In an excellent little essay at NRO, Michael Knox Beran reminds us that human suffering is, to borrow a word from the natural sciences, conserved: it can be transformed but not eliminated — and that the modern liberal obsession with its eradication at any cost is futile, and in the end destructive.
We read:
The dream of a painless world is the great illusion of liberalism. Classical liberalism, it is true, never promised to make men happier; it promised only to make them richer. Adam Smith argued that we deceive ourselves when we suppose that those material luxuries that we associate with happiness are “worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow’ on their attainment.
Material wealth is good, Smith says, not because it makes us permanently happier, but because it enables us to dispense, in some measure, with physical and corporeal miseries (hunger, squalor, disease, and the like). In their place we have psychological and spiritual debilities. The primitive man famishes; the civilized man despairs ”” he experiences the accidioso, the dejection and spiritual sloth, described by Dante, or the noia and “inward death’ of Leopardi, or the ennui of Baudelaire. The civilized man is not happier than the savage, but his misery is more polished and elegant, and as a general rule comely things are to be preferred to uncomely ones.
Very well said. Read the rest here.
23 Comments
There are enough straw men in Beran’s misguided piece to populate a Wizard of Oz remake.
While Beran’s argument rests on his statement that “nowhere is the callowness of the liberal philosophy more evident than in its tendency to look upon ever-larger swaths of human suffering as grievances from which people have a ‘right’ to be exempt,” he does not offer as much as a whiff of evidence to support his assertion.
In lieu of evidence, he takes a fifty year old quote from JFK and distorts it. While Kennedy was obviously talking about the tangible poverty of starvation and deprivation, Beran instead pretends that he was really talking about the metaphorical poverties of stupidity, despair, and ugliness, which would have produced a nonsensical statement.
Aside from that: nothing. Not so much as a Charles Schumer quote, a Paul Krugman op-ed, or even a Michael Moore film clip. But hey: it’s NRO, so not many readers will object to Beran’s characterization of liberalism as being callow, shallow, or intellectually lying fallow.
Another straw man is in his first paragraph. The free market per se is not the discontent of the mainstream left. Rather, it is “the bankers who benefit from self-serving regulation that not only insulates them from the consequences of their greed and stupidity but actually rewards them for it with taxpayer-subsidized bailouts,” which he ascribes as a right wing grievance. Well, we can all agree that it is a perversion of the free market to allow gains to be privatized when its attendant risks are socialized. However, in Beran’s Magoo-like vision, we live in a binary world where the left despises success while the right can pinpoint the actual root cause of the problem.
Nor is it true that liberals believe that “misery can be abolished by wisdom, or reason, or legislative fiat.” If so, where’s the legislation to abolish suffering? Life is inescapably nasty, brutish, and short, and it is especially brutish for Mets fans. Everybody knows this. However, since Beran elsewhere describes liberals as naive, arrogant, and in denial (also without evidence), he might as well throw starry-eyed and foolhardy in the mix as well. What-ever.
Ratiocination, perspective, and simple facts are not prominent features of NRO, but this piece takes flaccidity to a whole new level.
I have to say, you do give me a chuckle now and then, Peter.
I suppose he assumed that his readers have enough familiarity with 20th-century U.S. and European history, recent legislative events, the ballooning scope of the Federal government, and in particular with the political campaign the current chief executive has lately been running, to supply examples of their own without, shall we say, overtaxing themselves.
But as you say: for those in need of assistance, any Charles Schumer quote, Paul Krugman op-ed, or Michael Moore film clip chosen more or less at random ought to do the trick.
Also (and do forgive me for piling on), your objection to Beran’s remark about JFK seems almost intentionally obtuse. Beran wrote:
The whole point of Beran’s article, of course, is precisely that poverty takes many forms beyond the merely materialistic kind that JFK was obviously referring to.
Maybe it’s not intentional.
OK, you don’t have any examples either.
Beran makes the point that liberals look to government to end angst, ennui, depression, and buzzkills in general. Not to provide for the common good – basic living standards, accessible health care, college loans, and so forth – but to banish the suffering which is intrinsic to human life.
