Sometime after 9-11, I read an article in The Weekly Standard by David Brooks. The article compared reaction to Pearl Harbor to 9-11.

Brooks told his friends and neighbors what he was writing about. Their unanimous reaction was, “There must have been enormous Japan-bashing in those days.” The tone is that this was a bad thing to “bash the Japanese.” To Brooks’s friends, the Nisei internment was a far worse crime than bombing Pearl Harbor.

This didn’t bother Brooks in the slightest. He is the embodiment of the neocon “cheerfull conservative” we have seen recently.

Imagine FDR declaring, “Germany and Japan are lands of peace.”

Mr Auster, what should Bush have done exactly then?

Read the linked article at NewsMax, where I discuss one or two things that Bush should have done as a minimum, namely, explaining our own position, which he declined to do. As I said, such passivity would have been inconceivable in any administration prior to Clinton’s.
By the way, the Chinese incident is not the main subject of that article, it’s the introduction to it.

This morning newsmax was not accessible This is the reason I didnt read the article

Well, concrete right and wrong judgements in the political sphere seem difficult to make when the determining principle of American society is profit; proof of this is as easy to come by as turning on the television (kids, do not try this at home). Deregulated media, deregulated life - in favor of profit, renders moral judgements secondary it seems.

Is the fact that the pursuit of profit seems to have become the determining principle of American society the cause of nihilism (as Rory believes), or rather one of its many consequences? European societies do not make profit their determining principle, and pride themselves on their social egalitarian policies, yet they are at least as nihilistic as we are. Think of the Netherlands. Though there is an obvious tendency for money-making to become immoral, the same is true of any human activity, including the pursuit of equality. Much of the best in America has been built on the belief that the making of money is compatible with morality, and, indeed, that it is far more compatible with morality than a system that tries to suppress the making of money along with other forms of individual achievement.

Interesting point; nihilism coming first before profit-as-principle. It seems to me however, that the American idea of morality and money is that the two are separated. Traditional societies united these two and thus had certain controls on commerce (like the nearly universal prohibition on usury).
Capitalism, at least in its lately quite extreme form, sees morality as outside its realm - Is it wrong to use fake wealth (ie non-representational paper or electronic money)? Should profit be restrained in the name of morality? Capitalism, like Rockefeller, says it doesn’t matter, the goal is to make money, morality doesn’t have anything to do with it. Again just look at profit based television to see the separation of morality and commerce in action.
I like your first point about nihilism, but I disagree with the idea that America united commerce and morality, it seems to me that it separated them.

I think it’s a mistake to say that capitalism per se is immoral, just as it would be a mistake to say that sexual intercourse per se is immoral. Every legitimate human activity can be expressed in a variety of ways. It can be expressed in harmony with moral principles, or in defiance of them.

If Mr. Dickson wants to say that the dominant type of capitalism we have now is immoral or has a powerful tendency in that direction, I would agree with him. Like him, I find attractive many aspects of medieval society, which placed controls on economic activity for the sake of the social good. At the same time, a modern American businessman making money through moral means is engaged in a highly moral activity. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

There is not much to disagree with here, but I am curious as to what precisely Mr. Dickson means by “fake wealth” and what sorts of wealth are not fake, in his estimation. Is there a Marxist Labor Theory of Value lurking?

Well, first of all, if I am spouting a Marxist theory of value, it is a weird coincidence, as I know little or nothing about Marx’s theory of value.
What I am speaking about when I say real wealth, is stuff like property, livestock, food, means of transportation, resources, etc. When I say fake wealth, I mean paper or electronic currency that is not tied to any of the real wealth mentioned above. In which case, the currency just represents itself.
An example of this is the fact that there is more electronic ‘money’(various national currencies) traded on world markets in one day than there is trees to make the paper to represent that money, let alone any real wealth.
So this ‘money’ only really exists in numbers, so calling it ‘fake’ wealth, is, I think, legitimate.

With all due respect, I think that this is a rather naive view of wealth. Tangible things themselves do not constitute wealth; it is the various rights to choose, act upon, and dispense with those things (some of which, like information, are themselves intangible and all of which involve a network of obligations between people) that constitute wealth. If claims that you have on other human beings and that they have on you — including the sorts of claims that we call “wealth” — are all fake then I think any sort of moral or economic belief system breaks down. If all that there is to wealth is tangible things, then what distinguishes owner from trespasser?

In the LTV Marx tried to reduce value — that is, wealth — to a quantified product of human labor. This is slightly more sophisticated (though still hopelessly naive) than trying to reduce value to tangible stuff.

The “real wealth vs. fake wealth” distinctions are I think rooted in denial of the transcendent. Part of the problem with the word “transcendent” is its out-there and away-from-real-life modern connotations. In actual fact there are any number of run of the mill things — like human obligations to each other, and the thing we call “wealth” which is a subset of these obligations — which are transcendent.

My view of wealth is no doubt somewhat naive, and economics is a topic of which I am a hopeless amateur. I agree that wealth is not exclusively material, but derives from a social consensus that yes, if that person bought and maintains that material, then that is that person’s property.
What I guess I am poorly attempting to say is that ‘money’ can be a deceptive representative of wealth, as it is concievable that a nation can have lots of money, while its social, spiritual and natural environment can be impoverished.
So I guess I am critiqing capitalism’s use of money as a representative of wealth.
And to clarify, I do not base my excuses for economic theory on a denial of the trancendent, I base them on traditional critiques of modern money.

I think that to the extent “capitalism” is thought to abstract everything that is worth anything — the comprehensive good — and make it interchangeable with any other good based on actual human desires and willed choices, it is clearly an evil modern tyranny. I don’t think most people thought about money that way until Marx trained them to think about it that way, though, or at any rate until modern times. Even the word “capitalism” is Marx’s legacy, an epithet against the concept of property in general.

As a means for exchanging venial goods with others in a minimally regulated (which is to say non-tyrannical) but reasonably liquid manner, money of whatever form is always an abstraction but does not have to be intrinsically evil, it seems to me. Any “gold standard” implies that the only thing of any value is gold (and in like fashion a paper standard implies that the only thing of any value is paper bills). These notions seem to me to be counter to any world view that acknowledges the transcendent and places authority in it, whether self-consciously or not.