| Friday, August 16, 2002 |
16:03 - A Self-Made Country
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I wonder if the recent (and historic) alarm that the European nations have about successful countries like America and Israel has something to do with a general pandemic mistrust of earned wealth as opposed to inheritance.
In reading the "All Creatures Great and Small" books by James Herriot as a kid, one of the lines that really stuck with me was an observation Herriot made about the Yorkshire attitude about this subject, as sharply contrasted against that of his native Glasgow. He said that Yorkshiremen treated the self-made man with deep suspicion; as he put it, "Nothing was more damning than the darkly-muttered comment, He had nowt when he fust got 'ere."
I wonder how far across Europe that sentiment stretches. After all, the European powers all came from monarchies, with systems of lordships and hereditary fortunes and powerful houses who kept control banking on the strength of a name. The rich and powerful were always the rich and powerful, because the present generation was always seen as the living embodiment of the ancestral generation. You were supposed to see King Arthur in a portrait of Charles the First, or Charlemagne in Louis XVI, or Siegfried in Kaiser Wilhelm. Likewise, if you're a blacksmith in a small country hamlet, the implicit assumption is that you inherited the job from your father, and he from his great-grandfather. For it to be otherwise would mean a noble family had somehow fallen, or that a ruling lord had come from a house of cowhands. While that might have made for good Dickensian fiction, it wasn't something one wanted to see in the real, live Europe.
America is the national-scale equivalent of the self-made man. With rights and power given to the individual and equal opportunity for all, the catchphrase of being a kid in America is "Even you might grow up to be President someday." There are no hereditary lords; there is no implicit glass ceiling for advancement if someone came across the Atlantic on a tramp steamer in steerage. Sure, it took time; and sure, there were (and are) economic dynasties. But the noveau riche-- or what I liked to call the technoveau riche until a couple of years ago-- never were treated with suspicion. Quite the contrary; they were seen as heroes, embodiments of the American Dream. it was a matter of pride to be at the head of a successful company and look back with wistful fondness at an apartment in the inner city or an immigrant grandfather cast off with the wretched refuse from some distant teeming shore. That's America.
Likewise Israel. They went from a nation of victims, just out from the worst cultural disaster ever to befall a people in history, to a thriving democratic exporter of goods and technology in what? Thirty years? Twenty? Who knew that would have happened? They were supposed to go hack at the desert in the miserable sun and be a poor beggar nation, dependent upon handouts from the UN, like the other countries in the area. What went wrong? How dare they succeed! Damn this self-made-man mentality!
What Hitler had correctly guessed was that the German people still had enough respect left over for hereditary entitlements that he could parlay it into the basis for a revolution: sanctified Teutonic blood, the rightful heirs to the Holy Roman Empire, the long-haired square-jawed musclebound Viking supermen whose spears turned back the Roman legions at the height of their power. World domination was their birthright as Germans, just for being Germans. For the Americans to claim that throne-- with their grass-deep roots and their brand-new country devoid of history and their willingness to accept any old people from any old where into their melting pot-- must have seemed ludicrous.
And yet here we are. It would seem that inherited entitlement as a concept upon which to build a nation is discredited by history. This must annoy the hell out of the Europeans. If they've got any of that attitude left, leveled against the self-made man who usurps power from those who currently have it, purely through the use of something so grubby as his hands and mind-- then it would certainly help to explain the transnational progressivist mentality, the victimhood=entitlement reaction, the complete failure to understand that equal opportunity does not lead to equal results.
We would seem to have figured out stuff like that a long time ago. We realized that strength lies in diversity (call it "hybrid vigor" if you want), of the "melting pot" type rather than the "multiculturalist" type. We realized that genius makes successes of those worthy, and that wealth passes from the hands of those who can't handle it to the hands of those who can. And we realized that these things happen of their own accord-- just leave everybody alone and it all works out like magic. To force things into a different kind of structure requires constantly applied effort. It's artificial, it's wasteful, and it breaks the backs of otherwise vibrant nations with superstar potential.
Just another reason, I suppose, why we don't feel particularly inclined to take advice from people whose countries have repeatedly proven to be failures, while ours has repeatedly proven to succeed.
How did Tom Lehrer put it? "He specialized in giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was..."
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