I am an American in my Principles and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.”
With these politically incorrect words, written in a letter to Baron William Mure of Caldwell during the turmoil of 1775, the Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776) forever became an honorary American citizen. And by his influence, he became an uninvited but welcomed delegate to the American Constitutional Convention.
Hume’s good friend and executor of his literary estate, Adam Smith wrote about political leadership in a time of “turbulence and “disorder.” It is a brief passage and one quite applicable to Americans in the early twenty-first century. Smith tells us in the mid-eighteenth century there are two types of political leaders in any society: one is a person of the “system” while the other is a person of the “public spirit.” The man of the “system”:
holds out some plausible plan of [social] reformation which, [he] pretends, will not only remove the inconveniences and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, any return of the like inconveniences and distresses. . . . The system man is intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colors in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it.
Contrarily, the man of the “public spirit”:
will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of his people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniences which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to.
These descriptions are not just the chronologically bound musings of an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher but observations that can be applicable to twenty-first–century American political society. Smith describes American “intoxicated idealistic” activists who want to “immediately” eradicate, eviscerate, and expunge anything that offends their sensibilities. We live in an age “drunk” with political power.
David Hume was a “public spirit” man through and through, and wrote reflectively, systematically, and widely to this end. He left a body of substantial work that effectively combats the age of dictatorial rationalism from a secular vantage point. Hume’s writings provided political guidance, social security, and economic direction for America’s Founding Fathers as they created a constitution (with all its flaws) for a new and more just Republic. Hume’s ideas, which were so influential to the colonials can still provide guardrails for contemporary American political discourse. David Hume’s influence in the shaping of American political society from its very beginning codification will be shown and his benefit for contemporary American society to preserve our union will become evident.
In eighteenth-century America, Hume’s seminal works were read by college students and young leaders throughout the colonies. The colonials wrote in Humean phraseology, presumably to those who also understood Hume’s thought. Hume’s notions of experience and skepticism, the uniformity of human nature, commerce, culture, factions, interests, customs, social institutions, and most importantly, the “science of politics,” were avidly studied, absorbed, and promulgated by the leading colonial minds. As Jeffry Morrison put it, “the ideas and language of Hume were in the colonial air.”
Hume’s political writings fit the pragmatic temper of the new Americans. From every state at the Constitutional Convention his ideas found purchase in the delegates’ debates, letters, and essays. What the Founding Fathers found attractive in Hume was his Scottish common sense, and his freedom from political and religious mysticism and convictions. Hume’s powerful practical intellect grounded in experience resulted in political compromise, the art of the experience. It is no paradox that Americans have always continued to have faith in their religion but skepticism in their politics. That is, we Americans expect our religion to be metaphysical, but we expect our politicians to be very physical. Thus, there is a sense in which Hume’s religious “mitigated skepticism” has its political application in the American civil experience.
As diesel fuel prices rise across the country, the Department of Homeland Security is fielding requests for Jones Act waivers. While the government should approve these waivers, it seems likely that it will pursue a more permanent solution — to repeal the law altogether.
Otherwise known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act requires that any cargo carried between domestic ports must be transported on American-manufactured ships flying the American flag and manned by a mostly American crew. Initially aimed at protecting the U.S. shipping industry from foreign competition, the act artificially limits the supply of cargo ships, making it more costly to transport refined diesel fuel across the country. When energy shortages arise, governors often apply for waivers to get fuel delivered to their states from domestic refineries without having to wait for American ships to become available. Such waivers would not be necessary if the law were permanently revoked. Thankfully, there are strong indications that the Jones Act is facing a final repeal.
Although the law is not without its die-hard defenders:
Jones Act lobbyists have knives out to defend their pet policy. In 2020, the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee, an organization that includes cargo ship owners and builders, sent an email to a government agency recommending that “all past and present members of the Cato and Mercatus Institutes” be charged with treason. Their crime? Advocating the repeal of the Jones Act. Such extreme defensive measures show how vulnerable Jones Act supporters feel — clearly, proponents of the act sense that the political tide is turning against them.
It’s about time, too. The only reason it has lasted this long is that the benefits of the Jones Act are highly concentrated within small groups such as ship owners, ship manufacturers, crew members, and the unions that represent them. These groups have a huge incentive to lobby the government to keep it. And because they work closely with each other, they’re also easy to organize into groups such as the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee. Meanwhile, the marginal cost to everyone else has been negligible enough that it hasn’t been worth the time and effort it would take to lobby against the act — until now.
Pence doesn’t say. Instead, he focuses on the challenges to the electoral vote count in Congress, which he would preside over on Jan. 6. Pence writes that he “welcomed” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., co-sponsoring objections from House Republicans “because it meant we would have a substantive debate,” adding, “Without a senator’s support, I would have been required to dismiss House objections without debate, something I didn’t want to do.”
You see, Pence tries to have his cake and eat it, too. He says he supported “debate” around the “concerns” about the election — but doesn’t actually address the substance of those concerns or the purpose of the debate. Hawley may have avoided endorsing any of the conspiracies Trump was spreading directly, but he also had to know that Trump was the source of the vast majority of the concerns in question. It was all an exercise in self-promotion, not an attempt to clarify the record, and Pence should know that.
This is gonna leave a mark:
. . . let’s not even touch on the conversation with Trump that Pence recounts at the end of the op-ed, except to say that I haven’t read an epilogue that self-indulgent since the seventh “Harry Potter” book.
Ian Bogost's piece at The Atlanticentitled "We're Witnessing the End of Social Media" is garnering a lot of buzz right now, and it is worthy of discussion. He applauds the recent misfortunes of Twitter and Facebook, saying that they have mutated the way human beings are designed to interact and form communities:
t’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.
