Thanksgiving

Ben Bernanke is unworried about the American trade deficit. The core cause of such lop-sidedness is the sophisticated, post-industrial, and healthy consumerism of the US in contradistinction to the neo-industrial, wage-controlled "workers-hell" in China. We have a copious amount of discretionary income. They don't. We bought into the information economy. They haven't.

China and the Middle East are in the same dilemma. Their survival and relevance are dependent on the attentions of the United States and the particular type of market we help support. Our dependency on them is inextricably linked with the aged and dying paradigm of Industry. As the latter goes the way of the dinosaur, and as the United States gets richer, a single imperative will ring true with the Industrial nations of the world: evolve, or die.

They are in a precarious position, these niche players. The top of the food chain is moving skyward, as the ground falls away beneath their feet. As citizens around the world become more sophisticated due to cultural cross-pollination (internet, media), the universal question asked of government will soon become, "Where's the beef?" Without a compelling answer, national brain-drain to the US will proceed apace (see latest Economist).

Information is the new oil. And we (post-industrial nations) own all the refinaries.

On a side note, our national defense posture has shifted from retaliatory (pre-911), to preemptive (post-911), to preventative (post-OIF) in the space of five years. This means that any prospective enemy of the US will have to draw its followers and know-how from an ether filled with sentinels and guard dogs. Worse for them, once they find what they need, assembly--and speed--will be required.

A decentralized entry-barrier for our times. As we get richer and more powerful, outside threats diminish. Inside threats, however...

The Constitution is the Aegis that shields us from ourselves. On this Thanksgiving, it is something to be truly thankful for.

Loathing our Leaders

As we struggle to classify, categorize, and incorporate the lessons of Iraq into our institutional memory, our enemies grow emboldened by our doubt and inertia.

I use to think the joke was on them. The joke, it seems, is on those who must clean up the cafeteria after the children stop the food fight. Unfortunately, when the chaos dies down, there will be bodies amongst the foul and rotten debris.

When the histories are written, they will record that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Americans masturbated.

Flotsam and Jetsam

The difficulties of attempting to persuade an undiscerning public are indirectly correlated to the collapsibility of the issue at hand. Bush lied, people died is at least 50% right. It's implication, however, is 100% wrong.

The only thing worse than being wrong is being right, and alone.

The worlds we create in cinema now will be worlds to visit in our minds later. This turnabout will be here shortly, and it will not be relegated to the world of metaphor.

We don't realize it yet, but the inadvertent expressions of freedom that we take for granted will shine through to later generations in their moments of doubt and darkness. Seinfeld and Star Wars will last much longer than we. If poets are the unofficial legislators, we can take comfort in the worth of the laws we have passed. So long as they are remembered and recorded, we shall be free.

There is a growing suspicion in my mind that we must wait, and prepare. Leave precipitous action to the enemy. We must never lose our myth of virtue.

Many people who are not culturally mature will soon be granted an undeserved respite from nature's fury. Blame technology, but hold accountable the people, or our own Frankenstein's monster we will have made.

White flight will follow the space elevator out of the atmosphere.

We are building ourselves a world of distraction. Perhaps the alchemy of the senses is our last resort in our long, bloody fight against envy, and despair. If so, good riddance, and God help us.

Perhaps a machine can do better. Perhaps we will let it.

Response to Den Beste's media analysis

Steven Den Beste posts on Redstate.org an analysis of Al'Qaeda's inherent weaknesses in a propaganda campaign that depends on headlines, on the one hand, and the support of fellow travelers on the other. My response:

Your analysis is correct that headline fatigue and revulsion work against the Islamists in the majority, but Al'Qaeda is not necessarily playing to the majority. Zawahiri expressly states that the goal of the "propaganda by deed" is to reach a mere 5% of the Muslim youth. Comparing this objective to reality seems to indicate that Zawahiri is succeeding in what he and Osama set out to do.

Whether 5% is sufficient and whether propaganda by deed is a good strategy are valid questions and deserve a systematic inquiry. Nevertheless, one might concede your analysis of Al'Qaeda's informational weakness and still hold the opinion that they will not be determinative in Al'Qaeda's defeat.

The underlying problem, for which we have relatively few answers, is the increasing self-identification of young men according to their Muslimness, and the corollary universalization of grievances as Muslim grievances. This phenomenon is most prevalent in young Muslim men who have some level of interaction with the West (see Sayed Qutb's rejection of the West after his visit to America). This interaction heightens their awareness of global status (comparative failure), which then reinforces the jihadi imperative.

