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To: x
he's really got something against modern capitalism or hypercapitalism

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.

46 posted on 06/17/2013 5:38:56 PM PDT by annalex (fear them not)
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To: annalex
What Venner said is reminiscent of what Francis Fukuyama was saying 20 years ago. I'd have to go back and look through it again. My recollection, though, is that Europe adopted American's democratic, commercial, technological form of society, but there were key differences.

Less religion in Europe. Less rising to the military challenges of the Cold War. Less economic competitiveness, and that wasn't replaced by a more active political life, but by a welfare state administered from above by unelected Eurocrats. So Europe was closer to the passive, timid, apolitical, risk-averse, consumerist "Last Man" that Nietzsche and Fukuyama feared.

On the other hand, that model really isn't "hypercapitalist" or "turbocapitalist" either. "Hyperconsumerist," maybe, in some countries. But France, say, isn't likely to make much trouble for China's rising economic and industrial might. Also, nowadays people like Venner who express some admiration for the ideologies of the 1930s have to diverge somewhere to avoid being accused of actually being fascist, so what he said may or may not be exactly what he really thought.

47 posted on 06/18/2013 2:11:45 PM PDT by x
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