While all eyes are on Ukraine, it would be easy to lose sight of an earlier U.S. foreign-policy triumph: Libya. Has it really been a year and a half since we stopped having to worry about how to spell ‘Khadaffy’? How time flies.
Anyway, in case you were wondering, it’s going straight to hell — which won’t surprise anyone, except perhaps the people who made it all possible.
For some reason, we haven’t heard much about Libya from Foggy Bottom, lately. I guess our work there is done.
OK, one more on the events in Ukraine, this time from DiploMad. (h/t to Bill Keezer.)
Key excerpt:
“Putin is a patriot; Obama is not.”
Here’s another good article about Putin’s play in the Ukraine (or just “Ukraine”; I can’t keep track).
From the Times:
WASHINGTON ”” The Obama administration, struggling with continued political fallout over its troubled health care law, said Wednesday that it would allow consumers to renew health insurance policies that do not comply with the law for two more years.
The action is a reflection of the difficulties the president has faced as he tries to build support for the Affordable Care Act, and the backlash over his promise ”” which he later acknowledged was overstated — that individuals who liked their insurance plans could keep them, no matter what.
Under pressure from Democratic candidates, who are struggling to defend the president’s signature domestic policy, Mr. Obama announced in November a one-year reprieve on the cancellation of the noncompliant policies.
But today’s action goes much further, essentially stalling for two more years one of the central tenets of the much-debated law: that health insurance plans had to meet a basic minimum standard for care. The administration’s decision appears to buttress Republican criticism that the law was not ready for implementation last year.
The action also helps Democrats in tight midterm election races because it avoids the cancellation of insurance policies that would otherwise have occurred at the height of the political campaign season this fall.
We’ve come a very long way, now, from the idea that Congress passes laws, and that those laws are, well, the law.
There is still, perhaps, some awareness in Mr. Obama’s mind that this sort of thing is deeply, fundamentally wrong, and wholly at odds with the nation’s founding principles; we can guess this because he still, for now at least, feels the need to offer a little spin, a little cover. His motivation here, we are told with a straight face, is not political, but is rather to “ease the transition” to the better world that lies just ahead — in, oh, 2016 or so. (The kindly Mr. Obama wouldn’t want us to be overwhelmed by all of Obamacare’s wonderfulness all at once; after all, given what we’ve been through with all those failed policies for the past couple of centuries, it might be too much for our weakened constitution.)
We were also reminded, reassuringly, that this latest diktat was pronounced only after “close consultation” with several members of Congress. (I haven’t yet found the part of the Constitution that says the Executive can rewrite duly enacted law provided he has “consulted” his political allies in Congress, but I figure it must be in there someplace. Otherwise, people would be rioting in the streets by this point, right?)
So yes, there is still a tinge of caution there, a sense that, as he’s so fond of saying, there will be “consequences” if he goes too far with this. I don’t for a moment imagine that it rises to anything resembling shame — not this man — but still, perhaps, there is a wariness about limits. If nobody sets any, that won’t be a problem much longer.
Anyway, soon he’ll really be able to get his groove on. This November will be the last time that Mr. Obama will have to worry at all about a national election. After that, he’ll have more flexibility.
XKCD is always clever, and often brilliant. I like this one in particular.
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about Vladimir Putin’s being behind the curve, history-wise. The reader who sent me that Ceylan Ozbudak article yesterday, for example, said in his email to me that “territorial gain is an atavistic idea”, as well as saying that “I really question how strong supposed ethnic/historical affiliations are at this point in history, at least in a place like Ukraine as opposed to tribal Africa”. (This is a liberal friend of exceptionally high intelligence, but with whom, as you might imagine, I have various disagreements when it comes to politics.)
Why, our own Secretary of State delivered himself of the opinion on Sunday that “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion”, and today our President uttered the words I’d been waiting for, the words that for every decent liberal are in any debate the ace of trumps, the unreturnable serve, and the capture of the Snitch: he told Mr. Putin that he was “on the wrong side of history”. (Tremble!)
The problem is, I rather doubt that Mr. Putin gives a rat’s ass about Mr. Obama’s concept of history, or about what lies on which side of it. He is, I think, aware instead that history is just what happens, and that what happens is more often the result of what powerful people do than what others may say. Was Alaric the Goth on the “wrong side of history”? Was Tamerlane, or Suleyman the Magnificent? I doubt you’d even have been able to make them understand the question.
History is not teleological. Utopians think it is. Vladimir Putin is no Utopian.
Here’s a depressing commentary on, among other things, the quality of the modern American male (my emphasis):
Woman Going Into Labor Robbed in Anne Arundel County
— A woman reported to be in labor and her boyfriend were robbed in Annapolis as they headed to a hospital, police said.
The couple was confronted by three men with guns as they left an apartment on Copeland Street about 4:30 a.m. Sunday, police said. When the woman’s boyfriend fled, police spokeswoman Cpl. Amy Miguez said, the suspects tried to get the woman to let them into an apartment, but she didn’t have a key.
Maybe “reported to be in labor” meant that she was an AFSCME executive or something, but it’s a pretty sad story nevertheless.
I haven’t said much here about the situation in Ukraine; it would be like shooting fish in a barrel to use this latest ruction as an opportunity to highlight the incompetence of this administration’s foreign-policy team, and anyway, others have beaten me to it. (I will, however, recall that during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney pointed out that Russia was still our primary geopolitical foe — to which Mr. Obama, with the blithe self-assurance of the pathological narcissist, jeered in response that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”)
The most obvious parallel is with the Sudetenland, 1938, as many writers have pointed out.
Among all the things I’ve read about the Ukrainian affair in the past couple of weeks, there were two that I remember as being of particular interest: this blog post from Ara Maxima, and this entry from John McCreary’s NightWatch. Both are worth your time.
Just today a reader and old friend sent me this item, from the Turkish political analyst Ceylan Ozbudak. (At the risk of sounding unprofessional, let me say right up front that Ms. Ozbudak, besides being, no doubt, a keen political observer, is also one muy hot tamale. (Normally, of course, as a gentleman of the “old school”, I’d be the last person to discuss a prominent female intellectual in this way — but given the effort and expense she has obviously put into this, I’m sure she won’t mind my bringing it to your attention. She is manifestly not the sort to hide her light — or lights — under a bushel.)
In the linked article, Ms. Ozbudak had this to say:
In an article in last week’s Russian Pravda, it was noted that if Ukraine was divided, then the status of the Crimean Peninsula ”“ returned to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Kruschev, would be open to discussion, and that would include Turkey having a say in the future of Crimea.
The reference to this claim is the “Küçük Kaynarca” (Karlowitz I) signed 230 years ago. As per this agreement, signed by the Russian Tsarina Catherine II on April 19, 1783, the Crimean Peninsula was taken away from the dominion of the Ottomans and handed over to Russia. However, one of the most important provisions of this treaty was the debarment of independence for the Peninsula and outlawing its submission to a third party: Should any such attempt be made, then Crimea would automatically have to be returned to the sovereignty of Turkey.
While the pneumatic Ms. Ozbudak herself clearly scores an eleven out of a possible ten, I can’t give her article full marks for accuracy. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca was signed in 1774, not 1783, and what Catherine did in 1783 was simply to annex the Crimean Khanate, not as per the treaty, but in violation of it. (It is also not the Treaty of Karlowitz, which was a different pact, also humiliating to the Ottomans, that was signed in 1699.)
As it happens I had just been reading about Küçük Kaynarca in an excellent book called Worlds At War, by Anthony Pagden. In it he wrote:
The treaty of Küçük Kaynarca had also stipulated that the sultan recognize the “independence” of the khans of the Crimea. It soon became clear, however, that this had been intended only as a preliminary to full annexation. This duly followed in 1783. For the Turks, as Volney commented later, the Russian occupation had … inflicted on the Ottomans “the misery of the humbling of an ancient grandeur.”
So Ms. Ozbudak is drawing, I fear, more on her Turkish pride than on historical facts or contemporary realities when she imagines that the Russians will feel bound by this obsolete pact (that was itself violated by the Russians, with regard to the very territory now in question, less than a decade after its signing hundreds of years ago) to let the Turks have much to say about Crimea.
I have a feeling that what she’ll get instead will be something more like this.
One other thing about Ms. Ozbudak — I couldn’t help but notice, at the bottom of the page, the following:
Ceylan Ozbudak is a Turkish political analyst, television presenter, and executive director of Building Bridges, an Istanbul-based NGO. As a representative of Harun Yahya organization, she frequently cites quotations from the author in her writings.
Harun Yahya is a pen-name of one Adnan Oktar, who caught my attention a few years ago when he published the Atlas of Creation, a huge, glossy compendium of creationist hooey. He’s an interesting fellow: a “Sunni zealot”, and a fervent anti-Zionist, Koranic literalist, and author of a book called The Holocaust Deception. He’s also a handsome devil, as you can see here, and given that Ms. Ozbudak “frequently cites quotations” of Mr. Oktar’s, I wonder if they don’t get along very well generally.
Given the popularity in recent years of books like Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and the ready availability of reference material on the internet — and given also the accumulated wisdom of the ages, the testimony of our own eyes, and simple common sense — it always comes as a bit of a shock to me to see how many people are still in the stupefying grip of what’s called the Standard Social Science Model, which Wikipedia describes as the paradigm that “the mind is a general-purpose cognitive device shaped almost entirely by culture”. You’d think that by now this would have taken its place alongside phlogiston and the luminiferous aether, but it’s as stubborn as kudzu.
