Review: Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium

I don't like Bill O' Reilly or Jon Stewart. I don't find them particularly wise or informed, or articulate or funny. Both have a talent for interviewing, Stewart teasing out inconsistencies and O' Reilly holding someone to a single point, yet neither can be considered an intellectual by any stretch of the imagination.

Furthermore it is this general ignorance of the law, history, economics, political science, and philosophy, coupled with an inability or unwillingness to think systematically, which wafts the odor of pandering from their million-dollar studios.

I don't intend to analyze every element of this debate, which was nonetheless entertaining and provoking despite the participants' intellectual shortfalls, but I would like to note their premises and their answers to the question, "What do you think is the biggest problem in America?" I hope in simply laying out their ideas one may see them for what they are, and are not.

I. Stewart's main thesis is that America is a social democracy and that from the times of the pilgrims Americans wanted stuff for free. Americans, he said, essentially wanted socialism so they created Social Security and Medicare et cetera, therefore wanting more socialism. He did not address the many logical, constitutional, or moral implications of this assertion. He specifically rejected the idea that a citizen has to agree with everything the government does, though he did not define this position as majoritarianism or discuss this principle's impact on individual sovereignty. He adopted the progressive notion articulated by Wilson that democracy and socialism are in essence the same (see Socialism and Democracy.)

Curiously, Stewart said that the biggest problem in America remains that our political dialogue is about socialism and capitalism, or freedom and tyranny. To Stewart, America has socialistic governmental institutions thus they're here to stay, and preferably grow. Aside from this being inconsistent with his aforementioned majoritarianism, it is also takes for granted that these institutions work or can be made to work. He wants not less government but efficient government, completely bypassing the fact that no monopoly of any kind is ever efficient.

Lastly, because according to Stewart America was, is, and by right ought to be socialist, President Obama's policies are not fundamentally transformative.

II. O'Reilly's premise seems to have been that America was not socialist and is not and ought not be and President Obama is therefore fundamentally transforming America. He refused, however, to admit that any American program is socialistic in principle and argued that only at some degree does a program become so. Stewart even pressed him as to why he thought the progressively taxed Social Security program was not socialism and O' Reilly did not have a satisfactory reply.

To the question of America's greatest problem O' Reilly answered that capitalism rewards the greed which drives people in the media to lash out and tear people down. There was no follow up about whether this was true or what one could or ought to do about this.

If in describing O' Reilly's ideas I am brief only because they seem so close to those of his opponent. Stewart wants unlimited socialism and O' Reilly wants to restrain it at some arbitrary point. They both adore Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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With respect to rhetorical prowess, I don't think either man debated well. Anyone trained in rhetoric and oratory would have cleaned their clocks. Stewart's comedic antics tired me and distracted from the issues as they usually do, as did O' Reilly's paternalistic finger wagging. Neither man had a firm command of the facts, especially historical, legal, or economic ones, although O' Reilly had clearly done some math homework.  Structurally, this was certainly more of a debate than the recent presidential one which, as has been pointed out, was more of a joint press conference. Stewart and O' Reilly truly and admirably engaged each other, and mostly in good spirit. Neither debate, however, was well-structured or competently moderated.

Overall what The Rumble lacked most was a discussion of first principles. Both men dealt in caricatures of the other's ideas, but neither seemed to have any first principles of his own to articulate. Thus the debate about domestic policy was debate over how much, not whether. The debate about the debt devolved into a blame game. The foreign policy discussion never approached questions of actual policy, only criticisms of particular actions. And so on. I don't believe any mention was made of the Constitution at all.

The Rumble is useful insofar as it provokes discussion, but it certainly doesn't recommend these men or their ideas. The two anchors ended on the note that neither man could imagine disagreeing so fiercely with someone that he couldn't engage him and discuss the ideas with him. A bright spot.

Égalité

[Periander] sent an agent to Thrasybulus [the tyrant of Miletus] to ask what was the safest kind of government for him to establish, which would allow him to manage the state best. Thrasybulus took the man sent by Periander out of the city and into a field  where there were crops growing. As he walked through the gain, he kept questioning the messenger and getting him to repeat over and over again what he had come from Corinth to ask. Meanwhile, every time he saw an ear of grain standing higher than the rest, he broke it off and threw it away, and he went on doing this until he had destroyed the choicest, tallest stems in the crop. After this walk across the field, Thrasybulus sent Periander's man back home, without having offered him any advice. – Herodotus. Histories, V.

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"It is time that equality bore its scythe above all heads. It is time to horrify all the conspirators." –Maximilien de Robespierre

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Leveling is the barbarian’s substitute for order. –Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Libertarian Invective, A Sample

Just a little something I dashed off to friends in one of my surlier moments.

I cannot begin other than condemning today's bipartisan indifference to the cataracts of red ink bilging forth from Washington. That said, I pine for no other form of cooperation than toward the diminution of executive, legislative, and judiciary authority (I think it's a sham to call the apparatus "federal" at its present degree of authority.) Mindful of the aforementioned and in the spirit of this spirited thread, I don't find the Romney/Ryan plan of reducing the rate of increase (of authority and spending) much more palatable, let alone laudable, than the present (and previous) administrations' indifference toward liberty and solvency. Likewise I find the clueless haste with which Bush et al passed TARP outmatched only by the double-barreled imbecility of President Obama and his toadies' passage of the turgid and impotent ARRA. I pass over the unaccountable accounting of the Treasury and the Fed's ruinous and fruitless QE, which seem to be of no consequence to the populus, its governors, or its legislators, who patiently wait for these problems to swim up and bite us in the ass.

Ideologically, I have no sympathy with the Progressive's impatience with and disdain for the Constitution, the hippies' disco-era Marxist bastardizations, or the Clintonistas who envisioned the end of history during the merry rule of Slick Willie. Likewise the GOP, whose most recent representative in the Oval Office called, after 9/11, for all Americans to go shopping, is a first rate sham, a sham which has been successful at conserving only the mistakes of its predecessors, conservative and progressive alike. The present political climate, stripped of its plumes and spangles, is one in which decent citizens put aside their intelligence, sagacity, and good humor, willfully to see in political bunkum their own ideologies, and then not only to shill for the exponents of said bunkum, but to vote supreme power to such rogues and scoundrels they would disdain as neighbors. As for compromise, I'm not holding my breath for the genius of Cicero to step into the Capital Building and breathe forth the spirt of Concord onto this august body of miscreants. There is, however, a certain Laputian doctor with what seems a wise measure. . . and he could also supply the honorable Charlie Rangel with some apophlegmatics.

Socialism: What's in a Name?

We were fortunate this past week in being treated to political science theses from two acclaimed film directors, Milos Forman and Joss Whedon. I am not going to begin this brief critique by criticizing the credentials of these men, because I expect thoughtful and intelligent movies and such a demand necessitates a thoughtful and intelligent director. Nor will I suggest because these men are wealthy they ought not hold such positions, and though it indeed may be irrational or hypocritical for them, it is their ideas and not their characters which are in question.

What political theories have they brought forth? Similar ones, it turns out. Both directors take issue with the oft-repeated claim that President Obama is a socialist or that his policies are socialistic. It must be noted that of their arguments, at least as they have been reported, Forman's is the more complete. He at least acknowledges the question of government authority and the United States' exceptional grounding in liberty. For Whedon whoever disagrees has, "gone off the reservation," a downright embarrassing rhetorical sleight. The directors' arguments, however, are most similar: President Obama's policies are not socialism because they do not contain the essence of socialism, which Forman claims is in fact twofold: totalitarianism and the desire to eliminate social classes. In contrast, President Obama's policies merely seek to ameliorate suffering.

Before continuing, I would like to note that this is a conversation worth having: a discussion of what something is. Public political conversations in particular often focus on administration and policy but seldom on theory.

We first should note that most Americans, left and right and center, want to avoid the term socialism. In varying ways and to varying degrees it is associated with foreign affairs, Marxism, totalitarianism, and not-so-successful revolutions, so everyone wants to ditch it. However it gets remade or renamed, though, we must define its essence. We must also be diligent not to define it arbitrarily or simply define it as something we do not like so we may distance from it ourselves and our own ideas.

Outright we can see that the attempt to define the essence of socialism simply as any policy not for promoting social welfare is a failure insofar as it attempts to define something by what it is not. Unfortunately, Whedon's attempt at definition goes no further, although Forman's does. Forman defines it as totalitarianism or an attempt to create a classless society. We may dispense with his definitions also for they already constitute other ideologies, totalitarianism and egalitarianism.

So what is socialism? One might be tempted now to say, in a more precise wording of Whedon's inchoate and confused statement, that most laws are social because they concern how people relate to one another, even laws prohibiting murder and larceny. Exempted from this definition of social laws might be religious laws such as, for example, laws against blasphemy or laws against saying, having, or doing certain things simply because they are immoral. Yet this definition of "socialism" will help us very little since it would include most laws. Clearly and despite its name, some other principle besides social intercourse is at work. Besides, no one would call a law prohibiting murder a socialistic one. We need to develop a more restricted definition of socialism.

