Gelernter Discusses Winthrop

In the last issue of Commentary, David Gelernter’s “Americanism and Its Enemies” discusses the influence of religious beliefs, especially the narratives of the Old Testament, on the founders and how this thread of thought is important to our understanding of what is the essential American nature, especially in our relations to other countries. He emphasizes the role of Exodus in self-definitions – both of the Puritans and the founders. His argument has much in common with that of Michael Novak’s On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. Both note the inclusive nature of the vision and argue for a greater emphasis upon this tradition if we are to truly understand both the founders and ourselves. Gelernter especially appreciates the symbolic importance of Thanksgiving. He argues that Winthrop’s speech, “A Modell of Christian Charity” is the first and defining of American documents and, like Winthrop’s biographer Francis Bremer, puts Winthrop among the “founders.” . The relation between the passage emphasizing “choosing life,” our founding, and Bush’s vision for the mid-east was discussed in an earlier post.

Borlaug & Egeland

Our lives are easy – whether from the perspective of Jared Diamond’s book or our own lifetimes (my brother was out moving irrigation pipe in fifth grade and I was peddling around our village hawking newspapers – stories my children see as quite far from their experience). The deaths from the tsunami are hard to imagine, are horrible. The level of this human suffering seems beyond our ability to understand, to feel.

So, when a pompous and dry UN guy gets up and says we’re stingy, well, I’m likely to fall back on guilt. I could have put more into our Iraqi fund, I could be putting more into Tsunami relief. The charity to which our family devotes most of its energy is an ivory tower, designer one – setting up exchanges with Czech scholars, encouraging the teaching of Czech literature. But it does good and there is 0% overhead. You notice, these are all “I’s” – we think that way.

Okay, so I’m still on the defense but I am also not too crazy about my tax money’s “good deeds” being funneled through the UN conduit. We are always told to check out charities, to notice overhead – the UN’s percentage seems a bit too high for a good rating. (That’s part of the “I” – we notice things like that.)

But this post was prompted by one of those “good news we take for granted” moments – the “allies” Bush has lined up in his “coalition” are Australia, Japan, and India. And I observe, there he goes, being unilateral again. Australia’s like us – well, some would say “cocky” but we like to think we “honor indiviudualism.” But, let’s think about Japan & India.

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The Law & Iraq

Perhaps the essay (noted by Instapundit) by Brett H. McGurk, “A Lawyer in Baghdad” (published in The Green Bag: An Entertaining Journal of Law in the Autumn 2004 issue) describes what most lawyers know, but he gives outsiders (like me) a glimpse into that work. Pointing to some of the great paradoxes of law & occupation, he describes his work in the Green Zone. He notes the lack of precision and clarity in the rules under which the lawyers worked and the tensions in an occupation that also attempts to establish laws that arise from these specific (& fluid) circumstances. The necessity is at once to “affirmatively promote the welfare of the Iraqi people and establish conditions for self determination” which is a “positive mandate. . . far different than the largely negative obligations under the Convention and Regulations” (53-4).

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Himmelfarb’s 3 Enlightenments

One of the heroes of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity is Adam Smith, saluted every day on our masthead. This book’s design (not a surprising one for a Victorian scholar) is to honor the British Enlightenment; to do this, she splits it in thirds. She devotes the first 150 pages to the British (“The Sociology of Virtue”) and then examines more briefly the French (“The Ideology of Reason”) and, finally, the American (“The Politics of Liberty”). The book is short and lucid. Her approach uses the French as foil to the English; the Americans not only offer a third and often later perspective but give life to many of the arguments from these eighteenth century British thinkers. Needless to say, she doesn’t see that as a bad thing. She argues, toward the end, that “If America is now exceptional, it is because it has inherited and preserved aspects of the British Enlightenment that the British themselves have disarded and that other countries (France, most notably) have never adopted.” (233)

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Henry Adams & Drudge

“The motive for the crime remained unknown, investigators said. Local media in Kansas City reported that Montgomery had suffered an earlier miscarriage.” This blog does not (and should not, of course) descend to tabloid journalism, but even in that fatuous world doesn’t this remark have a certain unreality.

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