Instead of assuming that it’s so blazingly obvious that mere examples are superfluous, why not enlighten us as to what exactly Obama, the federal government, Paul Krugman, et. al. have done so that government rescues us from ourselves?
Boy, you are really doing a splendid job of completely missing the point, here, Peter. I thought you were just being coy, but I guess I’m going to have to walk you through it.
What Mr. Beran is saying is: liberals have for a very long time now sought to use the coercively redistributive power of government to address, at colossal (and now ruinous) expense, the more prosaic forms of human suffering. Examples? Just about every program the Left has put in place over the past century: Social Security, the ‘Great Society’, the ‘War on Poverty’, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and so on — a vast edifice of publicly funded entitlements that is now crushing this once-thriving nation, and indeed the whole world’s economy, under its unsupportable weight. Even now Mr. Obama’s entire political strategy for his reelection campaign consists of little more than telling voters how the miserliness of evil “fat cats” who “don’t pay their fair share” into the system’s gaping, insatiable suck-hole is the root of all American misery.
Mr. Beran’s point is twofold. First it is that suffering is fungible, and conserved, in that the elimination of ordinary material suffering simply opens the door to other varieties. His second point is not what you seem to think it is, i.e that liberals, aware of this and keeping it in mind, imagine that they actually have it in their power to eliminate suffering in all of its Protean shapes. No, his point, rather, is that the Left, failing to grasp that suffering is actually ineradicable here in this vale of woe, imagine that by eliminating material suffering they will have done the job — a futile cause, though they will pursue it unto the ends of the earth, and the ruin of us all.
Well, that’s complete nonsense, and wrong on all counts.
1) The social welfare net is not what is “crushing” our economy. The same edifice was in place during the Clinton administration — excluding Bush’s Medicare prescription part D — and we ran a surplus. We are in a parlous state now because we fought two long wars on borrowed money, lowered tax rates promiscuously, maintain a grossly expensive military operation around the world, and are stuck for the accumulated debt for all these things, all of which was then followed by the financial collapse of 2008 and the unwinding of the real estate bubble. Absent these events, and with tax rates at Clinton era levels, you could have both an effective safety net and a booming economy, as we did back then.
2) If you are so upset about Medicare, Social Security, and so forth, then what exactly is your alternative?
3) Suffering is not fungible, and the effort to eliminate material suffering did not create whole new classes of misery ex nihilo. Beran combs over the bald spots in his argument with a kaleidoscope of cultural references: a little Schopenhauer here, a little Dostoevsky there. His Comp Lit professor must be beaming. Since he is so fond of quoting Dante, Beaudelaire, and Hamlet, perhaps he should ask them if they were depressed, angst-ridden, and miserable, considering that they lived in times long before the welfare state was even contemplated.
4) It certainly seems to me that Beran is suggesting that “liberals, aware of this and keeping it in mind, imagine that they actually have it in their power to eliminate suffering in all of its Protean shapes.” Otherwise, it’s hard to explain his insistence on the putative “liberal belief that misery can be abolished by wisdom, or reason, or legislative fiat.”
5) As for your last sentence: who exactly are these liberals who fail to grasp that suffering is ineradicable, or that eliminating material suffering “does the job?” And where do they do so? Cue the straw men.
It is late here in California, so you may have the last word. As for me, I will sleep, perchance to dream, falling into slumber with these happy thoughts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSCmZU0eFJg
Pete, old chum, you have been a valued sparring partner here not in small part because of the quality of your arguments. You’re off your game with this one, though.
I have to get on the road and drive all day, so I’ll be brief:
If you think that the world economy isn’t collapsing under the weight of the modern liberal entitlement state, you are — how can I put this as delicately as possible — fucking nuts. Look around you. Look at Europe. Look at our current annual deficits, which are just easing past the trillion-dollar mark. And please spare me the Clinton-era pleading; this has been a ticking bomb all along, and it is now in the process of detonation. I’ll remind you that we could confiscate all annual corporate profits and still cover only half of annual spending. Our military follies, though I agree some are stupidly wasteful, are just a drop in the bucket.
What we might substitute for Medicare has nothing to do with the substance of this post.
