What’s Wrong with the World

“Modern man must be convinced again that he is free.” So declares Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver in a vigorous little talk delivered some weeks ago in Philadelphia. I do not believe I have heard the modern crisis ever put so succinctly and powerfully. The word freedom is nearer to our lips than perhaps any other society of men; and yet we do not believe in it. With every new calamity — every school-shooting or horrific murder, every affront to our honor as a nation, every cynicism, every petty betrayal, every sordid plunder — our instinct is to interpret events in light of material forces, against which man has no power of resistance. “Things are in the saddle,” as a great American wordsmith put it, “and ride mankind.”

I am conflicted on the subject of Tony Blair. There are good reasons to dislike him intensely. He has, for instance, presided over the abolition of Britain’s liberty. There has been no more reliable advocate of Liberalism, or more feckless and even perverse skeptic of multiculturalism, than Tony Blair.

On the other hand, his loyalty and eloquence as an ally has been unfailing; and shone most brightly when America was in her hour of need. This is no small thing. Nor should it be forgotten that he disarmed Socialism in Great Britain, and allowed the British people to prosper — at least materially.

Whether Britain can be said to have prospered, in the more general sense, under his Governments, is an open question. Business enterprise has been unfettered to some degree — but rushing in behind the levelers of Liberalism, Blair’s men, has been a wave of social ruin and debasement, of nihilism and passivity, almost unparalleled in the Western world. It is like American cities in the 1970s. And perhaps the Liberals can take credit for this at least: they have demonstrated that their philosophy, when implemented with sufficient vigor, can deprive men of any race, creed or color of their culture and manners, and reduce them to barbarism.

Into these ruins filtered the agents and provocateurs of the Jihad; and they will not be easily dislodged. This may well be Blair’s most lasting legacy: as from ruins of the decaying Byzantine Empire the Turkish Jihad acquired its resources and even manpower, so too may today’s incarnation of the Jihad soon gain control of substantial resources in Europe, including in Great Britain. Tony Blair presided over the first steps of this ominous process.

Cardinal Newman wrote very astutely, if a bit acidly, that it is a misfortune to be self-educated. It may be a misfortune; often it is a joy and a calling. But even where joyous it must always be an exception, unless barbarism is ascendant. In that sense we might almost say of a society which, by lassitude, heresy or avarice, forces many men to become autodidacts: “there is a society oppressed by barbarism.” Upon reading a devastating essay by Larry P. Arnn in the Fall 2006 issue of The Claremont Review of Books, one is left with that distinct impression. Ours is a society oppressed by barbarism. Misfortune will be the lot of Americans for some time to come — at least for those Americans who believe that “education” contains a notion of diligent immersion in, and exploration and veneration of one’s own civilization.

What Arnn — President of Hillsdale College — lays out in some detail is an arraignment of education in America so shattering as to induce the reader to a kind of despondency, followed by, it is to be hoped, a very solid kind of defiance. As Arnn tells it, with subtlety and incision, the agents of barbarism are in the driver’s seat; and the would-be defenders of civilization are reduced by bafflement, misconception, and disarray. Deriving from work by a committee of the President’s Advisory Council, the verdict is grim: “our kindergarten students rank with the best in the world in their knowledge of science and math. For each year that they are subjected to the capable attentions of our public education system, they fall a step behind. By the time they graduate from high school, they rank at the 10th percentile in math internationally, struggling to keep ahead of the unschooled goatherds of the Third World.” It might be added, of course, that a goatherd at age eighteen is probably the master of quite a variety of useful skills, such that his education is, in its own way, quite adequate.

