Is Our Civilization a Bubble? Part II
As I wrote in part I of our series, Americans have become bubble-conscious and bubble-shy. A tech bubble in the nineties, a housing bubble in the aughts, and fear of a massive fiscal bubble soon to come have temporally darkened the horizons of the world’s most optimistic people.
Not that bubbles are anything new. Black Friday popped the stock market. Eighteenth century bubbles burst on the Mississippi and in the South Seas. Tulips even made one bloom in Holland. Whenever greed and mania combine, bubbles beckon.
In part I, we mentioned the First Bubble Pathology — social pressure differentials inside and out lead to an overly universalized sense of trust. The Second Bubble Pathology is this: Too great a distance separating circumference and point of origin leads to historical amnesia. The success of our free civilization in producing wealth and smoothing social frictions has allowed it, despite its attendant weaknesses, to flourish and endure. But in so doing it has moved further and further away from the circumstances out of which it arose. Just as a gap between social pressure within and without risks bursting its protective envelope, so too may the increasing disparity between its period of origination and present state.
Freedom arose in a process of sanguinary struggle, the fact of which, in classroom and public commemoration, our culture once continually reminded us. The politics of medieval and early modern Europe, whose jealous rivalries pitted prince against prince, church against crown, town against lord or neighboring town, estate against estate, and estate against crown, engendered a lively sense of liberties (then understood largely in reference to caste and corporation) to be preserved as necessary, and with little apology, by menace and might. And that necessity was frequent, leaving dividing lines between adversaries etched in blood, yet, simultaneously, creating a rough and ready diffusion of power prefiguring, both causally and conceptually, modern constitutionalism. Survey the history of the Magna Carta, the investiture controversy, the tense and violent politics of a Flemish or North Italian town, and try to conclude otherwise.
The particular line of institutional development that led to modern America wended its early way through more than a few such fraught episodes, allowing little forgetting that the price of liberty, now seen in personal and private property terms, was anything less than eternal vigilance. No such naivety, certainly, was present in the deliberations, or actions, of the Founders, or, for that matter, during the tumult of the republic’s first century or so. Liberty though a natural right wasn’t assumed to be a natural state, but something that required courage and alertness to guard. Debates in Congress over banks, tariffs, expansion, to say nothing of slavery and Reconstruction, bristled with invocations of the right of free men to resist illegitimate power, sometimes punctuated by personal clashes between legislators, bordering or even crossing into violence, when procedural rights and individual honor were thought to be under challenge. Power in the hands of others, and most especially in the hands of government, was deeply distrusted. While this made for an exercise of liberty that could be fierce and disorderly, it preserved, even in parliamentary settings, a muscularity that connected it to the rough circumstances of its birth.
That was then. Today we blanch, or affect to, over the unconscious use of military metaphors in routine political discourse. Men no longer call each other out and rarely go armed, relegating law enforcement to uniformed professionals. Our military has become sexually polymorphous, with manly jocularity a possible career-ender. We agonize about eroding civility, but manage to settle our debates over matters of far wider sweep than any taxes on tea, with little more disturbance than those wrought by peaceful demonstrations and a few exercised words.
In most respects this state of affairs represents an immense social triumph, affording us an existence luxuriantly buffered from the endemic political violence with which humanity has mostly had to live. But, together with the perceived benefits of the welfare state, it has also diminished our fear of power, now commonly looked upon as an instrument of compassion. Representative institutions were originally thought far less a vehicle for ensuring that government did what its citizens bid — it was assumed they could generally take care of themselves — than as a means of keeping it from doing what they feared — interfering with their rights. Government was a necessary evil, more likely, once loosed from its restraints, to be an agent of servitude than redemption.
The rise of the welfare state and of the progressive outlook has turned this understanding on its head. They haven’t led to tyranny. Representative processes, our tradition of civil liberties, a pluralistic culture, and the lubricant of a prosperity of which the Framers never dreamed have thus far preserved most of our personal liberties and political freedoms intact. But it’s worth considering whether there are limits that even a two-hundred-year-old constitutional system crosses only at its peril. The bigger government grows the more difficult it becomes for the best informed citizens, even elected legislators, to monitor its activities and restrain abuses. Politicians armed with powers over agencies like the IRS, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Elections Commission, to which the government has just added vast new authority over health care and financial institutions, can recognize this altered equation. This alarms many, but does it alarm enough? Do we still have that salutary fear of power that the framers would have regarded as the heart of republican virtue? Or does this now seem like something that belongs to a remote, archaic past of no particular interest today? Are we, along with Europe, drifting towards an acceptance of Tocqueville’s soft despotism?
One remedy might lie in an educational system and civic culture insistent on overcoming amnesia: one that transmitted an account of American history respectful of the Framers’ wisdom — helping their past to live once again in the minds of our very different present. But that’s hardly the approach of academic multiculturalism, inclined to equate their singular tradition with that of many other times and places. Perhaps we’re now witnessing a political overreaching that will remind us again of those ancient political lessons America’s Founders never forgot — wealthy white slave owners though many may have been — and even rekindle among educators a strong interest in conveying them. It remains to be seen.
“Revolution is three missed meals away.”
While global economic collapse is unlikely, it appears that Obama’s inane economic ideas will bring more misery and pain than Marx and Engels ever dreamed of.
Or maybe that’s Obama’s goal . . .