5%, linked and reinforced through the internet, is a formidable force. Al'Qaeda's influence overall may wax and wane with the media cycle, but the resolve of this group will not.

Which means the arm of decision is predominantly a Western arm. The danger is an admixture of Al'Qaeda's propaganda by deed with the feeling of Western guilt propagated by a cannabalistic media. Our narcissism is unusual in that, while we cannot pull ourselves away from the looking glass, it is a self-immolating fascination with abomination that keeps us rooted. Such self-disgust and guilt, which are reinforced by a media and academia that trade in it, are the only factors that can create the necessary environment for Western defeat. We may be periodically disturbed from our trance, through rioting or the occasional attack, and we may lash out in annoyance, but pulling ourselves away from our self-obsession for any length of time is now almost impossible. How long before the roots take hold permanently? How long before our guilt--and the timid intertia it causes--transitions into decline?

Islamist terror is but one manifestation of rejectionist ideology--the most obvious and most visible (and therefore the least problematic). The real danger comes from within. To withstand the viral assaults on our society that will inevitably come, we need to be bolstered by self-confidence and purpose. Unfortunately, these are the virtues that are slowly being stripped away by our elite.

The cause in fact of a potential decline will be our academia, but the proximate cause will be an irresponsible and undiscerning media. Therefore, the media is a clear and present danger and must be engaged.

[Den Beste responded that 5% is an impotent mass]

Your points are well taken: that 5% cannot succeed against a motivated 95%, and that headline fatigue causes a flight to the macabre which then attrits the support of the fellow-traveler--a support necessary for a robust terrorist movement.

We should then fear not the macabre, but acts of ostensible revolution couched in language sure to hypnotize a vast segment of the disaffected, Marxist Left (riots in France, perhaps?). Islamists might not be nimble enough to manage this, though there are those in the West who try on their behalf (CAIR, e.g.).

I am not convinced that 5% is impotent against an undermotivated 95%, and I believe that is what we face for the foreseeable future.

New York Times, again...(sheesh)

The New York Times once again misleads the American people about the war. This from today's article on Bush's speech:

The president has been consistent in saying American troops would remain in Iraq until the job is done, since he said otherwise during the campaign, when Matt Lauer of NBC asked Mr. Bush in a televised interview in August 2004 about the war.

"I don't think you can win it," Mr. Bush said, a remark Democrats immediately seized on as defeatist.

Reading this one could be forgiven for thinking that Bush was saying he didn't think we could win in Iraq. In fact, that's what Richard Stevenson wants you to believe. The problem, unfortunately for Mr. Stevenson, is that Bush never said that about the War in Iraq. Here is the context for Bush's statement to Matt Lauer, as reported in the Washington Post:

President Bush said in an interview broadcast Monday that the war on terrorism cannot be won in the traditional sense of victory, one in a series of statements he has made in the past few days to lower public expectations and mitigate political problems before he reintroduces himself to the nation Thursday night.

Bush has given a spate of interviews in the run-up to this week's Republican National Convention in New York, and he was asked by Matt Lauer of NBC's "Today" show, in an interview taped Saturday in Ohio and shown on the convention's opening day, if the war on terrorism can be won.

"I don't think you can win it," Bush said. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world. Let's put it that way."

There is a huge difference between saying the war in Iraq can't be won, and saying the War on Terror (a war on a tactic) can't be won. This is either incredibly sloppy reporting, or it is an underhanded attempt to sell the subversive, anti-war propaganda the Times has come to specialize in. I report, you decide.

One Giant Leap for Mankind

Every so often I revisit the issue of the war on drugs, and every time I do I get more frustrated. Since I am once again mulling over all the bad consequences of such an ill-advised "war", I thought I would post an excellent analysis by William F. Buckley et al. that I read a while ago. I read this shortly after September 11, when the seriousness of that attack and the persuasiveness of these articles fused together into an everlasting opposition to victimless crime in general, and the war on drugs in particular. Here is an excerpt:

WE ARE speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 per cent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen -- yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect...

I HAVE spared you, even as I spared myself, an arithmetical consummation of my inquiry, but the data here cited instruct us that the cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs. We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health, even as, we can assume, a growing number of Americans desist from practicing unsafe sex and using polluted needles in this age of AIDS. If 80 million Americans can experiment with drugs and resist addiction using information publicly available, we can reasonably hope that approximately the same number would resist the temptation to purchase such drugs even if they were available at a federal drugstore at the mere cost of production.