As for “who exactly are these liberals?”: by way of reminding ourselves that this delusion afflicts even many who call themselves conservatives, I give you George W. Bush:
Finally, your third item only bolsters Beran’s argument: that suffering persists even when material needs are met. Are you talking, after all, about Hamlet, Prince of Denmark? I think Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about human nature, would have read Beran’s essay with approval.
You might consider enrolling in a local petard-safety course.
If I were monocular, which, thank god, I am not, my response would be:
Nucking futs? I think not, as I have both facts and logic on my side.
“What we might substitute for Medicare,” as well as the other safety net programs you cite, is most relevant. The chief weakness of your position is that it ignores the fact that these programs have been enormously successful. Americans live longer and healthier lives, poverty and starvation have decreased, and seniors no longer live on dog food or go bankrupt to pay for medical bills. Simply declaring that these programs are not worth keeping because of their costs, without positing an alternative, forms an unhelpful and simplistic argument. Absent another vision of how things ought to be, you are implicitly arguing that it is better for indigents to starve and forgo medical care because taxpayers should not bear the cost of programs which prevent this. Is that the argument you want to make?
Your assertion that America is “collapsing under the weight of the modern liberal entitlement state” is simply untrue. If your starting point is the national debt and operating surplus which George Bush inherited in 2001, and then ex out the costs of two wars, the Bush tax cuts, Medicare Part D, and the accumulated debt service to pay for these things, then by the time the financial crisis of 2008 rolled around, we would have had tax revenues which were roughly aligned with expenditures. Things fall off the map once the crisis hit, both because of reduced tax receipts and increased spending necessary to stabilize the economy. All of these things are extraneous to social welfare programs, but this mathematical truth is ignored by a right wing which adopted Rahm Emanuel’s dictum not to let a crisis go to waste. Rather than admit culpability for pushing us into Iraq and Afghanistan, recklessly lowering taxes, and adopting prescription drug benefits — and running up our debt service costs to do so – they blame the social welfare programs instead.
Europe is a different matter. They have a far more generous social net than we do, so there is a difference in scale. They also have restrictive work rules, high marginal tax rates, an anti-business culture, and a fear of immigration which deprives them of the entrepreneurial spirit which immigrants bring. There’s also the Euro, which helps some countries and hurts others.
This is not to suggest that entitlement programs should not be reformed, so the benefits are brought more into alignment with resources. I’m all for things like means testing and rationing medical care. In an ideal world, if we raised taxes to Clinton era levels, cut military spending (which, at $700 billion per year, is far from “a drop in the bucket”) and reformed entitlement programs, we would be running either a surplus or a deficit which is well under the growth rate. If we sold assets like gold, oil, and land to pay off our debts, we would be in even better fiscal health. Not incidentally, we can do all of this without Grandma eating Alpo for dinner.
Demography and rising medical costs necessitate a recalibration, but not the elimination, of the safety net. The time to hesitate is through. There’s no time to wallow in the mire.
The fact that “we could confiscate all annual corporate profits and still cover only half of annual spending” is irrelevant. Corporate income tax currently accounts for about one percent of GDP. The money is in income and sales taxes, not corporate income tax.
If you don’t like Hamlet as an example, you’re free to substitute the pauper Roskolnikov, who Beran also cites.
Your suggestion of a petard safety course is completely unnecessary, as my thesis is consistent, factual, and eminently reasonable. My suggestion to you is to spend less time in the right wing blogosphere, and more time with Rachel Maddow. You may find it to be enlightening.
Henry, are you psychic?
Peter, you wrote:
You need practice there, Pete. Off by 643.
You seem resolutely determined, despite my good-hearted efforts, to completely misunderstand this article, and to use it instead merely as a launching-pad for another long-winded rant about the stainless virtues of the political Left. It is as if the actual content of whatever you read here is completely irrelevant to you: you seem to skim along quickly until your exquisitely sensitive defense-of-liberalism detector touches upon a suitable trigger, at which point you treat us, with machine-like regularity, to another reflexive and copious disgorgement of David-Plouffe-style talking-points.
(I wrote, some five years ago, a post describing this sort of thing; you can read it here if you like.)