For this Sunday, we travel back in time, for a few thoughts not my own:

In an age which has in great measure repudiated the only kind of fear that Johnson acknowledged, it takes a little effort to repossess the knowledge of certain positive consequences that follow from an outright acceptance of the point of view centering in religious humility. Of these, one of the foremost has to do with the communication of ideas: with the nature of the ideas and the way in which they are expressed. The assurance of a common commitment, common perils, and a common goal with all mankind at once justifies addressing one's fellow men on the perennial topics of mutual and ultimate concern. It is unnecessary to apologiaize for raising subjects universally acknowledged to be of profound importance. That these have been discussed before is insignificant in face of the fact that everything to come is still involved with them. Platitudes are not platitudes while they are being tested in the fire of personal experience. To an apprehension vital and unjaded, a truism is a truth. And a conviction that our private welfare is implicated is a wonderful sharpener of attention...

One fact of nature and development that decisively separates America from her ancestors in Europe is that “wild unknown country” out West. At one time in our history it was only as far west as the Appalachians, then it shifted to the west bank of the Mississippi; and even when parts of the farther West were settled, whole huge swaths of its interior remained wilderness. Some are almost so to this day. When the last region of Europe to be settled was settled can only be conjectured, I think, but it was before the first was settled in North America. Columbus sought a western route to the East, not because Europeans did not know the East, but because a great martial Eastern Power blocked access to it. So Columbus found North America, and Americans have been finding more of it ever since (or least they had been, until relatively recently.)

Though I have been a resident of Southern states for over a decade now, and even tentatively consider myself an adopted son of the South, I was in fact born and raised in Denver, Colorado. My ancestors were the first Italians in that fair city.

Many a careful and penetrating student of politics — Burke, Oakeshott and Weaver come immediately to mind — has made a distinction between freedom as enjoyment and freedom as power. The former is tethered firmly to the historical and the particular, and even to the personal. This freedom, as Weaver put it, “is something that gathers around the hearth, inheres in local associations, and endears to a man his place of habitation.” It is not about action or force, but rather appreciation. Its spring is gratitude and its provocation the threat of change or deprivation. The man aware of this liberty will be more aware of his obligations than his rights; and he will feel, deep in his bones, the honor and joy it is to fulfill obligations honorably. He will not hesitate to embrace sacrifice.

Freedom as power is ahistorical and idealized. Not enjoyment of the things that exist, but the potential of those that one day might, is what gives it life. Its mark is that it almost has no tether, but rather a balloon that carries it to and fro according to the wind. Its spring is concepts spun out of the minds of men. It is adventurous and dissatisfied with the present; it needs no external provocation, but often demonstrates a complicated lineage of influence. Though this freedom is dismissive or even contemptuous of history, it is perfectly unintelligible without it. That is to say, the observer must consent to enter the history or world of this theory of freedom in order to understand it. Its historical roots are deep, tangled and long, but we may take the French Revolution as its great exemplar and solidifier. Its parlance is “rights”; its aspiration is to rule or possess; its currency is force. It operates on human desires, downplays obligation in favor of privilege, which its construes as right, and is oriented toward the future. Men possessed by this version of freedom tend toward grandeur of theory, stridency of debate, bafflement at reluctance, and exasperation at dissent.

In an earlier thread, in which I sought to challenge some of the presumptions and delusions of the economistic modes of analysis that too often shape public policy, a reader commented that mass immigration is the greatest issue confronting the Western world today. It is incontrovertible that immigration is one of the most salient of all the momentous questions that confront us; whether we are considering the disruption of the social fabric, the alteration of the economic patterns and relationships that prevail in our country, the devolution of our political culture, or the immigration-driven presence among us of devotees of the jihad, immigration is implicated in all of these developments. But it seems to me somewhat precipitous to pronounce that immigration is foremost among these issues, in the sense that doing so might be placing proverbial carts before proverbial horses. Rather, or so it seems to me upon reflection, immigration is an element - a critical and integral element, nonetheless - of a broader historical tendency, a tendency often presented to us under the aspects of inevitability and progress. We might even look through the historicism with which we are often confronted, seeing in it merely the masquerade of a doctrine of fate, of the totality to which all of the particulars of our societies are to be sacrificed.

