Motus Mentis

12 Comments

1. Whitewall says

   Nope, slow week. Same old same old with some extra organized looting.

   Posted June 1, 2020 at 4:17 pm | Permalink
2. Daniel says

   Malcolm, Daniel Bogart here. Wondering what your thoughts are about the murder of George Floyd? Your post comes across as tongue-in-cheek which is why I was hoping you would clarify. Also, I’m not sure if this Whitewall comment is meant to be satirical in some way or if this person is serious. If serious, i think it is vile and I would imagine if you feel the same way it would be appropriate for you to address it, since this is your site. If you recall, you are someone who has expressed a high moral standard to me when I was exploiting a loophole on yahoo chess, so Im surprised that your blog covering society and social commentary has so far elided over the morally justified social unrest we are seeing today, and have thus far remained silent in the face of commentators framing this issue in terms of looting and not the horrendous injustices that are the root cause. I wonder what Whitewall’s reaction would have been to the Boston tea party? Would it be to decry the loss of English Breakfast?

   Posted June 6, 2020 at 1:17 pm | Permalink
3. Malcolm says

   Hi Daniel,

   Yes, my comment was a wry observation — please forgive me, at my age, for my world-weariness — on the accelerating descent, from news cycle to news cycle, of the tottering American nation into what can reasonably be described as utter chaos, if not the early stages of civil war. (I have studied the history of civil wars throughout the ages well enough to know what that looks like.)

   I do not want a civil war in America; it is not a thing to hope for. (See this post.)

   Our first civil war, which we now call the Revolutionary War, involved a great deal of gruesome mob violence against decent people who were loyal to the Crown. (We hear very little of this now, for obvious reasons.) Widespread violent disorder is a terrifyingly dangerous and destructive thing, no matter what the perceived moral predicate (and there always is one). In every case there is much of incalculable value that is lost and destroyed forever, and without fail those who suffer the most — as we see here in these recent riots — are the weakest and most vulnerable people: those who, in the abstract, are supposed to be the beneficiaries. When raw chaos is loosed on the world, it is always the poorest and weakest who suffer the most. Always. A raging fire burns everything in its path.

   An old African saying:

   “When elephants fight, the grass suffers.”

   Make no mistake: elephants are fighting here. The poor people whose lives are being buffeted back and forth, and so casually destroyed, are just pieces on the chessboard.

   As for the death of George Floyd, it appears to have been a case of brutal and unnecessary excess of force. The officers involved were swiftly charged with murder. I hope, as I am sure you do, that justice will be done.

   You have known me all your life; I hope you do understand that I am deeply concerned by what I see all around us in these dark times, and that my heart aches for the suffering in the world.

   On a personal note: Nina and I have thought about you and your family often during these last months. I hope you are all bearing up under what must be a terrible strain.

   Posted June 6, 2020 at 1:51 pm | Permalink
4. Malcolm says

   I will add: People are flawed, and they are imperfectible. The veneer of civilization is thin, and it is far more fragile than I think most people of this era — especially younger people — realize. Beneath it is an abyss of darkness.

   The creation of organic societies is slow and given to failure, and the result is never perfect. This is because it is impossible, in principle, to construct a perfect society out of imperfect beings. This does not mean that we shouldn’t make the attempt, because such attempts are the only hope of improvement where improvement is in fact possible. It is only to remind us that our imperfection imposes irremediable limits upon what is possible, and that there is always terrible risk when we seek to smash down what exists. It’s hard to build a great cathedral; far easier (and for some, far more exciting) to blast it to smithereens.

   Irreversible destruction can happen in the blink of an eye. And as the old song goes, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

