History

Messages to Ahmadinejad

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In 1933, the Oxford Union debating society considered a resolution: “This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country.” It passed by 275 votes to 153. Apparently, Hitler was told of the passage of his resolution, and it encouraged him to believe that Britain would do nothing to interfere with his depradations. Many other events–in Britain, in France, and in the US–sent similar messages.

Fast-forward to the present. Put yourself in the shoes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and consider what conclusions you might draw from recent events in the U.S.

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Video: Claudio Véliz at the Anglosphere Institute

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Now you can watch Professor Claudio Véliz’s brilliant talk on “The Optional Descent of the English Speaking World,” which he gave at the inaugural event of Jim Bennett’s Anglosphere Institute. The lecture was hosted by the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.

Professor Véliz discusses the reasons for the global success of English culture and institutions, including meta-parallels between England and Ancient Athens.

Click here to watch the video.The lecture runs about 49 minutes and is followed by another 35 minutes of Q&A that are also very much worth watching. (There is a gap of approximately ten seconds at around 38:25.)

Unfortunately, the last few minutes of the lecture, in which Professor Véliz discusses the importance of cultural self-confidence to the survival of English civilization in its current struggle with radical Islam, were not recorded. However, a complete audio recording and written transcript of his talk may eventually be made available.

You may need to raise the volume on your speakers to get best audio quality.

50 Years Ago Today

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Our friend and contributor Helen has an excellent post about the Hungarian revolution (begun October 23, 1956) up at EU Referendum.

Her colleague Richard has a good one about the 2nd battle of EL Alamein, begun on the same date fourteen years earlier.

Both posts are well worth reading.

Also this (via The Corner)

DC Trip — Claudio Veliz Lecture, Anglosphere Institute Launch

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Lex in DC

I went out to DC from Chicago for the inaugural event for Jim Bennett�s Anglosphere Institute. (The Institute�s website is currently under construction, but has some interesting things on it.)

The first event was the lecture I mentioned in this earlier post by Claudio Veliz, author of The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America. The lecture was at the Hudson Institute.

I understand that the full text of Prof. Veliz’s talk will be online at some point, both audio and text. Prof. Veliz discussed the points raised in his book, specifically that the English and Castilian (rather than British and Spanish) cultures were the greatest exporters of culture of any of the European countries. He focused on the extraordinary fact that the English have exported their culture to the ends of the Earth to a degree unmatched by any other people. The main one is of course the Industrial Revolution, which began in England, and has in one way or another spread throughout the whole world and shows no sign of stopping or slowing down. Another is democratic government, though in most cases this is merely an aspiration or a fraud. Prof. Veliz focused in some detail on the example of soccer. Of course people have been kicking balls around for millennia. But only in England did organized teams with rules and their own buildings and groups of fans identifying with the team come into being. This phenomenon is now global. Terms like �sport� and �fair play� did not exist in other languages, they came from England.

He also answered the question �so what?� with regard to the ubiquity of English-derived, and American-derived �creatures� � i.e. cultural artifacts. He noted, following the thinking of Vico, that �what we do matters�. In other words, what we do becomes what we are, it changes us. Culture is a whole and each part carries something of the whole. The adoption of English-derived cultural forms has changed the consciousness of the world in many ways, not all of them discernible. He noted also that the spread of English-derived cultural �creatures� has occurred in large part because it was the fact that they came from a culture � the first ever � with a large, wealthy working class. It was and is the vulgarity, in the strict sense, which gives it its global appeal. I might have said demotic rather than vulgar, but Veliz was right to speak as he did. The �vulgarity� of much of our culture is the source of its appeal, but also of the hostility it provokes on the part of people who are exposed to it and don�t like it. This too is an old phenomenon. Veliz went on to say that people in other countries often want to have a sanitized version of modernization � antibiotics and indoor plumbing and computers which only contain and transmit wholesome things, without music videos or sugary soft drinks or Internet porn. But, Veliz insists, you cannot have modernization without the cultural baggage, as a practical matter, you are stuck with the whole package.

