Trailers and fripperies and survival

Reading in a catholic fashion and with a relatively high degree of disorder, I frequently come across unexpected juxtapositions. Sometimes they lead to insight by revealing connections or patterns and sometimes they are just intriguing.

From Brett & Kate McKay’s sterling Art of Manliness comes the essay, Leadership Lessons from Dwight D. Eisenhower #3: How to Make an Important Decision in which they have this throwaway line regarding the run up to the decision to launch Operation Overlord. It says nothing about the decision-making process but much about the character of the decision-maker.

The countdown began on June 2, when SHAEF set up its headquarters in Southwick House, a stately country mansion located just north of Portsmouth. As always, Eisenhower chose to make his quarters in an unpretentious, unheated trailer he dubbed “my circus wagon,” rather than in the home’s more comfortable bedrooms.

Not a particularly standout literary line but one with seeming significance when set alongside what I read last night in Derek Wilson’s Charlemagne in which he relates a story casting light on the character of Charlemagne.

He is described by Einhard as a benign dictator, a no-nonsense, straightforward ruler with a becoming modesty in his personal habits. He was slightly above average height and of heavy build, with a flowing mustache and wide, penetrating eyes. He dressed simply in the typical Frankish tunic over a linen shirt and long hose, over which he wore a blue cloak and, in winter, a jerkin of otter skin or ermine. Einhard tells us that the king loathed dressing up and was with difficulty persuaded to don ceremonial robes for major state or ecclesiastical occasions. A story from the highly anecdotal, ninth-century De Carolo Magno underlines Charles’ contempt for fripperies and has a ring of truth about it. He was at Friuli when some of his courtiers arrived back from Pavia, where they had been enjoying the festival and returned flaunting fashionable clothes of silk, bedecked with feathers and ribbons. Charles insisted that they immediately accompany him on a hunting expedition. The poor men were given no time to change and for several hours were obliged to ride through forest glades and thickets, lashed by rain and briars. On their return they were not allowed to change out of their bedraggled finery. Charles kept them dancing attendance upon him till late into the night. The next morning their ordeal was not over, for Charles commanded them to present themselves in the same clothes they had worn the day before. As they stood before him, shivering in their tattered, muddy garments, the king pointed out to them the moral of their uncomfortable experience; they should not allow their manhood to be sapped by effeminate, debilitating luxury.

And all that seems related to Hilaire Belloc’s observation about the Barbarian (And on these faces, there is no smile) where the barbarian is not necessarily the fearsome external Other but rather the weakness in our own midst, those who consume the seed corn without producing a crop.

The Barbarian hopes and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.

And all of these seem, in some vague fashion, linked to the current pathologies in the West where we seem to have fallen into the habit of indulging current consumption at the expense of future hardship. The capacity to borrow from future productivity growth only works to the extent that the rate of borrowing is less than the rate of future growth. If it exceeds that growth or, if in fact, there is no future productivity growth, you end up with a Greece (or Spain, or Portugal, or Italy . . or France, or . . . ).

The Gods of the Copybook Headings unrelentingly say that there is no free lunch. Someone pays, even if it is not us. Morality should restrict us to consuming at most that which we ourselves produce and not burden others in future generations or others elsewhere with the failure to pay for our excessive consumption. Morality plays such a critical failsafe role and yet we constantly overlook it. Because it is manifested in many small ways, choosing the trailer over the mansion, choosing practical clothing over “fripperies”, it is easy to overlook the importance of morality. And yet the aggregation of small moral decisions provides a failsafe to keep us within the parameters of the copybook headings. We ignore them at our peril.

The sophisticated Barbarian that we breed within our midst, mocks the quiet and consistent discipline that submits to profound accumulated wisdom. The homegrown Barbarian points out the irrelevance and costs of morality to our short term wellbeing, but fails entirely to comprehend its necessity to long term survival. The Barbarian is a short-timer.