Cobbett was not merely a wrong-headed fellow with a knack of saying the right word about the wrong thing. Cobbett was not merely an angry and antiquated old farmer who thought the country must be going to the dogs because the whole world was not given up to the cows. Cobbett was not merely a man with a lot of nonsensical notions that could be exploded by political economy; a man looking to turn England into an Eden that should grow nothing but Cobbett's Corn. What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the perish­ing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was not there. And some cannot see it — even when it is there.

To put into perspective how a great number of Russians regard their first president and his policies, imagine the governor of Illinois striking a deal with the leaders of New Mexico, Texas, and California and offering them support for their independence in order to oust his personal rival, the president, from the White House and take over the rump United States. Imagine, in addition, that he dissolves the US Congress by sending in tanks, resulting in the deaths of over 150 citizens. These patriotic activities then lead to hyperinflation, wiping out the citizens' personal savings. The economy in now in shambles, and high-tech gives way to raw-material extraction. Silicon Valley infogeeks are escaping to China, Europe, and Brazil. Lucrative businesses are "privatized" and handed over to the president's cronies. His reformist economists attempt to fix the economy by not paying wages - for years. Law enforcement virtually disappears, and US cities become the battlefields of endless gang wars. The life expectancy of men falls to 57 years.

One week before last Christmas, the US State Department fast-tracked four European Bank for Reconstruction and Development projects in Serbia, which consisted of a loan to HVB Banka Serbia; an equity investment in Syntaxis Mezzanine Fund I; an equity investment in South Eastern Energy Capital; and a loan to Danube Group Holding of Serbia, which holds a stake in JKR Natural Resource BV.

The State Department claims that these particular investments "will contribute to a stronger and more integrated economy in the Balkans." Therefore, Section 561 of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act was suspended. Section 561 would have prevented US executive directors of the EBRD from voting in favor of these initiatives because of the Serbian government's noncompliance with the Hague Tribunal.

Why is the United States so eager to fund these projects?

A subject that has provoked regular discussion, at various venues, among WWwtW contributors is the ethical character of the atomic strikes against Japanese cities at the end of the Second World War. Were they justifiable, or were they indelible stains on our national honor?

The month of August witnesses this old debate renewed virtually every year. Often it is a tiresome recitation of old arguments and older outrage: but it must be done. The day the Republic ceases to debate whether her war leaders, in the midst of the greatest crisis of the modern age, should have employed the most destructive weapons ever produced by man, is the day she abandons her solemn duty of self-government.

Our own Bill Luse, now (alas) Contributor emeritus, once wrote one of the finer assays of this terrible subject that I have ever had the honor to read. I recommend a careful and even-tempered perusal. Next, go and read the debate at The New Criterion from several weeks ago (it begins here, and continues here and here). Finally, read Larry Auster’s recent discovery of a new piece of information — one which many of us never knew, and one which, while perhaps not definitive, is not trivial either

Let’s try to recapitulate, in concise terms, the lineaments of the atomic bombing debate that has roiled this website and several others over the past few days. Like Mr. Auster, I am weary of the whole thing — I said in my original post that the debate tends to issue in “a tiresome recitation of old arguments and older outrage” — but I hold out hope that at least some success can be achieved in clarifying the disagreement. Therefore:

At the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, in late June of 1862, John B. Hood’s Texas Brigade delivered a ferocious blow against a strong Federal line that provoked from Stonewall Jackson this elegiac tribute, when he came to behold the carnage it required of the victors: “The men who carried this position were soldiers indeed.”

They were soldiers indeed because these men marched across a swamp under savage fire with their weapons unreadied. Their casualties were staggering, yet they never staggered; and the force of their boldness, when finally combined with a great volley of musketry at short range, broke the Union line. It was General Lee’s first victory. They were to distinguish themselves again in battle, many times, not the least of which was the charge they made on the second day at Gettysburg against the Federal far left, down in the Round Tops and the aptly-named Devil’s Den — a charge that, in the end, could not hold the ground gained, but earned its way into memory by way of the courage it demanded of these men.

What is it in men that gives them the power to accomplish such deeds? What is it that grants them the capacity to march calmly across a field of hot flying lead, while their comrades fall with shrieks of agony on either side?

