"It Takes a Family to Raise a Village"

Jennifer Roback Morse:

It takes a family to raise a village. Without the family, the village itself can not function. If the family breaks down, or fails to form in the first place, the “village” can not possibly provide adequate help to repair the damage. In any good society, the government must do what only the government can do: keep order internally and externally, enforce agreements and defend property rights. The market must do what only the market can do: create wealth and provide employment by combining goods and services that satisfy consumers. But only the family can create the next generation of human beings who will become citizens and consumers.

The Religion of Environmentalism

Freeman Dyson:

All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the be-lief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

U.S. Not a "Christian Republic"

Richard Reeb:

IS THE U.S. FOUNDED ON CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES?

Thanks for forwarding that item on this question. I agree with its sentiments, and liked its common sense approach. I certainly agree that our country has departed from our founding principles. I do not agree, however, that the foundation of our regime is "The Gospel of Jesus Christ." I believe that our founding principles are rooted in and directly derived from the natural law, not the Gospel as such except indirectly. This distinction is important because the natural law foundation allows non-Christians to be citizens of the Republic and to hold elective or appointed offices in good conscience. Ours is not a sectarian regime. The Constitution establishes no religious test either for office or for citizenship. Our regime was not founded to be a new Christendom. It forbids the establishment of religion while protecting its free exercise.

This does not mean that our Founders intended to found a secular regime, as that term is understood today. They did not mean to kick God out of the public square. They believed that self-government in the political sense is dependent on government of himself by each citizen. And they believed that individual self-government requires virtue and morality in each citizen, both of which are impossible for most humans without religion. The regime they intended was not hostile to religion, but dependent upon it if it were to long endure. Also, the Founders believed that for the most part there is no contradiction between Christianity and the natural law with respect to morality.

Did you know that the Declaration of Independence explicitly recognizes God in four places, and in four roles?

1. God as Law-Giver: "The laws of nature and nature's God" justify this act of separation (i.e. revolution) and distinguish it from mere rebellion.

2. God as Creator: "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...." (God created us and made us naturally equal [only] in that respect.)

3. God as Supreme Judge: "Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions...." (You can judge the rectitude of our action because the facts of our situation and the principles of natural law are accessible to reason. But only God can know our real intentions, so judge them and us--as indeed He will.)

4. God as Providence: "[F]or the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour." (You can also believe that our intentions are right and honorable because we stake all on this endeavor, even our sacred honor. You should support us because our just cause will be vindicated by Divine Providence, which governs all and protects men of good will.)

The theology of the Declaration is a natural theology grounded in both the laws of nature and the laws of nature's God. [The latter "laws" could be a reference to Revelation and the laws knowable only by Faith ( e.g., in "The Gospel of Jesus Christ"). But I doubt it. More probably it is a reference to the fact that the natural law is not morally obligatory if not rooted in Divine command (which is law to his creatures), or in what St. Thomas [Aquinas] called "the eternal law."] I believe that the Declaration's principles and argument refute the claims of the Secularists who would kick God out of our politics, laws, and customs. Nor do they support the claims of those Christians who proclaim that our regime is founded on the Gospel or its Christian principles. Compatibility is one thing; identity is another.

Our regime does not recognize a triune God whose essence is love. Our regime is ordered to freedom and justice, not to the advent of the Kingdom of God. Nor does our regime command either love of God or love of neighbor as does the Gospel. Finally, Christ founded a Church, not a polity. Salvation is to be found only in Christ and through Christ. It is not to be found in politics, or through politics, or through the founding or reconstitution of the political and social order. That belief is idolatry.

(I realize that the author of the item you sent did not preach that idolatry , and was not endorsing those Christians who have reduced Christianity to "The Social Gospel.")

Jonathan Rauch reviews Brian C. Anderson's Democratic Capitalism and its Discontents:

Like his intellectual mentor Alexis de Tocqueville, and unlike so many of today’s red-meat, red-state right-wingers, Anderson is no triumphalist tub-thumper for capitalism or democracy. Both, he recognizes, are far better than the alternatives; but both, unchecked, can set in motion cultural forces — anomie, dependency, ruthless egalitarianism — that corrode soul and society alike. Like Jouvenel, Anderson holds with a worldly-wise anti-utopianism whose lineage goes back to the very origins of conservative thought. If more of today’s conservatives had heeded its cautions, they might not have been so surprised to see Iraq’s unstructured liberation turn sour.

