Another Fine Mess

LAST WEEK was not the best in recent memory. The Fed and the European Central Bank had to rush the global financial system into an ICU and pump in hundreds of billions of dollars and euros to try and control its raging sub-prime mortgage contagion. If you aren’t nervous, you ought to be.

Yet the sub-prime contagion was not the only storm signal.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James E. Hansen, director, quietly updated its US temperature anomaly chart, demoting 1998 from its position as the warmest year ever and restoring 1934 to that honor. Canadian gadfly Steve McIntyre at climateaudit.org is now 2 for 2. First he pointed out that the global temperature “hockey stick” was flawed. Now he’s pointed out that James Hansen has committed a “Y2K error” by switching temperature time series in 2000.

To top it all, the US decided to opt out of the international math pennant race. According to Education Week, the US Department of Education has decided to sit out part of the current update of the international TIMSS study of student math performance. The education bureaucrats don’t want to be a part of the TIMSS-Advanced 2008 test that evaluates students “taking physics and upper-level math classes, such as calculus, at the end of their secondary school years.” You can see why. The last time they tested US students, they came in fourth from the bottom. But not to fear, says Newsweek. Congress has just passed the America COMPETES Act, “which carves out a whopping $43.6 billion for science education and research.”

Meanwhile it is beginning to seem as though all is not lost in Iraq, even though everyone knew it was.

How are we to make sense of all this?

Usually, you expect the nation’s writers and poets to tell the story that makes sense of it all. But today the writers and poets are demoralized. Recently Seattle Intiman Theatre director Bartlett Sher told Encore magazine “we’ve gotten to a point in our history where we feel that we can’t pull it all together.” What with all the cynicism, it’s become hard to build up hope in our country again.

So Sher has been putting on plays like Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town, and, of course, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which shows “how our kids learn about justice and learn to have an informed conscience.”

Our Town was written in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942. Mockingbird was the 1960 best-seller that told liberals they had always been on the side of the angels on civil rights. So the plays that Sher is presenting to his liberal Seattle audience are nostalgia pieces from a liberal golden age when America was sitting in front of the radio listening to FDR’s fireside chats or working to make civil rights a reality rather than a promise.

It was an era when “everyone” agreed that government was a force for positive good.

Here’s a nickel that says that Sher won’t be putting on a play about a fictional federal Office of Global Financial Coordination in which the ambitious executive-grade deputy assistant under-secretary hands out research grants to his academic buddies to study the importance of race in the development of mortgage-backed securities crises in between attending an endless round of international negotiations on global risk mitigation at which nothing is ever decided.

He won’t be putting on a play in which liberal school administrators and liberal teachers’ union leaders use their media contacts to publicize trumped-up charges against the principal of an inner-city private school while they trade financial and sexual favors at conferences in exotic vacation resorts.

He won’t be putting on a play about an academic hounded out of his tenured professorship because the grants dried up when he wouldn’t shade his research to support the prevailing academic global-warming orthodoxy.

And that’s a pity.

Americans desperately need to know what it all means whether “it” is globalized financial markets, politicized scientists, educational flatulence, or the clash of civilizations.

Bartlett Sher wonders why “we” can’t “pull it all together.” Maybe it’s because, in the liberal arts community, there are too many topics that can’t be brought to the stage or the screen. Because liberals don’t want to talk about it.

The troubling news of last week reminds us that we cannot put off a real national conversation much longer.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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