Yet if we exclude social living and appeals to morality, for example, appeals to ideas or to a deity, what remains to discuss? Material things. The question here is now whether the individual may own as much as he wishes or whether, at a certain point, someone or some other body, decides he has made enough. The confiscation of property might be carried out in a monarchy, oligarchy, or tyranny, and for egalitarian, bureaucratic, tyrannical, or non-social moral reasons, yet in all cases the means of production are taken from the individual. Consequently, we may add, the confiscators decide how to spend the confiscated resources and thus plan the economy. In all of these systems it is property which is at stake. It is only a question of who takes it from you, and why.

Recommended Reading

Mises, Ludwig von. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Chapter 15: Particular Forms of Socialism.

What Not to Tweet II: Political Edition

or, Yes you can undermine all of your credibility in 140 characters.

Rabble, rabble rabble!

You can feel it in the earth. You can feel it in the water. You can certainly smell it in the air: another presidential election season is upon these United States. Millions of concerned citizens have risen from their slumbers to carry forth the sacred fire of democracy by making room for The Daily Show on their DVRs. Yet with this great power comes great risk: to tweet or not to tweet?

The choice is yours, but as a courtesy I note the following cautions which when unheeded have caused me to think twice about someone's intellect or character.

10. Approval/Disapproval

Don't express approval or disapproval of something without any explanation. Persuade by reason not character, or you'll sound like a pompous fool. Don't assume people agree with you, even about fundamentals. You don't know why they're following you.

9. NOW!

Precious little must needs be done right now. I know you mean that this election is important, but let's reserve the word "now" for referring to "right this very moment" and not "this year."

Also, I know the election is important. I know you care. Don't over do it.

8. How __________ can win.

It is presumptuous to offer unsolicited advice. If you want to help a candidate's campaign, do it. If they don't want to appoint you chief strategist, well, that's tough luck. Offering advice to them publicly and without having been solicited is tantamount to saying, "Here's what they should do if they want to win which they clearly don't because they didn't ask me but I'm going to tell you anyway because I care that much."

Also, no one cares about your strategy of using Fig Newtons to help Candidate X win. If you're doing something, just do it. Tell other people what you are doing by all means, but don't tell them to do it.

7. Invidious References

Let us try and avoid references to communists, fascists, and the chancellor of Germany from 1933-1945.

6. "We"

I'm not necessarily included in "we" unless you mean Americans, and if you do mean Americans just say "Americans." Otherwise, saying "we" makes me feel like you're trying to include me in your group when I didn't ask. Again, you don't know why they're following you so don't alienate them by being presumptuous.

5. Change your avatar.

Nothing says, "I just started paying attention" more than changing your avatar to include a political message.

Also, we know what the candidates look like. Don't put his face on anything, ever, under any circumstances. In fact, don't put anything political on clothing of any kind. Buttons are the only acceptable form of advertising, and you only get to wear one.

4. Use the actual campaign slogan.

I know what the candidate says. Repeating it does not make you a concerned citizen or a reporter, it makes you a mouthpiece.

3. Blaming X

"Oh if only it weren't for the Democrats/Republicans/Klingons everything would be fine" translates into "If only everyone agreed with me everything would be fine."

2. Polls

I don't care what 45% of ambidextrous people, 55% of long-beaked jackdaws, or "most of" any group thinks. Admittedly, though polls can be relevant to a particular point. Use caution (and reason.) Also, on election day, I don't need a play-by-play account of the tallying of votes. Let's all just wait and find out together, shall we?

1. "Just Vote"

Please don't tell me that you don't care whom I vote for but that you "just want me to vote." You do care and you should, but my dog won't necessarily get to that last leg of the race. If he doesn't, I lose. I might decide to pick the next best candidate and I might not. If not, I lose. Please leave me alone.

Lastly, standard rules of tweeting still apply, especially Standard Rule #1.

Book Review: The Fortunes of Permanence

by Roger Kimball. 2012.

Dignity, tenacity, truthfulness, humor, confidence, freedom, joy, courage. The reader may follow with great pleasure and profit any of these threads (Roman virtues all, you say?) through Roger Kimball's new volume The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. These "cultural instructions" more than any genealogy or anatomy of culture constitute Kimball's book and their embodiment and exile become the touchstones of Culture and Anarchy. We have not, though, some ivory tower classification, for Kimball does not study these virtues in the vacuum of a philosophical treatise but in the lives of men. In fact while he prefaces each chapter with some choice quotations I think the following from Cicero might suffice for the whole:

In the days beyond our memory the traditional ways attached themselves by their own appeal to the outstanding men of the time; and to the ancient ways and to the institutions of their ancestors men of moral superiority clung fast.

Yet ours is an age of amnesia and the doors to the institutions have been shuttered and the men dragged off, and through the mud. They have been branded nationalists, racists, moralists, and ethno-centrists. They weren't "open-minded." Well, neither Cicero nor Burke, for example, would have tolerated living amongst a variety of scoundrels in the name of diversity, nor praised courage for the purpose of undermining the nation, nor joy over its destruction. Virtues without fixed values are virtues in name only, and after decades of being weaned off the real thing Western civilization is pretty "open." The result has been not the widespread joy and liberty of utopian prognostication but mass ennui. The West is passive in response to challenges to its fundamental traditions, tacit to mockery of its principles, and stultified faced with Islamic fundamentalism. The quiet and ambitious goal of The Fortunes of Permanence is, then, the rehabilitation of the men who vivified traditional Western values. If rehabilitation is the goal, though, energy is the theme and the fire of the West begins with the Greeks.

The heart of The Fortunes of Permanence begins with Pericles' storied Funeral Oration, which the Greek general took up with reluctance at the start of a bloody and costly war, and not because of its elegy for the fallen or even its roots in tradition or praise of the Athenian forefathers, but for the zeal and energy witch which Pericles took up duties of democracy. Kimball sees in Pericles' ancient exhortation the joy of the agonistic spirit and the antipathy toward shame. Most of all he sees a leader confident enough in the justice and beauty of his land and the goodness of his fellow citizens to say without irony or doubt:

. . . as a city we are the school of Hellas, while I doubt if the world can produce a man who, where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility, as the Athenian.

What is the alternative to such joyous undertaking of civil life and refusal to be lax "in the face of the perils of war?" Shuffling apologies, desultory policies, and dithering responses from politicians alongside the "words, words, words" of the intelligentsia? Kimball concludes Part I, "Does Pericles point the way? The alternative is suicide."

Part II, the heart of The Fortunes of Permanence, is a cheerful series of accounts of intellectuals long rusticated by the urban managerial elite. Now while rustication would have served most of them just fine, we would benefit from knowing a thing or two about, say, John Buchan. What can we learn from the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps? Well, apart from it being a gentlemanly thing to know a bit about a man who can write a good ripping yarn, he was an uncommon man of great energy, and by "great energy" I mean that he wrote Nelson's History of the War at the blistering pace of 5,000 words a day, a fact which when coupled with his simultaneous directorship of the British secret service would make anyone who ever put pen to paper put head in head.

What made Buchan so active? No coddled upbringing but a big old conk on the head when he was but five. He wasn't educated on politically correct pabulum but "schooled to toughness." The defense of his country probably put a fire in him too, although toward the end of his life a different concern gripped him. Barbarism was one threat, yes, but de-civilization, that is, "civilization gone rotten" is perhaps a more terrible sight. Too he feared the normalizing effects of science and the "extinction of eccentricity," a justified fear given how he himself would be ironed out of popular discourse.

Rudyard Kipling might not have been ironed out of the literary world but his didactic purposes have been. Today Kipling is permitted to play host to the exotic East and introduce us to Mowgli and friends but not to teach. I suppose his demotion is due not so much of the rejection of poetry's didactic imperative which dates from Hesiod, but a disagreement with him over his ideas. Kimball one-ups T. S. Eliot's observation that poetry, "is condemned as 'political' when we disagree with the politics" by adding that, "Kipling might have written good poetry, but it wasn't good for poetry to have been written by Kipling." Hence the ironing, sanitizing, et cetera. Kimball's discussion of the poetry is scholarly and his remarks about the oft-trotted criticism of refreshing. Yet more revealing than the obvious fact that "white" in the "white man's burden" refers not to the color of skin but the lawful citizens of civilization is Kipling's idea of civilization as something "laboriously achieved" and "precariously defended." It is this virile belief, in the value and identity of Western civilization, which has prevented Kipling passage into the literary Pantheon.

Kimball labors most lovingly on G. K. Chesterton, "Master of Rejuvenation" who perhaps most embodies the vigorous citizen whom this book is meant to praise and inspire. Vital energy abounds in Kimball's descriptions of this man of letters, arguments, and apologetics, of his ruddy health and strenuous genius. How much more joyful Chesterton's "mere excitement of existence" rooted in orthodoxy than the postmodern, post-structuralist, deconstructed, tedium rooted in. . .

