Maggie's Farm

From an excellent, pleasantly rambling essay by Fjordman which begins with a discussion of Diana West's The Death of the Grown Up. A quote: 

She (West) believes that "Where womanhood stands today is deeply affected by the death of grown-up. I would say the sexualized female is part of the phenomenon I'm talking about, so I don't think they're immune to the death of the grown-up. Women are still emulating young fashion. Where sex is more available, there are no longer the same incentives building toward married life, which once was a big motivation toward the maturing process."

Is she right? Have we become a civilization of Peter Pans refusing to grow up? Have we been cut off from the past by disparaging everything old as outmoded? I know blogger Conservative Swede, who likes Friedrich Nietzsche, thinks we suffer from "slave morality," but I sometimes wonder whether we suffer from child morality rather than slave morality. However, there are other forces at work here as well.

The welfare state encourages an infantilization of society where people return to childhood by being provided for by others. This creates not just a culture obsessed with youth but with adolescent irresponsibility. Many people live in a constant state of rebellion against not just their parents but their nation, their culture and their civilization.

These are themes which have been frequently discussed at Maggie's. Read the whole thing at Brussels Journal.

Exactly right. A quote:

The Democrats just don’t get it. They didn’t get it when questions arose about the Frosts. They don’t get it now. And it is likely they will never get it because they refuse to ask the right questions.

It’s not about income. It’s about choices. It’s about the kind of government we should have. It’s about freedom versus dependence, liberty versus slavery, self-reliance versus serfdom.

And it’s about fairness. In the Frost's case, the consequences of one family’s choices being foisted upon their fellow Americans who may be less well off but are nevertheless asked to pony up to support them.

No one should begrudge the Wilkerson’s their participation in S-CHIP. They are barely above the poverty level and have little in the way of assets. But the Wilkersons and those like them are not the problem and the Democrats know it. Borderline cases like the Wilkerson’s who regularly fall through the cracks of coverage in other government programs are not part of the central criticism against the expansion of S-CHIP. It is subsidizing coverage for those up to 400% above the poverty level that is the basis of conservative opposition to the Democrat’s bill.

A quote:

The engine driving the utopian dream is indeed, fueled by nostalgia, and at the wheel are the wordsmith intellectuals. From philosophers like Rousseau, to Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Derrida, and Herbert Marcuse, intellectuals continue to yearn for a world of perfection—as defined, naturally, by wordsmith themselves. In the sphere of imaginative writing, novels and plays, from H.G. Wells to Norman Mailer, from Arthur Miller to Harold Pinter, these spinners of fantasies cater to the universal human longing for utopia, a prelapsarian time of bliss. They share contempt for the world of capitalist democracy, and scorn for the workers who make it run. Men of letters are of course the preeminent arbiters of the good and true in their own, self-created ideal world.

Read the whole thing at Horsefeathers. The saints are what really bother me the most.

Ideological purity is for children, who want to insist on exactly what they want, when they want it. Politics is about the practical. As a Conservative, I think it's down to Fred vs. Rudy, and the only relevant question is who can put up the best fight against Hillary Clinton and her machine. 

I do like Fred very much. See The Conservative Case for Fred Thompson, by Hawkins. I also believe that Rudy is much more conservative than people think. Murdock at NRO: It's Wrong for the Right to be Rudyphobic.

Despite all the things that weigh against Hillary, I think it is going to take some fancy footwork to put her on the ropes. Is Fred up to that? Can he be expansive, vital, cheerful, embracing - or is he a grumpy old man like me?

What happens when the government mandates free hats for all. White Coat Rants (h/t, Bruce Kesler)

Also, Americans' Sense on Health Care, from Bruce re Rasmussen polling.

And, speaking of heathcare and free hats, Hillary asserts access to the internet is a right. As Right Thinking comments in a humorous piece,

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, is there anything Hillary doesn’t think the government should be doing?

Lastly, a great quote from Fightin' Rudy:

"If we do Hillary care or socialized medicine, Canadians will have no place to go to get their health care."

That line from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani drew plenty of laughs at Tuesday's Republican debate. 

Sure, Michael Moore's absurd fantasy that our northern neighbor's rationed government-run health care system is one to be coveted rings pretty funny.  But the underlying realities are fatally serious.

Our Aliyah Diary author Nathan sends us this piece from Jewish Chronicle describing how noted Marxist Bertell Ollman wishes to "resign from being a Jew" prior to surgery. A quote from the piece:

...it is lonely, on the left, when you step out of line. And the party line, when it comes to Israel and the Jews, is that one can express a proud Jewish identity only through the experience of suffering and victimisation from the past, which the Holocaust has come to embody above all. The Jew as a victim and as a witness of the quintessential, archetypal experience of suffering emerges as the positive Jewish role-model, in sharp contrast to the pro-Israel or even Zionist Jew, who is chastised for having betrayed both universal values and what is seen as the authentic Jew. Again, to borrow from Christian terminology, the Jew as the sacrificial lamb, the Agnus Dei, is what we are being asked to be.