   Posted June 6, 2020 at 2:22 pm | Permalink
5. Daniel says

   Malcolm, thank you for clarifying. I hoped you felt that way about George Floyd and the numerous other cases like his, but wasn’t sure based on what was written (and not written) here initially. I can only hope the other commenter was being wry as well…I certainly agree that mobs can be dangerous, and I think there is an interesting conversation to be had about when, whether, and to what degree destruction of property is justified/warranted in the face of repeated injustice. But to focus exclusively on that issue, while ignoring the larger atrocities—the destruction not of property but of LIFE, and the racial biases that put black people at repeated risk for these kinds of occurrences, as well as the nearly complete lack of accountability from those in power—is at best unintentionally missing the forest for the trees, and at worst an intentional ploy to distract from these systemic issues (to be clear I’m not accusing you of this, but I imagine those at Fox “News” are being quite calculated in how they choose to frame these protests). As divided as our country is right now, I would hope that all of us could unite in fighting against these injustices, and try to figure out ways to prevent similar ones from occurring in the future. And so to Whitewall and other readers here, I ask: how can we all come together to prevent incidents like this from happening? What can you, specifically, do to help? If you have an answer to the question: “what do you think of the looting?” but not to this question, then I challenge you to introspect and ask yourselves why.

   Posted June 6, 2020 at 3:55 pm | Permalink
6. Malcolm says

   Daniel,

   I appreciate your civility here, but it is clear enough to me that I stand in the dock, expected to give you a satisfactory account of the purity of my opinions. I hear Darth Vader’s menacing baritone:

   “I find your lack of faith… disturbing.”

   You suggest that for me, or others you mention, to pay attention to the breakdown of order during these dark days is, morally speaking, “missing the forest for the trees”. You have it, however, exactly backwards. The public order and rule of law that secure the natural rights of the American people, be they black or white, are not mere “trees”; they are the forest. The civil society, and the fragile structure it has so painstakingly erected, are the operating system within which runs the “virtual machine” of liberty and justice and human rights — and yes, of social “progress”, whatever form we may believe that to take. Crash that system, and it all collapses into anarchy, into Hobbes’s “state of nature”, in which the weak are at the mercy of the strong, and the raw power of the individual is the only arbiter of justice.

   You say that by focusing on all of this, I, along with other voices on the Right, am guilty of a moral error. I ask you to consider that it might be you who are mistaken (you, and the chorus of voices all around you, among which I may be the only person you know who does not sing in perfect unison). I will tell you that for the commanding voices of media and academia so blithely to wave aside this fundamental truth of human flourishing — that when we disregard the rule of law we open the door to the darkest recesses of Man’s brutal nature — is a far, far more serious moral blunder. While it is an error that can, in good and well-intentioned people, be charged merely to ignorance or folly, it is also one that commonly arises — has arisen, again and again — from a pseudo-religious, missionary extremism that sees only a single, burning, thing before it, without regard to whatever else — even the very house in which it dwells — must be consumed by the flames. For anyone who remembers the blood-dimmed tides of the twentieth century, in which hundreds of millions were drowned in the name of “progress”, such unforgiving zeal in the name of ideological purity is not only terrifying, but terrifyingly familiar, wherever its shadow appears. That foreboding shadow now darkens the skies again. Can someone of such exceptional intelligence as you really not see it? (That is the most worrisome thing, perhaps, of all.)

   Regarding the last few sentences of your remarks: given that I had just spent several paragraphs explaining why I believe that society is not perfectible, it is odd that you would then demand from me an account of exactly how I intend to perfect it! (Certainly it would not be to “dismantle” the police, as the Minneapolis City Council, in its majestic unwisdom, now proposes to do; can you imagine the horrors such idiocy would visit upon exactly those people and communities that already suffer the most from chaos and disorder? Those who can will simply flee; those who cannot will be left behind to fend for themselves in places already stubbornly blighted by crime and mutual violence.)

   I sincerely wonder what practical remedies you have in mind to hasten our asymptotic approach to perfection. Should we work upon the laws themselves, perhaps by making brutal violence illegal? I believe it already is; the men who killed George Floyd will likely die in prison. Will we declare, as so many have, that all the police are inherently and irredeemably evil, and make sure to expose them to the near-certainty of personal ruination? Then we soon will have no police at all, for why would anyone choose to become one? They already risk death; must they now endure universal opprobrium as well? Will we scold the traditional American nation into repentance, by denouncing them all as vile racists, and demanding, as in a Maoist struggle session, that they kneel to denounce themselves? Will that promote national “unity” at last? Or will it simply widen an already unbridgeable chasm, and serve only to hasten our descent into actual civil war? And while we are at it, what is to be done about the real engine of death in the black community, the one that grinds up young black lives week after week, year after year, with scant attention from anyone: the endless murder, by young, fatherless males, of one another? For some reason, it never seems to make the headlines — but it’s steady business for the undertaker.

