- What’s Distinctive About America?
- Carrying coal to Newcastle.
- Pray for Ken Myers.
- Knowing and Thinking.
Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin comments on a Metafilter thread on what’s distinctive about America. He thinks the commenters miss a few things, including a few wherein Americans and Russians are just about polar opposites. F’rinstance:
More generally, the US has a strong culture of self-esteem that makes it socially awkward to openly criticize people in many contexts. For example, American professors have to be much more careful about criticizing students than European ones. Russia is, once again, at the opposite end of the continuum from the US.
Ryan Anderson at Public Discourse comments on Conservatives and Social Justice. The type of conservatism he has in mind is that typified by the American Enterprise Institute, whose “Peter Wehner and Arthur Brooks provide a prime example as they helpfully lay out much of the case for democratic capitalism in their new book in the AEI Values and Capitalism series, Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism.”
Wehner and Brooks ably defend capitalism, but that’s a pretty superfluous task these days, notwithstanding the feigned concern of Fox News conservatives about socialism and communism at OWS. Where they fail is seriously engaging capitalism’s problems:
In framing their argument as a defense of capitalism against the alternatives of life pre-Industrial Revolution and life under communism, Wehner and Brooks have made their task too easy. The real question facing developed capitalist countries now is what type of capitalism to have, and what type of wealth distribution. Among the most thoughtful thinkers on these questions, few are strict egalitarians, and so even here Wehner and Brooks have engaged a strawman. One might think current disparities in wealth are unjust, not because material equality is the goal, but because human flourishing is, and too many people lack the requisite material goods for that flourishing. Income and wealth equality isn’t the concern, but having sufficient goods to meet one’s needs and fulfill one’s vocation is. Likewise, one might worry about the disparate political power that comes with gross material inequalities. Wehner and Brooks say nothing about these concerns.
When the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote Two Cheers for Capitalism, he intentionally held back from giving it a resounding three cheers. He knew there were downsides, and that conservatives had to be honest about these in order to address them adequately. But the conservative message about capitalism today glosses over these facts, proposes no principles of justice, and fails to engage—let alone persuade—our fellow citizens who worry about our economic order. Conservatives writing in defense of democratic capitalism need to spend less energy fighting off communism, and more energy developing a conservative vision of social justice, painting a picture of what a better capitalism could look like.
Some of my readers will be, like me, subscribers to and fans of the Mars Hill Audio Journal and its host and creator, Ken Myers. I’ve just received word that Ken suffered a major heart attack on Saturday morning while at home in Virginia. He was airlifted to the UVA hospital in Charlottesville, and is in the ICU. Word is that doctors are cautiously optimistic about his recovery, but that it will indeed be a long recovery.
Please keep Ken and his family in your prayers. The man is a national treasure. If you’ve never sampled the Journal, click here to see why I call him that.
(Rod Dreher). I agree completely with Rod. Mars Hill Audio Journal is a passion my wife and I share, despite currently professing different Christian traditions. Ken Myers polished his interviewing craft at NPR and is the the equal of CSPAN’s Brian Lamb at the art of a good interview.
A centipede was happy quite,
Until a frog in fun
Said, “Pray tell which leg comes after which?”
This raised her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
(Your Brain Knows a Lot More than You Think.)
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Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 