Motus Mentis

If any of you had any lingering illusions about the New York Times being any sort of impartial “news” agency, you can put them to rest. In an all-hands staff meeting last week, executive editor Dean Baquet announced in explicit terms that, the paper’s propaganda war against Donald Trump having suffered a defeat in the Russian-collusion campaign, it would now pivot to attacking both Mr. Trump and the American nation itself as irredeemably racist. It is committing itself to what it calls the “1619 Project” (named for the year the first African slaves were brought to the North American continent) and will devote the next two years to persuading its readers that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

This is startlingly irresponsible. At a time when social cohesion is collapsing before our eyes, public discourse is as venomous as it has been at any point in our history, and both historians and laymen warn that we seem to be drifting toward civil war, the Times has chosen to fan the flames of faction and hatred. And where the Times goes, so goes half the nation: what was already a bitterly polarized national election will now become a holy war, and very possibly a race war.

It is apt that this follows by only a few days the essay by Michael Anton that we linked to last week, and from which we excerpted this passage:

This is how the script goes: target a complex system that has been in place for centuries or longer; impose a new agenda in conflict with natural limits; stress that system beyond the breaking point; blame the inevitable reactions less on actual, individual bad actors than on an entire ecosystem of bad people; punish those bad people as a class; impose mass “reeducation” and “training” via ham-fisted propaganda; intensify the stresses on the system even further.

The people at the Times know very well what the effect of this “project” will be: by intensifying the zeal of its own army of cryptoreligious crusaders, it seeks to encourage new extremes of policy and local action against the enemy (i.e., traditionally minded white Americans). It will accelerate the denunciation and repudiation of every aspect of the Founding, and of the greatest names in American history and the national mythos. Washington, Jefferson, Madison — where will these names be in a few years if the Times has its way? If it is the duty of True Believers to cast out sin, and the American nation and its Constitution rest upon a foundation of unforgivable sin, then must not that foundation itself be broken up and cast away? The thing speaks for itself.

Half the nation, of course, rightly sees this crusade as a holy war against everything they honor and cherish, against everything that their fathers labored to build for their children, and that many of them fought and died for. They will not go quietly. They will react, and they will fight back. And so the flames will rise.

But let’s say the Times and the adherents of its Jacobin cult carry the day (they won’t, but let’s just say they do). The ancien regime is toppled, the Constitution discarded as nothing more than a manual of injustice, the names of the Founding Fathers disgraced and stripped from the nation’s books, places, and currency. Then what?

The lesson of civil wars and revolutions throughout history is that it is far easier to burn a civilization down than to build one up; one pile of rubble is more or less the same as another. When your dreams come true, Dean Baquet, and you are standing at last upon the rubble of what was once the United States of America, I hope you will forgive us for asking: what now?

This morning’s assortment of email alerts included a fine short essay by Anthony Esolen, writing at American Greatness on the subject of “toxic masculinity”. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a longish excerpt:

We’ve all been hearing plenty about “toxic masculinity’ these days, and never from people who trouble to tell us what strong, virtuous, and noble masculinity might look like. That should not surprise us. If someone should use the phrase “toxic Judaism,’ we would not expect from him a wistful description of gentle, intelligent rabbis studying for many years each phrase of the Scriptures and all the centuries of commentary thereupon, or a call for Jews to return to their heritage. We would expect rather a sense that all Judaism is more or less toxic, and the less of it a Jew might have, so much the better. In other words, we would expect sheer bigotry.

And yet I can see a paradoxical use for that phrase, “toxic masculinity.’ Many drugs, we know, are medicinal in small doses but toxic in large doses. The reverse applies here. Masculinity is the drug that is dynamic, creative, and protective in large doses, but querulous, selfish, irresponsible, and dangerous in small doses. And we find it to be so in some rather strange places.

Let me explain. I recall many years ago a study which showed that prison inmates with lower levels of testosterone tended to get into fights more often; and feminists, not known for thinking past a single move on the chessboard, concluded that it therefore proved that testosterone had nothing to do with aggressiveness. Of course it proved no such thing. Every boy knows that the bully is never the strongest kid in the class. The bully is the one who feels his weakness or inadequacy and takes it out on boys who are smaller than he is. The more manly you are, the more you will command simply by your presence. No announcement is needed.