In 1565 the Grand Master of the Knights was a Frenchmen of Gascony, Jean Parisot de la Valette by name, who was by then (like Sultan Suleiman himself) in his seventies, but still vigorous. Piety and military acumen were his leading virtues: he was the very model of the warrior-priest, a kind of throwback to a dying medieval age. The religious fervor of the Knights had of late diminished, much as the chivalric piety of the medieval age itself was dying, and many of them had become worldly, sensuous, and arrogant. But La Valette, when he became Grand Master, aimed to check this corruption. Ernle Bradford calls him, “that rarest of human beings, a completely single-minded man.” His lieutenant was an Englishman, in exile from his homeland where Catholicism was proscribed; and it was this latter who decoded the reports from spies in Constantinople that the Turks were again massing against the Knights. The Order was the last vestige of that great Christian counterattack known as the Crusades, and the Sultan was now determined to stamp it out forever. Communiqués were sent all over Europe, calling the Knights to the defense of their last island home.

For the strategists of the Turks, including an old Algerian corsair called Dragut, Malta was more than just the remnant of an antique military order: it was the key to a proposed offensive in the western Mediterranean, an offensive that was to cow the Spanish and if possible carry the jihad to the very doors of St. Peter’s. And in any case, since Sicily, Sardinia, Majorca, and southern Spain itself had once been Islamic lands, it was a duty imposed upon the Sultan, by the iron principles of jihad, as duly constituted ruler, the successor to the caliph, to recover them from the infidel. Lands where the banners of the Crescent had once flown proudly must be returned to the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam). The presence of the Maltese Knights barred such a project; and therefore the reduction of the island would be a prelude to a wider war. Said Dragut: “Unless you have smoked out this nest of vipers, you can do no good anywhere.” In March of 1565, a fleet of nearly 200 vessels, bearing some 40,000 soldiers (including 6,500 elite shock troops known as the Janissaries), assembled in the Golden Horn for the Sultan's inspection. Dragut made two astute recommendations: move against the isle early in the season, and detach a significant flotilla to menace the Spanish mainland, thereby preventing aid from the Emperor. Once the invasion began, the more confident among the Sultan's advisers anticipated the victory to come — in a matter of days.

The victory never came. Across Europe news of the bravery of Knights — outnumbered five to one or more — rang like a great tocsin. All throughout that brutal summer on the sun-baked isle, the Turks had been repulsed, time after time, in their attempts to take the Christian fortresses of Malta. One such fortress had been reduced to rubble by Turkish artillery, and its garrison (almost every one of them already dead) desecrated by enraged Turks; but the other had held. Casualties among the Sultan’s army had been terrible, and disease ran rampant. The stiffness of the resistance, added to the depredations of pestilence and heatstroke, had won for Western Christians their first great victory over the Turk. La Valette’s final address to his men has come down to us:

A formidable army composed of audacious barbarians is descending on this island. These persons, my brothers, are the enemies of Jesus Christ. Today it is a question of the defense of our faith — as to whether the Gospels are to be superseded by the Koran. God on this occasion demands of us our lives, already vowed to his service. Happy will be those who first consummate this sacrifice.

The date of this victory has for us a certain resonance: it was September 11, 1565.

From that day we may date the decline of Turkish power on the Mediterranean. Six years later at Lepanto, a vast Ottoman fleet was decisively beaten by a comparable fleet of the Christian Holy League in one of the largest and bloodiest naval battles ever fought. The Knights were there on that day too. On another September 11, 1683, the Polish King John Sobieski led an army to relieve Vienna from a Turkish siege, in a battle that marks the end of the Turkish advance into Europe. These dates may strike us today as very ancient indeed; the reader may wonder what significance they have to us. The answer is that they form the conclusion to a very long story, a great tale of human drama, mostly forgotten now by a forgetful people k a drama that, on yet another September 11th, was renewed here in America. It is the story of the Jihad. [read more]

The upcoming BSC has turned my mind to matters Byzantine, and so it was a happy coincidence that I came across a new volume of Byzantine history before I left for Toronto. Princeton University Press describes Judith Herrin's new Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire in some fairly surprising terms:

She argues that Byzantium's crucial role as the eastern defender of Christendom against Muslim expansion during the early Middle Ages made Europe--and the modern Western world--possible.