   You suggest that I “introspect”. I have deep and enduring fondness for you, Daniel — you and your brothers have always been as family to ours — so I will forgive you this brash, if touching, impertinence. I must remind you, though, that am sixty-four years old, and that I have been “introspecting”, and ruminating deeply on the lessons of history, the anfractuosities of human nature, and the conditions of human flourishing and happiness, since well before you were born. I am still at it, even now! — and believe it or not, I have already learned a thing or two. Among the things I have learned is that whenever in history great masses of people suddenly begin to see things in terms of perfect, binary, Manichaean moral absolutes, and to say things like “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”, then very hard times are right around the corner. Social collapse, and civil war, are like falling into a black hole: you don’t always know when you’ve crossed the event horizon, but once you do, there’s no going back. The only way forward after that is through the singularity — and that’s not a thing to wish for. We should all try to be careful about what we say and do just now, because we are already very close to the point of no return. We may already have crossed it.

   The great bulwark of our society against arbitrary injustice is equality before the common law. When that is abused, the abusers should be punished with the full weight of that law, regardless of race. Beyond that, we should simply meet every individual — just as Martin Luther King insisted — not as a black person, or a white person, but simply as a person — and as a fellow American. Have we lived perfectly according to this principle? Of course not. Will we ever? No. But it is a principle with which I think the vastly overwhelming majority of Americans would, and already do, agree. To insist otherwise, as so many now do who should know better, is a reckless and inflammatory slander.

   Posted June 6, 2020 at 8:28 pm | Permalink
7. Whitewall says

   Good morning Daniel. I was strolling down Malcolm’s page and came to this piece again and 6 comments all of a sudden instead of my 1 lonely tongue-in-cheek remark. I know you and Malcolm know each other so I will not take long.

   You have hit the mother lode with this comment you wrote: “and the racial biases that put black people at repeated risk for these kinds of occurrences, as well as the nearly complete lack of accountability from those in power”. There is where a great deal of time and effort should be given. Start about 1965 with the Civil Rights legislation and come forward. “Accountability-in power.”

   Posted June 7, 2020 at 8:49 am | Permalink
8. Daniel says

   Haha, are you imagining me to be Darth Vader? Malcolm I’m not your father!

   There is a lot to address here. Firstly, let me say that I do not normally comment on blogs or social media, so if my tone is coming across differently than how I intend then I apologize. If times were different, I would have liked to have this conversation with you in person, but alas here we are. My intention is to be respectful, but challenging, since I believe I likely have quite different viewpoints than many readers here. I don’t believe I was being impertinent in asking that people introspect, nor did I mean it to be accusatory–I have no earthly idea how often/deeply you or anyone else is thinking about issues of racial inequality and what we as a society can do to help mitigate them. What concerned me greatly–and what I was asking for reflection about– was the focus entirely on the issue of looting during these protests with initially no mention at all of the repeated injustices that these protests are a reaction to. The looting is not what these protests are about.

