Secular Right

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, gave an unapologetic defense of capitalism at the Cato Institute last week.  The recent economic crisis did not result from too much economic liberty, he argued, nor would it be solved by greater government control over businessmen and investors.  He spoke eloquently of the Czech Republic’s determined post-Communist recreation of a market system.  (This Cato essay from 2007 gives a good round-up of Klaus’s thinking; he identifies the three most serious threats to Western freedom at present as complacency that the central planning instinct is a thing of the past; the attack on state sovereignty:

Freedom and democracy — those two precious values — cannot be secured without parliamentary democracy within a clearly defined state territory. Yet that is exactly what the current European political elites and their fellow travelers are attempting to eliminate.

I was surprised, therefore, to read of the Pope’s rebuke of the Czech Republic for its secularism (nearly half of respondents in a recent poll said that they did not believe in God):

Your country, like other nations, is experiencing cultural conditions that often present a radical challenge to faith and therefore also to hope.

No one can gainsay the essential and courageous role of Catholics in helping bring down Communism in Czechoslovakia.  Yet it would seem that this small country has done pretty well in creating social stability and free economic exchange–which depends on trust—without a pervasive religiosity. Continue reading →

We often hear that high labor costs and excessive regulation have hurt the United States’ ability to compete globally in manufacturing.  Yet one of the goals of the recently concluded G-20 summit was to persuade Germany, no less than China, to whack back its export-driven economy in favor of greater consumerism.   So how does Germany, with its mandatory Mitbestimmung (worker participation in management decisions), strong unions, and extensive welfare protections,  keep its export sector competitive.  Perhaps by concentrating on high-end engineered products.  But so could the U.S., presumably.  I find this a puzzle.

It’s not exactly news that Carl Jung was a rum ‘un, but even so this piece from the New York Times is a reminder that the irrational will always be with us, perhaps too much of a reminder. Here’s an extract:

For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations…Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings…The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

Yikes. In an earlier age Jung would, doubtless, have been considered some sort of holy man. In a later age he probably will be.

H/t: Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh on splendidly snarky form