Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Richard Fernandez discusses Dostoevsky and abortion, noting that
Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through Ivan in his Brothers Karamazov, wrote that the only questions which really mattered were the eternal ones. They are what return in various guises generation after generation not because we can never resolve them, but because we resolve ourselves in them.
This century will reconcile individuality with community. We will find the vision and the means to achieve kinds of community that becomes possible only after complete liberation of the individual from any but self-imposed obligation. Post-individuation communities will be dynamic networks of voyagers bound to one another by sovereign commitment to shared images of good. This will happen most rapidly and beneficially if the ground from which it springs is understood.
James Bennett offers an important contribution to such understanding in an article published in The National Interest, Winter 2004/05, drawing attention to the work of Alan Macfarlane. Bennett writes:
… Over the past thirty years an intellectual revolution has been taking place in historical sociology …
[Alan] Macfarlane and his associates have demonstrated very convincingly that English society back to Anglo-Saxon days has been characterized by individual rather than familial landholding; by voluntary contract relationships rather than by inherited status; and by nuclear rather than extended families. Individuals were free of parental authority from age 21 on, and daughters could not be denied their choice of husband (unlike on the Continent). The English nobility, regularly churned by elevation of commoners and marriage of younger sons to non-titled families, tended to mix freely with the rest of society, rather than being a separate caste, again as on the Continent. Rather than the English Reformation being the event that caused this change, it seems to have been (for the majority of the population) the event that brought formal theology and church government more in line with the pre-existing customs of the country. So the English “peasant” the Hollywood is fond of depicting turns out to be the figment of a 19th-century Marxist’s imagination.
Macfarlane’s body of work represents a momentous intellectual revolution. The implications of this revolution have not yet been fully realized, or even generally understood. It suggests that modernity and its consequences came particularly easy for the already-individualistic English.
[ef glyph 180] The Making and Riddle of the Modern World & other contents of Alan Macfarlane’s website, including ebooks on Yukichi Fukuzawa, F.W. Maitland, Baron de Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Malthus — provided as a gift from Alan Macfarlane. Thanks Alan!
I’ve been thinking about this subject for sometime now. When recent events prompted me to write I spun out over a thousand words on the subject. (I’m rushed, please forgive any typos.) That’s a bit long for a blog post so I’ve split it into a short version here and then the long version in the “Read the Rest…”.
Short version: Leftists believe that elitism arises from wealth and only from wealth. Non-leftists believe that elitism arises from the belief in an intellectually and morally superior of a minority. Elitists demonstrate their elitism by their lack of respect for the decision-making ability of others.
They confuse compassion for their “lessors” with respect for the decision-making ability of those same people. Leftists view themselves as superhuman with the same relationship between themselves and the rest of the population as the relationship between adults and children. Since they have no respect for the decision-making ability or ordinary people, they seek to elect fellow extraordinary people, i.e., supermen, to political office.
Leftists hate Palin and non-leftists like her for the same reason: She represents a wide swath of Americans. She’s not a superman. Leftists can’t believe anyone would seriously elect an ordinary moron to the highest office in the land, instead of a superman. The same goes for McCain. Despite his wealth, people believe he would make the same decisions as an ordinary American.
The election comes down to whether people think of themselves as electing a superior person, someone who will make different and better decisions than ordinary Americans, or whether they think of electing someone who would make the same decisions that an ordinary American would make.
[Update:(2008.9.18.13:51): Sometimes, it falls right into your lap. Read this before reading the long version]
Long version…
Commenter greggriffith, commenting on this Hot Air Post [h/t Instapundit] makes a very good point:
What’s happening now in the Democratic party is that the ideological liberals (Dean, MoveOn, Kos, et al) have succeeded in wresting control from the institutional liberals (Hillary, Lieberman, et al). Where the Republicans have largely been successful at shearing off and marginalizing the influence in their own party of people like David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and less conservative but equally nutty types like Ross Perot, the Democrats have not. They have gone from Mondale, to Dukakis, to Clinton, to Gore, to Kerry, to Obama – a nearly unbroken linear progression from garden-variety liberal to wackadoo liberal.
I think this is a very good point. As I wrote before, the truly disturbing thing about the Obama-Ayers relationship is that nobody in the leftist community of Chicago seemed to find Ayers an unacceptable person. Ayers did not stand out as a whack job that people of good standing on the Left could refuse to deal with.
Obama just does not understand [h/t Instapundit]:
“So, when American workers hear John McCain talking about putting ‘Country First,’” Obama said, “it’s fair to ask – which country?”
Obama thinks “Country First” means “my country before your country”. However, when McCain says “Country First” he means that he puts the good of his country over his own self-interest. He finds fulfillment by serving the greater good and urges others to do like wise.