Edmunde Burke and Ireland
Number 12, Arran Quay
Edmund Burke and Ireland
By Joseph Morrison Skelly
For advocates of ordered freedom, Number 12, Arran Quay is an important address. Why? This is where Edmund Burke was born in 1729 and lived until he was 20, when, after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he moved to London to study law, enter politics, and shape the course of history. Burke’s career as a Whig member of the British parliament, however, has tended to overshadow his birthplace in the popular imagination. It did not go unnoticed by Russell Kirk, who opens his classic study, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, with the literary signpost quoted above.
Kirk understood that Burke’s Irish heritage had an influence on his worldview. So, too, have other scholars, including Sean Patrick Donlan, a lecturer in law at the University of Limerick and the editor of a new, compelling collection of essays entitled Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities. In his introduction, Donlan states that the volume’s purpose is “to invite discussion of Burke’s relationship to Ireland,” which is an appropriate conversation on Saint Patrick’s Day. Exploring Burke’s Irish background, in combination with some of the other more famous episodes in his career, will enhance our understanding of one of the most significant historical figures of the North Atlantic world. We will also see that Burke has much to teach his trans-Atlantic political heirs today, including reform-minded conservatives in the United States, their patriotic counterparts in the United Kingdom, and democratic citizens everywhere dedicated to winning the War on Islamic Terror.
The Great Melody
While Burke is most famous for his sustained opposition to Jacobin tyranny in Paris, which is encapsulated in his landmark treatise of 1790, Reflections on the Revolution in France, we can learn much from his preceding years as a Whig reformer, which began in the late 1750s and, for American readers, are best expressed in his famous speech in 1775, “On Conciliation with America.” Both stages of his public life, as we shall see, are more consistent than is commonly understood. At the outset of the first phase, according to Kirk, “Much in the Whig program could attract the imagination of a young man like Burke: freedom under law, the balancing of orders in the commonwealth, a considerable degree of religious toleration, the intellectual legacy of 1688.”
Where did this reformist impulse originate? Some scholars trace it, in part, to Ireland, where Burke witnessed first-hand the tenuous situation of Catholics, whose prospects were circumscribed by the self-aggrandizing habits of Anglo-Irish landlords and the residual effects of the Penal Laws (watered-down since their passage in the late 17th century, they still prevented many Catholics from joining certain professions, acquiring property, voting, or holding elective office). All of this would have cut close to the bone for Burke. He was a Protestant and a member of the Established Church, like his father, Richard (who, incidentally, may have converted in order to become a lawyer), but his mother, Mary Nagle, was a Catholic from the Blackwater Valley in Cork, where he spent time as a youth and would have encountered a Gaelic culture straining to maintain its customs, its religion and its land. In 1761 he observed these conditions again when he returned to Ireland as private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton, a member of Parliament who had been appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the second-ranking official at Dublin Castle, the seat of the British administration in the country. Spending part of each year in his native land, he grew more agitated by the corrupt Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the enduring restrictions on Catholics. During this time, he penned one of his early political pamphlets, entitled Tract Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland, which was an attack against the Penal Laws.
Burke’s official stint in Dublin, combined with his family background, may cast light on some of the public campaigns he waged. In his book Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, Russell Kirk writes: “Detesting the arbitrary exercise of political power, Burke was led into the four great struggles of his life — his effort to obtain conciliation with the American colonies, his participation in the Rockingham Whigs’ contest against the domestic power of George III, his prosecution of Warren Hastings [the governor-general of Bengal], and his impassioned resistance against Jacobinism, the ‘armed doctrine.’ In America, in England, in India, and in France, the denial of justice roused Burke to greatness; for his Dublin Castle years had shown him how order and freedom must be kept in a tolerable balance or tension, that all may be safe together. Irish affairs became the microcosm of his politics.”
In his poem “The Seven Sages,” William Butler Yeats lends a musical air to Burke’s opposition to “the arbitrary exercise of political power.” Replacing Kirk’s England with Ireland (which Burke worked tirelessly to improve), he intones:
American Colonies, Ireland, France and India
Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it.
The Irish statesman and scholar Conor Cruise O’Brien utilizes this Yeatsian motif for the title and central organizing principle of his magisterial biography of Burke, The Great Melody. In his preface he asks, referring to the last word of Yeats’ couplet, “What was it?” His reply: “the abuse of power.” Furthermore, O’Brien asserts, “Yeats was right about the main point. That is, he correctly identified, and isolated for attention, the main areas on which Burke’s creative energies were concentrated throughout the long and overlapping periods of his career.” There were therefore benefits to Burke’s Irish legacy. It opened a window onto other regions of the British Empire suffering from misrule, like America and India; it hard-wired him with an inner early warning system receptive to rebellious sentiments; it highlighted the need for social, political and religious reforms, both for their own sake and to stave off revolution.
