Moral Zeitgeist or Trickle-Down Politics
Thursday, October 11th, 2007When considering whether many businessmen and, more importantly, politicians may have more Objectivist-/capitalism-friendly leanings than is currently the fad and whether few of them could speak out concerning these leanings, I had a thought:
Theory 1: The so-called Founding Fathers were some of the intellectuals of their day. They were much more highly-educated than the populace-at-large, and assembled the Constitution in such a way as only to need to appease other intellectuals/politicians of similar leanings. The populace itself was simply expected to react, knee-jerk style, to the tyranny of an absolute monarchy, and approve of said Fathers’ founding laws. The ideals and reasoning behind the ideals of capitalism, limited government, and separation of church and state had not reached the level of zeitgeist in the populace but had many followers in levels of politics and academia.
Theory 2: Classical liberalism was the zeitgeist of the day. The populace, while perhaps not interested in all its reasons, embraced these principles on a common sense level. The politicians and other intellectuals simply led the charge to formalize what the people already wanted.
If the former is the case, I doubt whether such a thing could happen again. For the better, I think, we have shed ourselves of the need for unquestioned leadership from an intellectual class. However, no small group of intellectuals could, again, lead an entire fledgling nation into either rebellion or novel and radical directions.
On the other hand (theory 3?), perhaps history is full of events that spur the zeitgeist on to new things. It’s not gradual evolution of ideas (though that does happen) but punctuated, dramatic cataclysms of popular thought that cause events like this to happen. For instance, perhaps while the ideas of Voltaire and Montesquieu were brewing and trickling from the intellectuals to the commoners, the colonies’ rebellion against Britain was what crystallized those ideas in the masses. It took such a dramatic turn of events for the masses to embrace new and radical ideas.
If that’s the case, I wonder what leaf we’ve turned since 9/11. Will history show that the masses embraced a new kind of imperialistic xenophobia? Will it tell how we abandoned long-held principles like the sanctity of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and human rights in general? Or will those merely be tittles in the text, after which the populace awoke from its deliberate slumber, realized that the cost of absolute security is tyranny, and demanded justice—not vengeance—for the accused and liberty for the law-abiding?
The least likely possibility is, I think, that history will say we went about our merry ways while nothing changed.
