Quotations

Quote(s) of the Day — one from a review of America 3.0

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Arnold Kling has a nice quote about the relative importance of cultural over institutional factors. If for some reason the US Government stopped working overnight, the American people would not be plunged into chaos. We have a culture which would permit us to voluntarily organize much of what we need to do. As Mr. Kling put it:

[T]he cultural margin is more important than the institutional margin. … [T]here are no societies in which anarchy will work well but government would work poorly, or vice-versa. Instead, on the one hand there are well-developed cultures, which could have good government or good anarchy, while on the other hand there are poorly-developed cultures, which could have only bad government or bad anarchy.

Arnold Kling

If you are not currently making a daily visit to Arnold Kling’s blog Askblog you must begin doing so.

Note also, Arnold Kling’s review of America 3.0, entitled America’s Past and America’s Future.

He concludes:

The vision that Bennett and Lotus put forth is not the technocratically-run national system that most contemporary politicians and pundits presume is ideal. Nor is it the philosophically-driven rights-based society that libertarians might prefer. However, if the authors are correct in their cultural anthropology, then their idea of America 3.0 is what fits best with our culture.

This is a nice summary of the future we hope to see in America.

History Friday: Oliver P. Morton, The Great War Governor

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I mentioned Oliver P. Morton, the Governor of Indiana during the Civil War, in this post.

The statue in front of the Indiana state house has a plaque which says he shall “ever to be known in history as”¨ The Great War Governor.” When the Union veterans who built the state house and put up the statue were alive, I am sure they believed the heroic deeds of the war would “ever be known … .”

But one of the lessons of history is the fleetingness of fame. The things that move and inspire one generation are rejected by the next, or simply forgotten. This is especially true in America, where we are a forward looking people and typically not terribly concerned about what happened in the past. Henry Ford spoke for America when he said history is more or less bunk.

This short article from the Indiana Historical Bureau, entitled OLIVER P. MORTON AND CIVIL WAR POLITICS IN INDIANA is worth reading.

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Quote of the Day, or, A Challenge to the Millennial Generation

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They stand now on the threshold of public life. They are in the leash, but in a moment they will be slipped. What will be their fate? Will they maintain in august assemblies and high places the great truths which, in study and in solitude, they have embraced? Or will their courage exhaust itself in the struggle, their enthusiasm evaporate before hollow-hearted ridicule, their generous impulses yield with a vulgar catastrophe to the tawdry temptations of a low ambition? Will their skilled intelligence subside into being the adroit tool of a corrupt party? Will Vanity confound their fortunes, or Jealousy wither their sympathies? Or will they remain brave, single, and true; refuse to bow before shadows and worship phrases; sensible of the greatness of their position, recognise the greatness of their duties; denounce to a perplexed and disheartened world the frigid theories of a generalising age that have destroyed the individuality of man, and restore the happiness of their country by believing in their own energies, and daring to be great?

Conigsby, or The New Generation (1844) by Benjamin Disraeli.

Will they? Will they believe in their own energies? Will they dare to be great? Will they restore the happiness of their country? Will they denounce the frigid theories that have destroyed the individuality of man?

Incidentally the book is great.


Quote of the Day

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[W]e are swimming, or drowning, in a rhetoric of national, social and individual failure. Producers of this rhetoric … are so filled with narcissistic self-doubts as to depict America’s many adversities and frustrations as impending apocalypses or Auschwitzian holocausts. … No responsible historian advocates insensitivity to America’s historical warts, present difficulties and conceivable future problems … . Attention must obviously be paid to a nation’s dynamics of decline if this is what afflicts us. But attention does not require accepting an assumption that America’s reverses or unfulfilled goals are equivalent to total failures or disasters, or that America if not uniquely blessed, is uniquely cursed for allegedly singular sins.

Harold M. Hyman, American Singularity: The 1787 Northwest Ordinance, The 1862 Homestead And Morrill Acts, and the 1944 G.I. Bill (1986), referencing Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984).

Quote of the Day

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Richard Fernandez:

But if Obama and his supporters are ruling out the obvious, so too are many of the president’s critics who hope that at some point — perhaps when he misses 500 out of 500 — that he’ll suddenly realize that he’s doing it wrong. They’re hoping for this because the common perception is that the world is stuck with him until 2016. But perhaps he won’t notice he’s missed the last 1,000 shots for the very same reason that caused the blunders already committed.
 
The one crisis that Peter Baker omits to mention is the inability of the American political system to diagnose and fix itself. It lies in the circumstance that Baker can realize the world is falling apart without being able to put his finger on why. It is exhibited in Alan Dershowitz’s perspicacious insight that Israel has been put in an impossible position while remaining a pillar of the Democratic cheering squad. They can enumerate the problems but they don’t know what it means.
 
The feedback loop is kaput. That is the key. But no one in Washington seems capable of divining where the smoke on the ceiling is coming from because it’s coming from them. The significance of the dog that did not bark in the night is that nobody in establishment DC is barking. It means things will only come to a head when the theater actually starts to burn.