In retrospect, Burke’s resistance to unbridled power and his rejection of political vice are important reminders for contemporary conservatives that reform is wholly compatible with their political philosophy. A Burkean approach expands and improves upon our conception of modern conservatism: it is both a defender and a restorer of liberty. Burke represents a starting point for likeminded American citizens wedded to national renewal in accord with the timeless principles of liberal democracy.
Irish, English, British
The epitome of conservative reform in our own era is Margaret Thatcher. During her pathbreaking tenure as prime minister, she revitalized the sclerotic British economy and reinvigorated personal responsibility at home, while abroad she confronted tyranny and helped Ronald Reagan win the Cold War. Today, the United Kingdom remains a natural wellspring of conservatism, despite the Labor party’s long hold on power; the Tory party, in fact, is gaining traction in opinion polls and may be set for a return to government. Still, if the country is to remain a platform for conservative renewal it must overcome threats to its national integrity from without and within. The European Union, which is the antithesis of the Burkean constitutional model, is centralizing power in a labyrinthine bureaucracy in Brussels. Centrifugal forces in Scotland, the home of Edmund Burke’s friend Adam Smith, and similar, albeit paler, sentiments in Wales, jeopardize the unity of the United Kingdom. Imagine its unraveling. Such an outcome might have long-term consequences for political conservatism, not to mention international security. In Britain it would mark the end of three centuries of stability inaugurated with the Act of Union in 1707, the internal constitutional settlement that accelerated the nation’s rise — a point made often by Andrew Roberts, the author of The History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. It might also undermine the U.K.’s role in the Anglo-American security alliance, the partnership that underpins NATO and the War on Islamic Terrorism.
Edmund Burke may offer a historical counterweight to the processes underway in Brussels and in Edinburgh if we reconsider his national identity. He was born in Ireland, but did that mean he was Irish? In a review of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Great Melody, Paul Johnson calls Burke “the greatest Irishman who ever lived.” This is accurate in terms of his stature, but we are then confronted with another query: what was the nature of his Irishness — was he a Gaelic patriot, a Jacobite enthusiast, a member of the hidden Catholic gentry, or a pillar of the Protestant Ascendancy? There is ample room for discussion. Indeed, the scholars in Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities participate in an engaging, intellectually rigorous debate about this topic.
In one provocative essay, Katherine O’Donnell suggests that Burke may have harbored Jacobite sympathies. Lingering esteem for the legacy of King James II, the Catholic Duke of York who ascended to the English throne after the death of his brother Charles II in 1685 only to be deposed three years later, was still common among Irish Catholics throughout the eighteenth century, decades after he lost to the Protestant King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, which sealed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. O’Donnell argues that the “result of reading Burke as a ‘crypto-Catholic’ Irishman and reading his Reflections [on the Revolution in France] within the context of the Irish literary tradition is that he no longer is an ‘ungainly,’ strange, confusing or confused British statesman,” but rather “a brilliant and unique eighteenth-century Irish orator, a product of his Gaelic Jacobite upbringing and his patriotic Irish education at Trinity College Dublin.” To support this interpretation, which is compelling but perhaps overstated, O’Donnell draws on Burke’s “social origins” in Ireland, especially his maternal links to the Nagle family of the Blackwater Valley.
Whatever their exact nature, Burke’s Irish sensibilities did not sidetrack his career in England, for he rose to become a leading member of the Whig Party and a defender of an enlightened British Empire. They may have induced a spell of diplopia, however, which Nathan Wallace diagnoses in his essay, “Edmund Burke’s Anglo-Irish Double Vision in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent.” In an intriguing case of ophthalmological analysis applied to one of Burke’s earliest political tracts, which bemoans King George III’s encroachment on Parliamentary authority by ruling through quasi-ministers and outlines the functions of a responsible political party, Wallace’s core argument is that
the two most famous features of the Thoughts — the Double Cabinet conspiracy narrative and the defense of party politics — operate on public and private levels. On the public level the pamphlet operates as a Rockingham Whig Party manifesto, and on the private level it operates as a justification of, and guide to, what I call Burke’s own assimilation, as a new Irish man, to the English imperial system.
