Category: Politics

The Atlantic Monthly Ponders: Where Will It End?

Today we are witnessing extreme examples of moral nihilism. By moral nihilism I mean the concoction of novel “moral laws” in rapid succession, combined with the expection and demand that everyone else respect and obey these new “laws.” Moral nihilism is often associated with moral subjectivity. The opposite is the case. The current chaos in our cities is a direct manifestation of objective morality. It requires the assumption that one is acting on behalf of some objective “good,” existing independently of anyone’s mere opinion. It is an illusion spawned by the very power of our moral emotions, and one that we must shed if we are ever to make anything that can be accurately described as “moral progress.” Absent objective morality, the very notion of judging people who lived centuries ago by the moral fashions prevailing today becomes absurd.

The fundamental lie of objective morality is commonly used to justify all kinds of ancillary lies. Indeed, the illusion often promotes a sincere belief that the lies are true. One of the best antidotes is historical source material, taken straight up rather than filtered by some academic historian to fit a preferred narrative. I found a good example bearing on our current situation in the pages of the December, 1857 issue of the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Where Will It End?” (To see the article, click on the link that appears when you click on the first link).

The “it” referred to was slavery, and the question was to be emphatically answered in a few years. Among the lies that this article demolishes, along thousands of other articles like it that appeared in contemporary books, newspapers, and magazines, is the argument, beloved of Marxists, Confederate Heritage zealots, and 19th century British aristocrats alike, that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. By all means, read the whole thing, and you’ll see what I mean. However, its value hardly ends there. Let’s take a look at some of the more striking excerpts. The first explodes the leftist narrative that the country was built on the backs of slaves:

When the eyes of the thoughtful inquirer turn from the general prospect of the national greatness and strength, to the geographical divisions of the country… He beholds the Southern region, embracing within its circuit three hundred thousand more square miles than the domain of the North, dowered with a soil incomparably more fertile, watered by mighty rivers fit to float the argosies of the world, placed nearer the sun and canopied by more propitious skies, with every element of prosperity and wealth showered upon it with Nature’s fullest and most unwithdrawing hand, and sees that, notwithstanding all this, the share of public wealth and strength drawn thence is almost inappreciable, by the side of what is poured into the common stock by the strenuous sterility of the North. With every opportunity and means that Nature can supply for commerce, with navigable rivers searching its remotest corners, with admirable harbors in which the navies of the world might ride, with the chief articles of export for its staple productions, it still depends upon its Northern partner to fetch and carry all that it produces, and the little that it consumes. Possessed of all the raw materials of manufactures and the arts, its inhabitants look to the North for everything they need from the cradle to the coffin. Essentially agricultural in its constitution, with every blessing Nature can bestow upon it, the gross value of all its productions is less by millions than that of the simple grass of the field gathered into northern barns. With all the means and materials of wealth, the South is poor. With every advantage for gathering strength and self-reliance, it is weak and dependent. Why this difference between the two?

The author doesn’t leave us guessing. The answer is slavery. Far from being the economic dynamo on the back of which the evil whites stood to build their empire, it hobbled and impoverished them for the benefit of a few. In his words,

The key of the enigma is to be found in the constitution of human nature. A man in fetters cannot do the task-work that one whose limbs are unshackled looks upon as a pastime… Hence the difference so often noticed between tracts lying side by side, separated only by a river or an imaginary line; on one side of which, thrift and comfort and gathering wealth, growing villages, smiling farms, convenient habitations, school-houses and churches make the landscape beautiful; while on the other, slovenly husbandry, dilapidated mansions, sordid huts, perilous wastes, horrible roads, the rare spire, and rarer village school betray all the nakedness of the land. It is the magic of motive that calls forth all this wealth and beauty to bless the most sterile soil stirred by willing and intelligent labor; while the reversing of that spell scatters squalor and poverty and misery over lands endowed by Nature with the highest fertility, spreading their leprous infection from the laborer to his lord.

In the next passage we find a denunciation of slavery similar to those penned by a myriad other authors in the decades leading up to the Civil War:

That the denial of his natural and civil rights to the laborer who sows and reaps the harvests of the Southern country should be avenged upon his enslaver in the scanty yielding of the earth, and in the unthrift, the vices, and the wretchedness which are the only crops that spring spontaneously from soil blasted by slavery is nothing strange. It is only the statement of the truism in moral and in political economy, that true prosperity can never grow up from wrong and wickedness.

There is a striking similarity among virtually all of these authors; they are all white. Similar denunciations of slavery in the literature of any other race or culture are virtually nonexistent in comparison. We don’t know when or where the first incidence of human slavery occurred, but we do know who put a stop to it, and they happened to have white skin. Absent the battle waged by whites against slavery, first with the pen and then with the sword, the chances that slavery would be considered anything but a benign social institution today are vanishingly small. This fact alone exposes the gross racism of today’s pious social justice warriors.

The article also exposes the racism inherent in the claim that all whites are born tainted with the original sin of slavery. As the author points out,

The entire sum of all who have any direct connection with slavery, as owners or hirers, is less than three hundred and fifty thousand, – not half as many as the inhabitants of the single city of New York.

The white population of the country at the time the article was written was about 25 million. Slave owners and hirers made up little more than one percent of the total, especially when one deducts women and children from the total. As the author points out, the remaining white population of the South was impoverished by slavery, not enriched by it. He notes that the increasing desperation of the slave oligarchy is driven in part by growing signs of resistance among poor whites:

It rages, for its time is short. And its rage is the fiercer because of the symptoms of rebellion against its despotism which it discerns among the white men of the South, who from poverty or from principle have no share in its sway. When we speak of the South as distinguished from the North by elements of inherent hostility, we speak only of the governing faction, and not of the millions of nominally free men who are scarcely less its thralls than the black slaves themselves… That such a tyranny should excite an antagonistic spirit of resistance is inevitable from the constitution of man and the character of God. The sporadic cases of protest and of resistance to the slaveholding aristocracy, which lift themselves occasionally above the dead level of the surrounding despotism, are representative cases… The unity of interest of the non-slaveholders of the South with the people of the Free States is perfect, and it must one day combine them in a unity of action.

Just as many of us have underestimated the recently demonstrated willingness of many of our fellow citizens to grovel and humiliate themselves for such sins as telling the truth and mildly challenging leftist dogmas, the author underestimated the willingness of southern whiles to fight for the oligarchs who impoverished them. The Civil War demonstrated the southern oligarchy’s ability use their nearly unchallenged control of the social media of their day to influence and manipulate the behavior and opinions of the population. The techniques they used will sound eerily familiar to 21st century readers:

There must be intelligence enough among the non-slaveholding whites to see the difference there is between themselves and persons of the same condition in the Free States. Why have they no free schools?… Why are they hindered from taking such newspapers as they please? Why are they subjected to censorship of the press, which dictates to them what they may or may not read, and which punishes booksellers with exile and ruin for keeping for sale what they want to buy? Why must Northern publishers expurgate and emasculate the literature of the world before it is permitted to reach them?… The slaveholders, having the wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of, employ these mighty instruments of power to create the public sentiment and to control the public affairs of their region, so as best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction, even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in safety. A Christian minister in Tennessee relates an act of fiendish cruelty inflicted upon a slave by one of the members of his church, and he is forced to leave his charge, if not to fly the country. Another in South Carolina presumes to express in conversation his disapprobation of the murderous assault of Brooks on Senator Sumner, and his pastoral relations are broken up on the instant, as if he had been guilty of gross crime or flagrant heresy. Professor Hedrick, in North Carolina, ventures to utter a preference for the Northern candidate in the last presidential campaign, and he is summarily ejected from his chair, and virtually banished from his native State. Mr. Underwood of Virginia dares to attend the convention of the party he preferred, and he is forbidden to return to his home on pain of death. The blackness of darkness and the stillness of death are thus forced to brood over that land which God formed so fair, and made to be so happy.

Do you notice any similarity between the tactics of 19th century slave owners and 21st century social justice warriors? You should! Source literature is a wonderful thing. It transports you to a different world where you can watch the narratives that pass for “history” pop like soap bubbles before you eyes. The author concludes,

Thus the ideal of a true republic, of a government of laws made and executed by the people of which bards have sung and prophets dreamed, and for which martyrs have suffered and heroes died, may yet be possible to us, and the great experiment of this Western World be indeed a Model, instead of a Warning to the nations.

It was whites who first raised a moral challenge to slavery, and finally put an end to it. Their reward has been blanket condemnation as a race for the sins of a tiny minority. No, dear author, your hopes were vain. The monuments to the martyrs and heroes you refer to are being defaced and pulled down as I write this. We did not become a Model for others. We certainly became a Warning.

On the Need to Suppress Freedom of Speech in the Interest of “Moral Progress”

In my last post I noted that, objectively speaking, there can be no such thing as “moral progress,” and that pursuing such a nonexistent thing as a goal is potentially dangerous.  The reasons for this have to do with the way some of our innate behavioral traits manifest themselves in environments unlike the ones in which they evolved.  As I pointed out in the post,

It is certainly possible to identify aspects of the expression of moral emotions that all human populations have in common, but particular aspects of those emotions can vary significantly between individuals, and between populations.  It follows that we will never agree on what our “goals as a society” should be.  Some subset of the individuals in a society may agree on the goals of “moral progress,” but what of those who don’t?  Inevitably, they will be the evil ones, the “deplorables,” the outgroup whose opinions can be ignored because they are “morally bad.”

This dual nature of human morality based on our universal and powerful tendency to perceive others in terms of  ingroups and outgroups is reason enough in itself to reject the notion of “moral progress.”  We have tried to outlaw various manifestations of the behavior by giving them bad names, such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry, and so on.  The result of such attempts has invariably been the creation of yet more outgroups.  The hatred doesn’t disappear.  Instead, it simply pops up again, even more virulent than before, but directed at some alternative outgroup that hasn’t yet been declared off limits.

A good illustration of how this works in practice just turned up in the Washington Post in an article entitled, “When free speech becomes a political weapon.”  The author, Jennifer Delton, expresses concern about the threat of freedom of speech to “moral progress.”  According to Delton, when freedom of speech is accorded to “evil” people, it is transmuted into “freedom of speech.”  By this she means that it becomes a “political weapon,” which is then used by the “evil” people to impede “moral progress.”

As is often the case, Delton defines her ingroup in terms of ideology.  “Good” people are those whose ingroup is defined by the same ideological shibboleths as hers, and “evil” people are those belonging to outgroups whose members challenge those shibboleths.  More precisely, “Good” people are those whose beliefs are in harmony with “the internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism that marks the thinking of educated elites of both parties.”  She cites Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as an example of the practical application of these ideals.

In common with most humans, Delton perceives her “Good” as an objective thing.  In other words, she considers “internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism” to be “good in itself,” regardless of whether it is thought to be good or not.  Obviously, it never occurs to her to explore the evolutionary reasons for this common illusion.  Digging down through layers of cultural and environmental impedimenta to discover the innate predisposition(s) that are the “root cause” of her perception of “the Good” is certainly a project that would never occur to her.  Still less would it occur to her to consider the question, interesting from a biological, if not a moral point of view, of whether her response to the emotions in question enhance or reduce the odds that the responsible genes that she happens to carry will survive and reproduce.  Instead, she merely cites the authority of the “educated elites of both parties,” and leaves it at that.

Since the only “truly good” things are the “Goods” that define her ideology, it follows that any other supposed rights or principles are not good in themselves, and can be dispensed with to the extent that they threaten those things that are.  Freedom of speech belongs in this category.  As Delton puts it, referring to the New Deal,

Liberals would be chumps to let a principled commitment to “freedom of speech” undercut the pragmatic goal of political survival, which was the only way to ensure progress in civil rights and social welfare.

In this case, Delton is referring to the decision by an earlier generation of “Good” liberals to end their support of freedom of speech for Communists.  This was to be done, not because the Communists had murdered millions of people, and enslaved millions more, or because they sought to use freedom of speech to destroy the system that defended that freedom.  Indeed, Delton doesn’t perceive Communists as an outgroup at all.  Instead, Communists were to be deprived of freedom of speech because they were being used as tools by those who were “really evil.”  In Delton’s words,

Their presence in liberal organizations made liberals vulnerable to Republican and conservative attacks.  So those liberals interested in political success (and in preserving the New Deal) drove them out of politics.

If freedom of speech could be legitimately denied to Communists because they were a mere annoyance, it must be doubly legitimate to deny it to conservatives, who are “truly evil.”  However, Delton isn’t brazen enough, or at least not brazen enough yet, to say, “I think freedom of speech should be denied to conservatives,” which is what she actually means.  Instead, she falls back on the distinction between freedom of speech and “freedom of speech.”  Of course, that begs the question, “What’s the difference?”  According to Delton,

Philosopher Sidney Hook hinged his argument about speech on the distinction between the free flow of ideas, which the First Amendment protected, and actions, which it did not.  He said liberals had no problem with Communists’ ideas, which they were free to expound upon and disseminate.  The problem lay in their organized actions, which involved, “all sorts of stratagems, maneuvers, and illegal methods, evasions and subterfuges” developed by Lenin to subvert democracy.”

There’s no need to wade through swamps of philosophical mumbo-jumbo in a vain attempt to understand the obscure chain of events by which the “free flow of ideas” is transmogrified into “all sorts of stratagems, maneuvers, and illegal methods, evasions, and subterfuges.”  That Gordian knot is easily cut if you simply assume that the former applies to speech by those who belong to Ms. Delton’s ingroup, and the latter to speech by those who do not.  So it is that any attempt by “evil” people, that is, those who don’t quite see eye to eye with Ms. Delton touching on the universal benefits of “internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism,” to assert and defend their freedom of speech becomes a “right to create political spectacle and instigate violence.”  Apparently more or less the same logic is used to defend the assertion that attractive women who don’t wear a burka “create a public spectacle and instigate rape.”

Ms. Delton makes sure that her readers realize that anyone who disagrees with her opinion is evil.  Having compared them to Communists, she doubles down by claiming that they are Nazis on top of that:

It was one thing to defend the American Nazi Party’s right to march in Skokie, Ill. in 1977, when the liberal establishment and mainstream media were still intact and the American Nazi Party was a marginal fringe group.  The group was offensive, but neither its actions nor its ideas posed a threat to the political or social order, which was stable.  The situation is different today, with an erratic President Trump in the White House, elites in disarray and white nationalism on the rise.

I note in passing the degree of panic such hyperbole reveals on the left of the political spectrum in response to the recent election.  After dragging in the Communists and the di rigueur Nazis, Delton throws in some pejoratives to insure that even the most obtuse won’t fail to grasp that “conservatives = evil!”

Quoting Voltaire is not going to preserve anyone’s liberties – least of all those populations most vulnerable to vicious racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic attacks.

Note that racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism are merely different forms of outgroup identification that have been deemed by common agreement to be evil.  However, they are all symptoms of the same phenomenon; blind hatred of outgroups in the context of an environment radically different from the one in which that innately motivated behavior evolved.  Ms. Delton is no less a bigot merely because her hatred is directed at an outgroup based on ideology rather than race, sex, or religion, and one that doesn’t yet happen to be among those that are considered “off limits.”  Of course, there is an alternative explanation.  The people she hates may really be trying their very best to do things that they consciously believe are evil.  They may really be mortified if they pass the day without committing three or four bad deeds.  I wouldn’t put it past Ms. Delton to believe as much.  However, I have my doubts.

The point here isn’t that Mr. Delton is a bad person.  The identification of something she happens to want with “objective good” is a delusion common to almost every other human being on the planet.  I merely point out that the delusion can be inconvenient if you happen to value your right to speak freely, and downright deadly if you happen to be a Jew or a “bourgeois” in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It follows that it would behoove us to at least be aware of the danger.

I note in passing that the most extreme forms of the delusion are currently found among individuals who are on the left of the ideological spectrum.  That has not always been the case, and is, of course, no basis for concluding that leftists are “really evil.”  However, we can consider why this is the case.  I think part of the reason is that leftists like Ms. Delton imagined that they were safely in control of the tools needed to shape popular opinion, including the academy, the media, and the entertainment industry.  The results of the election were a terrible shock to many of them.  Ever since they have been frantically trying to think up ways to nullify those results and reassert their status and power.  Part of that project includes plugging the leaks that allowed thought crime to poison the minds of impressionable “deplorables” to begin with.  That entails denying access to a public forum to anyone who disagrees with “good” ideology, if necessary with the aid of modern day “antifa” storm troopers.

It is very unlikely that my little blog will convince enough people that “moral progress” is an illusion to matter.  It is much too delicious for human beings to believe in their own moral righteousness, and on the Left that sentiment has now become, for all practical purposes, an indispensable fetish, comparable to a form of religious fanaticism.  At best, I can point out the danger of the all but universal faith in “moral progress,” and advise my readers that, if they value freedom of speech, it is likely they will have to fight for it.

Japan and the Eternally Ticking “Demographic Time Bomb”

There are few metaphors more hackneyed than Japan’s “demographic time bomb.”  It is a never-failing source of copy for aspiring journalists on slow news days.  Stories about it keep popping up like so many mushrooms, all bearing more or less the same lugubrious burden.  Recent examples included the following from the Business Insider:

Experts call situations like Japan’s “demographic time bombs.”  They’re places where fertility rates are falling at the same time that longevity is increasing.  Without young people to support older generations, economies can shrink, putting even more pressure on younger generations to keep families small and budget-friendly.

Another article that turned up last month at Zero Hedge cited some dire statistical trends:

Mark August 16, 3766 on your calendar.  According to…researchers at Tohoku University, that’s the date Japan’s population will dwindle to one.  For 25 years, the country has had falling fertility rates, coinciding with widespread aging.  The worrisome trend has now reached a critical mass known as a “demographic time bomb.”  When that happens, a vicious cycle of low spending and low fertility can cause entire generations to shrink – or disappear completely.

In another article in The Economist, ominously entitled “The incredible shrinking country,” the ubiquitous “time bomb” again raises its ugly head:

A quiet but constant ticking can be heard from the demographic time bomb that sits beneath the worlds third-largest economy.  This week it made a louder tick than usual:  official statistics show that the population declined last year by a record 244,000 people – roughly the population of the London bureau of Hackney… The 2012 government report said that without policy change, by 2110 the number of Japanese could fall to 42.9m, ie just a third of its current population.  It is plausible to think that the country could learn to live with its shrinking population.  But that might mean also embracing a much diminished economic and political role in the world.

The amazing thing about these repetitious articles is their utter lack of any historical context.  It turns out that Japan’s population has been a “ticking time bomb” for well over a century.  However, back in the day it was ticking in a different direction.  For example, according to an article that appeared in the April, 1904 issue of the British Edinburgh Review, discussing the conflict in the Far East that would soon culminate in the Russo-Japanese war,

In 1872 the population of Japan amounted to only 33,110,793; in 1900 it was 44,805,937, already too great for her territory.

A few decades later the “time bomb” was still ticking in drive instead of reverse.  As noted in an article at the website of Australia’s Pacific War Historical Society,

Between 1918 and 1930, Japan’s population had expanded dramatically and outstripped the capacity of the nation’s resources to support it. To sustain its population blow-out, substantial food imports were essential, but foreign tariffs imposed on its exports of manufactured goods limited the capacity of Japan to pay for its food imports. Japan had tried to deal with its population problem by encouraging emigration of Japanese to countries such as the United States, but had met resistance from Americans who feared the loss of unskilled jobs to cheap immigrant labour.

This time, of course, the “time bomb” led to Japan’s disastrous decision to attack the United States.  Even after the war there was much wringing of hands about its rapid forward progress.  For example from an article that appeared in the December, 1950 issue of the American Mercury,

Our exceedingly efficient Public Health and Welfare Division has succeeded in driving down Japan’s death rate from 29.2 per thousand in 1945 to only 10.9 per thousand in 1949.  The birthrate, meanwhile, was rising to 32.8.  Thus, with our help, Japan’s population is now increasing at the rate of 1,800,000 per year.  Every morning there are 5,000 more Japanese than yesterday… How can we say that we have helped Japan when Japan is less self-sufficient today than she has ever been.

A few thoughts come to mind in light of these rather substantial changes to the nature of the “time bomb” over the years.  It appears that Japan was so desperate about the apparent impossibility of feeding her rapidly expanding population that she was willing to risk war with Russia in 1904 and with the United States in 1941.  In those years her population was around 47 million and 73 million, respectively.  Now her population is 127 million, and suggestions that she supplement her dwindling work force by massive immigration are considered the soul of wisdom.  For example, from an article that appeared in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs,

Japan must embrace immigration as a solution to its impending fiscal and demographic woes. A declining birthrate is a global trend, as is an ageing population. It will therefore be increasingly difficult for any country to meet all of its labor needs relying solely on the population that exists within its borders. In the case of Japan, more caregivers, nurses, and other providers catering to a graying society will be needed, especially if more women choose to go back to work full-time. The Japanese government will thus inevitably need to consider seriously the possibility of opening its doors to more immigration, rather than just to the highly skilled workers it currently courts. Although the Japanese have been at the forefront of developing robots designed to meet the mounting tsunami of elderly people’s needs, there is a limit to what can be expected from technology, especially when the psychological as well as physical needs of an ageing society are considered.

This, of course, is one of the standard globalist rationalizations of the suicidal policy of promoting mass immigration.  Heaven forefend that Japan ever sheds her “xenophobia” and concludes that she “must” accept this brilliant “solution” to her “time bomb” problem.  It boggles the mind!  How is it that all the environmental issues raised by mindlessly expanding the already massive population on the relatively small Japanese archipelago have suddenly evaporated?  Is our planet really such a stable place that a country that once despaired about the impossibility of feeding 47 million will now never again have to worry about feeding three times as many or more?  Is it safe for her to assume that climate change and/or political instability will never impair her ability to feed all those millions?  If the assumption that nothing in the world will ever happen to threaten her food supply turns out to be wrong, Japan’s problem of caring for its senior citizens could easily pale compared to the potential problem of mass starvation.  Beyond that, it’s hard to imagine anything more self-destructive than importing a massive population of people who will perceive the existing population of Japan as an outgroup, will be perceived by that population in turn as an outgroup, and will remain unassimilable indefinitely.  Is it really necessary to demonstrate yet again the disastrous results of pretending there’s no such thing as human nature?

I have an alternative suggestion.  Let the “time bomb” continue to tick in reverse.  It’s unlikely it will remain stuck in that position indefinitely, any more than it remained stuck in fast forward.  If the Japanese are really lucky, perhaps their population will decline to around 30 million, which was more or less what it was for hundreds of years before the Meiji Restoration.  I suspect their islands will be much more pleasant places to live at that level than they would be with the 150 million and up that the helpful people at Georgetown suggest it would take to defuse the “time bomb.”  I doubt that Japan would “lose face” due to declining economic and political clout in the world as a result, even if it mattered whether she “lost face” or not.  As a survivor of the “time bomb” it would be more likely that other countries would look on her as a role model.  She needn’t necessarily worry that such a small population would encourage aggression by her neighbors.  Japan possesses many tons of plutonium, which can be put to other uses than the peaceful production of nuclear power if need be.

Vignette of a Moderate Leftist

Scott Alexander is a U.S. psychiatrist and proprietor of Slate Star Codex, which he describes as “a blog about science, medicine, philosophy, politics, and futurism.” He considers himself a moderate liberal. In a recent post entitled Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle, he discussed Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology, an article published by David Roberts on Vox, the burden of which was that truth, justice, and moral rectitude are all under assault thanks to the rise of ideological tribalism on the right. In Roberts’ words,

Over time, this leads to what you might call tribal epistemology: Information is evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe’s values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders. “Good for our side” and “true” begin to blur into one…Now tribal epistemology has found its way to the White House…

Conservative media… profits from… a constant state of mobilized outrage.

This is the culmination of the right’s long campaign against media: a base that only trusts tribal news from tribal sources.

I suspect that if Roberts seriously expects us to believe that the traditional media don’t (or at least didn’t used to) support leftist tribal values and goals, that it is uncommon for leftist ideologues to be in a constant state of mobilized outrage, and that leftists commonly seek sources of news outside of their usual echo chambers, then clearly he has a pair of tribalist blinkers ensconced firmly at the end of his own nose. Of course we all do. We are a profoundly tribalist species, perceiving the world in terms of just and good ingroups and evil and deplorable outgroups. But that’s beside the point. The point is that Roberts suffers from the delusion that he’s somehow immune to tribalism. In fact, however, he wears the insignia of his tribe on his sleeve.

The article is full of ideologically slanted claims about conservative delusions spawned by conservative media misinformation.  Roberts clearly lacks even an elementary capacity to detect the slant in his own sources. To give just one example among the many, he cites “studies” according to which Fox viewers are more misinformed than those who rely on the traditional media. Even a cursory glance at the things they are misinformed about reveals that they are carefully chosen to insure that conservatives are more prone to “delusions.” For example, they were more likely to believe that “’weapons of mass destruction’ had been found in (Iraq) after the U.S. invasion, when they hadn’t,” they “were less likely to say the Earth’s temperature has been rising and less likely to attribute this temperature increase to human activities,” and were liable of a host of false beliefs about Obamacare. I could easily stand these studies on their heads by simply loading the questions with bits cherry-picked from the narratives of the Left instead of the Right. For example, the questions might include, “Are there significant differences in intelligence between different human ethnic groups?” “Is human biodiversity real and significant?” “According to Muslim teaching will most Christians burn in hell forever or not, and are women inferior to men or not?” “Did Michael Brown have his hands up and shout ‘don’t shoot’ when he was killed?”  “Was Hillary Clinton’s use of private computer resources to handle official government business a significant violation of federal regulations and the law?”  And so on.

Roberts goes on to promote doubling down on his tribe’s warfare against its conservative outgroup under the rubric of a return to the “traditional” techniques of supplying the public with information, concluding with the grim comment that,

There’s no other choice. In the end, if tribal epistemology wins, journalism loses.

I have news for Roberts. Tribal epistemology won a long time ago. All the evils he wrings his hands about are the inevitable result of marginalizing and vilifying the tribe that lost.

Which brings us back to our “moderate” leftist, Scott Alexander. Alexander doesn’t disagree with Roberts about tribalism on the right. He just prefers a different approach to dealing with it. He is St. Francis to Roberts’ Torquemada, if you will. He would rather bring erring conservatives back to the True Faith with a kid glove rather than an iron fist. For example, he suggests that some of the “studies” Roberts relies on to portray conservatives as deplorable might conceivably be affected by a liberal bias. He even admits that mainstream media outlets like CNN “lean liberal,” but claims they are not as liberal as Fox is conservative. That’s debatable. You can demonstrate that to yourself by simply turning on CNN every half hour or so over any six hour period. I can pretty much guarantee that the majority of time, and probably the vast majority of the time, you will be watching something that reflects negatively on Trump. Fox certainly opposed Obama, but was never as afflicted with single-minded hatred as CNN. Alexander thinks that CNN’s bogus pretense of neutrality is a feature, not a bug. I beg to differ. I prefer a news outlet that is open about its agenda to one that blatantly lies about it.

As we read further into the post, we find Alexander painting a rosy picture of the past. He tells us that there was once some kind of a Golden Age when, “the two parties had much more in common, and (were) able to appeal to shared gatekeeper institutions that both trusted.” Maybe, but it must have been long before my time. Now, however, all that has changed. In his words, “Right now, the neutral gatekeeper institutions have tried being biased against conservatives.” I rather think that “the neutral gatekeeper institutions have tried being biased against conservatives” for a lot longer than he imagines.  Conservatives just weren’t as effective in pushing back then as they are now. Among other things, they lacked the means to do so. Now they have the means. Both Roberts and Alexander agree that this is a deplorable situation. They concur that the outgroup, the “other” tribe is evil, and must be defanged. This ingroup/outgroup aspect of human nature, what Robert Ardrey called the “Amity-Enmity Complex,” should already be familiar to readers of this blog. The process by which Alexander manages to convince himself that the “other” is, indeed, evil is interesting in itself. He begins by continuing with his “kid glove” approach, debunking Roberts’ claim that, “the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own,” rightly noting that,

This is a bizarre claim, given the existence of groups like Accuracy in Media, Media Research Center, Newsbusters, Heterodox Academy, et cetera, which are all about the right seeking greater fairness in mainstream institutions, some of which are almost fifty years old… The way I remember it, conservatives spent about thirty years alternatively pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and literally praying for greater fairness in mainstream institutions, and it was basically all just hitting their heads against a brick wall. They then defected to create their own.

However, “creating their own” turned out to be the original sin.Here’s how Alexander describes the process:

A couple of years ago, Reddit decided to ban various undesirables and restrict discussion of offensive topics. A lot of users were really angry about this, and some of them set up a Reddit clone called Voat which promised that everyone was welcome regardless of their opinion.

What happened was – a small percent of average Reddit users went over, lured by curiosity or a principled commitment to free speech. And also, approximately 100% of Reddit’s offensive undesirables went there, lured by the promise of being able to be terrible and get away with it.

Even though Voat’s rules were similar to Reddit’s rules before the latter tightened its moderation policies, Voat itself was nothing like pre-tightening Reddit. I checked to see whether it had gotten any better in the last year, and I found the top three stories were:

SJW Awareness is a Steam curator that warns you about SJW games.

Africans describe their extortion schemes.  They put babies in ovens and hot showers.  They’re now migrating to EU.

“The Phantom,” and black serial killer who targeted blond haired white children, has been freed from prison and roaming streets of same city he terrorized.

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

In the first place, this is anecdotal evidence.In the second, at least two of the above blurbs are true. If Alexander doesn’t think that there are video games that come drenched in crude leftist propaganda, he must not have played many video games. If he did, he probably wouldn’t be too annoyed at discovering that his game was actually a leftist morality play in disguise, but some people are. As can be confirmed on Google, a black serial killer who targeted blonde haired white children actually was freed from prison in the same city where he committed his crimes. I would certainly deem this information useful if I had young children and the killer was released in my neighborhood. It would seem, then, that Alexander doesn’t think Voat is a “terrible place to live” because it is full of lies. Rather, its “seven zillion witches” are publishing truths that clash with Alexander’s preferred narrative, and he equates truth that clash with his narrative as evil.

After supplying us with this somewhat shaky evidence that Voat is inhabited by witches, Alexander reaches the dubious conclusion that all other right-leaning media outlets must therefore also be inhabited almost exclusively by witches as well. For example, it turns out that Fox was the unholy spawn of a similar process:

FOX’s slogans are “Fair and Balanced”, “Real Journalism”, and “We Report, You Decide”. They were pushing the “actually unbiased media” angle hard. I don’t know if this was ever true, or if people really believed it. It doesn’t matter. By attracting only the refugees from a left-slanted system, they ensured they would end up not just with conservatives, but with the worst and most extreme conservatives.

No doubt Alexander would find anyone who kicked at the ideological planks that form the box his tribe lives in “bad” and “extreme.”He challenges some of the more crudely biased “studies” cited by Roberts, but doesn’t neglect to virtue signal to his readers that “Fox is horrible.” Noting that Breitbart, Drudge, and the rest are just as horrible, he adds,

I think it’s right that this situation is horrible and toxic and destroying the country, and it’s really good that someone has pointed this out and framed it this clearly.

I don’t see it that way. I could care less whether Alexander’s tribe considers Fox and the rest “horrible.” They’re either making a moral judgment that lacks any legitimate basis and is nothing more significant than an expression of their emotional whims, or they’re suggesting that these alternative media do not supply useful information, which is false. The mainstream media will occasionally lie or manipulate facts to alter their meaning. Usually, however, they simply suppress any news that doesn’t fit their narrative. Conservative media supply these often significant facts, which are only “horrible” because they contradict that narrative. As a result, the United States has a more genuinely free press than many other countries where similarly powerful and influential alternatives are lacking.

For example, I happen to follow the German media fairly closely. They have no equivalent of Fox, and to an outside observer the media there are as similar to each other as so many peas in a pod, all flogging almost exactly the same political line when it comes to any issue of overriding significance. Among other things, this vanilla approach to journalism convinces citizens that they are much better informed than they actually are. When it comes to the United States, for example, they are fed a dumbed down version of the U.S. mainstream media narrative, typically much cruder and more extreme than anything you’ll find in this country. That’s exactly what we would have here lacking credible alternatives like Fox, Breitbart, Drudge, Instapundit, etc., whether Alexander imagines they’re full of scary witches or not. Alexander concludes his article with the following three paragraphs:

Look. I read Twitter. I know the sorts of complaints people have about this blog. I’m some kind of crypto-conservative, I’m a traitor to liberalism, I’m too quick to sell out under the guise of “compromise”. And I understand the sentiment. I write a lot about how we shouldn’t get our enemies fired lest they try to fire us, how we shouldn’t get our enemies’ campus speakers disinvited lest they try to disinvite ours, how we shouldn’t use deceit and hyperbole to push our policies lest our enemies try to push theirs the same way. And people very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.

And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”

Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging.

I agree that leftists like Roberts and Alexander are in a hole, but they can’t stop digging. Their ideology constrains them to keep those shovels flying. The only real way to stop would involve them challenging their own ideological preconceptions. However, their tribe is defined by ideology, so to challenge the ideology would mean ostracism – banishment from the tribe. Alexander admits he has already been denounced as a traitor and a sellout merely for advocating a milder approach. The lightening is poised to strike even though he hasn’t dared to lay so much as a finger on the fundamental shibboleths of his ingroup. There is no significant ideological difference at all between Roberts and Alexander. They only differ on how to guide the erring sheep back into the fold of the True Faith. That’s the problem. To actually stop digging, the leftists would have to admit that they may not be 100% right all the time, and that the conservatives may actually be right about some things. They can’t do that because of the way they define membership in their ingroup.  It would be something like St. Francis (or Torquemada) admitting that Christianity is mostly true, but the pagans might have a point about the existence of some of their gods. If the leftists, who are anything but “neutral,” want to lay down their shovels, the only solution is to leave their ingroup. However, it is usually very painful and traumatic for members of our species to do that.  They’re likely to be down there a good, long time.

Trump and Sex Talk: The Left Rediscovers its Inner Prude

D. C. McAllister just posted an article entitled “America, You Have No Right to Judge Donald Trump” over at PJ Media.  Setting aside the question of “rights” for the moment, I have to admit that she makes some good points.  Here’s one of the better ones:

Those who are complaining about Trump today have no basis for their moral outrage. That’s because their secular amoral worldview rejects any basis for that moral judgment. Any argument they make against the “immorality” of Trump is stolen, or at least borrowed for expediency, from a religious worldview they have soundly rejected.

Exactly!  It’s amazing that the religious apologists the Left despises can see immediately that they “have no basis for their moral outrage,” and yet the “enlightened” people on the Left never seem to get it.  You can say what you want about the “religious worldview,” but a God that threatens to burn you in hell for billions and trillions of years unless you do what he says seems to me a pretty convincing “basis” for “acting morally.”  The “enlightened” have never come up with anything of the sort.  One typically finds them working themselves into high dudgeon of virtuous indignation without realizing that the “basis” for all their furious anathemas is nothing but thin air.

The reason for their latest outburst of pious outrage is threadbare enough.  They claim that Trump is “immoral” because he engaged in “locker room talk” about women in what he supposed was a private conversation.  Are you kidding me?!  These people have just used their usual bullying tactics to impose a novel version of sexual morality on the rest of us that sets the old one recommended by a “religious worldview” on its head.   Now, all of a sudden, we are to believe that they’ve all rediscovered their inner prude.  Heaven forefend that anyone should dare to think of women as “objects!”

Puh-lease!  I’d say the chances that 99 out of 100 of the newly pious MSM journalists who have been flogging this story have never engaged in similar talk or worse are vanishingly small.  The other one is probably a eunuch.  As for the “objectification of women,” I’m sorry to be a bearer of bad tidings, but that’s what men do.  They are sexually attracted to the “object” of a woman’s body because it is their nature to be so attracted.  That is how they evolved.  It is highly unlikely that any of the current pious critics of “objectification” would be around today to register their complaints if that particular result of natural selection had never happened.

And what of Trump?  Well, if nothing else, he’s been a very good educator.  He’s shown us what the elites in the Republican Party really stand for.  I personally will never look at the McCains, Romneys, and Ryans of the world in quite the same way.  At the very least, I’m grateful to him for that.

Hillary and Her Classified E-mails

Rather than leave my readers in suspense, let me just say it up front.  If any of the “little people” working for the government, whether as feds or contractors, used a private computer for official business the way Hillary Clinton did, they would be fired.  If they used it to store and send classified information, a lot worse might happen to them.  By the letter of the law, they would certainly be punishable with heavy fines and/or jail time.  It is one of the more amusing and/or disturbing phenomena of the early 21st century, depending on your point of view, that such a person is even being seriously considered as a candidate for President of the United States.

The latest story about the subject on Foxnews is typical of the rampant disinformation being spread on the subject in the mass media.  Under the headline, “New batch of Clinton emails released, 84 now marked ‘classified’,” it continues with the byline, “State Department release 551 documents from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email account, including 84 that are considered to be classified today, but not at the time they were initially sent.”  Is it really too much to ask that these people occasionally consult, at the very least, some new hire who’s actually taken the elementary training course in security typically required for anyone who routinely handles sensitive information?  One can never assume information is unclassified because it has not been officially declared and marked classified.  If there is any doubt on the matter, it cannot simply be blown out to the general public without a second thought.  It must be submitted to a competent authority for a decision on whether and at what level it should be protected.  Regardless of whether it is classified or otherwise sensitive or not, it is illegal to transfer official government information to a private computer.

Let me explain how this works.  There are two major types of classified information; that which is protected by executive order, and that which is protected by statute.  Information protected by executive order is known as National Security Information, or NSI.  Each President typically releases an order early in his term with details on how such information is to be protected, for how long, etc.  The latest such order, E.O. 13526, was issued by President Obama in 2009.  Other major types of information, dealing with such things as the design and use of nuclear weapons and the production of special nuclear material such as enriched uranium and plutonium, are classified by statute, namely, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended.  The most sensitive category of this type of information is known as Restricted Data, or RD.  The Atomic Energy Act established another category of such information pertaining mainly to the military use of and yield of nuclear weapons, known as Formerly Restricted Data, or FRD.  There is also a third, seldom encountered category, dealing mainly with foreign intelligence information, known as Transclassified Foreign Nuclear Information, or TFNI.  The levels of classification, from top to bottom in order of sensitivity, are Top Secret, Secret and Confidential.  The categories, from top to bottom in order of sensitivity, are RD, FRD, TFNI, and NSI.

