America and the Freedom to Fail

Our world today has made greater strides in fighting poverty than at any time in its history. Even counting recent struggles and upheavals across the globe, peace and order have reigned like they rarely have before. Then there's the seemingly daily buzz of one frontier of science after another being crossed, or this or that record being broken. Literacy is at rates never fathomed before, college education is almost universal, and standards of living continue to rise. In the midst of so much success, why are we afraid as never before at the thought of failure?

Author Michael Goodwin points out in his video that this fear is inherent in our idea of “social promotion,” that is, giving students who haven't learned their subject a passing grade. As a senior pursuing a bachelor's degree in History, I have seen this philosophy spread to our universities as well. Curved scores are only the most obvious symptom of a teaching rubrik that harms the very students it professes to help. Academic success cannot be achieved by robbing our children of recognition when they succeed, and of the help they need when they don't.

The economist Milton Friedman once observed that “If you are not free to sin, then neither are you free to be virtuous.” How much freedom do we really have when we're only allowed to succeed? Yet this philosophy so pervasive in our school system has been adopted by our government. Rather than letting corporations fail when they can't turn a profit, Congress has voted to rescue them. This sends them the same message that schools send our children: ethical, honest, and diligent behavior doesn't matter. You can do just as well with less work, less honesty and less accountability.

We are created to learn by failure; it's at the very core of what's made us great as a nation. George Washington's celebrated victories at Trenton and Monmouth came only after crushing defeats had taught him what tactics didn't work. Our Founding Fathers never would have proposed the Constitution if they hadn't faced the shortcomings of their Articles of Confederation. The same is true of the new and uniquely American ideas of "capitalism” and the "self-made man.” Would they have been possible in a world like today's when they fundamentally depend on rewarding only the successful? If he had lived in an era of "social promotion,” would Thomas Edison have been inspired to try his lightbulb the 10,000th time?

Romanticism and Christianity

When we think of movements in art or culture, its tempting to fixate on where they lead, not where they begin. Consider the Enlightenment. Instead of seeing it as a rejection of abject superstition and ignorance in favor of a view of an ordered world created by an ordered God, we see it as humanism or a megalomaniacal IQ exercise by old, dead, white men. But what are the facts? The Enlightenment began with the Protestant rediscovery of the Bible through which God could speak to people individually. It was confirmed in the discoveries of rational scientific laws by the Christian scientists Newton, Kepler and Copernicus. The same is true with Romanticism. The utopian communities and Transcendentalism we associate with the movement don't do it justice; actually, they distort the truth. To judge a thing by where it leads in its extremes is a fallacy by which we would have to condemn the idea of “civilization” since it always ends in ruins, or “life” since it ends in death.

By the late 18th century, the Enlightenment had digressed into absolute faith in man's ability to discern truth for himself, attacks on Christianity, and degradation of nature into a machine for man's exploitation. Romanticism began by simply voicing opposition to each of these points. According to distinguished historian Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism, the earliest person to have done so in a “Romantic” way was the German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann. Hamann had received a broad education before his life began to fall apart in the pursuit of pleasure. Then, upon discovering the Bible, he was transformed and aligned himself with the Lutheran Pietists. A tireless writer, Hamann earned his nickname “Magus of the North” by churning out treatises in response to the dangerous theories of his Enlightenment friends who placed human Reason on a pedestal. He wrote to one of his closest friends, Immanuel Kant, “Reason is not given to you in order that you might become wise, but that you may know your folly and ignorance; as the Mosaic law was not given to the Jews to make them righteous, but to make their sins more sinful to them.” To reinforce this point, Hamann insisted that faith in God alone could lead one to a knowledge of the truth through his Holy Spirit. He deliberately styled himself after Socrates, the man whose greatest strength was his insistence that he knew nothing.

