More Hannah Arendt

The lower middle classes, or petty bourgeoisie, were the descendants of the guilds of artisans and tradesmen who for centuries had been protected against the hazards of life by a closed system which outlawed competition and was in the last instance under the protection of the state. They consequently blamed their misfortune upon the Manchester system, which had exposed them to the hardships of a competitive society and deprived them of all special protection and privileges granted by public authorities. They were, therefore, the first to clamor for the "welfare state," which they expected not only to shield them against emergencies but to keep them in the professions and callings they had inherited from their families.
-Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. (36)

Does This Thesis Hold?

Neither exploitation nor oppression as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible functions much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
-Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. (4)

The Bureau

Tim Weiner. Enemies: A History of the FBI. 537 pp. Random House. New York. 2012

In Federalist 8 Alexander Hamilton wrote:

"Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct....Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort to repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free."

Of course the counterargument from Benjamin Franklin runs along the lines of "they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." This is the eternal debate. But this is not the place for it.
Enemies deals with the agency tasked, among other things, with protecting the US from enemies foreign and domestic who seek to subvert our way of life [as opposed to our lifestyle]. Most works regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation fall into two camps: Saviors or Devils. Related to that is anything regarding the man who was the Bureau for fifty years: J. Edgar Hoover, either a hero or a crossdressing, deeply conflicted, villain. Weiner presents what is perhaps the most objective history of the FBI to date, a treatment that shows the War on Terror is not a recent phenomenon.

A Sure Sign of Spring

Pitchers and catchers report!

An Interesting Thought

From George Marsden. Religion and American Culture, pp. 194-195

The sensational reactions that marked the whole era between the two world wars reflected the tensions of rapid cultural change. They also sometimes obscured the significance of the changes since they helped create the impression, eagerly promoted by media, that anyone who would express alarm at the transformation must be a bigot or fanatic.
Nonetheless, some sober observers recognized the revolutionary nature of the developments taking place within American society itself. One of the most astute of these was the famed journalist Walter Lippmann. In A Preface to Morals, appearing in 1929, Lippmann observed that the irreligion of the modern world [is]... radical to a degree for which there is, I think, no counterpart." Modern Americans, he said, had "defied the Methodist God and have become very nervous." Lippmann, a secular Jew himself, was not recommending a return to old-time religion. Even though he thought that J. Gresham Machen had "the best popular argument produced by either side in the current controversy," he was convinced that anti-intellectual popular fundamentalism and extremism had irremediably discredited traditional Protestantism among the thinking people in the community. Yet civilization could not go on without a shared morality. Lippmann's solution was to base such a moral consensus on a new humanism. "When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists."
Building a new humanist moral consensus was, of course, more easily said than done. And "the acids of modernity" that Lippmann described had sources that went beyond ideological or even religious change.
Perhaps most basically, the United States was increasingly becoming what the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin described a few years later as a "sensate society." That is, the operative values for most Americans of the time were increasingly defined by satisfaction of the senses- materialistic, hedonistic, or sensuous. This was an accentuation of the trend that Henry Adams pointed out at the end of the nineteenth century, that the United States was preeminently a materialistic civilization. It was materialistic philosophically in that it was built on a science and technology that regarded the material, empirically observable world as the "real" world. And it was practically materialistic in its efficient commercial and technological management of material culture.
Such broad cultural trends lay beneath the celebrated "revolution in morals" of the 1920s. Commercial interests particularly pushed Americans toward definitions of themselves in terms of things that they owned and pleasures they could enjoy. In the 1920s the wide promotion of such outlooks was relatively new. Commercial advertising was just emerging in its modern form. The commercial possibilities of sexual suggestion were just being developed. During the Victorian Era sex was a subject to be avoided in public. Once that taboo was broken, around World War I, advertisers made the most of it. As one observer put it, "Advertising, once pristine, began the transition which...was to transmute soap from a cleansing agent into an aphrodisiac."

More Cicero

Shun also the desire for money. Nothing is more the mark of a mean and petty spirit than to love riches; nothing more honorable and more magnificent than to despise money if you are without it, but if you have it to devote it to liberality and beneficence.
-Cicero. On Duties. (I. 68)

More Cicero

Fleshly lusts are harsh masters for our minds, since they compel and command us to enter upon courses which never end. Because they can in no way be appeased or satisfied, there is no crime to which they do not drive those whom their enticements have ensnared.
-Cicero. On the Commonwealth. (VI. 1)

An Old Roman

The search for truth and its investigation are above all, peculiar to man. Therefore, whenever we are free from necessary business and other concerns we are eager to see or to hear or to learn, considering that the discovery of obscure or wonderful things is necessary for a blessed life.
-Cicero. On Duties. (I. 13)

From the Federal Farmer

We do not by declarations change the nature of things, or create new truths.
-Richard Henry Lee. Letters from a Federal Farmer. Number XVI.

Why Sports Matter

The most universal experience in America, historians say, is to have been uprooted. Rooting is a pressing national need. The human being needs roots, because the pretense to infinity, the search for total universality, may be proper to the spirit but not the body, and whoever commits himself to such a search dooms himself to the disintegration of the embodied self, which is death.
-Michael Novak. "Rooting, Agon"

Tradition

Tradition is an embodiment of givens that must constantly be fought for, recovered in each generation, and adjusted to new conditions.
-Eugene Genovese. The Southern Tradition. (4-5)

Richard Weaver

It is apparent...that those who are in rebellion against memory are the ones who wish to live without knowledge, and we can, in fact, tell from their conduct that they act more than others on instinct and sensation.
-Richard Weaver. Ideas Have Consequences. (67-68)

Will Percy

Should I therefore teach deceit, dishonor, ruthlessness, bestial force to the children in order that they survive? Better that they perish. It is sophistry to speak of two sets of virtues, there is but one: virtue is an end in itself; the survival virtues are means , not ends. Honor and honesty, compassion and truth are good even if they kill you, for they alone give life its dignity and worth. Yet probably England and France and all the good and noble and the true of all the world will die and obscenity will triumph. Probably those that practiced virtue will be destroyed, but it is better for men to die than to call evil good, and virtue itself will never die.
-William Alexander Percy. Lanterns on the Levee. (313)

C. S. Lewis on Politics

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from Rousseau, who believed in democracy because he thought mankind so wise and good that everybody deserved a share in government. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power. I do not think equality is one of those things which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes.
- C. S. Lewis. Present Concerns. (71)

Hayek on Rewards

Though most people regard as very natural the claim that nobody should be rewarded more than he deserves for his effort, it is nevertheless based on a colossal presumption. It presumes that we are able to judge in every individual instance how well people use the different talents and opportunities given to them and how meritorious their achievements are. It presumes that some human beings are in a position to know conclusively what a person is worth and are entitled to determine what he may achieve. It presumes what the argument for liberty rejects: that we can and do know all that guides a person's actions.
- F. A. Hayek. The Constitution of Liberty (97)