"Fortune does, in the end, favour the brave," said Margaret Thatcher yesterday in a speech marking the 25th anniversary of victory in the Falklands War. Baby the Brave -- above attempting to liberate a piece of chicken from Tuck's plate -- would agree.
"The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship," Terence Jeffrey quotes President Reagan in a lesser known passage from the Great Communicator's "Tear down this wall" speech -- delivered 20 years ago last Tuesday -- that resonates. The totalitarian instinct runs dark and deep in our species, as we are forever blogging, but "something there is that doesn't love a wall":
Pondering what sustained Berliners, surrounded as they were by the Soviet menace, Reagan concluded: "Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West . . ."
Even as Reagan spoke that day in Berlin, the forces of faith and reason were laying siege to Gdansk, Poland. On one side were Polish police, on the other, a Polish priest. The former came to intimidate the masses; the latter to say a Mass . . .
The Protestant president and Catholic pope won the Cold War in Eastern Europe without ever firing a shot there because Christianity had a more powerful and enduring grip on the soul of that region than communism could ever have.
We're reminded of Oriana Fallaci's spiritual kinship with John Paul's successor, blogged here early and often. As we wrote last year:
It's not faith vs. rationality [as some fundamentalist atheists like Sam Harris would have it], but intolerance vs. tolerance. Render unto Caesar, as we've blogged before. It doesn't require religious faith to believe in something worth fighting for. The shining city upon a hill shimmers in our mind's eye. As Oriana Fallaci wrote -- and we are forever quoting -- "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true."
Moral codes -- whether religious, non-religious or anti-religious, red in tooth and claw or metaphorical -- are our species' default mode, the glue that bonds persons related by DNA or by ideology for mutual physical and/or psychological survival. As anthropologist-turned-psychologist Pascal Boyer's brain-scan studies suggest:
When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe.
As well as providing succour for those troubled by the existential dilemma, religion, or at least a primitive spirituality, would have played another important role as human societies developed. By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival, says Boyer . . .
"What I find more plausible is that rather than religion itself offering any advantage in evolutionary terms, it's a byproduct of other cognitive capacities we evolved, which did have advantages," says Boyer.
Tiny in foreground watches as Baby achieves a victory in the latest suppertime skirmish.
The predisposition to believe is there. The standard model -- you're either a member of our group or we'll marginalize you or kill you -- is alive and well all over the world in what we have called "fear societies heavy and lite," wherever totalitarianism -- in President Reagan's words -- thwarts " the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship." Moral relativism notwithstanding, some cultures ARE better than others because they bring out the best in us, while the worst, unable to face life's dark side in themselves, encourage their citizens to stew in their own juices and project their all-too-human faults onto "the other."
Serendipitous double-exposure screen shot from live EWTN coverage of President Bush's historic audience with Pope Benedict XVI Saturday.
Let's give Margaret Thatcher the last word, in a speech yesterday "praising Britain's armed forces to mark the 25th anniversary of victory in the Falklands War":
There are in a sense no final victories, for the struggle against evil in the world is never ending. Tyranny and violence wear many masks. Yet from victory in the Falklands we can all today draw hope and strength.
Fortune does, in the end, favour the brave.
Fortunately, ours is not only the land of the free, but the home the brave.
Update: Modulator's Friday Ark #143, now boarding, is the home of all things bright and beautiful.
Update II: The News Junkie at Maggie's Farm has our number: "Maggie Thatcher, Reagan, fear, and cats."
Update III: For more Manichean musings, be sure to visit Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities, where "the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see!"
Moral codes are essential to any human society to provide rules to govern how we shall deal with each other. As you so aptly point out it is ridiculous to say that all moral codes are equal in the results that they produce. The moral codes which prevailed in the USA during the 18th, 19th, and most of the 20th century produced the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave". Let us hope that our present generations still have the courage to recognize that freedom and support that land.
Posted by: Goomp | June 14, 2007 at 11:59 AM
"Fortune does, in the end, favour the brave,"
what a wonderful post on the birthday of a Flag that stands for Freedom and the Brave.
thank you.
GOOMP says it well also...
Posted by: hnav | June 14, 2007 at 01:00 PM
Reagan and Thatcher... we need people like them now. Here and in Great Britain. People who know that we must fight tyranny in order for our countries to survive. People who aren't afraid to speak their minds when they see something needs to be said. People who aren't afraid to take a moral stand.
They were there in the 80's when we needed them. I think I see another entering the arena with that same sort of vision.
Run Fred Run.
Posted by: Teresa | June 14, 2007 at 05:04 PM