Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:28 and sunset is 8:15 for 14 hours 47 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 11.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1780, New England’s Dark Day, an unusual darkening of the day sky, is observed over the New England states and parts of Canada:
Most people found the darkness to be baffling and inexplicable. Many applied religious interpretations to the event.
In Connecticut, a member of the Governor’s Council (renamed the Connecticut State Senate in 1818), Abraham Davenport, became most famous for his response to his colleagues’ fears that it was the Day of Judgment:
I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.
Davenport’s approach is worthy, admirable, and inspirational. One continues in one’s good work come what may.
What role is there — what role should there be — for family legacy in public policy? None. None whatever. In private life, one may happily recall the accomplishments of prior generations: how long a family has been in the nation or city, what one’s late relatives did, said, and believed. Private, familial bonds extend from the present backward into the past.
In the public policy of the present, however, a well-ordered free society does not extend privileges among the living to accomplishments that belong only to those who have passed. We are, in the words of a venerable liturgy, responsible only for what we have done or left undone. We have no legitimate claim to an honorable share of the accomplishments of those who came before us.
Those were their accomplishments, not ours. We, ourselves, do not live many lives but one.
And look, and look — a libertarian (as I am) contends for individual rights, of those among us here and now. (From those individual rights, persons may freely choose with whom to associate. In this way, libertarianism rejects an initial position of group rights but acknowledges and defends the right of individuals, as individuals, to choose to associate into groups if they should so desire.)
And so, and so — in this city, few could be happier than I am with the decline of family legacy as a basis of public policy. Family legacy of the past never belonged as a legitimate influence on deliberations among the living. Someone’s distant ancestor may have done many good things; someone’s distant ancestor is no longer a member of this community and its electorate.
It would have been better for our community if past family legacy had ceased simply through its own absurdity to bedevil the debates of the present. Better for all of us if these claims had simply withered on their own.
Instead, it is the rise of an aggressive nativism that has made passive claims to family entitlement so obviously suspect. If it is wrong to claim a superior entitlement today based on bloodline and pedigree merely inherited, then it is wrong to claim a superior entitlement today based on family actions that were, in fact, never one’s own in any way.
Here we are, here one stands: it is incoherent to oppose nativism in support of the free, equal movement of people and families today while simultaneously contending that one’s own family history deserves special public consideration.
There are myriad anecdotes that this libertarian blogger heard about his family’s past on this continent; they mean nothing for public policy. Nothing.
It is a great tragedy of our time that blood and soil nativism (our own version of die Ideologie von Blut und Boden) grips some of our fellow residents.
We should have finished off familial entitlement on its own, before the worse problem of nativism arrived. Perhaps if we had done so today’s nativism would not be so virulent. Too late: that worse problem has now come our way.
And so, and so — claims of familial legacy and nativism in public policy should and must face the same dustbin.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Testing the Next Generation of Mars Helicopter Rotor Blades: