Well, God handles that role nicely.

A benevolent monarch? But couldn't one also have intervened to block Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, or Bush's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, or the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court?



Kraynak is wrong that the future lies with hierarchies; rather it lies with consensual as opposed to majoritarian democracy. Consensual means that rights are widely distributed among the people, not lodged solely in government, so that the majority needs the consent of minority members to act.

pj:



Those seem like a reasonable trade-off.

No "heroism" today? Tell that to our soldiers, policemen and firefighters. No "spritual purity", no "human spirit"? The danger of someone like Kraynak is that he loves these things in the abstract, but refuses to do the hard work of finding these qualities in the people that surround him everyday. Therefore, he would have a tyrant run our lives, and supress every human impulse which is not in accord with "heroic virtue, spiritual perfection, philosophical truth, and artistic beauty", so that he can be spared the indignity of witnessing human folly and weakness.



There were no "Golden Ages" of mankind, Kraynak would have been just as disgusted with any other society and time that he could have been born into. It is the filter of history that lets him enjoy the triumphs of the past without the need to wade through the dross of humanity.

RobertD:



You. presumably intentionally, elude the point. No one doubts the courage of a fireman, but if he spends his nights watching TV and his weekends at Foxwoods he's hardly part of a heroic culture. Dross is always with us, but must we aim at dross? Or should we accept dross only as a byproduct of a culture that aims for gold?

OJ



The "culture" is the sum total of what people in a society do. In a free society, this will include both gold and dross, but it does not aim at either, because noone is in control. Just as centrally planned economies both fail at acheiving what they intend and bring untold misery in their path, centrally planned cultures will also. You don't plan for heroism, heroism arises when it is needed. Kraynak shares the "fatal conceit" of the socialists in that he imagines a culture that can be molded and directed from the top down. Such a culture will be as good at producing heroism, beauty and goodness as the Soviet state was good at producing consumer goods.

Please remember that most of the causes of the Left are profoundly reactionary. Change does not equal progress.

RobertD:



Of course, no one announces that it is their intent to produce a culture that is sewage, just so that they can elevate the masses. But that is necessarily the end result.



An excellent book on the topic is Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses

">http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/967




and there's a great (surprisingly, French) film on it : Grand Illusion [La Grande Illusion]

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.moviedetail/movie_id/28

And an apt quote occurs: "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love--they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.''

-Harry Lime, The Third Man

So are you saying that you would prefer to live in a society of warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed as long as it produces great works of art?

Not only that, I'd say that anyone who says they didn't feel better about this country immediately after 9/11 than just before is lying.

I wont argue with you that our culture shows its better side during hardship and duress than during peace. But is it right to wish for such things so that we can feel better about ourselves? A heroic culture is not the same as a martial culture. Heroes love peace and goodness, and are willing to fight and die to preserve them. I wouldn't put the Italian states of the Borgias in that category. They were little more than gangsters fighting for turf. The fact that they had enough excess wealth to patronize a handful of brilliant artists is not to their credit.

RobertD - your positive statements are true but I think you underestimate the importance of virtue. It is the ancient Judeo-Christian puzzle of the relation between the law and love: goodness and justice require obedience to the law, e.g. refusal to murder or steal, but human society requires something more - love - but yet these two are so closely related that "(true) love is the fulfillment of the law." Conservatives tend to emphasize virtue/love and Libertarians obedience to the laws of justice, yet the two end up in the same place.

The Swiss may have been boring but they did

produce a superior system of political organization.

The Italians did not and still haven't.



How many of your children would you trade

for a pretty ceiling?

Hundreds of years after we're all gone and long forgotten (including the Italians and the Swiss) that ceiling will bring people pleasure and stand as a testament to Man's capacity on rare occassions to create beauty if he strives to--meanwhile, our great-great-greatkids will read about the Swiss system of cantonments. Who would choose to be remembered for the merely political?

Americans would not have to "choose" a sovereign. That is something of a contradiction anyway. You would simply have to apologize for the rebellion of your ancestors and accept Queen Elizabeth as your rightful hereditary ruler. I am sure she would be delighted to hold for you those considerable reserve constitutional powers she holds in Britain and Australia.

Her viceroy in Australia has dismissed rogue political leaders on a few occasions so I am sure she would be useful to you too.

That does seem to be one of the most efficacious purposes a sovereign might serve.

oj

I do not underestimate the importance of virtue. My disagreement with you and with Kraynak is that you can't get virtue by command from the top. Kings can't make a society virtuous, they will only allow their own virtue to be corrupted by power. The brilliance of the Italian Renaissance artists had nothing to do with the form of government. Such explosions of creativity happen rarely, are unplanned for, and can't be reproduced by kings or governments.



All kings can do is censor the art and the behavior that they don't like, they can't inspire good art or virtuous behavior. You underestimate the amount of creative accomplishment in our own society, because you can't ignore all the crap that it produces. An open society will produce a lot of crap for every ounce of brilliance. That is just the nature of it, it is the tradeoff for living freely.



As for the heroism of free societies vs traditional, authority based societies, read Victor Davis Hanson's "The Soul of Battle". Men who live in freedom outfight men who don't, and it isn't a matter of technology, it is because freedom brings out the heroic virtues of men more readily than authority does.

Venice, notoriously, continued to effloresce

culturally long after its heroic period had

ended.

RobertD:



The point is that in a masses elevating state like democracy you lose all capacity to distinguish between what's great and what's crap. Eventually all you have is the crap that you can get rich selling to the masses.

There's a vital problem with Hanson's fine book though--there's no more hierarchical institution in a democracy than its military, the success of which thereby validates hierarchy.

Robert - You are right that political leaders can do no positive good for a nation - but you overlook the harm they will do if they are not virtuous. Even in a limited government such as ours, the President has great power to damage the country. If political leaders are drawn from the people, should we not expect their virtue to correlate with the people's? Were not the founding fathers right that freedom cannot survive without virtue in the people?

oj, I disagree with you on your view of the military. What Hanson points out is that our (the West's) armies were citizen soldiers, who left their farms and peacetime jobs in times of crisis, fought wars to protect their free way of life, and then went back to their farms and jobs when the fighting was done. These were not career militarists, they did not obtain their values or their virtue from the military. What hierarchy existed in these citizen armies tended to be less absolute then the armies of their opponents (Spartans, Confederates, Nazis). The hierarchy of the military was important solely to channel, discipline and harness the heroic virtue that our soldiers brought to the fight from their lives as free citizens, not to instill virtues that were not there to begin with.

Let's not kid ourselves:



Grant and Sherman fed democratic fodder into the Confederate lines knowing they had more to waste than did the South.



Patton was a genius and none of his men could have stepped into his shoes.