This is all absolutely right, but still it is a little surprising (more on that in a moment). It's interesting that I came across this, by way of an Economist advance review of the book, because I had just been thinking earlier today of the far greater military and strategic significance of the Byzantine victories of 678 and 718 compared with the much better known Battle of Poitiers of 732. No offense to Charles Martel, who was a great defender of Christendom (and whose image adorns our "masthead"), but had Constantine IV and Leo III failed to hold Constantinople the ability of the Caliphate to project power across the Mediterranean and up through the Balkans would have been tremendous. Medieval Christendom as it came to exist would have never come into existence, and our civilisation as we know it would not have existed. Three cheers for Greek fire, obviously, and the Syrian Christian who invented it.

I say it is surprising that the book description frames the issue this way, because in certain Byzantinist circles it has come to be seen as old-fashioned and undesirable to emphasise Byzantium as the bulwark against Islam and protector of European civilisation. This interpretation of Byzantium-as-saviour is enshrined in the magisterial work of Ostrogorsky, and so is not going to disappear for a long time, but there has been a strange, if somewhat understandable, move in Byzantine studies to define Byzantium as its own separate civilisation--since medievalists initially were not concerned to include it as part of "the West"--and so to keep it apart from European history proper. The impulse to do this comes from two sources: the first are the Orthodox apologists who would like to keep Byzantium unsullied from both traces of heresy and later secularism of the West whose origins they locate in the medieval western world, and the other comes from the Byzantinists who are willing to admire Byzantium, but who want to admire it because it is unlike medieval Europe, or at least western Europe. Even Sir Steven Runciman, whose works were probably among the earliest and most eloquent arguments on behalf of the superior civilisation of the Byzantines, was effectively separating Byzantium from western Europe in his admiration for the former.

In my view, the drive to try to separate or distinguish sharply between Byzantium and the west is mistaken. Until at least 1204, the two undoubtedly formed two parts of the same civilisation, and just as in some important ways we today share Europe's fate as part of the same civilisation so, too, did western Europe share Byzantium's. When the Eastern Empire was gone, it was western Europe that had to bear the burden that Byzantium had carried for centuries before. Different cultures there were, as one would expect, but there was still a single Christian civilisation to which all their heirs still belong to one degree or another.

Paul makes some good points in his post on sedition, though the abuses of the Palmer raids and the excesses of Wilson's wartime government in particular should be remembered for their overreaching and paranoia. Wilson made a habit of jailing legitimate critics of the war, and fostered an atmosphere in which calls for the arrest of Sen. La Follette, for example, were commonplace.

I would follow up by noting what I think is still a relatively little-known fact: Jefferson objected to the Alien and Sedition Acts in large part on account of their redundancy and encroachment on the rights of the states. State laws c. 1798 already outlawed sedition, and Jefferson framed his protests against the Acts as a defense of state sovereignty. In other words, one of the basic problems Republicans had with the federal legislation on sedition in particular was that it was an act by the federal government in an area where it lacked authority and after the states had already addressed at least part of the problem. It was not ultimately a defense of seditious speech in the name of freedom of speech, but a protest against perceived encroachment by the center against the states. The complaint about the federal legislation fit into Jefferson's general anxiety about Federalist "monocracy" and his pamphleteering and propaganda struggle against what he regarded as Federalist usurpation (mostly related to the fight over the Bank).

One of the reasons for the generally poor memory of Adams' administration over the years is that the Quasi-War has never struck the popular imagination as a particularly serious or important conflict (and it was admittedly a minor, essentially entirely naval war that had limited impact on most citizens), which makes what were effectively wartime measures seem more unnecessary and excessive than they, in fact, were. The Republicans of the period did not distinguish themselves as good judges in their sympathy for the Revolution. It is impossible to separate the reaction of the Adams administration from the episodes involving the breakdown in relations with France and earlier attempts to draw America into the war on France's side that preceded the final rupture. Under the circumstances, and in light of what President Jefferson actually did once he was in power and was enforcing the Embargo Act, we can be fairly impressed by the restraint shown by Adams.

