Archive for Edmund Opitz
The Robber Barons and the Real Gilded Age
Posted by: |By Edmund Opitz, author of The Libertarian Theology of Freedom and Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies.
The Civil War marks a deep cleavage in American life; the increasingly industrialized America of the latter decades of the 19th century was quite different from pre-Civil War America. The economy of the first part of the last century did of course engage in some manufacturing, but the businessman of the period was typically a merchant and a trader rather than a factory owner or mine operator. Men of ambition made money shipping lumber to China and returning with tea, opium, mandarin screens, and the like. American whalers plied their arduous trade all over the world. The Yankee clipper, sailing out of eastern ports from Baltimore to Salem, was the most beautiful thing afloat, and the swiftest vessel on the seven seas till after the Civil War.
Most Americans, during this period, lived in villages and small towns; farming was the major occupation, and rural life was a struggle for survival. Poverty was widespread, giving rise to the old New England maxim: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby Dick, tells how dirty and dangerous life was on board a whaling ship. Imagine then, if you will, what it was like trying to wrest a living out of the rocky soil of New England if life aboard a whaler was the preferred alternative!
No one would refer to the early decades of the last century as “The Era of Free Enterprise Individualism.” It is the post-Civil War period that is usually labeled so. “Free Enterprise” and “Individualism” are two very slippery terms. In any event, the decades under evaluation here are bounded, on the one side, by the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, and on the other, by William McKinley; roughly from 1869 to 1901. This was America’s Gilded Age, so labeled by Mark Twain in his novel of that name. The Gilded Age expressed Mark Twain’s disillusionment over the decline in his nation from the decent, old, kindly America he remembered from his boyhood to the America of Black Friday, Credit Mobilier, Boss Tweed, Tammany, and the hustle for the fast buck.
The Changing Scene
Mark Twain, in collaboration with his neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner—called “Deadly Warning” by his friends—published The Gilded Age in 1873. The theme of this novel is announced in the Preface: “In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed.” But we no longer have people of this character, Mark Twain is telling us; corruption has eaten so deeply into the hearts and minds of people that he and Warner have ample material for the 453-page fictionalized history he and his friend have constructed.
In chapter 18 the authors venture a conjecture as to how this mutation in the American character had come about: “The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 had uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.” The Gadarene progress was more rapid than Mark Twain had anticipated; it worked itself out close to the bitter end before he died thirty- seven years later.
Twain’s satire was merely a prologue; the play followed, and the main characters are all well- known names. There was Commodore Vanderbilt (who conferred that naval distinction on himself because he ran a ferryboat between Staten Island and the Battery); and Jay Gould, who built himself a mansion just up the road from the property which now houses The Foundation for Economic Education. There was Daniel Drew, and Jim Fisk, and Andrew Carnegie; there was Huntington, Stanford, Harriman, Rockefeller and Morgan. I’ve listed here ten names; add ten more if you wish, or a thousand more. The point is that these “robber barons,” as they’ve been called, were a mere handful of men whose deeds and misdeeds have been lovingly chronicled by three generations of journalists and muckrakers.
Conniving with Politicians
These extravagant characters have been represented as exemplars of unrestrained individualism at its worst, fiercely competitive, practitioners of undiluted laissez faire capitalism. They were nothing of the sort. So far were they from wanting a genuinely free market economy that they bought up senators and paid off judges in order to stifle competition. They did not want a government that would let them alone; they wanted a government they could use. Had they been able to understand the original idea of laissez faire they would have opposed it. They were- not individualists; they did not believe in a fair field and no favor; they stacked the odds against their competitors.
The last thing Vanderbilt, Gould, Carnegie and the others wanted was open competition in a game where the best man wins. To the contrary! They connived with politicians to obtain advantages for themselves by controlling government and the law; they manipulated the public power for private gain. And the government was eager to oblige.
This was done openly, and virtually everyone knew about it. Witty commentators referred to certain politicians as the Senator from coal, or the Senator from railroads, or the Senator from steel. Observing the situation in Pennsylvania, one critic was led to remark that Standard Oil had done everything with the legislature—except refine it! Such political practices were a far cry from the vision of James Madison, who had declared that “Justice is the end of government, and justice is the end of civil society.” The Gilded Age was a throwback to the age-old practice of using political power for the economic advantage of those who hold office, and for their friends.
If you want the story of these men and their times, a good place to start is Gustavus Myers’ History of the Great American Fortunes. First published in 1907, this book went through several editions here and in England. It was published in a large inexpensive edition in 1936 as a Modern Library Giant. I bought my secondhand copy in 1953; the original purchaser bought his in 1939 and it contains a gracious inscription by Myers himself: “May you be included in my next- supplement to this tome.”
Myers tells the reader that he was just a reformer when he began his research, eager to reveal the unsavory tactics of rapacious men in business and industry in the absence of government supervision of economic life. Only later did he conclude that a radical restructuring of society—some form of socialism—was the only answer. The conclusion is a strange one. Myers demonstrates throughout his book that such powers as government exercised in this nation during the Gilded Age were misused so as to wrongfully give monetary advantage to some at the expense of others. If this government with a little power did harm, there is no reason at all to assume that a new government wielding a lot of power will do good!
I have gone through Myers’ book and underlined every passage which describes a sinister alliance between politicians and these fortune hunters; there are some hundred and fifty such passages. Let me offer you a representative sample.
. . . peculiar special privileges, worth millions of dollars.
. . . as a free gift from government.
. . . the free use of the people’s money, through the power of government.
. . . a notorious violator of the law, invoking the aid of the law to enrich himself still further.
. . . causing public money to be turned over to his private treasury.
By either the tacit permission or connivance of government.
The simple mandate of law was sufficient authorization for them to prey upon the whole world outside their charmed circles.
. . . while it was essential to control law-making bodies, it was imperative to have as their auxiliary the bodies that interpreted the law. [That is, the courts.]
I think you catch the flavor of Mr. Myers’ book. He is a moralist; he is indignant; he preaches a hell-fire and brimstone sermon against the wicked men who took advantage of their fellow Americans by subverting the law from its proper role of administering an evenhanded justice between person and person. They bent the law into an instrument of plunder. But Myers is not a philosopher; he does not shape his material according to a coherent theory of the economic and political orders.
Gaudy tales about these few unprincipled buccaneers distract our attention away from the millions of Americans on the farm and in the workshops. These hard working people constituted the real American economy during the Gilded Age. This bustling, surging economy of ours received immigrants from Europe at a rate of about a million a year, and it absorbed them on our farms and in other places of work. The standard of living was rising all the while; wages doubled between 1870 and 1900.
It was an age of invention. During the eighty years from 1790 to 1870, the U.S. Patent Office had granted just over 40,000 patents; during the next thirty years it granted just over 400,000. New types of farm machinery transformed agriculture. To cite one instance: not one bushel of wheat had been raised in the Dakota Territory before 1881; by 1887 its wheat crop was sixty-two million bushels. In 1870 there was nothing that could be called an American steel industry; by 1900 we were producing more than ten million tons of steel annually—more than all the rest of the world combined.
The economic opportunity in America attracted millions of foreigners to these shores during these decades. These men, women and children did not uproot themselves from Europe, leaving family and friends, then undertake an uncomfortable ocean voyage, in order to be exploited; they came here because they could, by their own efforts, forge a better life for themselves in the freest economy the world had yet known.
An Economy of Opportunity
The economy was not wholly free, else there would not have been a single robber baron. But the fact that certain sharp operators piled up large fortunes by means of legally sanctioned thievery means that there was already wealth here to be stolen. The wealth they filched from the taxpayers was created by millions of industrious Americans laboring under conditions that approximated the free market. Compared to working conditions in Europe, we had an economy of opportunity. Thirty million immigrants told us so by coming to these shores, where they found a better and freer life for themselves and their descendants.