Again (I don’t know why I bother, but you have dragged me to the very brink of vexation here):
1) What particular government policies we might or might not substitute for Medicare has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the point of Mr. Beran’s article, which is about various qualities of human nature, and nothing more;
2) Whether social safety-net programs have or have not alleviated various material afflictions, and whether the fiscal ruin now upon us has been worth it, and whether our current economic catastrophe is or is not the direct causal result of these programs, are utterly beside the point here: the article concerns itself with the observation that no amount of material relief can ever eliminate human suffering;
3) Your moth-like fluttering around the examples of Raskolnikov and Hamlet is also, though you seem perversely unable to grasp this, entirely at odds with your aim. Only on the hastiest, most unsubtle, and tendentious reading of Mr. Beran’s article could you imagine him to have suggested that the modern welfare state created “whole new classes of misery ex nihilo“; if nothing else, with a moment’s reflection it should have been blazingly obvious to you that Mr. Beran would be fully aware that the writers he cited flourished long before the appearance of the modern welfare state, and so he would never have introduced them in support of an argument that the modern welfare state had produced in them the ennui, the accidosio, the “inward death” that he refers to (which of course, as is clear to all but you, is not the argument he is making anyway). Indeed, by focusing as you do on Hamlet and Raskolnikov, you serve only to drive home Mr. Beran’s point: Raskolnikov had nothing and was miserable; Hamlet had everything and was miserable. Human suffering has always been with us, in all its forms, and it is ineradicable.
4) Though this may surprise you, I actually do spend quite a lot of effort keeping up with the views of the Left; I think it’s important to hear both sides, and I follow along attentively. If I seem “unenlightened” to you, all I can say is to remind you, as gently as possible, that I was once like you myself. I’m afraid you have it backward, my friend: this is what political enlightenment looks like. One day, perhaps you’ll understand. Until then, reflect on the fact that the conservative ranks are amply staffed with intelligent former liberals, while reformed conservatives are as rare as hen’s teeth. Perhaps a little road-trip to Damascus would do you good.
5) Finally: I have never suggested that all government programs of social support for the truly needy should be abolished, and I will thank you not to put such words in my mouth.
You are contradicting yourself here. Let’s review.
“The observation that no amount of material relief can ever eliminate human suffering” is an obvious truism upon which pretty much everyone can agree. However, Beran makes the case that liberals are oblivious to this, as they fail “to grasp that suffering is actually ineradicable here in this vale of woe (and) imagine that by eliminating material suffering they will have done the job.” Who are these clueless liberals who are unable to grasp this essential fact about the human condition?” We don’t know. Beran doesn’t tell us.
You write that the answer is obvious: “20th-century U.S. and European history, recent legislative events, the liberalism’s dream of an anodyne world, and in particular with the political campaign the current chief executive has lately been running.” I’m not sure what 20th century historical or legislative events you have in mind, but the general drift is that an expansive government is the problem here. However, this is a non sequitur. The fact that people (liberals, mostly) have expanded government does not indicate that they did so in the belief that they were achieving the “anodyne world” which Beran posits they were seeking. Perhaps they were doing so in order that society could be more decent by protecting its most vulnerable members, and not because of a misguided belief in the ability of legislation or social agenda to eliminate all human suffering.
You initially bring the modern welfare state in your first post, and then elaborate on your view that it is a colossal failure in your third, and fourth posts. When I respond to this sadly mistaken belief, you then complain that I am being impertinent and irrelevant. When you state that the world economy is “collapsing under the weight of the modern liberal entitlement state” and I point out that this is factually incorrect, you respond that I am being off-topic. You’ve got a real head scratcher there. If “the ballooning scope of the Federal government” is “utterly beside the point here,” then why did you bring it up in the first place?
The entirety of Beran’s argument rests on what liberals supposedly believe, but if this is such a commonplace belief, then surely he could have come up with a few examples of actual people saying or writing actual things. If he produced a clip of LBJ promising that his Great Society programs would bring us the Utopian world of our dreams, with two cats in the yard when life used to be so hard, that would be one thing. He doesn’t. When he tells us that liberals believe “that misery can be abolished by wisdom, or reason, or legislative fiat,” or that they have a “tendency to regard suffering as an exclusively material and physiological condition,” he seems to believe that we should just take his word for it. As stated above, he has created a straw man argument which has no basis in fact or reality.
