We also know that any market power turns people into slaves and consumers of the goods, but these are truths to keep to ourselves. In the manner of a huge clear-cutting bulldozer, the system leaves Europe with empty shell of States having abdicated much of their sovereignty to the global power of financial predators.
Maybe he's not against all trade, but he's really got something against modern capitalism or hypercapitalism. I can understand the argument that speculators and predators have too much power in today's world, but when people go on about the evils of the market too much I do start to wonder or worry.
Venner's admiration for the old Middle European aristocracy is of a piece with his unease with markets. One of the big sellers of 1915 was Haendler und Helden, or Merchants and Heroes. The British and French were supposed to be mere tradesmen, and the noble Germans heroes who disdained mere commerce.
Heroism, duty, service, are admirable qualities, but one has to find a way to fit them into the world we live in -- commercial, democratic, or whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, people looking for glory can do real damage.
With respect to Venner, he doesn't quite get that aristocracy wasn't about duty or service alone. There were other qualities that distinguished the aristocracy or nobility from the dutiful servant or peasant classes, and those qualities -- the drive for distinction and glory, say -- didn't always have wholesome or constructive results.
This is what Francis Fukuyama, and before him, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, were going on about: the role of "thymos," that is, spiritedness or ambition, in a commercial, democratic order that expects such forces to be narrowly channeled into money-making activity and middle class life.
It's also the problem William James was getting it back then when he tried to find "the moral equivalent of war," something that could satisfy the desire for service and self-sacrifice apart from wars that might be senseless or destructive.
One can't blame all of what happened on the old nobility, of course -- the professional politicians and businessmen were pushing in the same direction -- but the nobility were the people who saw the greatest change in their fortunes in the era Venner is talking about and perhaps the people who were positioned to serve as a break on destructive tendencies that they didn't resist.
In the current toxic environment, yes, perhaps. It is still more accurate to say that he's got something for spirituality, aristocracy, service. There is a patient: overweight, diabetic, blind, who eats nothing but copious amounts of pasta and naps the rest of the time. The doctor says,-- Keep that truth to yourself: you are killing yourself surer than if you let a bulldozer run over you. The patient responds -- You've really got something against spaghetti!
Heroism, duty, service, are admirable qualities, but one has to find a way to fit them into the world we live in -- commercial, democratic...
Man lives for heroic service; that is our purpose. Yes, the world has got to change; that is what the article is about. The virtues do not have to change, and they cannot. A nation without virtue has no identity and soon experiences a death. If I lived in France today, I would not worry so much that a drive for distinction might turn out unwholesome.
Back to America, it is not true that we are intrinsically hypercapitalistic. We are also a soldier nation, a frontier nation, a nation of farmers, of pilgrims and of preachers. This is why we seem to be surviving better than Europe; at least Venner counts us among victors. Hypercapitalism is the caricature of ourselves that we let the world develop. Venner, by the way, understood that: he knew, I think, that American digests commercialism in ways Europe cannot.