"However, we live in an increasingly censorious age. By this I mean that the broad, indeed international, acceptance of First Amendment principles is being steadily eroded. Many special-interest groups, claiming the moral high ground, now demand the protection of the censor. Political correctness and the rise of the religious right provide the pro-censorship lobby with further cohorts. I would like to say a little about just one of the weapons of this resurgent lobby, a weapon used, interestingly, by everyone from anti-pornography feminists to religious fundamentalists: I mean the concept of “respect.”
On the surface, “respect” is one of those ideas nobody’s against. Like a good warm coat in winter, like applause, like ketchup on your fries, everybody wants some of that. Sock-it-to-me-sock-it-to-me, as Aretha Franklin puts it. But what we used to mean by respect- what Aretha meant by it; that is, a mixture of good-hearted consideration and serious attention- has little to do with the new ideological usage of the word.
Religious extremists, these days, demand respect for their attitudes with growing stridency. Very few people would object to the idea that people’s rights to religious belief must be respected- after all, the First Amendment defends those rights as unequivocally as it defends free speech- but now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs- to hold that they are suspect, or antiquated, or wrong; that in fact, they are arguable- is incompatible with the idea of respect. When criticism is placed off limits as “disrespectful,” and therefore offensive, something strange is happening to the concept of respect. Yet in recent times both the American National Endowment for the Arts and the very British BBC have announced that they will use this new version of “respect” as a touchstone for their funding decisions.
Other minority groups- racial, sexual, social- have also demanded that they be accorded this new form of respect. To “respect” Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him. To “diss” him is, equally simply, to disagree. But if dissent is also to be though a form of “dissing,” then we have indeed succumbed to the Thought Police. I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow citizen’s opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not a calm and eventless place- that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreement. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists- for power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors- that I would like to celebrate this morning, and that I urge you all, in freedom’s name, to preserve."
Salman Rushdie
April 1996
“Farming Ostriches” Originally delivered as a keynote address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors
Saturday, February 23, 2008
"Conservatism favors the restraint of government. A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them. Also, conservatism is, at least in its American form, a philosophy that relies upon personal responsibility and promotes private liberty. It is an ideology of individuals. Everyone with any sense and experience in life would rather take his fellows one by one than in a crowd. Crowds are noisy, unreasonable and impatient. They can trample you easier than a single person can. And a crowd will never buy you lunch.
"But although this is a conservative book, it is not informed by any very elaborate political theory. I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.
God is an elderly, or, at any rate, a middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material weel-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.
Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and how’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus."
PJ O'Rourke
Road to serfdom pg 19-
"But while the progress toward what is commonly called “positive” action was necessarily slow, and while for the immediate improvement liberalism had to rely largely on the gradual increase of wealth which freedom brought about, it had constantly to fight proposals which threatened this progress. It came to be regarded as a “negative” creed because it could offer to particular individuals little more than a share in the common progress- a progress which came to be taken more and more for granted and was no longer recognized as the result of the policy of freedom. It might even be said that the very success of liberalism became the cause of its decline. Because of the success already achieved, man became increasingly unwilling to tolerate the evils still with him which now appeared both unbearable and unnecessary."
Road to serfdom pg 25-
"Nobody saw more clearly than De Tocqueville that democracy as an essentially individualist institution stood in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, “ he said in 1848; “socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”"
-Hayek
"But although this is a conservative book, it is not informed by any very elaborate political theory. I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.
God is an elderly, or, at any rate, a middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material weel-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.
Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and how’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus."
PJ O'Rourke
Road to serfdom pg 19-
"But while the progress toward what is commonly called “positive” action was necessarily slow, and while for the immediate improvement liberalism had to rely largely on the gradual increase of wealth which freedom brought about, it had constantly to fight proposals which threatened this progress. It came to be regarded as a “negative” creed because it could offer to particular individuals little more than a share in the common progress- a progress which came to be taken more and more for granted and was no longer recognized as the result of the policy of freedom. It might even be said that the very success of liberalism became the cause of its decline. Because of the success already achieved, man became increasingly unwilling to tolerate the evils still with him which now appeared both unbearable and unnecessary."
Road to serfdom pg 25-
"Nobody saw more clearly than De Tocqueville that democracy as an essentially individualist institution stood in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, “ he said in 1848; “socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”"
-Hayek
Sunday, September 16, 2007
I love Lubor Zink
"Some people maintain that Canada's basic and overriding interest is national sovereignty. Others are convinced that what really
matters is economic growth. Still others give basic priority to social justice. There are also those who believe that all
effort should be concentrated on transformation of the UN into a world government. Yet another view holds that the most
urgent problem we must tackle is pollution of natural environments. It is not difficult to find arguments in support of every
one of these positions. But that does not mean that any one of them qualifies as indisputable number one priority.