   Secondly, it is a lovely idea that we could treat everyone simply as a fellow American, regardless of race, and that will solve the issues here, but I don’t believe it will for several reasons. Firstly, your position is that the overwhelming majority of Americans agree with the principle that we should all be treated equal. It seems you also believe that because people endorse this thought, they will behave accordingly. Here I think you are both correct and incorrect. You are correct when it comes to explicit attitudes–when asked the question “do you believe that all Americans should have equal protections under the law, regardless of race”–most Americans would say yes. However, when it comes to implicit attitudes, which are less subject to conscious control, an immense body of psychological research has shown that the majority of people harbor anti-black biases (if you haven’t already please check out the IAT here to see for yourself: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html). This research indicates that we cannot simply choose by force of will to ignore race and thus solve the issues of inequality and differential treatment. These forces are at play even without intent. Which, again, leads me to ask the question: what can we do to help fix this problem? If it wasn’t clear in my initial posing of the question, I am including myself as someone to whom I am posing this query. By no means do I claim to have the answers, but I do think that the solution begins with a recognition that racial biases are unfortunately not rare and are not merely held by a few bad apples.
   Third, the laws on the books can specify equality for all, but the reality is that it is people who enforce those laws. There are also many studies showing that racial biases and stereotypes influence virtually every stage of our legal system (as one example–Ebberhardt et al. 2006 found that in cases involving a white victim, black defendants with darker skin were more than twice as likely to receive the death penalty than black defendants with lighter skin, even after controlling for a number of other factors). These biases already exist and are leading to differential treatment. The simple fact that laws ignore race does not negate the reality that people enforce those laws, and unfortunately race plays a role in that process, consciously or not.
   Lastly, I am obviously not advocating for a complete breakdown of laws. That said, I am angry that in many instances police seem to act with impunity, and I believe serious reform is needed regarding oversight and accountability of those charged with protecting the rule of law in this country. I also do empathize with people who feel the added pain that comes with moving at such a glacial pace towards fixing these issues. And for better or worse, I do suspect that making those in power hurt financially likely is a technique that will facilitate change quicker. I also think you took me a little too literally when I asked how we can help prevent these events from happening. Obviously we cannot “perfect” everything and make it 100% preventable, but certainly there are solutions that would make these occurrences less likely. Unfortunately, I am highly skeptical that the solution can just be found with laws that dictate equality. To start, I think as a society we need to be having discussions like this that raise awareness about implicit biases, and I think we absolutely need way more accountability out of the police—for starters, requiring use of force incidents to be reported into a federal database, and having separate entities conduct investigations into potential wrongdoing. Wondering your thoughts, and would be happy to continue this conversation over email or the phone, if you’d prefer.

   Posted June 7, 2020 at 10:08 pm | Permalink
9. Malcolm says

   Daniel,

   I do not want to spend the next year bandying studies and statistics, but the idea that blacks suffer disproportionate violence at the hands of white police, or of whites in general, is false. Interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white, and not the reverse. Police are vastly more likely to be killed by a black perp than an unarmed black arrestee is to be killed by the police. Black rates of criminality of every kind are the highest of any group. Black police are much more likely to fire their weapons than whites. Nearly all violence against blacks is committed by other blacks. Etc.

   As for prejudice and implicit bias: to the extent that it exists — and keep in mind that we are talking now about people’s thoughts and feelings, which are (I should hope, for God’s sake) beyond the reach of the coercion of the State — it is hardly an inexplicable phenomenon, given the actual facts of interracial violence, and of the racial tension that has been so assiduously whipped up, and kept aboil, by all of media and academia (and much of government) for decades now. Human beings quite naturally have biases and prejudices of every sort; if they didn’t they wouldn’t last long. Are they always fair, especially on an individual basis? Of course not. Should such biases be enshrined in law? No again. But to try to eliminate bias from human nature is a fool’s errand — and in the rough hands of the State, a truly terrifying intrusion.

   I could go on and on – but I don’t want to, because as I’ve said, the only way we are going to be able to coexist in this nation is to stop pitting one group against another, and to treat people as individuals. The United States in in a tremendously precarious position right now: it is so large and diverse, simply as a matter of geography, as to render it practically ungovernable by any centralized administration, and the recent enormous acceleration of demographic diversity has made the problem sharply worse.

   In Orwellian fashion, we are told to believe that “Diversity is our strength”. Nothing could be so obviously false, and I think that deep down, nearly everybody knows it. (If it were so, how could it be so easily wielded to sow such bitter discord?) There are few, if any, examples in history of nations riven by deep ethnic diversity that have held together for long without some sort of hierarchical relation between groups; typically one group dominates, and controls the others. Rome, the Balkans, Iraq, Rwanda – all are examples of what happens when that top-down control disappears. If we are going to pull it off in America — and the signs aren’t encouraging — the only way it will happen is to stop encouraging the division of the citizenry into identitarian factions — to emphasize the fundamental American principles of individual liberty, responsibility, and self-reliance, and to put an end to the wholesale marketing of identitarian grievance. But this is exactly the opposite of what we do; the unvarying message of academia and the media is the fostering of racial and “intersectional” resentment, of sullen anger against white America and the traditional American nation. The history of the United States is no longer taught, as it was when I was a boy, in order to unite us in national pride and belonging; it is now presented to our young people as a litany of sins, an occasion for shame and anger. What kind of sickness is it to teach children to hate their own nation, and by extension, themselves?