Wallace wisely reminds his readers that “Recovering Burke’s Irishness does not mean denying the Englishness he so frequently claimed for himself. This self-identification is crucial to understanding Burke’s political identity, and it is therefore no less crucial that we understand the dynamics of this gesture. By identifying his Englishness as an adoption, Burke signals the doubleness of his identity.”
A convincing argument is articulated by Michael Brown in his chapter, “The National Identity of Edmund Burke.” He asks the rhetorical question, “Was Burke Irish?” His answer: “Yes, but only in a limited and highly specific sense.” More to the point, and here Brown is on solid ground, “Burke’s national identity was multiple, polyphonic and integrative.” What does this mean? “In Burke’s case there was clearly a layering of identities onto each other. Burke’s Irish birth and education placed him within that nation … However, his career also supplied him with an English political identity and a British political identity, which both complicated and problematized his Irishness. Burke was, after all, an English landlord, an MP in the parliament at Westminster and a proponent of reform of the British Empire. The first two of these elements … supplied him with a set of commitments to the English nation. The third element, Britishness — which spanned not only the British Isles but evolved into a world-wide identity — both comprehended the other two facets of his political identity and articulated the relationship between them.”
Burke himself would probably agree. Without exaggerating the case, we may thus consider him British, or, more accurately, proto-British. He was proud of his Irish background, but knew where his ultimate loyalties resided. He explained as much in a Parliamentary speech refuting spurious allegations concerning his national allegiance (fueled, no doubt, by caricatures depicting him as a Jesuit and a closet Papist). Burke asserted that “he was a native of Ireland, it was true; and he conceived that much was due by every man to the place of his nativity, but this duty ought not to absorb every other; when another country was generous enough to receive a man into her bosom, and raise him from nothing, as this great country had raised him, to stations of the greatest honor and trust, and conferred on him the power of doing good to millions — such a country had claims upon him not inferior to those of that which had given him birth; it was the duty of such a man to reconcile, if possible, the two duties; however, should they unfortunately point in different ways, it was his bounden duty, either to return the trust reposed to him by the adopting country, or else consider its interests as paramount to every other upon Earth.”
Irish, English, British — this formula best describes Edmund Burke. His national identity provides an important example today. When multiplied by the countless other men and women from Ireland, Scotland, Ulster, and Wales who, like Burke, have thrived while living and working in Great Britain, it offers an alternative to those centralizing and separatist tendencies on the continent and in the country that imperil the liberty that a unified United Kingdom preserves.
“Never Succumb to the Enemy”
Burke’s commitment to the interests of his adopted land, his dedication to reform throughout the British Empire, and his defense of sound constitutional principles all set the stage for the pinnacle of his career, his implacable opposition to the French Revolution, a policy articulated in several works published from 1790 to 1797, including Reflections on the Revolution in France, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Letter to a Noble Lord, and Letters on a Regicide Peace. As Kirk observes, he was a “foe of arbitrary power, in Britain, in America, in India. But with consistency, he set his face against the [French] Revolution in particular and against revolution in general.” How is the latter example consonant with the first three? The year 1789 did not mark the outbreak of a limited rebellion as in 1688 or in 1776, but signaled a radical departure from tradition inflamed by the theories of philosophes like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and resulted in the concentration of authority in the hands of sanguinary fanatics like Maximilien Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just. Burke was right, in his day, “to stand athwart history yelling Stop!” During his entire life, Kirk reminds us,
Burke’s chief concern had been for justice and liberty, which must stand or fall together — liberty under law, a definite liberty, the limits of which were determined by prescription. He had defended the liberties of Englishmen against their king, and the liberties of Americans against king and parliament, and the liberties of Hindus against Europeans. He had defended those liberties not because they were innovations, discovered in the Age of Reason, but because they were ancient prerogatives, guaranteed by immemorial usage.
What is more, “Burke was liberal,” in the noble, traditional sense of the word, “because he was conservative.”
Conor Cruise O’Brien continues this line of analysis when he writes that Rousseau’s disciples in Britain and the United States “saw the French Revolution as continuous with the English and American ones. Burke’s far more powerful mind registered both the immensity and the terrible originality of the French Revolution.” O’Brien then connects him to the ideological struggles of the twentieth century. “From today’s perspective, we can best see Burke’s writings against the French Revolution as the first great act of intellectual resistance to the first great experiment in totalitarian innovation.” Others since have sought to imitate the Jacobins.
“The first and most durable emulators have been the Marxists. Marx and Engels, and later Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, had all the qualities that Burke abominated in the French Revolutionaries: radical repudiation of all existing institutions and arrangements; absolute confidence in their own competence to build a new and far better society; willingness to kill their contemporaries in great numbers, for the supposed benefit of posterity; contemptuous hostility to all religion, and a program for its enforced elimination from the world.”
