Now, a crowd shot only shows people holding up their cell phones and digital cameras and squinting to see if they’re focused on the action.

“Politics is not only conflict.”

From an obituary of former Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, who cleaned up after the dirty juntas. I have only seen the quote in an LA Times version of the obituary, on the wire but not currently available online.

“Our parents called themselves humanists. They had been raised as Christians, but had lived through the Second World War and lost faith in the God who permitted it. They regarded humanism as a residual option, once faith had dissolved. It was not something to make a song and dance about, still less something to impose on others, but simply the best they could manage in the absence of God.

“… Looking back on it, I see the humanism of my parents as a kind of rearguard action on behalf of religious values. They, and their contemporaries, believed that man is the source of his own ideals and also the object of them. There is no need for God, they thought, in order to live with a vision of the higher life. All the values that had been appropriated by the Christian churches are available to the humanist too. Faith, hope, and charity can exist as human causes, and without the need for a heavenly focus; humanists can build their lives on the love of neighbor, can exercise the virtues and discipline their appetites so as to be just, prudent, temperate, and courageous, just as the Greeks had taught, long before the edict of the Church had fallen like a shadow across the human spirit.”

I would know less about the British version, but in America, it seems to me, this was a long process that begins with the intellectual heirs of Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment grappling with the legacy of their thought and the advances of science in the 19th century. In other words, not entirely traceable to World War II, or World War I, which seems the stronger candidate for a tipping point.

When the point tipped and the basket spilled, more nervous mentalities scattered into bad constructions. The whole gore-clotted history of the 20th century is a record of what intellectual idealists do when they feel freed from old moral restraints and try to construct utopias.

Though WWII isn’t a bad choice, either. The last great humanist celebrity in the old style might have been Jacob Bronowski.

Scruton’s nostalgia is sharpened by his distaste for the new set of thinkers who claim the mantle of “humanists.”

“This humanism is self-consciously “new,” like New Labour; it has its own journal, the New Humanist, and its own sages, the most prominent of whom is Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and vice-president of the British Humanist Association. It runs advertising campaigns and letter-writing campaigns and is militant in asserting the truth of its vision and its right to make converts. But the vision is not that of my parents. The new humanism spends little time exalting man as an ideal. It says nothing, or next to nothing, about faith, hope, and charity; is scathing about patriotism; and is dismissive of those rearguard actions in defense of the family, public spirit, and sexual restraint that animated my parents. Instead of idealizing man, the new humanism denigrates God and attacks the belief in God as a human weakness. My parents too thought belief in God to be a weakness. But they were reluctant to deprive other human beings of a moral prop that they seemed to need.”

Notably, it is rooted in evolutionary biology. Darwin’s discovery is not the friend of humanism. It first drained the humanism out of Christianity, by robbing the Christian humanist of Nature as a book of God’s love and intentions to set against the strictures of the Testament. It also, ultimately, drains the goodness and morality out of secular humanism, too. It leaves you with a human life consisting of What Worked in the Pleistocene. What allowed us to best kill and fuck and snuff out the Neanderthals.

The humanists may laugh at the creationists as ignorant, but the creationists at least recognize the awful consequence of the science Darwin set in motion.

China is likely to instigate. There is a powerful and building thirst for revanche in the new Chinese nationalism. It sees China as a rightful center of the world, whose place was interrupted rudely by Western imperialists 200 years or so ago. Now, many Chinese seem to feel, the course of history is being set right. Europe is fading. But America, which took a lesser role in the imperialism (and in a few cases worked against it) will serve as a stand-in for the old enemy.

My feeling is that that spirit is especially strong in the Chinese military, or the sort of people from China who end up in the military.

The Chinese army has particular challenges and doesn’t see much advantage in going toe to toe with the U.S., however it may like to do so. The Chinese navy is a different story. I think it is itching for a chance to prove itself and to be the agent of revenge of national honor.

Our own Navy has been little tested since World War II. That could be a century ago by the time a conflict with China begins. Even the Soviets, at their height, never presented much of a direct threat at sea (sub-launched ICMBs don’t count; I’m talking about fleet-to-fleet action).

If China can continue to thrive as it has, these grudge forces will be largely diffused into prosperity. But if the economy stalls and stays that way, more blunt nationalists may obtain more power in China.

I suspect any conflict will begin indirectly. As a dispute with Japan or Vietnam or, of course, Taiwan. Perhaps even with Russia over a breakway Siberia. The U.S. may be only a tangential player at first. But it will be in the sights of the Chinese admirals.

Sea wars are nasty. With one well-placed missile a pilot can take out a mid-sized ship and give the U.S. as many casualties in 15 minutes as we’ve taken in 6 years in Iraq.

My hope is that it can be contained. The Chinese will be after a clear victory to slake their thirst for revanch. It will not need to be a war to destruction.

“Roughly one in 20 15-year-old German males is a member of a neo-Nazi group, a higher proportion than are involved in mainstream politics, according to a study released on Tuesday.

“Many politicians fear a resurgence of right-wing extremism as unemployment creeps higher in Germany, which is facing its deepest recession since World War II. Government figures have shown anti-Semitic crimes rose at the end of last year.

…

“The study, conducted in 2007 and 2008, also revealed that neo Nazi-symbols – in either rock music, stickers or special clothing – were used by one in 10 of the youths surveyed. The swastika and other Nazi symbols are banned in Germany.”

 Hat tip, Michael J. Totten.

Emphasis added.

When the authorities ban something — anything — it becomes the readiest-to-hand symbol of youth rebellion and general resistance to — what have you got? There’s always something. Like the Confederate flag would be in the U.S., if some had their way, and partially is already.

“He was a self-taught pianist and began writing songs at age 10. But after graduating from high school, his parents urged him to enroll in the First Institute of Podiatry.”

(Presumably, though, it was Lawrence, not his parents, who had just graduated from high school when the fateful dinner-table scene occurred.)

“All or Nothing at All” is a rightful standard, but ”Tenderly” is one of the great adult love songs of all time. “Adult” in the old sense.

“When they made silent movies everybody could laugh and joke and have a fun time on the set. When talkies came along, everybody had to be quiet.”