Let me retrace our steps to the place where I alleged that Gustavus Myers was long on indignation, but somewhat short on theory. He tells the sordid tale of a gang of private citizens in cahoots with government to operate a scam against the public. His fortune hunters are supposed to represent “free enterprise,” but in reality, the robber barons are to the market economy what Jesse James and the Dalton brothers were to the hardy homesteaders who settled the western territories. In other words, they were more predators than producers.
We need to come to some understanding of the political order appropriate to a society of free people. By the same token, we need to know how the free economy operates, and the role of the businessman within a market economy.
Politically, I call myself an old-fashioned Whig. I’m a believer in equal justice under the law, and something of a Jeffersonian, so let me quote a few lines from Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address describing the society he strove for: “Equal and exact justice to all men; of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendships with all nations,—entangling alliances with none . . . freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus.”
Later in the same Address Jefferson praised “. . . a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
The function of government, in the Jeffersonian scheme, is to secure the God-given rights of all persons, to deter and redress injury, and otherwise let people alone.
Limited Government
The American Constitution is more explicit in what it forbids government to do than in what it authorizes government to do; the words “no” and “not” in restraint of governmental power occur forty-five times in the first seven Articles and the Bill of Rights. Limiting the scope and power of government maximizes individual liberty and gives us a society of free people. Government, in a free society, has no power to confer economic advantage on some at the expense of others, which eliminates “robber barons,” be they individuals or groups, rich or poor. The government of a free people does not misuse its power to tax by taking wealth from those whose labor produced it and allocating it to the pressure groups who possess political influence.
Limited government under the Rule of Law maintains an evenhanded justice; it keeps the peace of the community by curbing those who break the peace. It lets people alone, and it punishes any individual who refuses to let other people alone.
A free government is distinguished from other forms of government by the use it makes of the law; it employs lawful force against criminals in order that peaceful people may go about their business. This is force used in self defense. Every other political system uses legal violence against peaceful people—for any sort of reason the users of violence may conjure up. This is the aggressive use of force. The distinction is between law and tyranny, as the Greeks put it. “Let no man live uncurbed by law; nor curbed by tyranny,” said the playwright Aeschylus.
Given the law order of a free society, the economic activities of men and women, as they go about the business of earning a livelihood, is necessarily free market and voluntary.
Consumer Sovereignty and the Free Society
In a genuinely free society, a laissez faire society in the early sense of this much abused phrase, the businessman is a mandatory of consumers; the customer is boss. Consumer sovereignty! Is this the way the businessman likes it? Of course not. Our businessman would like to think of himself as the man in charge, a captain of industry running a tight ship. But who’s he kidding? He doesn’t even have the power to set wages and prices. His competition, his employees, and his customers make those decisions for him. If he tries to lower wages he will lose his best workers to his competitors who pay the going rate or more. If he tries to raise prices, people buy elsewhere. He’s stymied, and that’s why he’s tempted on occasion to persuade some politician to bend the rules in his favor, just enough to give him what a friend of mine called, ironically, a “fair advantage.”
But when a businessman yields to this temptation he forfeits his standing as a businessman and becomes something else—a branch of the government bureaucracy. He has left the economic order, and is now part of the State. As a businessman he had no power over anyone; as a part of the State he shares, with government, the power to tax. People now have to pay for his products whether they buy them or not.
Was there “free enterprise” during the Gilded Age? Yes, there was—but not much of it on the part of the “robber barons” who were in cahoots with government. Was there “individualism” during the period? Well, there was individuality, but the kind of individualism which means equal freedom for every person to pursue his private goals was not a guiding policy.
But who are we, as we go stumbling down the road to serfdom, to cast the first stone?
Originally published in the August 1984 edition of The Freeman. Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.
Tags: 19th century, economics, Edmund Opitz, history, individualism, Mark Twain
The War on Poverty Revisited
Posted by: |By Edmund Opitz, originally published in the February 1986 edition of The Freeman.
Capitalism, by conquering poverty, creates the “problem” of poverty.
If we look back over the history of the past two or three thousand years we realize that most people who have ever lived on this planet were desperately poor, not merely poor by our standards – poor by any standards; miserably housed, shabbily clothed, and continually on the verge of starvation, only to go over the edge by the hundreds of thousands during the regularly recurring famines.