Yet when all is said and done, extremist Islam poses the same threat to our established way of life as the French radicals did in Burke’s day. He would espy in al-Qaeda the same evil he discerned in the Committee on Public Safety. In his masterful Letters on a Regicide Peace, he exhorted his countrymen to fight a “long war” against their enemies, and he would most likely advise the same today. In one of his last letters before his death in 1797, he urged his friends in Britain: “Never succumb to the enemy; it is a struggle for your existence as a nation; and if you must die, die with the sword in your hand.” These words could be Edmund Burke’s epitaph. They may also be our motto, on Saint Patrick’s Day, and until the “long war” is won.
— Joseph Morrison Skelly, a college history professor in New York City, is co-editor of Ideas Matter: Essays in Honour of Conor Cruise O’Brien and has served in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Teaching America
Teaching America
Do you know our heroes?
By William J. Bennett
These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find that war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our nation’s capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer have any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor are we fighting the toughest of wars. But try telling that to our nation’s young people; too many of them absorb too much of the negativism taught by our culture to know this.
The truth is, we’ve been in far worse shape in terms of what we’ve had to endure in this country — but we may not have been in far worse shape in terms of what we know about our country. Too many of our high-school students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not know the basic facts of their own country’s history.
This year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (our “Nation’s Report Card”) revealed that over 50-percent of our nation’s high-school students — our population reaching voting age — are functionally illiterate in their knowledge of U.S. History. Tragically, students do not begin their education careers in ignorance: if you track education progress in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades with the Nation’s Report Card, you will see students know more in the 4th grade, less in the 8th grade, and are failing by the time they are high-school seniors. Relative to what they should know at their grade level, the longer they live and grow up in America, the less they know about it. How did this happen? Why is knowledge of and about the greatest political story ever told so dim?
Too many of our nation’s adults have taken too dark a view of their country and have not seen fit to transmit her story down to the next generation. Too many in our culture would rather point out our nation’s failings than its successes. And in our schools, too many textbooks on American history are politically one-sided (turning off those with opposing political views). Worse, and more often, many of them are just plain boring.
Yet we know the study of our history can be bestseller material when presented with the glory and romance that resides in it. This is why historians such as David McCullough and Michael Beschloss, and networks like the History Channel, remain so popular. They capture our great triumphs and tragic failures with all the greatness of those triumphs and all the tragedy of those failures intact — they don’t redact, they don’t gloss over, and they don’t dull down.
But that is not the history we give to our students. One education expert recently wrote, “students in our high schools are rarely expected to read a complete history book.” That’s a history book of any sort: a biography, a 1776, a Bruce Catton Civil War book. And, a recent national survey found that a majority of public high-school students are never assigned as much as 12-page history paper.
This is doubly tragic when we stop to consider we are not talking about just any country’s history here, we are talking about our country’s history — the country Abraham Lincoln called the “last best hope of earth.” We are, after all, a country that has prevented epidemics, improved the conditions of mankind, and saved other countries. We have fought wars for those who could not defend themselves, we have liberated the immiserated, and we are a city of refuge for foreigners as well.
With all that has gone wrong in our war and in our economy dare I repeat our merits and take a positive view? Of course I do. In the midst of a previous war’s dark days that had cost many lives and would cost many more — hundreds of thousands more — President Franklin D. Roosevelt could still say “we are a great nation” even as we fought for what he called “total victory” against an enemy that hewed to a “pirate philosophy” of fascism, even as we had just come out of the Great Depression. And, I remind that Lincoln could call us the “last best hope” only three months after Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history.
But, America is not just the story of presidents. It is not just the study of great leaders, but, rather, of the undertaking of a great people — the study of great citizens who wisely choose how to save themselves and others, how to correct wrongs, and how to preserve what is still the greatest nation in the history of the world.
While we have our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Roosevelts, our Trumans, our Reagans, we also have so many others — heroes in every walk of life, in every city in America. If we take on the complete study of our country again — the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly — we will realize that for every anti-hero that we can be criticized for, there are hundreds of heroes; for every dark moment, there are thousands of rays of light to be seen through the passing clouds
Those who watched the recent Medal of Honor service for Lieutenant Michael Murphy were awestruck by the presentation to this young man’s family — by hearing of how Lt. Murphy’s “powerful sense of right and wrong,” guided him his whole life, and how he embraced from an early age the importance of “defend[ing] those who could not defend themselves.” “Murph,” as he was known by his friends, was our nation’s 3,445th Medal of Honor recipient, the highest honor our nation bestows.