That place surely must be reserved for the historical priority of free men throughout the ages, namely preservation of freedom.
Without freedom there can be no national sovereignty, no social justice, no economic growth worth working for, no peace
and no enjoyment of life even in the cleanest natural environment. That fact that from time immemorial people have valued
freedom above life itself attests that there is no higher priority in the scale of human values. Doubts on this score can
only come from those who have inherited the blessings of freedom, take them for granted and have no notion what loss of freedom means."
"The intimate spiritual and material bonds between Canada and the US grew out of shared concepts of human life within the
framework of the highest degree of individual and political freedom ever attained anywhere in the world. No one maintains
that the socio-politico-economic system of North America, as practiced with minor variations in Canada and the US, is perfect.
Perfection in the sense of idealistic abstractions is beyond the grasp of human nature. But with all its obvious shortcomings our social
system provinces a flexible structure of unparalleled liberty and unparalleled affluence.
The Soviet system of coercive messianism, spawned by contempt of what Marx called "the miserable individual," and fueled
by organized hate, has produced a rigid totalitarian structure that cannot tolerate any of the expressions of freedom we take
for granted. At the same time, while building and enormous military machine and providing material privileges for the
upper crust of its self-appointed ruling clique, it maintains a low general standard of living in what is in effect an archaic police
state. It takes a peculiar mind to seek cordial relations with the rulers of such a society. And it takes a streak of
perversion (or perhaps, blindness) in that peculiar mind to set as a national goal the same type of intimate relations
with a totalitarian state that we have enjoyed, until recently, with the congenial democracy south of the border.
Mr. Trudeau has such a a peculiar mind. While he was exercising it in the ivory tower of the academe, the harm he could do,
though not negligible, was fairly limited. As Prime Minister, who commands a rubber-stamping majority in Parliament, he is in a position to put the country on collision course
with its vital interests. "
matters is economic growth. Still others give basic priority to social justice. There are also those who believe that all
effort should be concentrated on transformation of the UN into a world government. Yet another view holds that the most
urgent problem we must tackle is pollution of natural environments. It is not difficult to find arguments in support of every
one of these positions. But that does not mean that any one of them qualifies as indisputable number one priority.
That place surely must be reserved for the historical priority of free men throughout the ages, namely preservation of freedom.
Without freedom there can be no national sovereignty, no social justice, no economic growth worth working for, no peace
and no enjoyment of life even in the cleanest natural environment. That fact that from time immemorial people have valued
freedom above life itself attests that there is no higher priority in the scale of human values. Doubts on this score can
only come from those who have inherited the blessings of freedom, take them for granted and have no notion what loss of freedom means."
"The intimate spiritual and material bonds between Canada and the US grew out of shared concepts of human life within the
framework of the highest degree of individual and political freedom ever attained anywhere in the world. No one maintains
that the socio-politico-economic system of North America, as practiced with minor variations in Canada and the US, is perfect.
Perfection in the sense of idealistic abstractions is beyond the grasp of human nature. But with all its obvious shortcomings our social
system provinces a flexible structure of unparalleled liberty and unparalleled affluence.
The Soviet system of coercive messianism, spawned by contempt of what Marx called "the miserable individual," and fueled
by organized hate, has produced a rigid totalitarian structure that cannot tolerate any of the expressions of freedom we take
for granted. At the same time, while building and enormous military machine and providing material privileges for the
upper crust of its self-appointed ruling clique, it maintains a low general standard of living in what is in effect an archaic police
state. It takes a peculiar mind to seek cordial relations with the rulers of such a society. And it takes a streak of
perversion (or perhaps, blindness) in that peculiar mind to set as a national goal the same type of intimate relations
with a totalitarian state that we have enjoyed, until recently, with the congenial democracy south of the border.
Mr. Trudeau has such a a peculiar mind. While he was exercising it in the ivory tower of the academe, the harm he could do,
though not negligible, was fairly limited. As Prime Minister, who commands a rubber-stamping majority in Parliament, he is in a position to put the country on collision course
with its vital interests. "
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
"One of Cromwell's Parliaments proposed burning all state records so that, having effaced all official memory of the past, life could begin afresh. Disavowel of antecedents is the quintessential revolutionary act, as Napoleon, too, understood.
When shown a genealogy of the Bonaparte family, Napoleon brushed it aside, remarking: "Je suis mon propre ancetre" (I am my own ancestor. Considering the scale of Napoleon's vanity, and the nature of that genealogy, his rejection of it was understandable. But his rejection also reflected the modern disdain for history as "the dead hand of the past."
