RUTHFULLY YOURS

Culture is inherently hostile to innovation. T.S. Eliot famously defined English culture as the regatta, the Glorious Twelfth, Wensleydale cheese, beetroot in vinegar, vestments, bishops, the music of Elgar — the minutiae of daily life accreted over generations. Culture is what does not change. There are rare exceptions, that is, cultures that foster innovation, or cultures that during brief time spans favour innovation.

Oswald Spengler called the great epoch of 19th-century innovation “Faustian,” in the literal sense of Goethe’s masterpiece: Faust will lose his pact with the devil if he is shown a single moment that satisfies him. His dying words, “Only he deserves freedom as well as life who must conquer them every day!” could have served as the century’s motto.

That was Europe once. When Goethe published his drama in 1807, he had God tell the Devil that human beings wanted unconditional rest, and that Faust was the only exception. By the end of the 19th century everyone wanted to be Faust. Faust bet the Devil that he could resist the temptation to hold on to the present moment (in Coleridge’s rendering):

FAUSTUS
Could you, by
Flattery or spells, seduce me to the feeling
Of one short throb of pleasure; let the hour
That brings it be my last. Take you my offer?

MEPHISTOPHELES
I do accept it.

FAUST
Be the bargain ratified!
And if at any moment I exclaim:
“Linger, still linger, beautiful illusions,”
Then throw me into fetters; then I’ll sink,
And willingly, to ruin. Ring my death-knell;
Thy service then is o’er; the clock may pause,
And the hand fall, and time be mine no longer.

What Oswald Spengler called the Faustian spirit of the 19th century gave us all the great inventions that inform our daily lives: electricity, the automobile, the aeroplane, and so forth. The latter part of the 19th century was the most fecund period of human history, and Continental Europe contributed disproportionately.

That is true no longer. Consider the 24 employees of France Telecom who committed suicide in 2009 and 2010 after reassignment to new jobs. One employee in Marseilles left a suicide note stating, “Overwork, stress, absence of training and total disorganisation in the company. I’m a wreck, it’s better to end it all.” He was healthy, ran marathons, had enough money, and had no family problems, but was evidently terrified of change. For some, sameness and security are so precious that life is too frightening to bear without them.

France remains a very wealthy country — it ranks third on Credit Suisse’s table of net average wealth per adult — but the main wealth-acquiring activity practised by the French today is waiting for one’s parents to die. The French once were a paradigm of ambition; Napoleon said that every private soldier carried a field-marshal’s baton in his rucksack. Today, French entrepreneurs move to the US, the UK, Canada or Israel. A 2014 New York Times feature entitled “Au Revoir, Entrepreneurs,” quoted a French transplant to London who heads a Google enterprise saying that in the UK, “it’s not considered bad if you have failed.” He went on: “You learn from failure in order to maximise success. Things are different in France. There is a fear of failure. If you fail, it’s like the ultimate shame. In London, there’s this can-do attitude, and a sense that anything’s possible. If you make an error, you can get up again.”

One might add that at 45 per cent, France’s top rate of taxation on capital gains is the highest in the OECD.

Is Saudi Arabia still providing “Alms for Jihad”?http://spectator.org/suing-the-saudis/

On May 17, the Senate passed legislation that would enable private citizens to sue the government of Saudi Arabia and other Saudis possibly connected to al-Qaeda for damages incurred in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that took nearly three thousand lives.

Predictably, the Saudis took an apocalyptic view of the bill. Before it passed the Senate, the Saudi foreign minister reportedly threatened to pull hundreds of billions of dollars of investments from the United States. One Saudi newspaper headlined it as a “satanic bill” that would “open the gates of hell.” In truth, the bill would open a window on the Saudis’ involvement in the 9/11 attacks that they, and our government, have made extraordinary efforts to conceal.

President Obama has threatened to veto the measure.

Famous by now are the twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission’s report that reportedly describe the connections between the Saudi government (including the Saudi royals and other Saudi citizens) and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. The Obama administration says it’s considering releasing the pages, but it’s a good bet it won’t because of Obama’s obsequious relationship with the Saudis.

What else do we know that could justify lawsuits against the Saudi government, and Saudi individuals, banks, and charities?

A December 30, 2009 State Department cable labeled “Secret/No Forn” (meaning no disclosure to foreign governments) published by WikiLeaks, says that, “…Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources…”

If a nation that pretends to be our ally is still funding al-Qaeda eight years after 9/11, we have to ask are they still?