Why don’t our schools take next week, as Veteran’s Day is celebrated, to start a program where they learn about “Murph” and the other Medal of Honor winners throughout their elementary- and secondary-school careers? Why not invite a veteran in to school next week? Such study would help teach our children history with real-life heroes and, at the same time, it would help repay the debt to those heroes by transmitting their stories unto the next generations. I cannot think of a greater way for young children and young adults to learn history than through the stories that make our history — and these stories deserve to be told and retold.
A time of war is a terrible thing, but it brings opportunities for teachable moments, and it is about the best time there can be to make our heroes and their cause teachable and estimable again. If we rededicate ourselves to studying our history and our people rightly, if we take the time to look at the entirety of our firmament, we will see what our Founders saw we could be, what foreigners who came here saw all along, and what we ourselves can — even today — see once again: that we have something precious here. That something is called America, where young men and women sign up to protect her each and every day in the uniform of our armed services. And it is worth the time of every young man and every young woman in our nation’s classrooms to study why.
—William J. Bennett is the author of Volumes I & II of America: The Last Best Hope — a new box set of American history (including a special audio tribute to Ronald Reagan). Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute .
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGU0MTA5NDIyZDI0M2ViNDdkYWQ4NDIzYzE5OWQzMzQ=
Miracle of Plenty
Miracle of Plenty
We have a lot to be thankful for.
By Rich Lowry
To what do we owe our 20-pound Butterball turkeys, our high-definition TVs, our spacious and warm homes this Thanksgiving? Something that won’t be high on anyone’s list of things to be grateful for, but undergirds our way of life — a centuries-old economic revolution that changed the very terms of human existence.
In his eye-opening new book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Gregory Clark produces a chart tracking income per person throughout history. By Clark’s account, it is essentially flat from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1800, reflecting the crushing burden of providing for our material wants in an environment of economic stasis. Then, income per person explodes upward around 1800, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution that first arrived in England. Without it, most of us would still be living poor, nasty, brutish and short lives.
How poor? “The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C.,” Clark argues. “Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: 30 to 35 years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800. And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery.”
Throughout most of history, Clark argues, humankind was caught in a “Malthusian trap”: Small economic advances were outpaced by resulting population growth that made it impossible for living standards to increase. The massive productivity gains of the Industrial Revolution — driven essentially by expanding knowledge — broke the trap and created modern life as we know it.
“The richest modern economies are now 10 to 20 times wealthier than the 1800 average,” Clark writes. In these economies, it is the unskilled who have benefited most. “Unskilled male wages in England have risen more since the Industrial Revolution than skilled wages,” Clark writes, “and this result holds for all advanced economies.” There have always been very rich people. What’s changed in the past 200 years is the growth of wealth and its spread.
It all started in England, and there’s a roiling academic debate about why. Clark attributes it partly to the slow but sure spread of middle-class values in England: Literacy and numeracy increased, hours worked rose, and interpersonal violence declined.
In his new book “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World,” Walter Russell Mead picks up the story from a geopolitical perspective. England embarked on its capitalist revolution at exactly the time when “the country that mastered this new system would gather rewards that far outstripped all the treasures of any empire in the past.” With that came world power. England reaped the benefits first, then its successor as a superpower, the United States.
The formulas for the two countries’ success have been the same: “An open, dynamic and capitalist society generated innovations in finance, technology, marketing and communications. Those innovations offered the open society enormous advantages in world trade. The wealth gained in this way provided the basis for military power that could withstand the largest and mightiest rival empires of the day.” The effect was to empower two liberal societies that had the wherewithal to beat back dictatorial challenges from continental Europe — from Napoleon’s France to Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia.
And so the miracle that started 200 years ago marches on. “Currently, industrial societies appear to be doubling their rate of technological progress every 10 years,” Mead writes. “If this continues, and there is every reason to suppose that it will, the 21st century will experience the equivalent of 20,000 years of ‘normal’ human progress.”
So long as it remains an open and dynamic economy, the United States is positioned to stay at the heart of this progress. Thank goodness for that, and pass the drumstick.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGZmOTg4ODI3MjQ4YWIwMTViZmE5NDdiMTQ1ZDM1MGE=
Thanksgiving: American Treasure
American Treasure
Giving thanks.
By Mark Steyn
Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”
Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!
But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. “The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west’”s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas — Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.
Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you’re struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced’n’diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish in effect the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it. I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era. In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there’s no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide’s usually up to your neck.
So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.
