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Hank
Nevertheless, the 50s represented the high point of Western Civilization in the US during the 20th century. We'll examine that twentieth century heigth of civilization by seeing the kind of people that comprised that society in the next article in this series.
The '50s represent the culmination of the American society and culture prior to the New Deal. It was built on a spirit of individual enterprise learned and ingrained before the the rot of socialism and "communitarianism" took hold culturally. I think too many make the mistake of thinking big, centralized bureaucratic government was responsible for it because it's advent preceeded it. It just took it a while to overcome the inertia, but it was the death of it. We'll not see it again unless we throw off the yoke. IMHO.
Cordially,
The fundamental rule of logic is: there are no contradictions.
Nothing can both be and not be, no proposition can be both true and not true, no choice is both right and wrong, no act is both good and bad.
If so, there is a fundamental flaw in our Constitutions "republican form of government"; - wherein the States of the Union can enact laws that regulate/prohibit both individual behaviors, and the possession of 'dangerous items' of property, - in order to ensure that 'community standards' [the will of the majority] are followed.
He goes on to say:
It means an individual owns his own life, because he either owns it completely, or to some extent is a slave, and slaves are not free to choose. -
- It means he must be free to keep and use the product of his efforts because it is an extension of himself, and one cannot learn from the consequences of one's choices if someone else is in charge of them. That's called property rights.
Constitutionally enacted State regulations are "both good and bad." - They protect community standards while regulating an individuals liberty. - Not so?
boosted to the top on merit....
“If you could bring someone from the 1950s into today’s world, they also would not recognize it; they would, in fact, be horrified.”
Horse puckey. The fifty years from 1950 to 2000 are unchanged compared to the fifty years from 1900 to 1950.
For example, imagine the 1967 NFL championship game halftime show featuring a musical group for 1917. Now consider the 2005 Super Bowl half time featuring the Rolling Stones, a group from nearly fifty years ago. The former rates an ‘impossible’ while the latter happened.
That someone would not even understand this sentence. Back then, "someone" was only one person, usually referred to as one, he or she. Nowadays, someONE is actually many people, referred to as as THEY.
What you're saying here reminds me a little of Alan Bloom in his Closing of the American Mind.
Thanks for posting this most excellent piece.
Cheers!
Well, no, not exactly, and I speak as someone who very clearly remembers the 1950's. That individual might well be horrified, but it would be at the world that he or she helped build. And what would be horrifying about it would be as much the success as the failure - the success of winning an unwinnable Cold War and the moral failure attendant with the widespread condemnation of the Western mores that went along with that.
I am inclined to agree with the author's six main precepts and enjoyed reading them. The belief in an objective reality especially is most unfashionable and is, in fact, the bedrock of many disparate schools of Western philosophy - as that old bully Samuel Johnson said when he kicked the rock, "I refute it thus!" And so he did.
But it must be understood that what is loosely termed the culture of the West contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction and rebirth. That is not at all an unhealthy thing but it is inherently unstable and the uncertainties it promises are anathema to those who hope, or think they do, for a stable, "peaceful" society that promises only the known at the price of irreparable and stupefying stagnation. That is the siren song of Marxism and it simply isn't going to happen.
Politics and philosophy are fields that are particularly subject to popular fads, enthusiasmes in that apt but untranslatable French term. I would class both multiculturalism and Postmodernism respectively in those roles, and while such enthusiasmes appear overwhelmingly convincing to their adherents they fade in time to the antics of children viewed by amused adults. That does not make them harmless. Good people went to the guillotine under them in the eighteenth century and to the gas chamber and the Gulag in the twentieth.
And so one must take them seriously while deploring them and pitying their earnest followers. These ideas kill as children kill - carelessly, casually, and with utter amorality. There are those who find that attractive, even romantic. These are, in my opinion, lost souls.