Mendacity The Mark Of Decline - Road to the Middle Class

REMEMBER the good old days when Tennessee Williams wrote about the mendacity of the white South? In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof the corrupted South had to lie. They lied about the shameful homosexuality of Brick, the star college athlete and heir. They had to lie about Big Daddy’s cancer. And they made a virtue of it. As Big Daddy tells Brick:

Boy, I’ve lived with mendacity. Now why can’t you live with it? You’ve got to live with it. There’s nothin’ to live with but mendacity. Is there?

That was back in the high noon of American liberalism when the idealistic New Dealers could sneer at the corrupt racists and bigots all around them. Liberals were idealistic and ethical; they would never lie. They would never need to.

But now the vortex of mendacity centers around a corrupt liberalism in terminal decline, and nowhere more so than in the university, writes Michael Barone.

Barone fingers the lie about race for starting the rot. Colleges started admitting minorities to campus who didn’t “meet ordinary standards.” Of course, the colleges couldn’t admit that. And to compound the lie, they decided that nobody else on campus could tell the truth either. Hence the speech codes t“which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others.”

They were instituted, it seems, to prevent [the minority] students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment.

But it was still a lie, and the lie deepens and corrupts all the more as it gets entangled in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Then there’s the cheap mendacity of partisan attack dogs like Media Matters. Never mind about whether they are fair and honest when they ruthlessly take comments out of context. They can’t even be straightforward about their very identity.

Is Media Matters an “avowedly political institution,” as Byron York suggests? Or is it “a nonpartisan, progressive nonprofit that is unaffiliated with any political party or candidate” as Media Matters insists?

And is it worth insisting on the distinction just for the sake of a stinking non-profit designation?

It really is beside the point to take pleasure in the decline of liberalism or even to mourn it. Everything in this world begins with soaring hope and high ideals and ends in shame and rotting cancer.

But for those of us who yearn for the moderation of a Burkean world of ordinary life and modest reform, the decline of liberalism does come as a relief.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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