That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eponymous anthem:
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
Which isn’t a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either. Three hundred and eighty-six years ago, the pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that too is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii. Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGQwZTI2NDE0OTg4YWQ5NzZjOWRjNjg5NThjOGEyM2Q=
Human Rights in China: Sujiatun
A Place Called Sujiatun
Are they killing Falun Gong, for their organs?
by Jay Nordlinger
There is a horrifying story going around the world: In the northeast of China, thousands of prisoners are being held, so that they can be killed for their organs. The prisoners are practitioners of Falun Gong, the meditation-and-exercise system. The facility at which they are being held — called a “concentration camp” or a “death camp” — is at Sujiatun. Chinese human-rights activists believe that this name should cause the same shudders as Treblinka and the others.
I cannot say whether this story is true; I can say that one ought to pay attention.
Of course, “organ-harvesting” is a very familiar story: The PRC has been doing it, with prisoners, for many years. In 2001, the U.S. Congress held hearings on the matter, which caused a sensation. But the sensation died down, as sensations tend to do. Organ-harvesting has gone on, with no negative consequences for the Chinese government.
Organ-selling is a huge business for the Chinese. You can obtain organs in China as you can nowhere else: any type, and very speedily.
The subject of organ-harvesting has been revived by the discovery of Sujiatun. I will not attempt to do justice to this story in this space (as though justice could be done). I will mainly direct you to the website of the Epoch Times, and specifically to its archive on Sujiatun: here. The Epoch Times is an international newspaper whose reason for being is to tell the truth about China. Media in China itself, of course, are government-owned or -controlled.
I also wish to direct you to an article by the tireless Bill Gertz of the Washington Times: here.
How do we know about Sujiatun? Mainly through two witnesses, indescribably brave. One is a woman whose husband was a doctor who took part in the organ-harvesting; the other is a Chinese journalist, long based in Japan, who investigated the matter. Both are now in the United States, in hiding, in fear of their lives. I talked to the journalist, by phone, on Monday morning.
First, a further word about the woman: You can read an Epoch Times interview with her here, and a follow-up story here. They will give you all the details a human mind can take, and probably more. In brief, her husband became deranged by his work, unable to go on. The wife did not intend to step forward as a witness, but concluded that she had no choice.
I will indulge in just a few details. The woman’s husband said to her, “You don’t understand my suffering. Those Falun Gong practitioners were alive. It might be easier for me if they were dead, but they were alive.”
The woman also said this, to the Epoch Times: “Some poor farmers from nearby places were hired to work in the boiler room. [This served as the crematory.] They were penniless when they first came. . . . But they could scrape up some watches, finger rings, necklaces, and so on. The amount is not small.”
Finally, she said, “I would like to expose this to the international community, so those who are not yet killed can be saved. Also, I would like to expose this as an atonement for my family.”
Now to the Chinese journalist: His name is Jin Zhong — or so he calls himself for the purpose of media reports. I spoke to him when I was meeting with some Falun Gong activists in a New York conference room. One of them, Charles Lee, was recently released from a Chinese prison after three years’ confinement. He was tortured, and I will be writing about him in the next issue of National Review. Dr. Lee is a U.S. citizen, by the way.
And, in a strange twist, he bore witness to organ-harvesting, while a young medical researcher in China, years ago. Prisoners would be shot in the back of the head, and their bodies would be hustled to a waiting van. There, doctors would extract their organs; Charles Lee served as an assistant, holding the instruments. Sometimes, the prisoners seemed not quite dead, he says.
Before Dr. Lee and I talked, I was able to interview Jin Zhong by phone, using an associate of Dr. Lee’s as a translator.
For an extended report on Mr. Jin, please see this Epoch Times article. I will say simply that he found out about Sujiatun when he was investigating SARS, and the extent of the Chinese government’s cover-up of that problem. Some local officials let slip information about the Falun Gong camp, and its purpose. He could not believe what he was hearing: It was too horrific, too inhuman. But he pursued the story, and confirmed that what he had heard was true.
I ask Mr. Jin whether the officials felt guilty about this murder and organ-harvesting. He says, “Not at all.”
Mr. Jin soon attracted the attention of the police, and was twice detained. He says he was tortured, while in detention. He managed to return to Japan, and then come to the United States. His family remains in Japan, and he says they have received death threats. Obviously, he fears for his own life here in America. PRC agents have never been respecters of national territory.
For those who care, Mr. Jin is not himself a Falun Gong practitioner. (Neither is the woman whose husband performed organ-harvesting.) “I’m not even interested,” says Mr. Jin. But he is interested in humanity, and in justice. He says, “I trust that the CCP [the Chinese Communist Party] will try to kill me,” for telling about Sujiatun. His life would have been far easier if he had kept quiet, but his conscience would not allow it.
