Redstate

What a giant. They offered to publish all his other books if he would just burn Gulag.

The truth comes with a price.

Perhaps after your challenge I will shoot for resolving mind body duality ;-)

There are without doubt skills and innate reflexes associated with living in our democracy. From small reflexes like placing your hand over your heart when the national anthem, to larger more reasoned things like deciphering when a politician is completely without merit. When you invoke your challenge, you are asking can an idea be actualized without the needed skill set ? From the perspective that ideas and skill sets are distinct the answer is always no. If you hold the view that skills are ideas in more concrete if still non material form the question becomes meaningless.

Then there is the common desire. As a nation we yearn to live a life of self responsibility. The desire for liberty, the belief and aspiration to pass on a better nation to our descendants as our forbears did for us, the need for free expression, and the belief that tomorrow can be made better. All ideas but with more to them than just the quantifiable.

So when you ask show that America is an Idea, my response is about 80 to 90 percent of America is immaterial and fundamentally of the realm of ideas and dreams. When you look at our nation what you see is the least of it.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

What is a pure “idea man?” An academic? Really? I hope we grant that every fully functioning human being is an “idea [wo]man.” The terms “pure idea man” as opposed to “pure action man” would seem to refer to empty sets, and so are useful only in suggesting a kind of continuum. And that continuum seems useful to prejudice the reader against the view that ideas – which are by nature acquisitions of mind by abstraction – are highly prominent features of American identity.

We would do well to question the usefulness of that continuum as a model for understanding human psychology and categorizing people. There is something inchoately applicable about this continuum, but the labels of the poles introduce extraneous, tendentious implications against “idea” itself.

If this were a pan against ideals and idealization, i.e., against the abstraction of the real referents of ideas from the ideas themselves, then I would find myself in sympathy. An ideal America is an abstraction of our ideas of America which are themselves an abstraction. The latter abstraction is remarkable as the necessary and sufficient condition for human evaluation. The former is something I am indeed inclined to join in criticizing wherein it is submitted as a solid foundation for American identity. But it is also errant – rather absurd actually (no offense intended), being mindful of our minds -- to argue that real facts of American identity can be abstracted from the ideas that represent them as such.

Once the conceptual and verbal switch is made from ideas to ideals, I do not find herein a challenge that applies to me. The “Invisible Hand” uncuffed by the elevation of the mutual valuation of individual liberties continues to ground and beneficially guide the American Republic in combination with other salubrious comprehensions acquired and certified in traditions.

The specific advice all seems good enough to me on the merits. No need to dare me.

I suspect we still have differences over dynamism and confidence versus stasis and protection.

The trouble is, "America" came packaged in an idea. After all, it was the era of the great Enlightenment, and ideas, some good, some bad, were kind of the air everybody breathed. And the Declaration of Independence was one hell of a package.

Truth to tell, it always reminded me of those tedious, pompous dedications that that authors of the time wrote to this or that noble patron. It certainly is not a small or limited document; it announces some pretty big, visionary truths for all humanity. Mischievous hooey, in the opinion of John Adams, and it's still getting us into trouble. The Constitution and the Federalist Papers give the real story, but having to concern themselves with the down to earth challenge of establishing a working republic out of a baker's dozen of ex-colonies, they lack the the easy sloganeering of "All men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights...yadda, yadda, yadda...."

So I think you're right, but it's not an open and shut case.

In fact there's an amusing paradox here. Instinctively attached as many of us conservatives are to the small, the local, the traditional, philosophically, we don't even like ideas. They're like chain restaurants that impose sameness everywhere you go, but the idea that ideas are bad is itself an idea, which is a real head scratcher, but that's what's fun about being a conservative.

Sorry, Paul. Guess I can't help you.

I will think on it some more, and study more as well.

I do want to ask you how you reconcile the basic premise of your starting position with the grandiosity of your aim, however. What I mean is, take this passage:

That “sensible and sure democracy” is the American political tradition in summary. Solzhenitsyn, like Tocqueville before him, readily perceived the importance of this self-government of the township in American history. But the most striking thing about it, which stands in defiance of so much else in America, is its essential smallness. It is not grandiose but rather modest; it does boast of its expansiveness, but takes pride in its limitation, from which it takes its form.

Now, take what you wrote there in conjunction with your introduction, in which Solzehnitsyn proclaims, "Vermont is home".

