The lessons you learn early along at home and in school leave lasting imprints on the mind. This is not big news. Biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene calls these lessons, memes. And he claims that some of these memes are every bit as important as genes in guiding the individual’s fortunes and in the long run in nudging the course of human history.
“Just as genes propagate themselves in a gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs,” he wrote, “so memes propagate themselves in the same pool by leaping from brain to brain.”
Like genes, memes also mutate and cause mutations in their parasitic leaps from brain to brain by means of music, books, talk, television, Internet, etc. In other words just as there is a geosphere (inanimate matter) and a biosphere (living matter) so there is a “noosphere” (world of thought) that compliments, interacts with and sometimes guides the geosphere and the biosphere.
I think this noosphere is real and is important in history.
One example: as a child in the depression days I remember asking my father why President Roosevelt didn’t just print some money and give it to people like us who needed it. I don’t remember his answer. He probably didn’t have one. (Actually Roosevelt did try to do that. It didn’t work very well.)
That idea however–that meme– that the government can and should solve all of our economic problems is a powerful one that has lasted right up to this day. Our founding fathers back in 1776 looked forward to a prosperous America. But they expected it to come not from government efforts so much as the growth of independent American farms, businesses and industry. And so it has. The government had an important part of course. That was primarily to defend the new country and to free the citizens from tyrannical rulers, royal and clerical, so that they could then produce wealth and prosperity.
Calvin Coolidge was president when I was born. For the most part he agreed with the founding fathers. My wife Jane shares a summer house in Vermont adjacent to the Coolidge farm and land. Often we have visited the Coolidge homestead in Plymouth, Vermont. The small post office in Plymouth has an upper attic room that was the “summer white house” in the Coolidge administration of the 1920s. They sell a post card there now with a picture of Cal and his two secretaries (his only two secretaries) in a bare room roughly 25 feet by 25 feet, opening a mail pouch. That was it. The summer white house!
Silent Cal is often ridiculed today. You have probably heard the perhaps apocryphal story about the fancy White House dinner party where a lovely lady seated next to the President said to him, “a friend bet me Mr. President that I couldn’t get more than three words from you.” Cal answered, “you lose.”
Some pundits love to mock his other much repeated quote that “the business of America is business.” Actually the quote is reasonably accurate but critics rarely put it in context. If you do so I think you might agree that he had some points we would be wise to consider today.
“After all,” Coolidge said in his speech before a gathering of businessmen, “The business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life. … Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture. Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well-nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it.”
In contrast consider Franklin Roosevelt’s attitude toward wealth. His attorney general, Homer Cummings, defended his boss’s visceral hatred of wealthy businessmen and once said “I cannot understand why it is immoral to stop people from becoming rich.”
Perhaps he should go to China as Jane and I did a few years ago. We came upon a street festival in a small city in Yunnan Province (one of the poorer provinces of China) where a group of women were singing to a large crowd. A translator said the lyrics were “it’s great to be rich!” What’s the world coming to when China is lecturing us about the virtues of capitalism?
During Coolidge’s six years of office we had an average unemployment of 3% and inflation of 1%, the lowest “misery index” for any president of the 20th century.
Unfortunately we seem to be now travelling down the Roosevelt path rather then the Jefferson/Washington/Hamilton/Franklin/Coolidge one. The meme that says to take from Peter to pay Paul will always get the support of Paul. In the long run both Peter and Paul will suffer however.
Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President
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