And added to the above is the point of civil justice. Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of forfeiture of one's home and property for violation of laws which, though designed to advance the war against drugs, could legally be used -- I am told by learned counsel -- as penalties for the neglect of one's pets. I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana. I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

Ending the drug war would be a giant step forward in our domestic and foreign policy. There must come a point when policy initiatives are revisited, measured for success, and finally thrown out if they have been unmitigated failures. The War on Drugs is such a failure.

By any metric, this pseudo-war has been a disaster (except in the feel-good, I'm-a-politician-and-I'm-on-a-soapbox metric). Drug use has not declined, drug crime has not declined, drug supply has not declined, and drug potency has not declined. This after unprecedented effort by the government over a span of several decades. A substantial amount of our prison population were incarcerated because of drug possession or sale. The removal of drugs from the white market has caused an immense growth in the black, which leads to gangs and turf-wars and terrorist groups like the ELN and FARC.

One of the first uses of the Patriot Act was by the DEA. In an age of global terrorism, can we afford to expend such manpower and assets trying to keep citizens from deciding what to put into their own bodies?

The only argument for the drug war is a moral one. All the utilitarian arguments have been invalidated by facts. Its supporters say that a society that allows drug use is a rotten society. This is an interesting formulation since, while we don't currently allow drug use, we have quite a bit of it, and since it is illegal, instead of worrying just about use we must also worry about gangs, crime, murder, terrorism, and dysfunctional states. I'd rather have a society with legal access, where the private sector can control use through drug tests for jobs, than a society with all the other problems listed above that, despite such heavy-handed laws, still has drug use.

Not that it's likely to end anytime soon. Any politician that puts forward such an agenda would be labeled "pro-drug", instead of pro-order and pro-freedom and pro-personal-responsibility. It's too bad. The crimewave that spawned from Prohibition is revisited in spades by the ill-advised war on drugs.

Riots in Paris

Wretchard, over at the Belmont Club, is trying to figure out the causes of the Parisian rights, and the question seems to turn on whether these riots are racial/sociological or racial/religious in origin.

I don't think the composition of race riots and Muslim riots is really that different. Both depend on group instead of individual identity, both use awareness of ostensible status as a foundation for grievances, a status that is conferred to the group and therefore transmuted to the individual. Segregation heightens this perception of collective grievance, and also reinforces the group identity at the expense of the individual's.

Sociologically, the conditions are the same for both types of unrests. It is dangerous to combine group identity, segregation, descrimination, and grievances within walking distance of their causes. The determinative variables, if one starts with the premise that a group is in fact subject to the above situations, are the strength of that particular group identification and the immediacy or primacy of the catalyzing injury.

Islam is unique because it is so successful at supplanted the self with the ideas and loyalties of "Muslimness," which, as Wretchard points out, provides a reckless vitality to Islamic mass movements. It is a lesson worth learning, because if one has a Muslim minority exposed to the sociological tripwires mentioned above, the admixture is uniquely toxic and flammable and might be uncontainable once ignited.

So the answer is that the riots are sociological in their origins, but specifically Muslim in the intensity of their manifestations.

Obstacles and Solutions

In my previous post I posited that, if one starts with the premise that the long war is predominantly fought in the heart and mind, the enemy we are fighting is human despair, what Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death. My thesis is that radical Islamism, nihilism, perhaps even subversive faiths like orientalism and socialism, are all particular manifestations of an underlying cancer. Kierkegaard lays much of the ground work for my thesis in his philosophical treatises on the self, and all I did was extrapolate his dialectical paradigm to cover and explain the current evils and obstacles that humanity now faces in the world.

Kierkegaard writes, "The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to this increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair." I think we must at least look at the possibility that Islamism is in fact a reaction to Islam's reemergence as a globally conscious ideology. Such a global consciousness, such a vivid awareness of how one "fits" into the overall dynamic, must weigh heavily upon one whose first observations, after gaining consciousness, are of failure and defeat. Muslims are especially vulnerable to a heightened "intensity of despair", because they hold in their mind a vision of absolute authority and superiority that is irreconcilable with what they see every day.

