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PaperclipPerfector  3yr ago (text post)   30229 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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A stirring speech, but the paean to martial honour that it is built around has always been the minority view among those who fought and bled in industrial-age warfare. The politics of Reconstruction-era America, like the politics of inter-war Europe, was defined by never again. So, in a more uplifting way, was the politics of post-WW2 Europe. War is the price we pay to preserve peace, not something valuable in its own right. This view, too, is in the old books, because things change less than you think. I think it is most eloquently put by John Adams in a letter to his wife:

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

The virtues of American (and before it, British) commercial culture are deep and wide - and, incidentally, unmatched on the battlefield. They should be celebrated for what they are, not compared unfavourably to the martial virtues that we appear to have given up for them. And we remember those who died to preserve them for what they gave up, not what they represent.

If the dead of Gettysburg could talk, would they agree with OWH or John Adams? Mass literacy continued to advance over the intervening decades, and the dead of Flanders speak to us through their letters. Famously, they agree with the living of their generation - war is hell, and war on that scale should only be fought to end all wars.

We men of the factories and counting-houses are not without honour (serial bankrupt Donald Trump excepted). "Dictum Meum Pactum" - "My word is my bond" - the motto of the London Stock Exchange. "The full faith and credit of the United States Government". These mean something (although unfortunately less than they would have done to John Quincy Adams), and people sleep more soundly at night knowing that they will not be ruined because of them. What are Mensur scars or the broken necks of the polo ground which OWH so admires when compared to the skills and spills of modern football (Association or gridiron) - whether you compare the quality of the spectacle at the top of the sport or the ratio of characters built to bodies maimed at the grassroots. Mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture are advanced wonderously.

And perhaps we should be more gracious if our granddaughters want to waste some of their time on painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. Rome, after all, is remembered as much for her achievements in those areas as for her battlefield victories.

"My word is my bond" - the motto of the London Stock Exchange. "The full faith and credit of the United States Government". These mean something (although unfortunately less than they would have done to John Quincy Adams

Civis Romanus Sum.

I'm also remind of this line from Patton's address to the 3rd Army.

All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don't say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important.

Emphasis mine

...and I can't help but suspect that the real "beef" that a lot of users here have with traditional American civic religion boils down to this line here.

I have always seen war as a very necessary evil. We shouldn’t seek it, but at the same time, there’s always barbarians at the gates, and peace is more often than not followed by those barbarians thirsting for the blood of a people who removed the cannons in favor of flower pots, who’d beaten their swords into plows and didn’t teach their kids to fight.

War is certainly hell, but I think the slavery bought by refusing to fight is just as bad. Watching your country ravaged and looted is bad, as is the hunger that follows. What concerns me hear is that Ukraine and (I suspect) Taiwan are the first of several wars that will result from the end of Pax Americana just as centuries of warfare followed the end of Pax Romana. Porcelain is great, but I think because we’re in the heart of the Atlanticist Empire, and don’t see the problems, that we assume we’re immune from nature’s law of tooth and fang. You cannot be weak.

I'm less concerned by the pean to martial honor than lines like...

The society for which many philanthropists, labor reformers, and men of fashion unite in longing is one in which they may be comfortable and may shine without much trouble or any danger. The unfortunately growing hatred of the poor for the rich seems to me to rest on the belief that money is the main thing (a belief in which the poor have been encouraged by the rich), more than on any other grievance.

...

Meantime we have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt against pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked. From societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented

...

to know that one's final judge and only rival is oneself

I can't help but think he saw something of what was to come there

I can imagine a future in which science shall have passed from the combative to the dogmatic stage, and shall have gained such catholic acceptance that it shall take control of life, and condemn at once with instant execution what now is left for nature to destroy. But we are far from such a future...

I found this bit to be particularly prescient. Much control over our lives has indeed been taken by those who proclaim a sort of scientific dogma, all while the combativeness that kept science honest and producing useful theories is fading. The future he dreamed about is here, right now.

the combativeness that kept science honest and producing useful theories is fading.

I feel like ties into a conversation I had at work this morning, as well a s some of the responses to my most recent inferential distance post. I think you may be on to something here.

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