Karl Popper once wrote, “The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.” For Anderson, conservatism’s stewardship of that truth is the source of both the movement’s indispensable strength and its intrinsic weakness. Conservatism can keep us out of trouble by warning against the fanciful idealisms of the left (communism), the right (fascism) and the ultrareligious (bin Ladenism), but it cannot scratch humanity’s perpetual itch for a Promised Land free of hunger, pain, conflict and grubby politics. “There is no ultimate solution in politics, only temporary ‘settlements,’ ” Anderson writes, affirming Jouvenel, who affirmed Aristotle (“Man is by nature a political animal”). To read Anderson at his luminous best is to be reminded of conservatism at its wisest — not least in its understanding of its own limitations.

Barone's Theory of History

Michael Barone:

The natural state of America, in my theory, is decentralized toleration: We stand together because we can live apart. We are, most of the time, the nation described by Alexis de Tocqueville, made up of various ethnic, religious, and racial strands who believe fervently that we can live and triumph together if we allow one another to observe our local mores. We can embody David Hackett Fischer's "four British folkways" and at the same time be a united people. There's a tension in that, which threatens to come apart. In the midcentury America of the 1850s, the threat was that we would come apart: We had an explosive political conflagration over the issue of slavery in the territories and an explosive ethnic conflagration in the decade that had the largest immigrant influx, in percentage of pre-existing population, of any decade in our history. Citations: Kenneth Stampp's America in 1857; the opening chapters in James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. And in fact, we produced a civil war.

We had the opposite situation in the midcentury America of the 1950s. After the shared experiences of the Depression and World War II, with universal institutions like the comprehensive high school, the military draft, and the big factory workforces represented by giant industrial unions, we were a culturally more uniform country than we have been before or since. We were a nation of conformism, of the regular guy, of the average guy who gets along with his peers. Citations: David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd; William H. Whyte's The Organization Man. It was a society, to take one example, far more hostile to homosexuality: The midcentury society of the 1850s could evidently tolerate Ishmael and Queequeeg sleeping together in Moby Dick and the poems of Walt Whitman, while the midcentury society of the 1950s cast its eyes away from the obvious gayness of the early Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and Roy Cohn.

The Civil War, the imposition of New England Yankee mores in the way described by Morton Keller, and the creation of national business and professional organizations described by Robert Wiebe in The Search for Order 1877-1910 reversed the extreme decentralization of the 1850s. The cultural rebellions, to the left and the right, described recently in neat form by Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance reversed the extreme centralization of the 1950s.

For those of us who grew up in the backwash of the 1950s, this decentralization seemed like an abandonment of American tradition. In the long line of history, I think it is more like a reversion to norm. The seeming inconsistency of currently prevailing attitudes on marriage and divorce, gambling and drinking, cigarette smoking and marijuana smoking, is part of the continuing turmoil of a decentralized society. The results don't cohere, but perhaps that is to be expected in a society like ours.

Kennedy Assassination: Ideological Turning Point of Democratic Party

Rich Lowry:

In his eye-opening new book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution," Jim Piereson argues The Fall was the assassination of President Kennedy. It represented more than the tragic death of a young president, but the descent of liberalism from an optimistic creed focused on pragmatic improvements in the American condition to a darker philosophy obsessed with America's sins. Echoes of the assassination -- and the meaning attributed to it by JFK's admirers -- can still be heard in the querulous tones of contemporary liberalism.

The real John F. Kennedy wasn't the paladin of liberal purity of myth. He was friends with Joseph McCarthy. In his 1952 campaign for Senate and his 1960 presidential campaign, he got to the right of his Republican opponents on key issues. "Kennedy did not want anyone to tag him as a liberal, which he regarded as the kiss of death in electoral politics," Piereson writes. As president, he was vigorously anti-communist, a tax-cutter and a cautious supporter of civil rights.

