Tocqueville Question of the Day--Scale. What Size America?

By Gary L. Gregg, Ph. D.

Today's question of the day being pondered by me in Brighton, Michigan this winter morning, is the question of the proper scale of a good nation. Are there consequences to size? Can a nation be too small? Can a nation be too big?

Tocqueville's answer to this question is that there very much are great consequences to the scale of a nation.  The founders fought over this, too, but we seem to have lost the question along the way as we "manifest destinied" our way west.

Well, Tocqueville seems to say that small republics (though he does not define a particular size) are the natural home of liberty and happiness.  Indeed, he ominously warns, "The history of the world provides no example of a large nation that remained a republic for long" (256).  He says, "All the passions fatal to republics grow with the extent of the territory, while the virtues that serve to support them do not increase in the same measure" (257).

What does he see in a large nation?  Why, "Great riches and profound poverty, large cities, depravity of mores, individual egoism, complexity of interests," all which undermine liberty and happiness. I think about all of us from left and right can find something in this analysis to appreciate, but who among us are laying the blame on America being too big?

On the other hand, Tocqueville argues there are benefits in large nations because size bring strength and glory.  They can fight wars and they can be self-sufficient. In the America he observed coming into view in the 1830's, we had created a decent balance--our federal system allowed most decisions to be made at the local level so we built mores and habits in small republics. But we were able to combine strength for foreign policy and related matters across a much larger extent of territory and population.

And so the Big T must ask us to think about the state of federalism over the last 180 years. Is the America he describes still in existence? Have we over centralized?  Have we kept the balance between small republics and a broader confederacy? And, he even, I think, asks us to ponder the question that it seems un-American to ask: Have we grown too large? If we care for liberty and happiness, should America be broken up into smaller republics where we share more in common and can build the kind of mores of self-government upon which Tocqueville believed liberty was built?

And, we can play historical counterfactual and wonder what would have happened if the secession of the southern states in 1861 would have been taken as an appropriately republican remedy for the problem of scale and every thirty or 70 years or so America would have split again into smaller republics. How would American history (and world history) have unfolded differently?]

Big questions from the Big T.

Tocqueville's Question of the Day--Decentralization

Question of the Day--Decentralization

By Gary L. Gregg

We have been fighting related questions for two hundred years, to one extent or another. Tocqueville offers some very powerful insights into the political consequences of where decisions are made that are worth tackling. These observations are found between pages 142-166 (the last section of Vol. I, part 1, Chapter 5).

While Tocqueville admits that a kind of European centralization of power can be more efficient and better organized, he marvels that no people on earth are more decentralized and still better (in the 1830s) at creating schools, roads, churches, civic organizations, etc. than are the Americans.  And they do it all without going to ask the government to do it for them. How can this be?

Well, it seems to be the effect of decentralized power.  When the core decisions of politics and life are made close to home, the people feel empowered. Their souls are transformed. They feel like CITIZENS and not SUBJECTS.  They voluntarily organize to take care of social problems like crime because they feel strong and free and responsible.  (Think about the posse of your favorite westerns--Tocqueville talks about this phenomena without using the name). 

The opposite effect is created by centralization of power, Tocqueville argues. As power is centralized, people feel weak and distant from decision-making. Eventually they feel like settlers in a land that is not their own and that they do not care to preserve or protect--"let the government do it." Citizens become subjects and democracies become despotisms.

Tocqueville's warning for our democratic society can be counter-intuitive: that no power on earth centralizes more quickly and ruthlessly than democratic peoples.  They see a good in centralizing power into few hands because those hands are their embodiment. 

Wow (this thought really did just hit me), from this Tocquevillien Angle, Lincoln's ideal of government "of the people, by the people, for the people" is just the kind of language that brings about centralization and the enervation of citizenship. Yikes. I must be wrong. . . please read and correct me!

Remembering C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley on the 50th Anniversary of their Death.

 

50th Anniversary--

Remembering Lewis and Huxley

by Gary L. Gregg

22-November-2013

For the last week our televisions and newspapers have been taken up with commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  As I write this, we are just an hour away from bells tolling across the land. It is right that we pause and remember the event that changed so many lives and in ways we won't ever fully unravel, changed a generation of Americans and altered the cultural landscape of our nation.

Two other giants of the 20th century also died on November 22, 1963 and deserve our remembrances and appreciations. Perhaps the most important Christian apologist of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis died in his beloved Oxford the same day one of the most prophetic writers of the century, Aldous Huxley passed away in a bed in Los Angeles. The death of both men was overshadowed by Kennedy's assassination and have been for the last fifty years.  Still, these writers had a profound and lasting influence on minds and imaginations around the world and, at least in the case of Lewis, it might well be that his influence over the last fifty years  has been more wide and profound than was that legacy cut short in Dallas.

