This happy story made me wonder what the difference is between Julia and the people Alexis de Tocqueville calls "place-hunters" (see Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part 2, chapter 20). The place-hunter is someone whose ambition finds its primary outlet in seeking a government job, a type that Tocqueville fears will arise in modern democracies. True, Julia seems to be on her own when it comes to choosing a job (she's a web-designer), though she does get government subsidized small business loans and tax credits to get started. But when so many of the major problems in life are solved by government, don't you become something like a place-hunter? At the least, you rely on government almost as much as someone who does have a government job.
So what's the problem with that? Here's our French observer, writing in the 1830's, long before the full-blown welfare state had developed:
"I shall not say that this universal and immoderate desire for public offices is a great social evil; that it destroys the spirit of independence in each citizen and spreads a venal and servile humor in the whole body of the nation; that it suffocates the virile virtues; nor shall I have it observed that an industry of this kind creates only an unproductive activity and agitates the country without making it fruitful: all that is easily understood."
No, the real problem Tocqueville sees is more political. In a "people of place-hunters" (think about that awful idea!), there can never be enough government jobs to satisfy the ever growing number of people who want such a job. And this creates a permanent class of discontented people who demand change "solely out of the need to make some places vacant", or, we may add, solely to acquire more benefits. And can there ever be enough money to satisfy the ever growing demand for more government assistance? Whether out of compassion or the desire to win political support, governments try to attract partisans by giving people jobs (or healthcare, retirement and vacation benefits, etc.); but instead, Tocqueville thinks governments end up endangering themselves, as we perhaps see in places like Greece.
Tocqueville concludes that it would be "more honest and more sure" for governments to teach each citizen "the art of being self-sufficient." Wouldn't that be better than a "people of place-hunters"?
On the other hand, the ad implies that a national census is the only or best way to determine how big any community is. It also suggests that the size of one's community is the sole or main consideration in determining the size of hospitals. Sure, the Census Bureau could add other considerations to the mix, but the point is that central planning inevitably simplifies and standardizes. And that - central planning - is the ad's most important premise: one arm of the Federal bureaucracy will supply the information that another arm of that bureaucracy needs to deliver services. The ad implies (at least to someone in small town Ohio) that decisions about the size of hospitals should be made by some distant experts, or at least with their information and under their guidance. And that mix of compassionate and gentle though irresistible suasion from outside is the problem. The more the decisions that affect our lives are made by others, Tocqueville argued, the less opportunity each citizen has to use and develop his or her own faculties and the less attached that citizen will be to his or her own community. The immediate danger is not tyranny, but that in turning over more and more decisions to the government shepherd, we become less and less like self-governing citizens and more and more sheep-like.
]]>the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.
I would add, they have distanced themselves from the young people who might be interested in using books to think about life and its questions. Among many other interesting arguments and observations, Chace reports that Harvard University recently replaced its survey of English literature for undergraduates with four new "affinity groups" - "Arrivals," "Poets," "Diffusions," and "Shakespeares." Sounds inspiring. And clear. (Incidentally, I had heard that Shakespeare didn't exist, but not that there were several of him.) The idea is that the content of the old survey will "trickle down" to students, but if no one takes thought that it happen, how likely is that? To his credit, Chace cautiously defends the idea of a tradition of English literature, and even intimates that those in the field ought to have a "sense of duty" towards the works of English or American literature. "Without such traditions," he concludes, "civil societies have no moral compass to guide them." It will be interesting to see how (or whether) the profession responds.
]]>In his manner, he was confirming that there are a billion Muslims in the world, they have only to make themselves felt as such, and power will then accrue to them, concluding in rightful God-given conquest. More than a challenge, here was an updating of the ancient division of the world into the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb. What he preached and exemplified has spread rapidly through one Muslim country after another, activating those who agreed with his dogmatic vision, as well as challenging those with alternative political, secular, or nationalist definitions of their societies. In response to Khomeini, the struggle for self-definition within the Dar al-Islam has left behind it a huge trail of sectarian and communal horrors in Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, Palestine, and elsewhere.
Including, we can add, Europe and America. If Pryce-Jones is right about the inspirational (to Muslims) character of the Iranian revolution, one is prompted to think that if Khomeini’s heirs succeed in their quest to acquire nuclear weapons, the West will be faced with a much bigger disaster than most people realize. On the other hand, by crushing that quest, the West might go far to reduce the problem of terrorism.
The essay lists some of the signs of the spread of Islam in Europe, as well as many examples of the amazing surrender and abasement of the multicultural European elite to this spread. The reaction of the elites is summed up by the President of the Italian Senate, who sarcastically described the West today as “a land of penitents beating their breast whenever someone strikes them.” (Incidentally, you hardly ever hear about an elite/mass distinction in Europe, one that would parallel our red state/blue state difference: does that exist in Europe?)
