Motus Mentis

In the aftermath of the Baltimore riots, there was a great deal of partisan debate about the root causes of the many woes of the urban black underclass. Many on the Right went no further than to blame black “thugs” and “race-hustlers”, and to call for militaristic crowd-control, while the Left settled in comfortably to sing their familiar song: institutionalized racism and the inexpungible legacy of slavery.

One thing the Right was also quick to point out was that all of these cities have been under continuous Democratic control for decades. This is, to be sure, an important part of the problem. In particular, I’ll call your attention to something called the “Curley Effect”. Here is how it was explained in a recent Forbes article:

As defined by Harvard scholars Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer in a famous 2002 article, the Curley effect (named after its prototype, James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston in the first half of the 20th century) is a political strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.’ Translation: A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.

Let’s say a mayor advocates and adopts policies that redistribute wealth from the prosperous to the not-so-prosperous by bestowing generous tax-financed favors on unions, the public sector in general, and select corporations. These beneficiaries become economically dependent on their political patrons, so they give them their undivided electoral support””e.g., votes, campaign contributions, and get-out-the-vote drives.

Meanwhile, the anti-rich rhetoric of these clever demagogues, combined with higher taxes to fund the political favors, triggers a flight of tax refugees from the cities to the suburbs. This reduces the number of political opponents on the city’s voter registration rolls, thereby consolidating an electoral majority for the anti-wealth party. It also shrinks the tax base of the city, even as the city’s budget swells. The inevitable bankruptcy that results from expanding expenditures while diminishing revenues can be postponed for decades with the help of state and federal subsidies (“stimulus’ in the Obama vernacular) and creative financing, but eventually you end up with cities like Detroit””called by Glaeser and Shleifer “the first major Third World city in the United States.’

Thomas Sowell joined in with an incisive column of his own, called The Inconvenient Truth about Ghetto Communities’ Social Breakdown. Here’s a longish excerpt:

The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.

Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.

You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact ”” for those who still have some respect for facts ”” black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.

Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Very good points all round. (And you really should read Mr. Dalrymple’s book, by the way.)

There is, however, another causative process at work here, one that is quite convincingly self-evident once you see it, but which gets very little attention. In his description of the comparatively well-functioning black communities of pre-1960s America Mr. Sowell glimpses it, but stops short of calling it out.

During the crisis in Baltimore, many on the Left reminded us that violent disorder by whites against blacks was a commonplace a century or so ago. One example given was the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riot of 1921. You can read about it on Wikipedia, here.

Wikipedia’s article describes the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, which was destroyed by white mobs, as follows:

The traditionally black district of Greenwood in Tulsa had a commercial district so prosperous it was known as “the Negro Wall Street” (now commonly referred to as “the Black Wall Street”). Blacks had created their own businesses and services in their enclave, including several groceries, two independent newspapers, two movie theaters, nightclubs, and numerous churches. Black professionals — doctors, dentists, lawyers, and clergy — served the community. Because of residential segregation in the city, most classes of blacks lived together in Greenwood. They selected their own leaders, and there was capital formation within the community. In the surrounding areas of northeastern Oklahoma, blacks also enjoyed relative prosperity and participated in the oil boom.

Does this sound anything like today’s all-black communities? Of course not. Why is that? I will suggest a heterodox explanation: it was due in large part to white intolerance — the very same barriers to meritorious black advancement that we have rightly done so much to eradicate. The mechanism is simple.

As a preliminary heresy, I will ask you to accept that most human cognitive and behavioral traits are highly heritable. This premise, I believe, has been so amply confirmed as to be beyond all reasonable doubt — but if you cannot accept it, there is no reason for you to read any further. I bid you adieu.

Still here? Good. Then consider also that in any human population there will be a statistical distribution of these traits. There will be some intelligent, conscientious, cooperative and industrious people, with the low time-preference that makes successful long-term enterprises possible. There will also be people who are dim-witted, unscrupulous, combative, lazy, and impulsive. Generally those of the first sort will seek out others with these superior qualities to marry; their children will likely inherit them as well. (This is known, by people who pay attention to such things, as “assortative mating”, and it works at every level of society.)

Now consider the difference between America in 1921 and America today. In 1921, no matter how richly blessed with the aforementioned genetic assets a black man or woman might be, and no matter how successful as a result, there was nowhere to go. Because of the wall of racism that excluded blacks from the upper (or even the lower) strata of white society, talented and successful black people remained, willy-nilly, in their black communities. And so did their genomes.

America in 2015 is a very different place, and has been since the victories of the civil-rights movement of the 1960’s. Nowadays any black person who “makes it” is immediately up and out. For a few years my daughter taught high-school science in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which is one of the toughest inner-city neighborhoods in America. I visited her there, and met some of her brightest students — and they were very bright indeed. Their aim, first and foremost, was to do well enough to get away. Who could blame them? I know a lot of exceptionally talented and successful black men and women, most of them musicians. I cannot think of one who still lives in these blighted ghettos.

