The Western tradition.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Hal Colebatch's long letter (March 2004) against my essay on the adulation of modern America is in the oracular and dithyrambic style. For all that, it is ineffectual. I have been savaged by a myxo rabbit. My mistake was to quote Tawney ("a leftish fool") without first checking to see if he was on Mr Colebatch's private index of proscribed (= socialist) economic historians. Tawney, being a Christian Socialist, cannot, by definition, assemble and deliver historical facts. We have here what C.S. Lewis has dubbed Bulverism--"the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument".

On the matter of embracing capitalism, Mr Colebatch and I differ only in degree. He thinks it a grand thing in itself, particularly the American version. I think it only the lesser of two evils. In practice, capitalism is not "morally neutral". When Tawney tells of the medieval proscription on usury, he is not delivering left-wing cant. By its very nature, capitalism makes a virtue out of the acquisition of wealth which in practice can lead to massive injustice and suffering. I wonder if Mr Colebatch, a poet himself, has read Robert Southey's The Sins of Manchester? History has shown that capitalism is a far better option than communism, but this is not to relieve it of wrong-doing. Here I stand with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

It is true that the Marxists actively attacked religion, whereas capitalists did not--they simply mined religion to their own purposes (can I quote Weber, or is he on the index too?) and thereby helped to destroy it. To praise modern American capitalism unreservedly is just plain silly. Allan Bloom, to quote just one notable American, lacks Mr Colebatch's enthusiasm for many aspects of its culture. To suppose it is linked positively to Christianity passes the camel through the eye of the needle. This is what raised my hackles, not some silly socialist dream. Selective quotation from Centesimus Annus will not do the job. I can play that game too (try Rerun Novarum 34-36).

As Sophie Masson points out in her March Quadrant article, the problem is that the old left-right polarity has largely been eroded by the course of recent history. Some old Cold War warriors are oblivious to this and they maintain their rage. New problems have arisen and they are of such a nature that no amount of new technology or political change will solve them. They are diseases of the soul, not of political organisation.

Mr Colebatch characterises the lives of our remote ancestors as being poor, nasty, brutish and short. This familiar, scornful dismissal ...