Motus Mentis

I saw a little of the Olympic opening ceremony last night; it was playing on the television at a local eatery where our small nuclear family, soon to be riven to opposite hemispheres of the globe, had gathered for a bite.

It was, from what I could see, a dismayingly shallow and garish entertainment. Apparently the only things worth noticing about Britain nowadays are its shoddy socialized health system, its fondness for pop music, and its fashionably (and forcibly) randomized demography, which has so atomized this once-coherent population that it is now apparently the law of the land that no two people of the same human subgroup may appear on stage at the same time.

One thing that is dying fast in our civilization is a proper appreciation of the importance of major public ceremonies. Britain used to understand this very well indeed, back when it ruled the world; its ostentatious rituals took place at the gravitational center of the culture, pulling all its parts toward the core. But how can this possibly work now that Britain has traded away its culture for a shapeless, acentric multiculture, and extinguished its haecceity as a nation, as the homeland of a common people with a shared way of life?

No, that’s all over and done with. In 2012 Britain is nothing but a place. With its youth long past and all vigor dissipated, the mighty nation of Churchill and Shakespeare, of Dickens and Drake and Newton and Nelson, now frisks and capers in the costume of the day, hoping for a few shillings from the crowd.

From longshoreman Eric Hoffer, November 29th, 1974:

I cannot see myself living in a socialist society. My passion is to be left alone and only a capitalist society does so. Capitalism is ideally equipped for mastering things but awkward in mastering men. It hugs the assumption that people will perform tolerably well when left to themselves.

The curious thing is that the reluctance or inability to manage men makes capitalist society uniquely modern. Managing men is a primitive thing. It partakes of magic and is the domain of medicine men and tribal chieftains. Socialist and communist societies are a throwback to the primitive in their passion for managing men.

Idealists never weary of decrying capitalism for its trivial motivation. Yet a discrepancy between trivial motives and weighty consequences is an essential trait of human uniqueness and is particularly pronounced in the creative individual. Not only in the marketplace and on the battlefield but also in the world of thought and imagination, men who set their hearts on toys often accomplish great things. The idealists prize seriousness and weightiness. Let them go to the animal kingdom! Animals are deadly serious.

– Before the Sabbath, p. 4

In the wake of the Aurora massacre, the usual groups are saying the usual things. Some of these things are flamboyantly stupid. For example, E.J. Dionne, complaining that dialogue about gun laws is “prevented” in America, wrote that ” where a gun massacre is concerned … an absolute and total gag rule is imposed on any thinking beyond the immediate circumstances of the catastrophe.” As James Taranto pointed out this afternoon in his Best of the Web newsletter, this assertion is obviously self-refuting — because if it were correct, Mr. Dionne wouldn’t be making it in a major newspaper, and then going on to write at length about matters that lie beyond the immediate circumstances of the catastrophe.

Mr. Taranto also gave us Mayor Bloomberg (who by the way is protected around the clock by rough men carrying guns), saying that the sensible folks who might wean America off guns “have been cowed by a handful of advocates who think that the right to bear arms allows you to go out and kill people at random.” Now I follow the gun debate pretty closely, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone, from Charlton Heston to Wayne LaPierre to Ted Nugent, interpret the Second Amendment quite like that.

As long-time readers will imagine, I’m a strong supporter of gun rights, for a long list of reasons I won’t go into here. But I will say that the Left, in its zeal to achieve near-zero tolerance of gun ownership in America, overlooks the question it should be asking if it really wants a “debate” about this. That question is:

“OK, gun advocates, will you agree that private citizens shouldn’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons? How about tanks, attack helicopters, or roof-mounted Hellfire missiles? If not those either, then where should the line be drawn, and on what coherent limiting principle?”

But nobody seems to be asking that.

Also:

“What is the appropriate trade-off, if any, between the need to protect individual rights under the Second Amendment and the need to keep lethal ordnance out of the hands of insane people? To what extent should we be willing to err on the side of caution, and to preempt the rights of the unhinged before they kill roomfuls of people? Afterward seems rather too late.”

These are hard questions, and fair ones, and the Left should ask them. And the Right should be thinking about how to answer them.