As a public service, then (and being too lazy to write anything tonight), I’ll take this opportunity to plug one of the best bloggers on the subject of human biodiversity, who goes by the name ‘Jayman‘. For an opening salvo, here’s a post of his entitled All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable.
For much more, browse the selections at HBD Bibliography.
Lastly, no survey of the topic would be complete without reading the incomparable hbd*chick.
There’s been a lot of argument lately about whether to raise the minimum wage, and I haven’t had much to say about it in these pages. But a comment in a recent thread got me digging into the topic more deeply than I had before, and so it’s time for a post about it, I think.
The subject came up almost by accident: our liberal commenter Peter K., a.k.a. The One Eyed Man, having made the audacious assertion that conservative thought was ‘mostly hokum’, offered to to take any conservative column or article of my choosing and expose its ‘fatuities’. I quickly chose one, more or less at random: a recent piece by Thomas Sowell on the minimum wage. I invite you to read it before proceeding.
In a Takimag article called Useless Mouths, John Derbyshire looks at the road ahead, as technology displaces more and more workers.
I recall that this sort of gloomy forecast was common when I was a boy, but I think this time round it’s more on the mark. (Barring a Butlerian Jihad, that is.) Things have come a long way in the past half-century.
We’ll probably be offline for a few days.
Meanwhile, here’s something interesting to read.
Update: this is a good one too: with a hat tip to Bill K., a fine rant from VDH.
Our previous post touched once again on how liberal orthodoxy habituates its adherents to deny reality and suppress the expression of truth. One such truth is the near-total hegemony of liberal orthodoxy itself in the social sciences, and of course our leading liberal commenter has wasted no time in denying it. (As I said in the post, this is a perfectly natural meta-effect of the same underlying cause, and should surprise no one.) “For every Bowdoin“, he says, there is a “Liberty University”. (This is, of course, simply false, but as noted just above, that’s rather the point here.)
Having denied any preponderance of liberalism in academia, however, he then switched gears to defend it, on the basis that critical thinking is important in universities, and conservative thought is “sheer hokum”. (See how easy this is, once you get the hang of it?)
For today’s selection, then, we have a longish excerpt from an Edge.org piece by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (who is hardly a Bible-thumping redneck) in which he examines precisely this question. (I’ve bolded a few passages.)
If a group circles around sacred values, they’ll evolve into a tribal moral community. They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value. You can see this on the right with global warming denialism. They’re protecting their sacralized free markets. But when sacred values are threatened, the moral force field turns on, and beliefs fall into line. We become intuitive theologians.
Is Social Psychology a Tribal Moral Community?
Has social psychology become a Tribal Moral Community since the 1960s? Are we a community that is bound together by liberal values and then blind to any ideas or findings that threaten our sacred values? I believe the answer is yes, and I’ll make 3 points to support that claim.
1) We have taboos and danger zones.
First, we have taboos and danger zones. We social psychologists are normally so good at challenging each other’s causal theories. If someone describes a phenomenon and then proposes a causal explanation, the rest of us will automatically generate 5 alternative causal explanations, along with 5 control conditions needed to rule out those alternatives. Except when any of these issues are in play. These issues turn on the force field, constrain our thinking, and deprive us of our ability to think of the full range of alternative hypotheses. It’s too dangerous for me to work through examples. I’ll just refer you to Larry Summers’ famous musings about why men are overrepresented in math and science departments at the nation’s top universities.
As on one of his 3 hypotheses, he noted that there is a sex difference in the standard deviation of IQ scores between men and women. He didn’t say that men are smarter. He didn’t say that men have higher IQs. He just noted the well known fact that the variance of male scores is larger, which means that there are more men at the very bottom, and at the very top. Might that contribute to the underrepresentation of women at the very top levels of science? If you’re standing outside the force field it’s a good hypothesis, certainly worth exploring. But if you’re inside the force field, it is not a permissible hypothesis. It is sacrilege. It blames the victims, rather than the powerful. The ensuing outrage led ultimately to his resignation as president of Harvard. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.
2) A statistically impossible lack of diversity
My second point is that we have a statistically impossible lack of diversity in social psychology. This graph shows Gallup data since 1992. Self-identified conservatives have long made up about 40% of the American public. Self identified liberals have made up about 20%. So the ratio in America is about two to one, conservative to liberal. What’s the ratio in social psychology?
To begin calculating our ratio, I first turned to Google. I simply Googled the phrase “liberal social psychologist.” I got 2740 hits. Then I changed liberal to conservative, and got 3 hits. So it looks like a ratio of roughly 1000 to one, liberal to conservative. But it’s actually much higher than that because this first one is some guy on a dating site asserting that his father was the only conservative social psychologist; this second one is a typographical error; and this third one is a conservative blogger who is angry about liberal bias in social psychology, who writes ”¦ “we can further conclude that the possible existence of a conservative social psychologist is statistically insignificant.’ So Google failed to uncover a single instance of a conservative social psychologist who is currently active.
I next conducted a small survey by emailing 30 social psychologists I know, spanning all levels from very senior professors down to grad student. I simply asked:”¦ “Can you reply to this message with the names of any social psychologists that you believe are politically conservative?’ There were 4 names mentioned one time each, but each of them was hedged with doubt, such as “I don’t really know, but she did work with Phil Tetlock.’ So I won’t print these 4 names. Peter Suedfeld got 2 votes, and he definitely worked with Tetlock. Rick McCauley got 3 votes. The next most common candidate was “I can’t think of any conservatives.” And finally, it turns out there is a fair amount of agreement as to who the conservative is in social psychology, and its Phil Tetlock. So there you have it, we do have a conservative. That conservative blogger was wrong. Right?
Well, not quite. I wrote to Phil to ask him whether it was true, as widely believed, that he is a conservative. Phil wrote back to me, in characteristically Tetlockian fashion, and said: “I hold a rather complex (value-pluralistic) bundle of preferences and labeling me liberal or conservative or libertarian or even moderate is just not very informative.”
But I pressed on in my search for the wild conservative social psychologist, and I found him, hiding in a bamboo grove outside of Philadelphia. Watch closely: there he is. Rick McCauley, at Bryn Mawr College. Rick is the only social psychologist I know of who publicly acknowledges that he is politically conservative.
I am extremely fortunate that I got to know Rick when I was a grad student at Penn, because Rick was a friend of one of my advisors, Paul Rozin. When I first met Rick I was wary of him. I had heard that he was a conservative. I had heard that he supported the Viet Nam war. It was only after I forged a personal relationship with him that I got over my distrust. I had never before met an actual conservative professor, and it took me a while to realize how valuable it was to hear from someone with a different perspective. Rick is now one of America’s foremost experts on the psychology of terrorism. I am convinced that many of his insights have only been possible because he stands outside of the liberal force field.
But McCauley can’t be the only conservative in social psychology. If we did a poll of the whole field, we’d surely find at least, what, five percent? Well, this room is just about the best sample of social psychologists we’re ever going to find, so let’s see. If there’s around a thousand people here, we should have about 50 conservatives. That would be 5%. So please tell me, by show of hands: How would you describe your political orientation? If you had to choose from one of these 4 labels, which would you pick? How many of you would describe yourself as liberal, or left of center. [At this point, a sea of hands went up. I estimated that it was between 80 and 90% of the audience, and I estimated the audience size to be about 1000 people.] How many of you would describe yourself as centrist or moderate? [approximately 20 hands went up]. How many of you would describe yourselves as libertarians? [Twelve hands went up] And when I asked how many would describe themselves as conservative, or right of center? [Exactly three hands went up.]
As you can see, we have nowhere near 50 conservatives in this room, we are nowhere near 5%. The actual number seems to be about 0.3%. In this room, the ratio of liberals to conservatives appears to be about 800 to 3, or 266 to 1. So the speaker in the earlier talk was correct when he said, from this stage: “I’m a good liberal democrat, just like every other social psychologist I know.’
Of course there are many reasons why conservatives would be underrepresented in social psychology, and most of them have nothing to do with discrimination or hostile climate. Research on personality consistently shows that liberals are higher on openness to experience. They’re more interested in novel ideas, and in trying to use science to improve society. So of course our field is and always will be mostly liberal. I don’t think we should ever strive for exact proportional representation.
But a ratio of two or three hundred to one, in a nation where the underlying ratio is one to two? When we find any job in the nation in which women or minorities are underrepresented by a factor of three or four, we make the strong presumption that this constitutes evidence of discrimination. And if we can’t find evidence of overt discrimination, we presume that there must be a hostile climate that discourages underrepresented groups from entering.
I submit to you that the underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology, by a factor of several hundred, is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering.
3) Closeted Conservatives
And this brings me to my third point, closeted conservatives. I recently came across this narrative, written by a young gay woman in 1985:
Until about a year ago, I was very quiet about my sexual orientation… I often didn’t understand the sexual jokes made by my colleagues”¦ the people making the jokes thought that we all felt the same way, and I certainly wasn’t going to reveal that I disagreed. That would have been much too awkward.
JB was really the first person I talked to about my sexual identity. He made me feel more comfortable and seemed to want to hear other perspectives”¦. Since then, taking PT’s class opened up a dialog and others have shared more as well. Before I thought that I was completely alone and was afraid to say much because of it. Now I feel both somewhat obligated to speak up (don’t want others to feel as alone as I did) and also know that I have more support than I originally realized.
