Another, related, passage from the book:

…children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever buiding Edens–and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same.

“Oddly, oil drilling is quite unobtrusive. I once had a tour of the great East Texas oil field, courtesy of the petroleum industry, and it was mostly cows, with an occasional small rocker arm pumping away. So in a way I agree with Feinstein — it is foolish to despoil the landscape with solar panels and windmills when we could rely on oil pumps.

“But I don’t see anything in the report that says she wants to open up federal lands to drilling, or promote the exploration of off-shore resources. As the wheels come off the whole climate change cart, an interesting possibility arises: an alliance between real environmentalists, who do not want to despoil the rare landscape for the sake of a corrupt international kleptocracy and rent-seeking US companies, and us cheap energy advocates. There is no real conflict between these two groups.”

How did that work out in the Soviet Union where the left had complete control ?

The Webbs, quoted above, definitely count as leftists, and clearly would have credited the Left as a major force toward giving workers more spare time, but they had sufficient intellectual honesty to recognize that this could not have happened without the Machine Age, even if that age had been mainly implemented under capitalism.

Did the left provide the jobs for the workers? One could argue that the left did provide MORE time for the worker to provide “other” things (good things?, socially beneficial things?) but basically the innovators and capitalists provided the work, the opportunity to earn for the workers.

What else is there? Afterall, the present is ephemeral, the future unknown. The past is, perhaps not wholly, knowable.

In fact, if workers today have more time to pursue things other than work, the job, it was because the Left made this possible.
Does scapegoating the Left take care of all matters?

“It often happens nowdays…that young technicians, engineers, and so forth, who have enjoyed an excellent university training as specialists, will completely devote themselves to their calling for ten or fifteen years and without looking either to the right or to the left will try only to be first-rate specialists. But then, in their middle or late thirties, something they have never felt before awakens in them, something that was never really brought to their attention in their education–something that we would call a suppressed metaphysical desire. Then they rashly seize upon any sort of ideas and activities, anything that is fashionable at the moment and seems to them important for the welfare of individuals–whether it be anti-alcoholism, agricultural reform, eugenics, or the occult sciences. The former first-rate specialist changes into a kind of prophet, into an enthusiast, perhaps even into a fanatic and monomaniac. Thus arises the type of man who wants to reform the world.”

(To be precise, Meinecke is quoting a friend who made these obserations in the days *before* Hitler’s triumph)

Not sure this really applies to Carter pe se…my understanding is that the U.S. Naval Academy is really pretty good as a liberal arts school..but I suspect it’s valid as a general point.

I have Meinecke’s book and got the quote from there, but being too lazy to retype it, I googled it and found it here.

I happened to hear him early in the campaign in Iowa and was so taken aback by those three outrageous claims that I was unable to formulate a question for him.

(On the peanut farmer part: Carter made his living as a warehouseman, though he did raise a few peanuts on the side. Nothing wrong with that, but as a onetime farm boy, I can tell you that farmers think less of warehousemen than they do of other farmers.)

The third claim, coming after the first two, was the most outrageous, in my opinion.

Expertise is not transferrable. Even if Carter were a top-notch nuclear physicist, that still doesn’t mean he’d have a clue about public policy. Cf. Union of Concerned Scientists.

Yes, I had heard that Carter’s nuclear credentials had been overstated – - in fact he was often referred to as a “nuclear physicist” which of course is entirely incorrect. However, he did have an engineering education (Annapolis is basically an engineering curriculum) and most of Rickover’s nuclear curse which was pretty rigorous. The point of the discussion was the question of whether the American elite suffers from being primarily educated in non-rigorous disciplines like the contemporary humanities. I think the answer is probably yes. However, my point about Carter was that a technical education is no guarantee of rigorous thinking.

Here’s one answer, from Walter Miller’s great philosophical novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:

“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew into richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they-this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.”

Abundant energy has freed mankind. Only when there is excess over the bare necessities of life is there an advance in civilization.

Leftists really do have this “back to Eden” vision. They think they know better what is good for people. Like a warm cozy ranch home with a back yard and a two car garage? No, no, no! You must live in a high rise apartment and take public transit. Oh, an you must live on beans and rice. Meat is bad for the planet.

The way to achieve their utopia is to ration energy, hence the mission to strangle nuclear power. Their attack on CO2 is another front of the same war but against fossil fuels, which didn’t go away as quickly as they had hoped.

I have a point, I really dom and it relates to powering down and nuclear power – sort of.

Why is it so hard to see the benefits of all that is around us, sometimes, while the negatives are magnified? The items in an ordinary drugstore were, at one time, luxuries for most. Out of reach for the everyday person. The strange fear of technology that exists when technology has moved us off the farm, out of the factory, and into safe, warm cubicles! We surf the net, in comfortable chairs, and find out about food additives and dangers from power lines. Human beings are cognitively weird.

(Tangential, in a way but not, is this graph at Greg Mankiw’s blog. Percentage of world GDP showing the sturdiness of American GDP from 1969-2009. Do some think it was just an accident that as Europe declined – as defined in the represented graph – we stayed the same in terms of percentage? Oh, and what do you all think of the graph?

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/11/changing-world-economy.html)

The older daughter has a business degree and law degree and I tried to get her to take Mandarin in college. No luck. Her younger sister and I began a Mandarin class at the local JC but she couldn’t get home from UCLA in time so we had to give up. The youngest is the one thinking about a French major. The middle one has applied for a grant to go to Morocco next summer to work on her Arabic. I have encouraged her as she visited Morocco when she was living in Spain.

I have advised a number of pre-med students to take computer science at least as a minor. We have an excellent junior college CS department near my home. I have taken a number of their courses and find that, by the time the final exam is given, most of the remaining students are over age 50. Too bad.