After the election where I was moved as always by the peaceful transition of power as well as by the notable achievement of Barack Obama, the new president-elect, I turned to more pressing personal matters which partially explains the lack of blogging.
I do want to point to this Time review Search for Civitas about a book written by Daniel Bell almost thirty years ago
"The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism: 20th Anniversary Edition" (Daniel Bell)
The more that Sociologist Daniel Bell peers into the future, the more he seems to respect the past. It would be hard to find anyone more at home in such a variety of contemporary disciplines—economics, politics, the arts, popular culture. Yet Bell is not happy with the trends in any of them. Something precious has gone out of life, he feels. The deficiency makes people harsher, more inward, more aggrandizing. Bell yearns for a restoration of civitas: "The spontaneous willingness to obey the law, to respect the rights of others, to forgo the temptations of private enrichment at the expense of the public weal—in short, to honor the 'city' of which one is a member."
Bell is no mere nostalgia peddler sighing for antique worlds. With acerbic but civil scholarship, he blames today's honorless condition on what he calls "modernism": the cultural movement that started in the latter half of the 19th century and has gathered momentum ever since. Modernism rejects the old, the traditional, the bourgeois in favor of the new, the sensational, the revolutionary. As such, it has dissolved many conventions, and discredited most institutions and values. Today, says Bell, its victory is complete. There is a perpetual, unwholesome rage for the new. Instead of affirming a "moral-philosophical tradition against which the new could be measured," contemporary culture has an "unprecedented mission: an official, ceaseless search for a new sensibility."
Under these conditions, an avant-garde can hardly be said to exist. The most outrageous or destructive idea or art form becomes accepted overnight. "In fact," writes Bell, the chief characteristic of the Establishment "is its eagerness to repudiate its own existence." The condition of art is echoed in politics and the economy. Capitalists have lost faith in their enterprise and are listless about defending it. Capitalism's very success has created a paradox: hard work, discipline and organization make capitalism successful. But the goods it abundantly produces encourage a mindless pursuit of hedonism. Capitalism is thus deprived of any "moral or transcendent ethic." There is a further paradox. The greater the economic growth under capitalism, the higher the expectations. People demand more government services and more protection against adversity. Inflation results, savings diminish, and capitalism is undermined. The only solution is a restraint on private appetite and a return to a public philosophy—a tall order, as Bell acknowledges, in these roiled times.
Usually we think of history as the product of either politics (the struggle for power) or economics (the production of wealth) George Weigel writes but history is better seen through culture in Is Europe Dying?
Europe began the twentieth century with bright expectations of new and unprecedented scientific, cultural, and political achievements. Yet within fifty years, Europe, the undisputed center of world civilization in 1900, produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War that threatened global holocaust, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, the Gulag, and Auschwitz. What happened? And, perhaps more to the point, why had what happened happened? Political and economic analyses do not offer satisfactory answers to those urgent questions. Cultural-which is to say spiritual, even theological-answers might help.
Weigel calls for a return to pietas, an ancient Roman virtue that teaches us reverence and gratitude for those on whose shoulders we stand, a fitting subject for this Veteran's Day.
To be patriotic is to acknowledge the patrimony, the legacy, we have been given and which we are duty bound to pass on to future generations. In America, it is not so much the land as the ideas of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. John Schaar explores The Case for Patriotism.
Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject, thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and niquely valuable among and to the other nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we.
He quotes Abraham Lincoln in Philadelphia on the way to Washington for his first inauguration.
I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live... I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence...I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was.something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.
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Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle--I was about to I say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.