Napoleon is the archetypal modern man of action, a bloody nuisance ricocheting around civilization, making history and orphans. He made so much history because he knew so little. He traveled fast because he traveled little, unencumbered by an educated person's sense of limitations, the sense that is the bittersweet fruit of historical understanding. Such people are tolerable, if you like history as made by Corsican bridgards and other modern world-shakers.
...
Many historians, like many other intellectuals, long to be "relevant" to the specific problems of today. Thy flinch from acknowledging that the most useful lesson of history is highly general. It is: things have not always been as they are, and will not always be as they are. This is an especially important insight for Americans, who take for granted freedom and abundance, both of which are, considered in the sweep of history, rare and shortlived phenomena.
History contains more sadness than gladness, more dreams frustrated than fulfilled. But this means that the study of history is, for many historians, unacceptably unfun and unheroic. Like many other intellectuals, many historians want to believe that they are pregnant with the future. They want to dissolve the distinction between thought and action. They are, they think, deliverers: history will yield highly practical "lessons" that will propel manking to the uplands of happiness.
Many modern intellectuals, like optimists through the ages, recoil from this truth: the best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering dissapointments.
Optimists as different as Marxists and Americans believe in History- Americans call it Progress- as a linear process leading inexorably to higher stages of life. But if historians and other intellectuals were free from Promethean pretensions, young people at school would learn the unfun, unheroic truth that history is circular, like a maelstrom."
-George Will, "Inoculation by History"
"FDR's New Deal broke with nineteenth-century liberalism (which is what passes for conservatism today) by abandoning the premise that society, as distinguished sharply from government, produces the elements of happiness in life, and that government's role is merely to maintain a framework of order in which people pursue happiness. What was new about the New Deal was the notion that government had a duty to provide people with some, and more and more, of the tangible elements of happiness.
Long and forever gone are the days when it was thought that well-bring, economic and otherwise, should be solely the result of the individual's ability to cope with society, with social forces that government could not or should not regulate. The New Deal changed, irreversibly, Americans' expectations, and the legal and psychic relationship of Americans to their government.
This year some GOP conservatives seem to be trying, again, to turn an election into a referendum on the propriety of those expectations and that relationship. It is unclear how the GOP can benefit from so straight-on a challenge to the settled habits of mind of the American majority, which accepts the Rooseveltian premise that government should supply crucial elements of happiness.
The GOP challenge is a risky tactic against Carter, who calls to mind Disraeli's recommendation: Tory men and Whig measures. Carter is an unmistakably conservative person. The values he obviously cherishes and repeatedly invokes- piety, family, community, continuity, industriousness, discipline- are the soul of conservatism, The appeal of Carter to conservatives is in his aspiration to use government vigorously in the service of conservative values."
-George Will, "Odd Man In"
"Most UN members are police regimes. Many of these regimes rule over ersatz nations. Many use their energies to pound together human elements that lack cultural affinities. To such regimes Israel, a real nation, is either unintelligible or a reproach. Regimes resting on force are bound to find fault with the rich legitimizing sources of Israel's nationhood.
Israel became a nation after the United Nations was born. But in a sense Israel is one of the oldest nations (with Egypt and China) represented there. One hundred years hence, if historians bother to remember the UN at all, they may remember it as a mob of regimes representing force without legitimacy, all power and no authority, venting their rage against one of the few nations truly represented there."
-George Will, "Zionism and Legitimacy," 1975
"As Czechoslovakia, a democratic country, was accused of mistreating the German minority in the Sudeten region, so Israel, also a democratic country, is accused of mistreating the Arab minority within Israel itself and also, of course, in the occupied territories. As the creation of the Czechoslovak state after WW1 was called a mistake by Hitler and Chamberlain, so the creation of the Jewish state after WW2 is called a crime by contemporary totalitarians and their appeasers. The insistence by the Czechs that surrendering the Sudeten regions to Hitler would leave Czechoslovakia hopelessly vulnerable to military assualt was derided, especially on the Left, as a shortsighted reliance on the false security of territory and arms; so a similar insistence by the Israelis with regard to the occupied territories is treated today with lofty disdain by contemporary descendants of those believers in the irrelevance to a nation's security of territorial buffers and arms."
-Norman Podhoretz
"In Cambodia the Communists, running true to form, are concentrating their fury on the ultimate enemy of any Communist regime, the people. The Communists have emptied the cities, driving upwards of four million people- young and old, childing mothers and newborn babies, the healthy, halt and lame- on a forced march to nowhere, deep into the countryside where food is scarce and shelter is scarcer still. Even hospitals have been emptied, operations interrupted at gunpoint, doctors and patients sent packing. The Communists call this the "purification" of Cambodia.
This forced march will leave a trail of corpses, and many more at its destination, wherever that is. But that is, according to the Communists, not an atrocity, it is a stern "necessity."
