They have a reproduction of the 1911 Boy Scout Handbook. Seeing this brought a wave of nostalgia through me.
There was a time when being a Boy Scout was an honorable thing, when young boys were brought up to value integrity, preparedness, alertness, diligence, and practical knowledge. This was a widespread and pervasive ideal.
It seems to me we are not only primed for, but seeing, a strong cultural resurgence of the basic Liberal ideals which informed American politics for most of history. Self reliance, kindness, honesty: all of these work to produce an informed, active, responsible public.
Ponder for a moment the obvious success of the Art of Shaving stores across the country (I travel, and am seeing them everywhere). Could one not readily correlate this with the Republican wave in the most recent election?
Life is uncertain, but it is much more uncertain when the basic ideal which have made us successful are daily attacked and denigrated–directly, or through being ignored.
I think we have reached a tipping point where there is too much confusion, where the desire to do right, to tolerate things we don’t like, has passed into anger, and an open willingness to call for returns to old ideas.
Goodness, as I define it, is being able to live happily on your own, and to be happy for others in their own successes, to take pleasure in them. It is the opposite of Schadenfreude. It is the opposite of self righteous anger on behalf of people who have not even asked you to help them. It is the opposite of intentional divisiveness, bitterness, anger, vitriol.
What we might term the Golden Age of the Boy Scout no doubt covered up much that was bad. It did not make enough room for including women as cultural equals (or superiors). It did not make room for inclusion of blacks, who I suspect may have been banned outright in some areas.
Boy Scout culture converted easily to militarism. I personally think it was vital that we battled both the Nazi Fascists and the Communist Fascists. Anti-Communism was vital throughout the second half of the 20th Century, and remains important. Our colleges are filled with people who would end our freedoms if they could, returning us to earlier ages of cruelty and barbarity, as seen in Cuba.
Now, though, I am with Rand Paul that enough is enough. Let us combat direct threats to our nation, but not try and guess 15 moves ahead as to who might threaten us. We need, as one example, to let Iran know their civilization will end if they attack us with a nuclear weapon. North Korea will cease to exist, as a socialist paradise or anything else.
Beyond that, though, I would support large increases in National Guard participation, and a substantial draw down of our standing military. We do not need to patrol the worlds oceans for free any more, even though we need to retain strike capabilities.
Ideals remain ideals even within conditions of change. The whole world was racist in 1776, and less than a 100 years later some 600,000 Americans died trying, in no small measure, to redefine them as human beings just like white people, with equal sufferings, equal wishings, equal rights. 200 years later it is self evident to nearly everyone that racism as an institutional creed is anti-Liberal and wrong.
People can change, and institutions can change, without altering their guiding ideals. You do not attack ideals: you attack ideas, and the behavior they support.
This is my foundational objection to Leftism: it does not in fact contain ANY ideals. It is a purely destructive cultural process. I have argued this at length.
And I want to be clear that I make no foundational distinction between the soft version, which I call Sybaritic Leftism, and hard Leftism, which I call Cultural Sadeism. The first LEADS to the second, perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, because it rejects IN PRINCIPLE all ideals other than leveling, other than bringing the high low. All socialisms are bad for this reason.
It is a perfectly acceptable ideal to want the poor fed, clothed and housed. But this is not the ACTUAL ideal of socialists. Everywhere this awful creed is implemented standards of living go down in aggregate, chronic unemployment becomes endemic, and anger builds.
Now, obviously there are continuums. I speak to the principle of egalitarianism as a primary goal. Slaves are equal, but they do not thereby become happier or more enlightened.
No society can be better than the aggregate average of the individuals in it. That a society as a whole can be a target of moral improvement is the great lie that leftists tell over and over, in no small measure, I would argue, because by invoked the General, they exempt themselves in the particular from cultivating virtue. France’s Msr. Hollande hates poor people. John Kerry doesn’t like paying taxes. Neither does Al Sharpton.
And returning to an article by the strongly Left-leaning Guardian, the Danes seem to be living on credit cards: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/scandinavian-miracle-brutal-truth-denmark-norway-sweden
Why do the Danes score so highly on international happiness surveys? Well, they do have high levels of trust and social cohesion, and do very nicely from industrial pork products, but according to the OECD they also work fewer hours per year than most of the rest of the world. As a result, productivity is worryingly sluggish. How can they afford all those expensively foraged meals and hand-knitted woollens? Simple, the Danes also have the highest level of private debt in the world (four times as much as the Italians, to put it into context; enough to warrant a warning from the IMF), while more than half of them admit to using the black market to obtain goods and services.
Perhaps the Danes’ dirtiest secret is that, according to a 2012 report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, they have the fourth largest per capita ecological footprint in the world. Even ahead of the US. Those offshore windmills may look impressive as you land at Kastrup, but Denmark burns an awful lot of coal. Worth bearing that in mind the next time a Dane wags her finger at your patio heater.
Most seriously of all, economic equality – which many believe is the foundation of societal success – is decreasing. According to a report in Politiken this month, the proportion of people below the poverty line has doubled over the last decade.Denmark is becoming a nation divided, essentially, between the places which have a branch of Sticks’n’Sushi (Copenhagen) and the rest. Denmark’s provinces have become a social dumping ground for non-western immigrants, the elderly, the unemployed and the unemployable who live alongside Denmark’s 22m intensively farmed pigs, raised 10 to a pen and pumped full of antibiotics (the pigs, that is).
My point: problems have solutions, and humankind has been on this Earth long enough to know what works and what doesn’t. As I have said Conservatives can certainly be anti-Progress. But they can also be anti-Regress, and we have reached the point where that is their primary mission. Whatever benefits may have accrued from asserting the rights and importance of women and minorities have been achieved. They are our (middle aged white men, in my case) equals (or superiors: my world view has no need to assert equality as a necessary given, in either direction) legally and socially, to the extent they work to do so.
But Boy Scout virtues continue to be relevant. They are the path to creating and sustaining freedom, and freedom is in my view the sine qua non of human advancement. Everyone who claims otherwise is peddling a lie, normally in pursuit of a totalitarianism which they seek because of their own moral inferiority, their own inability to grow as people, to learn to process anger, grief, and LIFE itself, in all its ugliness and beauty and ordinariness.