Well, Peter, if you don’t think the economy of the West is collapsing under the weight of its entitlement programs, I think you’ve lost all contact with reality, but that isn’t the point of this post, and I’m not going to belabor it with you here. Readers can have a look for themselves at the projected cost of these programs, both here and in Europe, and decide for themselves. All the relevant information is easily found online.
You disagree with Mr. Beran’s feeling that it is a characteristic of the modern liberal mindset, and a defining distinction from the conservative one, to imagine that it is the proper role of government to alleviate the suffering of its people, to level inequalities, to “move” when “people are hurting”, and to strain public resources to their utmost toward these ends?
Mr. Beran’s point is not that every liberal mind holds it axiomatic that government can in fact literally abolish all suffering, down to the merest hangnail or twinge of remorse. It is rather that the liberal agenda always tends toward government redistribution of resources in the direction of alleviation of life’s discomforts — or if not the discomforts themselves, then toward reducing the inequality in the distribution of those discomforts (which seems to be, to the liberal mind, the greatest discomfort of all).
In other words, in Mr. Beran’s view the persistent existence of human suffering means to the liberal that there is still work to do (for the State to do, that is) — despite the fact that no amount of such effort can ever finish the job. Meanwhile, though, the conservative (who is as bothered by human suffering as the liberal is, by the way) keeps in mind that the costs — in terms of basic liberties as well as treasure — mount higher and higher as the list of sufferings to be alleviated lengthens.
You disagree? You don’t like that characterization of the distinction between Left and Right? That’s fine; we note your difference of opinion. Again, readers can review modern history, listen to present-day voices of the Left such as Occupy Wall Street and the Obama campaign, and decide for themselves.
That’s as far as we are going to get here.
A well considered and eminently reasonable summation of your position, Malcolm. But you are laboring under a big disadvantage in these exchanges, namely the mismatch in objectives between yours and your opponent’s.
One-eye, like many of his leftists comrades, is not interested in making sense. He is interested in reframing the discussion to advance the leftist agenda. So he digs down into the weeds of leftist talking points and regurgitates a litany of confounding obscuration to obliterate the forest of reason with the trees of propaganda.
What a fascinating debate,even though Malcolm and the one-eyed man just keep restating their positions over and over.
I went to the source, and found Mr. Beran’s essay to be remarkably snide and dogmatic, but perhaps that’s the norm for him.
xo, Sister Wolf
The problem lies in his characterization of liberalism and “liberals.” He might as well just call them Pinko Fag Commies, for all his distain.
His premise is based on a ridiculous and small-minded stereotype! I don’t know of ANY liberal thinker who says that all suffering must be eradicated. I’ve never heard anything even remotely close to this infantile position.
If the Right must persist in depicting liberals as stupid cry-babies, no wonder the Left regards conservatives as selfish racists.
I was relieved to see that one of Mr. Beran’s followers was at least rational enough to agree that “[it] is not wrong to want to end physical suffering and this want does not translate into desiring to end all suffering in general.”
While it’s a conservative’s prerogative to despise liberals, it would be nice if that enmity were based on actual facts rather than a fantasy of what liberals believe about suffering.
As an afterthought, let me just say that Mr. Beran’s notion of depression as a modern liberal invention is so stupid as to nullify every word he sputters. Tell him to read Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” published in 1621.
Hi Sister Wolf,
You’re reading Mr. Beran too literally. As I pointed out above, I’m sure he realizes that nobody, even the most pie-eyed Utopian leftie, could possibly imagine in a literal sense that all suffering could ever be eradicated. (Such a position is easily refuted with a hammer and a thumb.) He’s exercising a little rhetorical license here to make the point that it is the political Left that keeps introducing new classes of suffering for which we may then claim a ‘right’ to state-assisted remediation. He wants to remind us that this is an ambition of potentially infinite scope.
I think a better summation of the agenda, generally, of the political Left is the one I gave above:
I also don’t think Mr. Beran was talking about the existence of melancholy itself, but rather the idea that melancholy should be on the list of things for which we now may claim a right to remediation. And pace Mr Beran’s follower quoted by you above, for a great many on the Left the quest to eliminate suffering most assuredly does not end with its merely material forms.
