Posted on 12/31/2009 7:31:43 AM PST by Graybeard58
"I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is in the spirit of delayed gratification that we decline to join the frenzy of decade-in-review commentary, at least until the first decade of the 21st century actually ends on Dec. 31, 2010. But those who share Emerson's disdain for instant gratification need not fret over the vagaries of the calendar. The past year provided ample illustrations of "this shallow Americanism" and its effect on U.S. policy, culture, possibly even its survival as a free nation.
Economists long have understood the concept of creative destruction in business and markets: Sam Walton enters the retail market with a business plan superior to that of his competitors; he gets rich and they vanish. A more recent example is Asian automakers building cars, mainly in Southern states, using nonunion labor. Rather than letting U.S. car companies adapt or die, the Bush and Obama administrations stepped in with $65 billion in loans that kept the old guard in Michigan unsteadily afloat. So: Both administrations substituted their own dubious knowledge for the wisdom of markets, refusing to let the automaking industry evolve at its own speed and in its own way.
National leaders were just as quick to intervene when jobless rates began climbing late last year. The Obama administration in February pushed through a $787 billion "stimulus" plan, promising it would hold the jobless rate under 8 percent. Instead, unemployment topped 10 percent; the best the administration can do is celebrate the recent decline in the rate of job loss. (Wise leaders will leave it to history to decide whether to credit federal policy with preventing Great Depression II.)
But if you work for the local, state or national government, you're probably still pulling down a paycheck. Bloomberg News' Joe Mysak reports U.S. companies have cut 6.29 percent of their work force since employment peaked in December 2007; state governments, 0.28 percent; local governments, 0.8 percent. So it can be said the "stimulus" worked, if its real purpose was to preserve the jobs of unionized government employees.
The accelerating budget deficits and long-term debt at the federal level, as well as in many states including Connecticut, testify to the ceaseless quest for instant gratification. Leaders can't or won't stop giving the people what they want — fat public-employee-union contracts, various forms of welfare, huge and wasteful government programs — and every day they delay, they add new and unimaginable layers of cataclysm to some future day of reckoning.
Americans and their leaders are so war-weary, eight years after 9/11, that President Obama dithered and poll-watched for months before making the right choice on a troop surge in Afghanistan. Chillingly, it's less a matter of no longer believing U.S. forces can prevail, than a lack of conviction that victory matters — an illusion the administration unwittingly encourages by resisting the impulse to talk of winning, and by identifying enemies, from the would-be Christmas Day airline bomber to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, as criminals to be dealt with in civil courts.
For Democrats in Congress, health-care reform is instant gratification squared. First, the finished product almost certainly will give them uncontested power over one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Second, the deals they cut — $100 million for Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., to build a new University of Connecticut hospital and bolster his re-election bid; the millions in Medicaid dollars for Nebraska, paid by taxpayers in other states, to silence Sen. Ben Nelson's objections to the prospect of publicly funded killing of unborn babies — add up to a shopping spree for pork-barreling politicians. ("Every state got something," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.) Mr. Obama and legislative leaders consistently have called for the utmost speed, ignoring constituents' pleas that they slow down.
The failure of Copenhagen and the scandal of Climategate notwithstanding, the global-warming juggernaut rolls on. Americans have grown increasingly doubtful of the validity of the "science" behind the climate warnings. Increasingly, it seems it would be easier to change the weather than to persuade U.N. bureaucrats, leading Democratic politicians and others in the global-government movement to abandon their scheme to assert control over how much energy we consume, what we buy, even how many children we have.
What's the solution to these and many other ills? Emerson might not wholeheartedly approve, but the solution may be found in another form of instant gratification — the one Americans will exercise, hopefully with energy and wisdom, on Nov. 2, 2010.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this list, let me know.
ping
Global warming is the new phrenology.
