Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation

Learning is not a cloak to be worn lightly on the mind, to be casually tossed aside when the breeze is summer fair and the sun is in our hair. Learning is a fire: it needs constant stoking to be kept ablaze. These flames may bring discomfort when our season is ripe and we may we may be tempted to let the fire fade, perhaps even to smother the fitful embers. But this is the heat which preserves us in the inevitable, inexorable winter, when our thoughts – and all our striving efforts – would otherwise be frozen and fruitless.

There is a shallow drift of mind that is swept up by facile words, finding itself channeled into well-worn streams and into already over watered fields. Such a mind catches hold of a pretty turn of phrase, seemingly graven with images of eternity and truth. Clever aphorisms, removed from context, are apprehended as absolute certainties and are copied down as epistles for living, shouted as slogans for action, hummed as the jingles of profound thought. Yet their meaning is never again sounded against experience and their useful history is washed away.

Let me offer as an example an aphorism considered an eternal flame of the English-speaking world, but whose gilded surface proves vulnerable to an inner rot, that a learning lightly worn has seized upon as cold fact, a brave truth to be firmly grasped and boldly lived.

Consider Lord Acton's grand maxim: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The Bush Administration seems to have taken this aphorism not as a warning, but instead . . . as a duty.

. . .

Actually believing that all power corrupts offers no compelling reason - once you happen to be in a position of power - to check your own corrupt behavior. Since you expect others to abuse their position, you feel that abuse is expected of you.

This is the true, destructive cynicism at the heart of the Bush Administration. They seriously believe that corruption in government is business as usual, that everybody does it, that everybody expects it. This is the reason why their ideology suggests that less government is better, but also why they and their ilk never reduce it when they are in power.

. . .

FURTHERMORE: Dave Trowbridge alerts me to the fact that Jim Henley is also thinking about power.

"It Lord Actons when it's Lord Acton time."

UPDATE: I've seen several Lord Acton references this week. Maybe all our thoughts turn in this direction because, to coin a phrase, "Power appears corrupt when those in power are corrupt".

Posted by Martial