Patrick Deneen waxes philosophical on the final hours of this fateful year. Excerpt:
When the history is written, it seems likely that not only will 2008 go down as the year when the fissures of the American way of life were made plain, but it will be understood to be the date when the beginning of the end of the American empire was made manifest. No empire of significant power falls in a day or a year, but in stages, like the slow motion internal degradation of a rotting building.Historians will write with amazement and wonder at the madness that had swept the land, such that even (or especially) the best and the brightest believed that something - a great deal, in fact - could be had for nothing. In the course of a few months this year we went collectively from feeling wealthy and insulated from any great harms, to discovering that our entire edifice was built on a foundation of unsustainable risk. The last bit of breaking news of the year was the revelation of a massive Ponzi scheme, a bit of financial chicanery by which newer "investors" are fleeced in order to line the pockets of older "investors." The massive scheme hatched by Bernie Madoff - not now on impoverished little widows and orphans, but the power elite of America and even the world - was a smaller morality tale of the entire American financial system, one that had been all along premised upon impoverishing the young and the unborn for the sake of the living and soon dead.
Stories will be told about this year, with amazement that humans could have attempted to organize a society around a belief in the utter efficacy of self interest. This philosophy appeared to work for a time, and was well-designed to do so by virtue of the presumed existence of two phenomena that it neither created nor replenished. What allowed this philosophy of the Enlightenment - so-called - to succeed for a time were two gigantic reservoirs that the philosophy fundamentally held in contempt, yet nevertheless assumed to exist and even to persist: a long prehistoric accumulation of material and moral inheritances.
Wonder what Alasdair MacIntyre's doing for New Year's Eve...
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It seems to me that Deneen is arguing two points, which he's linked, and that perhaps it might be worth it to sever. The first is that America has hit a real tilting point in its economic health, and that this will result in an end of American empire. The second is that this tilting point is based on a false idea about human ingenuity and human domination over nature. Deneen thinks that our recent financial collapses indicate that we've reached some kind of limit with our real control over the world; I don't know that this is true, or how we can make this prognosis so soon after the fact. Large historical judgments generally take a long time to arrive at, and the short view is often inaccurate.
I don't know that either of these points Deneen makes is true. I do wish that we were more humble and realistic in our sense of dominance over the natural world and its systems that we're dependent on for our being and wellbeing. Wendell Berry regularly argues for this point, and I for one think he is right. Those crying Luddite above need to think about whether this more general point is accurate: whether we need a greater degree of humility with respect to creation than we've had for the past several hundred years.
But whether we're really at a tilting point as a nation or empire is a different judgment altogether; I can see why Deneen might want to make the connection he does, but also can see why others resist his connecting these two. But the philosophical connection Deneen sees between general human arrogance and US hubris may be true, even if his sense of the future for the USA is untrue.
I agree with Lancelot, Celtic Dragon, and I will add something else: I believe that Lancelot is correct that human ingenuity has always found a way. That doesn't mean that every particular individual society or civilization or country has found a way out of its problems, or at least the way it might have liked (I am a classicist, after all), but we have survived as a species. In the modern world no society is as isolated as the Easter Islanders or the Vikings on Greenland were; no country in the modern world is going to be thrown back entirely on its own resources. We really are one interconnected world now. The problems of one country can resonate around the world -- but the solutions and advances of one country do, too. Just as the United States couldn't keep the atomic bomb to itself indefinitely, similarly the country that comes up with cheap energy solutions won't be able to keep those to itself, either.
Please. You could likely read the exact same post during the Gilded Age as well as the Great Depression. The Gilded age lead tot he roaring 20's and the Great Depression was followed by the unprecedented growth nearly unabated until now, and this period will likely be a blip on the map.
But stockpile your rice nonetheless. I'm having a(nother) cocktail.
I see no contradiction between rice-stockpiling and bourbon-drinking. Drink while ye stockpile, brethren!
Rod, this will sound scandalous and be much too broad a question, but here it goes: I'm not much into politics and was wondering if you could recommend some good reading on what it means to be a conservative politically, as well as the differences, politically, between conservatives and liberals. Thanks for your time—and your blog. -Jason
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