The Detroit Free Press containted a droll (I hope it was meant to be droll) sub-headline on events in Cambodia: "Reds Decree Rural Society." If one kind of society offends you, decree another. Communism, like its totalitarian sibling, fascism, is the culmination of a modern heresy: people are plastic, infinitely malleable under determined pounding. And society is a tinker toy, its shape being whatever the ruling class decrees.
To create a New (Soviet, Chinese, German, Cambodian) Man- and what totalitarian would aim lower?- you must shatter the old man, ripping him from the community that nourishes him. Send him on a forced march into a forbidding future. He may die. If he survives he will be deracinated, demoralized, pliant.
There is no atrocity so gross that American voices will not pipe up in defense of it. Today they say: it is "cultural arrogance" for Americans to call this forced march an atrocity, when it is just different people pursuing their "vision."
This is the mock cosmopolitianism of the morally obtuse. Such people say: only "ideologically blinkered" Americans mistake stern idealism for an atrocity just because it involves the slaughter of innocents. Such people will never face the fact that most atrocities, and all the large ones, from the Thirty Years War through Biafra, have been acts of idealism.
Of course, one must not discount sheer blood lust, and the joy of bullying. Totalitarian governments rest on dumb philosophy and are sustained by secret police. But they are a bully's delight. Totalitarians have never been without apologists here, people who derice vicarious pleasure from watching- from a safe distance, of course; from the meadow, with ice cream bars, if possible- other people ground up by stern "necessities." Apologists say that totalitarians only want totalitarianism for the sake of the revolution. The apologists, being backward, have got things backward.
-George Will, "Famous Victory"
It's always good to be smacked back to reality by the consummate Tory.
"The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposted on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings."
-Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XV"
"In retrospect there is a quality of inevitability about the course he did puruse. But historians insist that the inevitable is inevitable only after man have made it happen."
-Teddy White, "The Making of the President, 1964"
"I just want to remind you, ladies and gentleman, of one proven fact in history, because we conservatives are always blamed for wanting to go backwards. That is not true. We just want to take a look at what has happened before we try it again. Because everything that this administration is trying today has been tried not by just our own government, but in other governments of the history of the world, and I remind you, they have never succeeded. A government that is big enough to give everything that you need and want is also big enough to take it all away."
-Barry Goldwater, 1964 campaign
"[Grits are] men...who tremble with anticipation because they have seen the rouged face of power."
-Pierre Trudeau
"But the Liberal Party is the greatest whorehouse in the western world and you know what happens when you try playing piano in the parlor of a place like that. Pretty soon, you're in the thick of the fray upstairs."
-Rene Levesque
"Quebec politicians have never been either Liberal or Conservative. They have always been simply and wholeheartedly French."
-Frank Underhill
"The philosophy of the Liberal Party is very simple- say anything, think anything, or better still, do not think at all, but put us in power because it is we who can govern you best."
-Pierre Trudeau
"The Liberal Party has no dogma. Its creed is unity- national unity and party unity."
-Michael Pitfield
"The Liberal Party is like a high-powered fraternity. It rushes the most promising young men in every generation. And then it demands their absolute loyalty."
-Wilson Parasiuk
""It's the League for Social Reconstruction all over again," they would say. "Those people will get sick of it, always sitting there on the Opposition benches yelling across the floor. There's a limit to altruism. If you can't win, you can't get any policies effected, no matter how high-minded or well-meaning they are.""
-Christina McCall
When shown a genealogy of the Bonaparte family, Napoleon brushed it aside, remarking: "Je suis mon propre ancetre" (I am my own ancestor. Considering the scale of Napoleon's vanity, and the nature of that genealogy, his rejection of it was understandable. But his rejection also reflected the modern disdain for history as "the dead hand of the past."
Napoleon is the archetypal modern man of action, a bloody nuisance ricocheting around civilization, making history and orphans. He made so much history because he knew so little. He traveled fast because he traveled little, unencumbered by an educated person's sense of limitations, the sense that is the bittersweet fruit of historical understanding. Such people are tolerable, if you like history as made by Corsican bridgards and other modern world-shakers.
...
Many historians, like many other intellectuals, long to be "relevant" to the specific problems of today. Thy flinch from acknowledging that the most useful lesson of history is highly general. It is: things have not always been as they are, and will not always be as they are. This is an especially important insight for Americans, who take for granted freedom and abundance, both of which are, considered in the sweep of history, rare and shortlived phenomena.
History contains more sadness than gladness, more dreams frustrated than fulfilled. But this means that the study of history is, for many historians, unacceptably unfun and unheroic. Like many other intellectuals, many historians want to believe that they are pregnant with the future. They want to dissolve the distinction between thought and action. They are, they think, deliverers: history will yield highly practical "lessons" that will propel manking to the uplands of happiness.
