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Listen To This Frenchman, America

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry knocks it out of the park by clobbering idiotic journalists who freaked out because David Brat, the Tea Party candidate who upset Eric Cantor, once wrote that government should have a monopoly on the use of force. The journos thought this was a sign of some kind of bizarro cult mindset, when in […]

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry knocks it out of the park by clobbering idiotic journalists who freaked out because David Brat, the Tea Party candidate who upset Eric Cantor, once wrote that government should have a monopoly on the use of force. The journos thought this was a sign of some kind of bizarro cult mindset, when in fact, as PEG says, it’s a basic concept in modern democratic thought. If we didn’t believe the state properly had a monopoly on the use of force, we wouldn’t have police.

This is really very basic civics. The fact that leading American journalists don’t know this is a canary in the coal mine, says PEG. It shows that we are badly educating ourselves for democratic self-governance. Excerpt:

The expression “liberal education” is quite important. Today, when we think “liberal education”, we think “Would you like fries with that?” But as the common root with the word liberty suggests, liberal education is an education that helps make us free. Only by first understanding not only the empirical scaffolding of our Universe–a.k.a. science–but also its conceptual scaffolding, a.k.a. the ideas, concepts and history which shape the world we live in, can we ever hope to be free, that is to say to be able to make informed, consciousdecisions.

Similarly, the great men (and, sorry, they were mostly men) who bequeathed us this wonderful order understood that a regime of majority rule cannot long withstand the test of time without having a citizenship that takes seriously the notion of virtue. The virtues, to Aristotle and others, are not so much about being a goody-two-shoes, but rather about the lifelong effort to reach self-mastery through confronting our passions (today, perhaps, we would say: our addictions) and properly ordering our will towards that which is good. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see how growth in virtue is itself a form of liberal education.

Without an awareness of these things, a bunch of very smart people who built our world and know the instruction manual have been warning us, we consign ourselves to doom.

Which brings me back full circle, which is that when a bunch of people, whose job is to write about politics, who presumably have nice-sounding educations, who have editors, don’t know one of the very basics of the political thought that gave us the world we live in, the hour is very late indeed.

But see, here is the thing: no one is talking about it.

You really should read the whole thing. It’s a cri de coeur for putting the liberal arts back into education. PEG, who writes from Paris, says all our leaders talk about is studying more math and science so we can compete with the Chinese, but there is a lot more to life than being better technicians and capitalists.

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