15 hours ago
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Caught in the Larousse trap
America upsets people for various reasons today, though it's hard to resist the music, movies and much else. However, you can't help but approve of the American work ethic that made peanut farmers into Presidents (Jimmy Carter) and dirt-poor secretaries into glamorous magazine editors who defined a new way to be for working girls (Helen Gurley Brown). That's just two historical examples.
Moreover, if you examine their upper class, the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), those 'Boston Brahmin' values were pretty sound, really. You had to study, you had to have accomplishments (in music, ballet, or foreign languages), and you had to be outdoorsy for body-mind balance. Besides wealth creation, you had to work on something that added to the sum of human knowledge; you had to support museums, universities, and good causes, grow gardens, and practise serious philanthropy. Most appealing, you had to practise thrift: use money for acquiring graces, not for showing off.
An Austrian Jew who embodied these values was Justice Felix Frankfurter, a star of Harvard Law School, an advisor to President Franklin D Roosevelt, and a Supreme Court judge. I love his 'Advice to a Young Man Interested in Going to Law'; it's a life-bestowing mantra:
'No one can be a truly competent lawyer unless he is a cultivated man. If I were you, I would forget all about my technical preparation for law. The best way to prepare for the law is to come to the study of law as a well-read person. Thus alone can one acquire the capacity to use the English language on paper and in speech and with the habit of clear thinking, which only a truly liberal education can give. No less important for a lawyer is the cultivation of the imaginative faculties by reading poetry, seeing great paintings, in the original or in easily available reproductions, and listening to great music. Stock your mind with the deposit of much good reading and widen and deepen your feelings by experiencing vicariously as much as possible the wonderful mysteries of the universe and forget all about your career.'