Compare that text to this political coming out narrative, which was sent to me last week, as I was searching for conservative social psychologists. One of my friends said, in response to my email survey, that he knew of two grad students who might be conservative. I wrote to each of them and asked them about their experiences in social psychology. Both of them said they are not conservative, but neither are they liberal, and because they are not liberal, they feel pressure to keep quiet. One of them wrote this to me. As you can see, it’s nearly identical to the coming out narrative.
In fact, it differs by just five words, because that’s all I had to change to convert this text”¦ into this text, which I told you, falsely, was a coming out narrative from 1985. This is the text of the email that was sent to me last week, by a graduate student who is here in the room with us right now. She and other non-liberal students would like to come out of the closet, just as gay students wanted to 25 years ago. I think we have an obligation to help them.
Of course it’s a moral issue, and the moral argument about political discrimination is being developed by Richard Redding, at Chapman University Law School. But I’m going to set that aside. I’m not even going to make the moral argument. Rather, what I really want to emphasize today is that it is a scientific issue. We are hurting ourselves when we deprive ourselves of critics, of people who are as committed to science as we are, but who ask different questions, and make different background assumptions.
Here’s the email I got from the other non-liberal student:
I consider myself very middle of the road politically: A social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work”¦ Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, thereby, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.
This too is from a student who is in the room with us right now.
This how we like to see ourselves. We social psychologists are supertolerant free thinkers. We celebrate diversity and non-conformity. We boldly follow our science wherever it takes us, and no matter whom it offends. We care only about truth!
But in reality, we are a tribal moral community. In support of that claim, I made three arguments. I said that, because we have sacred values other than truth, we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don’t share those sacred values. If these statements are true, then I think we must begin some serious discussions about how to turn off the magnet.
Last year I wrote this about liberal orthodoxy’s unavoidable antagonism to truth:
A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, economic, cultural, mathematical, and biological realities of the actual world.
That this reality-denying orthodoxy dominates, to the point of suffocation, our educational institutions has from time to time been a contentious issue in our comment-threads (which is in itself a meta-effect of the same cause, I suppose).
Well, then, here’s another exhibit for you, from the very heart of the Cathedral itself: the Harvard Crimson. It “puts the cards on the table”, clearly and without apology: when truth and ideology collide, truth must die.
We read:
If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom’?
Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.’ When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.
It’s easy to understand the real threat that such research poses: not the justification of oppression, but the revelation that human groups actually do differ in nontrivial ways, that the stubborn differences in life outcomes among various human groups may in large part be due to these innate differences, and that therefore the systematic, malevolent “oppression” that they plan to devote their lives to eradicating, and that they have dedicated entire academic departments to vilifying white male Europeans for, might not exist at all. For the acolytes of this priesthood, then, such research poses not just a social threat, but an existential one.
The article is very clear and direct (and to those of you familiar with the history of the last century, will seem ominously familiar). We should thank the author, Sandra Korn, and the editors of the Crimson for publishing it. That they are comfortable enough to publish it, however — that, dear Readers, should disturb your slumber.
I’m working late, so all I have for you tonight is this little quiz. Give it a go.
Julius Evola, from the opening pages of Men Among The Ruins:
Recently, various forces have attempted to set up a defense and a resistance in the sociopolitical domain against the extreme forms in which the disorder of our age manifests itself. It is necessary to realize that this is a useless effort, even for the sake of merely demonstrative purposes, unless the disease is dealt with at its very roots. These roots, as far as the historical dimension is concerned, are to be found in the subversion introduced in Europe by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. The disease must be recognized in all of its forms and degrees; thus, the main task is to establish if there are still men willing to reject all the ideologies, political movements, and parties that, directly or indirectly, derive from those revolutionary ideas (i.e., everything ranging from liberalism and democracy to Marxism and communism)…
Strictly speaking, the watchword could then be counterrevolution; however, the revolutionary origins are by now remote and almost forgotten. The subversion has long since taken root, so much so as to appear obvious and natural in the majority of existing institutions. Thus, for all practical purposes, the formula of “counterrevolution” would make sense only if people were able to see clearly the last stages that the world subversion is trying to cover up through revolutionary communism. Otherwise, another watchword is to be preferred, namely reaction. To adopt it and call oneself “reactionary’ is a true test of courage. For quite some time, left-wing movements have made the term “reaction” synonymous with all kinds of iniquity and shame; they never miss an opportunity to thereby stigmatize all those who are not helpful to their cause and who do not go with the flow, or do not follow what, according to them, is the “course of History.” While it is very natural for the Left to employ this tactic, I find unnatural the sense of anguish that the term often induces in people, due to their lack of political, intellectual, and even physical courage; this lack of courage plagues even the representatives of the so-called Right or “national conservatives,” who, as soon as they are labeled “reactionaries,” protest, exculpate themselves, and try to show that they do not deserve that label.
What is the Right expected to do? While activists of the Left are “acting’ and carrying forward the process of world subversion, is a conservative supposed to refrain from reacting and rather to look on, cheer them on, and even help them along the way? Historically speaking, it is deplorable that a “reaction’ has been absent, inadequate, or only half-hearted, lacking people, means, and adequate doctrines, right at the time when the disease was still at an embryonic stage and thus susceptible to be eliminated by immediate cauterization of its infectious hotbeds; had that been the case, the European nations would have been spared untold calamities…
Naturally, the term “reaction” intrinsically possesses a slightly negative connotation: those who react do not have the initiative of action; one reacts, in a polemical or defensive way, when confronted by something that has already been affirmed or done. Thus, it is necessary to specify that reaction does not consist in parrying the moves of the opponent without having anything positive to oppose him with. This misperception could be eliminated by associating the formula of “reaction” with that of “conservative revolution,” a formula in which a dynamic element is evident. In this context “revolution” no longer signifies a violent overthrow of a legitimate established order, but rather an action aimed at eliminating a newly emerged disorder and at reestablishing a state of normalcy. Joseph De Maistre remarked that what is needed, more than a “counterrevolution” in a polemical and strict sense, is the “opposite to a revolution,” namely a positive action inspired by the origins. It is curious how words evolve: after all, revolution, according to its original Latin meaning (re-volvere), referred to a motion that led again to the starting point, to the origins.
In conversation with my friends on the Left I often hear the phrase “the wrong side of history”; implicit in the use of this expression is the idea that it is the flow of history itself that ratifies changes in the condition of human society, rather than any higher and more permanent principle. The stark contrast between this view and that of the reactionary was borne home to me in two exchanges over the past weekend.
In the first, I replied to a remark made on Twitter about gay marriage. Someone had tweeted:
In 20 years, conservatives will be pointing out the positive effect marriage has on the gay community.
I replied:
And liberals will point out that opposition to gay marriage 20 yrs ago was just as strong as opposition to interspecies marriage is now.
In my mind this was a reductio ad absurdum, intended to show the lack of a limiting principle, and the folly of ascribing intrinsic wisdom to the entropic evolution of history.
A day later, the subject came up again, this time in private conversation with a dear, but very liberal, friend. I pointed out that, now that the ancient and universal understanding of marriage had been overthrown, marriage could defensibly become a relationship between a man and his goat.
She responded by reminding me that I was too mired in present-day attitudes, and that in a few decades it may well turn out to be considered perfectly acceptable for a man to marry his goat. What had been for me a reductio ad absurdum, then, was for her a perfectly plausible progression; in other words, it was her view that whatever such norms might become in the future, they are ratified, and justified, simply by virtue of their having evolved into whatever they will have become. This is the implicit meaning of “the wrong side of history”.
It seems to to me that “reaction” stands in relation to this worldview in the same way that position is related to momentum in quantum-mechanics: it is a complementary property of the human psyche. If we analyze the eigenfunction of a quantum particle so as to determine its position, we introduce uncertainty as to its momentum; by focusing on location, we lose sight of its motion. Likewise, we can understand the condition of a society either in terms of its location relative to an absolute frame of reference — i.e., to a set of immutable principles, or our concept of the sacred — or simply in terms of its momentum.
From Australia’s News.com.au:
New forms of discrimination, known as “neoracism”, are taking hold in scientific research, spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture, according to anthropologists who spoke at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago.
This would be bad enough all by itself — but what makes the spread of this belief particularly worrisome is the fact that races exist, and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture.
Read the rest here.
Yep, they’ve been piling up again. (Just like the snow is supposed to do, again, here in the Outer Cape tonight.)
— The GDP of American states and foreign nations.
— Theodore Dalrymple on the suppression of dissent.
— See above.
— The most beautiful rendition of the National Anthem you will ever hear.
— Magnus Carlsen crushes Bill Gates.
— The arrogance and ignorance of hoplophobic liberals.
— A spectacular new lode of Burgess Shale fauna.
— The “science is settled”, so the observations must be wrong.
— Another nail in the blank-slate coffin.
— Crazy ants.
— Jim Donald on natural law. Excellent.
In which blogger Mark Shea is shamelessly pwned by a spectacularly imaginative troll. Here.
Some heartening news on the Second Amendment front:
First, the good people of Connecticut are defying that state’s new registration laws with some old-fashioned civil disobedience. This is what you get when you pass bad laws: people will not respect them, and will not obey them.