Nearly all of Lewis' books are still available in print and in just the last couple of years at least two new volumes have been salvaged from his records and made available to the public. His life has been the subject of a major motion picture. His children's books continue to baptize the imaginations of our young and have been made into movies that have reached even more. His Christian apologetics have converted atheists, like he once was himself, and instructed anew millions raised in the church. His scholarship stands the test of time. His adult fiction, particularly his novel That Hideous Strength has never been more timely. His The Abolition of Man remains a powerful tonic to the moral relativism of the modern world.

Later today Clives Staples Lewis joins the likes of some of the greatest literary artists in the English speaking world including Chaucer, Browning, Blake, Dickens, Austin, and Kipling, with a special memorial in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey. The honor is more than well-deserved.

Aldous Huxley's literary influence has not remained nearly as influential as has Lewis' but his _Brave New World_ remains one of the greatest warnings against the trends of the modern world. From genetic engineering to drugs for sexual enhancement, few writers were as prescient about the way our culture would decline into decadence over the last seventy years. His imaginary world built on the elimination of pain and the maximization of mindless contentment deserves reading and re-reading in our age of electronic distraction, declining education standards, and sexual mores as loose as the novelist could ever have imagined.

As we commemorate our fallen political figure today, let's also remember the literary giants who warned us, prepared us, and continue to inspire and instruct those who still read books in our own Brave New World full, as it is, of hideous strengths.

 Chickamauga

A Ghostly Tale of the Civil War

By Gary L. Gregg

I wrote this little tale on Halloween night 2013.

For the full story, please visit: Chickamauga

Fog covered the camp as he arose the next morning.  It was early and the late night sentries were exchanging their positions with fresh eyes as he crossed the dewy grass.  “I have never been so glad to see dawn,” one of them said to another, “it was like I could feel ten thousand dead standing up and walking the grounds about that bloody creek.” The boy from Ohio rolled his eyes and kept walking toward the edge of the camp.  He pulled a small mirror from his pocket to check his hair, vanity knowing no end, even in the terrible war of brothers.  He squinted as his eyes seemed less bold and clear, almost grey, in fact.  He looked up at the fog and determined it was just the defuse morning light.

Hands in his pocket, the soldier looked into the dense fog, playing games trying to make out the objects cutting the peculiar shapes.  One was moving and moving fast.  It grew in size and speed at it approached.  A man.  No, a horse. It was a proud and mighty black steed that burst from the oblivion beyond. No rider drove it on, but it bore an empty saddle upon its back, cavalry stirrups dangling at the edge of its belly.  The beast pulled up short in front of the Union soldier.

“Move on, plug. Be your man living or dead, an officer’s mount is no good for me in camp!” As he slapped the horse’s rump, he noticed the saddle had the initials CSA burned into the leather. “Ah, a Rebel horse! Well, who killed your traitor-owner?”

Fueled again with an energy he only knew when he was looking down on someone else, the boy who volunteered each time a chicken needed slaughtered, threw himself up into the saddle.  He felt the power of the horse beneath him and took the reigns into his hands. He would ride it over to his superior officer’s tent and offer it as tribute.  Perhaps he would be rewarded.  It did appear to be a very fine horse.

He dug the heels of his worn and nearly ruined boots into the horse’s flanks.  As he did, he felt his hands tighten around the reins. Pressure built in his legs as they pressed against the ribs beneath. He pulled his right leg and then his left but neither moved. Pressure like arms enveloped his chest and squeezed. The private squirmed but could not move.  He called for help but no one reacted. He didn’t know if they could not hear or the pressure around his chest kept him from emitting the sounds he intended.

The horse reared back and turned.  Out of the camp in Chattanooga it ran.  Into the deep fog. The helpless rider was flung left and right as the horse lurched around trees and jumped brambles and boulders. Onto the fields where sergeants lay next to privates in the equalizing embrace of death, the horse carried its prisoner. Bodies, once full with laughter, now lay in unnatural contortions, their life-giving blood staining the grass and already sunk into the soil below.

The boy thought he could see all the existence of these bodies in all their forms, one after another and almost all at once; Life, agonizing death, deep fear, resignation, the bleaching of death, gaseous explosions before the final stages of decay made the renewing magic of new soil. Movement. The movement of the bodies. Death was to be still, here it was all movement, all change. Fear gripped his soul and squeezed in the same way his body was being held to the horse.

Pulling up to a rising Confederate casualty, the horse bucked. The pressure released. The boy from Ohio felt himself falling toward the killing fields.

For the Full story, please visit:  http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/11/chickmauga-war.html

Leadership and the Moral Imagination, a snippit.

