Strength's complacency and ennervation.

Mr. Smith captures two important ideas in his excellent post. The primary focus is on the success we've had in saving ourselves from our environment, i.e., solving the problems of survival and how our ability to do so with very little original effort has taken away much from our lives.^[1] Western pop culture celebrates Matthew Arnold's "thousand nothings of the hour" with a vengeance and "serious" people today debate the necessity of making sodomy a sacrament.

The victory of communism indeed.

The idea that struck me most in this post, however, is the one that explains our national embrace of weakness or charity or compromise as freestanding virtues disconnected from that which makes it possible to be charitable, etc. Charity is possible because one has the right feelings toward other humans, not because capitalism has made abundance possible.

One can and must compromise first and foremost and failure to do that is conclusive evidence of stunted moral development at best or, what else, fascism and/or racism at worst. Fracism, perhaps? The position that "we have what we have because we've got a superior culture so bloody well bugger off" is unsustainable in modern discourse. The idea that we have security for all other pursuits by having prepared ourselves superbly for the bloody business of mass annihilation just does not occur to The Enlightened Ones. War is for knuckledraggers not for the elite, whereas, in fact, it is the elite who should wearing the BDUs -- something they steadfastly refuse to do.^[2]

In our strength, we allowed ourselves to believe we could afford to be weak, and now we are in a position of lethargy. The Big Questions of God, Race, Nation and similar don't really matter. What matters is what's on the box, who's divorcing who on your favourite soap, and if that career move is going the way you want it. Let the Proper Authorities deal with the nation . . . . Has communism ever had a greater victory than capitalist victory, and its narcotic after-effects, I wonder?^[3]

Notes
^[1] The happiest or most interesting moments of my life were those when I was at the end of a narrow gauge railway far from a major city or spent my time looking out over barbed wire at pagodas and rice fields. A few nights I spent on an African farm years ago were almost magical with the utter blackness of the night sky, the total quiet, and the soft light from kerosene lamps. What could "Sex and the City" have added to those moments?
^[2] I knew of only one man in my high school who served in the military and not one of my personal acquaintances or friends (not medically exempt) in my undergraduate days served.
^[3] "Is Our Strength Our Weakness?" By Mr. Smith, Mr Smith's Refusal, 5/13/07.