Medieval Europe is regarded by many scholars as one of the high points in world civilization. It gave us the great cathedrals, scholastic philosophy, magnificent works of art, literature like Dante’s Divine Comedy, specimens of craftsmanship that grace our museums, and chivalry. But the Middle Ages in Europe suffered from a number of famines. Between 1201 and 1600 there were seven famines, averaging ten years of famine per century. Coming down to 1709, there was a famine in France that wiped out one million people, five percent of the population. The last great natural famine in Europe was the Potato Famine in Ireland in the late 1840s, which claimed about one and a half million lives.
Tags: capitalism, charity, economics, Edmund Opitz, poverty
Battle for the Mind
Posted by: |By Edmund Opitz, originally published in the April 1984 edition of The Freeman.
The term Weltanschauung is nothing more than a highfalutin label for “world view.” Everyone has a world view, although not everyone is fully conscious of it or aware of its implications. In other words, everyone conducts his life on the basis of some fundamental premises he takes for granted. The premises may not be explicitly stated, in which case they can be deduced from observations of the way a person habitually acts. Your Weltanschauung is analogous to the contact lenses you are wearing; you don’t see the lenses while you are using them to see other things. The late Cornell philosopher E. A. Burtt put it well when he said: “In the last analysis it is the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of the world that is its most fundamental possession. It is the final controlling factor in all thinking whatever.” That is why it is so important.
We are in the midst of a battle for men’s minds. This is obvious at the level of the news, where we read and hear about a confrontation between Communism and what, for want of a better term, is labeled The Free World. The battle for the mind goes on at the level of official propaganda, and it is also fought out in the classroom, on the podium, from the pulpit, in books—wherever the intellect is engaged and ideas are wrestled with.
The Communists are pretty clear about their world view, Dialectical Materialism, and strongly motivated by it. The people of The Free World, on the other hand, are so unclear about their basic beliefs that little dedication is aroused. Once it was different. Two centuries ago the philosophy of freedom was in the ascendant and clear thinkers declared that “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And they spelled them out in detail. The Free World today gives little more than lip service to its heritage, half-heartedly accepts a milk and water version of the opposition’s world view. That makes for a lopsided contest, for the side that seems to be in focus and dynamic can always recruit fellow travelers from among the lackadaisical.
Two world views are in conflict: Materialism, intellectually insubstantial but passionately adhered to, versus non-Materialism, which generates only lukewarm devotion despite its intellectual and moral strengths. This paper exposes the weakness of the Materialist’s case and demonstrates the strengths of the contrary world view.
Everyone, to repeat, entertains some picture of the entire scheme of things; everyone has a mental image of what the cosmic totality is like — in the final analysis. During the past couple of centuries the most popular world view has conceived the universe along the lines of a mechanism — an immense and intricate piece of clockwork, each cog and gear meshing with the others in a self-contained system. If you like labels, this world view has been called Mechanism by some, Positivism by some, Materialism by others. Karl Marx adopted the belief that only matter is genuinely real, and he gave this doctrine enormous momentum. The Marxist version of this theory is called Dialectical Materialism, and Dialectical Materialism is the most widespread religion in the world today, numbering among its adherents millions who are not Marxists — except at the rock-bottom level of believing that matter is the fundamental reality in this universe.
I believe that Materialism is intellectually incoherent and demonstrably untrue in four essential areas. In the first place, this world view has no genuine place within it where mind, reason, and free will can find their rightful niche. Secondly, Materialism cannot accommodate the idea of inherent rights — immunities belonging to each person in virtue of his humanity. Thirdly, the idea of a moral order is incompatible with the notion that only material things are real. And finally, no one can achieve a proper view of himself as a person who accepts the Materialist teaching that he is merely a chance collocation of atoms, a by-product of physiochemical interactions. Materialism is genuinely compatible with collectivism, but it is incompatible with the freedom philosophy. The free society and market, economy need a world view which has a sound theory of mind, reason and free will; a logically grounded doctrine of inherent rights; a firmly based belief in the moral order; and an authentic understanding of personhood.