I'll apologize in advance for the length of the quotation, which is drawn from a favourite essay within a favourite book, Kolakowski's Modernity on Endless Trial, an anthology of selected essays written between 1973 and 1986. The essay, entitled, Politics and the Devil, commences with a brief discussion of the Christian doctrine of existence as a positive good, with evil, therefore, being wholly negative or privative in nature. The devil, then, cannot create either ex nihilo or de novo his own world-order, but must instead corrupt, debauch, deflect, or commandeer institutions or tendencies which have already legitimate purposes, moral and otherwise. Kolakowski's essay traces the moves and countermoves in the grand chess-match between God and the devil, wrought in the sphere of human freedom, as this impinges upon political affairs. We pick up his 'general history of their struggle' on the cusp of the transition to modernity:

One major task of the Enlightenment, among others, was to free politics from the fetters of religion. Since religion itself, by assuming so many political responsibilities and so much power, had become more and more contaminated with secular interests, more and more involved in military adventures, in diplomatic intrigues, and in amassing wealth for wealth's sake, the other part of the assignment was to purify Christianity itself and to reduce it to what was its proper business. This part was to be given to the Reform movement within the Church. Again, two sides of the same Roman coin.

The devil, as one should have expected, was operating relentlessly on both sides of the process, and quite successfully. Within in the Enlightenment proper, his idea was to convince people that it was not enough to liberate politics from religious control and to sever the State from the Church but that the progress of humanity consisted in forgetting its religious tradition altogether and, if necessary, doing it by violence. He gave the Enlightenment its anti-Christian shape and worked out, with the help of many fine and virtuous minds, the idea of humanism, which defined itself primarily by godlessness. Thereby it opened the door to the concept of politics as a sheer vying for power, power being a supreme good in itself; this went far beyond the Aristotelian tradition.

This was the easier and not very complicated half of the devil's job. Properly to wreck and to exploit the ideal of Christianity, which would have gotten rid of the secular pollution and returned it to its original purity, was a much harder task, but the devil proved to be up to the challenge.

I don't post much on immigration. It is a messy subject, and I'm not informed enough on the reams of statistics and standard apologetical moves to be able to add much to the discussion; though every now and then I get the conceit that I may have something unique to say on the subject.

However, I do quite often take an interest in the various ways in which our politics degenerates into unreason. You can think of it as a lazy man's activity in a target-rich environment. So, motivated by a recent thread of Maximos', I wanted to point out a particular way in which our discussion of immigration degenerates into unreason.

It turns out, friends, that this here website — yes indeed none other than What’s Wrong with the World itself —, has a connection to Paul Butterfield of the eponymous band which backed Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s. ‘Tis true. The man of whom Dylan later said he knew no better guitarist, whose band played with Dylan during the first disillusionment of the modern sans culottes, in their belief that they could claim this great American troubadour for their own, is first cousin once-removed to one of our Contributors.

There have been many moments of shattering disillusionment for our poor sans culottes, our dear hippies and hipsters, in the drama of Dylan’s career — moments of forced realization that this the troubadour did not, in fact, share their project, their dreams, their Utopia. “It wasn’t better world a-coming, you know. It just wasn’t that,” says someone in Martin Scorsese’s fine documentary No Direction Home. He is speaking of Dylan performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan stood on stage before thousands of folk fans and sold out, right there, in front of their eyes.

He went electric, horror of horrors, and (over some considerable booing and heckling) delivered some of the greatest performances of some of his greatest songs.

He began with “Maggie’s Farm,” in its hard-blues variation, a song of marvelously infectious defiance and provocation which only the dullest, most inebriated could have mistaken for anything else. (Watch and listen here.) He played “Like a Rolling Stone” (watch and listen here), and I do wonder if it has ever been played better. Later he played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” (watch and listen) and for many of the leftists, who wanted “topical songs,” i.e., leftist propaganda, it was indeed.

