In her column this last Friday, Peggy Noonan discusses the ever more mind-boggling absurdity that is the “Baghdad Diarist” TNR debacle. (If you don’t know the Scott Beauchamp story, a soldier agreed to blog for the magazine, and decided to fictionalize his account in ways that a) painted our soldiers in the worst possible light, and b) were easily discredited, presumably to ingratiate himself with the leftist anti-war intelligentsia that stands ever ready to believe that our military is made up of gleeful baby killers or those too stupid or poor to resist their orders.)
But it was not her discussion of the all-too-predictable liberal mainstream media that really got my attention. That story hasn’t been new since John Kerry testified about his “war crimes.” It was the discussion of why it was that the editors were so easily duped by the story got my attention, and reflected something I’d been thinking about for awhile.
Ms. Noonan noted:
It has to do with what sometimes seems to me to be the limited lives that have been or are being lived by the rising generation of American professionals in the arts, journalism, academia and business. They have had good lives, happy lives, but there is a sense with some of them that they didn’t so much live it as view it. That they learned too much from media and not enough from life’s difficulties. That they saw much of what they know in a film or play and picked up all the memes and themes. […]
I’m not sure it’s always good to grow up surrounded by stability, immersed in affluence, and having had it drummed into you that you are entitled to be a member of the next leadership class. To have this background in the modern era is to come from a ghetto, the luckiest ghetto in the world, a golden ghetto beyond whose walls it can be hard to see. There’s much to be said for suffering, for being on the outside or the bottom, for having to have fought yourself up and through. It can leave you grounded. It can give you real knowledge not only of the world and of other men but of yourself. In some ways it can leave you less cynical. (Not everything comes down to money.) And in some ways it leaves you just cynical enough.
I think this is right. Human beings aren’t built to live cushy lives, and that fact doesn’t just make us physically fat because we’re not chasing mammoths any more. Our brains are meant to grow through negative reinforcement and adversity. We’re happier when we’re disciplined and challenged. When every luxury is handed to us without fear of want or even of excess effort, we atrophy, we grow stupider, and life looses meaning.
Worse, we start manufacturing fake dangers and imagined boogey men, like George Bush’s anti-free speech gestapo troops, or the 9/11 CIA conspirators, (or war criminal soldiers who kill puppies for the fun of it in Iraq), and ignore real ones on the horizon because they lack the necessary immediacy or familiarity. We think we need the government to give us everything we want (like a 30 hour work week and 2 months of vacation a year), or our human rights are somehow being abridged.
We loose ourselves and our sense of our own vitality – and of our responsibilities to retain our own individual sovereignty. When we lose this, we hand away our freedoms to the government because they’re just too darn hard to maintain for ourselves. We become selfish, sullen, and child-like, expecting that Mommy will always clean up our messes. Our own success makes us soft, and without an understanding of where our prosperity came from in the first place, it will be impossible to maintain.
But we can have the best of both of those worlds. We already live in the most prosperous country the world has ever seen, with standards of living that would have stunned even our parents in their youth and would have made the Queen of England herself blush only a century ago. And that’s because of our relative lack of reliance on the government compared to the rest of the world – not in spite of it as the social engineers would have us believe. We need not give up prosperity so we can be more in touch with our own liberty. We just need to take responsibility for acquiring it ourselves.
And that’s what is so onerous about big government programs that purport to give us an unearned chicken in every pot or a “free” $5,000 in every bassinet. Aside from the fact that someone else has to pay for those things, it saps the rest of us of our desire to produce. Why should we if Big Brother is going to give us everything we need?
Big government is nothing more than an attack on our individual will. Government is necessary, but government cannot create prosperity and wealth – only free people with a self-interested drive to produce can do that. When too many people give up that drive, when we have too many consumers and not enough producers, our economy and our society will collapse. And this isn’t a guess – we have plenty of models across the Pond warning us of our possible fate.
We need to reinvest in a culture that finds government handouts embarrassing instead of an entitlement, bad grades reason for grounding, not a yoga class, and responsibility an opportunity that is ever sought, not an inconvenience that is to be shirked at the least discomfort. Those are traits that were once more common in society, and ones that conservatives understand we need to conserve. The more prosperous we are, the easier it might be to let them fall by the wayside. But without them , we cannot protect our individual sovereignty. And once we lose that, the astonishingly successful political experiment that has been America will be over, and what remains will not be to our liking.