If we believe that only matter is genuinely real, we are logically committed to the corollary that mind is secondary, a derived thing dependent on that which is more basic than itself, namely matter. Mind, then, is not sui generis; it does not exist in its own right; it is not a primary ingredient of the cosmos. Mind, for the Materialist, is merely an epiphenomenon; it is matter in a late stage of development. Mind, intellect, consciousness, cognition, tea-son, rationality, will — are offshoots of matter; shadow, not substance. The really fundamental stuff of the universe — according to this theory — consists of the particles of matter which we can see, touch, count, weigh and measure.
The Reality of Matter Depends upon Reason
It is a peculiar quirk of the modern mentality to affirm without question the reality of matter, but to deny reality to mind. The catch is that it is only by using our mind that we know that matter exists! A rock does not know that stars exist; a tree is unaware of the oceans. Only we human beings know these and other things, and we know them by exercising our cognitive faculties upon the impressions gained through the senses. But our own mind is so close to us, it is so intimately a part of our very self, that we allow ourselves to be misled into downgrading our minds into something subservient to matter.
Matter is indisputably real; that is obvious. But the reality of the mental activity by which we come to know this is equally obvious; every attempt to prove otherwise must be self- defeating. Downgrade the mind, even by the tiniest degree, and you discredit any conclusion you presume to reach by the exercise of your mental powers. A rational case against reason is a contradiction in terms, for the more airtight your argument against reason the stronger the proof — contrary to your intention — of the efficacy of reason.
My proposition may be put in the form of Aristotle’s Law of Identity: Mind is Mind. Mind is not a mere attribute of something sub-mental. Mind is a primordial ingredient of the universe at the most basic level. To reduce Mind to the non-mental is to declare that Mind is non-Mind, which is nonsense. Because Mind is Mind we human beings are able to understand, to make choices, to take charge of our own lives, and to order our lives in line with human purposes. If we believe anything less than this about ourselves we lower our capacity to resist those misguided authoritarians who would make us their creatures.
Our Declaration of Independence talks about “unalienable rights . . . endowed by the Creator,” then goes on to say that governments are instituted to secure these rights. It appears to be one of those self-evident truths that no people would make a valiant effort to structure the laws of their society so as to protect each person’s private domain and render justice for all, unless they first believe in individual rights — the idea that each person possesses an inviolable region at the core of his being. The old-fashioned Whig idea of the Founding Fathers was to limit the reach of the law to the task of securing and preserving freedom of individual action within the rules of the game, and the rules were designed to maximize liberty and opportunity for everyone, allowing everyone the elbow room each of us needs to pursue his personal goals. Only thus may each person’s rights be secured.
The Nature of Rights
The word “liberal” today is the opposite of what the word meant when it first entered the vocabulary about two centuries ago, and a similar fate has befallen the word “rights.” Formerly, rights signified individual freedom and personal immunity from arbitrary interference with peaceful action; the popular belief today is that “rights” are legal privileges entitling people to housing, medical care, education, equal pay, or whatever. How may we recover the sounder idea which was once the keystone of our political system?
There are three schools of thought as to the nature of rights. The popular “liberal” belief today is that society is the dispenser of rights, but this viewpoint depends on the verbal sleight of hand which confuses rights as immunities with “rights” as entitlements. If you define words to mean whatever suits your purpose, anything can be made to mean anything else. As Dr. Johnson said, if you call stones plums you can make plum pudding out of stones!
The second school of thought declares that nature is the source of rights. Let it be noted that rights, whatever they might be, are not material objects. Your liver, your brain, your heart are material objects; they have mass and extension, and can be weighed and measured. Likewise your body; when life has departed, your carcass can be reduced to $1.98 worth of chemicals! But your rights are like your ideas, in that neither your rights nor your ideas occupy space, nor can either be reduced to a chemical formula.