Many modern intellectuals, like optimists through the ages, recoil from this truth: the best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering dissapointments.
Optimists as different as Marxists and Americans believe in History- Americans call it Progress- as a linear process leading inexorably to higher stages of life. But if historians and other intellectuals were free from Promethean pretensions, young people at school would learn the unfun, unheroic truth that history is circular, like a maelstrom."
-George Will, "Inoculation by History"
"FDR's New Deal broke with nineteenth-century liberalism (which is what passes for conservatism today) by abandoning the premise that society, as distinguished sharply from government, produces the elements of happiness in life, and that government's role is merely to maintain a framework of order in which people pursue happiness. What was new about the New Deal was the notion that government had a duty to provide people with some, and more and more, of the tangible elements of happiness.
Long and forever gone are the days when it was thought that well-bring, economic and otherwise, should be solely the result of the individual's ability to cope with society, with social forces that government could not or should not regulate. The New Deal changed, irreversibly, Americans' expectations, and the legal and psychic relationship of Americans to their government.
This year some GOP conservatives seem to be trying, again, to turn an election into a referendum on the propriety of those expectations and that relationship. It is unclear how the GOP can benefit from so straight-on a challenge to the settled habits of mind of the American majority, which accepts the Rooseveltian premise that government should supply crucial elements of happiness.
The GOP challenge is a risky tactic against Carter, who calls to mind Disraeli's recommendation: Tory men and Whig measures. Carter is an unmistakably conservative person. The values he obviously cherishes and repeatedly invokes- piety, family, community, continuity, industriousness, discipline- are the soul of conservatism, The appeal of Carter to conservatives is in his aspiration to use government vigorously in the service of conservative values."
-George Will, "Odd Man In"
"Most UN members are police regimes. Many of these regimes rule over ersatz nations. Many use their energies to pound together human elements that lack cultural affinities. To such regimes Israel, a real nation, is either unintelligible or a reproach. Regimes resting on force are bound to find fault with the rich legitimizing sources of Israel's nationhood.
Israel became a nation after the United Nations was born. But in a sense Israel is one of the oldest nations (with Egypt and China) represented there. One hundred years hence, if historians bother to remember the UN at all, they may remember it as a mob of regimes representing force without legitimacy, all power and no authority, venting their rage against one of the few nations truly represented there."
-George Will, "Zionism and Legitimacy," 1975
"As Czechoslovakia, a democratic country, was accused of mistreating the German minority in the Sudeten region, so Israel, also a democratic country, is accused of mistreating the Arab minority within Israel itself and also, of course, in the occupied territories. As the creation of the Czechoslovak state after WW1 was called a mistake by Hitler and Chamberlain, so the creation of the Jewish state after WW2 is called a crime by contemporary totalitarians and their appeasers. The insistence by the Czechs that surrendering the Sudeten regions to Hitler would leave Czechoslovakia hopelessly vulnerable to military assualt was derided, especially on the Left, as a shortsighted reliance on the false security of territory and arms; so a similar insistence by the Israelis with regard to the occupied territories is treated today with lofty disdain by contemporary descendants of those believers in the irrelevance to a nation's security of territorial buffers and arms."
-Norman Podhoretz
"In Cambodia the Communists, running true to form, are concentrating their fury on the ultimate enemy of any Communist regime, the people. The Communists have emptied the cities, driving upwards of four million people- young and old, childing mothers and newborn babies, the healthy, halt and lame- on a forced march to nowhere, deep into the countryside where food is scarce and shelter is scarcer still. Even hospitals have been emptied, operations interrupted at gunpoint, doctors and patients sent packing. The Communists call this the "purification" of Cambodia.
This forced march will leave a trail of corpses, and many more at its destination, wherever that is. But that is, according to the Communists, not an atrocity, it is a stern "necessity."
The Detroit Free Press containted a droll (I hope it was meant to be droll) sub-headline on events in Cambodia: "Reds Decree Rural Society." If one kind of society offends you, decree another. Communism, like its totalitarian sibling, fascism, is the culmination of a modern heresy: people are plastic, infinitely malleable under determined pounding. And society is a tinker toy, its shape being whatever the ruling class decrees.
To create a New (Soviet, Chinese, German, Cambodian) Man- and what totalitarian would aim lower?- you must shatter the old man, ripping him from the community that nourishes him. Send him on a forced march into a forbidding future. He may die. If he survives he will be deracinated, demoralized, pliant.
There is no atrocity so gross that American voices will not pipe up in defense of it. Today they say: it is "cultural arrogance" for Americans to call this forced march an atrocity, when it is just different people pursuing their "vision."