How do you then apply that to America? Is the assumption that what is good for a village good for the state, and what is good for the state is good for the nation?

Your instincts lead you to the founding of the Republic, and most of the early part of the nation's life, during which local rule was seen as predominant. The colonies truly thought of themselves as sovereign states; each town or village made rules and got along without worrying about the emperor in his capitol.

Let us, indeed, set aside the idealism, if you wish. But as a matter of historical fact, do you not have to contend with how what began with smallness has become grandiose indeed? The Civil War settled the controversy of whether each state of the union is indeed sovereign. The New Deal -- not driven out of ideology, but out of practical realities -- set forth the form for the modern state as we know it today. Our rise to superpower status after WWI and WWII necessitated the responses we have made as a society -- for ill and for good, without too much idealism in how we went about things, but with practical men making practical decisions about practical things.

Further, your initial starting point draws much from the Yankee/New England experience, with the roots in political resistance, flight from England, and religious community. I don't know that the experience was the same in the Southern colonies, settled more by those with closer ties to Mother England, prison colonists, and the like. Was there really such uniformity even during colonial times between the Puritan North and the slaveowning South?

Even if we assume arguendo that your depiction of America's roots are in small local self-government experiments, simply yearning for a return to those idyllic days seems to be tilting at windmills at best. Presumably, what you're after is to extract the "essence" if you will, of such "smallness" and try to apply it to the national experiment writ large across a huge chunk of a continent.

What I wonder is if you're not making an assumption that what works for a village in Vermont can work at the scale of the 48 states across 4 time zones, not to mention Alaska and Hawaii.

I'll try to have more on this, as I've been doing some reading on topics related to this project.

-TS

"When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth." - Teddy Roosevelt

All early American life was dictated by the push to the frontier and the leaving behind of settled places and ways. It required personal abilities, strength, and discipline. For those who ventured first, there was no one beyond family upon which to rely, later came small groups of neighbors often sharing either kinship or religious belief. The life itself both forced and defined self-government.

To The Sophist's inquiry, The South fought its first Civil War during The Revolution and it didn't have a particularly good outcome for the Loyalists; lots of that stuff in the Constitution about bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and corruption of blood comes from that bloody civil war. The South of white-columned mansions existed only in the Tidewater and in relative isolation elsewhere. The Cotton Kindom South of Tara, to the extent that it existed at all, only existed from the early-19th Century following the invention of the cotton gin, which allowed upland cotton farming, to the end of the Civil War. Most of the interior South was open range and the inhabitants were grazers and stock breeders who maintained subsistence farms for a family or clan, the most prosperous of which might have owned a slave or two. After the Revolution as development spread westward in The South and over the Appalachians in The Mid-Atlantic and North, younger sons had to leave to find land to live on. As land wore out or opportunity to get more land beckoned, family or church groups would migrate to new land to the West. Even today in the South, most of the "12-mile towns," twelve miles is the usual distance between communities since that is about the limit of a days travel on horseback, are essentially clan communities. Early 20th Century maps of my home county in Georgia still show communities named Norristown, Durdenville, and Riner, all ancestral names in my family, comprised of kinfolk who settled those places on land acquired in the 1795 Lottery of Creek Cession lands. Even in The North, over the mountains was the Frontier. The Last of the Mohicans, perhaps the first great frontier story, was set in Western New York.

So, back to Paul's question. I don't see America or American exceptionalism as an idea. I see the Constitution as a codification of a society of individual freedom and personal property rights based on self-government that already existed in America. The way of life preceded the lofty ideas and words that came later to describe it.

I think this gets to our struggle with modernity. With the end of the Frontier came the end of the necessity of frontier skills and virtues. That hard man, hard in both body and mind, that conquered the frontier really doesn't fit very well among the softer sorts in the softer places. Only a miniscule minority of modern Americans could survive a week if suddenly thrust into 1825 America anywhere other than the largest cities. We may look with some admiration today at the Daniel Boones, Davy Crocketts, and Andrew Jacksons, but they wouldn't fare well today due to their lack of ability to "play well with others." Hell, they didn't fare well among the coastal gentility even then.

Living in what comes closest to the Frontier today, I know I feel it when I go Outside. Here we call it being "Bushy" (rural Alaska is referred to as The Bush). I am decidedly uncomfortable among the crowds and in dealing with the delicate sensibilities in the Lower 48, and by Alaska standards, I am positively urbane.

In Vino Veritas