That’s why so many Jews, spiteful of their faith and ashamed of Zionism’s accomplishments as a society which rejects the role of the victim, wish Israel away. For them, it was so much better before Zionism, when we could still say, with some self-righteousness, S’iz shver tsu zayn a Yid — it is hard to be a Jew!

Nasty little printer's devils spew forth from the press in this Puck cartoon of Nov 21, 1888. (H/t, Gumshoe)

Some further thoughts about The Barrister's fine post Freedom? No Thanks, and a word about Erich Fromm:

Freedom is about the relationship of the individual to the State. I think of freedom as being a zero-sum game: either freedom, and the heavy responsibilities that go with it, belong to the individual or the power belongs to the State (but that may be a bit too black-and-white).

Even in democracies, the State is not "the people" and is not "the nation." Institutions have a power-seeking dynamic of their own. Our Founders knew that - and rightly feared that.

Does "security from the vicissitudes of life," when provided by the State, result in a diminution of individual freedom? Our Libertarian-minded Barrister often speaks dramatically about "selling our birthright of liberty for a bowl of lentils."

Ed Driscoll quotes a piece by Orin Judd. A snippet:

...the importance of the responses to the Depression by both Hoover and Roosevelt lay in their decision to elevate a negative idea of Freedom, freedom from want, from hunger, from "the vicissitudes of life" above, and against, the traditional American ideal of republican Liberty. This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America.

This is why we sometimes refer to FDR, except for his role as a wartime leader, as the worst President of the US. In his noblesse oblige socialist fashion, he shifted the psychology of the nation to one in which people were encouraged to look to a government as parent (while grossly mis-managing the economy, and while viewing the Depression as a "market failure" rather than partly the consequence of mis-management).

I understand very well the human desire for security: emotional, material, physical, spiritual, etc. These are things most of us strive for. However, the psychological shift from "Uncle Sam" to "Mom and Dad" government has been momentous and has, I believe, weakened the American spirit by appealing to the dependent child inside all of us and the notion that somebody else can do it for us. Naturally, many politicians jump on this opportunity to win votes by the transfer of money from neighbor to neighbor.

We are ambivalent about freedom and autonomy, and our ambivalence is exploited by politicians. Even those who do not chose lives of wealth-seeking unashamedly covet the wealth of others through government programs and benefits - from corporate farmers to single moms to those on Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and SCHIP to those on government pensions, etc. etc.

That is why we find ourselves in a place where people can complain, with a straight face, that "Bush doesn't care about the health of our children" - as if the care and feeding of our kids were the job of the federal government, instead of ours. The thought contains an infantile assumption and an infantile wish. The trend leads to a royal, if not god-like, view of the State, as if reality no longer counted, and as if the State had the power to immanentize the eschaton. As Robert Parker would say, "Pretty to think so."

The conservative JFK tried to reverse this trend. "Ask not..." was an appeal to the best in the country, an effort to right the ship, to redefine the country as something that depended on us, the people, rather than something we looked to for care and parenting. He was trying to say that "the country" is not "the government." He was saying that the duties of citizens of a free republic and large, and serious. But then we had Johnson.

Neoneo reminds me of her piece from Passover, 2006, In Celebration of Freedom. She quotes the immortal Dostoevsky in The Grand Inquisitor chapter of Brothers:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Addendum: Our blog pal Shrinkwrapped happily picked up on the theme with a thoughtful piece which focuses on the psychology of freedom - On Autonomy and Regression.

Late Addendum from Dr. Bliss:  Lest this post, with which I entirely agree, sound too heartless, we are entirely in favor of a safety net for the unlucky, the feckless, the mentally ill, and for those who, for whatever good reason, cannot make it in the modern world. We are not in favor of policies which put every able-bodied soul on the dole, and reduce them to political and literal serfdom. We resist anything which causes or tempts the able-bodied towards dependency in some way: that is not the American spirit nor does it do justice to the human spirit. Plus, if we do that, who will be motivated to take the risks and to create the wealth to pay those bills? That has been tried, and it failed, because of human nature. Governments cannot create wealth: they can only help create conditions under which people can create it. On the whole, humans will rise to challenge, but will take what they can get, if their pride and conscience permit.

SISU. She quotes Schopenhauer from John Tierney's NYT piece:

We should find that it is two or three persons who, in the first instance, accepted it, or advanced and maintained it; and of whom people were so good as to believe that they had thoroughly tested it. Then a few other persons, persuaded beforehand that the first were men of the requisite capacity, also accepted the opinion. These, again, were trusted by many others, whose laziness suggested to them that it was better to believe at once, than to go through the troublesome task of testing the matter for themselves.

When opinion reaches this stage, adhesion becomes a duty; and henceforward the few who are capable of forming a judgment hold their peace . . . there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?