Second, the Ninth Circuit (!) has tossed out, as unjustifiably restrictive, the “good cause” provision in California’s handgun-carry law. This is a major victory for the citizens of the Golden State, and will no doubt set an important precedent. New York, for example, has similar restrictions; I hope this ruling will provide ammunition for related litigation there and elsewhere.
Third, this “bears” watching: the Supreme Court will be announcing shortly whether it will take on yet another basic Second Amendment issue.
Got two items in the mail today from Barack Obama’s Ministry of Truth, shortly after learning that He had decided, on a whim, to change an explicitly articulated (and politically damaging) proviso of the healthcare law until after the upcoming elections.
Make sure you read the letter from ‘Cathi’, which I’ve pasted in below the ‘Selfie With The President’ email.
Does any of this bother you? The personality cult? The pathological, unceasing narcissism? The utter contempt for the law, and for us?
Well, get over it. As He reminded Himself earlier today, on camera: “That’s the good thing about being president: I can do whatever I want.”
“This could be you”? A tattooed Eloi female, in thrall to a malevolent megalomaniac? I think not.
Anyway, next there’s this:
Malcolm —
If you think you’re never going to win a chance to go backstage to meet President Obama, I need to tell you something:
That’s what I thought, too.
When I got the phone call to tell me my name had been selected, I was floored. It wasn’t long before my husband and I were getting on a free flight to D.C. to meet the President face to face.
I’m here to tell you — if you’re still on the fence, you should go for it right now.
Anyone who adds their name to help with the final push on health care enrollment is automatically eligible to win. Chances are, you were probably planning to help out anyway. This is a pretty amazing bonus.
When you get home, all your friends will want to know: What is it like to meet President Obama?
Here’s the truth — it felt like meeting an old friend.
The President is so warm and genuine — he wanted to know all about me and my husband. Talking with him completely reaffirmed my commitment to keep fighting for what is important. And the photo of the three of us is one of my favorite things to show off.
If I could go again, I’d do it in a heartbeat — heck, I’m going to throw my name in too, just in case.
Add your name to help spread the word on health care enrollment, and you’ll be automatically entered to meet President Obama himself:
http://my.barackobama.com/This-is-Your-Chance
Thanks — I’ll be pulling for you!
Cathi
If any of you happen to be baseball fans, my son Nick has just launched a new website: Pitcher GIFS. Go have a look.
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Here’s your antidote for those Monday blues: two stories to warm your heart.
First you’ll be glad to see that New York State residents can own an AR-15 after all, and at the same time show just how foolish these hysterical “assault-rifle” bans — which prohibit, on the basis of superficial appearance, weapons that are almost never used in gun violence — really are.
And then there’s this.
The CBS program 60 Minutes reported tonight, to everyone’s astonishment and dismay, on a recent, and heretofore completely unsuspected, scientific discovery.
The context was specific — differences in the effect of the sleeping pill Ambien on men and women — but it appears, shockingly, that the scope of the problem might be far more general, with truly horrifying implications.
I won’t sugar-coat it for you, readers; we are all grown-ups here, and I’m just going to give it to you straight: these profoundly disturbing new findings suggest that men and women might actually be quite different.
In a clip from this evening’s show, reporter Lesley Stahl interviews UC Irvine neuroscientist Larry Cahill. Ms. Stahl explains that Dr. Cahill “used to share his field’s assumption that males and females, outside the reproductive system, were fundamentally the same.”
One can almost feel the ground shifting beneath their feet as the interview continues. Asked by Ms. Stahl if this problem of sex-based differences might be bigger than just Ambien, Dr. Cahill confirmed her darkest fears:
“Once you see this difference — and that difference — and that difference — and that difference — and that difference — and that difference — and you see this thing’s everywhere, you go ‘wait a minute!’ So the assumption we’re making, that it really doesn’t matter — sex — is not a valid assumption!”
Later, in a panel discussion, Ms. Stahl was asked: “what surprised you most of all the things that you found out?”
She replied: “I guess the big thing is how pervasive the differences between men and women are.”
Yes, it’s surprising, all right — unless, of course, you have any acquaintance whatsoever with literature, history, folklore, human nature, human societies, actual men and women, the real world, the theory of evolution, or simple common sense.
As bad as this is, folks, it gets even worse. Our pal Mangan has more.
A while back, the comment-thread of a post about the government shutdown turned into a discussion about the obesity of the American poor. A commenter remarked:
The reason why many poor people are obese, of course, is that the cheapest foods tend to be high in carbs and low in nutrients, which often leads to obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular problems.
I replied:
Interesting. The cheapest food everywhere, throughout history, has always been starchy and nutrient-poor.
If you go to, say, poor Asian neighborhoods, where people of no greater income live (especially considering that government food subsidies are readily available), you don’t see much obesity. You see women in the markets, selecting inexpensive but nourishing ingredients to take home to cook.
Perhaps the difference is mostly that: taking eating seriously enough to make the effort to seek out nourishing food, and to cook it at home, rather than as just another passing appetite to satisfy with the least effort possible, and the no reflection upon the long-term consequences of one’s dietary choices.
The exchange continued:
This probably has a lot to do with what is locally available. If you live in Flushing, you can get great food which is fresh and cheap. If you live in Harlem, your choices are mostly overpriced supermarkets, overpriced Korean markets, and fast food joints.
I pointed out:
People only sell what others will buy.
This subject of “food deserts” — inner-city areas where fresh and nutritious food is hard to find — has been in the air again lately. In yesterday’s Best of the Web opinion digest, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto had this to say:
Poverty used to mean going hungry. These days — at least in the developed West, and especially in America — it means getting hungry, consuming loads of inexpensive carbohydrates, and becoming fat and unhealthy. It’s progress of a sort, but those concerned with social uplift aren’t wrong to see a problem here. But their assumptions about its cause and solution have been tested and found wanting.
As National Journal’s Clara Ritger describes it:
With the obesity epidemic in full swing and millions of American [sic] living in neighborhoods where fruits and vegetables are hard to come by, the Obama administration thought it saw a solution: fund stores that will stock fresh, affordable produce in these deprived areas.
But now, three years and $500 million into the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative, there’s a problem: A study suggests it’s not working.
The idea behind what we wish the administration had the wit to call the Affordable Pear Act is that “food deserts” exist because of a market failure–because produce is in short supply. The experiment suggests the problem is more one of demand.
Ritger reports on a study in the February issue of Health Affairs. Researchers from Penn State and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine “studied two comparable neighborhoods in Philadelphia”:
When a grocery store was opened in one Philadelphia food desert, 26.7 percent of residents made it their main grocery store and 51.4 percent indicated using it for any food shopping, the report found. But among the population that used the new supermarket, the researchers saw no significant improvement in BMI, fruit and vegetable intake, or perceptions of food accessibility, although there was a significant improvement in perception of accessibility to fruits and vegetables. . . .
The researchers compared the Philadelphia neighborhood that would soon receive a new supermarket to a similar community three miles away, hoping to avoid any crossover effect from the opening of the new store. They polled the two communities before and after the store opened to see the effect of the change.The results “mirror findings in the U.K., where researchers created a similar comparison of two neighborhoods in Scotland and observed no net effect on fruit and vegetable intake,” Ritger adds.
All of which suggests that the Affordable Pear Act rests on a backward assumption about cause and effect. It’s not that most “food desert” denizens eat unhealthy food because grocers refuse to supply them with fruits and vegetables. Instead, grocers don’t supply them with fruits and vegetables because the demand is insufficient.
Theodore Dalrymple wrote a piercing essay, back in 2002, about the malnourishment of the underclass. He wrote:
It has become a truth universally acknowledged that food deserts actually exist and must be the fault of the supermarket chains (and, by extension, the System). Indeed, the government, ever on the lookout for new areas of life to control with its dictatorial benevolence, has proposed a new law to eradicate what is now known as “food poverty’ by irrigating these deserts with subsidies to food suppliers. As yet the additional provisions of the bill are not at all firm, except for the establishment of a Food Poverty Authority in every district, manned by bureaucrats, who will measure food poverty and count the miles people have to go to get fresh vegetables. One man’s poverty is another man’s employment opportunity: as long ago as the sixteenth century, a German bishop remarked that the poor are a gold mine.
Nothing has changed, at least not for the better. Read Dalrymple’s article here. (Though depressing, it’s well worth your time — and it contains the cleverest paraphrase of Hobbes ever written.)
Some good reads from the Web today:
Matt Ridley on inequality.
Kevin Williamson on feminism.
From the Statistics Lab at Cambridge University, a look at some climate-alarmist buncombe.
The Second Amendment notwithstanding, it appears that some pretty serious infringement is under consideration in Massachusetts, right-to-bear-arms-wise. Boston.com reports (my emphasis):
More than a year after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., a panel of academic experts today released a long-awaited report recommending that Massachusetts tighten its gun laws, which are already considered among the toughest in the country.
The panel made 44 recommendations, including that Massachusetts join a national mental health database for screening potential gun owners, that it beef up firearms training requirements, and that it eliminate Class B gun licenses, which are seldom used.
It recommended that the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association help define a series of factors that could be used to prohibit “unsuitable persons’ from acquiring firearms. The panel said the current process allows local law enforcement officials too much discretion to determine whether a person is suitable to be granted a license to carry.
It also said Massachusetts should require anyone wanting to purchase a hunting rifle or a shotgun to pass those standards of suitability. That could allow local police chiefs to deny gun purchases to people who have been arrested, but not convicted, of a crime.
Charles C. W. Cooke tweeted:
In other words, MA wants to deny a constitutional right to anyone who the state has accused of doing something wrong.
In other words:
1) You annoy the State.
2) The State arrests you, on charges that it knows it cannot prove.
3) You can now be legally and permanently disarmed.
Even in these dark days, it startles me that a “panel of academic experts” (i.e. statist Eloi hoplophobes) could issue, without fear of inciting widespread rebellion, such a breathtakingly audacious insult to the liberty of the people of Massachusetts, and to the Constitution that supposedly guarantees their most basic rights. (I should know better by now; things are moving very fast these days.)
Keep your powder dry, people.
I used to spill a lot of ink here about the question of free will. In the most recent of a series of thirteen related posts on the topic, I mentioned a disagreement on this topic between two writers whose names are often linked: the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the neuroscientist Sam Harris. Both are, probably, best known to the public as members, along with Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, of the prominent quartet of atheist authors often lumped together as the “Four Horsemen”.
Before all this atheism, though, Daniel Dennett had already made a name for himself for his controversial work on the philosophy of mind, and for several books and papers on free will. When it comes to free will, Dennett is what’s known as a “compatibilist”: he believes that our traditional concept of volitional freedom, when examined closely, is incoherent, but that even an ordinary materialistic understanding of our nature — in which our minds, and our choices, are entirely supervenient upon the workings of our biological brains — can give us, nevertheless, all the free will that’s “worth wanting”. I have found his two books, Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves, to be persuasive, and I would say that I am a “compatibilist” myself. (If you are interested in this ancient question, you should read them both.)
Sam Harris, on the other hand, is what you might call a “hard determinist”. He agrees with Professor Dennett both that our ordinary idea of free will is incoherent, and that our minds and choices are simply the output of our material brains — but unlike Dennett, he argues that free will is simply an illusion, and that this has important moral consequences. He has written a book of his own about this.
Daniel Dennett has now written a serious critique of Sam Harris’s book, which Dr. Harris has posted at his own website. You can read it here. If this topic interests you at all, it’s well worth your time.
Over the years readers have mentioned to me that too much of the discussion here takes place in the comment-threads, which are often far longer than the posts themselves. The days go by, the posts roll away down the screen, and exchanges that happen days after the original post are, effectively, hidden. I’ve been trying to remind myself to make substantial responses to comments in new posts, but I often forget.
In a recent item I mentioned that most conservatives regard liberals as decent, well-intentioned people. Responding to our consistently leftmost commenter, I wrote:
I think that both conservatives and well-intentioned liberals such as yourself want the same thing, which is to create and sustain a prosperous and well-functioning American society that maximizes opportunity and happiness, in harmony with our nature. What we disagree about is how best to achieve it (and I think this is due in large part to disagreements about the realities of human nature).
This prompted another commenter to inquire:
What I don’t understand is: why do conservatives insist on seeing liberals as good people with bad ideas?
I replied:
I feel that way only because I know so many of them. Looking at history with aloof, post-Enlightenment skepticism, modern liberals have come to believe that the source of humanity’s endless conflict and suffering is the self-confidence of traditional societies ”” above all, the discriminations that such cultures, in order to survive and flourish, necessarily make between friend and foe, higher and lower, self and other, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, wisdom and folly, sacred and profane, and right and wrong.
The key to harmony and happiness, then, is to reject and abandon all such confident discrimination in favor of radical doubt, which leads in turn to radical relativism. The equally radical — and poisonous — consequence of this is that if nothing and nobody can rightly be judged to be better or worse, or right or wrong, then the world’s obvious inequalities must mean that somehow, somebody cheated.
For example, look at the phenomenal success of Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, which effectively conquered and transformed the entire world, while creating sublime works of art, immeasurable wealth, and lifting billions out of poverty.
There are two possibilities. One is that for such a stupendous conquest to have happened, there must simply have been something inherently superior about such a civilization — and, because cultures do not fall from the sky, something special also about the people who created it.
But if you must rule that out, because it is offensive even to imagine such a thing, then what’s left? Only that somehow it was a dirty trick, a great injustice ”” and that in the name of justice the villains must be brought down, their perfidy exposed, their altars shattered, their ill-gotten wealth confiscated, and their ambitions confounded.
This necessary insight — that the essence and primum movens of modern liberalism is the pursuit of a radical equality that ultimately eliminates all basis for conflict, and that this pursuit makes necessary a corrosive and ultimately suicidal relativism — is obviously not my own. I had my first serious encounter with it in Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Reading that book was what started me on my own road to Damascus.
Bloom wrote this about the students entering his university (my emphasis):
They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society…
The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness — and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings — is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
President Obama recently called the quest for equality “the defining challenge of our time”, and said “it drives everything I do in this office”. It is the Holy Grail.
In my response to our commenter, I ended with a polemical flourish:
And so liberals, with the best of intentions, have made themselves the enemies of everything good, everything true, everything superior, and everything sacred: in short, everything that once made our civilization great.
This is, perhaps, a trifle excessive, though not by much. I certainly do not mean to say that in modern liberalism’s relentless jihad against all forms of inequality, nothing good has been accomplished. Although the capacity to make essential discriminations is necessary for the survival of any living organism — from a paramecium to a civilization — not all discrimination is good or just, and the liberal juggernaut of the late 20th century achieved some genuine moral victories, particularly in its struggle to ensure that all Americans, regardless of race, stood as equals before the law. The problem is that the radically egalitarian anti-discrimination at the heart of modern liberalism knows no limiting principle: it is a “universal acid” that gnaws relentlessly at any vessel that tries to contain it. Having leached away the pernicious discriminations in our society’s laws, it began next to attack the civil, social, and educational framework of society itself — and now dissolves the very foundations upon which our nation, and our civilization, were erected. In particular, it is antagonistic to both truth and liberty: to truth, because it must deny the permanent, natural inequalities of the world, and to liberty, because, as Will Durant reminds us:
[F]reedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.
I’ve been working long hours this week, and haven’t had the time — nor sufficient sleep — to write anything worth reading. Meanwhile, the links have been piling up, as they tend to do. So it’s time once again to flush, as we programmers say, the cache:
— Another reason that I hope humans never lose their fondness for creating beautiful, useless things.
— From Ben Franklin, a handy compendium.
— Goats.
— Going, going…
— We’ve been neglecting this topic. More later.
— U.S. cities over time, in a lovely chart.
— Nice UI. (It was recommended for use with the GSS, as I recall.)
— Safe house. See also here.
Here’s a pleasingly dyspeptic assessment of the State of the Union pageant, from Kevin D. Williamson.
It’s the dead of winter here in the Outer Cape, and it’s been unusually cold and snowy. That doesn’t stop me from getting outside, though. Here are a few cell-phone shots from some recent walks around Wellfleet:
First, our little wooded lane, after Tuesday’s snowstorm:
Next, a few shots of Duck Harbor from about ten days ago. (The beach faces due west, across Cape Cod Bay.) These were taken at the end of a rainy day:
Just as the sun was about to set, the clouds broke. Here’s some of that famous Cape light:
It’s been so cold that the harbor was choked with ice earlier today:
From Powers Landing, a couple of days ago: snow, sand, ice, sea, and sky.
And from just before sunset today, a view of The Gut, from the Herring River dike:
I feel sorry, sometimes, for the throngs of people who come here every summer, but never get to see how beautiful it is in the winter. Can’t really say I miss ’em, though.
Here’s something that seems to be in the air today.
Yesterday I added a comment to our Benghazi thread from a few days back. As usually happens as threads lengthen, the conversation had wandered off-topic toward the more general sort of ideological scuffling that is a constant attractor in any discussion of current events these days.
I was responding to a typical example of what self-styled “progressives” think conservatives are all about, to wit:
The Republican Party does “really stand for something.’ It stands for a lot of things: tax cuts for high income households, subsidies for farmers, science denial, the criminalization of abortion, hostility to immigrants, indifference towards the environment, bans on gay marriage, favored treatment towards their favored industries, and so forth. You could look at the concatenation of Ayn Rand / Rand Paul / Paul Ryan and see a miserly and contemptuous worldview which would make Ebenezar [sic] Scrooge blush.
After I had responded to some of the other points the commenter had made, I ended with:
I will say this though, in a spirit of generosity: leaving aside professional political operatives of both parties, whose only aim is to seize and retain power, I think that both conservatives and well-intentioned liberals such as yourself want the same thing, which is to create and sustain a prosperous and well-functioning American society that maximizes opportunity and happiness, in harmony with our nature. What we disagree about is how best to achieve it (and I think this is due in large part to disagreements about the realities of human nature). It’s wrong of you to impugn our motives so, and I wish you’d stop doing it.
I had also added, but then deleted shortly after posting, an extra passage in which I pointed out an asymmetry between the ways conservatives and liberals view each other — namely that while conservatives generally think that liberals are misguided, and live in deep denial of obvious truths about human nature and the way the world actually works (as opposed to the way they think it ought to work), liberals view conservatives not just as misguided, but as morally evil. From there, it is easy to demonize and dehumanize them.
It may well be that our differences are truly intractable (indeed, I think they are), and that what we need is some sort of divorce, or disaggregation — but at the very least it would be nice to accomplish this without bloodshed, and if history teaches us anything at all, it teaches us that framing your political opponents not only as different, but evil, has a worrisome track-record.
Shortly after I posted this abridged comment, our reader Henry sent along a link to a column by Thomas Sowell, published just today on this very subject.
We read:
From the 18th century to today, many leading thinkers on the left have regarded those who disagree with them as being not merely factually wrong but morally repugnant. And again, this pattern is far less often found among those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum.
The visceral hostility toward Sarah Palin by present day liberals, and the gutter level to which some descend in expressing it, is just one sign of a mindset on the left that goes back more than two centuries.
T.R. Malthus was the target of such hostility in the 18th and early 19th centuries. When replying to his critics, Malthus said, “I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor.”
But William Godwin’s vision of Malthus was very different. He called Malthus “malignant,” questioned “the humanity of the man,” and said “I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the man was made.”
This asymmetry in responses to people with different opinions has been too persistent, for too many years, to be just a matter of individual personality differences.
Although Charles Murray has been a major critic of the welfare state and of the assumptions behind it, he recalled that before writing his landmark book, “Losing Ground,” he had been “working for years with people who ran social programs at street level, and knew the overwhelming majority of them to be good people trying hard to help.”
Can you think of anyone on the left who has described Charles Murray as “a good person trying hard to help”? He has been repeatedly denounced as virtually the devil incarnate — far more often than anyone has tried seriously to refute his facts.
Such treatment is not reserved solely for Murray. Liberal writer Andrew Hacker spoke more sweepingly when he said, “conservatives don’t really care whether black Americans are happy or unhappy.”
Even in the midst of an election campaign against the British Labour Party, when Winston Churchill said that there would be dire consequences if his opponents won, he said that this was because “they do not see where their theories are leading them.”
But, in an earlier campaign, Churchill’s opponent said that he looked upon Churchill “as such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against him with a whole heart.”
In today’s Best of the Web James Taranto also picked up the same theme. Mr. Taranto commented on New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s harsh remarks about traditional conservatives (he said on TV the other day that they had “no place in the state of New York”) — an opinion that was quickly and enthusiastically seconded by Gotham’s radically left-wing Mayor, Bill de Blasio. Mr. Taranto wrote (my emphasis):
[T]here’s something a bit puzzling about the sheer viciousness of the governor’s and the mayor’s rhetoric. Liberals, after all, pride themselves on their toleration and open-mindedness, but often they sound like Michael Caine’s character in “Austin Powers in Goldmember” who said: “There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” Cuomo and de Blasio, unlike Caine, don’t understand they’re the butt of the joke.
One explanation for this phenomenon comes from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” Todd Zywicki, coincidentally on the same day Cuomo made his remark, summed up the relevant finding in a Volokh Conspiracy post:
Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.
In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”–and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this.
Haidt has a theory that moral reasoning is driven by, as Zywicki writes, “five key vectors or values of psychological morality: (1) care/harm, (2) fairness, (3) loyalty, (4) authority, and (5) sanctity.” Haidt posits that “conservative values are more overlapping than liberals–conservatives have a ‘thicker’ moral worldview that includes all five values, whereas liberals have a ‘thinner’ view that rests on only two variables,” in Zywicki’s summary.
I don’t know much about Haidt’s research, but I do know, from extensive personal experience, the vicious antipathy — it hardly seems excessive to call it hatred — that “progressives” so often feel toward conservatives. Again and again, when I have been with them in social settings, and the conversation turns to politics, I have heard truly intemperate expressions of moral condemnation and venomous loathing expressed about conservatives, with the general agreement of those assembled — and when I have chosen not to sit in silence, but to engage their ideas from a conservative viewpoint, I have seen, again and again, their faces darken with resentment as their eyes narrow with a look of barely contained fury. It is altogether familiar and predictable. It is clear that to them I am not just someone with a different opinion about what makes for happy, harmonious societies: I am a heretic, a malefactor, a threat, a devil. It is distinctly unpleasant to be on the receiving end of such malignance, and for some folks it must even be frightening. I can easily see why some people are afraid to speak up.
Thomas Sowell concludes:
Examples of this asymmetry between those on opposite sides of the ideological divide could be multiplied almost without limit. It is not solely a matter of individual personality differences.
The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. For many, it is also a vision of themselves — a very flattering vision of people trying to save the planet, rescue the exploited, create “social justice” and otherwise be on the side of the angels. This is an exalting vision that few are ready to give up, or to risk on a roll of the dice, which is what submitting it to the test of factual evidence amounts to. Maybe that is why there are so many fact-free arguments on the left, whether on gun control, minimum wages, or innumerable other issues — and why they react so viscerally to those who challenge their vision.
I’m sure that’s true. But the intensity of this reaction seems to go beyond mere defensiveness about one’s self-image. It seems downright… religious.
A common response from those who wish to inoculate the Obama administration, and in particular Hillary Clinton, from charges of negligence and malfeasance in the Benghazi murders, is to suggest that Ambassador Chris Stevens was in large part responsible for the absence of security at the diplomatic compound. In our own comment thread, for example, we saw:
What looks obvious in hindsight appears much less so in real time: we know that Ambassador Stevens twice declined offers of military assistance shortly before the attacks. If the Ambassador on the ground considers the consulate to be safe, one could forgive people in Washington for minimizing the risk.
Right, there’s Hillary off the hook. Anyway, what difference, at this point, does it make?
Well, not so fast, says Gregory Hicks. He should know; he was there.
It’s good to see someone sticking up for Mr. Stevens, even now. Too bad nobody did when it mattered.
The venerable liberal journalist Nat Hentoff joins the chorus calling for Barack Obama’s impeachment.
Worth a try, say I. The only plausible objection I can think of is Joe Biden, but at this point that’s a trade I’d be glad to make.
Boy, do these things pile up quickly.
— Ice balls.
— I can almost hear him say “I told you so.”
— Maybe we can get the Dems to primary this guy in 2016.
— Common sense from Jim Cramer.
— Even more personality tests.
— Race trumps sex, gals. (There’s plenty of room over here on the right.)
— 102 years old and counting: inside the 1911.
— Coming soon: the 28th Amendment. Not.
— Bundle up, folks, and throw some more carbon on the fire.
— More on this one later.
— The UK: as good as dead.
A lot has been made of The New York Times’s recent article, by David Kirkpatrick, about the sacking of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi on September 11th of 2012, in which four men, including our ambassador, were killed. The Obama administration’s partisans have given the article a triumphal reception, and have announced repeatedly that it ‘debunks’ the Right’s criticism of the administration’s handling of the affair. I was happy to let this one pass by in silence — there has been ample commentary from all sides, and most people’s minds are already made up when it comes to this shameful affair — but having had some requests from readers and commenters, I thought I should put together a post. I’m sorry that it’s a little “after the fact”.
What, then, does the article say? I’ve read it several times now, and as far as I can see, it makes only two claims that might be understood as ‘debunking’ anything. These claims are:
1) That the attack was not an al-Qaeda operation, and
2) That the attack was in fact a reaction to a provocative video, as the Obama administration claimed in the days and weeks after the attack.
The first point was made clearly and explicitly by Mr. Kirkpatrick:
Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.
This assertion was taken up immediately and effectively by a great many sources. The Washington Post, for example, gave us the following:
Militiamen under the command of Abu Sufian bin Qumu, the leader of Ansar al-Sharia in the Libyan city of Darnah, participated in the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, U.S. officials said…
Qumu, 54, a Libyan from Darnah, is well known to U.S. intelligence officials. A former tank driver in the Libyan army, he served 10 years in prison in the country before fleeing to Egypt and then to Afghanistan.
According to U.S. military files disclosed by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, Qumu trained in 1993 at one of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan and later worked for a bin Laden company in Sudan, where the al-Qaeda leader lived for three years.
Qumu fought alongside the Taliban against the United States in Afghanistan; he then fled to Pakistan and was later arrested in Peshawar. He was turned over to the United States and held at Guantanamo Bay.
He has a “long-term association with Islamic extremist jihad and members of al-Qaida and other extremist groups,’ according to the military files. “Detainee’s alias is found on a list of probable al-Qaida personnel receiving monthly stipends.’
Qumu also had links to Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known by his alias Abu Zubaida, a key al-Qaeda facilitator who is being held indefinitely at Guantanamo.
Even the New York Times itself had previously acknowledged Mr Qumu’s a-Qaeda connections.
After all this came out, the Times tried to backpedal. In particular it denied that Qumu was involved. The Weekly Standard stops this cold. (Why were Ansar al-Sharia Derna’s men in town that day?)
The Times also reported, on October 29th of 2012, that one Muhammad Jamal was involved in the attack. Mr. Jamal, who trained with al-Qaeda, is a long-standing acolyte of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s global leader. Here are some of Mr. Jamal’s letters to Zawahiri. Both the State DepartmentFoggy Bottom and the UN have certified Jamal’s link to al-Qaeda.
Regarding Mr. Jamal, the Weekly Standard reports:
Jamal was arrested in November 2012 by Egyptian authorities and identified as a leader of the so-called Nasr City cell, which has multiple ties to al Qaeda.
Jamal is not the only key suspect omitted by Kirkpatrick. Another suspect is Faraj al-Shibli, a Libyan who, according to U.S. intelligence officials contacted by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, served as Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard during the 1990s. According to these same officials, al-Shibli is suspected of bringing materials from the Benghazi compound to senior al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. Al-Shibli was detained in Pakistan and then Libya. Al Shibli did not immediately admit his involvement in the Benghazi attacks and was subsequently released. But U.S. officials continue to believe he played a role.