Unlike the other philosophers in his circle, Hamann never held a post at a university, but he did attract an enthusiastic following. One of his students was another Lutheran: a scholar and a priest, named Johann Gottfried Herder. Together, Herder and Hamann's ideas inspired a new genre of German art called Sturm und Drang. In its eschewing of rationality as the basis of truth, this style of music, plays and books profoundly influenced Goethe and all later Romanticists, including the master painter Caspar David Friedrich and his profoundly Christian artwork. Meanwhile, the Christian elements of this message had reached France, where the nobleman Francois Rene de Chateaubriand was hard at work writing what would become one of the brightest ornaments of the Romantic movement: The Genius of Christianity. This book argued that "Christianity comes from God, because it is excellent,” and defended it from its Enlightenment critics by arguing that the very beauty of the Christian religion was a proof that it was true. Chateaubriand's thesis was a tremendous influence on Lord Byron and other Romantics, but they unfortunately dropped the author's orthodoxy in favor of his aesthetic finesse. This was increasingly true of the Romantic movement as the 1800s wore on. Like the Enlightenment before it, the movement that had started as a Christian reaction to error branched out farther and farther from its original purpose and looked for truth somewhere other than in God. For the Romantics, this door to understanding became the senses instead of the mind, as it had been for the Rationalists. But let's not forget how it began. Rather than lamenting where movements in the arts, philosophy and culture may go in the end, Christians should be inspired that they have, and can still, frame the discussion from the beginning.

The Power to Destroy

Most people who didn't sleep through their high school history classes are familiar with the Supreme Court case McCulloch vs. Maryland. Those who were the brighter stars in their constellations may even remember the essence of the dispute: In the midst of an ongoing firestorm over the relationship of the state and federal governments, the Second Bank of the United States mischievously established a branch in Maryland. The state legislature fired back by passing a bill that placed such a tax burden on the bank that it couldn't hope to make a profit. Chief Justice John Marshall rejected this bill and with it the ability of a state to impede a Federal project. He declared that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy." As you can see, it was an interesting era; one where "Federal government" and "larceny" weren't yet synonyms.

This blush of youthful innocence wouldn't last terribly long, however, thanks to a Federal government that overcame the troublesome check of the states by learning to wage unjust wars by unjust means. In 1861 the first (and, at that time, unconstitutional) income tax was passed as part of the Revenue Act of 1861, confiscating 3% of the annual income of Americans to aid the war effort. Prior to this, the Federal government's revenues had come mainly through indirect taxes like excise fees, and for good reason. Indirect taxes targeted events rather than specific people or property. The Founding Fathers' revolt against governmental power run amok had been partly because of the ease with which direct taxation could be abused. They enshrined this experience in the Constitution's Article Nine, expressly forbidding an income tax. Any remembrance of this was all but drowned out by the furor of the Civil War years. In 1862, a second act was passed that expanded on the Revenue Act. A bedrock precedent was laid for the progressivism of the early 1900s when the 16th Amendment was passed, making the income tax constitutional. At first rates were well below 10%, but with newfound legal authority came newfound abuse, and they began to climb steeply. At first, there were seemingly good reasons, like World War II. But it is the nature of injustice once justified to numb its victims. The 1940s' jump in rates by more than 400% was quickly followed by less extenuating, and more suspicious, reasons to which there was little resistance. With a seemingly unlimited pool of wealth to draw from, America was soon the proud owner of several bizarre accomplishments characteristic of a government with more money than it needs: Korea, Vietnam, and the Great Society.

Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire contains a very striking account of what eventually happens when a nation allows its government to prey directly upon the fruits of its labor: "In the sixth year of his reign Constantine visited the city of Autun, and generously remitted the arrears of tribute, reducing...the proportion of their assessment...to eighteen thousand heads, subject to the real and personal capitation [i.e., income tax]. Yet even this indulgence affords the most unquestionable proof of the public misery. This tax was so extremely oppressive...that, whilst the revenue was increased by extortion, it was diminished by despair: a considerable part of the territory of Autun was left uncultivated; and great numbers of [citizens] rather chose to live as exiles and outlaws than to support the weight of civil society."