Now, nature is the material world; it’s a marvelously intricate combination and recombination of the 105 chemical elements from actinium to zirconium. To speak of chemicals as the source of our rights makes as little sense as to speak of the chemical origin of mind and thought. Nor does it make much sense for the Materialist to speak of human nature as the source of man’s rights, because his philosophy has first subordinated human nature itself to physical nature.
The world view of Materialism, I argued earlier, has no genuine place within it for Mind and thought; nor does it have a valid ground for the concept of rights—which is why it twists them into entitlements. There is a radical alternative to Materialism, but what shall we call this other world view? Call it whatever you like, but it’s the religious or theistic world view in its affirmation of the reality of a non-material, mental, or spiritual dimension of the universe. Call it the sacred or divine order, if you like. Or refer to the Mysterium Tremendum Fascinans explored by Rudolph Otto in his seminal book The Idea of the Holy.
Our forebears were not afraid of using three-letter words in public so they used the term God for the creative Power. This Power also worked within — the word enthusiasm is derived from two Greek words meaning “the god within” — and thus each person participates in an order of reality beyond society and beyond nature. He is thereby endowed with an inner sanctum which is his alone, any trespass upon which is taboo. His rights are endowed by the creative Power.
The world view which declares that only material things are real, has no place for an independent moral order, and this leads to moral relativism. Theories of moral relativism have seeped into the popular mentality to emerge as slogans and bumper stickers such as “Whatever turns you on,” “If it feels good, do it,” “Do your own thing.” The result is that the shrewd, the wily, the clever, the unscrupulous doing their thing have the rest of us over a barrel.
Moral Relativism
The U.S. News and World Report for October 8, 1984 has a story headlined “Nearly 1 in 3 Gets U.S. Benefits.” It listed the eleven biggest programs from Social Security to infants’ nutrition, involving 66 million people. Many of these recipients are into several programs, for 129,299,000 checks are mailed out from Washington regularly to these 66 million people. The report did not cover farm families, or union members, or the government bureaucrats, or those employed in schools paid for by taxpayers, or people in tariff protected industries, like those in Detroit who charge us thousands of dollars extra for the cars we buy. And there are others. We are now a nation where almost everyone is trying to live at the expense of everyone else. We have written a form of theft into our statutes. Why? Because there’s a little larceny in our souls!
It’s too easy, and too false, to blame the politicians. They’re only our hired hit men, and in cases of this sort the principal is at least as guilty as his agent. Large chunks of the American electorate decided that living off government handouts is easier than working for a living and safer than stealing, so they created political parties in their own image and elected politicians who promise them an inside track to the public treasury.
Moralists in former periods inveighed against this sort of thing, but in the modern world they were no match for the theoreticians of communism and socialism who convinced almost everyone that legal plundering was the wonderful wave of the future. Intellectuals today are not so sure, and many now side with the free society-market economy team. And it is our good fortune that many men and women in public life, people of integrity and intelligence, are fighting in their own way the same battle we are waging.
Reason to Believe in An Objective Moral Order
Is there an objective moral order? That is not possible within the world view of Materialism! Is it probable within a theistic world view? I think so. Your individual physical survival depends on several factors. You need so many cubic feet of air per hour, or you suffocate. You need a minimum number of calories per day, or you starve. If you lack certain vitamins and minerals, specific diseases appear. There is a temperature range within which human life is possible; too low and you freeze, too high and you roast. These are some of the requirements you must meet for individual bodily survival. They are not statutory requirements; nor are they mere custom. They are laws of this universe; they are built into the nature of things. This is obvious.
And it is just as obvious that there are certain requirements and rules built into the nature of things which must be met if we are to survive as a civilization characterized by personal freedom, private property, and social cooperation under the division of labor. It would be impossible to have any kind of a society where most people are constantly on the prowl for opportunities to murder, assault, lie and steal. A good society is possible only if most people most of the time do not murder, assault, steal and lie. A good society is one where most people most of the time tell the truth, keep their word, fulfill their contracts, don’t covet their neighbor’s goods, and occasionally lend a helping hand.
