Here’s a quick scenario based on my own experience. I’ve attended my local Tea Party group’s meetings many times. I know how they are organized. They have a web site with a fair amount of contact information. The organizers are proud of what they do, and make no attempt to hide their identities. Meeting attendees often provide their phone numbers so they can stay informed about future meetings, upcoming speakers, and so forth. The organization’s volunteer secretary feeds these numbers into a robocaller for that purpose. The robocaller makes a series of calls in steady succession, which has a certain pattern no doubt easily identifiable by NSA software. An analyst can easily look up the originator of the calls, a Tea Party group secretary, and reasonably infer that she isn’t robocalling birthday greetings to her grandchildren. Thus, without a warrant, a list of people connected with that Tea Party organization can be arrived at. When people have to worry that participating in a political organization that supports the US Constitution might result in harassment from the IRS or some other government entity, they may decide to stay at home and keep their mouths shut. They may take a step, in fear, away from freedom. That is why a little metadata matters.
May 28, 2013
A good walk through the woods
I had a good walk through the woods the other day. It is both refreshing and instructive to observe those parts of the world that remain largely beyond the regulatory influence of human beings. Contrary to what some might think, plants and animals get on pretty well without our intervention. They flourish and decline by turns with the fortunes of the seasons. Trees struggle slowly, invisibly, upward towards the sun, competing against one another for the holes made in the canopy by storms and disease. Animals strive to eat without being eaten. Their lives, for the most part, are brief – but I think not wholly miserable. The turtle that sits on the log in the river, warming itself in the sun, does not convey a sense of desperation. There is room in this world for pleasure and pain, for life and for death.
The woods is, of course, a wonderfully complex Darwinian engine. The term “ecosystem” is popular now, but I prefer the 19th century word “engine” because I think it captures the essential dynamism characteristic of living things. Seen as a whole, a woods is a solar-powered machine. It is composed of an enormous number of different parts all working together with complete indifference to their collective result. The sycamore does not think “I must contribute this much shade, and this many places for birds and insects to live.” It doesn’t even think “I must push toward the sun.” It just does what it does. The sycamore is a machine itself – in the purest, broadest, most sublime, most beautiful sense of the word. “Ecosystem,” to me, sounds like a bureaucracy. A sort of a closed box of plants and animals, every pigeon in its proper pigeonhole, limited, with overtones of deliberate cooperation and a shared desire for collective success. A theoretical place, more than a physical one. “Nature” as the mind imagines it. “Engine,” too, I realize, is only another rough description of that which stubbornly eludes the trap of words. Nothing in the universe survives the passage into language true and whole. But then, I’m a symbolizing animal. It is just what I do.
When I am paying enough attention – which is to say, when I am living in the physical world instead of in my head – I find “nature” both humbling and uplifting. Most of the time I am trapped, along with the rest of humanity, in one kind of social game or another. We weigh the merits of this person or that person, or what someone did, or will do, or might do. Most of it is not only trivial but nonsense – only real because we make it so. The woods is full of reality – right down to its roots. It overflows with reality. A minute spent in the woods, or on an empty beach, or on a mountainside, makes a minute spent in any city on the planet almost embarrassing. A paltry knock-off of life. A crude impersonation of reality.
The woods is, of course, a wonderfully complex Darwinian engine. The term “ecosystem” is popular now, but I prefer the 19th century word “engine” because I think it captures the essential dynamism characteristic of living things. Seen as a whole, a woods is a solar-powered machine. It is composed of an enormous number of different parts all working together with complete indifference to their collective result. The sycamore does not think “I must contribute this much shade, and this many places for birds and insects to live.” It doesn’t even think “I must push toward the sun.” It just does what it does. The sycamore is a machine itself – in the purest, broadest, most sublime, most beautiful sense of the word. “Ecosystem,” to me, sounds like a bureaucracy. A sort of a closed box of plants and animals, every pigeon in its proper pigeonhole, limited, with overtones of deliberate cooperation and a shared desire for collective success. A theoretical place, more than a physical one. “Nature” as the mind imagines it. “Engine,” too, I realize, is only another rough description of that which stubbornly eludes the trap of words. Nothing in the universe survives the passage into language true and whole. But then, I’m a symbolizing animal. It is just what I do.
When I am paying enough attention – which is to say, when I am living in the physical world instead of in my head – I find “nature” both humbling and uplifting. Most of the time I am trapped, along with the rest of humanity, in one kind of social game or another. We weigh the merits of this person or that person, or what someone did, or will do, or might do. Most of it is not only trivial but nonsense – only real because we make it so. The woods is full of reality – right down to its roots. It overflows with reality. A minute spent in the woods, or on an empty beach, or on a mountainside, makes a minute spent in any city on the planet almost embarrassing. A paltry knock-off of life. A crude impersonation of reality.
May 17, 2013
Contemporary American Liberalism, a brief dissection
I know many lifelong conservatives who either misunderstand American liberalism, or find it utterly incomprehensible. While I have never considered myself a liberal per se, I was at one time sympathetic to many of their causes. My own political views were actually to the left of mainstream liberalism for much of my life, but liberalism has drifted left while I have reasoned my way inevitably to the right. I could say I’ve looked at liberalism from both sides now – but unlike the Judy Collins song, I think I know and understand it pretty well. Here, then, are my general conclusions about how liberalism functions as a movement.
First, like most other groups, liberals are not a homogeneous like-minded mass. They are really three groups that, while distinctly different, operate symbiotically from a political perspective. Far from being equal, these three groups are stratified by class and there is only very limited interaction between them.
At the bottom of the liberal pyramid, we find the people among the lower and lower middle classes that believe they will benefit from a redistribution of wealth. Generally speaking, these people do not perceive themselves as liberals or progressives, though some may self-identify as Democrats. They rarely think about politics in any abstract, ideological sense. Rather, they vote for those that offer them some real, tangible favors. They are entirely practical in this regard. They want material things from the government, and they are unimpressed with the complex ideas of individual liberty, property rights, limitations to government power, etc. Their eyes are on their own immediate interests.
While there was a time when the direct beneficiaries of government charity were few, they have grown steadily more numerous as government has seen fit to compensate for more and more kinds of inequities. To begin with the most inflammatory example, history furnished a ready-made grievance for most black Americans, and the liberal elite have been happy to tuck them under the great paternalistic wing. This alliance is largely opportunistic at both ends. The leaders of the American left do not care about black people as individual human beings. Government policies, by their nature, do not cope well with the unique circumstances of individuals. This is a weakness of all social policies, not merely leftist ones. Leftist ideology though, from Marx on, has always explicitly dealt with people as aggregate classes, ethnic groups, or some other kind of collective.1 They always talk about what is best for society rather than about what is best for the individual. It is the collective which is important. The importance of the individual human being is a bourgeois enlightenment idea – it has never been a socialist one. Consequently, the left treats blacks, and everybody else, as members of a particular group, and it is the group whose history must be redressed – in exchange, of course, for their support in the elections. If you think that wealthy liberals genuinely like poor blacks as individuals, see if you can find some section 8 housing in one of the neighborhoods where the liberal elites live.
The same basic way of carving up humanity is applicable to all sorts of groups. For example, a liberal government created a bureaucratic category of disabled persons and functionally pretends that no one collecting disability is able to work. What else could disability mean? Yet I have known several people on disability, including a couple of my own relatives, and none were so handicapped that they could not have continued to do productive work of some kind. Indeed, it is not unusual for someone receiving disability benefits to be quite active, and even to operate some small business on the side. On the other hand, I know several blind people who are not collecting disability at all, but who manage to support themselves quite well. Disability is, from a social engineering perspective, a construct for the redistribution of wealth and the reorganization of labor. It’s a way to keep unemployment numbers down by removing people from the workforce. From an individual perspective it is, more often than not, a way to get a paycheck without working. Ask and you shall receive. The number of people who have been exempted from contributing to the theoretically all-important greater good of society is now quite staggering. Nine million on disability alone.2
I will skip over the middle tier of educated middle class liberals for now, getting back to them in a moment. It’s always best to tell your jokes either at the beginning or the end – either to set your audience at ease, or to leave them with a laugh. There is nothing especially funny about either the dependent classes or the elites, but the middle classes of liberals are one long running gag.
The ruling elite, those people who enact new laws and feel entitled by their stations to ignore the old ones, is the group with whom I have the least direct experience. Practically none, in fact. I stood on a street corner once as a president passed by in an armored bus with black windows, preceded and followed by an army of well-dressed but intimidating thugs with black sunglasses. On another occasion, I saw my governor at about a hundred yards distance. This is about as close as most of us will ever get to a major political figure. That is significant in itself. The ruling class of the United States today are far more estranged from the general public than the aristocracy of medieval Europe ever was. The medieval lord might live in a castle, but the castle at least overlooked the town. If the lord did not necessarily share in every aspect of the lives of his serfs, he at least could not help but be aware of them. A couple of decades ago, the first president Bush had a telling moment during a campaign visit to a supermarket, when he was surprised and obviously fascinated by the bar code scanner. He had obviously never seen or used one. Why would he have? George H. W. Bush is obviously no liberal, but he is certainly a member of the ruling class and shares in its high degree of isolation from the rest of us. Some of our rulers may come from modest backgrounds, but it is a rare politician, high level bureaucrat or nationally recognized journalist who maintains much active contact with those roots. Official Washington is, in a very importance sense, a nation unto itself.
In the absence of personal experience, I can only make inferences about the thinking of the elites based on their statements, their reported behavior, and the public policies they advocate. Their actual statements are the least compelling of the three. All major politicians now are surrounded not only by a cordon of security, but also by a buzzing swarm of campaign managers, media consultants and the like. This is to say, they are surrounded by people whose goal is to turn all of their utterances to some political advantage, either by encouraging pompous grandstanding, or some comforting, well-crafted species of baby-talk. Politicians don’t tell you what they believe, but do their best to shape what you believe. This is incompatible with any notion that their function is to represent you. Rather, your function is to support them. Their consultants are nothing more or less than a specialized group of advertizing experts, who want to sell you a narrative or a candidate rather than a product. The policy or the persona is the product. It is a mistake, though, to think of members of the ruling elite as habitual liars. It is perfectly possible that they maintain at least a normal level of honesty among themselves. They lie to us because the lies are impersonal, and because they are supremely confident that they know best, and any abuse of the truth that will convince us to go along enthusiastically or at least quietly is just a normal part of political life. They treat us, at best, like children. The only vestige of power still in the hands of the public is our tenuous hold on the elections, but in a culture that values emotional reactions and charisma over substance, elections are more of a beauty contest than an expression of the popular will. One can only elect a candidate who represents one’s interests if the candidate’s views are both known and consistent. The system that has evolved makes it unlikely they will be either.
I haven’t delineated the differences between the liberal ruling elite from their nominally conservative, Republican counterparts because, frankly, the differences are minor. Bill Clinton can be chummy with the Bushes because they both see themselves in essentially the same way. To use George junior’s own inane, quasi-folksy term – they are “the deciders.” The great experiment of the United States, in which, to use Thoreau’s rather more articulate phrase – “that government is best which governs least” – is over. Republicans talk about freedom and conjure up the image of the rugged individualist, but most don’t really take it seriously. What they want is not a diminution of government size or power, but merely it’s redirection to favor a somewhat different agenda. Likewise, most Democrats only talk about the preservation of privacy and other civil liberties. They do so only to avoid alienating the more educated members of their base by moving toward authoritarianism too quickly. They know well that they will never be subject to any oppressive laws themselves, and that sweeping government powers would make governing easier.
The American ruling class is, in one sense, uninteresting. Anyone with even a moderate knowledge of history can see that they are nothing new. Humanity has been burdened with such people since the dawn of civilization. The details of the methods are new, but the motives and attitudes are timeless. The liberals at the top of the current political heap are not egalitarians. They are people who enjoy the exercise of power, and feel that some natural superiority on their part entitles them to mold the rest of us like so much human clay. They recognize, to some degree, that they are constrained by the dictates of their own public narrative – which is to say that, to the extent that elections still matter, they must still dance the egalitarian dance to the satisfaction of their base – but their goal is not to serve that base, but to serve their own ambitions – utopian, avaricious or otherwise. Nothing much to see here. Let us move along.
It is now my pleasure to present the class that I know best – that class from which, in fact, I sprang. (“Stumbled” might be a better word – or perhaps “escaped after a protracted struggle.”) Middle class liberals are not an absolutely uniform group either. They range from upper middle class professionals (lawyers, doctors, professors in schools beneath the Ivy League, et al.) to lower middle class union workers and school teachers. Still, within this broad swath of people there are some common characteristics.
The first point of similarity is one of simple identification with the ideology’s core narrative. Middle class liberals see themselves as part of a continual moral and material progress upward. The newly revived term “progressive” is probably a more apt term than “liberal” – a term which once connoted nearly the opposite of what it connotes now. Contemporary liberals see themselves as good because they want society to continually be made better. Conservatives, by contrast, are suspicious of dismantling institutions that experience has proven to work. Though this distinction is simplistic to the point of childishness, it is still quite illustrative. The core liberal belief is that the aggregate direction of change is always toward improvement. By destroying established tradition, they believe they will get a better society when the dust settles. For this reason, they tend not to worry much about the consequences of change, provided that change is being driven by members of their own team. To them, progress it the inevitable consequence of upheaval. Unfortunately for them, history fails to confirm this outlook.
Reality is under no obligation to adhere to anyone’s beliefs. A religious belief in progress is no better a predictor of the future than any other magical belief. The historical record indicates that civilizations rise and fall due to many subtle factors, and that rapid change has at least as good a chance of being negative as it does of being positive. Things don’t just get better and better because you feel good about your ideology. The story of civilization is substantially a chronicle of unintended consequences – of unhappy things that happened on the way to somebody’s idea of utopia.
The second thing that bonds middle class liberalism together is a misguided notion of altruism. This can have different motivations depending on the circumstances of the individual. If one is a materially successful liberal – not a member of the political elite, but in the top 5 or 10% of the population economically – altruism in the form of coughing up a little more in taxes, or just having the proper attitudes toward the least successful members of society, gets you off the moral hook. You can be rich, which your ideology tells you is a kind of sin – and yet have a clean conscience through the secular tithe of taxation and a politically correct thought or two. I can only imagine many lawyers find their politics a useful balm to sooth the atrophying vestiges of their consciences. At the other end of the spectrum, in the liberal lower middle class, the additional tax tithe and political correctness elevates your station through association with the elite. Perhaps you cannot change the world like Bill or Hillary Clinton – but you can help! You can have a little piece of their high holiness through your modest sacrifice and right (or rather left) ideas.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not opposed to genuine human sympathy. The world would be a wretched place if we were all unflinching Randian egoists. What I am opposed to is letting a government or an ideology manage and codify our natural human sympathies for us. If someone takes a certain share of my income by force and tells me they are doing good with it, this does not constitute a moral action on my part. Only voluntary actions can be moral. Likewise, if I feel a politically correct sense of pity toward some underprivileged minority whose members I only rarely or superficially encounter, I do not make their lives any better. Words and thoughts are cheap. This isn’t altruism at all – it is just a thinly disguised exercise in good old fashioned subservience and conformity. How often does the average liberal ask: “So – how are these social policies really working out?” “Is there less poverty now than there was 40 years ago?” “How well do my representatives actually embody my ideals?” Some do, of course, but most are content to play the my-team-vs-their-team game which is the default pattern of human interaction wherever recognizable groups of any kind exist. Liberals don’t love all human beings – they love the people that their culture elevates and hate the people that their culture vilifies. In this way, frankly, I suppose the liberal middle class really isn’t very interesting either. A mob of followers and wannabes that are the willing tools of an elite. Nothing new under the sun.
What is peculiar (though not unique) about the contemporary liberal middle class is their enthusiasm for undermining their own actual best interests. It does not benefit them to have a greater and greater share of their income doled out to a growing number of entitled victims. Neither does it benefit them to grovel at the feet of their own leadership. Virtually all of the productive capacity of society lies in the knowledge and abilities of the dwindling middle class. Despite this theoretical power, they are progressively wrung dry by the elite, who use their wealth to pay both the poor and themselves while contributing rather little useful work themselves. Politically speaking, the middle class is the most naïve component of the liberal movement.
The lengths to which the middle tier of liberals will go to defend their narrative are both tragic and amusing. I can think of no better illustration of this than the comments of a liberal friend. He once told me that he knew perfectly well his leadership was lying to him, but he’d concluded that this wasn’t a particularly serious problem. He felt that because his leaders always said the right things that they would eventually have to do the right things as well. Stunned, I countered with the argument that Joseph Stalin always said the right things, while happily sending millions to the gulag. I needn’t have bothered. My friend’s position was neither rational nor amenable to argument. It was, in fact, the perfect political analog of battered woman syndrome – the victim’s belief that, although the abuser has beaten her repeatedly in the past, his words prove that he really loves her and that eventually he will change. The only rational response – no, to forgive abuse is to encourage more abuse, and to believe in change occurring spontaneously under such circumstances is self-destructive – is rarely worth the effort of expressing. Against a truly magical belief, mere reason struggles in vain.
It is bitterly ironic that contemporary liberalism has identified itself so closely with science, and yet divorced itself so completely from external epistemic standards. So confident are most middle class progressives that their ideology is grounded in science that they endow liberal policies of all sorts with an aura of infallibility they do not merit. At least the religious realize their understanding of the world is based on faith – the liberal has a faith-based worldview he thinks is factual because, here and there, it has a veneer of scientific structure and the approval of scientists.