This led to his conclusion, which he left as an open question. Will the English speaking world die out? What could cause it to fade away as the prior culture-forming civilization of Greece died out, giving rise to a Hellenistic successor civilization? He seemed to believe that there is nothing in the world that is a mortal threat from outside the Anglosphere (a word he did not use). Rather, the danger is from a lack of understanding and a lack of cultural confidence within the Anglophone world. In other words, the danger is not conquest from without but suicide from within.

Please note the foregoing is my recollection, done without notes. I look forward to the actual transcript.

Following the lecture there was a dinner party for supporters of the Anglosphere Institute, which was very enjoyable. I got a chance to chat with Professor Veliz. I also got to meet one of my favorite writers, Michael Barone, and got my books autographed. In addition, prior to the lecture, I got to spend some time with Jim Bennett, who has several interesting Anglosphere-related projects in the works, which he will announce in due course.

The next day I met up with Jonathan, and we visited the Air and Space Museum, and briefly, the National Gallery. The National Gallery is clearly an extraordinary museum, and I will make a point of returning to it. An unnecessarily rude guard at the door was the only indication that it is a government-run entity.

Old, Old News

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Glenn Reynolds quotes Roger Simon who notes that �People like Reid, Hastert, Pelosi are complete mediocrities� and that �something is fundamentally wrong� that such people are in the upper reaches of government. Reynolds concludes that �Politics is not attracting our best people.�

This has been an accurate complaint since immediately after the Founding generation. But, still, the whole thing worked anyway, and always has.

Lord Bryce, in his classic American Commonwealth (1888), had a famous chapter entitled Why the Best Men do not Go into Politics. Some of the details of his analysis are outdated, but the general reasoning is still sound. I cannot do justice to it, so go read it, but a very rough sketch goes as follows. The fact is that being in Congress is not a very good career. It was not then and it is not now. It is precarious, and Americans are rarely so wealthy that they can withstand having their career obliterated without suffering a great personal loss. Service in Congress removes the member from his own district where his future business contacts would have to be. It incapacitates the member for other work during and after his term of service. And there is the mundane and dreary nature of the day-to-day work of congresssmen. There is little opportunity for politicians to engage in very exciting activity, thankfully, very often, which would call for heroic or even truly creative effort. What we would call opportunity costs � the far superior chances for great material success, at lower risk, in the private economy lead to the same outcome in 2006 as they did in 1888.

Bryce expressly rules out any idea that the tough treatment politicians get is any reason why American politicians are so noticeably bad:

It may however be alleged that I have omitted one significant ground for the distaste of �the best people� for public life, viz., the bad company they would have to keep, the general vulgarity of tone in politics, the exposure to invective or ribaldry by hostile speakers and a reckless press.
I omit this ground because it seems insignificant. In every country a politician has to associate with men whom he despises and distrusts, and those whom he most despises and distrusts are sometimes those whose so-called social rank is highest�the sons or nephews of great nobles. In every country he is exposed to misrepresentation and abuse, and the most galling misrepresentations are not the coarse and incredible ones, but those which have a semblance of probability, which delicately discolour his motives and ingeniously pervert his words. A statesman must soon learn, even in decorous England or punctilious France or polished Italy, to disregard all this, and rely upon his conscience for his peace of mind, and upon his conduct for the respect of his countrymen. If he can do so in England or France or Italy, he may do so in America also.

It has always been an ugly game, in a country where the other games are more appealing, and the people who go into it are rarely going to be our �best� people by any reasonable criterion.

I strongly advise you to read the whole Bryce chapter. It is not long.

Having mediocre politicians is a consequence of our having a superb private economy. We are, actually, fortunate that we have some relatively competent and public-spirited people in public life at all.

This is not a problem with a solution, but a permanent, structural condition.

Nor is it one that needs to concern us much.

We do not rely for the success of our public institutions that they be staffed by geniuses or the shining lights of the age. To the contrary, as Walter Bagehot noted, we rely on our legislatures to act in the aggregate, to be wiser and abler collectively, or at least able to discern and respond to the public mood and public interest, than the mere sum of its parts, to capture the “wisdom of crowds”. The process seems to work. Despite all its defects, our Congress, in much this form, has legislated for the country throughout its rise from a strip along the Eastern Seaboard to global power. The system works despite the apparent, even manifest, deficiencies of its components, as it it was designed to do.