 Here is a snippet from my talk tonight on leadership and the moral imagination to students of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

# # #
 

The phrase "moral imagination" is from that great 18th century British parliamentarian Edmund Burke in his  Reflections on the Revolution in France.  Attacking the French Revolution, he wrote the following difficult but very insightful paragraph:

       "All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.  All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion."

*****

Now . . .

“furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination. . .”  What on earth does that mean?  I read Russell Kirk’s essays on the topic.  I read and reread Burke’s language.

Maybe I am not as smart as most, but I know I wrestled with this concept on and off for a decade or more before it finally started to make sense to me.  It was like one of those lizards you grab at and think you caught and then it scampers out of your fingers and you are left with just the decoupled tail.

I don’t have time this morning to give you a full treatment of the topic of imagination or that particular variant called the MORAL IMAGINATION.  I don’t have time this morning to explore all the intricacies of the argument or what I have learned about it all in the last decade.  Instead, I want to offer a few thoughts to set up a couple of the ways I have come to think of the power and importance of IMAGINATION and particularly of what I think is the essential link between imagination and LEADERSHIP.

My own eureka moment came when reading Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer prize winning novel All the King’s Men, a book I highly recommend to you. It is mandatory reading for my leadership students. There is a scene in that book that rocked me back on my heels.  To boil it down, the scene had one man (Jack) changing another man’s mind (Dr. Stanton) and convincing him to do what Jack wanted him to do.  (That is, jack was exercising leadership).  When asked how he did it, Jack said that he “changed the pictures in Dr. Stanton’s head.”

You see, he didn’t give him a better argument.  He didn’t threaten or bribe him.  Those tactics wouldn’t work with a man of such integrity as Dr. Stanton and he knew it.  He changed the pictures in the Dr.’s head and that was sufficient.

This insight, that we might be driven in our actions, not so much by cold, calculating reason but by the pictures in our head, forms an essential foundation of what I want to talk to you about today.

I have become convinced, we are all governed by the pictures in your heads.  We are sad or happy, successful or a failure, well-adjusted or an outcast, Christian or pagan largely because of the pictures we carry around in our heads.  They are essential to who we are. 

We all carry pictures around with us from all sorts of places: parents, teachers, loved ones, movies, music, classmates, church, books. 

       If you are a conservative, you probably carry around with you certain pictures of things you want to conserve and find true and others you find false and maybe even dangerous.  More on that as the week progresses.

So, back to my more general point; these pictures, in other words, are what inhabit our imagination.

It is those pictures that govern our lives.  It is our imaginations that rule our world.

We can’t get any further than the pictures in our heads allow us to go.  We can’t do anything that the pictures in our heads tell us we can’t. 

And so you might now start to see the genius of Dr. Kirk’s friend who claimed we could reform our politics by infusing poets into the process as advisors to our leaders. 

Our political figures are governed in their actions no less by the pictures in their heads and the quality of their imaginations, than are we.

It was a twisted and diabolic imagination that made possible Nazi Rule.

It was the idyllic imagination that made possible the terrors of the French Revolution and the excesses of 20th century communism.

Think of the differences in public policy decisions made by a political leader who had visions of America as one huge secular empire.  And another whose vision of America at its best is that of a republic of small republics who worship as communities and raise families according to shared values. What divergent decisions those two would make!

Genesis--The Power of Ideas

 A Review of Genesis by Bernard Beckett

 

By Gary Gregg, PhD

McConnell Center Director

What does it mean to be human? In one way or another almost every great piece of literature–from Homer's Odyssey to Shakespeare's Hamlet to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings–asks this basic question. Few authors are as overt in their raising this question than is Bernard Beckett in his 2006 novel Genesis (Mariner Books).

I recently picked up this slim volume because a friend suggested it as a modern companion to Plato's Republic.  Though what I found in the pages was not at all what I had expected from the description given, I did find a good read that raises profound questions for our age of the machine and the growing science of genetics. And, the final twists of the plot were worth every moment.

The book takes place in a post-apocalyptic age. A plague has decimated the population of the planet except for a small island-nation led by a man who calls himself Plato. Plato builds a sea wall to protect his people from the carriers of the plague and then proceeds to build a society remarkably like the Republic that sprang from the imagination of the great Greek thinker 2,500 years ago. The Republic's motto is "Forward toward the past" and its version of conservatism manifests itself in the platonic vision that change means decay. The classes of society are divided into philosophers, soldiers, technicians and laborers. 

The key moment in the downfall of the Republic comes with the discovery that the laboring class would be the key source of instability. To deal with this situation, the leaders reason, they must do away with labor so no human being finds themselves at the bottom.  To that end, they build labor- saving machines and continue in their experiments to perfect their machines by making them capable of artificial intelligence.

