Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
A Beautiful Older Woman With A Breadbasket And A Great Big Gun
June 10, 2003
Courtesy of the invaluable Samizdata Weblog, your Curmudgeon has learned of the rising cries from Liberia for an American intervention in their nightmare.
“There’s no food anywhere,” said Fanny, a Liberian refugee who had trudged for two days to reach the stadium. “People are dying. The Americans must come. We want peace.”
It appears that not the entire world regards the United States as a rapacious hegemon against whom the rest of humanity must unite in self-defense. But nevertheless, the story is very sad. We won’t be going to Liberia any time soon. Just as many peoples have misjudged our intentions, others have an exaggerated idea of our capacity to spread peace on Earth and good will toward men.
American armed power could put an end to the current Liberian civil war. But no army and no policing agency could force sufficient political maturity on the Liberians to prevent the next civil war...the one that would break out when our forces departed. For peace and plenty are not primary characteristics of a society; they are resultants that arise from a near-universal acceptance of the concept of rights.
Judging solely from history, no nation in sub-Saharan Africa has achieved the preconditions for a just, peaceful, and prosperous social order.
But the Liberians, and many other Africans, and many other dispossessed, brutally oppressed peoples the world around look to America and say: “There it is! Everything we want, everything we need, everything we’ve yearned for all these years! Why can they have it, but not we?”
So mired are they in their tribalistic, superstitious, zero-sum mindset that they can’t comprehend the answer. Therein lies the greatest tragedy.
P. J. O’Rourke’s characterization from Holidays In Hell remains the best capsule of the Third World’s vision of us. They are teenaged boys: overflowing with energy, fundamentally undisciplined, prisoners of drives not yet brought under control. We are a beautiful older woman: lush, alluring, worldly wise, deeply sensual. We are everything they yearn for and dream they might one day have...if only they could grow up.
The growing up part is not optional.
Despite our appearance of political fractiousness, it’s really only a tiny minority of our people who dissent from the fundamentals that make American society as dynamic, and giddily exuberant as it is. Nearly all Americans believe in the same core concepts: individual rights, private property, the free market, and the supremacy of law over connections, causes, or opinions. We build prisons to house the rest.
But take just one of those pillars away, and our house would fall. Whenever we’ve undermined any of them, regardless of the reason, we’ve quickly reaped the whirlwind. (Yes, yes, in some cases we’re still unlearning our mistakes. That will always be so.)
Barbara Tuchman, among others, has speculated on our enormous political good fortune. In her book The March Of Folly, she marveled at the genius of the Founders, at their availability for the job of crafting a nation out of ideas no one had ever tried before, and wondered what would have become of the nascent American republic without them.
Your Curmudgeon yields to no one in his regard for the solons of the Revolutionary and Constitutional periods. Yet, he has become convinced that, had bolts of lightning removed all of them from the world before their great works were begun, others would have stepped forward in their place and done a creditable job. Though Washington, Madison, Jefferson and the rest were the titans of their day, behind them stood still others with just as much understanding of the ideas of liberty and justice. They were emigrants from Europe, or the descendants of such emigrants, who had come here seeking freedom and opportunity. They knew what it would require to transform freedom in the New World’s virgin vistas into prosperity and security. They had learned it the hard way.
America is what it is because it is a made society, founded on clearly understood principles by a pioneer people. The societies of Africa are legacy societies, weighed down by the tribal traditions, superstitions and animosities of thousands of years, unleavened by the Enlightenment from which our core concepts sprang. Until Africa renounces its past, there will be no room in which to build a new future.
But Africa will not renounce its past. It hasn’t yet outgrown its belief in magic. Combatants in the Liberian nightmare are eating their slain enemies’ vital organs, in accord with the ancient voodoo belief that this will add the strength of the vanquished to their own. So Liberians look across the Atlantic and cry, “Help us, Lady Liberty! Feed us! We are poor and terrified, you are rich and strong! Bring your breadbasket and your gun and deliver us from the darkness!”
We tried that in Somalia, and failed miserably. We’re trying it today in Iraq, where the prospects appear somewhat better but are still not guaranteed, due to the pernicious effects of militant Islam.
“A slave cannot be freed, save he free himself,” wrote Robert A. Heinlein. He was speaking of the slave’s attainment of the mental prerequisites for freedom: the insistence on his rights and responsibilities as an individual, which imply the identical rights and responsibilities of all others. Slavery and political tyranny are indistinguishable; each generates the other. Until the enslaving tribal darkness of the African mind lifts to admit the concepts of liberty and justice, no light can be shone on Africa, even by the United States.
So the beautiful older woman watches Africa from her side of the Atlantic, and weeps.
| <<- "If You Can't Be Careful..." | Beliefs Of A Feather ->> |