Connectivity cuts both ways, and it may be said that with Muslims, both cuts are deeper. This from Theodore Dalrymple:

Even if for no other reason, then (and there are in fact other reasons), young Muslim males have a strong motive for maintaining an identity apart. And since people rarely like to admit low motives for their behavior, such as the wish to maintain a self-gratifying dominance, these young Muslims need a more elevated justification for their conduct toward women. They find it, of course, in a residual Islam: not the Islam of onerous duties, rituals, and prohibitions, which interferes so insistently in day-to-day life, but in an Islam of residual feeling, which allows them a sense of moral superiority to everything around them, including women, without in any way cramping their style.

This Islam contains little that is theological, spiritual, or even religious, but it nevertheless exists in the mental economy as what anatomists call a “potential space.” A potential space occurs where two tissues or organs are separated by smooth membranes that are normally close together, but that can be separated by an accumulation of fluid such as pus if infection or inflammation occurs.

The other side is represented by Muslims in exile like Salman Rushdie and Hirsi Ali. These Muslims have avoided the pitfall of despair by, ironically, being subject to constant, withering, and sometimes murderous persecution from other Muslims. They have avoided, or rather supplanted, the bedrock identity of "I am Muslim" and the consciousness that attends it. They have walked that final step and embraced the self, embraced the primacy of the self, and in doing so inoculated it against the erosion of despair.

Rushdie and Ali have avoided despair because they do not despair of themselves; they do not will themselves to change. Instead, they will the world to change and keep for themselves a rock-solid identity that is inviolable. Therefore, whatever their trials and tribulations, Muslims like these succeed because they avoid the vicious feedback loop that conquers their contemporaries; by refusing a group identity that, in its current iteration, hawks grievances and victimhood in the present while promising conquest and glory in the future, they have sidestepped most of the radical pathologies.

Nevertheless, anxiety in the face of freedom yields more anxiety, and group-identity Muslims have a considerable amount of anxiety to bring to the table.

Dalrymple demonstrates this anxiety in his essay, particularly in his talk to a would-be suicide bomber:

Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could.

Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies—enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it—and hence were legitimate targets.

I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters—and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.

The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy.

We are his enemies because he is unhappy. We are his enemies because he despairs, and we do not.

This dynamic, the misrelation of the self, is aggravated for another reason. Kierkegaard writes, "Despair is intensified in relation to the consciousness of the self, but the self is intensified in relation to the criterion for the self, infinitely when God is the criterion." The young Muslim sees the world as ungodly, sees his place in it as a farce, or a cruelty, and wills himself to be other than who he is. He rejects his role as an immigrant, as a student, as a lower-middle class, ordinary boy, and becomes something more, and something less. His rejection of himself creates a void where the "idea of being a Muslim" can grow, filling his being and becoming his sole identity. The self subsumed, the world becomes Manichean, grievances become universal, and he takes up the cause of his God. His consciousness of his own despair and his intimate relationship with the infinite God lead the young Westernized Muslim to deny, and then defy, the world as he sees it:

First comes despair over the earthly or over something earthly, then despair of the eternal, over oneself. Then comes defiance, which is really despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself.... In this form of despair, there is a rise in the consciousness of the self, and therefore a greater consciousness of what despair is and that one's state is despair. Here the despair is conscious of itself as an act.... In order to despair to will to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self. This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self. And this is the self that a person in despair wills to be.

The story of Sayyid Qutb is enlightening:

Qutb's special ability as a writer came from the fact that, as a young boy, he received a traditional Muslim education -- he committed the Koran to memory by the age of 10 -- yet he went on, at a college in Cairo, to receive a modern, secular education. He was born in 1906, and in the 1920's and 30's he took up socialism and literature. He wrote novels, poems and a book that is still said to be well regarded called ''Literary Criticism: Its Principles and Methodology.'' His writings reflected -- here I quote one of his admirers and translators, Hamid Algar of the University of California at Berkeley -- a ''Western-tinged outlook on cultural and literary questions.'' Qutb displayed ''traces of individualism and existentialism.'' He even traveled to the United States in the late 1940's, enrolled at the Colorado State College of Education and earned a master's degree. In some of the accounts of Qutb's life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly trauma, mostly because of America's sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear.

Qutb was the epitome of the Westernized Muslim. His education and experience in Western Culture and dominance forced him to make a choice early on. Either he would subsume his Muslim identity into the self, or his self would be subsumed into his Muslim identity. The former takes much more courage because, in a world of free individuals, failure is one's own fault. The latter's message is quite different, and takes much less bravery.