But if a machine can be developed with artificial intelligence–with the ability to learn, mimic, change and evolve as it interacts with its environment (like human babies interacting with their parents), what sets it apart from being considered a human being? This, perhaps, is the key question of the novel and unfolds as a series of interactions between a robot dressed as an orangutan and a human rebel whose crime was to save an innocent girl adrift on the sea by killing one a fellow soldier who, under orders, was about to kill her.

Beckett wrote the novel while he was on a science fellowship exploring DNA mutations and one can see the application he was making of applying our understanding of DNA to that basic question of what makes us human.

What does make us human? Is it being self-conscious? Being able to imagine and create? Being created in the image of God? Suffering from Original Sin? Having a soul? A certain particular pattern in our DNA? Amidst all we can do with machines, is there something that is ultimately non-transferable from our species? 

In 1948, Richard M. Weaver published a book called Ideas Have Consequences. In that important book, Weaver showed the origins of modernity and also gave us a very handy phrase with which to understand the power of ideas. In Genesis, Beckett gives us a short novel whose basic thrust is to imaginatively demonstrate his conception of the incredible power of ideas. Ideas, one of his characters argues, are all that hold us together. They bind person to person into communities. But, what is more, rather than understanding ideas to be the creations of individual human beings, he creates a picture of ideas as being outside forces which invade and colonize individual minds. They are like microbes transmitted from host to new brain, occasionally mutating in order to survive in their new environment.  

What if being human, Beckett seems to want us to ask, is just to have been colonized by a certain set of particular ideas? What if those ideas are best expressed, perhaps, in the first book of the Bible which Beckett takes for his own title? What if, then, those ideas can jump from organic intelligence to colonize artificial intelligence, too? Or, what if those ideas, like all living things, can die away in a culture that neglects them or actively assaults them?

Genesis is a slim volume and worth the time, thought and reaction it might provoke. In our age no less than any other and perhaps more, we must continue to seek wisdom about what it means to be human.

Gary L. Gregg II is the author or editor of ten books including his young adult novels The Sporran and The Iona Conspiracy.

Russell Kirk's Founders and the Unwritten Constitution

 RUSSELL KIRK'S FOUNDERS AND THE UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION

BY

GARY L. GREGG

2013 is the 60th anniversary of the publication of one of the most consequential books of the 20th century.  I am privileged to have been asked to contribute to a number of forums this year discussing Kirk and his work and am particularly thankful to Liberty Fund and Richard Reinsch for inviting me to contribute to this one.  As I considered what I would write and thumbed through The Conservative Mind, I hit upon some things I had never spent time thinking about and my essay represents one strand of that new thought on Kirk's ideas.

I hope you enjoy this section of my essay and will read the full version at the website listed at the bottom.


A consideration of Kirk’s founders, both missing and rediscovered, lead us to an understanding of Kirk’s conservatism that would surprise many who consider themselves contemporary heirs of the movement he helped found.  Kirk is concerned with institutions, including those of the U.S. Constitution, to the degree that they are aligned with two more critical under girding phenomena: human nature and political culture.

Throughout The Conservative Mind, authors and statesmen are upheld to the degree that their understanding of human nature is in accordance with the inherited vision of Judeo-Christian revelation and human experience.  Human beings are flawed, incapable of perfection, and suffer profoundly from original sin.  To the degree that political institutions are structured to account for this overriding fact and meliorate its most negative consequences, they are found to be worthy of praise.  Here the United States’ Constitution is good as it rests on just this basic understanding and accounts for the corruption of power by separated and checked institutions.

Though John Adams fought hard against the philosophes and their abstract accounts of human nature untethered to imperfectability, he admitted some degree of change possible within the human species.  Such change is manifest in the political culture.  As the virtues, values and ideas of a people change so will their political prospects, making any constitution only as useful or as pernicious as the culture that underpins it.  Of course, with Adams and all of Kirk’s conservative minds, any change is bounded by the fact that we are created somewhere between the beasts and the angels and are destined to always stay in that zone of humanity.

To understand and learn from Russell Kirk’s magnum opus, then, we must understand an overriding fact of human existence: sin and culture trump politics and planning. This is why Kirk, unlike so many contemporary conservatives, point us in the direction of the poets and not the politicians; the unwritten more than to the written constitution.  It is in this way that we might more properly consider our “founders,” not the framers of the Constitution in 1787 but those who shaped the minds and imaginations of the culture that produced it.  The Constitution of 1787 will survive as something more than parchment only to the degree that it is supported by the prevailing political culture of America.

FOR THE FULL ESSAY VISIT: http://www.libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/russell-kirks-founders-and-the-unwritten-constitution/