Wisdom

"The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation.

This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me ... What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom -- a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything ..."

The above is another extract from the Peggy Noonan article to which I referred earlier.

I think that she sums it up well. I say that because, as my friends will tell you, I expressed my final dis-illusion with Tony Blair, of whom I was an admirer, in almost identical terms.

That dis-illusion came, quite a bit before before Ms Noonan's, in the course of Blair's spectacularly foolish advocacy of the nvasion of Iraq.

Update on Sunday, July 15, 2007 at 11:09AM by Fergus O'Rourke

My earlier reference to Peggy Noonan's article has been expunged a few minutes ago, in the process of site housekeeping, as not meriting retention for posterity. I really do not think that you have been deprived of anything of permanent value.

Marc Coleman again

I wrote last month some critical remarks about an article by Marc Coleman in "The Irish Times", and had intended to follow it up with some more positive things about the article, but then Enza flew in. However, both in fairness to him - he has had a sleepless few weeks, apparently - and because the points he made are so important, I post the follow-up now.

He observes that :

We take the State for granted and assume that all aid for the poor must be channeled through it. The willingness of people to care for the elderly is declining placing a burden on the state. In schools teachers are increasingly forced to provide parenting services because some real parents are either too busy scared or disinterested while juvenile delinquency and crime place an increasing burden on An Garda Siochana. ..Everywhere and more often than before the taxpayer is confronted with the cost of a declining common ethic which in this country comes from Christianity. The question to ask now is whether the State is going too far ...trying to solve problems that can only be solved by people families and communities acting on their own initiatives ... bonds of ethics and civility are falling asunder ...they were fostered by Judaeo-Christian tradition stretching back centuries. In the naive assumption that the State will foot the bill, those traditions are being abandoned in favour of synthetic alternatives ...[while] a consumerist culture is giving people too little time with families and more money to indulge the alternatives. Thus, the substance of life - religion family and community - is being squeezed in a relentless pincer by the two great materialist forces of our age - capitalism and state interventionism.

With only a quibble or two e.g.the use of "dis-interested" when he means "uninterested", I would endorse every word of that.

Socialism

Marc Coleman, writing in today's "The Irish Times", makes a few comments about socialism which have raised my hackles.

It seems to me that the word has become almost impossible to use any more because its meaning is so difficult to define. In the mouths of many - and I suspect Coleman is probably one of them - it is simply a catch-all phrase to attach to someone who does not share the economic/value assumptions of the capitalist class.

Hence, these dogmatic assertions, with each of which I disagree:

• ...two former enemies - socialism and the church
• Socialism requires the direction by the state of the means of production ...
• Socialism is a doctrine of power ...