If modernity's cultural guardians banish Buchan for his eccentricity, Kipling for his defense of the West, and Chesterton's orthodoxy, what palpitations must they suffer from someone who defended the culture of the Old South! Richard Weaver took up the strenuous, romantic, and perhaps futile challenge of defending the Old South and its virtues of hierarchy, chivalry, gentility, and religion from the North's centralizing mechanical and political machines.

The concluding chapters of Part II on modern art might seem a dour turn from the preceding eclectic stands against the 20th century's encroaching progressivism, relativism, and socialism, but they couldn't provide a finer contrast. Never have the progressive credos seemed like so many bromides. "Art for art's sake" seems more an excuse for not learning your craft and refusing to live up to creative heights of your predecessors than any grand philosophical pronouncement. If art is not subject to strictures of form and purpose, then it devolves, as it has, into esoterica meaningful only to its creator, so who cares about it?

Kimball deftly brings this observation around to architecture in his lively discussion of an exhibition of the architecture of Peter Eisenman and Leon Krier. Why would you want, as Eisenman does, your space to "disrupt" and "intrude?" It is made for man, no? The space may be logical and highly ordered but, to be frank, so what? If a man is to live in a space it must meet his needs and seldom among those needs are being disrupted and intruded upon. Quite simply, nobody wants to live in an ugly building and, to quote Roger Scruton, "Nobody wants to live in it because it's so damn ugly." Yet beauty is a value, and we moderns can't have that can we?

Ugly buildings lack what Kimball, continuing his theme of vitality, calls "the animating leaven of taste." Ugly architecture is dead to us because it is unpleasant and we avoid it as we avoid all unpleasant things. Post-human architecture is anti-human architecture and it will limp along in "sterility and exhaustion" until its purpose turns back to man.

The final branch of The Fortunes of Permanence might be subtitled, "Unmasking the Friends of Humanity." Oh you know the Friends of Humanity: the managerial progressives, the distributers of "social justice," and their many brothers and cousins. All they want is to remake society; is that so much to ask? The reward is universal brotherhood and abundance. Not sold? Well, that was my best pitch. I apologize if I failed to sell you utopia but it is a rather touch sell, is it not? To fall for it I suppose one needs to think human nature infinitely malleable, that one may be educated or trained out of any behavior. Too you would need to thing society and its infinite parts equally pliable. Nothing immovable, nothing permanent stands in the way of progress. Just as modern theories of art pushed God, man's nature, and tradition from the center so have modern political theories, and just as modern art is enervated and listless so is modern politics. Stand up for what?

Marxism and its offshoots, hybrids, and bastards have everywhere degenerated into vacuousness. In politics it has devolved into lawlessness, in academics into relativism, and in art into banality. Who would have thought that the widespread loss of valid intellectual criteria and the politicization and celebration of that loss as "social (fill-in-the-blank)" would lead to degeneration? Just Pericles, Cicero, Burke. . . and if those voices are too distant, Burnham, Kolakowski, and Hayek.

Again I have mentioned the great men. Perhaps now their presence will seem less conspicuous here and more necessary in the world.

In the days beyond our memory the traditional ways attached themselves by their own appeal to the outstanding men of the time; and to the ancient ways and to the institutions of their ancestors men of moral superiority clung fast.

As Kimball has shown us, the rejection of these men had to follow the rejection of their values. Their disappearance is no coincidence for the Marxian intelligentsia knew too, as Alan Bloom wrote, that, "The essence of education is the experience of greatness." The Fortunes of Permanence is such an experience.

The Fortunes of Permanence is also an important book, not just remedy but tocsin. How close to the brink of de-civilization must the West creep before it pulls back?

Alarms aside, but not far, The Fortunes of Permanence is a vigorous book of joyful praise and serrated criticism. Kimball's knowledge and love of the classics are not so much apparent in as infused into the pages. If it contains an abundance of quotations from the greats, from Aristotle to Orwell, well so much the better for a book about culture and permanence. If it is Kimball's great achievement that Classical values and the men who lived them shine so, his portrait of the left is equally admirable. Never has the left, traced finely from the French Revolution through today, seemed so dull: it's politics so many utopian schemes ending in tears, its art so much "outrage by the yard." Yawn.

In contrast, the virile and adventurous spirit of the West, from Pericles to Burke, in Homer and Kipling and yes, even in the Dangerous Book for Boys, endures.

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If you enjoyed this review, you would probably like our blog in general. Still, a few choice bits:

• Presidential Rhetoric I: Worthy of Marble?
• Review: Marathon: How One Battle Changed Western Civilization
• Art vs. Beauty
• Calvin Coolidge on Classics
• Lessons From Thucydides and the Founding Fathers
• Freedom and Natural Law
• Why I Hate Modernism: The Tragedy of St. Stephen Walbrook
• Minus Virtue: Aristotle and the Neuroscientists

The Tax Zone

With apologies to Rod Serling.

Tiberius Quartermain had just returned home from another day of trading Triscuits on the wheat exchange. "What peace!" he thought, pacing through the last steps of daily journey back to his door. Anticipating the liberty of the evening, weary Tiberius hung up his overcoat and unlaced his bluchers. He finished the day's last duty by feeding Bimperl, his wife's Pomeranian, and then for himself he prepared some tea. At last like every other Friday, Tiberius, with his Earl Grey steeping beside him, sank into his lounger to dilute amongst the noble lays of Schwanda, der Dudelsackpfeifer.

Just as Tiberius began to list asleep the telephone rang. Tiberius, who could bear no cacophony of any kind, vaulted from his cozy repose to arrest the clamor. "Hello," he gargled, before clearing his throat.

"Hello is this Teeberoos Quarterman?" the woman asked. Tiberius heard enough of the faint voice to recognize his mangled nomen.

"Yes, this is Tie-bee-ree-uhs Kwor-ter-mayn," Tiberius articulated as he lifted the head off the record.

"Oh good, Mr. Quarterman." the woman replied, "We're so glad we found you and boy are you going to be glad we did."

With Schwanda silenced Tiberius resigned himself to the conversation. "Yes and whom do you represent, madam?" he asked.

"We've called to tell you about our special program which we know you will–"

"Pardon me madam, please," Tiberius interrupted, "but whom do you represent."

"I'm from the government," she replied, "and I'm here to help."

But no one could help Tiberius now, for although he didn't know it, he was in. . . The Tax Zone.

Fund the Arts?

His cats, however, look amiable.

Privileged this morning to enjoy a day of leisure, that is, rest and study, upon waking I picked up my iPad to read a bit. I set upon Bach's cello sonatas to highlight the insights that awaited me. Zipping through my Twitter feed I brought my vigorous fingering of the screen to a hasty halt: Lo! Alex Ross has tweeted. I tapped through and began to read the article he had posted. As I read a cloud formed in my mind. A haze fogged my vision. My synapses writhed and my neurotransmitters gushed in an attempt to explain what I read. It wasn't just me, either. I'm certain Casals split a string as I spoke the crazed falderal in the vain hope that my ears could translate what had befuddled my eyes. Alas and Alack! They could not.

You see there is a particularly gross caricature of conservatives that irks me. In this fantasy Dick Cheney is Medusa, who plans to replace all of the world's museums with oozing oil rigs. He rides a chariot cast from melted Greek bronzes and pulled by a Brobdinagian Hydra of Conservative High Philistines. You cut of the Goldwater head and Reagan pops up. Cut off the Burkean head and Scruton rears his ugly one. One neck supplies an endless supply of Bushes. Before the beast marches the Grand Army of Conservative Neanderthals, their dragging knuckles raising such dust that their approach blots out the sun.

That a quiet, soft-tempered conservative man sits at his desk reading Latin and listening to Bach does not enter into this chimerical relief. That peace, quiet, and privacy are his preferred environment does not gel with his reputation for bloodletting. His childlike love of family belies the news stories that he lets children die in the streets and his hobbit-like love of the earth and all things growing nips at the fib that he cares not for the environment.

I would be an unserious or dishonest man not to admit the above descriptions are themselves caricatures. Neither image, of the conservative as saint or scion of darkness, is likely to be found with great ease or in great numbers. What to make of this article by a Mr. Will Robin from his blog Seated Ovation I'm not sure. What to make of Ross' Tweet of it, which can only be seen as a semi-tacit public endorsement, I know a bit. It's like finding Jersey Shore sandwiched between Ikiru and Wild Strawberries on his DVD shelf, or I suppose Lady Gaga between Bach and Mozart. It's embarrassing. Yes, we all come to moments of exasperation with our political opposites, moments in which we heedlessly lap up material which is more polemical swiping than scholarship. Yet these moments are brief and regretted as indulgences to baser impulses. To grace such fetid fair with display, let alone the slightest approbation, is to tread without wisdom.