The Manhattan Purchase and Multiculturalism

Who hasn't heard the story of the infamous Manhattan Purchase? It goes something like this: In 1626, a group of West India Company merchants led by Peter Minuit swindled Manhattan out of the hands of its natives for a mere $24. Like the legends of George Washington and the cherry tree, the glories of the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Kennedy family, this story has been subsumed into our Western consciousness in all its misinterpreted glory. The next time someone tells it the way you've heard it before, keep these facts in mind:

The Dutch currency of the 17th century was the guilder. To estimate the value of what Minuit was offering the natives for their land in contemporary terms, a New York historian converted guilders into dollars and came up with the figure $24. The problem is that this was calculated 165 years ago. Since then, the value of your dollar has gone down more than 99%, and what was $24 then would now be worth almost $2400. Add to this the extreme cheapness of unsettled land in a continent still bursting with it, and you may begin wondering who was swindling whom. It gets better. The natives of the northeast were known to make bead-like pieces out of seashells to use as jewelry and currency.The time and labour involved in carving and filing the shells into these decorative pieces was immense. As a result, each individual “bead” was worth a small fortune. When the Dutch offered hundreds of beads as part of their payment for the land, the natives suddenly found themselves exorbitantly enriched. If I were faced with the choice of either continuing to squat on my undeveloped land, or moving into the vast interior with overflowing coffers, I would have done just like the natives did. Maybe that's just me.

The irony of this story isn't only how it's been misconstrued, it's what it says about our multiculturalist mentality. In the name of protecting oppressed minorities we presume to think for them. We know what's in their best interest, whether it's what they want or not. In this case, we assume that the natives must have been extremely gullible to willingly sell the Dutch their land, when in fact they were making a rational decision to "get rich quick." Similarly, we don't think that Jews who vote Republican can be true Jews. Female politicians can't be touched - unless they're pro-life. Blacks who frequent tea parties have been misled by conservatives. Clarence Thomas, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes and other African-Americans can't have made an intelligent decision to embrace free markets, they must have been beguiled by the white establishment. The multiculturalists insist that all these exceptions to their heavy-handed rule are simply naive individuals. In the end, who's truly naïve? At least the arrogance of the “white man's burden” vilified the native cultures alone. In its contemptuous disdain for universal truth, postmodernity vilifies both the white man's culture and the native's intelligence.

The Early Church and Abortion

Several years ago, I distinctly remember when I first learned that abortion was practiced in the ancient world. This came as no small surprise to me, having always associated the murder of the unborn with either advanced surgery or coat-hangers, neither of which was known a couple of millenia ago. The historian's classic conflict between vilifying or romanticizing the past had me in its grasp; I had forgotten that, in the words of King Solomon, “There is nothing new under the sun.” It takes a peculiar -and usually unintentional- form of arrogance to presume to have problems today that our ancestors didn't share.

As it turns out, abortion stretches back to the beginning of human history. Not only were there primitive attempts at surgical abortion, but people as varied as the civilized Greeks, the Romans, and the itinerant shepherds of Illyria, had access to the Iron Age equivelant of the birth control pill: herbal abortifacients, such as pennyroyal, saffron and rue. The pagan world was divided over the issue. Some men, like Hippocrates, defended the unborn and refused to administer abortive mixtures. Other men, like Aristotle, found themselves defending abortion. This philosophical position was based on the belief in “ensoulment,” the notion found in Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals that human beings don't have souls until between 40 and 90 days after they're conceived.

When the Gospel surged across the vast openness of the Pax Romana, Christians encountered a world whose peace and order were deceptive. Although the watchmen along the sweeping frontiers were idle, this lull had been bought by decades of incessant warfare and violence. Inside the Empire, Christians encountered daily bloodshed not only in the arena, but in the streets. Abortion and infanticide were widespread from one end of the Roman world to the other. It was such a problem, in fact, that the Didache (an early Christian catechism) saw fit to include a line specifically condemning abortion and infanticide as murder. Faced with a world where life was held so cheaply, Christians immediately began to defend the Bible's definition of life. God had said to the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart...." This belief in the eternal nature of the soul was in direct opposition to the philosophy of the day. Almost every one of the early Church Fathers -Tertullian, Clement, Jerome, Basil, Felix, Hippolytus- unanimously declared abortion's absolute moral wrong. Athenagoras only echoed the rest of Christendom when he petitioned Emperor Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 177: “We say that women who induce abortions are murderers, and will have to give account of it to God.... The fetus in the womb is a living being and therefore the object of God's care.”

