prestigious prep school. He later studied English literature at Columbia University and at the University of Cambridge in England. His dissertation, which explored the social ideas of Charles Dickens, was the basis for Dickens and the Social Order, published in 1985. Magnet currently serves as a senior editor at Fortune magazine. The Dream and the Nightmare began as a series of three articles he published in Fortune in 1987 and 1988.
We asked Magnet about the cultural values he received from his parents. Did he come from a religious background?
"Well, yes, I attended Sunday school, but I'm afraid I was a skeptic. My father quite shocked me, I remember, when he revealed that he, too, was a religious skeptic. I was brought up in that tradition--there was a great movement among middle-class Jews to assimilate into America--and I really believed that we were first and foremost Americans, and that what defined us was our belief in American democracy and all those values of the Declaration of Independence. I remember feeling as I went through grammar school with people from sharply defined ethnic groups that although it was fine to have these identities, there was a virtue in some larger American identity."
When asked if he remains a religious skeptic, Myron says, "Yes, that's why I get so exercised about political correctness. . . . In a secular age the only thing you have to authenticate morality is four thousand years of thought about what constitutes the good life for man, four thousand years of historical experimentation with living this system or that. . . . If you're a secular person you don't know things are right or wrong because God says so, [but] you have four thousand years of the thought of wise people, including the great religious people, including the Bible, which tells you what is right and wrong and what the good life is for man. If you turn around and say that
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