Pryce-Jones also makes the useful observation that the decades of Muslim immigration into Europe coincided with the project of the European political elite to centralize and unify Europe. This required citizens of historic nation-states to “acquire a new collective identity replacing their ancient individual nationalities, calling into question all the moral, legal, and cultural features of their heritage.” But, while the old attachments and beliefs have withered, nothing solid has replaced them. In other words, just as the Muslims arrived in large numbers, radicalized by Iran, Europe was profoundly weakened internally. For the author’s pessimistic view of where this will probably end, see his last paragraph.
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“This is a different worldview, from our Western one. It is not less rational – it works from different premises about man and God. We cannot dismiss it, on its own terms. We can say, however, that our premises are incompatible, and insist that in Canada, ours will prevail.”
Although Warren is discussing Canada, this conclusion appears to be widely believed in many Western countries. Unless I misunderstand something, it is very dangerous. It is true that Islam works from very different premises than we in the West do; and it may be true that we cannot dismiss Islam on its own terms – how many Westerners know Islam well enough to say whether or not it has important internal contradictions? But can we really expect to prevail in our struggle with radical Islam if we admit that its worldview is “not less rational” than our own and so believe that all we can do is “insist” that in our backyard Muslims must adopt our worldview?
If that is all we have say to the radical Muslim, why should he give up his views and adapt to our ways? We tell him that his view is just as rational as ours, but in addition to that, he believes he is following the commands of God: neither reason, then, nor faith tells him he should adapt to us. What then is to make him do it?
Even more fundamentally, perhaps, why should we cling to our own ways, believing them to be no more rational than those of the radical Muslim’s? It seems that one of the West’s fundamental claims is precisely that its worldview is more rational than the alternatives, many of which are founded on some form of revelation. It is true that Christians still survive in the West, but the public articulation of our primary ideas and principles, while not perhaps incompatible with Christianity, are also not specifically Christian. We claim that the West is hospitable to all sorts of people, good Hindus, for example. If we abandon that claim to superior rationality and concede to our enemies an equal right to possess the compelling character that belongs to reason, we have already lost the war.
When Warren says that Islam is no less rational than the Western worldview, he means that once you accept certain premises, Islam is a consistently worked out system. Our worldview is equally rational in this sense, only we start from different premises. The real difference, then, lies in the premises; and Warren appears to suggest that our premises are no more defensible than the Islamic ones; this is why all we can do is insist on our premises. What we really need, however, is not so much an act of insistence, that is, of pure will, as it is a real defense of our premises – a defense that shows why our premises are truer or better than the Islamic ones.
These people are naturally goodhearted and intelligent, and with education and liberty would be a happy and contented race. They often appeal to the stranger to know if the great world will not someday come to their relief and save them. The Sultan has been lavishing money like water in England and Paris, but his subjects are suffering for it now.
Subjects suffering while the Sultan lavishes money in Paris? Havent we heard that before? But today the “great world,” or at least part of it, has come to the relief of the Iraqis; and its no accident that the helper is a part of the world still capable of using words like “tyranny” and “liberty”. We hope the voting goes peacefully, and congratulations to the Iraqi people.
]]>What’s wrong with our aid? A lot: “Huge bureaucracies are financed, corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. ... If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid... Unfortunately, the Europeans’ devastating urge to do good can no longer be countered with reason.”
Read the whole thing (Hat tip to David Warren).
]]>What is really interesting, though, are the problems in the search for WMD. First off, if your idea of what they are looking for is something big and distinctive, like a Soviet missile, a Wal-Mart store, or even a locomotive engine, you have the wrong idea. What Kay is looking for is small, the kind of thing that can be hidden in a scientist’s back yard or concealed in spaces “not much larger than a two car garage.” The things we are looking for, Kay says, are “difficult to near impossible to identify with normal search procedures.” It is going to take a lot longer than three months to get to the bottom here.
Besides that, Kay reveals that the Bathists went to great lengths to disperse and conceal their weapons programs. Indeed, his team has already “discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment” that Iraq successfully concealed from UN inspectors in 2002. Dozens! And then, leading up to, during, and even after the war, there is evidence of a systematic plan to destroy material and records relating to weapons programs. Again, Kay’s team has been able to examine only 10 of the 130 known Iraqi “Ammunition Storage Points, many of which exceed 50 square miles in size”. In other words, only 7% of the most obvious known sites have even been examined. Still again, the report suggests that some of the Iraqi scientists who might be willing to cooperate with the search team are holding back for fear of exposing themselves to war crimes prosecutions. And finally, as American inspectors go about their business the remnants of Saddam’s regime are shooting at them. In September alone, they were attacked three times, most recently on the 24th, when their Baghdad headquarters came under mortar attack. For all these reasons, I’d say that the “Interim Report” is more like a “Very Preliminary Report”. It is possible, even probable that Saddam destroyed or moved the most incriminating evidence, but there is an awful lot more work to be done before we can conclude that Iraq had no illicit weapons.
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