Far from being ‘on the run’, as the Obama administration would have us believe, al-Qaeda is doing very well, and its web of influence appears to be expanding throughout the Mideast and the Maghreb. In August, Reuters reported on connections between the Benghazi attackers and the jihadis who made a deadly January 2013 assault on a gas plant in Algeria, in which 39 foreigners were killed. Reuters added:
At the center of the web is Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which has expanded far from its Algerian birthplace and now has links to other jihadi groups in Maghreb countries, including Tunisia and Libya. Their shared ideology combines with other, often financial, interests.
Just a week or so ago, CNN reported that al-Qaeda now controls more territory than ever in the Middle East.
Besides its claim that there was no al-Qaeda involvement in the attack at Benghazi, the Times‘s article tried to shore up the Obama administration’s early insistence that the massive assault was simply a spontaneous demonstration about a blasphemous movie, Innocence of Muslms. To support this assertion, the article featured a photo taken on September 11th at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which showed angry protestors (waving al-Qaeda flags, by the way), and bore the following caption:
Egyptian protesters tearing down the United States flag at the American Embassy in Cairo on Sept.11, 2012, during a demonstration against “Innocence of Muslims,’ a video offensive to Islam.
As multiple sources have reported, though, the Cairo demonstration wasn’t about a movie, but was about the continued imprisonment of the “blind sheik” Omar Rahman, who remains incarcerated for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Aaron Klein reminds us that CNN covered the story that day:
On the day of the Sept. 11, 2012, protests in Cairo, CNN’s Nic Robertson interviewed the son of Rahman, who described the protest as being about freeing his father. No Muhammad film was mentioned.
In the wake of the Obama administration’s media blitz about the movie, Fox News commissioned Agincourt Solutions (now Babel Street), a global social-media analysis firm, to look for signs of a groundswell of resentment about the film. They found none:
As the State Department began Tuesday to circulate a highly anticipated report into what happened in the Sept. 11 Libya consulate attack, a separate analysis found that the first reference to the anti-Islam film that was initially blamed for sparking the attack was not detected on social media until a day later.
The independent review of more than 4,000 postings was conducted by a leading social media monitoring firm.
“From the data we have, it’s hard for us to reach the conclusion that the consulate attack was motivated by the movie. Nothing in the immediate picture ”“ surrounding the attack in Libya — suggests that,’ Jeff Chapman, chief executive with Agincourt Solutions told Fox News.
This attack employed arson, small arms, vehicle-mounted machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. (Much of this weaponry, by the way, was under the control of our former ally Muammar Qaddafi — until we threw him to the dogs. Our military intervention, made entirely without Congressional approval, allowed his arsenals to fall into the hands of jihadist militias.) There is also evidence that the attackers knew the layout of the compound in advance, including the location of the “safe room” in which Ambassador Stevens was asphyxiated. There is simply no compelling reason for any thinking person to doubt that it was a premeditated assault. The Times invests a lot of ink in parsing the distinction between the al-Qaeda core, its major affiliates, and the many sympathetic warlords and militias who carry out jihadist warfare throughout the bloody Muslim world, but at bottom, to quote the woman for whose sake the article was obviously written: “what difference does it make?” Our people were put in harm’s way, with grotesquely insufficient security, in a failed state that had become a viper’s nest of violent and heavily armed jihadists. How could something awful not have happened?
Leaving aside its claims about al-Qaeda and the video, there is much in the Times’s article that is damning indeed, and indicates serious incompetence, and astonishing unwisdom, at the State Department. Again and again Mr. Kirkpatrick exposes the naive optimism that led to this catastrophe. In the first section of the article, Mr. Kirkpatrick refers to State Department’s “months of American misunderstandings and misperceptions about Libya and especially Benghazi”:
The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved both avowed opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies.
Bloody fools.
A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict.
There simply are not words to express the historical, cultural, and strategic naiveté on display here. How could anyone not a child or an idiot be surprised by any of what happened? Yet this administration, and this reporter, having at last been “shown the risks” by the actual slaughter of our people, stand in dawning awareness only now.
As depressing as all of this is, far, far worse is the prospect that the architect of this folly — the heartless, ambitious woman who set the stage for this calamity, and who has declined, as both she and her husband always have throughout their disgraceful career in public life, to accept any responsibility for the wreckage she has left in her wake — may in a few short years ascend to the Presidency.
Note: so polarizing is this topic, and so unlikely to produce fruitful discussion, that it is with some reluctance that I leave the comment-box open. But comment away, if you like. I doubt I’ll join in.
According to the New York Times, the “prolonged” execution of one Dennis McGuire — who had been condemned for the brutal murder of a young pregnant woman — has raised, once again, questions about the humaneness of various methods of execution. In Mr. McGuire’s case, the technique was lethal injection:
As the lethal drugs flowed into his veins in the Ohio death chamber, Dennis B. McGuire at first “went unconscious’ and his body was still, his daughter, Amber McGuire, said Friday.
But a few minutes later, she said, she was horrified to see her father struggling, his stomach heaving, a fist clenching.
“He started making all these horrible, horrible noises, and at that point, that’s when I covered my eyes and my ears,’ said Ms. McGuire, who watched the execution on Thursday at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, near Lucasville. “He was suffering.’
Mr. McGuire’s execution, conducted with a new and untested combination of drugs, took about 25 minutes from the time the drugs were started to the time death was declared. The process, several witnesses said, was accompanied by movement and gasping, snorting and choking sounds.
It has not been established whether Mr. McGuire was conscious of pain or whether the drugs that were used were responsible for his prolonged death. But at a time when the drugs once routinely used in executions are in short supply and states are scrambling to find new formulas, the execution is stirring intense debate about the obligations of the state toward those it kills.
Let’s leave aside the not-uninteresting question of the “obligations of the state toward those it kills” (some might argue, after all, that flaying and exposure would be a more suitable response, and a more effective deterrent, for the kind of crime Mr. McGuire committed). We will assume, arguendo, that what we want is a means of execution that is sudden, 100% reliable, and can safely be assumed to cause no lingering discomfort.
Is this really so difficult to produce? How about, say, three simultaneous shotgun blasts to the back of the head, at point-blank range? That ought to satisfy our criteria. What about dropping a ten-ton flat steel slab from a height of about fifteen feet? Why not a Semtex neck-pillow? (I could go on, but you get the point: this is easy.)
What am I missing here? Why all this fussing? Given what we are trying to accomplish here this should be, if you will forgive me, a no-brainer.
Here’s the only answer I can think of: we’re squeamish. All the methods I’ve suggested are messy, and create a lot of splatter. I think that we prefer silly, complicated arrangements — gas chambers, electrocution, and lethal injection — because they make killing the condemned more painless for us.
For today’s reading, we have an essay on income inequality by tech entrepreneur Paul Graham.
Mr. Graham makes two key points:
First, he reminds us that in a free society, the natural diversity of human characteristics, talents, and dispositions will always result in inequalities of wealth:
When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There’s a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once.
Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.
Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?
I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?
Mr. Graham kindly (or prudently) frames the cause of these inequalities — that, say, between a Kasparov and the average patzer — only in terms of “caring enough about something to do it well”. Obviously, though, there is more to the story than that: “care” as they might, Danny DeVito would never have been a LeBron James, nor Rachel Jeantel a Feynman. Readers will recall that in their book The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant expressed the same idea, in slightly darker terms:
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups. This competition becomes more severe as the destruction of distance intensifies the confrontation of states.
Mr. Graham’s second point is that where once the only way to get rich was through ‘zero-sum’ appropriation of the wealth of others — by military conquest, taxation, or political cronyism — most of today’s wealth is created by offering desirable goods or services that also enrich the lives of others (see the original for footnotes):
[F]or most of human history the usual way to accumulate a fortune was to steal it: in pastoral societies by cattle raiding; in agricultural societies by appropriating others’ estates in times of war, and taxing them in times of peace.
In conflicts, those on the winning side would receive the estates confiscated from the losers. In England in the 1060s, when William the Conqueror distributed the estates of the defeated Anglo-Saxon nobles to his followers, the conflict was military. By the 1530s, when Henry VIII distributed the estates of the monasteries to his followers, it was mostly political. [9] But the principle was the same. Indeed, the same principle is at work now in Zimbabwe.
In more organized societies, like China, the ruler and his officials used taxation instead of confiscation. But here too we see the same principle: the way to get rich was not to create wealth, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to appropriate it.
This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class. Now we think of the middle class as people who are neither rich nor poor, but originally they were a distinct group. In a feudal society, there are just two classes: a warrior aristocracy, and the serfs who work their estates. The middle class were a new, third group who lived in towns and supported themselves by manufacturing and trade.
Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords. [10] Like serfs, the middle class made a living largely by creating wealth. (In port cities like Genoa and Pisa, they also engaged in piracy.) But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a lot of it. Any wealth a serf created belonged to his master. There was not much point in making more than you could hide. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.
Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)
But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called “corruption”) when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.
Seventeenth-century England was much like the third world today, in that government office was a recognized route to wealth. The great fortunes of that time still derived more from what we would now call corruption than from commerce. [11] By the nineteenth century that had changed. There continued to be bribes, as there still are everywhere, but politics had by then been left to men who were driven more by vanity than greed. Technology had made it possible to create wealth faster than you could steal it. The prototypical rich man of the nineteenth century was not a courtier but an industrialist.
