Denver Catholic

14 FEBRUARY 25-MARCH 10, 2017 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives A modest defense of the "liberal world order" S ome preliminaries: I quite agree that the United Nations is a sad, and sometimes malicious, joke. I understand that some people have been the victims of a global- ized world economy and that the "Davos people" who run that econ- omy have (like most of the rest of us) paid them too little heed. Fif- teen years ago, in The Cube and the Cathedral, I warned that the Euro- pean Union risked becoming the overbearing bureaucratic Leviathan it is today; and it seemed to me then, as it does now, that the EU's embrace of a sterile secularism, which accel- erated Europe's detachment from its cultural roots, helped destroy a rev- erence for particularity and for what Edmund Burke called society's small platoons. I get it that the American people are tired of wars, that many Poles and Hungarians don't want their social policy dictated by Brussels, and that Italians and Greeks are tired of having their pleasures disrupted by steely-eyed German accountants. I agree that NATO member states should stop riding American coattails in their laggardly defense spending. I think a visceral defense of British sovereignty was the primary reason for the Brexit "yes" vote, and I fi nd the contemptuous response to that vote by European Union manda- rins a signal that, like the Bourbons, those riding the EU gravy train have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Moreover, and to end this throat-clearing, I think liberal democracy is in grave danger from the ideology of Me and the notion that "freedom" is just willfulness – which is, among many other things, reducing higher education in the U.S. and Canada to a playpen for mini-brownshirts who get violently disruptive when their silly certainties about the plasticity of the human condition are challenged. And yet I think there are things that can and must be said for the "liberal world order" and for liberal democracy. The political and economic system created by the United States and its allies after World War II – a system built around common defense measures and free trade – rescued Europe from the self-infl icted catastrophe of 1914- 1945, prevented nuclear war, preserved the peace until the collapse of the Soviet empire, and allowed once-captive nations to reclaim their liberties. It didn't do too badly by the rest of the world, either. Over the past several decades, more than a billion people lifted themselves out of abject poverty by becoming participants in a system of free trade and the free movement of capital and labor – even as those economic suc- cesses helped create conditions for the possibility of free and decent gov- ernance in places like Taiwan, South Korea, Chile, and India. So might it not be the case that the "liberal world order" needs fi xing rather than dismantling, as some "populists" propose today? Surely those dismantlers don't propose a return to the beggar-thy-neigh- bor economic autarky and myopic nationalism that intensifi ed the Great Depression and helped bring on World War II. As for the security side of the equation, doesn't the cata- strophic condition of the Middle East, after eight years of an American-led withdrawal of western power from the region, demonstrate what happens when those committed to a "liberal world order" retreat from history in history's most volatile regions? Given Vladimir Putin's evident determina- tion to reverse history's verdict in the Cold War, would order be maintained in Europe over the next decade absent a robust NATO? As for the failings of liberal democ- racy itself, the lesson to be learned is surely not that eš cient authori- tarianism makes for better national governance; the lesson is that the democratic project is not a machine that can run by itself. The hardware of democracy cannot run by any soft- ware. Rather, democracy depends on a moral-cultural foundation that has been seriously eroded by the Culture of Me. So if the democratic project is not to decay into either chaos or a dictatorship of relativism, a great work of moral and cultural renewal must be undertaken throughout the West: something akin to a new Great Awakening. Sympathetic as I am to many of their complaints, I don't see that Awakening arising from the most vociferous of today's angry and inward-looking new populists. Thus far, the new populism, whether Euro- pean or American, is much better at identifying what's broken than in defi ning how to fi x it. The Catholic Di° erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL Here's an idea, give up busyness for Lent R emember downtime? It was that thing we did before cell- phones. We'd be waiting for a doctor's appointment or for a bus, and we'd just sit there, idle. I was waiting for a table at a restaurant the other night, and right in front of me was a family of four — mom, dad, son and grandma. Mom, Dad and son all had their cell- phones out, doing whatever urgent tasks people do on their cellphones to take advantage of those few precious moments before their table for four is called, but grandma was just sitting there — watching, thinking, possibly just letting her mind wander. One might be tempted to think that's just what old people do. But according to an article from 2013 in Scientifi c American, titled "Why your brain needs more downtime," grandma was actually engaging in an activity that healthy people do. "Downtime replenishes the brain's stores of attention and motivation," the article states, "encourages pro- ductivity and creativity, and is essen- tial to both achieve our highest levels of performance and simply form stable memories in everyday life. … "Moments of respite may even be necessary to keep one's moral com- pass in working order and maintain a sense of self." The article quotes another essay on a similar topic, one published by the New York Times the year before titled "The Busy Trap." Essayist Tim Kreider defends habits of doing nothing, sug- gesting that being idle is not "an indul- gence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body." "The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole," he added. But isn't idleness the devil's playground? Yes, it can be, when it becomes one's primary mode of being. But I think the authors quoted above aren't advocating so much a life of idleness, as they are suggesting that lives that are spent constantly "doing " something are out of balance. In favor of being "busy" doing stu¡ all the time, we have lost touch with the need to take a break, disconnect, and just rest. And all of that unbri- dled activity hurts more than just our mental processes, it hurts our rela- tionships. If we are always busy, when do we have time for others? Let's go back to the example of the family waiting for a table. Instead of taking advantage of valuable time together to connect and share, they were ignoring each other. Grandma was the only one showing any avail- ability for engaging in conversation, but she was alone. Taking this one step further: If we are too busy to talk to the people right in front of us, how do we expect to have any time to talk to Our Father in Heaven? How often do we say that we would love to pray more, or go to daily Mass, but we are just too busy? We opt for "busyness" over moments of prayer — the perennial problem of choosing to be Martha over Mary. Maybe this Lent we decide to break the cycle. Maybe we opt to "not do" over "do." One practical suggestion would be to take a page out of grandma's play- book and put our cellphones away for a little bit each day, and just sit and look. Maybe we do this in the chapel and spend some time just sitting with God. Go ahead, your Facebook friends will wait. Manager's Column Karna Swanson is the general manager of Denver Catholic, www. DenverCatholic.org. KARNA SWANSON

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