This is the mock cosmopolitianism of the morally obtuse. Such people say: only "ideologically blinkered" Americans mistake stern idealism for an atrocity just because it involves the slaughter of innocents. Such people will never face the fact that most atrocities, and all the large ones, from the Thirty Years War through Biafra, have been acts of idealism.
Of course, one must not discount sheer blood lust, and the joy of bullying. Totalitarian governments rest on dumb philosophy and are sustained by secret police. But they are a bully's delight. Totalitarians have never been without apologists here, people who derice vicarious pleasure from watching- from a safe distance, of course; from the meadow, with ice cream bars, if possible- other people ground up by stern "necessities." Apologists say that totalitarians only want totalitarianism for the sake of the revolution. The apologists, being backward, have got things backward.
-George Will, "Famous Victory"
It's always good to be smacked back to reality by the consummate Tory.
"The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposted on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings."
-Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XV"
"In retrospect there is a quality of inevitability about the course he did puruse. But historians insist that the inevitable is inevitable only after man have made it happen."
-Teddy White, "The Making of the President, 1964"
"I just want to remind you, ladies and gentleman, of one proven fact in history, because we conservatives are always blamed for wanting to go backwards. That is not true. We just want to take a look at what has happened before we try it again. Because everything that this administration is trying today has been tried not by just our own government, but in other governments of the history of the world, and I remind you, they have never succeeded. A government that is big enough to give everything that you need and want is also big enough to take it all away."
-Barry Goldwater, 1964 campaign
"[Grits are] men...who tremble with anticipation because they have seen the rouged face of power."
-Pierre Trudeau
"But the Liberal Party is the greatest whorehouse in the western world and you know what happens when you try playing piano in the parlor of a place like that. Pretty soon, you're in the thick of the fray upstairs."
-Rene Levesque
"Quebec politicians have never been either Liberal or Conservative. They have always been simply and wholeheartedly French."
-Frank Underhill
"The philosophy of the Liberal Party is very simple- say anything, think anything, or better still, do not think at all, but put us in power because it is we who can govern you best."
-Pierre Trudeau
"The Liberal Party has no dogma. Its creed is unity- national unity and party unity."
-Michael Pitfield
"The Liberal Party is like a high-powered fraternity. It rushes the most promising young men in every generation. And then it demands their absolute loyalty."
-Wilson Parasiuk
""It's the League for Social Reconstruction all over again," they would say. "Those people will get sick of it, always sitting there on the Opposition benches yelling across the floor. There's a limit to altruism. If you can't win, you can't get any policies effected, no matter how high-minded or well-meaning they are.""
-Christina McCall
Friday, June 1, 2007
Antipathy to capitalism is of legendary proportions, especially among the classes whose status is higher under aristocracies and dictatorships: aristocrats, clergy, scholars, artists, and of course government officials. Working people tend to prefer democratic capitalism which, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci pointed out, quickly raises them into the middle class. Thus, even now that Marxism has been discredited as a social ideal, we may expect new forms of anticapitalism to appear. Eric Voegelin once pointed out that Marxism is a species of gnosticism, that is, a perfectionism (“the paradise of the proletariat”) access to which depends upon a privileged form of knowledge (gnosis, in this case “scientific socialism”) that makes a certain elite superior to everybody else. Gnosticism also implies a certain impatience with the human body, with imperfections, with democratic politics and the slow procedures of persuasion, with compromise, and (in short) with the human condition. Now that Marxism is no longer a credible vehicle for this underlying passion, what will replace it?
In 1990, it seems already clear that antimodern passions run high; even a passion for primitivism is again in evidence. Similar signs were present in the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century, notably in the operas of Richard Wagner. In the origins of totalitarianism, especially in Italy and Germany, the call of the primitive was quite important, including the cult of unspoiled nature. No doubt, the passions of National Socialism are as dead as the passions of communism. But the underlying sensibility is still very much alive. Capable of assuming a great many shapes, perhaps the cult of nature will be put to creative use in the environmental movement. That movement, however, has already shown many signs of hatred for business corporations, industry, property, and even- on a different plane of reality- the idea of “progress.” Its tendency to turn on the power of the state to enforce its own passions is also manifest. One can predict with some certainty that environmentalism is likely to replace Marxism as the main carrier of gnosticism (and anticapitalism) in the near future.
This is not, of course, inevitable. Environmentalists could conclude that the new forms of awareness they are teaching the public can best be served by a free and inventive economy. Whatever the public wants, industry has an incentive to invent a way of supplying. Given the widespread desire for environmental protection now growing in the public mind, a shrewd investor might even anticipate on the part of business corporations an outpouring of new technologies, approaches, products, and processes, around which entire new environmental-minded industries may come into existence. As the public becomes willing to pay for environmental enhancement, ways to achieve it will be swiftly invented. That is already happening. The newer the factory, the cleaner in tends to be; the more recent the product, the more “environment friendly.” Meanwhile, the public as a whole will not wish to abolish the benefits of modernity- the medical benefits especially- even though some extremists might. Environmental activists will want television for their messages and please, and airplanes to carry them to international conferences. An environmentally conscious industry will thus have plenty to do; the question is only whether environmentalists will perceive it as an ally or not.
