Miracles Aren’t Free

[Valin]

Washington Free Beacon

Charles Fain Lehman
May 27, 2018

At the heart of Jonah Goldberg's excellent new book is one simple, startling fact. It looks something like this:

 

For most of our history, humanity has been impossibly poor. But in the last several hundred years, total human wealth exploded, raising the living standards of the modern average American to levels unthinkable by eleventh-century royalty. The collective rise out of poverty by so many quickly is so astonishing that Goldberg calls it "the Miracle." This is apt inasmuch as to Goldberg the Miracle represents not merely a change in degree, but a change in kind. It is "humanity's quantum leap out of its natural environment of poverty."

Importantly, Goldberg says, the Miracle is "unnatural." It relies upon forms and concepts alien to basic human tendencies. The dichotomy between natural and unnatural does a lot of work in Suicide of the West, and Goldberg spends a whole chapter reviewing both popular and more scholarly works in his account of what human nature exactly is.

(Snip)

Perhaps the reason so many are ungrateful for the Miracle is because of the hidden costs it has imposed. Discussion of the individual as the fundamental unit of society is inexorably tied up with social atomism. An extreme rationalism erodes the affection that ties together communities. The elevation of wealth as good in itself, unmediated by virtue, cannot help undermine institutions that require self-sacrifice and going without.

This is not to say that the Miracle is bad or must be turned against—only that those who are discontented may have at least the beginnings of a point. After all, miracles are when we get something for nothing, and as all conservatives know, such trades should be faced with suspicion. Is it possible that the cost of all our growth has been the strength of the very institutions needed to sustain it?

To his credit, Goldberg is a far more charitable analyst of current trends than most. Suicide of the West is primarily an apologetic for liberal democratic capitalism, but it is also an astute explanation of how we got to where we are as a nation. It is in this form most valuable, and recommendable on its insight alone.

 

[Valin]