The association of a political movement with science tends to have a corrupting influence on both. It gives political positions credibility they do not merit, while is undermines the credibility of science. Take the recent case of Diederik Stapel, the well-respected Dutch sociologist. He spent the greater part of his career inventing sociological mechanisms and supporting them with data he invented out of thin air. Since his work supported the general narrative of western liberalism, it escaped serious scrutiny for decades. It was peer reviewed, of course – but by peers who were in general sympathetic, and who knew quite well the consequences of bucking the culture. Consider, by contrast, the case of Charles Murray. Murray’s landmark work, The Bell Curve, brought an immediate storm of academic attack for showing that, as groups, blacks and Latinos performed significantly poorer than whites on intelligence tests, and for asserting that genetics could not be ruled out as a contributing factor to the disparity. Whether Murray and his co-author Richard Herrnstein where ultimately correct or not is not at issue. The point is that scientists who excoriated Murray in the popular press were heroes, whereas Stapel’s credibility was taken for granted.
I have digressed somewhat. Let’s return to my main topic, which is the interplay between the three classes of liberals.
In its roughest, most general outlines, the socio-economic mechanism of contemporary American liberalism is as I outlined earlier: the elites harvest the productive effort of the middle class to maintain their own status and to buy the support of the dependent classes. The elites win economically in more-or-less the same way elites always win economically – they own the game – and they entrench themselves politically by buying the support of a large class of dependents. This part of the mechanism is as old as Rome, at least. The dependent classes win to the extent that they can live a poor but not a desperate life without having to do any real work for it. They lose in that tax pressure suppresses the economic activity that would allow them to rise from a state of dependency more easily if they wanted to – as some of them certainly do want to. Their rise from dependency would be of no real benefit to the liberal elite – in fact quite the opposite. They are perfectly useful where they are. Although this may sound cynical, consider what would have to be true were it otherwise. The leaders of the left would have to be so altruistic as to be willing to give up a near-certain source of political support simply because it helped some individuals not personally known to them. Individuals whose culture is as alien to that of the elites as a Kalahari bushman’s is to you or I.
The middle class loses. The leftwing middle class wins the fantasy moral victory of feeling it is on the side of the angels. The conservative middle class just loses.
The problem with this game, even from the perspective of the current winners, is that it can’t go on forever. We have reached a point in history where both the socio-economic mechanism outlined above and a variety of material factors (mostly involving resources shortages of one kind or another) are eroding the middle class engine that powers the system. The crash of 2008 and a gradually shrinking economy that has followed has pushed a huge number of productive working people into a condition of non-productive dependence. Since at least 2008, we have had largely a fictitious economy built of currency debasement and dishonest government statistics. The shrinking middle class can carry no more burdens. Certainly, they cannot offset in taxes the 40% of the budget that the government prints out of thin air. Sooner or later there are just going to be more balls in the air than the juggler can handle, and people are going to discover the hard way that they cannot eat promises or dreams – which is all the government will have to offer them. Many people now feel this intuitively, but not very many look too closely. It’s a frightening sight. And if they did look – what could they do?
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1 Yes, I know that I am generalizing in exactly the same way. Old habits die hard. I do not claim that absolutely every liberal fits neatly into my formula. What I am struggling to paint is a portrait of a crowd in its most general outlines. It is only an aggregate form created from the shapes of many individuals, who are themselves undoubtedly unique in many respects. I do not claim the portrait fully subsumes the beliefs of all those that it contains, or that their individual lives or characters are altogether irrelevant.
2 To be fair, if I may be forgiven the use of a liberal holy word, the economy has become so structurally distorted that there would not be enough jobs to go around now if, by magic or necessity, everybody wanted one. I deal with that in more detail elsewhere. http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2012/07/automation-service-economy-and-welfare.html
First, like most other groups, liberals are not a homogeneous like-minded mass. They are really three groups that, while distinctly different, operate symbiotically from a political perspective. Far from being equal, these three groups are stratified by class and there is only very limited interaction between them.
At the bottom of the liberal pyramid, we find the people among the lower and lower middle classes that believe they will benefit from a redistribution of wealth. Generally speaking, these people do not perceive themselves as liberals or progressives, though some may self-identify as Democrats. They rarely think about politics in any abstract, ideological sense. Rather, they vote for those that offer them some real, tangible favors. They are entirely practical in this regard. They want material things from the government, and they are unimpressed with the complex ideas of individual liberty, property rights, limitations to government power, etc. Their eyes are on their own immediate interests.
While there was a time when the direct beneficiaries of government charity were few, they have grown steadily more numerous as government has seen fit to compensate for more and more kinds of inequities. To begin with the most inflammatory example, history furnished a ready-made grievance for most black Americans, and the liberal elite have been happy to tuck them under the great paternalistic wing. This alliance is largely opportunistic at both ends. The leaders of the American left do not care about black people as individual human beings. Government policies, by their nature, do not cope well with the unique circumstances of individuals. This is a weakness of all social policies, not merely leftist ones. Leftist ideology though, from Marx on, has always explicitly dealt with people as aggregate classes, ethnic groups, or some other kind of collective.1 They always talk about what is best for society rather than about what is best for the individual. It is the collective which is important. The importance of the individual human being is a bourgeois enlightenment idea – it has never been a socialist one. Consequently, the left treats blacks, and everybody else, as members of a particular group, and it is the group whose history must be redressed – in exchange, of course, for their support in the elections. If you think that wealthy liberals genuinely like poor blacks as individuals, see if you can find some section 8 housing in one of the neighborhoods where the liberal elites live.
The same basic way of carving up humanity is applicable to all sorts of groups. For example, a liberal government created a bureaucratic category of disabled persons and functionally pretends that no one collecting disability is able to work. What else could disability mean? Yet I have known several people on disability, including a couple of my own relatives, and none were so handicapped that they could not have continued to do productive work of some kind. Indeed, it is not unusual for someone receiving disability benefits to be quite active, and even to operate some small business on the side. On the other hand, I know several blind people who are not collecting disability at all, but who manage to support themselves quite well. Disability is, from a social engineering perspective, a construct for the redistribution of wealth and the reorganization of labor. It’s a way to keep unemployment numbers down by removing people from the workforce. From an individual perspective it is, more often than not, a way to get a paycheck without working. Ask and you shall receive. The number of people who have been exempted from contributing to the theoretically all-important greater good of society is now quite staggering. Nine million on disability alone.2
I will skip over the middle tier of educated middle class liberals for now, getting back to them in a moment. It’s always best to tell your jokes either at the beginning or the end – either to set your audience at ease, or to leave them with a laugh. There is nothing especially funny about either the dependent classes or the elites, but the middle classes of liberals are one long running gag.
The ruling elite, those people who enact new laws and feel entitled by their stations to ignore the old ones, is the group with whom I have the least direct experience. Practically none, in fact. I stood on a street corner once as a president passed by in an armored bus with black windows, preceded and followed by an army of well-dressed but intimidating thugs with black sunglasses. On another occasion, I saw my governor at about a hundred yards distance. This is about as close as most of us will ever get to a major political figure. That is significant in itself. The ruling class of the United States today are far more estranged from the general public than the aristocracy of medieval Europe ever was. The medieval lord might live in a castle, but the castle at least overlooked the town. If the lord did not necessarily share in every aspect of the lives of his serfs, he at least could not help but be aware of them. A couple of decades ago, the first president Bush had a telling moment during a campaign visit to a supermarket, when he was surprised and obviously fascinated by the bar code scanner. He had obviously never seen or used one. Why would he have? George H. W. Bush is obviously no liberal, but he is certainly a member of the ruling class and shares in its high degree of isolation from the rest of us. Some of our rulers may come from modest backgrounds, but it is a rare politician, high level bureaucrat or nationally recognized journalist who maintains much active contact with those roots. Official Washington is, in a very importance sense, a nation unto itself.
In the absence of personal experience, I can only make inferences about the thinking of the elites based on their statements, their reported behavior, and the public policies they advocate. Their actual statements are the least compelling of the three. All major politicians now are surrounded not only by a cordon of security, but also by a buzzing swarm of campaign managers, media consultants and the like. This is to say, they are surrounded by people whose goal is to turn all of their utterances to some political advantage, either by encouraging pompous grandstanding, or some comforting, well-crafted species of baby-talk. Politicians don’t tell you what they believe, but do their best to shape what you believe. This is incompatible with any notion that their function is to represent you. Rather, your function is to support them. Their consultants are nothing more or less than a specialized group of advertizing experts, who want to sell you a narrative or a candidate rather than a product. The policy or the persona is the product. It is a mistake, though, to think of members of the ruling elite as habitual liars. It is perfectly possible that they maintain at least a normal level of honesty among themselves. They lie to us because the lies are impersonal, and because they are supremely confident that they know best, and any abuse of the truth that will convince us to go along enthusiastically or at least quietly is just a normal part of political life. They treat us, at best, like children. The only vestige of power still in the hands of the public is our tenuous hold on the elections, but in a culture that values emotional reactions and charisma over substance, elections are more of a beauty contest than an expression of the popular will. One can only elect a candidate who represents one’s interests if the candidate’s views are both known and consistent. The system that has evolved makes it unlikely they will be either.