Information that is protected by statute, such as RD, is “born classified.”  It is under the purview of the Department of Energy (DOE).  If there is any doubt whether it must be protected or not, it must be submitted to a “Derivative Classifier,” who consults classification guides within his/her area of competence to decide whether it is classified or not, and at what level.  If the guides don’t cover it, it may be submitted to one of the few individuals in the country with Original Classification authority for a determination.  RD is never automatically declassified, nor must a date or event be set for its eventual declassification.  RD information may occasionally be declassified by proper authority.  In that case, another specially trained individual, known as a Derivative Declassifier, is appointed to decide whether documents are no longer classified, or may be classified at a lower level.  Note the important distinction between information and documents.  In some cases declassifiers are authorized to act alone, and in others declassification decisions must be made by a declassifier and another classifier or declassifier acting together.

NSI is not “born classified.”  However, it may not be automatically assumed unclassified, either.  Each government agency has authority over its own NSI.  Each typically has the equivalent of DOE’s Original Classifiers, Derivative Classifiers, and classification guides.  Unlike RD, a date or event must be set for declassification of NSI.  Under the current executive order, declassification must occur within 25 years, except under special circumstances.  Currently, NSI documents may not be automatically declassified, even when the declassification date has passed or the declassification event has happened.  They must first be reviewed by an authorized declassifier.

Other than classified information, there are other types of information which must be protected, and to which legal penalties apply if released deliberately or through negligence.  These include Official Use Only, which must meet one of the nine exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information, or UCNI (DOE), Safeguards Information (NRC), Protected Critical Infrastructure Information or PCII (DHS), etc.  It is illegal, and the lowliest employee of the federal government should know it’s illegal, to have any of these types of information on a private computer.

So much for a very elementary description of the classification process in the US.  Some of the above is relevant to the case of Hillary Clinton, and some not.  However, the fact that she simply ignored all the legal and administrative requirements regarding the handling and protection of sensitive information demonstrates that she is incompetent to be a federal mailroom employee, far less President of the United States.  It is sad but hardly surprising in this day and age that most journalists and media organizations have such an abject lack of any sense of a responsibility to inform the public that they ignore all these facts.  Their main function, as far as they are concerned, is to defeat the hated and despised conservative outgroup.  As a result we find them circling the wagons around her, determined to suppress any hint of the real gravity and implications of her incompetence as Secretary of State.  This should provide us with a rather clear indication of what they are talking about when they speak of the “moral compass” referred to in my previous post.

As my readers know, I don’t believe in the existence of objective moral truths.  However, I am human.  As a result, I experience moral emotions.  When I contemplate the fact that Hillary Clinton is very likely to become President of my country, I experience a moral emotion that is familiar to all of us.  Shame.

Is Trump Evil?

No.

The question itself is absurd.  It implies the existence of things – objective good and evil – that are purely imaginary.  Good and evil seem to be real, but they are actually only words we assign to subjective emotional responses.  Darwin was aware of the fact, as demonstrated in his writings.  Westermarck stated it as a scientific theory in his Ethical Relativity.  Arthur Keith and others before him noted critical aspect of human morality that is commonly ignored to this day; its dual nature.  Robert Ardrey referred to it as the “Amity-Enmity Complex,” noting that we categorize others into ingroups, with which we associate “good” qualities, and outgroups, with which we associate “evil.”  Denial of the dual nature of morality has been one of the more damaging legacies of the Blank Slate.  Among other things, it has obscured the reasons for the existence of such variants of outgroup identification as racism, religious bigotry, and anti-Semitism.  In the process, it has obscured from the consciousness of those who are loudest in condemning these “evils” that they, too, have outgroups, which they commonly hate more bitterly and irrationally than those they accuse of such sins.

The current attempts in the UK to establish a travel ban on Donald Trump are a good illustration of the absurdities that are commonly the result of failure to recognize the simple truths stated above.  As I write this, 570,000 Brits have signed a petition calling for such a ban.  In response, the British parliament has begun debating the issue.  All this is justified on moral grounds.  Ask one of the petition signers why, exactly, Trump is evil, and typical responses would include the claim that he is a racist, a religious bigot, spreads “hate-speech,” etc.  If one were to continue the line of questioning, asking why racism is bad, they might respond that it leads to inequality.  Ask them why equality is good, and they might start losing patience with the questioner because, in fact, they don’t know.  None of these saintly petition signers has the faintest clue why Trump is “really evil.”  It’s no wonder.  Legions of philosophers have been trying to catch the gaudy butterflies of “good” and “evil” for the last few millennia.  They have failed for a very good reason.  The butterflies don’t exist.

Let us attempt to bring the debate back into the real world.  Trump wants to expel illegal immigrants from the U.S., and end immigration of Muslims.  These are not irrational goals.  As history demonstrates, they are both legally and physically possible.  In both cases, they would recognize the existence of human nature in general, and our tendency to perceive others in terms of ingroups and outgroups in particular.  They will result in the exclusion from the country of people who have historically perceived the lion’s share of the existing population of the United States as an outgroup.  In the case of Moslems, their holy book, the Quran, includes many passages forbidding friendship with Christians and condemning those with commonly held Christian beliefs to burn in hell for eternity.  In the case of Hispanics, they come from cultures that have historically perceived North Americans as exploiters and imperialist aggressors.  Both of these groups, in turn, are typically perceived by Americans as belonging to outgroups.  Allowing them to remain in or enter the country has already resulted in civil strife.  If history is any guide, there is a non-trivial possibility that the eventual result will be civil war.  These are outcomes that most current US citizens would prefer to avoid.  They are being told, however, that to avoid being “racist,” or “bigoted,” or, in fine, “immoral,” they must accept these outcomes.  In other words, to be “good,” they must practice an absurd form of altruism, in which they must make tangible sacrifices, even though the chances that they will ever receive anything back in return are nil.  Otherwise, they will be “evil.”  This unusual form of moral behavior is not encountered elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

Moral emotions certainly do not exist to promote “good” and defeat “evil.”  They exist solely because, at points in time that were utterly unlike the present, they happened to increase the odds that the genes responsible for spawning them would survive and reproduce.  Importing civil strife and, potentially, civil war, are not good strategies for promoting genetic survival.  The subjective desire to direct moral emotions in order to accomplish goals that are in harmony with the reasons those emotions exist to begin with is neither “good” nor “evil.”  However, as long as one recognizes the necessarily subjective nature of those goals, there is no basis for the claim that pursuing them is irrational.  In short, expelling illegal immigrants and banning Muslim immigration are not “evil,” because there is no such thing as “evil,” beyond its subjective and dependent existence in the consciousness of individuals.  They are, however, rational, in the sense that they are legal and achievable, and are also in harmony with the goal of genetic, not to mention cultural survival.  Most US citizens seem to recognize this fact at some conscious or subconscious level.  This explains their support for Trump, and what one might call their immune response to a deluge of culturally alien immigrants, whether legal or illegal.  As so often happens, many of those who don’t “get it” are intellectuals, who have a disconcerting tendency to bamboozle themselves with ideological concoctions from which they imagine they can distill the “good,” often at the expense of others not afflicted with a similar talent for self-delusion.