His kind of liberalism -- "tough and realistic," as Piereson puts it, in the tradition of FDR and Truman -- was carried away in the riptide of his death. In a crucial and counterintuitive interpretive act, the nation's opinion elite made JFK a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Kennedy had been killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, who a few years before had tried to defect to the Soviet Union. Liberals nonetheless blamed the assassination on, in the characteristic words of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots."

Thus, the assassination curdled into an indictment of American society: "Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation," read a New York Times headline. Until this point, 20th-century liberalism had tended to see history as a steady march of progress. Now, the march had been interrupted by the country's own pathologies. "Kennedy was mourned in a spirit of frustrated possibility and dashed hopes," Piereson argues, and that sense of loss came to define the new liberalism.

Will: Countering Modern Liberalism

George Will:

Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism's ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party's interest in pleasing its most powerful faction -- public employees and their unions. Conservatism's rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today's proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes -- a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living -- that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenue in an aging society, requires.

This reasoning is congruent with conservatism's argument that excessively benevolent government is not a benefactor, and that capitalism does not merely make people better off, it makes them better. Liberalism once argued that large corporate entities of industrial capitalism degraded individuals by breeding dependence, passivity and servility. Conservatism challenges liberalism's blindness about the comparable dangers from the biggest social entity, government.

Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and the Welfare State

George Will:

Two decades ago, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote about "the cultural contradictions of capitalism" to express this worry: Capitalism flourishes because of virtues that its flourishing undermines. Its success requires thrift, industriousness and deferral of gratifications, but that success produces abundance, expanding leisure and the emancipation of appetites, all of which weaken capitalism's moral prerequisites.

The cultural contradictions of welfare states are comparable. Such states presuppose economic dynamism sufficient to generate investments, job creation, corporate profits and individuals' incomes from which comes tax revenue needed to fund entitlements.

But welfare states produce in citizens an entitlement mentality and a low pain threshold. That mentality inflames appetites for more entitlements, broadly construed to include all government benefits and protections that contribute to welfare understood as material well-being, enhanced security and enlarged leisure.

The low pain threshold causes a ruinous flinch from the rigors, insecurities, uncertainties and dislocations inherent in the creative destruction of dynamic capitalism. The flinch takes the form of protectionism, regulations and other government-imposed inefficiencies that impede the economic growth that the welfare state requires.

So welfare states are, paradoxically, both enervating and energizing -- and infantilizing. They are enervating because they foster dependency; they are energizing because they aggravate an aggressive (think of burning Peugeots) sense of entitlement; they are infantilizing because it is infantile to will an end without willing the means to that end, and people who desire welfare states increasingly desire relief from the rigors necessary to finance them.

Mansfield on Reforming PoliSci

Harvey Mansfield:

Human greatness is the height of human importance, where the best that humans can do is tested, and it is the work of great individuals. The great Tocqueville—and I refuse to give a lecture on politics without mentioning his name—alluded to himself and his favorite readers as “the true friends of liberty and human greatness.” Somehow liberty and human greatness go together, a hint that nature cares only for the human species and leaves its greatness to be revealed by free human action, by our assertiveness prompted by thumos. To be great one must become great, requiring an effort of ambition. Not everyone has that ambition; most of us are content with modest careers in safe niches, like tenured professors. But we all feel ambition in our small ways, and, moreover, we know something of great ambition when admiring it. Now it may be hard to believe, but I must tell you that the political science of our day almost entirely ignores ambition. It is, for example, anxious over the problem of how to recover our spirit of civil engagement, but it looks mostly at what moves most people to vote, which it calls by the vague term “participation.” The trouble is that ambition smacks of greatness; it is not average enough to be the object of a science that knows nothing of individuality, hence nothing of greatness. Even the word “great” is unscientific because it is pretentious. But we human beings are animals with pretensions.