Frankly, what won me over to this essay, despite its polarizing tone, was a splendid, aphoristic sentence:
I grant you that Mr. Beran’s tone is condescending. You’re right also that if the Right keeps painting the Left as stupid cry-babies, the chances of a happy reconciliation, with teary hugs all round, are diminished. (Of course the relentless characterization of the Right by the Left as evil racist plutocrats doesn’t help much either.) But just between you and me, I don’t think either the Right or the Left has any lingering interest at this point in such a rapprochement; they’d really just like the other side to go away. The real problem in this country nowadays is not a matter of tone; we’ve gone far beyond that at this point, I think. The emergency facing America now is that Right and Left can’t get away from each other.
PS: I’m sure it got rather boring to see me stating my position over and over. When the penny just won’t drop, though, one has little choice but to keep kicking the machine; all one can try is to vary the angle slightly and hope for the best.
That’s preposterous — “Pinko Commies” is redundant.
TheBigHenry, I like to think of it as “descriptive.”
A society that abandons its sick and its elderly has stopped being civilized, in my view. Is it the perceived sense of entitlement that enrages the Right? Maybe the disadvantaged and most vulnerable members can change their tone? They can plead and beg, so that the Right can experience the moral virtue of generosity!
If suffering is so ennobling, let’s see conservatives welcome more of it in their own lives instead of whining about the liberal’s inability to grin and bear it.
As for depression, it is an illness that deserves treatment no more or less than any other illness. To dismiss it as the domain of spoiled brats demanding “remediation” is a sign of ignorance, surely?
xoSister Wolf
Sister Wolf,
If generosity is your preferred measure of civilized behavior, then Americans comprise the most civilized society in the world. The major difference between our opposing worldviews, however, is that the left’s generosity relies mostly on other people’s money.
Sister Wolf,
You wrote:
Quite right you are, and I don’t suppose that any member of any healthy society since time immemorial would disagree with you. I certainly don’t.
There’s a lot in that statement to unpack, though: in particular the word “society”, which in the mouths of the modern Left is more or less synonymous with “government”. In my view, the obliteration of the distinction between those two concepts is the most important difference between liberals and conservatives.
Here’s how I see all this, and I hope you will forgive me for running on a bit:
First, let me repeat that I completely agree with you — as would, I think, almost all people, regardless of their political views — that a society that abandons its sick and its elderly is gravely ill. In traditional societies throughout history and around the world, the care of the sick and elderly was provided by the family, or extended family. When having many children was seen as a blessing, and was also an important economic asset, the burden was relatively light. But the modern world crossed a watershed in the 20th century: in economic terms, children became a net economic liability. Also, as affluence increases and civilizations advance, there are a great many new and distracting influences for the successful: learning, power, government, the arts, travel, fine dining, and other luxuries. The result? Fewer children, born later in life. With smaller families, and with the scattering of relations all over the country and the globe, caring for the sick and elderly became, rather than a familial duty both solemn and joyful, an increasingly burdensome, and increasingly resented, obligation of both time and money — time and money more enjoyably allocated elsewhere. And so more and more of the responsibility was handed over to the government – which is to say, this ancient familial burden was now foisted off onto the collective resources of strangers. What began out as a startling innovation quickly became normal, and then became a ‘right’.
But what else could be done? The dwindling birthrate among educated and productive people in all modern societies is simply a fact — inherent, it seems, in human nature itself. And when the government first assumed responsibility for the suffering of the sick and elderly, there were still enough young and prospectively successful people in the pipeline to shoulder the burden. But if the qualities that engender success — in particular, intelligence and conscientiousness — are highly heritable (and it is very clear now that they are), then a dwindling birthrate among those who have them will thin their ranks in each generation. This process is accelerated in societies that, like ours, have high levels of social mobility, because those from the lower, more fecund economic ranks who have the innate qualities needed to do well move up and away, taking their genes with them, and thereby further impoverishing the human stock of the underclass they have risen out of. Once they arrive in any of the upper strata, they can generally be counted on to have few children of their own.
