Gratitude: reflections on what we owe to our country - book excerpt - special issue: 35th Anniversary 1955-1990

National Review, Nov 5, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Access. Freedom. I think back to an afternoon in 1955 when I visited the University of Salamanea and was taken to its original library. Salamanca is the second oldest university in Europe, and in one of its rooms, not much larger than a barbershop, reposes the entire known literature of the West, as of the thirteenth century. The scholars and the monks could enter the library to do their studying. But a Big Bertha was there, a really big cannon to discourage them from removing from that little room any of its all-but-irreplaceable treasures. The ultimate weapon continues to hang over the arched doorway, a few lines of calligraphy, modestly framed: A bull of excommunication, signed by Pope Gregory IX. Remove a book from that library, and you go to hell.

It goes on. I am a sailor who does his own navigation. Stored inside a $200 instrument about the size of my hand I have the exact geographical location of 57 navigation instruments such as; sun, and the moon, for every second of every day between now and 2010. This instrument isn't, for me, a toy. By consulting it I have known how slightly to nudge the wheel of my sailing vessel to come upon remote little islands in obscure parts of the world. The market answer to the question, How do I repay those who made this possible? is easy: I pay the merchandiser $200.

I am less than satisfied that I have requited that debt. Or perhaps the point is that I ought to be less than satisfied.

Yes, there are the utilitarians who will tell you that we owe nothing at all beyond whatever it is we are ready to give, in exchange for what we see displayed in the market. In a biography of Salvador Dali it is recorded that, quarreling with his father when a young man, the hot-bloodedartist set out in a fury to dispose once and for all of e question, -Mat do I owe my father?" He sought to answer the question by withdrawing during a night of passion and sending his ejaculate to his father in an envelope marked PAID IN FULL. That was a high-wire act of reductionism, but philosophically bulletproof- The debt to one's father, repaid by the biological reciprocal. In the implicit social philosophy of too many of our contemporaries one finds little that helps to explain why this is less than an appropriate, let alone tasteful, return: this discharge of one's total obligation to one's father.

No Fatherhood, No Brotherhood was Nelson Rockefeller's social philosophy (as he expressed it in public. Some called it BOMFOG-the Brotherhood of Man, the Fatherhood of God). Other attempts to express collateral relations in the shared patrimony are found here and there. Tocqueville lamented that while aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king, . . . democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it. Thus, not only does democracy induce to make every man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him utterly within the solitude of his own heart." An arresting indictment of a democratic peril: That which makes a man a stranger to his father makes him also a stranger to his brother ... and what severs the cords binding the generations also snaps the web that unites contemporaries.