No society will ever eliminate crime completely, but any society where more than a tiny fraction of the population exercises criminal tendencies is on the skids. To affirm a moral order is to say, in effect, that this universe has a deep prejudice against murder, a strong bias in favor of private property, and hates a lie. We may not like living in a stringent universe which lays down a tough set of rules for individual and social survival. But let’s face it; nobody has ever come up with a better alternative to living here and now.
Of course we know that this planetary home of ours is where we belong; and it’s a pretty good place to be, even if at times it’s a pretty tough test run. Each of us came into this world chock full of potentialities and with an immense capacity for learning. At birth we were, in effect, handed a do-it-yourself kit, a do-it-yourself kit for the manufacture of a human being. And then we were given a life sentence in order to transform this raw material into a full-fledged mature adult. In the nature of the case this has to be an inside job, for each person is the custodian of the time, energies and talents which are uniquely his own. Each individual is in charge of his own life, constructing, by the choices he makes hourly and daily, the person he has it in him to become. No outsider can take over this responsibility for us.
The collectivist promise that if we give them the power they will fashion a new social environment which will create a new humanity, is a damnable lie — and I’ve chosen the word deliberately.
Becoming a human being is a full time job, and it’s for life. But there is that perennial urge in the human psyche egging us on to bigger things, like the latest dream of empire, like a “brave new world,” like one more desperate try at some newfangled model of the Tower of Babel. Every collapse of these megalomaniac dreams hurts, but it does provide some people with a clue that human fulfillment lies in a different direction; we have to begin from within. Gerald Heard used to say that we must grow as big inside as the whale has grown outside! A cartoon shows a man paying the final installment on his psychiatrist’s bill. As he hands over the money the former patient says to the doctor: “You call this a cure? When I came to you I was Napoleon; now I’m nobody.” We know that this former patient is on his way, but a gain of this sort feels at first like a loss!
Man is not God; he did not create himself, nor did he write the laws of his being; but men and women do make themselves. And as we seriously take ourselves in hand, we begin to discover who we are and what we may become. “That wonderful structure, Man,” wrote Edmund Burke, “whose prerogative it is to be in a great degree a creature of his own working, and who, when made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation.”
Read more from the Edmund Opitz Archive.
Tags: christian libertarian, Christianity, collectivism, Edmund Opitz, ethics, liberalism, libertarianism, materialism, philosophy, theism, theology
To Save the World
Posted by: |By Edmund Opitz, originally published in the April 1984 edition of The Freeman.
Status quo is a Latin phrase meaning, in a modern translation, “the mess we are in.” A great number of our contemporaries must understand it so, because never have so many persons and organizations come forward with such a variety of schemes for reforming other people and saving the world. This is the age of the Man with the Plan. The reformer, with his blueprints for social uplift, is in his heyday. I suppose that I too would be classified by some as a reformer, for I travel around the country making speeches and taking part in seminars. And the gist of what I have to say is that, indeed, things are in bad shape, but that they might be improved if we approached economic and political issues with more sense and in a different spirit. If the distinguishing mark of a reformer is his yen to save the world, then I am not a reformer. But I live close enough to the tribe so that many of them send me their literature.
Tags: activism, economics, Edmund Opitz, free market, free society, freedom, Marx
Classical Liberalism and Religion
Posted by: |Originally by Edmund Opitz in the November 1985 issue of The Freeman.
Classical liberalism created a revolutionary new view of the political State, its nature and proper functions. We may better understand this sea change in political thought if we contrast the secular state of liberalism with it polar opposite found in the ancient world. The great authority on the ancient city, Fustel De Coulange, tells us that “the state was a religious community, the king a pontiff, the magistrate a priest, and the law a sacred formula.” The Greek polis was Church and State in one, Julius Caesar was Pontifex Maximus; the citizen was bound to the State body and soul. When civic and religious obligations are combined and owed to the same institution we have that absolute power dreaded by Lord Acton.
Tags: Edmund Opitz, justice, liberalism, libertarianism, minarchism, religious freedom
Norman Horn is the creator and primary writer for LCC. Learn a little bit about him in the 