My profession needs to open its eyes and admit to its curriculum the help of literature and history. It should be unafraid to risk considering what is ignored by science and may lack the approval of science. The humanities too, whose professors often suffer from a faint heart, need to recover their faith in what is individual and their courage to defend it. Thumos is not merely theoretical. To learn of it will improve your life as well as your thinking. It is up to you to improve your life by behaving as if it were important, but let me provide a summary of the things that you will know better after reflecting on the nature of thumos: the contrast between anger and gain; the insistence on victory; the function of protectiveness; the stubbornness of partisanship; the role of assertiveness; the ever-presence of one’s own; the task of religion; the result of individuality; the ambition of greatness. Altogether thumos is one basis for a human science aware of the body but not bound to it, a science with soul and taught by poetry well interpreted.

Dalrymple On Virtue

(Via Dale Light) Theodore Dalrymple:

The assault on freedom in Britain in the name of social welfare is an illustration of something that the American founding fathers understood, but that is not very congenial to the temper of our times: that in the long run, only a population that strives for virtue (with at least a degree of success) will be able to maintain its freedom. A nation whose individuals choose vice rather than virtue as the guiding principle of their lives will not long remain free, because it will need rescuing from the consequences of its own vices.

....

One of the destructive consequences of the spread of sociological modes of thought is that it has transferred the notion of virtue from individuals to social structures, and in so doing has made personal striving for virtue (as against happiness) not merely unnecessary but ridiculous and even bad, insofar as it diverted attention from the real task at hand, that of creating the perfect society: the society so perfect, as T S Eliot put it, that no one will have to be good.

A New Vermont Republic?

A couple Vermonters--one an original Green Mountain Boy-type and the other a "flatlander"--recently plead their case for the secession of Vermont:

Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans' fundamental freedoms.

Actually, their call to the founders is interesting. At first, many didn't think that a Republic could be effective in anything other than a small state. Machiavelli and Montesquieu come to mind as two thinkers who held this view. Maybe they were right?

Sinclair: The Political Right's Separation Anxiety

Mathew Sinclair at TCS:

Thus conservatism can strengthen liberalism by defending its gains in times of plenty. In return, classical liberals can give direction to conservatism and offer it prescriptions in hard times. For this co-operation to work the right-wing movement needs to do two things. First, libertarians and conservatives need to recognise that their movements are quite compatible and be understanding when we frustrate each other. When libertarians cry "faster" or conservatives "slow down" we should understand that sometimes it is necessary that we not get what we want. Second, they need to get better at shifting the emphasis between the two movements as conditions change.

Intellectual Opposition to the Military

James Holmes updates Robert Nozick's decade-old essay "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" by asking if--and why--they oppose the military. Good question:

Do intellectuals' attitudes even matter, given their predilection for the abstract over the concrete and for ideas over action? Yes, says Nozick. While wordsmiths cannot dictate the outcome of national discourse, they do set the terms of debate.

"They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly on the explicit formulation and dissemination of information."

Nozick left his inquiry open-ended, commending it to the study of social scientists, and so will I. Some enterprising social scientist ought to examine these matters in a sustained, rigorous manner. If wordsmith intellectuals indeed frame debates on affairs of state-in particular war and peace-then their views and prejudices must be taken into account in public discourse. Our system of civil-military relations could depend on it.

Giulianni's Appeal to Conservatives

Michael Brandon McClellan:

Giuliani's enduring image is more conservative than McCain's. At the risk of oversimplifying, it is perhaps fair to say that Giuliani's image is loudly conservative and quietly moderate, whereas McCain's image is loudly moderate and quietly conservative.

Michael Barone also examines how Rudy compares favorably to Hillary:

Rudy's electoral vote position against Hillary is much stronger than Bush's against Kerry. Rudy puts almost the whole East into play and is significantly stronger in several target states in the Midwest and West. Hillary puts some states into play in the South but with many fewer electoral votes than Rudy does elsewhere. Even if you assume that Hillary is stronger against Rudy today than she was in July, the pairing does place the Republicans in a stronger position than Bush was in '04.

Father Thomas D. Williams and the Catholic Ideology of Progress

Fr. Thomas D. Williams:

The Enlightenment had taken the idea of progress as its leitmotiv, preaching a secular humanism that would usher in an age of reason, where religion would be replaced by science...the Enlightenment...also had a marked materialistic and anti-religious dimension as well. Man became his own savior, able to resolve his own problems, and no longer needful of a transcendent and personal God.