I haven’t delineated the differences between the liberal ruling elite from their nominally conservative, Republican counterparts because, frankly, the differences are minor. Bill Clinton can be chummy with the Bushes because they both see themselves in essentially the same way. To use George junior’s own inane, quasi-folksy term – they are “the deciders.” The great experiment of the United States, in which, to use Thoreau’s rather more articulate phrase – “that government is best which governs least” – is over. Republicans talk about freedom and conjure up the image of the rugged individualist, but most don’t really take it seriously. What they want is not a diminution of government size or power, but merely it’s redirection to favor a somewhat different agenda. Likewise, most Democrats only talk about the preservation of privacy and other civil liberties. They do so only to avoid alienating the more educated members of their base by moving toward authoritarianism too quickly. They know well that they will never be subject to any oppressive laws themselves, and that sweeping government powers would make governing easier.
The American ruling class is, in one sense, uninteresting. Anyone with even a moderate knowledge of history can see that they are nothing new. Humanity has been burdened with such people since the dawn of civilization. The details of the methods are new, but the motives and attitudes are timeless. The liberals at the top of the current political heap are not egalitarians. They are people who enjoy the exercise of power, and feel that some natural superiority on their part entitles them to mold the rest of us like so much human clay. They recognize, to some degree, that they are constrained by the dictates of their own public narrative – which is to say that, to the extent that elections still matter, they must still dance the egalitarian dance to the satisfaction of their base – but their goal is not to serve that base, but to serve their own ambitions – utopian, avaricious or otherwise. Nothing much to see here. Let us move along.
It is now my pleasure to present the class that I know best – that class from which, in fact, I sprang. (“Stumbled” might be a better word – or perhaps “escaped after a protracted struggle.”) Middle class liberals are not an absolutely uniform group either. They range from upper middle class professionals (lawyers, doctors, professors in schools beneath the Ivy League, et al.) to lower middle class union workers and school teachers. Still, within this broad swath of people there are some common characteristics.
The first point of similarity is one of simple identification with the ideology’s core narrative. Middle class liberals see themselves as part of a continual moral and material progress upward. The newly revived term “progressive” is probably a more apt term than “liberal” – a term which once connoted nearly the opposite of what it connotes now. Contemporary liberals see themselves as good because they want society to continually be made better. Conservatives, by contrast, are suspicious of dismantling institutions that experience has proven to work. Though this distinction is simplistic to the point of childishness, it is still quite illustrative. The core liberal belief is that the aggregate direction of change is always toward improvement. By destroying established tradition, they believe they will get a better society when the dust settles. For this reason, they tend not to worry much about the consequences of change, provided that change is being driven by members of their own team. To them, progress it the inevitable consequence of upheaval. Unfortunately for them, history fails to confirm this outlook.
Reality is under no obligation to adhere to anyone’s beliefs. A religious belief in progress is no better a predictor of the future than any other magical belief. The historical record indicates that civilizations rise and fall due to many subtle factors, and that rapid change has at least as good a chance of being negative as it does of being positive. Things don’t just get better and better because you feel good about your ideology. The story of civilization is substantially a chronicle of unintended consequences – of unhappy things that happened on the way to somebody’s idea of utopia.
The second thing that bonds middle class liberalism together is a misguided notion of altruism. This can have different motivations depending on the circumstances of the individual. If one is a materially successful liberal – not a member of the political elite, but in the top 5 or 10% of the population economically – altruism in the form of coughing up a little more in taxes, or just having the proper attitudes toward the least successful members of society, gets you off the moral hook. You can be rich, which your ideology tells you is a kind of sin – and yet have a clean conscience through the secular tithe of taxation and a politically correct thought or two. I can only imagine many lawyers find their politics a useful balm to sooth the atrophying vestiges of their consciences. At the other end of the spectrum, in the liberal lower middle class, the additional tax tithe and political correctness elevates your station through association with the elite. Perhaps you cannot change the world like Bill or Hillary Clinton – but you can help! You can have a little piece of their high holiness through your modest sacrifice and right (or rather left) ideas.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not opposed to genuine human sympathy. The world would be a wretched place if we were all unflinching Randian egoists. What I am opposed to is letting a government or an ideology manage and codify our natural human sympathies for us. If someone takes a certain share of my income by force and tells me they are doing good with it, this does not constitute a moral action on my part. Only voluntary actions can be moral. Likewise, if I feel a politically correct sense of pity toward some underprivileged minority whose members I only rarely or superficially encounter, I do not make their lives any better. Words and thoughts are cheap. This isn’t altruism at all – it is just a thinly disguised exercise in good old fashioned subservience and conformity. How often does the average liberal ask: “So – how are these social policies really working out?” “Is there less poverty now than there was 40 years ago?” “How well do my representatives actually embody my ideals?” Some do, of course, but most are content to play the my-team-vs-their-team game which is the default pattern of human interaction wherever recognizable groups of any kind exist. Liberals don’t love all human beings – they love the people that their culture elevates and hate the people that their culture vilifies. In this way, frankly, I suppose the liberal middle class really isn’t very interesting either. A mob of followers and wannabes that are the willing tools of an elite. Nothing new under the sun.
What is peculiar (though not unique) about the contemporary liberal middle class is their enthusiasm for undermining their own actual best interests. It does not benefit them to have a greater and greater share of their income doled out to a growing number of entitled victims. Neither does it benefit them to grovel at the feet of their own leadership. Virtually all of the productive capacity of society lies in the knowledge and abilities of the dwindling middle class. Despite this theoretical power, they are progressively wrung dry by the elite, who use their wealth to pay both the poor and themselves while contributing rather little useful work themselves. Politically speaking, the middle class is the most naïve component of the liberal movement.
The lengths to which the middle tier of liberals will go to defend their narrative are both tragic and amusing. I can think of no better illustration of this than the comments of a liberal friend. He once told me that he knew perfectly well his leadership was lying to him, but he’d concluded that this wasn’t a particularly serious problem. He felt that because his leaders always said the right things that they would eventually have to do the right things as well. Stunned, I countered with the argument that Joseph Stalin always said the right things, while happily sending millions to the gulag. I needn’t have bothered. My friend’s position was neither rational nor amenable to argument. It was, in fact, the perfect political analog of battered woman syndrome – the victim’s belief that, although the abuser has beaten her repeatedly in the past, his words prove that he really loves her and that eventually he will change. The only rational response – no, to forgive abuse is to encourage more abuse, and to believe in change occurring spontaneously under such circumstances is self-destructive – is rarely worth the effort of expressing. Against a truly magical belief, mere reason struggles in vain.
It is bitterly ironic that contemporary liberalism has identified itself so closely with science, and yet divorced itself so completely from external epistemic standards. So confident are most middle class progressives that their ideology is grounded in science that they endow liberal policies of all sorts with an aura of infallibility they do not merit. At least the religious realize their understanding of the world is based on faith – the liberal has a faith-based worldview he thinks is factual because, here and there, it has a veneer of scientific structure and the approval of scientists.
The association of a political movement with science tends to have a corrupting influence on both. It gives political positions credibility they do not merit, while is undermines the credibility of science. Take the recent case of Diederik Stapel, the well-respected Dutch sociologist. He spent the greater part of his career inventing sociological mechanisms and supporting them with data he invented out of thin air. Since his work supported the general narrative of western liberalism, it escaped serious scrutiny for decades. It was peer reviewed, of course – but by peers who were in general sympathetic, and who knew quite well the consequences of bucking the culture. Consider, by contrast, the case of Charles Murray. Murray’s landmark work, The Bell Curve, brought an immediate storm of academic attack for showing that, as groups, blacks and Latinos performed significantly poorer than whites on intelligence tests, and for asserting that genetics could not be ruled out as a contributing factor to the disparity. Whether Murray and his co-author Richard Herrnstein where ultimately correct or not is not at issue. The point is that scientists who excoriated Murray in the popular press were heroes, whereas Stapel’s credibility was taken for granted.
I have digressed somewhat. Let’s return to my main topic, which is the interplay between the three classes of liberals.
In its roughest, most general outlines, the socio-economic mechanism of contemporary American liberalism is as I outlined earlier: the elites harvest the productive effort of the middle class to maintain their own status and to buy the support of the dependent classes. The elites win economically in more-or-less the same way elites always win economically – they own the game – and they entrench themselves politically by buying the support of a large class of dependents. This part of the mechanism is as old as Rome, at least. The dependent classes win to the extent that they can live a poor but not a desperate life without having to do any real work for it. They lose in that tax pressure suppresses the economic activity that would allow them to rise from a state of dependency more easily if they wanted to – as some of them certainly do want to. Their rise from dependency would be of no real benefit to the liberal elite – in fact quite the opposite. They are perfectly useful where they are. Although this may sound cynical, consider what would have to be true were it otherwise. The leaders of the left would have to be so altruistic as to be willing to give up a near-certain source of political support simply because it helped some individuals not personally known to them. Individuals whose culture is as alien to that of the elites as a Kalahari bushman’s is to you or I.
The middle class loses. The leftwing middle class wins the fantasy moral victory of feeling it is on the side of the angels. The conservative middle class just loses.
The problem with this game, even from the perspective of the current winners, is that it can’t go on forever. We have reached a point in history where both the socio-economic mechanism outlined above and a variety of material factors (mostly involving resources shortages of one kind or another) are eroding the middle class engine that powers the system. The crash of 2008 and a gradually shrinking economy that has followed has pushed a huge number of productive working people into a condition of non-productive dependence. Since at least 2008, we have had largely a fictitious economy built of currency debasement and dishonest government statistics. The shrinking middle class can carry no more burdens. Certainly, they cannot offset in taxes the 40% of the budget that the government prints out of thin air. Sooner or later there are just going to be more balls in the air than the juggler can handle, and people are going to discover the hard way that they cannot eat promises or dreams – which is all the government will have to offer them. Many people now feel this intuitively, but not very many look too closely. It’s a frightening sight. And if they did look – what could they do?
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1 Yes, I know that I am generalizing in exactly the same way. Old habits die hard. I do not claim that absolutely every liberal fits neatly into my formula. What I am struggling to paint is a portrait of a crowd in its most general outlines. It is only an aggregate form created from the shapes of many individuals, who are themselves undoubtedly unique in many respects. I do not claim the portrait fully subsumes the beliefs of all those that it contains, or that their individual lives or characters are altogether irrelevant.
2 To be fair, if I may be forgiven the use of a liberal holy word, the economy has become so structurally distorted that there would not be enough jobs to go around now if, by magic or necessity, everybody wanted one. I deal with that in more detail elsewhere. http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2012/07/automation-service-economy-and-welfare.html
April 29, 2013
Rand Paul and the illusion of the righteous drone
In a recent interview on Fox News, Senator Rand Paul said:
“I never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on. If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him, but it is different if they want to come fly over your hot tub or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activity.”
Yes, it is different… it’s just not very different. In his statement, Senator Paul is making two mistakes. The first is an old one: The ends justify the means. The second is a modern one: Technology is neutral.
While he has attempted the usual political backpedaling since, what Senator Paul clearly intended to say was, to put it crudely, how you kill the bad guy doesn’t matter. In fact, it does. A policeman with a badge and a nametag is a legitimate, accountable agent of the state. He is subject to the law himself, and acts in full view of the public. He is not there to kill, but to arrest if possible, and ultimately to protect the innocent. He gives the honest citizen a sense of security. A weaponized drone does just the opposite. It protects no one, and it arrests no one. It is an anonymous killer. Its operator sits in a room at an undisclosed location. No one will ever know exactly who that operator is, or even what governmental entity the drone belongs to. It can be used with near impunity. It is, therefore, a weapon of state terror by its very nature. If it is just fine to fly weaponized drones over public areas – so long as they pretend not to spy on private property – then it will also soon be fine to fly a weaponized drone over a troublesome crowd of protesters to intimidate and scatter them. Twenty years ago this would have sounded paranoid and far-fetched, but now the only thing that keeps such a scenario from happening is the will to carry it out.
Our government now makes a regular habit of assassinating foreigners from the sky. They find this a convenient process, because it kills or terrifies a few of America’s enemies without risking the embarrassment of having American pilots shown captured and blindfolded on TV. I am no longer confident that the people who now order such things will not, in some eventual emergency, turn those weapons loose on honest citizens who merely disagree with them. I am no longer confident that a farmer in Alabama means any more to our rulers than a villager in Pakistan or Yemen. To the people who hold the reins of power, the Pakistani villager and the Alabama farmer are about equally alien, and about equally unimportant. And, to the media that is supposed to hold the government in check by exposing it to our scrutiny, the villager and the farmer are about equally un-newsworthy too.
We have already gotten accustomed to nameless law enforcement agents wearing masks, dressed from head to toe in black military-style uniforms, equipped with military rifles and concussion grenades. A weaponized drone is merely an extension of this trend. I believe the cop on the beat, with his badge, his pistol, and his duty to serve and protect – keeps us free. I believe an anonymous stormtrooper or a drone does just the opposite. I have no idea, anymore, what Senator Paul believes.
“I never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on. If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him, but it is different if they want to come fly over your hot tub or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activity.”
Yes, it is different… it’s just not very different. In his statement, Senator Paul is making two mistakes. The first is an old one: The ends justify the means. The second is a modern one: Technology is neutral.
While he has attempted the usual political backpedaling since, what Senator Paul clearly intended to say was, to put it crudely, how you kill the bad guy doesn’t matter. In fact, it does. A policeman with a badge and a nametag is a legitimate, accountable agent of the state. He is subject to the law himself, and acts in full view of the public. He is not there to kill, but to arrest if possible, and ultimately to protect the innocent. He gives the honest citizen a sense of security. A weaponized drone does just the opposite. It protects no one, and it arrests no one. It is an anonymous killer. Its operator sits in a room at an undisclosed location. No one will ever know exactly who that operator is, or even what governmental entity the drone belongs to. It can be used with near impunity. It is, therefore, a weapon of state terror by its very nature. If it is just fine to fly weaponized drones over public areas – so long as they pretend not to spy on private property – then it will also soon be fine to fly a weaponized drone over a troublesome crowd of protesters to intimidate and scatter them. Twenty years ago this would have sounded paranoid and far-fetched, but now the only thing that keeps such a scenario from happening is the will to carry it out.
Our government now makes a regular habit of assassinating foreigners from the sky. They find this a convenient process, because it kills or terrifies a few of America’s enemies without risking the embarrassment of having American pilots shown captured and blindfolded on TV. I am no longer confident that the people who now order such things will not, in some eventual emergency, turn those weapons loose on honest citizens who merely disagree with them. I am no longer confident that a farmer in Alabama means any more to our rulers than a villager in Pakistan or Yemen. To the people who hold the reins of power, the Pakistani villager and the Alabama farmer are about equally alien, and about equally unimportant. And, to the media that is supposed to hold the government in check by exposing it to our scrutiny, the villager and the farmer are about equally un-newsworthy too.
We have already gotten accustomed to nameless law enforcement agents wearing masks, dressed from head to toe in black military-style uniforms, equipped with military rifles and concussion grenades. A weaponized drone is merely an extension of this trend. I believe the cop on the beat, with his badge, his pistol, and his duty to serve and protect – keeps us free. I believe an anonymous stormtrooper or a drone does just the opposite. I have no idea, anymore, what Senator Paul believes.
April 24, 2013
The fantasy society of western liberalism
A couple of decades ago there was a popular TV series entitled Star Trek: The Next Generation. Superficially, it was a spin-off of the original Star Trek series of the mid-1960’s. I found it moderately entertaining at the time. There were good episodes and bad episodes. What I did not notice, perhaps because I was more left-leaning then, was that it was not merely a TV show, but rather a long set of parables about how western liberalism imagines society not only will be – but should be.
I will skip the silly exercise of quoting characters and episodes. If your life is so empty of content that you care, you can, I’m sure, watch the whole seven seasons on demand. Since I’m merely using Star Trek: The Next Generation as an illustration of an ideology, I’ll just highlight the salient points from memory.
The series centered on the adventures of a nominally military vessel, whose modus operandi was to seek out hostile aliens and avoid fighting them at all costs. The ship was a kind of “community” vessel, with children and teenagers in evidence, and probably a Montessori school on board somewhere. A few specific passages have stuck in memory. In one, I recall the captain noting, with obvious astonished contempt, how in earlier times the people of Earth had been willing to go to war with one another “even over economic systems.” In other words – Communism is just a different way of doing things! Get over it!
In various episodes it was revealed that, in the brave new world of the 23rd century, work had become an entirely optional thing. You could have a job if you wanted one, but those who didn’t were free to just aspire to whatever higher calling they happened to be interested in. Somehow, in this society, although there were bad apples here and there to advance the storyline, no one simply degenerated into an idle, whiney, de-socialized couch potato. Given the opportunity to aspire to liberal avocations, almost everybody did.