This is pure gold: a dance montage featuring the heartbreakingly lovely Rita Hayworth, set to a familiar soundtrack. How vulgar our modern “culture” seems in comparison to the artistry, elegance, and allure on display here.

It would have been even better with the original music, but what a treat nevertheless. Have a look.

I don’t go to my employer’s Manhattan office much anymore; mostly I work from home, to save the time and inconvenience of riding the subway from Brooklyn to Midtown. I did go in today, though, for a lunch meeting with some other members of our software-development team.

It’s July, and so there is plenty of exposed skin on view here in the city. As I walked back to the office just now I was struck by how many young people, especially pretty young women, have chosen to cover themselves with tattoos, often hideously ugly ones. (I realize this is nothing very new, but being in the skimpily dressed crowds around Times Square just now really drove the point home.)

Why are people doing this to themselves? In my day tattooing was the mark of the lowest classes, of criminals and itinerants and gang members. (It still is, of course.) But now it is seeping up the social scale — I doubt many debutantes or members of the British nobility are sporting much ink yet, but it seems rampant among the white-collar middle-class workers I saw everywhere on the streets of Midtown just now. Indeed, even my own nephew, who I would have thought was a sensible and well-brought-up young man, has decorated his chest with six-inch-tall images of the animated characters Bender and Fry (from the TV series Futurama.) Why would anyone in his right mind do such a thing?

I ought to know the answer myself, in fact: when I was nineteen, a girl I was seeing went to get a little star put on her abdomen, and I, a young and impulsive swain, had three of the same applied to my left shoulder. I soon regretted it, however, and went so far as to have them lasered off (at considerable expense) a few years later. Why did I do it in the first place? For the same reason I took up smoking, I suppose: it made me feel grown-up and slightly tough (and of course there was that girl…). But even then I had ambivalent feelings about it, and the stars were tiny things, drawn only in outline, and easily hidden — nothing like the huge, indelible tattoos I see all around me nowadays, applied to people who are, presumably, responsible adults. One of the sideshow attractions I saw on the street just now was an otherwise normal-looking woman in her thirties, with two young children. She had tattoos running all the way up one of her legs, completely covering the skin like a stocking, and some sort of barbed-wire affair girdling her upper arm.

Anyway, imagine my surprise when, back in the office, I spent a few minutes poking around online while waiting for some software to build, and saw a lively thread about just this topic over at VFR. (See also Theodore Dalrymple’s essay on tattooing, linked therein.) The discussion appears to be converging on what I think is the right assessment: that modern society, in its relentless destruction of all cultural standards, traditions, values, norms, and affinities, has so radically atomized the individual that he or she is reduced to expressing selfhood in a way that exactly matches the superficiality of the “culture” itself: by mutilating the surface of the body. Particularly on-target was a commenter by the name of Matt, who wrote that it is “a rejection of the tyranny of unchosen natural beauty in favor of man-made mutilation”. That’s absolutely correct, I think: as we increasingly reject and deny the natural categories and structures, both social and physical, that until now have given human life its order and form, it becomes more necessary to be radically self-created to have any value, to be anything at all.

Here are some further thoughts on the Corpus Christi police-standards issue that was the subject of our previous post.

A reasonable response might be:

Malcolm, you grumpy old fossil: can’t you see the obvious benefits of putting women on the police force? Women, who handle social interactions and conflict very differently from the “rough men” you extol, bring a complementary set of skills and competencies to the job, and thereby enhance the effectiveness of the force.

Perhaps so, and I certainly wouldn’t argue that there’s no place on the police force for women.

The Justice department’s beef with Corpus Christi has to do with the percentages of women applicants admitted to the force. One of the following relevant statements must be true:

A) Women are statistically identical to men as regards all important skills and competencies.
B) Women are not statistically identical to men as regards all important skills and competencies.

Do we not these days hear a steady drumbeat of protest against sex-based hiring preferences (except, of course, in order to harass employers in fields where women are considered to be “under-represented”)? Is this not based on option A): the modern liberal assumption that women are effectively identical to men in every way, and so for an employer to prefer one sex over the other for a given job is vile, and completely unjustifiable, Discrimination?