A man’s man does not raise his hand in anger against a woman. He despises men who do that: he considers them to be less than the mud on the sole of his shoe. Women, for their part, are attracted to strong and virile men for the protection they will afford them, because women are vulnerable””smaller and weaker than teenage boys, even when they are not bearing a child or taking care of an infant or of small children. To use the old poetic image, she is the fruitful and “marriageable vine’ that clings to the tall and strong but otherwise barren elm.

We may find “toxic masculinity,’ then, wherever there is toxic aggression but without manliness, without the sense that power is to be used sparingly and always for protection of the weaker, without the strict accountability that the man demands of himself, blaming himself first for things that go wrong, while giving credit to others when things go right. The more masculine you are, the more confident you are that you need not prove your manhood by swagger, by picking on the weak, by pumping yourself, and by stiffing those who have assisted you.

There’s a reason why “virile” and “virtuous” have the same etymological root, and it’s up to us men to keep that ancient and honorable virtue alive. (Indeed, it’s our duty — and the mephitic cultural ascendance of dessicated feminists and epicene soy-boys should remind us that our civilization depends on it.)

In his book Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, Forrest McDonald had this to say (my emphasis):

Public virtue entailed firmness, courage, endurance, industry, frugal living, strength, and above all, unremitting devotion to the weal of the public’s corporate self, the community of virtuous men. It was at once individualistic and communal: individualistic in that no member could be dependent upon another and still be reckoned a member of the public; communal in that every man gave himself totally to the good of the public as a whole. If public virtue declined, the republic declined, and if it declined too far, the republic died. Philosophical historians had worked out a regular life cycle, or more properly death cycle, of republics. Manhood gave way to effeminacy, republican liberty to licentiousness. Licentiousness, in turn, degenerated into anarchy, and anarchy inevitably led to tyranny.

So, brothers, as we prepare to enjoy and honor our nation’s birthday, remember: the stakes are high. Man up.

My friend Bill Vallicella has posted another interesting item on the idea of America as a “proposition nation”. Bill, who is quite rightly trying to find a middle way between open-borders multiculturalism and blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, begins by citing with approval a quote from Patrick Buchanan:

But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, is the annual importation of well over a million legal and illegal immigrants, many from the failed states of the Third World, in the belief we can create a united, peaceful and harmonious land of 400 million, composed of every race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, creed, culture and language on earth.

Where is the historic evidence for the success of this experiment, the failure of which could mean the end of America as one nation and one people?

Bill responds:

There is none. Most people with a bit of life experience know that one can get along and interact productively with only some people. There has to be a broad base of shared agreement on all sorts of things. For example, there ought to be only one language in the U. S. for all public purposes, English. It was a huge mistake when voting forms were allowed to be published in foreign languages. Only legal immigrants should be allowed in, and assimilation must be demanded of them.

No comity without commonality as one of my aphorisms has it.

Quite right. Bill and I generally agree very closely about all of this. But I must ask: how much commonality is required, and of what sort? Commonality has infinite forms: people may have in common language, race, religion, folklore, history, tradition, food, ritual, music, humor, and a thousand other things. A recently arrived Somali jihadist and an evangelical Christian with a MAGA hat might both enjoy gardening, but such commonality hardly seems sufficient for robust social cohesion.

Given, then, that commonality is necessary, what degree of commonality is sufficient?

Bill ventures an answer:

But I must add, contra certain of the Alt Right, that “one people” should not be understood racially or ethnically. An enlightened nationalism is not a white nationalism. America is of course ‘a proposition nation.’ You will find the propositions in the founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t give a flying enchilada whether you are Hispanic or Asian. If you immigrated legally, accept the propositions, drop the hyphens, and identify as an American, then I say you are one of us. I’ll even celebrate the culinary diversity you contribute.

He immediately qualifies this, though:

That being understood, it is also true that whites discovered these America-constitutive propositions and are well-equipped to appreciate and uphold them, and better equipped than some other groups. That is a fact that a sane immigration policy must reflect.

