Energy And Freedom

WHEN SINGER Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers in Los Angeles got a chance to audition for the Tommy Dorsey big band in New York, they piled into a car and drove across the nation—in 1939. No doubt it was cheaper than taking the train.

When Jack Kerouac went On the Road in the late 1940s he went in a car. It wouldn’t have been quite the same if he’d taken the bus.

Cars have been useful to ordinary people too. When Americans have looked to buy a home they have often traded price for commute time. They decide how big of a home they want, and then start driving out of town knowing that the longer the commute, the lower the price.

Cars are freedom. Even back in the 1840s Thomas Cook could see that. Of course, in those days there weren’t any cars, but he arranged for a special train to carry him and 500 other temperance campaigners to a meeting eleven miles out of town.

As the Duke of Wellington complained, railways encouraged the poor to travel around needlessly.

Sooner or later, the powerful were going to try to put a stop to all this needlessness. It was a question of saving the planet. Rich, powerful people would travel around the planet on executive jets exhorting people to stay home and use mass transit. And if that didn’t work they had a old-fashioned backup plan: prophecy. Oil, the major transportation fuel, was running out, they preached. So it didn’t make any sense to look for it, since it was running out anyway.

This campaign worked like a champ for a while, for people naturally defer to their superiors, especially when they talk in a confident, superior way from a media pulpit. People decided it would be good to “go green,” especially if it meant buying a vanity car like the Toyota Prius.

But when gasoline reaches $4.50 per gallon then “going green” doesn’t do it. If you are a young singer, maybe you can’t afford to drive to that breakthrough audition. If you are a dental assistant, it means giving up your dream of a little acreage and a horse. What’s a few acres compared to saving the planet?

In his Farewell to Alms Gregory Clark reminds us that underneath all the innovation and the freedom of the modern capitalist world is one rather simple concept. It is the energy input from non-biological production. In the old days there was a limit to the energy that could be deployed for human use. It was limited to the output from organic agriculture.

Today things are different. We can mine and drill for energy instead of grow on farms. Remove that energy and we would still be better off than 200 years ago, but not much. There is a limit to a world fueled entirely by animal power and agriculture.

It is the concentration of energy in oil and in coal and, even more so, in uranium that enables us the ordinary Wal-Mart worker to enjoy luxuries hardly dreamed of by Egyptian pharaohs. So when planet-saving priests urge us to abandon highly concentrated energy that has transformed our lives and return to low-concentration energy sources like biofuels and wind power we may well believe that they are flying us up a box canyon.

When a pilot realizes he is flying up a box canyon with nothing but a rock wall ahead, he understands that he must abandon his natural precautionary principle—there are old pilots, bold pilots, but no old, bold, pilots—and take a big risk for once.

In the summer of Drill, Drill, Drill, the American consumer finds himself in a similar situation. He finds that the natural instinct of the powerful to increase their power by reducing his access to energy has him flying up a box canyon.

In Congress the high priests of carbon footprints and peak oil are still celebrating the Mass of global warming with its liturgy of carbon taxes, cap and trade, and wind and solar. But they are worried by the mob outside the door baying Drill, Drill, Drill. Are you afraid, Wolf Blitzer asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week?

PELOSI: You know, I mean, the point is, is we are putting forth the alternatives that we need to put forth, and that is, drill, use it or lose it. …

BLITZER: So let me get — will you allow this issue, offshore oil drilling, to come up for a vote on the floor of the House?

PELOSI: We’re going to exhaust our other remedies in terms of increasing supply in America by…

BLITZER: So the answer is no?

PELOSI: I have no plans to do so.

The text doesn’t quite communicate an embarrassed Speaker stumbling over her talking points and finally admitting that she has no intention of getting the ordinary people in America out of the energy box canyon.

But don’t lose hope America. It took six months of dithering before the Democratic Congress threw the trial lawyers under the bus and passed the update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. How long will it take for Democrats in Congress to throw the environmentalists under the bus?

After all there is something more important than saving the planet. It is winning the next election.

Some people think that there is something more important than winning elections. It is an America where Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers can still pile into a car and drive across the continent to audition for the Tommy Dorsey band. Because if freedom means anything it means an America where people don’t have to live in a liberal-approved townhouse and commute to work on a liberal-approved mass-transit system.

An America that is still strong and free would be an America where a dental assistant can aspire to a little acreage and a horse or two.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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