Kudos to them for standing on principle, however obscure, if they actually do. The modern mind has become more and more used to counting from zero thanks to the ubiquity of the digital computer and its peculiar internal arithmetic. Even our appliances' power switches now show zero and one, not off and on. So most people would excuse them if they joined the madding crowd and waited only until 2009 was over to "review the decade."
How does science pull such big boners while managing to get excruciatingly small details exactly right for the sake of technology?
Technologists (engineers), generally, manifest their
egos in accomplishments; whilst scientists manifest
their egos in prestige. The later has no worth, ergo
political grants.
“
“I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit,
to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy
of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery
without apprenticeship.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“
I suspect that if the revered Mr. Emerson was re-animated, I’d not
agree with him on many things.
But this quote from him...it’s a keeper!
“
Global warming is the new phrenology.
“
Some decades ago I did some work for a “senior” professor at a
major West Coast research university.
Looking at the prof’s library was fascinating. Some of the books from
professors in the USA on the subject of genetics (mostly from approx.
1900-1930) were interesting...and disturbing.
If I’d been on the jury at Nuremburg, my verdict would have been
“Yes, Herr Goering, you and your co-defendents are right about the
racialist basis of American view on human genetics are true.
And those views are controversial. But at least in the USA, we weren’t
feeding people into ovens based on the work of our academicians.”
re: wouldn’t agree with Emerson
I think you would agree with him on many things.
Are you upset that he doesn’t believe Jesus performed miracles? If so then find out why he thinks that.
Read his Divinity School Address. Here’s a paragraph:
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, `This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
Nov. 2, 2010 isn’t soon enough gratification.
>>>How does science pull such big boners while managing to get excruciatingly small details exactly right for the sake of technology?<<<
That’s due to the nature of scientific method, which is based on the idea that the results of experimentation can be replicated by different people in different places.
Of course, science is also produced by human beings, and human beings are prone to all kinds of blindness - ideological, personal, political, spiritual. After a while, though, as people attempt to replicate the experimentation from previous science, it becomes clear that some science is shaky and some science is more solid.
These concerns are more prominent in areas of science based on modeling or which need assumptions to proceed. Einstein believed in a static universe, and fiddled with his own findings to fit his worldview. Ptolemy believes the Earth was at the center of the universe and emerged with a system that accurately predicted the motions of the planets, even though it was totally wrong. The problem is that you can’t re-run the universe to do another experiment; you can only observe, measure, and hypothesize. It’s the core of the problem with evolution (or not). We can’t do it over in a laboratory and see what happens; all we have is what we can observe and measure. Ditto the present state of climate science.
In sciences like engineering and chemistry the situation is better. You can replicate an experiment which alters substances and chemicals over and over to find out if the science is sound.
In any case, eventually, as long as people are allowed to use the scientific method without outside interference, the bad science is eliminated in favor of better science. It takes time (sometimes generations and millenia), though, and often the need for someone outside the box to think through things different.
Hope this helps. Happy New Year.
Emerson is not alone in hankering for substance over shadow, but it goes one further in orthodox Christian faith. We are certainly not about sloganeering, but we are also not the old thing about new principles. We are a new thing. We are in this world but literally not of it any more. We can't declare a unity with the clovers even though they themselves speak of divine power.
I think the earlier comment about prestige vs. results nails the real world phenomenon better.
It’s pretty scandalous when you can’t even check the MATH of the climatologists back to the original data, as rough as their system has to be. This has ceased to be science at all and has become a kind of priestcraft.
I agree in the short term. People are people, and we all like to be liked and respected. And I’d go further and call environmentalism in general as a religion, with climate change just part of the whole, so it would make sense to fudge the data to fit the worldview of the scientists.
However, I also think in the long term that the real science will triumph over the bad science we have right now. We don’t have any phrenologists today; I think we’ll be snickering about the statements of Al Gore a few generations from now.
Be well!
>> I’d not agree with him on many things.
I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you.
But if we lock our spindles and consider his work as it exists, it’s ‘safe’ material from this Conservative’s point of view.
blah, blah, blah...nothing will change until a few of them are strung up.
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