For hundreds of years, the Church's position on abortion was consistent and uncompromising. In the 13th century, however, a challenge came from a surprising source. Thomas Aquinas, leader of the Scholastic movement, reintroduced the mixed legacy of Aristotelian thought to Europe. Renewed reading of Aristotle's theories of the political world were unfortunately accompanied by the reemergence of his metaphysical musings. Among these was the old doctrine of ensoulment, which some spiritual and secular scholars of the day embraced, including Aquinas. The consequence was a temporary weakening of the Church's stance against abortion by a group of churchmen who proclaimed that fetuses that had not yet received a soul (as the theory went) could be aborted. This temptation to defer to philosophy and science in place of faith has been with Christians since the days of the apostles and will be until the end. Hundreds of years later, in the 20th century, a similar acceptance of the “prevailing wisdom” of the day over and above of biblical revelation would lead to some Protestant denominations condoning abortion.

But for the time, the influence of this idea was short lived. By the 15th century, Pope Sixtus V had renewed the classification of abortion as murder and prescribed severe punishments for its practice. Although in the 16th century Pope Gregory XIV briefly returned the Church to Aquinas' position, it was soon once again widely accepted throughout all of Christendom that abortion at any stage was immoral. Despite the many differences between the burgeoning denominations of the Church in that era, any Christian of the 17th century would have agreed with John Calvin when he made this simple argument: “The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being and it is a most monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.”

The Story of the Parthenon

Built in 15 years (447-432 B.C.) at the height of the Athenian golden age under Pericles, the Parthenon was the fruit of Greece’s finest craftsmen. Its symmetry, harmony with its surroundings, and gracefully commanding air testify to the faith the Greeks had in human perfectibility. At 469 silver talents, the building was costly enough, but if it drained the Athenian purse, it bankrupted their moral purity. The funds had been illegally seized from the treasury of the Delian League, a confederation of Greek states allied to take the offensive against the Persians who had been pushed out of Greece in 479 B.C. This money had been intended for defending member states against the enemy. The Athenian demagogue Pericles, however, was more concerned at the moment with flattering his fellow citizens. His city had recently come under a firestorm of criticism for its growing abuse of power as head city in the League. Athenians needed reassurance of their leading role. Mumbling something about the silver not being “theirs that give it, but theirs that receive it, if… they perform the conditions upon which they receive it.”, Pericles lavished the money on the beautification of Athens in a move of vain defiance that shocked the classical world. Part of this project included setting aside 469 talents for a monument to grace the Acropolis -the Parthenon. This symbol, ostensibly to honor Athena Parthenos, was in reality an in-your-face display of Athenian pride and supremacy.

Athens paid a horrible price for going to such lengths to assert its vanishing reputation and appease its citizens.  Two years after the Parthenon’s completion, Pericles and 1/3 of the Athenian populace died during a plague as the Greek world rent itself in two. This was the beginning of the Peloponnesian War -a war caused by Sparta’s indignation at Athens’ growing wealth and usurpation of power. Athens would never regain the glorious position it had held for so brief a time, but it did leave us a monument whose story became complete 2117 years later: In 1689 Venetian warships bombarded the temple (now an ammunition dump for Turkish cannons), sculpting it more decisively than any chisel ever could have into the symbol of ancient Greece that we know today. It’s a symbol not only of the consummate skill of the ancient Athenians, but of their excessive egotism. When men try to make a lasting name for themselves, they're faced with a dilemma. A symbol grand enough to overshadow their neighbors and startle their foes requires more skill and more resources than is native to anyone. They find that to create such an edifice they must betray their own laws, their own consciences, and exploit their fellow men. This is a theme common to many of the monuments we're familiar with. The Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Solomon's Temple, and the Coliseum all became showcases for their patrons; all were built by slave labor. These monuments' stories were similar to the Parthenon's, whose friezes and sculptures had been bought with stolen money. While these exorbitant ornaments may have depicted Athena, in reality they were meant to honor their own craftsmen.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley