A phlegmatic pragmatism.

I just posted When This Bloody War is Over, the lyrics to the eponymous song from World War I.  

The song jogs a thought.

It is easy to become depressed about the dynamic which is driving racism, authoritarianism, and socialism, through the many of variants of Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Theory, or just plain old Socialism, pervading our leading institutions.  Those forces have taken on especial salience during the venture of Covid-19 Panic.  

Everywhere you look, it seems we are abandoning Classical Liberalism and Age of Enlightenment thinking based as they are on human universalism, natural rights, freedom, rule of law, equality before the law, due process, empiricism, free markets, freedom of speech, etc.  

My suspicion is that we are simply going through an evolutionary cycle.  Classical Liberalism has delivered astonishing human well-being and is now being tested by the traditional reactionary forces of authoritarianism in its many forms.  Will we survive?  Sure.  But living through the moment can engender doubt.

When This Bloody War Is Over captures the pugnacious Anglo spirit, disrespectful of authority, libertarian in nature and illustrative of attributes which are perhaps among our greatest strengths.  The British Empire was unique in many ways.  Most people focus on its mere size and diversity . . . The sun never sets, etc.  True enough.

But one of the more astonishing attributes was the degree to which it simply emerged rather than was deliberately constructed, the by-product of a thousand different path dependencies.  And more startling yet was the British, especially the English, jaundice and skepticism of what they had accidentally created.  

One of the more delightful forms of this skepticism is in what they celebrated.  Sure, they had plenty of jingoism.  But, for a martial empire, they certainly had a lot of celebration of losses and failures.  Dunkirk was held out as a shining triumph.  Of a catastrophic military defeat.  Rorke's Drift celebrated in song and movie was the bare survival of one small unit after a preceding massacre at the Battle of Isandlwana during which the entire British force of 3,100 was killed.  Then there is the heralded Battle of Britain, a defensive battle for the very survival of the British nation.  There is the celebration of the glory of the sinking of the British troopship Birkenhead.  Not to forget the portrayal of the fall of Khartoum and the death of General Charles Gordon.

This spirit seems, in some unclear way, linked to the English tradition of muddling through, defined by the Oxford dictionary as 

to continue doing something without having any clear plan or purpose, or without having enough help or support

A phlegmatic pragmatism.   Books have been written, as have serious articles about The Science of "Muddling Through".  

And I wonder whether some of our despondency about the encroachments of Wokeism and Authoritarianism might not be a blindness to our own American inherited Anglo cultural trait of muddling through and celebrating reverses (Pearl Harbor, the Alamo, etc.).  We are threatened by the new authoritarians, racists, centralizers.  It is easy to look at universities and the Deep State and the failing mainsteam media and feel like all our central pillars of culture and success are being assailed.

And they are.  But perhaps we are just not enough attuned to American phlegmatic pragmatism.  For individuals, there is no point in fighting the centralizing intellectuals and their theoretical battles when you are busy working.  But . . . you get between an American and their critical beliefs - family, community, freedom, independence?  Watch out.  Rousing the sleeping giant is a tired metaphor as is poking the tiger.  

But I suspect something like that is going on.  We see the national assaults on our Classical Liberal society from the authoritarians and socialists.  It is harder to pay attention to the thousands of local school board overthrows, the rousting out of politicians who thought it a good idea to undermine the rule of law by defunding the police, the decline in college attendance as administrators strip away the value of an education.  

Authoritarian, divisive socialists are noisy and noisome.  But America, with its tradition of energetic and aspirational muddling through is not particularly conducive of these alien ideologies.  

UPDATE:  And as if right on schedule, I finish this post and exit back to work.  In passing I notice that the Senate has just (barely) approved a new federal district attorney for Massachusetts who, apparently has decided to omit prosecution of a lot of property laws.  Rule of Law and Equality before the Law are pretty fundamental tenets which are probably risky to be seen to be jettisoning by the public.