In a high civilization, the sheer volume of knowledge and culture that must be carried forward by each succeeding generation always increases. Given that all societies depend for their prosperity upon their most productive members, and given that being productive in an advancing society requires an ever-greater capacity in each generation for lifting and carrying forward what has been passed to it from its parents, such a civilization becomes more top-heavy over time, as the ranks of those innately capable of such an effort dwindles in each generation. It is like a tree whose crown expands, and becomes heavier with fruit, even as its roots contract. In the aging West, the tree’s roots have become so weak, and the soil so eroded, that a stiff gust of wind, such as the recent economic crisis, will soon be enough to topple it altogether.
What is to be done? Nobody, I can assure you, on either side of the aisle, wants to push Granny off the cliff. It’s unrealistic, though, to imagine that the productive members of Western society will return to the high birthrates that might keep things going; the native populations of Europe, for example, have already passed the point of almost certain demographic extinction. It seems that government is the only entity with the collective resources, and the coercive power to collect those resources, that are needed to carry the load. But of course there are other factors as well: as the ranks of the productive dwindle, fewer and fewer people must carry more and more of the burden. In highly homogeneous societies — as, say, Scandinavia used to be — people are more willing to be laden in this way, as they can still imagine that they are contributing to the support of what is essentially an extended family; but as ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic heterogeneity increase, the social cohesion required for such cheery, shoulder-to-the-wheel acquiescence diminishes.
So we’re in a bit of a pickle. The system as it exists is failing, all over the modern world, and prospects are getting worse, not better. As Herbert Stein said, if something cannot go on forever, it must stop, and stop it will — either by remaking the current system, or by going over a cliff. How to alter the system? Well, as the Occupy Wall Street crowd would prefer, one can intensify confiscation and redistribution of the resources of the productive, making the State ever larger in relation to the individual, and thereby substituting inequalities of material success for the soul-destroying inequalities of power that are the hallmark of Marxist societies everywhere, despite the consistent historical evidence that coercively leveling everything downward drives a society into penurious mediocrity. Or we can try to nibble at the edges of the problem, as the coalition now forming around Paul Ryan and Ron Wyden seeks to do. The problem is far too enormous, though, to be solved simply by levying gigantic taxes on the rich, or demonizing corporate-jet owners, as some seem to think.
Indeed, I think the problem is far too enormous to be solved at all. I believe Western civilization has passed beyond hope, and is dying. Perhaps something vaguely recognizable as America, or at least flying the same flag, may carry on for a while.
Regarding depression, you wrote that “it is an illness”. Well, quite so, I suppose; I imagine most people know someone who has even died from it, as did my lovely wife Nina’s best friend, who hanged herself a few years ago. At the very least, it is clearly something we can alter with drugs; living here in New York City, I’d say that fully half the adults I know are now on some sort of anti-depressant medications. (Stupidity can cause suffering, too, and excessive boisterousness can even lead to death; perhaps we will one day have pharmaceutical remedies for those diseases as well.)
But I’m being too dark here, I fear. A friend of mine, a prominent psychiatrist, is an expert on the treatment of depression, and I’m sure he’ll chide me for my tone if he happens to read this, and rightly so. (Indeed, looking back at all I’ve just written, maybe I’ve got the disease myself: if not exactly depressed, I’m certainly not what you’d call optimistic.) Anyway, I’ve run on far too long already. So I’ll just cite a very interesting statistic about depression, taken from the NIMH Website:
At least we agree that Western civilization is doomed.
But to compare depression with stupidity or boisterousness, you seem to need to mock it, a la Mr. Beran. Maybe deep down, you think of it as a liberal shortcoming? Or an American refusal to just Pull Ourselves Up with Our Bootstraps?
As for Mr. Beran’s aphorism re misery, it sounds to me like an inane quip by Oscar Wilde. It has no validity, it’s just snide upper-class bullshit. With all due respect to upper-class bullshit, course!
xo Sister Wolf
No: boisterousness, impulsiveness, feeble-mindedness, and and all manner of other psychological and cognitive difficulties, including plain old foolishness, have the power to make people’s lives miserable.
I’m not mocking depression. God knows, this whole bloody topic is amply depressing.
Glad we agree Western civilization is doomed, I guess. I’d much rather it weren’t.
Forgive the 1,100-word reply.