Yes, I really am blathering on about this reflexive Tweet of a thoughtless essay but I think the occasion is quite revealing. You see I do think people change over time, but slowly and almost imperceptibly until they suddenly seem a caricature of their former selves. This is so because we to become more like our surroundings. Being surrounded by people who are crass and rude rubs off on you. One cuss becomes two becomes three until those all-too-versatile four-letter words have replaced a good deal of your vocabulary. Theodore Dalrymple has a recent and customarily noteworthy take on the phenomenon, but the ability of habits to form and change your character is as old as Aristotle. For my part I've recently been enjoying the series Edward the King in which, somewhere late in the series, someone shouts ass! It comes as quite a shock given the genteel world we've grown accustomed to in the program.

Indeed TV is a particularly powerful method of habit-forming since it's influence is over long periods of time. Because of that length of time, as I have articulated before, at some level we perceive television as real. I can't imagine what watching one of the many graphic criminal shows week after week will do to you, to say nothing of reality TV. Considering politics again, take Comedy Central's lucrative tag-team of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Funny they may be and often, but their shows consist of nothing more than relentlessly excoriating "the right" and without any formal standards of logic or argumentation or broad consideration of facts. Any honest man would call it, at best, infotainment. With scant exception, I say those I know who are fond of these shows are cynical, they think they are highly intelligent, and they are not nearly as informed as they think they are. Over time their image of their opposition has veered toward the cataclysmic scene I sketched before. Their change wasn't deliberate but it was unchecked. They think the Democratic Party is at worst incompetent but best left in charge because the Republican Party is manic. Add Stewart's plangent appeals to reason, the fact that his only real criticism is that people are stupid, and Colbert's shtick of mocking the reason (i.e. alleged lack of reason) of the right, and you have a feedback loop frightful to look upon. . . from the outside.

We can see then that pandering is not such a mild vice. We need little encouragement, already seeking out as we do, people, places, facts, and so forth, that allow us to perpetuate what comforts us.

Robin's Argument is of course no such thing. It is simply a series of assertions about government funding of the arts and cheap shots at conservatives. Though this rattle-banging falderal cannot be taken seriously I will endeavor to respond. I will spare any further mention of the embarrassing flaccidity of the argument as well as the extent to which using that clip from the television drama West Wing falls squarely within the behavior we looked at before. That said, I will address the points as they should have been made and as they would have to be made to respond.

The first issue is obviously the legal one, that is, the constitutional one. Our government is not set up as a pure democracy but a democratic-republic which requires deference to written law and also a declaration which acknowledges an overriding and inviolate natural law. I hope that sounds as serious as it is. If that doesn't sound reasonable to you then you're not a democrat since "Democracy" implies both the rule of the many and individual sovereignty, but simply a majoritarian. So if you want to spend on anything not spelled out in the constitution, prepare an amendment. That's the process. If people don't think it's appropriate for the government to do at all, whether or not it produces good, then that's the end of it.

The next issue would be when such a hypothetical amendment were being debated. Remember a government acts for all people, so any law should be supported by as high a majority of people as possible. By definition the fewer people that support it the less democratic it is. So to fund the arts, art itself would have to be defined. If that enterprise doesn't cause you some concern then you've put the cart ahead of the horse. Must it have a specific purpose, or should it not have specific purposes? Must it consist of specific parts? May it be abstract? Must it be intellectual? What about expressive content?

Then, whether you settle on funding art by a particular definition or anything calling itself art, you have more questions about the content. Should art be funded independent of content? What about art advocating breaking the law, or treason? What about religious art? These seemingly detailed questions beg another, which is of course why fund art? It's not as if art has some special edifying power apart from its process and the idea it expresses. Any old self-expression isn't necessarily of value and in a free society not everyone shares the same values.  Cato taught his son fighting, riding, and boxing in addition to reading whereas Aemilius Paulus gave his son a Greek education. (See Plutarch on these men for the details.) Take a guess whether or not Cato or Paulus would have tolerated meddling in their sons' educations?

Apart from processes, though, there still remains to discuss the ideas and as ideas are unavoidable in expression there is no such thing as funding " just the arts" because you're in effect funding specific art and specific ideas. So you end up with a council or individual enforcing standards. Now if everyone agrees, fine (maybe). None other than Destutt de Tracy, an Enlightenment thinker most influential on Jefferson, didn't see a problem with the government promoting republican values. (Why would a republican government not want to promote republican values?) Still: in that situation would it or would it not be propaganda? Bear in mind, this is a problem stemming from propagating ideas on which people already agree:  republican government. Imagine the storm around ideas on which people disagree.

Besides those points, who appoints the members of this committee? Do they run for the office? Is this an "office?"  For how long do they stay in office? Or is this committee just another government bureaucratic entity no one understands or oversees except those with enough pull to tug the ears of its members? Are they appointed in the way the "Secretary" or "Czar" is? Is that very democratic? To whom are they responsible? How? Robin speaks of "the symbolism of the position." Shouldn't in a liberal society, the symbolism of any office of authority make one a tad, oh, nervous? This issue is no less than the problem of government itself and that this serious matter is glossed over by Mr. Robin as wanton conservative mongering is nothing short of outrageous (and illiberal.) Robin continues with this wistful thought about a best-case scenario for what we'll benignly call the "post" in dispute:

Maybe we would end up with someone with a lot of political clout. . .

You see in the Res Gestae of Augustus the emperor states that during his reign he had no more potestas than any of his political colleagues but rather only more auctoritas. That is to say, technically he had no special power buy he wielded such enormous influence that he was the one in charge anyway. This might be laudable if there were no government at all, maybe, but to praise political muscle instead of the authority conferred by the office is once more, illiberal, undemocratic, and un-republican.

Even more illiberal is the following proposition:

Any attempt to create a position at the level of Secretary of Arts/Culture would be a political debacle. Let’s say we somehow actually get the position approved (can you imagine the nightmare of congressional hearings?). . . 

Whence this contempt for the political process? Aren't the problems of electing officials worth having in a free society? Aren't they more then "debacles" and "nightmares?" Shouldn't liberals consider undemocratic processes "nightmares?" Good grief!

So instead of treading this authoritarian path consider how you yourself, directly, might spread the arts without the use of force and perhaps even for free:

1. Make instructional videos, podcasts, or materials.
2. Write a book.
3. Make a website.
4. Subscribe to a scholarly publication.
5. Donate everywhere you can as much as you can.
6. Buy things from institutions whose causes you support.
7. Perform wherever and whenever possible.
8. Tutor people.
9. Raise money for a local school's scholarship or competition.
10. Pay for someone's education. 

Lastly, to promote the arts is to change men's hearts. Never underestimate this task and how little grand designs will succeed at it. No society has or will embrace "art for art's sake." Nor should one. They need ideas to want to express. I'll leave it to Nietzsche to explain the greatest folly of "funding the arts."

If forced to speak, philosophy might say: Wretched people! Is it my fault if I am roaming the country among you like a cheap fortune-teller? If I must hide and disguise myself as though I were a fallen woman and you my judges? Just look at my sister, Art! Like me, she is in exile among barbarians. We no longer know what to do to save ourselves. True, here among you we have lost our rights, but the judges who shall restore them to us shall judge you too. And to you they shall say: Go get yourselves a culture. Only then will you find out what philosophy can and will do. [Emphasis mine.]

Culture, although Robin so casually adds it to the title of his newly minted post, "Secretary of Arts/Culture," is by no means easy to define. It is certainly not something that can be planned, bureaucratized, produced, or administrated. It is not the same as "education." For a fuller discussion of this  topic I direct you to T. S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture and some of our other essays below.

If you enjoyed (or hated) this essay you may enjoy (or hate) the following: 

• Culture and Community
• Libertarianism and Moral Authority
• Manners, Duties, and Society
• A Telling Comment
• Caution: Intellectuals at Work
• Defining Progressivism
• Democracy and Freedom
• Primitive Romance

Notable Conservatives: A Crossword

More fun! Again, I think I made it moderately difficult. All answers are last names. Click to enlarge. It's an 8.5x11 image if you want to print it out. As usual please post any questions, comments, or corrections in the comments section below. Have fun and good luck!

Calvin Coolidge on Classics

Is 1921 really so long ago? It doesn't seem so. They had motorcars and electricity, indoor plumbing and pantaloons. Alright, clearly much has changed but so much so that a speech given 90 years ago would be shocking today? Apparently.

There is little in Calvin Coolidge's 1921 speech at the Second Annual meeting of the American Classical League at the University of Pennsylvania that wouldn't create a stir today. The first surprise is undoubtedly the thought of a classicist politician in the 20th century. I must admit I am quite skeptical of, and generally concerned about the competence of, presidents without a classical education. The thought of making political judgments without having read Thucydides, moral judgments without having read Plato, and just plain thinking without having read Aristotle makes me wince. Magnify that concern by the authority vested, wisely or not, in the office of the president and you have an uneasy citizen. This is not to say a classical education is a prescription for virtue or ability. In my own life study of the classics has led primarily to gratitude, humility, conservation, and moderation, but it might just as easily lead one to hubris and grandiosity. That too might not be all for ill. The classically-trained Founding Fathers certainly took a big, liberal step. In either case though, one acts informed. Not to see the modern world in the light of the world from whence it came is quite simply not to see it. We may then safely say that a classical education is at least a prerequisite for prudence.

Returning to "Silent Cal," how surprising it is to see a politician so lovingly and earnestly speak about the classics.  More noteworthy is how forcefully he recommends.

For many centuries, in education, the classics have meant Greek and Latin literature. It does not need much argument to demonstrate that in the western world society can have little liberal culture which is not based on these. Without them there could be no interpretation of language and literature, no adequate comprehension of history, no understanding of the foundations of philosophy and law.

Coolidge is not at all at pains to speak of the necessity of the classics.

No question can be adequately comprehended without knowing its historical background. Modern civilization dates from Greece and Rome. The world was not new in their day. They were the inheritors of a civilization which-had gone before, but what they had inherited they recast, enlarged and intensified and made their own. . .

Here Coolidge is tying self-knowledge to learning and that's when we realize something unusual: he's talking about actual ideas. Not the flapping platitudes and political pablum we are used to, but actual ideas. Ideas worth exploring, I think, at least because it is hard to imagine any politician saying them today. Consider the following passage:

The present age has been marked by science and commercialism. In its primary purpose it reveals mankind undertaking to overcome their physical limitations. This is being accomplished by wonderful discoveries which have given the race dominion over new powers. The chief demand of all the world has seemed to be for new increases in these directions. There has been a great impatience with everything which did not appear to minister to this requirement.

Can you imagine any politician making such a defense of a liberal education? Defending "impractical" education? What about suggesting there is more to life than physical, material concerns? What about the following, a legitimate swipe at commercialism?

The age of science and commercialism is here. There is no sound reason for wishing it otherwise. The wise desire is not to destroy it, but to use it and direct it rather than to be used and directed by it, that it may be as it should be. not the master but the servant, that the physical forces may not prevail over the moral forces and that the rule of life may not be expediency but righteousness.

Now Coolidge doesn't deride commercialism but he does knock it down a few pegs, suggesting it is of less importance and moreover that it can be a danger, and still more that it can be a consuming danger. The phrase, "that it may be as it should be" would probably not go over well today. First, it is compact and requires one to unpack it and think on it. Second, it implies there is a natural order, that commercialism simply occupies a lower rung in the hierarchy of man's goods. "Expediency," that is, convenience, is not man's greatest need. Could George W. Bush, who told Americans after 9/11 to go out and shop, or President Obama, whose economic plan is spending for the sake of spending, have made these remarks?

Coolidge continues to make some genuinely conservative comments which would be alien and tendentious to current crop of "conservative" politicians.

It is impossible for society to break with its past. It is the product of all which has gone before. We could not cut ourselves off from all influences which existed prior to the Declaration of Independence and expect any success by undertaking to ignore all that happened before that date. The development of society is a gradual accomplishment. Culture is the product of a continuing effort. The education of the race is never accomplished. It must be gone over with each individual and it must continue from the beginning to the ending of life. Society cannot say it has attained culture and can therefore rest from its labors. All that it can say is that it has learned the method and process by which culture is secured and go on applying such method and process.

There can be no city on a hill, no new era or order or deal. Every society and every man has both an inheritance and a burden. No new plan will remedy all or forever rather it is the duty of each generation and each person to learn, do, and pass on. Culture and education are not objects to be acquired but processes. What a conservative and even elegant thought that puts to shame, to scandalous shame, the "spend more money on education" policy we endure today. How inestimably impoverished the latter! Coolidge continues on education.

Education is primarily a means of establishing ideals. Its first great duty is the formation of character, which is the result of heredity and training. This by no means excludes the desirability of an education in the utilities, but is a statement of what education must include if it meet with any success. It is not only because the classical method has been followed in our evolution of culture, but because the study of Greek and Latin is unsurpassed as a method of discipline. Their mastery requires an effort and an application which must be both intense and prolonged. They bring into action all the faculties of observation, understanding and reason. To become proficient in them is to become possessed of self control and of intelligence, which are the foundations of all character.

The first end of education is not fame and profit? No, but Coolidge does not dismiss the need of profit to support oneself. Again he simply rearranges the hierarchy: the first goal of education is to develop character. Working, then, becomes a subset of who you are, not all you are. Faculties then have two goals also, utility and self-control. Self-control, a virtue? Good heavens! Notice also how Coolidge has managed to make some significant claims here without actually waxing philosophical.

How unusual, too, for a politician ever to use the word culture. When was the last time one acknowledged the existence of culture, of looking at people through a lens not political or social per se, but for the whence and wherefore of their world.

Coolidge now asks a penetrating question, "How are we to justify the existing form of government in our Republic?" which he thusly answers, "The beginnings of modern democracy were in Athens and Sparta. That form of human relationship can neither be explained nor defended, except by reference to these examples and a restatement of the principles in which their government rested." What a far cry from the mindless endorsements of democracy without reference to any value which democracy is supposed to further. Speaking of the loss of those values,

Both of these nations speak to us eloquently of the progress they made so long as their citizens held to these ideals, and they admonish us with an eloquence even more convincing of the decay and ruin which comes to any people when it falls away from these ideals. There is no surer road to destruction than prosperity without character.

With this reference to character Coolidge has linked his political philosophy to his philosophy of education and the lynch pin to both of these is classics. Only a classical education can show you the ideas which justify or condemn. Only a classical education can give you the tools of self control and intelligence to form a character, and only a character can let you weather the suffering of poverty and the temptations of prosperity.

In the most conservative section of the speech Coolidge continues to tie together classical education, the individual, society, and culture:

We do not wish to be Greek, we do not wish to be Roman. We have a great desire to be supremely American. That purpose we know we can accomplish by continuing the process which has made us Americans. We must search out and think the thoughts of those who established our institutions. The education which made them must not be divorced from the education which is to make us. In our efforts to minister to man's material welfare we must not forget to minister to his spiritual welfare. It is not enough to teach men science, the great thing is to teach them how to use science.

Being American is not simply being born in America but too a process. Being American requires you to follow American ideals, in a nice turn of phrase, to "think the thoughts of those who established our institutions." Thus being American too is a process of education, and being conservative is a process of inheriting and passing on ideas. Coolidge concludes the paragraph by reducing yet another star of the modern world often seen as an end in itself, science, to its status as a tool.

Coolidge concludes with an exceptional exhortation:

Unless Americans shall continue to live in something more than the present, to be moved by something more than material gains, they will not be able to respond to these requirements and they will go down as other peoples have gone down before some nation possessed of a greater moral force. The will to endure is not the creation of a moment, it is the result of long training. 

The speech culminates in the idea that everything is a process, and thus that the "now" is never everything. Man must have transcending goals and transcendent values.

Finally, how does Coolidge propose to further the classics? A modern speech would conclude with the promise to have the government support their study, but Coolidge lets the burden rest on the people: "If they are to be maintained they will find their support in the institutions of the liberal arts." It is up to individuals, to "those who believe in America, in her language, her arts, her literature and in her science. . . to perpetuate them by perpetuating the education which has produced them."

This speech from then Vice President Coolidge would make a much-needed splash today. It reclaims the dignity of the individual by restoring character over its replacement, the ego. It makes culture and not politics the essence of living. It restores use to education by insisting on purpose. It reduces tools like science and values like materialism to their proper status and Coolidge weaves these values together with the thread of classics, the discipline that enlightens, scolds, warns, that discipline ever challenging, ever rewarding, ever necessary.

Presidential Rhetoric III: Thomas Jefferson

Welcome to Part III of our series on the rhetoric of American presidential inaugural addresses. Feel free to take a peek at the previous entries in the series:

1. Worthy of Marble?
2. John Adams

As with the the previous speeches we will not be addressing the truthfulness of the assertions but rather we will consider primarily two questions: what is it trying to persuade us of and how does it do so. We will also, as before, look at some rhetorical criteria as set forth by Aristotle. For clarity I have chosen to annotate certain sections.

–

[Called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive office of our country,] I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow-citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favor with which they have been pleased to look toward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and [to declare] that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire. A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye—when I contemplate these transcendent objects, and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue, and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking. Utterly, indeed, should I despair did not the presence of many whom I here see remind me that in the other high authorities provided by our Constitution I shall find resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal on which to rely under all difficulties. To you, then, gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereign functions of legislation, and to those associated with you, I look with encouragement for that guidance and support which may enable us to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all embarked amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world.

