November 11, 2012

In Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead praised the Seventeenth Century as "the one century which consistently, and throughout the whole range of human activities, provided intellectual genius adequate for the greatness of its occasions." His focus was on science, but he mentioned two men of letters, Shakespeare and Cervantes. He might have added another, John Donne who, in 1624, wrote these familiar lines:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Donne’s insight is a lesson we need to relearn. Conservatives, especially in their libertarian form, are wedded to the notion that everyone should be able to go his own way, keep what he has, take what he can, and ignore everyone else. (The contemporary formula for that is YOYO: you’re on your own). Contrary to Donne, they believe that the loss of a mere clod is unimportant: they will take notice only if a promontory, one of their manors, is lost. We’ve just had a presidential election in which that philosophy came to the fore and was personified in the Republican candidates. They lost, but no transformation should be expected.

One excuse for that philosophy is that we can’t afford the welfare state, that transfer payments lie at the heart of our budgetary problems. Another is that welfare (including Social Security) creates laziness and dependency. Both were offered up today by the reliably reactionary Robert Samuelson of the frequently reactionary Washington Post.⁸⁶

Our society is increasingly divided, increasingly controlled by great wealth, unwilling or unable to solve or even recognize urgent problems, prone to treat social programs, even disaster relief, as if they were gifts to the unworthy rather than a mark of an advanced and stable culture. We need inspiration but, unlike the Seventeenth Century, the present one is not blessed with thinkers adequate to the occasion. We must resort to those in the past, which ought to appeal to conservatives.

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86. "It’s the Welfare State, Stupid," http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-samuelson-its-the-welfare-state-stupid/2012/11/11/e392868a-2ab0-11e2-bab2-eda299503684_story.html?hpid=z2