Dennis Prager has decided to release a series of very short lectures under the name, "Prager University"
Here's a 25-second introduction to the series.
And his first 5-minute lecture, on the "American Trinity" of core values. (He's Jewish, so this does not refer in any way to the Christian concept of Trinity).
I recommend the video. Simple ideas. It's not always obvious today that these ideas were basic to the foundation of our country. Worth pondering at this time of rapid change.
I think illustrating basic American values using the words on any American coin makes these ideas easy to remember. And the connection of the French motto, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" with The Terror which overtook the French Revolution was a powerful contrast. The Terror and the subsequent inability of French revolutionaries to form a stable government led to Napoleon's coup d'etat. And The Terror was only a preview of the mass slaughters in Communist countries later on, in the theoretical quest to impose equality.
Did Prager present a semester's worth of ideas in 5 minutes? Possibly, if you (1) evaluate what you have already been taught about culture and politics and (2) think about what you are now learning about current affairs in light of "The American Trinity" of values found on all our coins. You don't need a pendant to remind you of those values.
Prager has a tendency to present ideas "in shorthand" when he writes, too. I prefer to listen to him on the radio, where he can discuss ideas with others in more detail.
Update: Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom, a frequent target of vicious written attacks by liberal academia (including, in the past, serious threats against his small child), thinks that Prager should have used the word "principles" instead of "values" to avoid intellectual attacks from the Left. He also says, in reference to Prager's naming of God as fundamental to the American system:
But importantly, one does not need believe in God to accept this premise. One needs only to agree to the terms of our national contract — to accept the premise as a foundational premise for living and acting within the laws that make us US. And by conceiving of our principles as acting in this way, we take away the power of those sophists who would, by showing that they are the product of man and not of some higher power (or an earthly desire necessarily to please that higher power), attempt to raze the entire foundation as insecure.I think that Prager would go along with that.
The Protein Wisdom crowd has some other interesting observations on Prager's short video. Read the whole post if you're feeling up to some intellectual exercise. Plus the comments if you're really brave. There may be a semester's worth of thought in this post. You might not agree with all of it.
Update 2: Mark Steyn writes about "Liberty" as an American value, contrasting it with European values in a different way than Prager did. Steyn connects the goal of maintaining liberty with our survival as a nation. He worries about loss of liberties during times of relative ease and prosperity. "Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic."
It will be interesting to see if Prager takes his 5-minute lectures in a direction which is consistent with Steyn's observations.
Personal Story: The French Revolution and the Seeds of Communism As an aside, a few months ago, a very nice young man, around 30, helped a friend and me move some furniture up a difficult flight of stairs into her apartment. His necklace had a pendant resembling a large dog tag, carefully crafted in enamel and gold. On one side, it said "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". On the other side was a hammer and sickle on a field of red, just as they appeared on the old Soviet flag and as they still appear on the flag of the communist party of China. I asked him where he got the pendant. He had ordered it over the internet. I wonder if he deeply understands what the hammer and sickle represent when one gets beyond communist theory and into practice?
Conservative economist Thomas Sowell was once deeply attached to the writings of Marx, but now considers the Communist Manifesto to be useful only as a masterpiece of propaganda . Even most of the New Left has repudiated Stalin and some others like him. But Noam Chomsky has written that we have to keep the killing fields of Cambodia "in perspective". Pol Pot's goal was to erase all memory of the former culture so totally that a glorious new one could be build from nothing. Memory and personal attachments are enemies of communism. He killed everyone who wore eyeglasses and even killed most of the people who knew how to grow crops, leading to starvation of some of the people he had intended to lead into a glorious future. The glorious future never arrived. Cambodia is still struggling to re-make its society.
Noam Chomsky's books are the most popular assigned texts on some American college campuses. So it is likely that young people are being taught to put in perspective events like the killing fields. I have not been able to see much redeeming value in Pol Pot's actions since reading a poem in my Alma Mater's literary magazine by a Cambodian refugee, describing a father gently tossing his baby into the air and catching him, then presenting the image of Pol Pot's soldier tossing babies into the air and catching them on the tips of bayonets.
The young man who helped us move furniture didn't seem like the communist type. He was a maintenance man who contracted with several apartment complexes. You never know who will have political views which you don't expect. It struck me that the venerable motto of the French republic was now associated with communism in the minds of enough people to warrant the manufacture of a pendant for marketing over the internet.