More on Qutb:

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity, which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but, even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world.

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To deny freedom, to deny the primacy of the individual, is to deny the self, which leads us to a solution.

Muslims must embrace individuality, must embrace the primacy and inviolability of the self for both men and women, if they are to survive this war. As Kierkegaard would say, they must become men of this world, and happy with the self as it relates to it, if they are to avoid despair. Muslims must also develop the bravery to be introspective and self-critical while still accepting and loving the self. It is no accident that cultures and people who have the courage to look inside themselves are the most successful and the least prone to despair.

Freedom, and the concepts of possiblity and necessity that adhere to it, can lead to self-denial, self-guilt, and ultimately to despair. To deal with these currents, the self must rest firmly between the finite and the infinite. It must become the relationship between the two, and then relate that relationship back and forth between the finite world and the infinite. In doing so, the perfection of the infinite and the imperfection of the finite play out their differences through the medium of the self. Happiness can only be found in the interaction between the two. Embracing too fully one at the expense of the other can lead to emptiness, anxiety, and ultimately to despair.

The final question is one of metaphysics, and perhaps theology: what is the infinite? I posit that the infinite is Truth. Part of that Truth, a subset of it, is the answer to the question "How can humans live together and survive?". The answer to that question is morality, or virtue, as the art of living together. But that is truth on the macro scale.

Luckily for us, societal happiness and individual happiness have the same cause. Embracing virtue--a way of behaving, but using it as a way of defining oneself--guards against the sickness of despair. The virtuous man does not will himself to be different, and he interacts in the world confidently, knowing that the world is imperfect, but he less so.

Individuality (enlightened selfishness), freedom, and virtue. That is how we win the war. In other words, we will win when everyone becomes, in their mind, the ideal American.

"First they came for the mannequins..."

From Regime Change Iran:

Police in Iran have launched a new crackdown on alluring mannequins rounding up 65 feminine mannequins.

What the hell can you say about that?

The Sickness Unto Death

Wretchard posts a provocative essay on The Long War, what Newt Gingrich describes as "an inherently offensive war in which we have to actively defeat our opponents. Furthermore this war resembles the Reformation-era wars of religion in which fellow nationals may be traitors serving the other side (examine Elizabethan England and the origins of the English secret service as an example)."

I think there is something deeper--something more primal--that we are fighting for, and fighting against. Our enemy is more than the "irreconcilable wing of Islam", though it is that, too. It is more than terrorism--which is nothing but a particular manifestation of our enemy--and it is more than nihilism, though nihilism is a direct consequence and a dangerous ideological iteration of our underlying foe.

In the year 2005 of the common era, we find ourselves in a state of flux. We are witnessing a shift in the human condition, one that is global and fraught with...unknowns. That there are so many unknowns gives rise to caution, perhaps even fear and trembling, for in our depths we know that chaos, chance, dynamism--these things bring storms as often as they bring light.

We are in the twilight of an era. Many of us, if we are observant, can see the sun setting on a vast array of ideas and a previously-powerful set of ideologies. Memes that are as old as man and thoughts only recently born are giving way to a new order, one not yet consumated but brimming with its own potential energy. Some ideas will carry over, and some will perish in the night. That we know not which is cause for some concern.

Peggy Noonan senses the twilight in her recent essay:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon...

I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them...

I have wondered if it hasn't all gotten too big, too complicated, too crucial, too many-fronted, too . . . impossible...

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

Cicero, at Winds of Change, also senses a shift:

And there we have the Old Order, nursing their drinks and watching the sunset. "Who knows about the coming sunrise," they lament, looking confused. And so it is confusing -- none of us see the sunrise to come. We only see the sunset. We remember the warmth of the long day. We knit together pleasant memories and the certainty of past convictions, admiring the clarity we once had.

I think both 'sides' within the West -- left and right, European and American -- really are after the same thing: to preserve what they have.

Cicero speaks of this shift as a law of nature, and our reaction to it a law of man:

I think that's where Ms. Noonan's at. She's from a generation that saw great things in itself, and in its nation. What comes next is beyond comprehension. We're in flux -- change only seems to bring about more change, over and over again. Older people want to hang on to what they have, perhaps more so than keep up with the times. I empathize -- I know that none of us on the cutting edge should be so smug as to think we're past getting cut by it ourselves. Compounding innovation exacts a heavy toll, and can leave many people behind. None of us can say what the outcome will be.