Of course he did not “sell out,” then or ever: Certainly not a few years later when he answered the Vietnam protest movement with simple country songs about loss and regret. Certainly not a dozen or so years later when he converted to the Cross of Christ, the most radical thing a man may ever do. Certainly not two years ago when he solidified beyond most doubt his mastery of his art, above all (in my view) with a song which is named after, and begins with an adaptation of the second verse of the first chapter of Genesis.

Learning of the kinds of exotic instruments used by Wall Street in the years before the crash can be a mind-boggling experience. First, of course, because of the complexity of these things; but also because of the staggering sums of "paper wealth" they produced. AIG and other firms sold credit default swaps in such massive numbers that there was at one point insurance on $60 trillion in credit. In other words, they wrote so many CDS contracts that on paper they were insuring a credit market that exceeded, several times over, the GDP of the whole country. Try to wrap your mind around that.

Now they did this because each one of those swaps generated a steady revenue stream. Let's say I hold a mass of Lehman Brothers corporate bonds, and I start to get wind the Lehman Brothers may not be in the best shape. So I call the AIG Financial Products office in London and place an order for swaps protecting $10 million in Lehman debt. For this I agree to pay AIG, say, 150 grand in premiums every year for five years. I feel good because my Lehman debt is now insured. AIG feels good because they have another revenue stream -- my yearly premiums. Of course, I don't even have to actually hold any Lehman debt to buy the swaps. Maybe I just think Lehman's in deep trouble, and suspect that there could be a nice profit to turn if the poor company defaults. The CDS become a speculative instrument for me.

As some of you may know, I am a private pilot. I am licensed to fly land-based single-engine airplanes, and I have an instrument rating which permits me to fly in the clouds and in bad weather. I am also a licensed helicopter pilot.

All of that makes me about as qualified to comment on yesterday's extraordinary aviation accident as the average weekend golfer is to comment on the performance of Tiger Woods.

My comment, succinctly, is: Wow.

I don't know of any other successful intentional emergency water landing (ditching) of a large modern airliner, other than yesterday's. The survival rate for ditching in a small plane is actually remarkably good; but there just aren't any data points to go on for large airliners. Airliner engines and systems are incredibly reliable, which is component of why, mile for mile, airline travel is safer than any other form of travel -- even bicycles or walking. But part of what that means is that in the history of aviation, before yesterday, there have been no successful emergency large airliner landings on the water, despite all the time spent by stewardesses telling us what to do in case it happens.

It is possible that Ethiopian Airlines 961 might have achieved this feat if the pilot had not been fighting with hijackers in the middle of the ditching. I certainly view Captain Abate and co-pilot Yonas Mekuria as aviation heroes; Abate seems to be something of a hijacker magnet, having been hijacked twice before the Flight 961 accident. But in any case it is a very different story from yesterday's story.

Then there is Japan Airlines 2, which landed short of the runway at San Francisco International in 1968. Captain Asoh may not be the hero in the accident, but you have to give him credit: when he took the stand in front of the NTSB, upon being asked why he landed in the shallow water short of the runway, he replied "As you Americans say, I f***ed up." When you hear a pilot say "I was just being an Asoh", unlike Captain Asoh, he isn't using profanity: but like Captain Asoh, he is manning up to his mistake.

If you want the definition of a cool customer, though, you need look no further than Captian Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III and co-pilot Jeff Skiles. Over densely populated New York City, these men were faced with the unthinkable: bird strikes had taken out both of their engines. And while takeoffs are optional, landings are not. I read a rumor that the initial plan, in the first seconds after the loss of the engines, was to glide to Teterboro airport for a dead-stick landing on a runway; this kind of thing has been done before.

