The Road To Serfdom - 80 years later

and the blessing of a child entering the world.

“Yet although history never quite repeats itself, and just because no development is inevitable, we can in a measure learn from the past to avoid a repetition of the same process. One need not be a prophet to be aware of impending danger. An accidental combination of experience and interest will often reveal events to one man under aspects which few yet see.”

~ Friedrich F. Hayek The Road To Serfdom, Introduction

“I have every possible reason for not writing or publishing this book. It is certain to offend many people with whom I wish to live on friendly terms: it has forced me to put aside work for which I feel better qualified and to which I attach greater importance in the long run; and, above all, it is certain to prejudice the reception of the results of the more strictly academic work to which all my inclinations lead me.

In spite of this I have come to regard the writing of this book as a duty which I must not evade.”

~ Friedrich F. Hayek The Road To Serfdom, Preface to the 1944 Original Edition

A New Turning

Our first grandson was born in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, an event which has overwhelmed me in ways more numerous than I have the ability to articulate. I cannot recall being as deeply touched on such manifold levels at the arrival of any of our own children, a fact which I attribute to the passage of time, the different season of life, and perhaps that it was my daughter and not my wife who was going through the miraculous agony of childbirth, a process about which nature has wisely kept my sex in blissful ignorance and in a very limited capacity to comprehend.

All I know is that with his arrival - blessédly unscathed and healthy - everything changed. For instance everyone in my entire family moved up a generation. My mother is now a great-grandmother, my wife and I are grandparents, my children - themselves still within spitting distance of childhood, or at least with childhood still visible in the rear view mirror - are now mothers and aunts and uncles and he, Julius, as the vanguard of a new generation, is the future. What was theoretical on Monday is now empirical.

He can probably and reasonably expect to live a century which means he will be around, God willing, in 2124 a full saeculum’s worth of history away. Behind the miracle and blessing of birth and health and endless gratitude for the midwives at Coombe Maternity Hospital in Dublin (if ever a profession was directly designated by God then this one), my thoughts are dwelling on the question of what sort of a world the princeling was entering, where in the cycle he could expect to experience his childhood and what my and his parents’ generations’ primary responsibility was in ensuring that his and his generations’ future has the chance to be as fulsome, free and safe as ours has been up until now?