The Federation – the centralized, federal government depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, could only be characterized as a humane, consensual, collectivist state. Not only weren’t there any couch potatoes, there weren’t really many misfits or dissenters either. Everybody agreed that the faux-multicultural monoculture of the Federation was the best thing for everybody, and that freedom meant that everybody could wear their own unique ethnic clothing, have their own tastes in food, and sleep with whoever or whatever they wanted to. Here and there an alien race might depart this perfect way of thinking, but that was OK too. To be a citizen of the Federation was to exercise practically unlimited tolerance toward outsiders – one is tempted to say, to bumpy-headed aliens of color. In later seasons, this extended to accepting a parasitic race that sucked the consciousness out of a succession of human hosts and used their bodies merely as vehicles. Well, one mustn’t be judgmental about other, uh… people and their cultures.
There was at least one episode dedicated to advancing the gay and lesbian cause (by thinly disguised alien proxies). There were other episodes, generally less disguised, dedicated to portraying the conservative faction of some planet’s population as paranoid, dishonest, or dangerous. In all respects, the western liberal worldview – complete with its self-righteous monologues, its dewy emotionalism, and its impossible contradictions.
It was only a TV show. Still, let’s not pretend that the messages that people absorb from the popular media don’t mold them in part, particularly during their youth, and more particularly in a culture in which parenting is often a sort of afterthought, and in which established authority has largely discredited itself. I have to wonder if we don’t have mid-level diplomats right now who were Star Trek NG fans as kids. “Kim Jong Un just doesn’t seem to understand our patient, infinitely tolerant response. Maybe we should apologize again, or lay down our weapons or something. WTF!?” Maybe the love that the rest of the world has long had for American TV hasn’t been about their love for us, but about every human’s prurient curiosity regarding the behavior of idiots. Perhaps we aren’t the role model we like to think we are – but just another of history’s traveling freak shows.
The larger liberal narrative, the one of which outdated science fiction programs are only the smallest and most petty examples, is indeed quite like a freak show – and not completely unlike the fantasy regime of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. We don’t have all the totalitarian trappings yet, but our internal surveillance technology is already far better than his. We – or they, as I can no longer even recognize, let alone identify with, my own government – are certainly obsessed, like North Korea, with defining and redefining reality to meet political need. Our government is now a tiny circle of ideologues in a shrinking ideological bubble. Or perhaps even to call it a bubble is overly optimistic. Bubbles, at least, are transparent. It is, I think, more like a citadel. A fortress that sees the outside world only through the lens of what its occupants already know – and know a priori. A truth which is ultimately measured against the liberal narrative itself – in which every opponent is a racist; every non-Caucasian is a liberal; every corporation is deliberately evil; every expansion of government is good; and everyone one outside the citadel is ultimately too stupid to be allowed any decisions beyond the color of his or her cell phone case. It is a movement desperately re-enacting its own history – the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement – in the absence of any real opposition to those causes. What could be more freakish? What could be more tragically entertaining?
I will skip the silly exercise of quoting characters and episodes. If your life is so empty of content that you care, you can, I’m sure, watch the whole seven seasons on demand. Since I’m merely using Star Trek: The Next Generation as an illustration of an ideology, I’ll just highlight the salient points from memory.
The series centered on the adventures of a nominally military vessel, whose modus operandi was to seek out hostile aliens and avoid fighting them at all costs. The ship was a kind of “community” vessel, with children and teenagers in evidence, and probably a Montessori school on board somewhere. A few specific passages have stuck in memory. In one, I recall the captain noting, with obvious astonished contempt, how in earlier times the people of Earth had been willing to go to war with one another “even over economic systems.” In other words – Communism is just a different way of doing things! Get over it!
In various episodes it was revealed that, in the brave new world of the 23rd century, work had become an entirely optional thing. You could have a job if you wanted one, but those who didn’t were free to just aspire to whatever higher calling they happened to be interested in. Somehow, in this society, although there were bad apples here and there to advance the storyline, no one simply degenerated into an idle, whiney, de-socialized couch potato. Given the opportunity to aspire to liberal avocations, almost everybody did.
The Federation – the centralized, federal government depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, could only be characterized as a humane, consensual, collectivist state. Not only weren’t there any couch potatoes, there weren’t really many misfits or dissenters either. Everybody agreed that the faux-multicultural monoculture of the Federation was the best thing for everybody, and that freedom meant that everybody could wear their own unique ethnic clothing, have their own tastes in food, and sleep with whoever or whatever they wanted to. Here and there an alien race might depart this perfect way of thinking, but that was OK too. To be a citizen of the Federation was to exercise practically unlimited tolerance toward outsiders – one is tempted to say, to bumpy-headed aliens of color. In later seasons, this extended to accepting a parasitic race that sucked the consciousness out of a succession of human hosts and used their bodies merely as vehicles. Well, one mustn’t be judgmental about other, uh… people and their cultures.
There was at least one episode dedicated to advancing the gay and lesbian cause (by thinly disguised alien proxies). There were other episodes, generally less disguised, dedicated to portraying the conservative faction of some planet’s population as paranoid, dishonest, or dangerous. In all respects, the western liberal worldview – complete with its self-righteous monologues, its dewy emotionalism, and its impossible contradictions.
It was only a TV show. Still, let’s not pretend that the messages that people absorb from the popular media don’t mold them in part, particularly during their youth, and more particularly in a culture in which parenting is often a sort of afterthought, and in which established authority has largely discredited itself. I have to wonder if we don’t have mid-level diplomats right now who were Star Trek NG fans as kids. “Kim Jong Un just doesn’t seem to understand our patient, infinitely tolerant response. Maybe we should apologize again, or lay down our weapons or something. WTF!?” Maybe the love that the rest of the world has long had for American TV hasn’t been about their love for us, but about every human’s prurient curiosity regarding the behavior of idiots. Perhaps we aren’t the role model we like to think we are – but just another of history’s traveling freak shows.
The larger liberal narrative, the one of which outdated science fiction programs are only the smallest and most petty examples, is indeed quite like a freak show – and not completely unlike the fantasy regime of Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. We don’t have all the totalitarian trappings yet, but our internal surveillance technology is already far better than his. We – or they, as I can no longer even recognize, let alone identify with, my own government – are certainly obsessed, like North Korea, with defining and redefining reality to meet political need. Our government is now a tiny circle of ideologues in a shrinking ideological bubble. Or perhaps even to call it a bubble is overly optimistic. Bubbles, at least, are transparent. It is, I think, more like a citadel. A fortress that sees the outside world only through the lens of what its occupants already know – and know a priori. A truth which is ultimately measured against the liberal narrative itself – in which every opponent is a racist; every non-Caucasian is a liberal; every corporation is deliberately evil; every expansion of government is good; and everyone one outside the citadel is ultimately too stupid to be allowed any decisions beyond the color of his or her cell phone case. It is a movement desperately re-enacting its own history – the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement – in the absence of any real opposition to those causes. What could be more freakish? What could be more tragically entertaining?
April 19, 2013
The saddest possible form of dignity
Watching the coverage of the Boston marathon bombing a few days ago, I began to think about the question of who was responsible. There are people who would obviously love the bombers to have been rightwing extremists -- there are even leftwing journalists who have said so. Most Americans believe the perpetrators were the usual Islamic suspects, perhaps foreign-born or perhaps domestic. The Federal authorities will eventually arrest somebody, probably the guilty parties, and it will all get incorporated into everybody’s respective narratives, with the usual finger-pointing, hand wringing, TV commentary, and a book or two in a couple of months. This is the way we digest tragedy at this point in our history, for better or for worse. Everybody in the media will tell us how we should feel about the incident – as though we were mere inanimate objects, waiting for the godlike voices of others to fill our empty minds with feelings. As though we were not qualified to fill in even those for ourselves.
Of one thing, I am fairly certain. Anyone who plants a bomb in a crowd, or shoots up a school, or even flies an airplane into a building, shares in a very common, very unhappy byproduct of progress. They all know, in their hearts if not in their minds, that the world has no need for them. People who believe that they are needed, that they have some meaningful connections to their societies, are not generally willing to engage in random murder to get attention. To do that, you have to know beyond a doubt that you are nothing.
I don’t think the ideologies that crop up in these things are really very important. To be sure, radical Islam is a nasty set of ideas, but it does not make people want to kill so much as it promises relevance to people who have little reason to live. People who love their lives have better things to do than throw them away. A person who would lay a bomb in a crowd is someone with nothing better to do.
A kid shoots up a theater or a school, and we say that he is mentally ill – as though that diagnosis somehow meant something. For the most part, it is nonsense. All that this sort of labeling really accomplishes is to draw a psychological line between us and the people that we fear. It is really not much better than saying that the killer was “bewitched,” or “possessed by the devil.” It makes us feel better about ourselves. It gives us comfort in whatever sociological niche we happen to identify as our sanity.
