https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-undying-necessity-of-moral-courage-5687359The Undying Necessity of Moral Courage
By Jeffrey A. Tucker
7/16/24
NOTE: when reading at The Epoch Times, either use your browser's "reader mode" or disable javascript in your browser.Excerpts:Joseph Schumpeter dishes out heaps of astounding insights in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.” I keep going back to this treatise for guidance in our strange times, mainly to better understand the interaction of economics, politics, history, and culture. His outlook is probably best described as transideological: a partisan of capitalist systems, he was not optimistic about human nature itself.
Part of my draw to his work is that I used to dismiss it as excessively pessimistic. Of course he wrote in wartime. A product of Old World Europe, he made a name for himself as a scholar before the Great War. His education was of the highest prewar sort: all romance languages, all disciplines, the great books of all time, along with mighty technical knowledge. We’ll probably never see his likes again.
By the time the second war in Europe broke loose, his outlook had matured greatly from his earlier works on technical economics. He saw the impact of the rise of incredible wealth on the culture at large. Essentially, his view was that markets and capitalism lead to their own cultural undoing.
Yes, capitalism works. Manna falls as if from heaven, and people are no longer taught its source through any lived experience. Better lives, richer lives, more opportunities rain down on the population as if by magic, leading generations of people to believe that none of the blessings of civilization require anything like the ancient virtues. We are all along for the ride, and just enjoying its riches.
What does this do to human character? It trains people to believe that the ancient virtues are no longer operational. We don’t need fortitude, resilience, courage, and determination. A credit-soaked world no longer needs thrift, prudence, or sobriety. Instead, rising wealth of the sort we’ve experienced since the late 19th century trains people just to go along for the ride. Careerism replaces courage. Credentials replace talent. Erudition replaces wisdom. Indulgence displaces prudence.
This has a profound effect on policy, Schumpeter wrote. States come to believe that they can promise their populations anything and that normal accounting has been superseded. They create giant cradle-to-grave welfare states. They intervene in every conflict, domestic and foreign, as if there are no limits to resources. The culture celebrates recklessness, sloth, and opportunism instead of discipline and fortitude.
And what is the result, in Schumpeter’s view? The very foundations of prosperity are eaten away, giving rise to a form of socialism that works so long as the crisis is kept at bay.
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Our standards of living are falling, even dramatically, even at a pace no one has previously experienced in living memory. You know it in your bones and yet public culture hasn’t really admitted it.
All of this is backdrop to the real crisis of right now, and you know the substance of it: It is a political crisis now illustrated by an attempt on Donald Trump’s life. He was spared by the grace of God: a sudden turn of his head toward the screen caused the bullet to slice off the top of his ear but miss his head.
As if by a miracle, he survived.
But the story does not stop there. Having been shot at, and bleeding from his head, he rose to his feet and rallied the gathered crowd, while promising to fight on, and urging others to do the same. As security forces got him away from the violence, he fist-pumped the air one more time and then left.
In our times, we’ve rarely if ever seen anything like that. Those who said he was a mere actor, influencer, opportunistic politician, or businessman on the make saw a different man when faced with mortality itself. He exercised resilience, fortitude, and moral courage, all those ancient virtues that are so ill-practiced in our times but which ultimately drive history.
Most people I know, even those who completely oppose his politics, are still in awe of that scene. It rocked the world, and made history. This is even aside from the incredible images that came from the scene: the real-time videos themselves present a stunning display.
We in our times are so accustomed to a culture of inauthenticity, opportunism, performance, posing, careerist ladder climbing, and pettiness that it is startling to witness an authentic display of genuine fearlessness in the face of death. If I may say so: we needed this. Desperately. We all needed to remember and to know that it matters.
All politics aside, our times have deprecated and driven out the old virtues and toughness along with it. I’m convinced that an authentic display of exactly that is precisely what the world craves right now. We need it more than ever in our lives. Otherwise, we will continue to go the way that Schumpeter predicted, straight to the doom he foresaw for Western culture.
More at URL above...Poster's comment:
Superb piece by Mr. Tucker.
I have taken the liberty of posting it to the Editorial section, where it probably belongs, but also posting here, since this is the thread that is getting all the activity.
So... moderators adjust if you wish.
