Every time I read things by the founding fathers and the era immediately after them, I am always surprised by how many extremely insightful people the time period produced and that they actually got into positions of power where they could organize things according to constitutional principles. Pretty amazing group of people in one place and at one time in a culture and circumstances that could have a large impact.
A lot of people at the time were likely first or second generation immigrants and the tyrannies of the "old world" were still experienced either first-hand or through the eyes of their parents and grandparents. I think, this, in a lot of ways, influenced the founding fathers. And similarly, I think this is why many immigrants in this country become successful people in the modern times.
... and in a backwater colony with a population of 2 1/2 million or so. There are metro areas today with that kind of population, look at the kind of leadership they end up with.
The past is such a weird place, not least because there's just so few people actually in it. The 19th and 20th century revolutions in agricultural technology exploded the numbers of human beings on the planet, particularly coming on the heels of the depopulation of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries.
There are lots of comparably astute thinkers in the modern age. We ignore them because they don't command the same gravitas as the founders and because in some sense intellectualism is no longer valued in the West.
But it's not hard to say: "if you commercialize war and create an entrenched institution around it, then there are a lot of people (weapons manufacturers, government contractors, military leadership) with considerable money and power who are highly incentivized to perpetuate the state of war, irrespective of its necessity."
One of the most successful con jobs was conceptually linking war and manliness, so that 'pacifist' became a derisive label. I always found it staggeringly obtuse for conservatives (people; not the corrupt politicians and media manipulating them) to simultaneously complain about the debt and endorse pointless wars that end up costing many trillions of their own taxpaying dollars.
And then I realized that rationalizing the right wing platform is a total package deal: maybe you came for your gun rights, red meat manliness, shallow (or deep) streak of white supremacy, and/or your Christian values, but you end up staying for the costly warmongering, poor-to-rich wealth transfer, and excessive broad spectrum deregulation.
I don’t buy that that is any longer a significant contributing factor. Unadulterated societies should graduate from barbarism as they move up Maslow's hierarchy. That the most secure civilization (economically and otherwise) in human history has not managed to completely do so is almost surely the consequence of artificial intervention.
If you compare military ads for example, you’ll see that in the US we glorify and Hollywoodize war (because they know the Call of Duty aesthetic will lure kids into joining) whereas in a place like Ukraine it’s positioned as a grim and unpalatable necessity.
I’m not saying we don’t need a military btw. I am saying it’s potentially an order of magnitude more bloated than it needs to be. Biological aggression alone hardly serves to explain that. Cultural and political manipulation are the dominant explanatory variables.
And this should bother us, because while we’re busy fighting the wanton perversion of our democratic system in this and various other ways, other countries committed to a state-sanctioned technocratic agenda are running laps around us. It’s stupidly tragic.
>I don’t buy that that is any longer a significant contributing factor. Unadulterated societies should graduate from barbarism as they move up Maslow's hierarchy.
That is a very idealistic view. The truth is that the majority of the world still lives a stone's throw from death, and even lower class American neighborhoods are filled with violence that is inseparable from traits that are amplified by male biology - pride, aggression, anger - compounded by physical differences between the sexes which affect psychology - i.e. a lifetime spent weaker or stronger than average.
Don't get me wrong. These drives and emotions have their place, and I would argue that they are also responsible for much of the good in the modern world.
But these biological and social properties continue to force an association between manliness and war, although to some degree propaganda and Hollywood do have an amplifying affect, as you suggest.
The reason it isn't hard to say that (about war and power) is, in large part, because we are preceded by people like Madison.
It is, I have found, very difficult for people to accurately assess what it would be like to not know something they already know. Steven Pinker calls this the Curse of Knowledge.
Founding father fetishizing (or whatever you want to call it) is very taboo in lefty circles because of how much conservatives do it. But that doesn't stop me personally from thinking that that group of people had the best ideas and developed the best framework for government the world has ever seen. It's just a shame it didn't work out to their intentions in practice.
The issue is that the “Founding Fathers” are treated as if they thought collectively. They didn’t. Among themselves, they agreed, disagreed, and changed their mind on many things.
Highly amused at how you have illustrated the bovine predictability of the HN hivemind. The HN crowd smugly pats itself on the back as being smarter and more enlightened than the average bear, yet in practice is tremendously narrow minded and hateful of anything that goes against its prevailing norms. The diversity agenda apparently does not include diversity of thought.
People with opposite views have opposite images of the "HN crowd". Since these images are determined by your/their own views, they don't contain any information about HN.
And so you prove my point yet even a step removed - to even mention that mentioning that a collective narrowmindedness might exist incurs criticism, is not permitted.
No, they didn't. They had some good ideas inspired by the Enlightenment and by Romanticism, but quite a few expressed the idea that the Constitution should be reviewed regularly and updated and adjusted for changing conditions. The issue is that many "conservatives" believe the Constitution was perfect from the get go.
You have a point there, in that the Constitution was designed to be changeable. It was not supposed to be easy to change, but possible. But there has been just one new amendment since 1971, and none since 1992.
That’s a deliberate strategy on the part of the conservatives.
Ferishizing the past while simultaneously ignoring everything they have to say is a cynical way to anchor modern policy position with the distant past.
The sentiment about the harms of long duration wars is echoed in the Art of War. When I read that book, I wonder if our politicians and military leaders have bothered to (not Trump or the Republicans, that much is obvious). Astute thinkers have existed in all generations of humanity. Many of the principles that were mentioned in past are relevant today. We just have a bad track record of following them.