Ms. Noonan is witnessing and lamenting the passage of an era -- one that needs to pass by. It's hard, because we are a part of that era. Looking to a waning era's elite for consolation is understandable, but it will not ease the bewilderment. New worlds are being built, while old ones fall. Somehow, we have to be brave, put away the photo albums, and engage this flux.

Cicero speaks of the way forward, but his analysis also implies a destination of sorts. A physical destination it is not, nor is it stationary, but it is a place we must get to nonetheless. Our lives--our survival--depend on it.

The goal--the destination--is elusive, and it cannot be held down nor spoken of in precise terms. As Marcus Aurelius said of Rome, it is but a whisper, an idea so fragile that to speak it causes it to vanish. It is drastically vulnerable to invasion and subversion. Enemies, it may be said, are all around.

What I speak of is a posture, an outlook and a direction to look out. I would call it truth, for it is that, but that is not enough. Bravery and courage are elements of it; goodness and virtue define it. Compassion, rigor, vitality, decency; patience, hope, temperance, and faith--how many coordinates must be given before the constellation begins to take shape?

The name of the constellation is elusive, but as Shakespeare said, by any name it smells as sweet. Like many things, it exists as relation. More specifically, it is a relation that relates to itself:

The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another.

That is a quote from Soren Kierkegaard, taken from his book "The Sickness Unto Death." Enigmatic? Maybe, but it is not impermeably so. One can approach it, weigh it, taste it even, and its truth, like a kernel, is there to find if one looks hard enough. It is the truth of who we are, who we can be, who we should be. The disconnect between those concepts is our danger--our bane of existence. It is the sickness that afflicts many, a nothingness that spreads everyday. It is despair:

Despair is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself...

An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is "Either Caesar or nothing" does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be Caesar.... Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper.... To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.

Our enemy, the one we fight in this long war, is despair. Our problem, and perhaps our contradiction, is the freedom we are spreading, wittingly and unwittingly, across the entire world. Let me explain.

A man who cannot be Caesar, who has no hope of being Caesar, does not despair when he remains himself. A man who is born, lives, and dies with a knowledge of place, of status, of inevitability does not despair over unrequited dreams of conquest and glory, fame and fortune. A man who is chained, who understands the inevitability of those chains, looks upon his condition with resignation, perhaps with hatred, perhaps with indignation--he does not, however, regret...and he does not despair. It is not himself he wishes to be rid of. It is the world that abuses him so violently and unapologetically that he finds disgusting, and unworthy. He wills himself, as himself, a better life. But he does not despair; he does not will to be rid of himself.

Freedom is defined by Kierkegaard as "the dialectical aspect of the categories possibility and necessity." It is the relation of these two concepts that defines freedom--possibility and chance pulling one side while necessity and determination pull the other. The self, when thrown into this violent vortex, can be ripped apart by the competing currents, and that is where you can find despair.

Our problem--our test--is that we are building a world that is eminently likable, an existence of perfect malleability that at once seduces and taunts our passions, and our soul. We are building a world of freedom and prosperity unlike any that has ever been seen, yet we are blind to the implications and dangers that lie beneath the surface. When the world is perfect, the self suffers in comparison. When you can be Caesar, when the world opens that door, it is the self that is hated for not walking through. The self despairs, and wills away its existence.

In a world of freedom and opportunity, the self can no longer look outwards for definition, though it will try. It will try to subsume itself into a group, or an ideology, or a mass movement--these efforts will manifest themselves as spasms, and they will afflict our new world most grievously:

When feeling or knowing or willing has become fantastic, the entire self can become that, whether in the most active form of plunging headlong into fantasy or in the more passive form of being carried away.... The self, then, leads a fantasized existence in abstract infinitizing or in abstract isolation, continually lacking its self, from which it moves further and further away....To lack infinitude is despairing reductionism, narrowness.... But whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self by "the others." Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be himself, and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man.... When a self becomes lost in possibility...it is not merely because of a lack of energy.... What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limitations. Therefore, the tragedy is not that such a self did not amount to something in the world; no, the tragedy is that he did not become aware of himself, aware that the self he is a very definite something and thus the necessary.... The determinist, the fatalist, is in despair and as one in despair has lost his self, because for him everything has become necessary

The enemy, therefore, is within, but so is our salvation. I do not know how we can win, but win we must.

Our war is against despair. It is a melancholy joke that its forebearer is freedom.