With the rise of the middle class, wealth stopped being a zero-sum game. Jobs and Wozniak didn’t have to make us poor to make themselves rich. Quite the opposite: they created things that made our lives materially richer. They had to, or we wouldn’t have paid for them.
But since for most of the world’s history the main route to wealth was to steal it, we tend to be suspicious of rich people. Idealistic undergraduates find their unconsciously preserved child’s model of wealth confirmed by eminent writers of the past. It is a case of the mistaken meeting the outdated.
He concludes:
If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I’d take the first option. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to. It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If, as the evidence so far implies, you have to have one or the other in your society, take relative poverty.
You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I’m not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I’m not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he’ll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I’m saying that he’ll make you a tractor to replace your horse.
A final thought: Mr. Graham makes a perfectly rational choice in the passage just above, but he is mistaken to think that everyone would. Relative status is a powerful social, psychological, and historical force. To quote the Durants again, also from The Lessons of History:
The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce — except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.
Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is concentrated in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history … the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
… We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
For Mr. Graham, because the process that creates inequality today has, in absolute terms, a beneficial effect for everyone, it should no longer be seen as a social evil to be eradicated, and we should be able, finally, to escape the ancient cycle descibed by the Durants. But is this rational argument really enough to override our ancient, universal concern for relative status? As my mother used to say: I hae me doots.
The psychotic, pestiferous torrent of cultural-Marxist sludge excerpted below is, apparently, what a college education in the humanities produces nowadays.
This is the moment when you make of your fist the same clench in your teeth, make of your tongue all the textbooks your school was not funded enough to provide you with, make of your fingerprints the first draft of a revolt, when the follicles of capitalism’s hips falls on your school like angel dust, an army of unbranded jungle mouths will shout and yell and the trinity will linger there too like an arena of thunderclaps, and I will be there too and I will wonder how a genocide of shredded trees somehow makes some people think they can somehow play god, and then I will further wonder what made white people so insecure that they will do everything to put us in the lion’s den, and call us everything opposite of Daniel, which is to say the real reason for underfunded city schools is because deep down those in power know of the prophet that hugs our skeleton, know of the Solomon in our gene pools, know of the burning bush our spirit is, and if that takes flight”¦
For an extra frisson of horror, reflect on the fact that it was read at City Hall yesterday, at the request of Gotham’s new chief magistrate, Nyarlathotep Mayor Bill De Blasio. Know, too, that the author, a student at St. John’s, is the “2014 Youth Poet Laureate of New York City”. And despair.
Here is a good example, from the Huffington Post, of a modern Eloi woman: a psychotherapist who responds to her young son’s naturally boyish play by wondering where she “went wrong”. (As one commenter remarks, it’s as if she sees her normal boy as a “defective girl”.) In particular, she is horrified that he might be interested in guns. I’d have thought that, as a psychologist, she might have engaged in sufficient introspection to examine her own hoplophobia, but I suppose that’s hardly realistic.
The safety and security that make possible this young mother’s pacifism and loathing of weapons are luxuries she enjoys only because, to paraphrase Orwell, “rough men stand ready to do violence on her behalf”. She acknowledges this in passing, but clearly it is not the sort of thing she would want her own boy to have anything to do with; presumably her defenders are of another species altogether, and are no mother’s sons. The “very thought” of guns evokes in her no recognition of the essential role they play as a means of safeguarding her family from the predatory evil that is always at large in the world. It evokes only emotion: “a wave of sadness and despondence.”
It is as if she thinks that weapons create the violence within us. Rather than confront and understand the stubborn and comfortless truth of our nature, she prefers instead to fetishize the artifacts it has created, and imagines that by rejecting these potent objects, she can transform human nature itself.
I’m glad, of course, that she and her child are able to feel so secure in their home. It would be nice, though, if she had some appreciation of what makes this so — and some measure of respect for the sort of people who will fight and die to preserve and protect her blithe existence, and for the tools they must use to do so.
What is gratifying, however, about this article is the near-unanimous criticism, in the comment thread, of the author’s ideological enthrallment. Perhaps the wind is changing.
I’m having a busy stretch here; the blog might be rather quieter than usual for a few days. Back to normal soon.
Today we have an interesting piece by Nick Land on John Smart’s novel approach to the Fermi Paradox (see here for more about the Fermi Paradox, if you aren’t familiar with the term): that advanced civilizations, rather than expanding into space, relentlessly turn inward.
We read:
John M. Smart’s solution to the Fermi Paradox is integral to his broader ”˜Speculations on Cosmic Culture’ and emerges naturally from compressive development. Advanced intelligences do not expand into space, colonizing vast galactic tracts or dispersing self-replicating robot probes in a program of exploration. Instead, they implode, in a process of ”˜transcension’ — resourcing themselves primarily through the hyper-exponential efficiency gains of extreme miniaturization (through micro- and nano- to femto-scale engineering, of subatomic functional components). Such cultures or civilizations, nucleated upon self-augmenting technological intelligence, emigrate from the extensive universe in the direction of abysmal intensity, crushing themselves to near-black-hole densities at the edge of physical possibility. Through transcension, they withdraw from extensive communication (whilst, perhaps, leaving ”˜radio fossils’ behind, before these blink-out into the silence of cosmic escape).
If Smart’s speculations capture the basic outlines of a density-attracted developmental system, then cities should be expected to follow a comparable path, characterized by an escape into inwardness, an interior voyage, involution, or implosion. Approaching singularity on an accelerating trajectory, each city becomes increasingly inwardly directed, as it falls prey to the irresistible attraction of its own hyperbolic intensification, whilst the outside world fades to irrelevant static. Things disappear into cities, on a path of departure from the world. Their destination cannot be described within the dimensions of the known ”“ and, indeed, tediously over-familiar ”“ universe. Only in the deep exploratory interior is innovation still occurring, but there it takes place at an infernal, time-melting rate.
Read the rest here.
I haven’t anything substantial prepared for tonight, so just a brief salmagundi:
— A lexical-distance graph of European languages. (Where’s Basque? So far out it’s off the chart, maybe.)
— “Exponential medicine”.
— Amazing to see this, from the Times’s senior science writer. Is the edifice starting to crumble under the weight of too much reality?
— The strange art of Zdzislaw Beksinki.
— MSLSD.
— A puffin with its beak full of eels. And more.
— What? You aren’t reading The Fortean Times?
— Now this I’ll pay taxes for.
— Yet another political-personality test. (I’m 85% you-know-what.)
— AP computer-science exam race/sex data.
— Some awkward Father’s Days on the way.
— A thousand-year-old chess problem.
— The DOJ’s idea of justice, or Auster’s First Law.
— Heather Mac Donald discusses the high culture of the West, and where it’s headed.
In the comment-thread to our post about Duck Dynasty a few weeks back, the discussion turned to abortion rights. I wrote this:
Are the not-yet-born rights-bearing persons, deserving of moral consideration? One would think that in a morally consistent ethics this would be an attribute inhering in the unborn person ”” but apparently in many people’s opinion it depends merely upon the whim of the mother. From the perspective of the unborn, that’s a mighty precarious position to be in ”” and rather unfairly so, it seems to me.
It’s SchrÁ¶dinger’s Kid.
Later on I added:
To leave that ontological determination up to the whim of the person doing the killing is a unique moral and philosophical ambiguity. If you were a developing fetus, would you want your fate to be in such a precarious position?
Given that we are all brought into the world this way, one could say this is the ultimate Rawlsian question.
In John Rawls’s theory of justice, the “original position” is the position, behind the “veil of ignorance”, of people not yet placed into the world, who have no idea into what circumstances they will be delivered. The idea is that the optimally just society would be one designed by those behind the veil, because without foreknowledge of the station they are about to occupy, they will be maximally impartial.
What better instantiates the “original position” than our situation in utero? One might find oneself in the belly of a pleasure-seeking, atheistic NYU sophomore (a precarious situation!), or that of a pious, married Catholic. Under our law, your very personhood — your existential status, your chance at moral consideration, and most important of all, your chance at ever getting past the original position — depends upon nothing intrinsic to yourself. Indeed, it depends upon no consistent principle whatsoever, but rather upon the caprice of the woman into whose womb you happen to have been deployed.
Before I go looking around online, I’ll ask the question here: how do Rawlsians address this issue?
Here’s an outstanding piece by Heather Mac Donald on our new, Marxist mayor. I had begun to prepare some excerpts and commentary, but you should really just go read the whole thing, here.
It’s a sad day here at waka waka, where we’ve just heard that an old friend, Dr. Clive Sell of Phoenix, Arizona, has died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
I got to know Clive many years ago, and hadn’t seen him in a long time, but he was a fine man: a charming Southerner, exceptionally intelligent, tall and handsome, a gifted athlete, and one of the cheeriest, friendliest fellows you might ever hope to meet.
Our sympathy goes out in particular to our high-school chum, longtime commenter and regular sparring partner Peter, AKA ‘The One Eyed Man’. Clive and Peter had been best friends since they were roommates together at Amherst College in the early 1970s, and I am sure that Clive’s death is for Peter a grievous loss.
It was good to know you, Clive, and you should have been with us many a long year more. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Here’s a story that might get interesting. I’ll let you know.