Many environmentalists are, of course, conservatives quite committed to the capitalist economy, but many others are hostile to capitalism. The latter might wish to consider two points: First, the dire state of environmental protections both in socialist and in traditionalist (third world) countries; and second, the fact that no other system is as likely to produce the wealth necessary for environmental protections as democratic capitalist systems.
Another frequently overlooked source of the anticapiatlist leaning is the ancient and medieval experience of wealth as a zero-sum game: what some gained, others lost. Wealth was then thought to lie solely in land and gold coin and precious objects, and was usually acquired by plunder, conquest, or favor. In this context such aphorisms arose as Radix malorum est cupiditas (“Cupidity is the root of evils”); “Property is theft”; and “The rich get richer, the poor poorer.”
A third strain of this anticapitalist leaning is communicated through illusions about the precapitalist system. Not much has changed in the harsh life of the poor from the time of Christ until the realities of France as described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables. Similarly, before 1989 critics of capitalism seldom counted the moral and economic costs of socialism; they gave it the benefit of their dreams. Admittedly, the morality of democratic capitalism is low when compared with the supernatural standards of Christianity and other codes of spiritual perfection. But its daily practice in supplying opportunity to the poor is superior to the daily practice of any other historical system, traditional or socialist. It does not pretend to offer a moral paradise, only greater liberties and more flexible supports for moral living than any other system. It brings temptations, but also incredibly high moral possibilities. That is why people migrate in such numbers and with such passion toward it.
A fourth source of anticapitalist leaning is to associate capitalism solely with material things, with commodities, with objects. This is the usage of Karl Marx; it is also the usage adopted by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Laborem Exercens. To take this approach, however, is to overlook the spirit of capitalism, its dynamic principle, its central commitment to practical intellect: to invention, discovery, reasoned cooperation, and the intellectual and moral virtue of enterprise. Were the impulse of capitalism solely materialistic, the system would have long since fallen into narcissism, hedonism, and death. This was the theory of Marx; namely that the alienation inherent in the system would drive the workers to “narcissism” or, in the current Marxist lingo, “consumerism.” Instead, the spirit of capitalism seems constantly to reinvigorate itself, to work revolution after revolution in technological possibility (mechanical, industrial, and electronic), and to inspire creativity in every sphere of life. It is a system designed to arouse and to liberate, no the body, but the creative soul. It arouses even the high ideals of those who disdain the “consumerism” they think affects others.
Communism taught citizens to respect one moral principle alone: total subjection to the power of party rule. Nothing else mattered, neither truth nor fairness nor competence. However lazy, incompetent, immoral, or even criminal one’s behavior might be judged under other systems, under communism no burden of guilt had to be borne for it, so long as one was recognized as a loyal, obedient follower of the party. The polluting of the natural environment of Eastern Europe, the corruption of the moral ethos, and the relentless spending down of the capital stock of communist countries has left behind a wasteland- except for one thing. Somehow the love for liberty survived. Human nature has asserted itself, like green shoots at the end of winter. How to give moral nurture to those shoots is now on the world’s agenda. A huge moral task lies before us.
-Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
In 1990, it seems already clear that antimodern passions run high; even a passion for primitivism is again in evidence. Similar signs were present in the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century, notably in the operas of Richard Wagner. In the origins of totalitarianism, especially in Italy and Germany, the call of the primitive was quite important, including the cult of unspoiled nature. No doubt, the passions of National Socialism are as dead as the passions of communism. But the underlying sensibility is still very much alive. Capable of assuming a great many shapes, perhaps the cult of nature will be put to creative use in the environmental movement. That movement, however, has already shown many signs of hatred for business corporations, industry, property, and even- on a different plane of reality- the idea of “progress.” Its tendency to turn on the power of the state to enforce its own passions is also manifest. One can predict with some certainty that environmentalism is likely to replace Marxism as the main carrier of gnosticism (and anticapitalism) in the near future.