That complicates things a bit. If, as I have argued, variations in the distribution of cognitive and behavioral traits among human groups means that (on average at least) populations vary to a meaningful extent with regard to what sorts of cultures and political systems suit them most naturally, then merely verbal assent to our founding abstracta, given in exchange for settlement, might turn out in practice to be insufficient for robust assimilation and cohesion. In a post last month on this topic (also in response to an item at Bill’s place), I quoted Thomas G. West on the question of whether propositions alone were enough:

In that post I wrote:

In The Political Theory of the American Founding (see more about this book in the series of posts beginning here) Thomas G. West argues, following Aristotle, that the newly founded nation depended for its existence on both its form and matter. The form, he writes, was “its principles: the laws of nature and of nature’s God.’ He continues:

The matter that existed in 1776 was a brute fact, which included the universal features of human nature. But it also included the particular geography, laws, racial stock, popular sentiments, moral habits, and religion of colonial America. The form, the natural rights theory ”¦ determined, more than anything else, which traditions would continue and which would be discarded as the new regime took shape under the ruling guidance of natural rights.

The critical point is that both form and matter are essential, and both limit and determine what sort of nation they can make in combination. The American Founding could not have happened elsewhere: swap out the colonial population of 1776 with a random assortment of people from everywhere on Earth and it would quickly have failed. The particularities of the “matter’ upon which the American propositions were to act were every bit as determining as the “form’ ”” the propositions ”” themselves.

Form alone, then, is not enough: we must pay continuing attention to the matter. (And we are not, to put it mildly, doing a very good job of this just now, even on the mainstream Right.)

Moreover, there is always the question of tribalism and faction. In the latest edition of the Claremont Review Of Books, Thomas Klingenstein wrote:

The more tribes in a given society, the more conflict. Conversely, the fewer the tribes (other things being equal), the closer the friendships among citizens and thereby the greater the opportunity to pursue happiness (the purpose of society). This is because friends themselves contribute to happiness, and because friends are more trustworthy than non-friends: friends are more inclined to sacrifice for each other and a community of friends requires fewer social and political restraints than a community of non-friends. Who can be friends is open to debate, but there should be no debate that not everyone can be a friend. In other words, there is a limit to “diversity.’

Good common sense.

Bill assesses his position:

My view is eminently reasonable and balanced. It navigates between the Scylla of destructive leftist globalist internationalism and the Charybdis of racist identity-political particularism.

I too think there is, somewhere, a narrow way between Scylla and Charybdis, and I’ve been squinting into the fog myself, trying to find it. But as we navigate we must keep in mind at least two things. The first is that the cultural and biological diversity of human groups (which, as noted above, I believe to have some relation to each other), may equip them differently to internalize, and live according to, the philosophical abstractions that constitute our nation’s founding principles. The second is the extent to which they will be drawn away from commonality, and into factional rivalry, by tribalism. Though there may be some variety in the disposition of different human populations to tribalism (“hbd chick” is the scholar to consult on this) it remains a natural and universal impulse — and faction, as Klingenstein notes above, will naturally increase as diversity deepens.

So, as we steer our ship through these treacherous waters, with our children born and yet-unborn on board, we must remember that the survival of our vessel is our highest duty. Should we steer closer to Scylla, or Charybdis? Which of these presents the greatest existential danger? Are the survival of our nation and culture (and, of course, the very propositions we seek to cherish and preserve, which will sink right along with the passengers if the ship goes down) more at risk from an excess of caution regarding indiscriminate immigration, or from globalism, multiculturalism, and open borders?

For my own answer to this question, I refer readers to this post, from 2013. And my questions for Bill are: what does constitute a “sane immigration policy”? How can we know that lip service to our founding propositions, given as a condition for admission at a port of entry, is enough? How close to Charybdis are you willing to sail?

Here’s the story of the day:

BOSTON ”“ A Massachusetts judge was indicted Thursday on charges that she helped a man who was living in the U.S. illegally sneak out a back door of the courthouse to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent.

Newton District Court Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph and former court officer Wesley MacGregor were charged with obstruction of justice based on accusations that they schemed to let the man escape after a hearing last year on charges that included drug possession.

More here.

I hope they throw the book at her, pour encourager les autres. This haughty self-righteousness in “sanctuary-state” judiciaries — missionary judges imagining they are a law unto themselves — is absolutely intolerable, and it’s time we put a stop to it.