What this means, then, is that since the 1960s a mechanism has been at work that continuously “boils off” all of the best genes from black communities, leaving behind an increasingly concentrated and dysfunctional underclass. Of course this is not all of the story — as noted above, for half a century it has been the government’s policy to subsidize dysfunction, and when the government subsidizes anything, it always creates more of it — but this is an important part of it, and one that is almost completely unmentioned in public discourse. It is further evidence that no great social transformation — no matter how just and well-intended — is without unintended consequences.

What, then, is to be done? I really can’t say. But I do know this: there can be no hope of treating any of these ills without an accurate diagnosis.

In the same-sex marriage arguments at the Supreme Court the other day (see the Washington Post’s coverage, here), the discussion naturally touched upon the wisdom, or folly, of discarding by government fiat a sacred tradition that is at least as old as civilization itself, and universal to every society that has ever existed.

Left and Right, just as naturally, disagree about the importance of this question. An oft-cited metaphor for the conservative view is known as “Chesterton’s Fence”. It comes from G.K. Chesterton’s book The Thing:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

I refer readers also to a post of our own from July of 2013, the subject of which was the diametrically different attitudes of conservatives and liberals toward tradition generally. An excerpt:

To the conservative, traditions arise naturally from the workings of human nature, as part of the ontogeny and organic development of societies. They are not the result of scientific planning or sociological theorizing ”” and like biological species themselves, they only come into view in retrospect. They are, in a sense, part of the “extended phenotype’ of our species and its various subgroups, as languages are; and just as languages do, they naturally adapt to, and come to represent, those things that actually matter to the various human groups from which they arise. (Many have been, at least up till now, more or less universal.) In this way they contain a great deal of deeply-buried knowledge about the optimal functioning of the human social organism, often for reasons, and in ways, that themselves need not be explicitly represented in the organism’s consciousness. Because of this, disrupting them will always have unknowable consequences ”” and so, at least, tradition justifies respect for its embodied wisdom, and caution as regards casual tampering.

To those on the Left, traditions are artifacts. Rather than being organic outgrowths and aspects of human nature itself, they are human creations; they are social technology, whose only purpose is to control and manipulate human behavior. In this view, human “nature’ hardly exists at all, and traditions are wholly external things; indeed almost everything about human behavior and human life is external to the individual. This means that to mold human beings, or human societies, into any desirable configuration is simply a matter of discarding traditions, and inventing new ones, until we obtain the correct result. Because of this, tradition justifies very little indeed.

As we see all around us, these views of the world are not particularly compatible, and cannot easily coexist, at least within any given society.

Here is a thing Hillary Clinton said in 2004:

“I believe that marriage is not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman. I have had occasion in my life to defend marriage, to stand up for marriage, to believe in the hard work and challenge of marriage. So I take umbrage at anyone who might suggest that those of us who worry about amending the Constitution are less committed to the sanctity of marriage, or to the fundamental bedrock principle that exists between a man and a woman, going back into the mists of history as one of the founding, foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization, and that its primary, principal role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society into which they are to become adults.”

Well! A “fundamental bedrock principle that exists between a man and a woman, going back into the mists of history as one of the founding, foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization, and that its primary, principal role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society into which they are to become adults.” Quite so, and exactly right. There is nothing in any of this this that is a matter of opinion, or of political sympathies; it is nothing more than a statement of plainly evident fact about the history and purpose of a universal human institution that is, in all probability, the most universal, and probably the oldest, human institution of all.

And yet, with astonishing suddenness, this is not only a controversial thing to say, but a wicked thing to say — or even to think.

What extraordinary times we live in.

In preparing the previous post, I ran across a blog I’d never seen before — a neoreactionary organ called Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. (I had originally been about to use Mao’s line, “Let a thousand flowers bloom!”) I rather liked the look of the website, so I gave it a link at the bottom of the post.

Glancing around over there just now I came across something else I liked: a post called The Heat Death of Humanity: Progressivism as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

This has been a theme of mine for some time now. (See, for example, my own post The Heat Death of the Universe, from March of last year. See also my look at the relation between social connectivity and the ideal-gas-laws, here.

In short, as my friend Bob Wyman has argued, a persuasive case can be made that maps good and evil onto the Second Law: all good consists of resisting or reversing entropy, while evil can be defined as that which encourages the entropic increase of decay, disorder, corruption, and decomposition. On this view, then, radical egalitarianism — which has been the animating force of the Left going back at least as far as the French Revolution, and which acts always to suppress and to level those gradients, differences, discriminations, inequalities, and local concentrations of order from which all of the world’s creative energy arises — is not only the natural enemy of liberty; it is objectively evil.