Thomas Jefferson penned the phrase “pursuit of happiness,”
to replace his original word of “property” as in Life, Liberty and Property.
The New Yorkers (Hamilton) and Bostonites (Adams) wouldn’t let the Southerners’ property rights of slaves be recognized. They substituted the nebulous and mealy mouthed phrase “pursuit of hapiness”, thereby setting the stage for all property to be entrusted to the State.
Now THAT’s the “original sin” of our founding documents.
Stephen, At times, you let your prose style become needlessly convoluted, but you do a decent job of showing how we got to this point in time. We got here because it is PROGRESS in a nation of 300 million plus. Given the harder times of my youth, it is abundantly clear to me how good I have it.
Yes, there is the strong fear that the center can no longer hold, that we cannot sustain a lower middle class that makes things; fixes, yes, makes, no.
Folks here reflexively spout how we are all going to or have already arrived at…hell, but they tend not to acknowledge the irresistable “progress” by which we got here, and they definitely fail to supply a vision of how things will get better. Most of the “regulation” developed because it served a purpose. Astronomical energy prices will eventually force us to do more drilling and nuking…but in season.
Of course, you don’t have any solutions either, but you frame the issues reasonably, which undoubtedly will result in gnawing from the gnashers; so it goes.
4-4-4.
@pelaut:
I disagree with your assessment. I think Jefferson’s substitution of “the pursuit of happiness” was a brilliant encapsulation of the American Dream. Dinesh D’Souza said it very well in What’s So Great About America:
“In America your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper and you are the artist. This notion of being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America. Young people especially find the prospect of authoring their own lives irresistible. The immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.
“If there is a single phrase that captures this, it is ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ As writer V. S. Naipaul notes, ‘much is contained’ in that simple phrase: ‘the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation, perfectibility, and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known [around the world] to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.’ ”
The Declaration of Independence is the founding philosophical document of our nation. The Constitution is the founding legal document, and it is the Constitution (abused and ignored as it is) that should be looked to to protect our property, not the Declaration.
The pursuit of happiness… that comes from the concept of happenstance, of how fortune plays a role in one’s life and in the pursuit of happiness one must deal with what fortune deals you, both good and ill. Happiness is not a single minded pursuit but a double-edged sword, in which the most skilled of wielders can be brought down by his own misfortunes.
If we are protected, today, by our civilization, then we also neglect the basis of that civilization at our peril. Not just the morals and ethics, that would take some generations to mend, but the much harder stuff that keeps us alive: plumbing, sanitation facilities, electricity, roads, fuel supplies, and the entire physical plant of the modern world. All of that requires that it be maintained – it isn’t that our parents and grand-parents built so much more, so much faster, but they expected us to maintain and replace their works, not marvel at them and point and ponder on how great they were. Doing that latter gets you a piece of concrete falling into your vehicle from that overpass that hasn’t seen proper maintenance in a decade.
Yet where is the very first place we cut to fund social programs?
Maintainance of the infrastructure that allows us to have a modern society.
Spend hundreds of billions in limited funds on ‘health care’ and ‘social security’ and the very infrastructure that allows you to have those things goes to rot and ruin. Now we face up to not just being broke, but having a crumbling infrastructure that should have been maintained… but we had to cut budgets for ‘social programs’. Instead of college how about vocational education so we can get honorable tradescraftsmen and women to help maintain and rebuild what we have?
We are missing about 500,000 welders in our society and it is the major hang-up for maintenance and new construction as that lack of skilled welders means that those projects can’t even be planned for properly, not to speak of started. A society cannot have everyone go to college, and not everyone really wants or needs a college education to lead a good and even relatively worthwhile life. Let people pursue their happiness in finding their work roles, or none and learn much if not earn well, and then we will be able to see a society that understands we cannot all be equal in results, but the inequality in outcome is to be appreciated, not scorned and derided.
AS Azar Gat had brought up, much of history depends upon circumstances… upon what happens and what the situations are, but even with that it is what we do with what we have that matters. We came to believe our culture was going to last forever. We forgot to repair the sewer lines. That will get you a loss of that civilization faster than anything else known to man as it is the harbinger of all other ills.
http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org
No, we cannot forget that it is progress that has brought us so far nor that some form of government organization has had a hand in pushing and pulling it in one direction or the other. However, progress does not mean we must surrender all to the organizing power of the state nor that the state must become in size of man power or intake of income as tax revenue, half that of the existing producing population or more.
The great progress of the last half of the twentieth century and into this century, is the creation and expansion of the greatest organizing, yet decentralizing power on the planet: the internet. The idea that, in a world where we can fill out forms online, order merchandise, ponder great and weighty matters, debate the efficacy of a machine or system, it is nearly unconscionable that government should expand in its current manner.
That, instead of searching for ways to expand freedom and reduce it’s presence, power and cost, government and those who seek it’s power only wish to expand it, to gather more power in the form of money and regulations. Regulation that is expressly counter to the deregulating power of the internet and its manifold uses.
It is this continuing growth of government against the very growth of individual liberty that creates this knowledge: progress does not require the ever present power, regulation and organizing force of government.
It is odd that those who consider themselves “progressives” are in fact the “conservatives” who are attempting to conserve government power as the pre-eminent organizing power of society when it is the liberty of information and the decentralizing organization of the internet that is modern day “progress”.
The Real Housewives of Wall
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?page=1
We deserve answers.