Jefferson's structure defers mention of himself to the middle of the sentence and begins by stating that the people have asked him to take up duties in the government. He continues by acknowledging with great care the American people, both those present and those elsewhere by saying "that portion of my fellow-citizens." Jefferson thanks them for their favor and states that he is humbled before the task. His use of the phrase "above my talents" compliments the opening "undertakes," both images of the president below the task. Clearly Jefferson is doing everything he can to convey humility. Even his structure does this, for example he says, "I avail myself. . . to express, to declare, that I approach" Clearly the "that I approach" utilizes some understood infinitive (for example, "to acknowledge") parallel to "to express" and "to declare" but he omits it to the effect of a mild anacoluthon, that is, a breaking off of the structure to suggest that he is being carried away by the moment. Jefferson continues to describe the awesomeness of the task before him, describing them not just as "anxious and awful presentiments" but "those anxious and awful presentiments, which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire." The phrase, "which the greatness of the charge" suggests that anyone ought to be humbled by this office and the word "those" amplifies the sentiments by suggesting that the presentiments are somehow familiar to the men who have been president and endemic to the office. "Those" implies, "those same presidential." Jefferson continues to humble himself by expressing, parallel to the previous thought, that his own weakness is the cause of some of his apprehension. The logic of this naturally elevates the status of his predecessors. The phrase, "so justly inspires" emphasizes both points, that his apprehensions are cause by 1) the natural greatness of the office and 2) his own weakness.

Presidential Rhetoric II: John Adams

In Part I of our series on presidential rhetoric we look at President Obama's Inaugural Address. Today we will look at John Adams', delivered in the city of Philadelphia on Saturday, March 4, 1797.

As with the first speech, we will not be addressing the truthfulness of the assertions but rather we will consider primarily two questions: what is it trying to persuade us of and how does it do so. We will also, as before, look at some rhetorical criteria as set forth by Aristotle. Due to the complexity of some of the sentences I have chosen to annotate the sections.

–

When it was first perceived, in early times, that no middle course for America remained between unlimited submission to a foreign legislature and a total independence of its claims, men of reflection were less apprehensive [of danger from the formidable power of fleets and armies they must determine to resist] [than from those contests and dissensions which would certainly arise concerning the forms of government to be instituted] over the whole and over the parts of this extensive country. Relying, however, on the purity of their intentions, the justice of their cause, and the integrity and intelligence of the people, under an overruling Providence which had so signally protected this country from the first, the representatives of this nation, then consisting of little more than half its present number, not only broke to pieces the chains which were forging and the rod of iron that was lifted up, but frankly cut asunder the ties which had bound them, and launched into an ocean of uncertainty. 

We first notice that the first sentence is rather long. Syntactically it is not quite so complex, though, simply indicating that on the one hand in early times when X was the case, men were still more worried about Y than Z. That is, even when men were fighting armies, they were more worried about the debates to come than the immediate threats to their lives. This statement has several effects, 1) praising the founders for their bravery, 2) praising them for their wisdom in fearing the present political challenge, and 3) suggesting the gravity of the current challenge (i.e. "if those men, who were both brave and reflective, feared this debate, and we face more than they did, then we ought to take this seriously.") Compressed as that is, more details paint an even more vivid picture. Adams uses the passive voice, "when it was perceived" not to stoke the flames of faction and point fingers at those who were reluctant to declare independency. Too, a less precise description of the men he was speaking of ("men of reflection") portrays the men of that era as equal and united. Immediately then, before he uses any obvious terms like "peace" or "accord" or "unity," the structure of Adams' first sentence reflects the theme of unity, that he seeks to bridge the factions he saw forming. Adams also impersonally expresses that "no middle course remained" to suggest inevitability of the split with England; he does not say that the risk was to great, or that no alternative was perceived, or some people or reason would not permit it. He simply says, "no course remained" and follows it up with a clause of interlocking phrases with parallel thoughts to complete the idea. No course remained between

unlimited submission to a foreign legislature and total independence of its claims.

The alternatives could not be any clearer. We have a clear, compact, opening sentence which paints a scene and situation for the audience to get drawn into. Adams continues by listing why the men were successful: they were, guided by pure motives, they had a just cause, they were wise people, they were under under God's watch. Yet he doesn't blandly list these traits, but rather breaks the parallelism of the third trait of the trio by using two words with a conjunction and alliteration (the i's.) Adams then adds yet another trait, here avoiding monotony with of a visual, "under an overruling." Also, notice the ascending significance of the traits that allowed these men to succeed: first their own qualities, then the qualities of the people who elected then, then God's watchfulness. Adams continues, using the word "representatives" to emphasize the republican nature of the country, the slightly anachronistic word "nation" since technically there was no nation until after the declaration, and "growing population" to suggest subsequent prosperity. The second sentence has built from the descriptive literal opening and concludes in metaphor.

not only broke to pieces the chains which were forging and the rod of iron that was lifted up, but frankly cut asunder the ties which had bound them, and launched into an ocean of uncertainty. 

Again, Adams' balanced clauses make the situation clear: the men broke A and B, cut C, and then launched into D. Notice also the tenses, the chains "were forging" and the iron "was [already] lifted up," suggesting that the men were only responding to actions that were already in progress against them. Note the use of "frankly" instead of the expected "also," an example of Adams using a stronger word wherever possible. Adams concludes with the classic and classical metaphor of risk and of statesmanship.

The zeal and ardor of the people during the Revolutionary war, supplying the place of government, commanded a degree of order sufficient at least for the temporary preservation of society. The Confederation which was early felt to be necessary was prepared from the models of the Batavian and Helvetic confederacies, the only examples which remain with any detail and precision in history, and certainly the only ones which the people at large had ever considered. But reflecting on the striking difference in so many particulars between this country and those where a courier may go from the seat of government to the frontier in a single day, it was then certainly foreseen by some who assisted in Congress at the formation of it that it could not be durable.

Adams moves on to a more direct paragraph in which he simply, as a historian, recalls the first confederation which in three ways he characterizes as temporary, first insofar as it provided but the bare minimum of order that the people demanded, second insofar as it was written based on certain models simply because those models were the only complete ones, and lastly insofar as those countries for whom those models were written were quite different from America. For those reasons, it was inevitably temporary. Adams is careful, though, not to offend the authors of those articles either, stating, "it was then certainly foreseen by some who assisted in Congress at the formation of it. . .," i.e. that they must have known it was temporary.

Negligence of its regulations, inattention to its recommendations, if not disobedience to its authority, not only in individuals but in States, soon appeared with their melancholy consequences-- universal languor, jealousies and rivalries of States, decline of navigation and commerce, discouragement of necessary manufactures, universal fall in the value of lands and their produce, contempt of public and private faith, loss of consideration and credit with foreign nations, and at length in discontents, animosities, combinations, partial conventions, and insurrection, threatening some great national calamity.

In this dangerous crisis the people of America were not abandoned by their usual good sense, presence of mind, resolution, or integrity. Measures were pursued to concert a plan to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty. The public disquisitions, discussions, and deliberations issued in the present happy Constitution of Government.

Adams continues with a list of the problems that occurred and while he is specific in describing the natures of the problems he refrains from listing any specifics. We will see that Adams tends to do this throughout the speech and at the end of our discussion will consider why and what he gains and loses in terms of impression and persuasion.

He  is careful to lay the problems at the feet of the imperfect confederation, not the people themselves, let alone anyone in particular. In contrast, he praises the people for their "usual good sense" for deciding to form another constitution. Adams quotes the preamble to the constitution verbatim and thus the thought of his speech flows seamlessly from the imperfect articles of confederation, through the strife which succeeded it, to the "more perfect union" of the day, ending with, "the present happy Constitution of Government." To set the stage, then, Adams traces the history of the nation from the revolution to the day of this speech in 1797. The thread most visible again and again that Americans of integrity and sound mind were who permitted success.

Employed in the service of my country abroad during the whole course of these transactions, I first saw the Constitution of the United States in a foreign country. Irritated by no literary altercation, animated by no public debate, heated by no party animosity, I read it with great satisfaction, as the result of good heads prompted by good hearts, as an experiment better adapted to the genius, character, situation, and relations of this nation and country than any which had ever been proposed or suggested. In its general principles and great outlines it was conformable to such a system of government as I had ever most esteemed, and in some States, my own native State in particular, had contributed to establish. Claiming a right of suffrage, in common with my fellow-citizens, in the adoption or rejection of a constitution which was to rule me and my posterity, as well as them and theirs, I did not hesitate to express my approbation of it on all occasions, in public and in private. It was not then, nor has been since, any objection to it in my mind that the Executive and Senate were not more permanent. Nor have I ever entertained a thought of promoting any alteration in it but such as the people themselves, in the course of their experience, should see and feel to be necessary or expedient, and by their representatives in Congress and the State legislatures, according to the Constitution itself, adopt and ordain.