I compliment him on his bravery. He says, “You’re a journalist. You wouldn’t have done any differently, in my position.” I reply, “I can only hope that that is so.”
Is the U.S. government aware of Sujiatun? Mr. Jin says he has informed interested congressmen and their aides. And friends of human rights in the media are weighing in. Peter Worthington concluded a piece in the Toronto Sun this way: “China’s use of prisoners as guinea pigs, or as a supply to meet world demand, makes Nazi medical experimentation seem almost benign by comparison.”
No one should bet that Sujiatun will penetrate the world’s consciousness. Governments everywhere are keen on smooth relations with the PRC; media, even in free countries, seem to want to help them. The reluctance of major newspapers and TV networks to report on atrocities in China is a sad subject.
And I recall what Robert Conquest, the great analyst of totalitarianism, once told me: The world has seldom wanted to believe witnesses. Ten, 20, or 30 years later, maybe, but rarely sooner.
Testimony out of the early Soviet Union was scoffed at; these were “rumors in Riga.” Tales of the Holocaust were Jewish whining. When escapees from Mao spilled into Hong Kong, they were “embittered warlords.” When Cubans landed in Florida, they were “Batista stooges.” And so on.
There is an extra incentive to look away from persecution when the victims are Falun Gong. Many people are suspicious of these meditators and slow-motion exercisers, with their strange philosophy. And massive Communist propaganda against them has not been without an effect. Western business leaders see Falun Gong standing in their way, or at least irritating them.
I have no idea what will happen to Jin Zhong, or to the wife of the doctor, or to the prisoners who remain in Sujiatun. It may well be that, with some international attention, the Chinese government will Potemkinize the place. They have done as much before, as have many governments like them. And it could be that people will simply not care about Sujiatun, no matter what is proven.
My main hope, at the moment, is that readers will glance at the reports I have mentioned, especially those in the Epoch Times. Because, sometimes, the unthinkable needs to be thought about, just a bit.
http://www.nationalreview.com/nordlinger/nordlinger200603300722.asp
“Birkenstocked Burkeans,” “Crunchy Conservatives,” and “Granola Conservatives”
Birkenstocked Burkeans
Confessions of a granola conservative.
By Rod Dreher
Boston College professor Peter Kreeft discovered this phenomenon a few years ago. Kreeft said he and three friends fit John Courtney Murray’s four American political types: radical, liberal, traditionalist, and conservative. One day, Kreeft, a traditional Catholic, discovered a close affinity with the Marxist atheist in the group. What did it was driving around Cambridge and judging everyone’s reaction to a new housing development the conservative Republican had moved into. It was clean, well lighted, green, and spacious, with attractive amenities.
Kreeft and his friend Dick, the radical, thought it was an abomination, because it was ugly and therefore inhuman. The conservative said the fact that they cared about how the place looked marked them as “artsy-fartsy,” but the traditionalist and the radical argued that beauty was one of the most important things there is.
Soon, Kreeft and his radical friend found out that despite the gulf that separated them on politics, they shared a number of areas of agreement (suburbs bad; nature good; big business and big government bad; small business and small government good). Kreeft determined from this that “beneath the current political left-right alignments there are fault lines embedded in the crust of human nature that will inevitably open up some day and produce earthquakes that will change the current map of the political landscape.”
Well, maybe. All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer. Take food, for example. After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We’d go to farmers’ markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties.
We were also startled to discover how large the homeschooling movement is here in New York City, and that it’s primarily a phenomenon of the left-wing counterculture. Given our backgrounds in Texas and Louisiana, we assumed religious conservatives were the only folks interested in homeschooling. I did some reporting on homeschoolers in Manhattan, and learned that most of them did it for the same reasons we plan to: an unwillingness to trust the state schools here with something as important as our children’s education.
All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like — jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son — is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain. We found that though the Shiite environmentalists drive us nuts, there was also something off-putting about the way many conservatives speak with caustic derision about environmental conservation. Two weeks ago, some conservative friends were driving me down the Pacific Coast Highway, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty, as they are. “I’m afraid we have to tip our hats to the tree-huggers,” said one. “If it weren’t for them, much of what you see would be covered with tract houses and malls.”