Let me be clear – I am not defending the killers as yet another class of victim. We already have far too many victims. Most of contemporary life seems to be one long competition for the attainment of the most attractive form of victim status. Setting out to butcher people for whom the world is working a little better than it is for you can never become an acceptable defense for murder. If it does (and it has sometimes come perilously close to doing so) the glue that binds society together will dissolve. When everyone’s sins are forgiven in advance there is no incentive not to commit them.
What I am saying is that perhaps we have so many mass murderers because we have so many people whose lives are essentially irrelevant. This is not a matter of mere income inequality. Even in an extremely stratified society, the lowest classes can do vitally important things and take some pride in their mundane contributions to the public as a whole. The problem of our times is that one could erase enormous numbers of people from most societies without any economic consequences whatsoever. Technology has made us so productive that most people are unnecessary. Large populations are not a strength now, but a burden. In America, at least, this is something rather new.
People die if they do not have food. If they do not have purpose, they rot. Most rot quietly in front of a TV screen or some equivalent venue, but a handful, especially among the young, rot actively in the pursuit of the saddest possible form of dignity. They feel, even if they can seldom quite articulate the fact, that it is better to be the world’s enemy than the world’s discarded trash.
This is where we are right now, as the population rises and the market value of human life declines.
Of one thing, I am fairly certain. Anyone who plants a bomb in a crowd, or shoots up a school, or even flies an airplane into a building, shares in a very common, very unhappy byproduct of progress. They all know, in their hearts if not in their minds, that the world has no need for them. People who believe that they are needed, that they have some meaningful connections to their societies, are not generally willing to engage in random murder to get attention. To do that, you have to know beyond a doubt that you are nothing.
I don’t think the ideologies that crop up in these things are really very important. To be sure, radical Islam is a nasty set of ideas, but it does not make people want to kill so much as it promises relevance to people who have little reason to live. People who love their lives have better things to do than throw them away. A person who would lay a bomb in a crowd is someone with nothing better to do.
A kid shoots up a theater or a school, and we say that he is mentally ill – as though that diagnosis somehow meant something. For the most part, it is nonsense. All that this sort of labeling really accomplishes is to draw a psychological line between us and the people that we fear. It is really not much better than saying that the killer was “bewitched,” or “possessed by the devil.” It makes us feel better about ourselves. It gives us comfort in whatever sociological niche we happen to identify as our sanity.
Let me be clear – I am not defending the killers as yet another class of victim. We already have far too many victims. Most of contemporary life seems to be one long competition for the attainment of the most attractive form of victim status. Setting out to butcher people for whom the world is working a little better than it is for you can never become an acceptable defense for murder. If it does (and it has sometimes come perilously close to doing so) the glue that binds society together will dissolve. When everyone’s sins are forgiven in advance there is no incentive not to commit them.
What I am saying is that perhaps we have so many mass murderers because we have so many people whose lives are essentially irrelevant. This is not a matter of mere income inequality. Even in an extremely stratified society, the lowest classes can do vitally important things and take some pride in their mundane contributions to the public as a whole. The problem of our times is that one could erase enormous numbers of people from most societies without any economic consequences whatsoever. Technology has made us so productive that most people are unnecessary. Large populations are not a strength now, but a burden. In America, at least, this is something rather new.
People die if they do not have food. If they do not have purpose, they rot. Most rot quietly in front of a TV screen or some equivalent venue, but a handful, especially among the young, rot actively in the pursuit of the saddest possible form of dignity. They feel, even if they can seldom quite articulate the fact, that it is better to be the world’s enemy than the world’s discarded trash.
This is where we are right now, as the population rises and the market value of human life declines.
March 15, 2013
The Birth Control Mandate
The recent government mandate for employers to cover the expense of employees’ contraceptives in their insurance plans is significant in two respects. Most of the media attention has centered on the religious freedom issue, but the mandate raises a second, equally important issue that has gone almost unnoticed. Quietly, over a series of laws of which the mandate is only the most recent, we are becoming acclimated to the idea that businesses can be made into public welfare institutions, subordinated to the authority of the Federal government. This is a significant transformation of the relationship between the individual, business, and the government.
Consider the model of government intervention in business that predominated through most of the last century. Institutions like the FDA, OSHA, and the EPA were all, in principle, dedicated to a single concern – that of safety. The FDA’s initial purpose was to make sure that the food and medications that reached the public were safe. OSHA’s purpose was to make sure that the workplace was safe. The EPA had the task of controlling pollution, making sure the environment was safe. None of these concerns are within the power of ordinary individuals to address themselves. Environmental issues are often even beyond the control of individual powerful corporations. While these regulatory institutions necessarily took an adversarial position toward business they were, unquestionably, formed for good purposes and did good things. They mitigated dangers against which individuals were truly powerless.
The mandate for unemployment compensation was, perhaps, the beginning of the deviation from government intervention on the basis of safety alone. Making an employer pay into an unemployment insurance fund is, essentially, making employers protect their employees from the vicissitudes of the economy for a specified term. That is only a safety issue if you interpret the term “safety” very broadly indeed. Unemployment is a problem which, in theory at least, individuals can defend themselves against through savings. While there is little doubt that unemployment benefits reduce hardship, the mandate did constitute an expansion of the scope of government’s intervention in the economy. Unemployment insurance may be a good thing in itself, but it set a precedent for other kinds of interventions that have not been as benign.
The provision in Obamacare which prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage of preexisting conditions (set to take full effect in 2014) abrogates the very mechanism by which insurance companies operate. An insurance policy, at its core, is just a very well researched wager. The policy holder bets on getting sick enough to need more money than he or she will end up paying to maintain the policy. The insurance company bets the policy holder will be relatively healthy, and has compiled enough predictive data to win most of the bets. When the system works correctly, the insurance company makes a profit and the policy holder minimizes the severity of the worst possible outcome. All the participants in the system win. Not everyone gets covered, so the model is flawed from the perspective of making paid medical treatment universal – but that is not what private insurance is designed to do. Forcing an insurance company to cover people who are already sick is like making a gambler place a bet on a horse that isn’t even in the race. It is mandated charity, or, to look at it another way, it is a narrowly targeted and irregular tax.1
While health insurance was, at least, a problem everybody recognized, affordable contraception was a bolt from the blue. It was not a problem anyone was wrangling with because, frankly, it is not a real problem. Contraceptives have long been available at no cost to the user from Planned Parenthood and similar organizations. They are not particularly expensive in any case. Anyone who wants them can get them. The only vague inkling that contraception was being scrutinized as a public policy issue came in a question put to Mitt Romney by George Stephanopoulos during a Republican presidential debate in late 2011. “Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” Every candidate on the stage was stunned by this absolute non sequitur. It was shrugged off by Romney and the others as a ridiculous question and quickly forgotten. The question was probably intended to produce a useful gaff, and to that extent it failed. Nevertheless, a few months later the mandate was unveiled, Sandra Fluke appeared before congress with her carefully crafted testimony, and the “Republican war on women” was born. The correct people were offended and the resulting narrative contributed to the president’s re-election victory. That such political theater was foisted on the public is contemptible. That a significant number of people found it credible is a tragedy.
Buried in the noise of this Machiavellian maneuver were, as I’ve said, two significant policy agendas. The attack on the Catholic Church was the more obvious of the two, and garnered most of both the media and public interest.
While I personally do not believe any form of theism is epistemically tenable, I am nonetheless a defender of religious liberty and religious tolerance. Our republic was founded on these principles and has, in the main, benefitted by our adherence to them. When government intrudes so deeply into the life of the individual that it begins to require a particular worldview, regardless of what that worldview happens to be, it has overstepped its constitutional limitations. Conflicts with religious liberty have certainly occurred in our history, but they have tended to focus on obvious life-or-death issues. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses vehemently oppose receiving blood or blood products on scriptural grounds. While we accept the right of adult Jehovah’s Witnesses to do this, we do not accept their right to deny blood products to their children in life-or-death situations. While this is an infringement of religious liberty, it is an ethically justifiable one. The birth control mandate is not an issue of that character. No one is denying anyone the right to use birth control. Churches might discourage the practice openly, and it’s conceivable that a business might somehow discourage the practice tacitly, but no adult in the United States is going to actually be denied access to birth control by their church or their employer. Buying contraceptives is the prerogative of any adult citizen. Forcing one citizen to buy them for another is unjustified, and, I believe, deliberately malicious. To use the case above as an analogy, it would be like forcing a Jehovah’s Witness mother to administer blood to her child personally. It is simply an abuse of power, not to save life, but to force adherence to a particular ideology.