But there wasn't enough altitude: the choice was buildings or freezing cold water. Looking back during those crucial moments, history provided no comfort. Ahead and below them was death, not merely their own deaths but their passengers' deaths too, 155 souls, and possibly the deaths of others on the surface. But they followed the pilot's mantra: fly the airplane. Never stop flying the airplane, not until you are dead and can't fly it anymore; fly it into and through the crash, as long as you have any control.

And that is just what they did.

I came upon this passage in Belloc's The Servile State and found it thoroughly fascinating, on several levels:

Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing land and capital that a determining number of families in the State were possessed of the means of production ; or they would put those means of production into the hands of the political officers of the community, to be held in trust for the advantage of all.

The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of the DISTRIBUTIVE STATE. The second may be called the attempted establishment of the COLLECTIVIST STATE.

Those who favour the first course are the Conservatives or Traditionalists. They are men who respect and would,if possible, preserve the old forms of Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed throughout the State during the happiest periods of our past history; they also know that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have greater social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would re-establish, if possible, the Distributive State in the place of, and as a remedy for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned with known realities, and having for their ideal a condition of society which experience has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of the two schools of reformers, the more practical in the sense that they deal more than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists) with things which either are or have been in actual existence.

According to Belloc (writing back in 1913) the Collectivist or Socialist, meanwhile, "proposes to put land and capital into the hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently dealing with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that has been tested by experience" or Western history.

Somewhere is in his spellbinding work of history and synthesis The Might of the West, Lawrence Brown writes of that “great company of Irish saints,” which, by boldness of faith, industry, and patience, were able to begin in the North of Europe what St. Benedict began in the South: the remaking of a workable and fruitful order for human life in the ruins left by the retreat of the Roman Empire from the western provinces. As Whittaker Chambers said of Benedict, we too may say, mutatis mutantis, of the Irish company: “At the touch of [their] mild inspiration, the bones of a new order stirred and clothed themselves with life, drawing to itself much of what was best and most vigorous among the ruins of man and his work in the Dark Ages, and conserving and shaping its energy for that unparalleled outburst of mind and spirit in the Middle Ages.”

The Celtic Church, though it ultimately submitted to the authority of the Papacy, had its own character and integrity. It had never known the secular, and was largely isolated from the ecclesiastical power of Rome — a fact that became quite evident when St. Columbanus came to France and quarreled with the worldly and often decadent Frankish hierarchy. We do not know how these quarrels were settled, but we can reasonably guess that the settlements, which avoided what would have been a disastrous schism, were the fruit of the holiness of Columbanus and Gregory the Great, who then sat on the Chair of St. Peter.

The Irish were susceptible to the error of their kinsman Pelagius against whom St. Augustine of Hippo contended with all his enormous vigor: the denial of the doctrine of Original Sin. Mr. Brown himself follows them in that error, but as he was not really a believing Christian, that is understandable. Only a Christian can really understand the depth of sin, and therefore only a Christian can realize how absolutely vital it is to retain the doctrine of Original Sin. For if there is no Original Sin, then it is possible that men are really good, and only the “system” that has made them bad. We followed the path of that logic in the twentieth century, and it led only to blood and decay.

There is a lot of contempt, in modern thought, and more in modern unthinking prejudice, for the idea of monasticism. But what is often forgotten about monasticism is how powerful an engine of political economy it was in a world were political and economic stability had vanished. Paul Johnson makes this point in his engrossing but peculiar A History of Christianity. In monasticism Western man at last found a way to be productive again; and in monasticism we see the early beginnings of that power over material forces, that stewardship of the riches of creation, that made us — we men of the West — masters of the earth. That this power has perhaps been the single most calamitously abused thing in all of the bloody history of mankind does not diminish the astonishing humility and piety at its roots. And I might be forgiven for the occasional fancy that all our machines and computers and efficiency are but a slow decline from the awesome achievement that the Irish monks and their students all over Europe, along with their Benedictine brothers, made visible in the gardens of the great monasteries.

So on this day when we celebrate the man who drove all the snakes from Ireland, let us also recall his Irish brethren, who so filled the world with their own “mild inspiration,” and made us who we are.