Here’s something else I’ve noticed: The Granola Conservatives I know tend not to be wealthy, but labor in the creative and intellectual vineyards as writers, professors, and artists. They also tend to be religious. It’s foolish to go too far in metaphysicalizing questions of taste, but a big part of it, at least for those of us who are part of older Christian traditions, comes from learning to see the world sacramentally. In the sacramental vision, which is shared by Catholics and the Orthodox, the spirit world is mediated through the material world, which is another way of saying we experience God in creation. To someone imbued with a sacramental vision, qualities inherent in things — from the food we eat to the buildings we live in — matter in profoundly spiritual ways.
Admittedly, this is very close to what David Brooks identified as classic bourgeois Bohemian (“Bobo”) behavior. “Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that is sacred and makes it profane. The Bobos take everything that is profane and make it sacred,” he writes in Bobos in Paradise, his highly entertaining foray into pop sociology. “We take the quintessential bourgeois activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action.”
In Brooks’s view, the Bobo will spend lots of money on things he believes (though not consciously) possess the power to transfer spiritual or moral qualities to its owner. This debased form of sacramentalism is an ersatz, consumerist version of the real thing, which doesn’t fetishize objects themselves, but which is really a way of thinking about the importance of aesthetics to the good life. This may be a distinction without a discernible difference; Brooks told me that conservative writers just have to live with the fact that we share certain tastes with the predominantly liberal intellectual class. But if there’s nothing to it, and the consumer choices people make are purely a function of social determinism, then it leaves no room for the person who purchases certain products simply because the products look good, taste good or offer superior value, despite costing more. It means accepting bad beer, lousy coffee, Top-40 radio, strip malls, and all popular manifestations of cheapness and ugliness as proof that One Is Not an Effete Liberal. And that’s just as phony as anything the Bobos stand for.
Curious about the possible spiritual aspect of this phenomenon, I wrote to my crunchy-right friends Julianne Loesch Wiley (a Catholic) and Frederica Mathewes-Green (Orthodox), both of whom have long been active in the pro-life movement, to ask them how they reconciled their conservatism with their countercultural tastes. Frederica responded first, saying that she embraced her “mother-earth hippie aesthetic” in her liberal youth, and has stuck with it even though she’s now firmly in the religious conservative camp.
“What hooked me then, and continues to hold me, and what is the underlying theme of the contemporary liberal side of this aesthetic, is authenticity,” she said. “I read a piece in American Demographics a few years ago about this, that the hook for progressives is this concept of ‘authenticity,’ the distrust of mass-produced sentiment or materials.”
She thinks secular leftists, having emptied the world of God, hunger for something to anchor their lives, and seek it out in various manifestations of Boboism. As a believing Christian and a religious conservative, though, Frederica still feels a kinship with this longing, “because I find in the presence of the old and funky furniture and things I live with a reminder of the goodness of the material world God made, and visited, and fills.”
“Every single thing that comes into my house, down to the salt shakers, have to first pass a test of being persuasive, winsome, original, odd — ‘authentic.’ I think that this is a cousin to what you and Julie are doing with food and other tastes. You’re looking for true quality and refusing to be satisfied with Purina People Chow. You have your antennas up for what is real, original, worthy. And to many conservatives, that sounds stuck-up and suspiciously lefty.”
Catholic Julianne says she absorbed a lot of her “natural” ideas through her anti-abortion activism. Awe over the miracle of birth led her to study natural-childbirth practices, which hooked her up with herb-savvy Earth Mother types in Birkenstocks — “and before you know it, I was eating nutritional yeast on my baked potatoes. Eeuh! Liberal!”
Teaching her kids to read early made Julianne think that maybe the intellectually deadening public school wasn’t the best thing for them, and she became a homeschooler without quite realizing what was happening. “That’s supposed to be right-wing,” she wrote. “But I was first introduced to homeschooling by John Holt, who was left-wing. How do I know? There were certain telltale phrases he used. He didn’t trust the Establishment. He didn’t trust the government schools. But that’s right wing now. Funny how I went straight from left wing to right wing without ever once passing through a phase where I trusted the government.”
That’s an amusing line, but it also points out how so many of us depend on labels to frame our experiences so as not to be disturbed by the idea that somebody on the other side might be on to something good, beautiful or true. Somebody’s got to pioneer these things. My wife gets a kick out of the fact that she’s the only housewife in the neighborhood who carries home her organic vegetables in a National Review Online tote bag. Who knows, one of these days, maybe one of the liberal housewives doling out the Swiss chard on delivery day will ask her about the flat tax. Dare to dream, you Birkenstocked Burkeans, and pass the hippie carrots.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTFmYmUzNGZiMGFjN2EwMDlhODk1MDg0N2UzOTlkYWE=
