A Popular Form of Monomania

Conceptions of morality change, never more so than in the lifetime of The New Criterion. If a person who died at the time of the first issue were to return to life, he would find himself in an angrier and more charged moral atmosphere than the one he had left—and one in which the principles that undergird Western civilization scarcely seem to be in evidence. Indeed, he would think that the world was a moral hornets’ nest that had been poked with a stick, so furious is the buzzing.