07/16/2024
The Undying Necessity of Moral Courage
By Jeffrey Tucker - The Epoch Times 7/16/2024
Commentary
Joseph Schumpeter dishes out heaps of astounding insights in his
1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.” I keep going
back to this treatise for guidance in our strange times, mainly to
better understand the interaction of economics, politics, history,
and culture. His outlook is probably best described as
transideological: a partisan of capitalist systems, he was not
optimistic about human nature itself.
Part of my draw to his work is that I used to dismiss it as excessively
pessimistic. Of course he wrote in wartime. A product of Old World
Europe, he made a name for himself as a scholar before the Great
War. His education was of the highest prewar sort: all romance
languages, all disciplines, the great books of all time, along with
mighty technical knowledge. We’ll probably never see his likes
again.
By the time the second war in Europe broke loose, his outlook had
matured greatly from his earlier works on technical economics. He
saw the impact of the rise of incredible wealth on the culture at
large. Essentially, his view was that markets and capitalism lead to
their own cultural undoing.
Yes, capitalism works. Manna falls as if from heaven, and people
are no longer taught its source through any lived experience. Better
lives, richer lives, more opportunities rain down on the population
as if by magic, leading generations of people to believe that none of
the blessings of civilization require anything like the ancient virtues.
We are all along for the ride, and just enjoying its riches.
What does this do to human character? It trains people to believe
that the ancient virtues are no longer operational. We don’t need
fortitude, resilience, courage, and determination. A credit-soaked
world no longer needs thrift, prudence, or sobriety. Instead, rising
wealth of the sort we’ve experienced since the late 19th century
trains people just to go along for the ride. Careerism replaces
courage. Credentials replace talent. Erudition replaces wisdom.
Indulgence displaces prudence.
This has a profound effect on policy, Schumpeter wrote. States
come to believe that they can promise their populations anything
and that normal accounting has been superseded. They create giant
cradle-to-grave welfare states. They intervene in every conflict,
domestic and foreign, as if there are no limits to resources. The
culture celebrates recklessness, sloth, and opportunism instead of
discipline and fortitude.
And what is the result, in Schumpeter’s view? The very foundations
of prosperity are eaten away, giving rise to a form of socialism that
works so long as the crisis is kept at bay. This shows up in various
ways; for example, in higher education. The belief is that as many
people as possible should get a college degree, which ends up
flooding the labor markets with educated professionals with an
entitlement mentality for whom there is no real market demand. So
long as the wealth is extant, they end up creating markets for
themselves: fake jobs in fake institutions doing fake things. No
matter what else happened, the whole of life seemed like “a room
without a roof,” in the words of Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy,” released in 2013.
Schumpeter predicted all of this in 1942, and it was why he was so
doubtful about the survivability of capitalism and market freedom.
There is much more to the book.
You can see the entire work as an elaboration on the following
principle sometimes attributed to the Stoics: “Hard times create
strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak
men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Perhaps you can see why I dismissed the work when I was younger.
I came of age during the great prosperity. I did not know it but
generations were in fact being trained to go along for the ride,
tempted to believe that the old virtues no longer mattered or, at
most, were nothing but a pious indulgence suitable for homogenous
religious communities but not the general culture.
There was never a need for moral courage, at least not habitually.
To be sure, there have been people enlisted in the military, frontline
workers, and many examples of extreme challenges in people’s
private lives. I’m obviously generalizing but, speaking overall, the
challenges of life itself have been minimized probably more than at
any time in history. Capitalism worked, too well, one might say.
Schumpeter was even more correct than he knew. In 2020, the
wealth seemed so automatic, so inevitable, so indestructible, that
most nations in the world actually set out to shut down their whole
economies in a new science experiment in disease mitigation, all
while they waited for labs to roll out some magic cure that turned
out not to work. And how did most people respond? They went along. The churches
were closed, as were businesses, schools, travel, and more. Supply
chains were wrecked. Populations used to having “the system” take
care of them did not know what to do. So most people defaulted to
the norm: acquiescence, trust, biding their time, maintaining
caution, and not disrupting the flow of life.
The path of maximum compliance always worked in the past. Why
not now? And yet, a generation of school kids was ruined. People’s
lives absolutely fell apart. Arts, culture, mainline religion, and so
much more fell apart. Major media lined up to push official
messaging. So did Big Tech. The upheaval utterly changed the
functioning of life itself.
It was a fiasco for the ages, and guess what? Weak men did indeed
create hard times, and those have hit everyone very hard today. It’s
not making the news and the official data is still in denial but
everyone knows it in their personal lives.
Our standards of living are falling, even dramatically, even at a pace
no one has previously experienced in living memory. You know it in
your bones and yet public culture hasn’t really admitted it.
All of this is backdrop to the real crisis of right now, and you know
the substance of it: It is a political crisis now illustrated by an
attempt on Donald Trump’s life. He was spared by the grace of God:
a sudden turn of his head toward the screen caused the bullet to
slice off the top of his ear but miss his head.
As if by a miracle, he survived.
But the story does not stop there. Having been shot at, and bleeding
from his head, he rose to his feet and rallied the gathered crowd,
while promising to fight on, and urging others to do the same. As
security forces got him away from the violence, he fist-pumped the
air one more time and then left.
In our times, we’ve rarely if ever seen anything like that. Those who
said he was a mere actor, influencer, opportunistic politician, or
businessman on the make saw a different man when faced with
mortality itself. He exercised resilience, fortitude, and moral
courage, all those ancient virtues that are so ill-practiced in our
times but which ultimately drive history.
Most people I know, even those who completely oppose his politics,
are still in awe of that scene. It rocked the world, and made history.
This is even aside from the incredible images that came from the
scene: the real-time videos themselves present a stunning display.
We in our times are so accustomed to a culture of inauthenticity,
opportunism, performance, posing, careerist ladder climbing, and
pettiness that it is startling to witness an authentic display of
genuine fearlessness in the face of death. If I may say so: we needed
this. Desperately. We all needed to remember and to know that it
matters.
All politics aside, our times have deprecated and driven out the old
virtues and toughness along with it. I’m convinced that an authentic
display of exactly that is precisely what the world craves right now.
We need it more than ever in our lives. Otherwise, we will continue
to go the way that Schumpeter predicted, straight to the doom he
foresaw for Western culture.
Copyright © 2024 The Epoch Times, All rights reserved.
The Epoch Times, 229 W 28th St, Fl.5, New York, NY 10001