But this is, of course, completely at odds with the hypothetical objection above, which was that women differ from men in their skills and competencies, and that this difference is exactly what makes adding them to the police force so important.

Indeed A) cannot possibly be true, because if women did not exhibit systematic inferiority as regards the skills and competencies measured by the current Corpus Christi P.D. fitness test, the Justice department would have no basis for its complaint.

So, our hypothetical objection clearly asserts B): women do differ from men as regards their skills and competencies, but what they do well is useful to the police force, and so they should be included.

This is reasonable, and indeed I agree. But within any organization, employee roles that require different skills and competencies are usually considered to be different jobs, with different hiring criteria. For example, in the IT departments of modern companies there are programmers, network administrators, and database specialists. When staffing these positions, the company will apply different criteria to determine how many of each are needed, what each job is worth, and how best to screen applicants.

So if we accept the objection above, then, on the basis described, wouldn’t the most reasonable approach be for the police department to define two different jobs, suited to the admittedly different skills and competencies of men and women — and then to determine how many of each type are needed, what the appropriate screening criteria should be, and what salaries to pay for each?

One of these job descriptions would require the obvious “rough man” package: physical size and strength, with the potential for intimidation and success in physical restraint of violent perps that these qualities entail; willingness to take on high levels of physical stress and risk, and so on. For them, the screening test would be the same as it has always been. The other would make use of whatever special qualities we think women bring to the force: a gentler style of conflict resolution, perhaps, or whatever else we imagine there is about women officers that offsets their obvious (and easily measurable) physical shortcomings in comparison to males. Using a different screening test for female candidates would also have the advantage of forcing the bureaucracy to define and quantify just what it is that makes us so enthusiastic about having women on the force in the first place, and to devise a test that measures these qualities in a meaningful way.

In other words: lowering the physical-fitness standards for candidates obviously diminishes the quality of the force in an easily understood and quantifiable way. To justify doing so, there should be some compensatory benefit. If the compensatory benefit is that women, being different from men, bring other valuable qualities to the police force, then let’s figure out what those qualities are and how to quantify them, determine how many officers of that sort we actually need, and devise an appropriate screening test for female candidates. This seems to me the most obvious, and most rational, solution.

Nobody will choose it, however. This is because the premises that such an approach is based on — that there are in fact statistically significant differences in skills and competencies between men and women, and that in order to build the most effective police force we can we should recognize these differences and incorporate them into our hiring policies — violate not just one, but three fundamental principles of modern liberal culture.

The first is principle A) above: that there are in fact no important differences between men and women.

The second is that, to the extent that there are stubborn differences between men and women, to allow these differences to be reflected in “under-representation” of women in any area of the workplace is pernicious sexism. If, on average, women don’t perform as well at some quantifiable skill as men, then under principle A) that skill is by definition irrelevant to the job at hand, and for employers to rely on high competence in that skill to qualify job applicants should be, in the DOJ’s plain language, “unlawful”.

The third, and most destructive, is the wholesale rejection of the traditional view of public agencies such as the police department and the military: to wit, that their whole purpose is to enforce the law and to fight wars, and that therefore all hiring criteria should be highly selective, and based solely on assembling the organization that best serves its mission. Under the radical inversion of this view that now has the upper hand in political discourse, the primary mission — nay, the very raison d’Áªtre — of such public agencies is instead to provide a stringently non-discriminatory job market and venue for self-actualization, open to all, in which maximal Diversity is the summum bonum. If standards need to be lowered along the way to make that happen, then lowered they will be.

Under this view, then, everyone has a “right” to be a police officer, and those females who didn’t make the cut were “unlawfully” “screened out”, and deprived of the “opportunity” to which they were entitled.

This is not, however, a principled position, or at least not if we stop there. Let’s say we eliminate the pull-up test, because it discriminates against women. Social Justice achieved, right? Not so fast. Still “screened out” are the blind, the deaf, hemiplegics, quadraplegics, and shoals of others who, through no fault of their own, are still denied their rightful “opportunity” to serve their communities behind badge and truncheon. What about them?

The answer is: it’s no easy walk to Freedom, friends. There’s always more work to do.

Forward!