Nineteenth-century ideologies built on many of the aspects of the Enlightenment, and came to see progress as a necessary and inexorable phenomenon, an expression of Darwinian evolutionism...Add to the mix Hegel's philosophy of dialectical progress, whereby society necessarily progresses through conflict -- thesis, antithesis and synthesis -- and we had the perfect setup for the tragic totalitarian experiments of the 20th century...

....as Paul VI taught in "Populorum Progressio," the Christian idea of progress is not merely material or technological....If a society doesn't advance in goodness, in justice and in love, it doesn't truly advance....Christians do not see human progress as a necessary phenomenon....Moving forward in time doesn't guarantee that we are moving forward in virtue....because progress isn't automatic, all of us must take responsibility for the direction our society takes. We are not simply swept along by the winds of change; each of us also influences the direction our culture takes....As Christians we believe that each of us has a specific vocation and a mission to fulfill. In this context, progress means doing our part to bring about the Kingdom of Christ in human society.

Finally, the progress of the earthly city does not exhaust the human condition. No matter how much human society progresses, our temporal existence will come to an end. We are called to eternal life in Christ. True progress must take into account man's spiritual dimension and transcendent vocation as a child of God destined for heaven.

Kling: Human Behavior is More than Self-Interest

Arnold Kling:

Economics should be subsumed under the general study of human behavior, not the other way around....I have no sympathy for the economic imperialists who insist that every action must be explained in terms of the rational, self-interested calculator. Instead, I would start with the presumption that every action can be explained in terms of habits, customs, and the like. Making rational economic decisions is just one of many habits. Rational, economic behavior is like a hat. Sometimes we wear the hat, and sometimes we do not.

I also have no sympathy for behavioral economics. All it does is take the rational, individualistic model and extend it to include common biases and mistakes. It generally ignores the larger context of behavioral influences, particularly the social ones...Finally, I should emphasize that I have no sympathy with those who view self-interested economic calculation as a bad habit. On the contrary, I believe it is a very good habit, particularly when it is combined with other habits and ethics for commercial behavior.

The Symbiosis of History and Politics: Review of Constantin Fasolt's The Limits of History

Susanne Rau:

The fact that historiography can be influenced by politics, evidence of which can be found in histories written during the nineteenth century and under totalitarian regimes, is not a foregone conclusion, but due to changes in academic culture this connection has slowly slipped into the practice of history. To understand the place of Fasolt's argument, one must consider the differences between two views of the way politics has influenced history. One view focuses upon a work's perspective, the value judgments it makes and sometimes even the content of historiography that comes across in contract works or historical eulogies. The second, the focus of this book, concerns the principles of historical thought. Here, human actions are no longer considered to be governed by divine providence, and the study or writing of history is thus considered a form of political activity.

Kling: Why Be a Conservative Libertarian

Arnold Kling at TCS:

The typical libertarian shorthand is that we are with the Democrats on social issues and with the Republicans on economic issues. In recent years, the Republicans betrayed us on economic issues. However, my sense is that many in the conservative movement are anxious to repent. On foreign policy, I think that we can gradually persuade more of them to come to their senses on the challenges of the Natural State.

Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be completely dug in to hard-left positions on economics. They lack any vision for foreign policy. I think we should stick with our marriage to conservatives, and try to make it work.

Mansfield: "Democracy and Greatness"

Harvey Mansfield:

The desire for distinction in a great man represents a threat to the established institutions of a democratic republic. Yet it is not likely that a democracy is going to express its gratitude to such a person for not overthrowing it--any more than a man will thank his guest for not raping his wife. Thus the great man in a democracy must show his modesty in noble condescension to his fellow citizens, as he must consider them. Lincoln did this, and so did George Washington, whose name Lincoln recommended to be revered "to the last."

Post-Post Modern = Pseudomodern

Alan Kirby at Philosophy Now buries post-modernism and replaces it with pseudo-modernism. For instance:

pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity" and "the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless.