#90: Disappointed Expectations and Common Sense (II)

February 22, 2011

My young friend A.G.H.’s responses always push me to rethink and to think more deeply. This time, he referred me to a piece by Jonah Goldberg on the meaning of the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. Goldberg’s article is well worth reading and is very thought provoking. In fact, it provoked some thoughts in me.

Goldberg argues that the notion of freedom we currently employ in the civilized West is a relatively new thing, that the freedom people fought for until very recently was a freedom of nations from the domination of other nations. More specifically, he wants to say that the idea that “freedom” is a personal freedom, a freedom of and for an individual is very new. He cites as one example, the first world war.

“The notion that we all crave personal liberty is a fairly new one, historically. Most of the calls for freedom over the centuries have been in the context of national, not personal, liberation. The 20th century began with an atrocious war allegedly fought over something called “self-determination,” but the “self” in question wasn’t the id, ego, or super ego, or the individual soul. The “self” in “self-determination” referred to the captive nations of Europe.” (Goldberg – http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/260001/liberty-21st-century-style-jonah-goldberg)

There are a number of things that come to mind with respect to this intriguing proposition.

First, this proposition seems to ignore the entire history of religious thought, which focused on the individual much earlier than the beginning of the twentieth century. One could argue that the dignity and value of the individual is actually rooted in the Judaic (first) and Judaeo-Christian traditions. But even if one wanted to pass on that, a strong case could be made for the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century being precisely a matter of making the individual important over the Church. And even if one wanted to pass on this, the Romantic turn of the 19th century in both its religious and artistic form focused on the primacy of the individual.

Thus, Goldberg’s thesis should be given a far more narrow reading than his text suggests. If what he says is true, then it must be given a specifically political rendition. What is new, then, is the idea that it is the function of the state to make personal freedom possible. But even this reading runs afoul of historical fact.

Surely it was the point of these words in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

that the new and independent nation would take the freedom and dignity of the individual as fundamental principles from which all others would spring. And this was in 1776!

Second, and this may be a quibble, is that there is considerable debate about the causes of the first World War. We must always be on guard to distinguish the useful rhetoric of wars from their underlying causes: what politicians say a war is about is rarely what that war is about.

It has been argued that WW I was a war that should never have happened, that it happened even though none of the participants actually wanted a war through a kind of synergy due partly to inadequate communications between heads of state. That may well have been the case, but it is also true that Western Europe, and particularly Bismarck’s Prussia, had a long history of coveting Russia. We remember Napoleon’s appetite leading him into the catastrophe of the Russian winter and it can be argued that both Kaiser Will and Hitler were primarily interested in expanding their holdings to the east.

“Self-determination?” That may have been the pap fed to the masses to get them to enlist and support bloody wars, but arguably it was really all about the accumulation of wealth and power.

Goldberg further cites the historian Fukuyama as a source for his thesis. I confess that I have not been as impressed by Fukuyama as others have been, I find his thinking fatuous and murky. He fails to distinguish between the kind of respect for individual dignity that is to be found in the Declaration of Independence, on the one hand, and the preoccupation for “respect” that failed minority cultures demand with threats of violence.

The former respect involves acknowledging that everyone has a right to live and a right to a fair shake in the effort to improve his condition.

The latter “respect” involves forcing others to pretend one is far more than one actually is by means of intimidation and threat. This is not respect at all, it is appeasement.

It is the latter “respect” that is a new phenomenon peculiar to Western countries who are unhappily hosts to large failed sub-cultures who demand ever greater tribute from their hosts in the form “respect” and gigantic welfare bills. The people in the sub-cultures are uneasily aware that something is wrong with themselves and their tribes, but they accept the narratives of their demagogues who point the finger of blame at their successful hosts. The situation of most European nations and, to some extent, the U.S. is similar to that of a fictitious latter-day Rome playing uneasy host to Attila and his Huns. Give us loot, the Huns would have cried, or we’ll burn the whole place down.

Goldberg writes in conclusion:

“Great civilizations die when the people believe their personal dignity demands more than the society can possibly provide.” (ibid)

I’m inclined to rephrase that as follows:

“Great civilizations die when respect for oneself and others is replaced in the minds of the people with a truculent demand for appeasement and a lack of authentic respect for others.”