By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
My Christmas holiday was not the usual one this year. I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day in Munich, watching my grandson’s Connecticut high school hockey team playing in a tournament against German and Austrian teams.
And why would that be of interest to anyone? This is The Wanderer, not Sports Illustrated. (Just for the record: the Connecticut kids won all three of their games against some very good German and Austrian teams.) What prompted me to bring up my time in Munich was something I read by Victor Davis Hanson in National Review the day after I returned home.
Davis described in his January 4 column his exasperation with life in the rural section of California where he lives, contrasting it to the wealthy liberal enclaves around Los Angeles and San Francisco.
He writes of the day when “a neighbor down the road asked whether I had put any outgoing mail in our town’s drive-by blue federal mailbox, adjacent to the downtown Post Office. I had. And he had, too — to have it delivered a few hours later to his home in scraps, with the checks missing, by a Good Samaritan. She had collected the torn envelopes with his return address scattered along the street. I’m still waiting to see whether my own bills got collected before the thieves struck the box.”
After a few more episodes of this sort, Davis and his neighbors decided they had no choice but to “go into town to mail our letters, because our rural boxes have been vandalized by gangs so frequently that it is suicidal to mail anything from home.”
We must stress what Davis is describing: rural and suburban Americans for over a century now have had their mail picked up and delivered in unprotected roadside mailboxes. We have known all along that these mailboxes were vulnerable, but took it for granted that our neighbors would not take advantage of that fact. We trusted our fellow citizens to be good folks who would permit our post office to provide us with the convenience of local delivery and pickup.
That presumption is now unwarranted in Davis’ area of California. Illegal immigration has changed the character of the neighborhood. Davis also points to widespread vandalism, littering and a despoliation of the countryside, families sleeping in their cars and dumping their household trash — everything from used diapers to empty beer cans — along the side of the road.
And what is the Munich connection? It centers on a subway station just a few short blocks from the hotel where the American hockey players and their families stayed. It was a great convenience. It permitted the families to access easily downtown Munich’s shopping centers and restaurants, Olympia Park, and the nearby BMW museum.
Everyone was impressed. But not only by the city’s beauty. What drew as many comments was the subway system itself. Repeatedly, people said to me, “I can’t believe it. It is almost like an honor system!”
Which it almost was. Tickets were sold at an automated kiosk at the train station. You punched in how far you wanted to travel from your current destination, and whether you intended to use your ticket just for a single day or for an extended period of time. At which point, the price appeared on a screen, somewhere between 3 and 8 Euros in most cases. After you paid, your ticket popped out from a slot on the kiosk. You took the ticket and went on your way to the clean and well-lit platform and the train of your choice. No one stopped you to see if you had the appropriate ticket.
I learned later that conductors make spot checks. But for the most part, the presumption was that cheating would not be an issue; that most people would pay the appropriate amount. Just as Victor Davis Hanson and his California neighbors once assumed that there was little chance that anyone would drive around stealing their unprotected mail.
This led me to think of Edmund Burke’s observation: “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
In the Christian West, the controlling power upon will and appetite that permitted free societies to flourish was the Christian religion. It is this self-discipline that permits the Munich subways to operate without turnstiles and a swarm of conductors and policemen guaranteeing that the system is not abused by freeloaders.
The chaos in Davis Hanson’s mail service is a result of those inner disciplines no longer holding sway in California. It is why so many of the families on the hockey tour remarked with raised eyes, “Imagine what would happen if they used this system in the New York City subways!” Turnstiles and policemen on the subway platform in New York City are a far cry from Burke’s “fetters,” but you get the point — and its implications.
One might object at this point that surveys point to a decline in active Church membership in modern Germany. I don’t question those findings. But Burke has an answer. He writes of how the inner disciplines of Christianity can live on as an “unbought grace of life” long after the members of a society desert their religious beliefs; that the years when the Church shaped societal beliefs result in moral standards that endure among once-Christian populations that think of themselves as secular.
But if my point is that the secularized people of Munich behave so honestly on their subway systems because of the impact of Christianity on their national culture, why did not those inner disciplines prevent the rise of Nazism? Dachau is located a short drive from the heart of Munich. (The hockey players and their families toured the concentration camp as part of their trip.)
Burke cannot help us out here. He died long before Hitler appeared on the stage. But the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine can stand in his place. Ponder his words:
“When once the restraining talisman of the Christian cross is broken in Germany, then the fury of the ancient warriors, the berserker rage of which the Nordic poets sang, will surge up again. The old stone gods will rise from long-forgotten ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes; and Thor with his giant hammer will leap up and smash the Gothic cathedrals. And when that crash comes, it will be like nothing heard before in history….A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll” (1834).
Put otherwise, the unbought grace Burke described should not be taken for granted. A society can turn its back on its blessings, whether in Germany in the 1930s or in California and New York City in our day and age.
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