Motus Mentis

Here you go, folks: the live-tweeting of last night’s Park Slope Food Co-op meeting.

Last spring I wrote a brief post called Golden Mean, reproduced below in full:

If you look at any vigorous society in its prime, you see a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When either grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on the other into tyranny.

In the first prong of this aphorism I was not talking about ‘negative’ rights, of the sort found in the Constitution, which boil down to particular variants of a more general right not to be interfered with by the government. I had in mind ‘positive’ rights — rights to goods that require expense and effort to provide — which necessarily involve a positive compulsion on someone’s part to provide them, effectively indenturing one segment of society to another. As more and more of these goods become mere entitlements, rather than rewards to be earned by productive labor, the burden upon the productive segment of society increases, even as that segment dwindles — and the nation sags toward impotent mediocrity.

Privileges, on the other hand, are by definition blessings that are granted from the seat of power to those who seek them. It is always and everywhere a hallmark of tyranny that all rights, even negative rights, become privileges granted at the whim of the tyrant.

It has become a talking point in this election season that in the name of “fairness”, the well-to-do must pay more to the government for the “privilege” of being American. The latest prominent official to make this argument was the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, in an interview last week.

In an opinion piece published today at the Wall Street Journal, former Federal Reserve governor Lawrence Lindsay pushes back. Read it here.

A while back, in a private correspondence with a conservative blogger about what the Left means when it talks about “social justice”, I wrote the following:

Daniel Dennett once wrote that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything”. The central principle of liberal “justice”, and of Rawlsian justice, is exactly that: to view the individual not as as an originating agent of free choices, with all the responsibility for the resulting outcomes that free choice entails — but rather as a social infinitesimal, whose freedom, and therefore personal responsibility, is diminished effectively to zero by the nexus of external causes in which he is embedded: racism, gender stereotypes, corporate greed, economic inequality, political favoritism, institutionalized (and even unconscious) prejudices, and so on.

Dennis Prager has said that “the bigger the State, the smaller the citizen”, but this goes even farther: at the logical endpoint of the liberal, Rawlsian view it is not until all intrinsic aspects of individual advantage have been externalized, and thereby compensated for in the social framework, that a truly ‘just’ society will have been achieved. If Smith is congenitally smarter, more future-oriented, and more industrious than Jones, then he will end up being better off than Jones. But behind the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”, one cannot choose in advance what inborn advantages one will have, so by Rawls’s logic the just society must be one in which such natural inequalities cannot confer an advantage.

Ultimately, under such a philosophy the individual human being vanishes altogether.

I was reminded of this today when I ran across an item in the news about the poor woman who was brained a while ago by a shopping cart tossed off a shopping-mall balcony by two “teens”. The article, which you can read here, opens with the following sentence (my emphasis):

The husband of a Manhattan real-estate agent left with severe injuries after a shopping cart was dropped on her head from an East Harlem parking garage claims lax security caused the devastating accident.

That’s it: no human agency, no shred of responsibility ascribed to the attackers themselves for their brutal assault of an innocent woman. The whole thing just comes down to an “accident” due to “lax security” on the part of a corporate entity.

The individual human being vanishes altogether.

John Derbyshire commented, in last Friday’s Radio Derb podcast, on the Dharun Ravi trial getting underway today in New Jersey (this is the case in which a gay Rutgers student named Tyler Clementi killed himself some time after Mr. Ravi had secretly recorded Mr. Clementi kissing a male student in his dorm room).

The case appears to be a thoughtcrime persecution for which Mr. Clementi’s suicide was merely a trigger: Mr. Ravi, after all, is not charged with having caused Mr. Clementi’s death, and the prosecution is not allowed even to mention the suicide. I think we can rest assured, though, that this case wouldn’t be happening at all had Mr. Clementi not killed himself. So it seems, then, that what is on trial is the fact that this cruel and as-yet-unenlightened world is still a place that so chafes a young gay man’s sensitivities that he can no longer bear it — and Mr. Ravi, who is guilty of nothing more than a nasty college prank, is about to take the fall for all of us.

I will note in passing how handy the 1984 glossary, formerly a mere literary curiosity, has become these days.

Read Derb’s item here.

For his heresies, Patrick Buchanan has now officially been sacked by MSNBC. (I’ll confess that I’m surprised he lasted so long.)

He comments here.

From Tocqueville’s Democracy In America, 1840:

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.

Here’s how it’s done.