Adams finally makes his own entrance in the narrative, deferring his entry further even into the middle of the sentence. He describes himself not merely as "working" or "living abroad" but as "employed" abroad, suggesting service. Adams uses in the next sentence another tripartite construction of parallel phrases with the verbs at the beginning of each, then breaking the parallelism by beginning the next sentence with "I": Irritated [by nothing], animated [by nothing], heated [by nothing], I read. . . Adams most cleverly does not stop this sentence but rolls right into his evaluation. Had he stopped he would have had introduce his evaluation separately and draw attention to the fact that he was judging everyone, a feature he acutely would seem monarchical. Instead he introduces his thoughts (which are an evaluation nonetheless) with a simile, "I read it as the result of good heads. . ." which bypasses his act of judging but not his judgment. Having softened its entry, Adams then offers more of his judgments, though still deferring himself to the middle of the sentence. 1) It was as comfortable as he had ever seen in the general and specific, 2) it was even as good as the state constitutions (an indirect, multi-pronged compliment), 3) he approved of it as a free man, and 4) he approved of it as a father. He approved of it in private and public. In contrast, he refrained from three things: hesitation to approve, object, or entertain the thought of changes. Only according to the will of the people themselves and the rules of the constitution itself could it be changed. Adams here echoes the Declaration of Independence's "in the Course of human events" with his "in the course of their experience." He is also careful of just who is doing what; it is ever the people who both "adopt" and "ordain" by means of their representatives.

At this point we ought to make a note about style. The prose of the second president, a classically trained man and a lawyer, reveals his training and occupation. We see large-scale structures (Adams not only read Cicero and Demosthenes but often spoke of them) andspecific ideas (the lawyer must always make specific claims.) As a result we have organization with dense content.

Returning to the bosom of my country after a painful separation from it for ten years, I had the honor to be elected to a station under the new order of things, and I have repeatedly laid myself under the most serious obligations to support the Constitution. The operation of it has equaled the most sanguine expectations of its friends, and from an habitual attention to it, satisfaction in its administration, and delight in its effects upon the peace, order, prosperity, and happiness of the nation I have acquired an habitual attachment to it and veneration for it. What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?

Adams continues with another relatively lengthy sentence in three parts with the verb coming at the beginning of each clause and with careful attention to the aspect of the action: while he was returning, he had the honor to be elected, and has since been obligated to support. Adams once again starts describing something in the past, describes its transition, ends in the present time, and then in the subsequent sentence describes the situation of the moment. Adams in the next sentence makes a subtle argument: on the one hand the government is operating well based on the theories of those who liked it
and on the other he himself is persuaded by its goodness by the following reasons, from his 1) attention to it, 2) administration of it, and 3) the effects of it. For those reasons he "has acquired an attachment and veneration." That is, the government is sound in theory and sound in practice. "What more can you want?" Adams essentially concludes in a short sentence whose brevity (contrasting the previous sentences) drives home the argument. Nonetheless, Adams elaborates on this point more overtly in the following.

There may be little solidity in an ancient idea that congregations of men into cities and nations are the most pleasing objects in the sight of superior intelligences, but this is very certain, that to a benevolent human mind there can be no spectacle presented by any nation more pleasing, more noble, majestic, or august, than an assembly like that which has so often been seen in this and the other Chamber of Congress, of a Government in which the Executive authority, as well as that of all the branches of the Legislature, are exercised by citizens selected at regular periods by their neighbors to make and execute laws for the general good. Can anything essential, anything more than mere ornament and decoration, be added to this by robes and diamonds? Can authority be more amiable and respectable when it descends from accidents or institutions established in remote antiquity than when it springs fresh from the hearts and judgments of an honest and enlightened people? For it is the people only that are represented. It is their power and majesty that is reflected, and only for their good, in every legitimate government, under whatever form it may appear. The existence of such a government as ours for any length of time is a full proof of a general dissemination of knowledge and virtue throughout the whole body of the people. And what object or consideration more pleasing than this can be presented to the human mind? If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information, and benevolence. 

Theory may be unpersuasive, he says, but the conduct of this government is surely testament to its righteousness. Adams is again most deliberate in his use of tense and voice: like that which has so often been seen. What has been seen is not simply something Adams saw and, if you don't like him, which you'd be inclined to disagree with. Rather, Adams suggests, "it has been seen" by many people. Adams is very subtly suggesting if not consensus a general observation. And what has been seen? Adams continues to summarize the essence of the government: representatives elected by the people at regular intervals to legislate for the general good. Adams again apostrophizes, essentially saying, "What can you add to this?" Whatever you might think it lacks, he says, those things are details. Surely you wouldn't prefer a king, who has his authority by accident, or a government so old it does not fit you? In a very clever turn of argument Adams says, "For it is the people only that are represented." which essentially challenges the listener by saying, in effect, "This is your government. You control it, so what could be the problem with that? If you don't like something you can change it." Adams chooses not to entertain any specific complaints about the constitution and government. We will discuss later the benefits and losses of this tactic. He continues to praise the people that they must in fact be very wise for such a government to have endured at all. That itself should be cause for praise and that is a legitimate cause for national pride. A very interesting paragraph of persuasion and argumentation by means almost exclusively of questioning. Adams concludes with a now familiar argument: neither A nor B is the case, but rather C, D, and E.

In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and [if] that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, [then] the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good. If that solitary suffrage can be obtained by foreign nations by flattery or menaces, by fraud or violence, by terror, intrigue, or venality, [then] the Government may not be the choice of the American people, but of foreign nations. It may be foreign nations who govern us, and not we, the people, who govern ourselves; and candid men will acknowledge that in such cases choice would have little advantage to boast of over lot or chance.

Adams now, at last, depicts the dangers of his time as he sees them. He has argued that as of that day they had a great government and will now say, in effect, that if we lose it, it is our fault. What are the dangers? Adams describes two with very straightforward if/then clauses. First, notice what he does not do: Adams does not summarize his arguments or introduce his arguments with single words, what we today might call "buzz words." He simply makes an argument for or against a course of action. He does not use the words "Federalist" or "Republican" or "faction." He does not invoke an idea with one simple word but insists you follow the argument. The if/then statements are annotated above and it is not necessary to summarize them. Adams' conclusion of that paragraph makes a subtle point, though: if we allow this to happen, if we allow foreign nations to govern us, then our deliberately chosen and crafted nation is no better for us than something else we might have by accident (an alternative he decried above.)

[Such is the amiable and interesting system of government (and such are some of the abuses to which it may be exposed) which the people of America have exhibited to the admiration and anxiety of the wise and virtuous of all nations for eight years] under the administration of a [A] citizen who, [B] [by a long course of great actions, [C] regulated by prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, [D] conducting a people inspired with the same virtues and animated with the same ardent patriotism and love of liberty to independence and peace, to [E] increasing wealth and unexampled prosperity,] has merited the gratitude of his fellow-citizens, commanded the highest praises of foreign nations, and secured immortal glory with posterity.

This is probably not the best section of the speech, being rather long and wordy and without any particular unifying device. Here Adams' penchant for pairs of ideas starts to weigh the speech and the lack of larger-scale structure hampers the flow of ideas which is thus: government-people-nations-Washington-people-nations-posterity. It works, but not quite smoothly or readily. It is, in fact, a large, simple sentence and as such it feels weighted. The paragraph is clearly all about Washington but it ends with posterity and the argument and line of thought from government to posterity is not as clear as one would like, though the sense of Washington being the preserver of government for posterity remains.

If you remove the asides and extraneous details, the awkwardness is apparent: a citizen. . . by a long course of actions. . . regulated by xyz, conducting a people. . . to increasing xyz. . . has merited, commanded, and secured. . .The distance between conducting and increasing makes one want to take them as parallel and independent when in fact increasing depends on conducting. The pairing is also awkward, "conducting to increasing." Lastly, do we take C to modify B or A? I think we ought to take B, C, and D as parallel and modifying A, though if so the conjunction "and" before D would have been most clarifying. Overall, the passage is comprehensible but slightly overburdened.

In practice, though, with all eyes on Washington, with pauses for applause, and perhaps with gestures from Adams to both Washington and the people, this list of praises could have been more effective than it seems in print.

In that retirement which is his voluntary choice may he long live to enjoy the delicious recollection of his services, the gratitude of mankind, (the happy fruits of them to himself and the world, which are daily increasing), and that splendid prospect of the future fortunes of this country which is opening from year to year. His name may be still a rampart, and the knowledge that he lives a bulwark, against all open or secret enemies of his country's peace. This example has been recommended to the imitation of his successors by both Houses of Congress and by the voice of the legislatures and the people throughout the nation.

Though he concluded with "posterity" he was talking about Washington, who he returns to. Again, though, the previous sentence-paragraph is so big that the transition back to Washington feels like a jump. Adams emphasizes the voluntary nature of Washington's retirement before giving us another one of his lists. The fact that "fruits of them" is parallel to "recollection" and "gratitude" but refers to them and depends on them for sense, and that the list continues on to "prospect" which is parallel to them also, is slightly jarring. The next sentence is a rather bold (and complementary) assertion: so great is Washington that his mere name is a rampart and the fact that he lives is a bulwark against the nation's enemies. The phrase "recommended to the imitation of his successors" sounds perhaps awkward or in too grand of a style to the ears of non-Classicists. Today one would probably write, "recommended as a model to. . ." This is less an issue of style than grammar. The idea is nonetheless clear: everyone wants the subsequent presidents to be like Washington.