   How can you “unite” a nation like that? You can’t. How can any sane person accuse the majority American population of the darkest, most “deplorable” sins, and at the same time imagine that he is rallying them for “unity”? Are we really so ignorant of human nature as to imagine that this will not just inflame their hearts with rage?

   The idea that the American Left now seeks any kind of unity or comity is a transparent lie. It seeks, rather, to pit one group against another until it all comes apart in chaos, at which point the only thing that will hold the wreck together is a supremely powerful State, from which all blessings and privileges will henceforward flow. It is a dumbbell-shaped coalition of oligarchs and the underclass, intended to crush the traditional, bourgeois American nation out of existence, and to rule over the ruins.

   And precisely as one might expect, it is, indeed, all coming apart in chaos. Those of us who understand the seriousness of the disease that now afflicts us are hardly inclined to fuss about “microaggressions” and “implicit bias” while our cites are burning, and while the nation that we loved and cherished, and had hoped to preserve for our children’s children, is dying before our eyes.

   So: if there is any hope at all here, against all the odds, of restoring peace and unity in America — and frankly I have very little hope remaining — it must involve establishing once again the founding principle that every American citizen is intrinsically nothing more or less than a free man or woman: not by birth a member of, or victim of, this or that group, but just a free man or woman, with God-given rights, the civic duties that attend their position as a rights-bearing member of the civil society, and with nothing due to them over and above the freedom to make their own way in the world as successfully as their talents, industry, personal virtue, and free choices permit. If we can pull that off, we just might have a chance.

   Posted June 7, 2020 at 11:26 pm | Permalink
10. Malcolm says

    P.S. I haven’t read the Eberhardt sentencing study you mentioned, but I did remember reading about another one of hers that made a bit of a splash a couple of years back. The article I’d read is here.

    Correlation is not causation, and sentencing is affected, among other things, by the heinousness of the crime, expressions of remorse, prior convictions, character testimony, etc. I wonder what was controlled for in the study you mentioned – as well as the race of the sentencing judges. (Bias, even anti-black bias, is not limited to whites.)

    Posted June 8, 2020 at 12:03 am | Permalink
11. JK says

    Daniel. Sir.

    I address you respectfully foremost but in the interests of brevity I consider I ought just get to the point.

    I speak as a veteran and at that a veteran in a couple places especially memorably where the day to day social intercourse, for such as myself when in the company of my fellows who were there too we refer to those societies as “lively.” I’ve heard it said the Chinese might describe what I’m talking about as “interesting times” but whether that’s just apocryphal or not I don’t know but it seems apt.

    Something Malcolm included above strikes me as likewise appropriate for me to convey to you where I’m coming from and that’s where Malcolm’s typed, “terrifyingly familiar.”

    As I’ve stuff I need to get done before the rains hit – my area is waterlogged and more’s on the way – I’ll just drop a couple links here an e-pal (like Malcolm and I are, we’ve not met in the flesh but we are likeminded – same with the fellow whose links I place except this e-pal is likewise a veteran of “lively society”).

    https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-frightening-fragility-of-our-cities.html

    https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2020/06/whats-next-rainbow-farting-unicorns-to.html

    I’ll check back in but it’ll be awhile like I mention a deluge is headed my way and if I don’t get to working on fixing my pickup pretty quick I’m thinking I may be better off switching to fixing myself up an ark.

    Posted June 8, 2020 at 12:05 pm | Permalink
12. Malcolm says

    P.P.S.

    Daniel, I realize my remarks about Diversity — that never in history has it ever been a “strength”, but always, rather, a liability to be managed with difficulty — mark me off, in this bizarre epoch, as some sort of heretic, and quite beyond the pale of polite society.

    But until the post-war era in the West, it was understood by everyone everywhere, simply and intuitively, to be an obvious and incontrovertible fact.

    More detail on my own understanding of this, from 2013:

    Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration

    Posted June 8, 2020 at 1:20 pm | Permalink