I, myself, believe that widespread contraception is a good thing. While I respect other views, I think that slowing and reversing world population growth is a laudable goal. The world has almost certainly exceeded its sustainable carrying capacity. There are too many of us. Most of the world’s problems stem from this simple fact. If we do not decrease the population ourselves, nature will eventually do it for us. Malthus has never been refuted. That being said, I do not believe the ends justify the means. While we may, perhaps, only understand society in terms of aggregates, when we treat individual human beings as mere parts of a collective we lose touch with our own humanity. In the end, only the individual can really matter. Groups have neither feelings nor aspirations – except for those embodied in individual, flesh-and-blood human beings. Unnecessarily diminishing the freedom of the religious is not an attack on the religious alone, but is also an attack on the principle of individualism itself.
The second agenda, that of rendering business subservient to the state, goes hand-in-hand with the first. Free enterprise, in all its strengths and weaknesses, is an expression of the individual capacity to strive and prosper. If money is power, functioning free markets are the diffusion of that power into a comparatively large number of hands. If this is not conducive to perfect equality, it is at least more conducive to equality than the centralization of economic and social authority in the hands of the state. I may opt to neither work for nor to buy from an objectionable business, but I may not decline to pay my taxes nor ignore objectionable laws. In the last hundred years, government has gone from being a relatively benign regulator of business to being its ultimate overlord. Or, in cases like the banks of the Federal Reserve System, government and private enterprise have already become one and the same. All of our resources, from the poorest of us to the richest, can now be bent to the will of quite a small group of planners – ideologically driven people who view the nation and everything in it as theirs to redirect or redistribute. Odd that we, as a people, should give up so much freedom with so little complaint – and call it progress.
_______________________
1 The same thing has been happening with hospitals for many years, insofar as they are required to provide a considerable level of care whether the patient has any means of paying or not. This is obviously a related issue, but it is complicated by the fact that hospitals, prior to the last half century or so, were largely run as charities. It is an open question whether or not the charity model of healthcare is or isn’t better for society, but at the point at which healthcare isn’t organized that way, forcing it back into the charity role is a little peculiar. While I’m dubious about the ethics of running hospitals as profit centers, I can’t imagine many other businesses being forced to give their products or services away for the sake of the public good. Restaurants are not required by law to feed the hungry, nor are clothing stores required to clothe the threadbare.
Consider the model of government intervention in business that predominated through most of the last century. Institutions like the FDA, OSHA, and the EPA were all, in principle, dedicated to a single concern – that of safety. The FDA’s initial purpose was to make sure that the food and medications that reached the public were safe. OSHA’s purpose was to make sure that the workplace was safe. The EPA had the task of controlling pollution, making sure the environment was safe. None of these concerns are within the power of ordinary individuals to address themselves. Environmental issues are often even beyond the control of individual powerful corporations. While these regulatory institutions necessarily took an adversarial position toward business they were, unquestionably, formed for good purposes and did good things. They mitigated dangers against which individuals were truly powerless.
The mandate for unemployment compensation was, perhaps, the beginning of the deviation from government intervention on the basis of safety alone. Making an employer pay into an unemployment insurance fund is, essentially, making employers protect their employees from the vicissitudes of the economy for a specified term. That is only a safety issue if you interpret the term “safety” very broadly indeed. Unemployment is a problem which, in theory at least, individuals can defend themselves against through savings. While there is little doubt that unemployment benefits reduce hardship, the mandate did constitute an expansion of the scope of government’s intervention in the economy. Unemployment insurance may be a good thing in itself, but it set a precedent for other kinds of interventions that have not been as benign.
The provision in Obamacare which prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage of preexisting conditions (set to take full effect in 2014) abrogates the very mechanism by which insurance companies operate. An insurance policy, at its core, is just a very well researched wager. The policy holder bets on getting sick enough to need more money than he or she will end up paying to maintain the policy. The insurance company bets the policy holder will be relatively healthy, and has compiled enough predictive data to win most of the bets. When the system works correctly, the insurance company makes a profit and the policy holder minimizes the severity of the worst possible outcome. All the participants in the system win. Not everyone gets covered, so the model is flawed from the perspective of making paid medical treatment universal – but that is not what private insurance is designed to do. Forcing an insurance company to cover people who are already sick is like making a gambler place a bet on a horse that isn’t even in the race. It is mandated charity, or, to look at it another way, it is a narrowly targeted and irregular tax.1
While health insurance was, at least, a problem everybody recognized, affordable contraception was a bolt from the blue. It was not a problem anyone was wrangling with because, frankly, it is not a real problem. Contraceptives have long been available at no cost to the user from Planned Parenthood and similar organizations. They are not particularly expensive in any case. Anyone who wants them can get them. The only vague inkling that contraception was being scrutinized as a public policy issue came in a question put to Mitt Romney by George Stephanopoulos during a Republican presidential debate in late 2011. “Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?” Every candidate on the stage was stunned by this absolute non sequitur. It was shrugged off by Romney and the others as a ridiculous question and quickly forgotten. The question was probably intended to produce a useful gaff, and to that extent it failed. Nevertheless, a few months later the mandate was unveiled, Sandra Fluke appeared before congress with her carefully crafted testimony, and the “Republican war on women” was born. The correct people were offended and the resulting narrative contributed to the president’s re-election victory. That such political theater was foisted on the public is contemptible. That a significant number of people found it credible is a tragedy.
Buried in the noise of this Machiavellian maneuver were, as I’ve said, two significant policy agendas. The attack on the Catholic Church was the more obvious of the two, and garnered most of both the media and public interest.
While I personally do not believe any form of theism is epistemically tenable, I am nonetheless a defender of religious liberty and religious tolerance. Our republic was founded on these principles and has, in the main, benefitted by our adherence to them. When government intrudes so deeply into the life of the individual that it begins to require a particular worldview, regardless of what that worldview happens to be, it has overstepped its constitutional limitations. Conflicts with religious liberty have certainly occurred in our history, but they have tended to focus on obvious life-or-death issues. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses vehemently oppose receiving blood or blood products on scriptural grounds. While we accept the right of adult Jehovah’s Witnesses to do this, we do not accept their right to deny blood products to their children in life-or-death situations. While this is an infringement of religious liberty, it is an ethically justifiable one. The birth control mandate is not an issue of that character. No one is denying anyone the right to use birth control. Churches might discourage the practice openly, and it’s conceivable that a business might somehow discourage the practice tacitly, but no adult in the United States is going to actually be denied access to birth control by their church or their employer. Buying contraceptives is the prerogative of any adult citizen. Forcing one citizen to buy them for another is unjustified, and, I believe, deliberately malicious. To use the case above as an analogy, it would be like forcing a Jehovah’s Witness mother to administer blood to her child personally. It is simply an abuse of power, not to save life, but to force adherence to a particular ideology.
I, myself, believe that widespread contraception is a good thing. While I respect other views, I think that slowing and reversing world population growth is a laudable goal. The world has almost certainly exceeded its sustainable carrying capacity. There are too many of us. Most of the world’s problems stem from this simple fact. If we do not decrease the population ourselves, nature will eventually do it for us. Malthus has never been refuted. That being said, I do not believe the ends justify the means. While we may, perhaps, only understand society in terms of aggregates, when we treat individual human beings as mere parts of a collective we lose touch with our own humanity. In the end, only the individual can really matter. Groups have neither feelings nor aspirations – except for those embodied in individual, flesh-and-blood human beings. Unnecessarily diminishing the freedom of the religious is not an attack on the religious alone, but is also an attack on the principle of individualism itself.
The second agenda, that of rendering business subservient to the state, goes hand-in-hand with the first. Free enterprise, in all its strengths and weaknesses, is an expression of the individual capacity to strive and prosper. If money is power, functioning free markets are the diffusion of that power into a comparatively large number of hands. If this is not conducive to perfect equality, it is at least more conducive to equality than the centralization of economic and social authority in the hands of the state. I may opt to neither work for nor to buy from an objectionable business, but I may not decline to pay my taxes nor ignore objectionable laws. In the last hundred years, government has gone from being a relatively benign regulator of business to being its ultimate overlord. Or, in cases like the banks of the Federal Reserve System, government and private enterprise have already become one and the same. All of our resources, from the poorest of us to the richest, can now be bent to the will of quite a small group of planners – ideologically driven people who view the nation and everything in it as theirs to redirect or redistribute. Odd that we, as a people, should give up so much freedom with so little complaint – and call it progress.
_______________________
1 The same thing has been happening with hospitals for many years, insofar as they are required to provide a considerable level of care whether the patient has any means of paying or not. This is obviously a related issue, but it is complicated by the fact that hospitals, prior to the last half century or so, were largely run as charities. It is an open question whether or not the charity model of healthcare is or isn’t better for society, but at the point at which healthcare isn’t organized that way, forcing it back into the charity role is a little peculiar. While I’m dubious about the ethics of running hospitals as profit centers, I can’t imagine many other businesses being forced to give their products or services away for the sake of the public good. Restaurants are not required by law to feed the hungry, nor are clothing stores required to clothe the threadbare.
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