The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable.
At the Washington Free Beacon, Aaron Sibarium alerts us to a particularly insidious bank-loan concept: looking at how borrowers measure up in terms of diversity practices when deciding whether to lend them money:
Amid an uptick in race-conscious hiring programs throughout corporate America, many prominent businesses are now writing racial and gender quotas into their credit agreements with banks, tying the cost of borrowing to the companies’ workforce diversity, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.
Over the past two years, each of those companies has secured a lending agreement, known as a credit facility, that links the interest rate charged by banks to the company’s internal diversity targets, creating a financial incentive to meet them. If the business achieves its targets, it won’t have to pay as much interest on the loans it takes out; if it falls short, it is required to pay more.
Under the terms of BlackRock’s $4.4 billion credit facility, for example, Wells Fargo will lower the firm’s interest rate by 0.05 percent if it hits two benchmarks—a 30 percent increase in the share of black and Hispanic employees by 2024, and a 3 percent increase in the share of female executives each year—or hike the rate by the same amount if it misses both.
The agreements, which typically involve multiple banks, are effectively credit cards for businesses: Rather than make a onetime loan, lenders extend a continuous line of credit that companies can dip into at will, either to cover operating costs or as a rainy day fund for emergencies. That means changes in a facility’s interest rate—even modest ones like BlackRock’s 0.05 percent diversity adjustment—can have an appreciable effect on a business’s bottom line.
Companies have advertised these agreements as proof of their progressive bona fides. Trimble CEO Rob Painter, for example, said the company’s credit facility—which conditions interest rates on the percentage of female employees—illustrates Trimble’s "commitment" to "gender diversity in the workplace." In press releases announcing their own credit facilities, executives at BlackRock, Prudential, and Definity say the agreements demonstrate their commitment to "accountability."
But critics see something far more sinister: a form of blatant discrimination that will harm consumers, credit markets, and the rule of law.
"If a bank penalized a company's credit rating because it had too many women or was too racially diverse, we would be appalled," said one senior government regulator, who managed a nine-figure credit facility as a lawyer in private practice. "This is the exact same thing, except the penalized target is white men."
Who originated DEI? Why DEI and not another set of laudable values? Does “equity” refer to opportunity or result? How do those of mixed race fit in diversity assessments? Is the goal of racial representation proportionate to that of the population, the history of marginalization, or something else? DEI terms are defined so obtusely that they can refer to a spectrum of policiesfrom mere platitudes to radical agendas including litmus tests and racial quotas.
The older I get, the more reluctant I am to lend any writer or thinker with whom I'm currently resonating my full enthusiasm. I've been burned too many times. But Andrew T. Walker, who teaches Christian ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is currently addressing things that need broader discussion. In his latest piece for World, entitled "Why Is America Coming Apart?", he takes dead aim at what is really going on:
What would have been revolutionary in 2008, like “gay marriage,” seems almost “traditional” to many Americans in 2022, by the sheer force of its cultural normalization in America. Drag Queens dancing in front of children is as recreational as baseball in some parts of the country, or so it seems. Mainstream medical guilds now suggest that confused children and teens mutilate their bodies to tranquilize the mind. Public schools when I grew up might have been secular, but they weren’t morally insane or propagandizing students in cultural self-hatred like I routinely hear about now. Major media outlets are entirely compromised by a groveling deference to wokism and identity politics. The left once called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” but the move to de-stigmatize abortion and gloat about it has moved the needle in a ghoulish direction.
The surrealism of our simmering unrest is explainable, I think, in the near total collapse of Christianity as America’s underlying public ethic. At least for the moment, put away questions about Christian Nationalism. What I’m observing is the final stripping away over the last few years of the last thin layer of Christian veneer. No secularist will say this out loud, of course. Because that would mean restoring virtues that figures like former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy believe are incompatible with liberty. Such virtues can only be grounded in a transcendent account of the universe.
At Medium, Drew Shepherd looks at how a Christian might address the charge of hypocrisy:
. . . if we stick to the notion that Christianity should be dismissed because its followers act contrarily to their claims, we must first go to the source to see what those claims actually are.
Because if you’re looking for biblical evidence that says Christians never do wrong, you’re out of luck:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. (Rom. 7:18–21 NIV)
These verses describe the apostle Paul’s struggle with sin in his life. And if the man who wrote a large chunk of the New Testament admitted he was a “hypocrite”, it’s no surprise that other Christians face the same problem.
Ecclesiastes also presented this truth in the Old Testament:
Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins. (Eccles. 7:20 NASB)
And the apostle John followed with the same idea:
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8 NIV)
No matter how clean some Christians appear or how outspoken they are, they will always contend with a form of evil in their life.
So since this problem is common among all Christians — even the ones who should know better — you’d think God would be angry at us all the time. At least that’s how most people think of God: as a harsh, unforgiving, ban-you-to-hell-because-of-what-you-did-in-second-grade Person. But these next verses from the book of Psalms paint a different picture:
Just as a father has compassion on his children, So the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him. For He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust. (Psalm 103:13–14 NASB)
God knows everything about our fragile makeup and the condition of our nature — He has compassion on us because of it.
He knows the Christian life involves doing the unnatural. And He knows we would never succeed without His help.
And my latest at Precipice is about how it's time for me to realize I'm no longer a fledgling Christian and that I can and need to engage the world with the assurance of someone whose been at this faith-walk thing a while.
There. That ought to keep you out of mischief this weekend.
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