Civil Society

Communal Grief

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Murdering Amish schoolgirls is an almost unimaginable, a vile, indeed, an evil act. And passivity in the face of evil is seldom all that virtuous. I have great respect for Dr. Helen’s blog – she clearly sees through our culture’s current & destructive attitude toward men; she sees herself (and others) as responsible, active, even aggressive about defending rights; she is neither soft nor sentimental. That is bracing: her positive, forthright attitude is admirable & a nice antidote to modern feminist victimology.

Nonetheless, a cookie cutter ideological approach can be more than insensitive, it can misunderstand. Her first response was “Is Passivity and Forgiveness an Aphrodisiac for Murderers?” and asks in her second

So now that the murderer has been forgiven and the school demolished, I wonder if that will help erase the memory of the five murdered girls from their minds? If it is true that the Amish think that the girls are better off than their survivors, why knock down the school house at all–shouldn’t it stand as a symbol of these girls going to a better place?

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Hayek on Tradition

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Just as instinct is older than custom and tradition, so then are the latter older than reason: custom and tradition stand between instinct and reason — logically, psychologically, temporally. They are due neither to what is sometimes called the unconscious, nor to intuition, nor to rational understanding. Though in a sense based on human experience in that they were shaped in the course of cultural evolution, they were not formed by drawing reasoned conclusions from certain facts or from an awareness that things behaved in a particular way. Though governed in our conduct by what we have learnt, we often do not know why we do what we do. Learnt moral rules, customs, progressively replaced innate responses, not because men recognized by reason that they were better but because they made possible the growth of an extended order exceeding anyone’s vision, in which more effective collaboration enabled its members, however blindly, to maintain more people and displace other groups.

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of SocialismThe Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

(I remembered this passage when reading Shannon’s prior post, entitled On Tradition.)