Charles Krauthammer - Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

Copyright 2013 by Charles Krauthammer

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Forum,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

C ROWN F ORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

The following originally appeared in The New Republic: The Tirana Index (December 13, 1982); and On Ethics of Embryonic Research as Crossing Lines (April 29, 2002).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-385-34917-8
eISBN 978-0-385-34918-5

Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket photograph: Frank Longhitano

v3.1

For Robyn and Daniel

What matters? Lives of the good and the great, the innocence of dogs, the cunning of cats, the elegance of nature, the wonders of space, the perfectly thrown outfield assist, the difference between historical guilt and historical responsibility, homage and sacrilege in monumental architecture, fashions and follies and the finer uses of the F-word.

What matters? Manners and habits, curiosities and conundrums social and ethical: Is a doctor ever permitted to kill a patient wishing to die? Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase women and children? How many lies is one allowed to tell to advance stem cell research?

What matters? Occams razor, Fermats last theorem, the Fermi paradox in which the great man asks: With so many habitable planets out there, why in Gods name have we never heard a word from a single one of them?

These are the things that most engage me. They fill my days, some trouble my nights. They give me pause, pleasure, wonder. They make me grateful for the gift of consciousness. And for three decades they have occupied my mind and commanded my pen.

I dont claim these things matter to everyone. Nor should they. I have my eccentricities. Ive driven from Washington to New York to watch a chess match. Twice. Ive read Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time. Also twice, though here as a public serviceto reassure my readers that this most unread bestseller is indeed as inscrutable as they thought. And perhaps most eccentric of all, I left a life in medicine for a life in journalism devoted mostly to politics, while firmly believing that what really matters, what moves the spirit, what elevates the mind, what fires the imagination, what makes us fully human are all of these endeavors, disciplines, confusions and amusements that lie outside politics.

Accordingly, this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about everything but politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd. Working title: Theres More to Life than Politics.

But in the end I couldnt. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everythinghigh and low and, most especially, highlives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know, every schoolchild is fed. But even Keatspoet, romantic, early 19th-century man oblivious to the horrors of the century to comekept quotational distance from such blissful innocence. Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politicsbecause of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.

This is no abstraction. We see it in North Korea, whose deranged Stalinist politics has created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and material. We saw it in Chinas Cultural Revolution, a sustained act of national self-immolation, designed to dethrone, debase and destroy the highest achievements of five millennia of Chinese culture. We saw it in Taliban Afghanistan, which, just months before 9/11, marched its cadres into the Bamiyan Valley and with tanks, artillery and dynamite destroyed its magnificent cliff-carved 1,700-year-old Buddhas lest theylike kite flying and music and other things lovelydisturb the scorched-earth purity of their nihilism.

Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns. The entire 20th century with its mass political enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin. World War I not only killed more people than any previous war. The psychological shock of Europes senseless self-inflicted devastation forever changed Western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts, virtues and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughlyto war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the statethat the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution. Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the culture, the very tongue of the now-vanished world of European Jewry.

The only power comparably destructive belongs to God. Or nature. Or, if like Jefferson you cannot quite decide, Natures God. Santorini was a thriving island civilization in the Mediterranean until, one morning 3,500 years ago, it simply fell into the sea. An earthquake. A volcanic eruption. The end.

And yet even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of manmore particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power.

Which in its day-to-day conduct tends not to be the most elevated of human enterprises. Machiavelli gave it an air of grandeur and glory, but Disraelis mordant exultation I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole, best captured its quotidian essencegrubby, grasping, manipulative, demagogic, cynical.

The most considered and balanced statement of politics place in the hierarchy of human disciplines came, naturally, from an American. I must study politics and war, wrote John Adams, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. Thats politics done right, hard-earned, often by war. And yet the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the ever more delicate and refined arts. Note Adams double reference to architecture: The second generation must study naval architecturea hybrid discipline of war, commerce and sciencebefore the third can freely and securely study architecture for its own sake.