Equally valuable information, and a ton of it, is contained in Alms for Jihad by J. Millard Burr and Robert Collins. It details the enormous and complex web of Islamic charities and banks, many funded by prominent Saudis, that are directly involved in funding terrorism.

Recently my wife and I drove past the house in New Hampshire where I grew up. It looked lonely, in need of repair and, to anthropomorphize the place, hesitant about the future – a metaphor for our nation, with its flagging leadership, crumbling infrastructures and doubt that the future can be as good as the past – a past, admittedly, more idyllic in memory than in reality.

When my newly-married parents came to the house in 1938 the country was mired in an eight-year-old depression, Europe was on the verge of falling to the Nazis, and Japan had occupied large swaths of China. With a future so uncertain, it would not have been surprising if my parents had decided that prospects were too bleak to bring another person into the world. Instead, the first of nine children was born eleven months later – about as positive a bet on the future that a couple can make! Educated people (and my father had a Harvard education) don’t bring children into a world for which they have no hope.

Yet, today, amidst living standards our ancestors could not have imagined, we seem to have lost confidence that the future can be better than the past. Why? And why have we, as a nation, reached a nadir in terms of national confidence, while our leaders are at an apex in terms of supercilious arrogance? Is there a connection between the descent of the former and the ascent of the latter?

As a nation, we should be more confident. We should be able to look back over the past hundred years, with pride and relief in equal measures. The great domestic issues of segregation, civil and women’s rights were addressed and largely resolved in the last seventy-five years. Geography, abundant natural resources, a literate electorate, a penchant for innovation and hard work, and a democratic political system have made our nation the most powerful (and most decent) the world has ever known. What, for example, would have happened had Communism spread to the United States, as looked possible in the two decades following the Russian Revolution? What if Hitler had prevailed in Europe in the 1940s? What if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War in the 1980s? What would have happened to liberty and individual human rights? Would standards of living be as high? Would declines in global poverty have been as rapid as they were? Would there be a United Nations, or a World Bank? What would have happened to the world’s great centers of learning – to the Oxford’s, Cambridge’s, Harvard’s and Yale’s? Would the environment be as clean? Would science have advanced for the benefit of mankind, or would it have been used to sustain dictatorial governments? Those rhetorical questions and their answers should give confidence to Americans that their country is exceptional. America is not perfect and hubris is a sin, but confidence, which stems from self-reliance, a belief in one’s capabilities and faith that the nation’s laws will protect personal and property rights, is critical for a bright and sustained future.

For a century progressives have argued that History and a more scientific understanding of human behavior have required a new, “living” Constitution interpreted “according to the Darwinian principle,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. The technocrats, whom Wilson called “the hundreds who are wise,” were gradually empowered by an expanded federal government to guide the millions he dubbed “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” This concentration of power in the federal Leviathan has subjected both individuals and the states to its ever-expanding, intrusive reach.

In other words, we now have a kind of government that the Constitution was designed to prevent. To quote George Orwell, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Robert Curry’s Common Sense Nation, however, is much more that an intelligent restatement of the Constitution’s protections. A member of the board of directors of the Claremont Institute, and a contributor to the American Thinker and the Federalist websites, Curry corrects various misconceptions and recovers influences on the founders that are too often forgotten.

He pays special attention to the influence of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment on men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Curry clearly and briskly sets out the key insights of philosophers Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid, as well as of Protestant clergyman John Witherspoon, who immigrated to America, signed the Declaration of Independence, and served as president of what would become Princeton University, where his students included three future Supreme Court Justices and 28 senators.

The distinctively Scottish belief in innate human faculties of “moral sense” and “common sense,” Curry argues, left their mark on the American Enlightenment that produced the Declaration and the Constitution. The moral sense, as Hutcheson explained, is the instinctive faculty for recognizing right and wrong. It is as much a part of human nature as is hearing or seeing, providing access to elementary morals through feelings of pleasure and pain innate to a social animal; and a political community is impossible without it. Reid expanded this notion to include common sense, which Curry defines as “an endowment of human nature that makes possible both moral knowledge and human knowledge in general.” Common sense unifies the reports of the other senses, both physical and moral, into a full picture of the real world. With it we are able to make rational judgments on everything from technical knowledge to moral questions, in order to determine what is both useful and morally right. Rather than being John Locke’s tabula rasa, a “blank slate” upon which experience writes ideas and concepts, people are born with both common sense and the moral sense upon which popular sovereignty must be founded.