This is not, of course, inevitable. Environmentalists could conclude that the new forms of awareness they are teaching the public can best be served by a free and inventive economy. Whatever the public wants, industry has an incentive to invent a way of supplying. Given the widespread desire for environmental protection now growing in the public mind, a shrewd investor might even anticipate on the part of business corporations an outpouring of new technologies, approaches, products, and processes, around which entire new environmental-minded industries may come into existence. As the public becomes willing to pay for environmental enhancement, ways to achieve it will be swiftly invented. That is already happening. The newer the factory, the cleaner in tends to be; the more recent the product, the more “environment friendly.” Meanwhile, the public as a whole will not wish to abolish the benefits of modernity- the medical benefits especially- even though some extremists might. Environmental activists will want television for their messages and please, and airplanes to carry them to international conferences. An environmentally conscious industry will thus have plenty to do; the question is only whether environmentalists will perceive it as an ally or not.
Many environmentalists are, of course, conservatives quite committed to the capitalist economy, but many others are hostile to capitalism. The latter might wish to consider two points: First, the dire state of environmental protections both in socialist and in traditionalist (third world) countries; and second, the fact that no other system is as likely to produce the wealth necessary for environmental protections as democratic capitalist systems.
Another frequently overlooked source of the anticapiatlist leaning is the ancient and medieval experience of wealth as a zero-sum game: what some gained, others lost. Wealth was then thought to lie solely in land and gold coin and precious objects, and was usually acquired by plunder, conquest, or favor. In this context such aphorisms arose as Radix malorum est cupiditas (“Cupidity is the root of evils”); “Property is theft”; and “The rich get richer, the poor poorer.”
A third strain of this anticapitalist leaning is communicated through illusions about the precapitalist system. Not much has changed in the harsh life of the poor from the time of Christ until the realities of France as described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables. Similarly, before 1989 critics of capitalism seldom counted the moral and economic costs of socialism; they gave it the benefit of their dreams. Admittedly, the morality of democratic capitalism is low when compared with the supernatural standards of Christianity and other codes of spiritual perfection. But its daily practice in supplying opportunity to the poor is superior to the daily practice of any other historical system, traditional or socialist. It does not pretend to offer a moral paradise, only greater liberties and more flexible supports for moral living than any other system. It brings temptations, but also incredibly high moral possibilities. That is why people migrate in such numbers and with such passion toward it.
A fourth source of anticapitalist leaning is to associate capitalism solely with material things, with commodities, with objects. This is the usage of Karl Marx; it is also the usage adopted by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Laborem Exercens. To take this approach, however, is to overlook the spirit of capitalism, its dynamic principle, its central commitment to practical intellect: to invention, discovery, reasoned cooperation, and the intellectual and moral virtue of enterprise. Were the impulse of capitalism solely materialistic, the system would have long since fallen into narcissism, hedonism, and death. This was the theory of Marx; namely that the alienation inherent in the system would drive the workers to “narcissism” or, in the current Marxist lingo, “consumerism.” Instead, the spirit of capitalism seems constantly to reinvigorate itself, to work revolution after revolution in technological possibility (mechanical, industrial, and electronic), and to inspire creativity in every sphere of life. It is a system designed to arouse and to liberate, no the body, but the creative soul. It arouses even the high ideals of those who disdain the “consumerism” they think affects others.
Communism taught citizens to respect one moral principle alone: total subjection to the power of party rule. Nothing else mattered, neither truth nor fairness nor competence. However lazy, incompetent, immoral, or even criminal one’s behavior might be judged under other systems, under communism no burden of guilt had to be borne for it, so long as one was recognized as a loyal, obedient follower of the party. The polluting of the natural environment of Eastern Europe, the corruption of the moral ethos, and the relentless spending down of the capital stock of communist countries has left behind a wasteland- except for one thing. Somehow the love for liberty survived. Human nature has asserted itself, like green shoots at the end of winter. How to give moral nurture to those shoots is now on the world’s agenda. A huge moral task lies before us.
-Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
"The universe is very, very big. It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules. Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever. Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies.
Rule number two: Everything lasts forever. For example, George was made up of billions of atoms, some of which had, at various times, been parts of, among other things, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a red felt hat, and some porridge. In a staggering coincidence, Claudette had a few atoms of that same bowl of porridge in her system. It had been served to Alexander the Great during his campaign in Afghanistan. He loved porridge.
Perhaps that was the key to the attraction between George and Claudette- their shared porridge molecules. It makes as much sense as anything else that goes on between men and women."
-Craig Ferguson, pg 108 "Between the Bridge and the River"
Rule number two: Everything lasts forever. For example, George was made up of billions of atoms, some of which had, at various times, been parts of, among other things, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a red felt hat, and some porridge. In a staggering coincidence, Claudette had a few atoms of that same bowl of porridge in her system. It had been served to Alexander the Great during his campaign in Afghanistan. He loved porridge.
Perhaps that was the key to the attraction between George and Claudette- their shared porridge molecules. It makes as much sense as anything else that goes on between men and women."
-Craig Ferguson, pg 108 "Between the Bridge and the River"
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