On this subject it might become me better to be silent or to speak with diffidence; but as something may be expected, the occasion, I hope, will be admitted as an apology if I venture to say that if a preference, upon principle, of a free republican government, formed upon long and serious reflection, after a diligent and impartial inquiry after truth; if an attachment to the Constitution of the United States, and a conscientious determination to support it until it shall be altered by the judgments and wishes of the people, expressed in the mode prescribed in it; if a respectful attention to the constitutions of the individual States and a constant caution and delicacy toward the State governments; if an equal and impartial regard to the rights, interest, honor, and happiness of all the States in the Union, without preference or regard to a northern or southern, an eastern or western, position, their various political opinions on unessential points or their personal attachments; if a love of virtuous men of all parties and denominations; if a love of science and letters and a wish to patronize every rational effort to encourage schools, colleges, universities, academies, and every institution for propagating knowledge, virtue, and religion among all classes of the people, not only for their benign influence on the happiness of life in all its stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments; if a love of equal laws, of justice, and humanity in the interior administration; if an inclination to improve agriculture, commerce, and manufacturers for necessity, convenience, and defense; if a spirit of equity and humanity toward the aboriginal nations of America, and a disposition to meliorate their condition by inclining them to be more friendly to us, and our citizens to be more friendly to them; if an inflexible determination to maintain peace and inviolable faith with all nations, and that system of neutrality and impartiality among the belligerent powers of Europe which has been adopted by this Government and so solemnly sanctioned by both Houses of Congress and applauded by the legislatures of the States and the public opinion, until it shall be otherwise ordained by Congress; if a personal esteem for the French nation, formed in a residence of seven years chiefly among them, and a sincere desire to preserve the friendship which has been so much for the honor and interest of both nations; if, while the conscious honor and integrity of the people of America and the internal sentiment of their own power and energies must be preserved, an earnest endeavor to investigate every just cause and remove every colorable pretense of complaint; if an intention to pursue by amicable negotiation a reparation for the injuries that have been committed on the commerce of our fellow-citizens by whatever nation, and if success can not be obtained, to lay the facts before the Legislature, that they may consider what further measures the honor and interest of the Government and its constituents demand; if a resolution to do justice as far as may depend upon me, at all times and to all nations, and maintain peace, friendship, and benevolence with all the world; if an unshaken confidence in the honor, spirit, and resources of the American people, on which I have so often hazarded my all and never been deceived; if elevated ideas of the high destinies of this country and of my own duties toward it, founded on a knowledge of the moral principles and intellectual improvements of the people deeply engraven on my mind in early life, and not obscured but exalted by experience and age; and, with humble reverence, I feel it to be my duty to add, if a veneration for the religion of a people who profess and call themselves Christians, and a fixed resolution to consider a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for the public service, can enable me in any degree to comply with your wishes, it shall be my strenuous endeavor that this sagacious injunction of the two Houses shall not be without effect.

Now this is quite a bit of prose, flowing nicely as it does from the previous thought. To paraphrase the thoughts, "Speaking as to what the President ought to be like, well, I should probably not say anything. But the occasion calls for something so I'll say this. . ." Adams continues with a massive anaphora through the repetitions of if. This is where Adams outlines himself and his principles for the people. The whole list, though is structured as an argument, and a simple one at that: "If all of these things will help me do the job, which is to serve you, then I'll take it." This list is, again, specific in idea but not in execution.

With this great example before me, with the sense and spirit, the faith and honor, the duty and interest, of the same American people pledged to support the Constitution of the United States, I entertain no doubt of its continuance in all its energy, and my mind is prepared without hesitation to lay myself under the most solemn obligations to support it to the utmost of my power.

This is essentially an oath which sums up the speech (about the virtues of the government, the people, and his predecessor), announces his hope for the future, and commits himself to the task.

And may that Being who is supreme over all, the Patron of Order, the Fountain of Justice, and the Protector in all ages of the world of virtuous liberty, continue His blessing upon this nation and its Government and give it all possible success and duration consistent with the ends of His providence.

Adams concludes with a prayerful invocation for God's blessing, asking for order, justice, and continued protection.

Concluding Thoughts

Overall we may say this speech is characterized by a great density of ideas. No one could accuse Adams of being vague. (Such specificity, as we said, is a lawyerly tendency.) Adams is ever precise and not afraid to use a parenthetical reference to avoid a misreading of his statement. There is a preponderance of pairs and trios of ideas and Adams clearly enjoys such pairings.

Adams too took great pains to include all Americans in his praises and exclude no one from the events he depicted. He was careful not to name people or groups as responsible for the nation's problems. Certainly he was trying to bridge the growing divide he saw between the Republicans and Federalists, using Washington as the model and rallying point. He depicted the situation he came to as positive and put the burden of continued success on himself, the current congress, and the American people. He balances a commitment to the government and constitution itself and the more general principles of republicanism and democracy. He repeatedly emphasizes that the government and constitution is true to these principles. Adams is consistently humble, praising only the wisdom of the people, congress, and Washington.

The speech is dense with ideas and especially dense with verbs, emphasizing action and energy, and modest with use of figurative language, which Adams employs sparingly but effectively. Its argumentation is careful and rather subtle, relying most often on his ability to paint a situation. Adams' lengthy opening, depicting the republic up to the moment of his speech, is quite effective. It draws everyone into the narrative and, by not excluding anyone, makes everyone feel as if they were part of it. As such, it puts everyone on a level playing field and invites all people to take part in the government and not retreat into parties or private life. Though the opening is in a rather learned style and the construction is complex, as a whole the speech is quite approachable.

To consider again Aristotle's categories, we may say that the inaugural speech has two functions: for a president to outline his particular ideas and policy, and to celebrate America. Adams speech is a success as a ceremonial speech, praising the American people and government thoroughly and specifically. Aristotle also noted (Rhetoric I.ii) that three modes of persuasion exist: 1) of the personal character of the speaker, 2) putting the audience in a particular frame of mind, 3) proof or apparent proof of the words themselves. Which does this speech use?

Adams utilizes Mode 1 two times, first suggesting that since he was abroad he was impartial and able wisely to reflect on the constitution and then at the end of the speech that his ideals qualify him for the post. Adams begins with Mode 2, putting the audience in the frame of mind to approve of the government by painting its history and intertwining it with their own wisdom and the ideals of the revolution. The fundamental argument of the speech is that, "If the revolution was just, and you are wise, then the government is good," the argument which Adams makes most subtly in the paragraph of questions. Too, in his final paragraph, he outlines his goals (to maintain peace, to respect state's rights, et cetera.) Adams, then, avails himself of all three modes of persuasion. Adams recommends a course of action (faith participation in the current system) and praises the nation.

Adams does not, though, make any specific recommendations in terms of implementation. The concluding large paragraph is not so much a statement of implementation as of principles. What does "a spirit of equity and humanity toward the aboriginal nations of America" mean in terms of action? What about, "an inclination to improve agriculture?" What does, "an attachment to the Constitution," mean in practice? Too, throughout the rest of the speech Adams talks more of ideas than specific events. He speaks of the "zeal and ardor" of the people but not of specific battles, he mentions that people are represented but not how (i.e., whether sufficiently), and he recalls the "universal languor, and jealousies and rivalries of States" without reference to specific events. These glosses and omissions miss opportunity for potency and vividness, though no doubt Adams made the concessions from a concern not to appear partisan. Unfortunately, when you do not address the alternatives to your policy you inevitably lose some of your ability to praise yours by making the alternatives appear unworkable, immoral, et cetera.

Yet while we are not inclined to see controversial material in the speech we ought to recall that the government was still young and Adams inauguration was the first peaceful transition of power. It was not yet clear that the government would remain and many had doubts about its ability to. Thus Adams' course of action, avoiding potential controversy and emphasizing praise, is quite understandable and one could certainly argue appropriate or even necessary. The narrative is clear: set up, complemented, and most importantly, maintained by the structure. The structure of sentences and the attention to tense and voice are polished and effective. The speech is well-paced and the transitions from idea to idea are elegant. Adams is very effective at suggesting causality, e.g. "because these things are so, such must necessarily follow," and "if we avoid these things, then we will also avoid these." He makes the situation at the time of his speech seem the natural and positive outcome of past events. The whole speech is augmented by varied and vivid diction and careful attention to word order, though Adams' penchant for pairs and trios of words adds some length. There is always a mode of persuasion in use, that is, the speech is always rhetorical. Perhaps most of all, it is always engaging. Overall, a fine speech.