Recently the Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau criticized Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Islamic cartoons. He accused the magazine of using satire to “punch down” — that is, of abusing one’s own position of safety and privilege in order to harass the “disenfranchised”.

The blogger and columnist Daniel Greenfield has offered a tart response. Excerpt:

The left has adopted “Punching up’ and “Punching down’ as the legitimate metrics for comedy and satire, but real ”˜Punching down’ comes from the establishment. When an establishment satirist like Trudeau attacks satirists who risked their lives challenging a real authority with the power to kill them, what he is really saying is that satire should only serve the ends and agendas of the establishment.

That is the very definition of “Punching down’. When the establishment tells you what satire is supposed to be, then anyone following those rules is punching down.

…There is in fact an easy way to tell whether your satire is really punching up or down. Try it and see what happens. If you run into a gigantic backlash that impacts your career and your safety, then you’re actually punching up. Just ask a rodeo clown out of Missouri who went out wearing an Obama mask and ended having to go into hiding while the Governor, a Senator and the Kansas City Star called for his head. Bans were issued, blacklists were assembled and Obama fans threatened to burn down his house.

That’s what real “Punching up’ looks like.

Or, as Voltaire said:

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

Read the whole thing here.

One of the more spirited characters in our politically-oriented online media is the blogger who goes by the name ‘Ace of Spades’. Here’s a fine rant by Ace on this shameful Indiana business. (Warning: intemperate language.)

This ruction about Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act is deplorable for many reasons — not least of which is the fact that Indiana’s law is nothing unusual, and resembles very closely similar laws in other states (including, for example, Connecticut, whose governor has ostentatiously called for a state-spending boycott of Indiana, and Illinois, where young Barack Obama voted ‘yes’ to a very similar bill). The Indiana statute also is more or less the same as the 1993 Federal RFRA — which was introduced by Chuck Schumer and Ted Kennedy, passed the House on a voice vote, was approved by the Senate 97-3, and was proudly signed into law by Bill Clinton.

So why the fuss now? It’s because the law, which was originally imagined to preserve the religious freedoms of marginalized minority groups (the Federal law’s original aim, for example, was to protect ritualistic use of peyote by American Indians), is now being used to defend the religious liberties of Christians who refuse to get in line behind same-sex marriage and other left-wing causes. Observant Christians, you see, aren’t a protected class in liberal America; indeed, they are increasingly seen (and rightly so!) as stubborn obstacles to the Left’s withering assault on traditional American culture. On this new cultural battlefield, laws like Indiana’s become nothing less than enemy fortifications, and so they must be shelled and degraded with all the heavy artillery the media can bring to bear.

Amid all the agitation, there’s a more general question I’d like to ask: what are laws for? Given that, as citizens under the coercive power of the State, our behavior is constrained, and our liberties affected, by our laws, then presumably there ought to be some explicable rationale for every law we create. Generally speaking, it seems reasonable to imagine that the enactment of any new law has as its aim the prevention of some harm or evil that the State has a legitimate interest in eliminating. (If you have a better short description of what laws are for, our comment-box is open.)

The ‘evil’ that seems to dominate the Left’s rhetoric regarding these RFRA laws has, apparently, to do with discrimination against homosexuals, and in particular against homosexual marriage. The cases that we have already seen have involved same-sex couples who sought out the services of Christian bakers and photographers for their weddings. The businesses refused, because for them to participate in a celebration of something they consider morally wrong would violate their religious beliefs and affirmations. They paid a heavy price for this principled stance: their lives were upended, and at least in the case of Elane Photographers, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, they lost their business.

Did this have to happen? Of course not. There are lots of photographers in Albuquerque, and I’m sure that a homosexual couple pretty much anywhere in America can easily find somebody who’d be happy to photograph their wedding.

So who was harmed here? Who would have been harmed if Elane Photographers had simply been allowed to turn down the job? If there is an ‘evil’ to be detected and prevented here, it seems to me that the destruction of a couple’s livelihood, or conversely the public humiliation of innocent citizens by forcing them to violate their religious beliefs under crushing coercion, is a far greater ill than the minor inconvenience of having to call a different photographer to shoot your wedding, especially when it would have been easy to find others who would have been proud and happy to do so. And that’s the harm that these RFRA laws are intended to prevent. The problem now, though, as noted above, is that all of a sudden they are protecting people whom the Left would rather see harmed.

One last thing: as good as it is to see these religious-freedom laws offering some protection for dissent against the Left’s cultural juggernaut, I’m sorry that they only seek to protect dissent on religious grounds. I’m not a religious person, but I have, nevertheless, moral convictions that I feel as strongly about as any churchman. It would be nice if they were considered worthy of protection also.

P.S. Gratifyingly, I see that just today Arkansas has passed a similar law. Nice to see a little backbone.

P.P.S., April 1: I spoke too soon — looks like Arkansas is chickening out.