The petition signers, on the other hand, would be somewhat embarrassed if asked to justify their condemnation of Trump on grounds other than such imaginary categories as “good” and “evil.”  Perhaps they might argue that he is acting against the “brotherhood of man,” and that the “brotherhood of man” is a rational goal because it would reduce or eliminate inter-species warfare and other forms of violence, goals which are also in harmony with genetic survival.  To this, one need merely respond, “Look in the mirror.”  There, if they look closely, they will see the reflection of their own hatreds, and of their own outgroups.  They are no more immune to human nature than the racists and bigots they so piously condemn.  After their own fashion, like virtually every other human being on the planet, they are “racists and bigots” themselves.  The only difference between them and those they condemn is in the choice of outgroup.  Their own hatreds expose the “brotherhood of man” as a fantasy.

In short, all these Brits who imagine themselves dwelling on pinnacles of righteousness don’t oppose Trump’s policies on rational grounds.  They oppose him because they hate him, and they hate him because he is included in their outgroup, and must, therefore, be “immoral.”  In that they are similar to American Trump-haters.  Typical Brits, on the other hand, have many other hatreds in common.  Many of them have a long and abiding hatred of Americans.  Going back to the years just after we gained our independence, one may consult the pages of the British Quarterly Review, probably their most influential journal during the first half of the 19th century.  There you will find nothing but scorn for Americans and their “silly paper Constitution.”  As anyone who has read a little history is aware, little changed between then and the most recent orgasm of anti-American hatred in Europe, in which the Brits were eager participants.  It’s ironic that these hatemongers are now sufficiently droll to accuse others of “hate-speech.”  Ideologues may be defined as those who identify their in- and outgroups according to ideological criteria.  In common with ideologues everywhere, British ideologues hatred of the “other,” so defined, is as virulent as the hatreds of any racist ever heard of.  In other words, to judge by their “racism,” they are at least as “evil” as the outgroups they condemn.  The only difference is that their hatred is aroused by “races” that differ from them in political alignment rather than skin color.  It is this variant of “racism” that they are now directing at Trump.

If Trump does become President, it would not be surprising to see him retaliate against the British hatemongers, if not in response to moral emotions, perhaps as a mere matter of self-defense.  To begin, for example, he might expel the British scientists who are now so ubiquitous at our national weapons laboratories, with free access to both our classified nuclear weapons information and to expensive experimental facilities, to the construction and maintenance of which they have contributed little if anything.  Beyond that, we might deliver some broad hints as to the violation of the Monroe Doctrine posed by their occupation of the Malvinas Islands, accompanied by some judicious arming of Argentina.

None of what I have written above implies nihilism, or moral relativism, nor does it exclude the possibility of an absolute morality.  I merely recognize the fact that good and evil are not objective things, and draw the obvious conclusions.  Facts are not good or evil.  They are simply facts.

 

On the Hatred of the “Anti-Haters”

Europe is an amazing sight these days.  The leftists are doing what leftists do – fighting to eliminate any semblance of recognizable borders or national sovereignty, encouraging hordes of culturally alien immigrants to pour into the continent in the process.  All this is being done in the name of “morality,” more or less in the same sense as one might jump off a cliff in the name of “getting exercise.”  Leftists, whether they nominally belong to the “conservative” or “liberal” parties, control the media, the schools, the churches, and state power.  But in spite of an unprecedented barrage of propaganda from all those sources, the populations of the countries concerned are starting to demonstrate a slight uneasiness, or, if you will, common sense.  They know that, historically, allowing the numbers of unassimilable aliens in ones country to increase beyond a certain point has invariably resulted in violent social unrest, and occasionally civil war.  They would prefer to avoid those outcomes.  Denied any democratic means of expressing their opinions via, for example, plebiscites, some of them have taken to the streets in protest.  The response of their masters has been remarkable.  Aware that they lack any semblance of a democratic mandate for the profound and likely irreversible changes they have been making to Europe’s demographic and cultural landscape, and also aware that the people are not with them, they have reacted with what one might describe as a form of hysteria.

Germany, of course, has been taking a leading role in destabilizing the continent in keeping with time-honored tradition.  As I have German relatives and a German wife, I pay particular attention happenings there.  As examples of what I have described above as the hysteria of the string pullers in that country, one might consider the following:

  • Some of the first German citizens to take to the streets were loosely organized under the rubric of “PEGIDA,” (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident.)  Several similar groups have emerged since then.  For the most part, they consist of citizens who simply gather in the streets and occasionally conduct peaceful marches.  In other words, they are people who “peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.”  According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the response has been to intimidate them with threats of surveillance by the local equivalent of the FBI, rationalized by the claim that they are all merely puppets in the hands of right wing fringe elements.
  • The “respectable” and “conservative FAZ also “informed” its readers about PEGIDA by publishing an interview with one Hajo Funke, described as an “extremism researcher.”  Readers are left trembling over accounts of supposed “connections” between PEGIDA and the murder of Cologne’s mayor by right wingers.  U.S. readers should be familiar with this rather hackneyed tactic of claiming that whatever heinous crimes can be exploited for the purpose were “inspired” by whatever group one wants to smear.
  • Media giant ARD ran a story about a “chain of lights,” made up of citizens holding candles and torches to welcome immigrants.  Some of the supposed images of the event turned out to be fake, and were actually taken at a different event back in 2003.
  • Not to be outdone, Der Spiegel, Germany’s largest news magazine, cites supposed incidents of “hatemongering” against immigrants on YouTube, and “inciting the populace” on Facebook, with allusions of ongoing government investigations of the “extremists.”  Focus magazine chimes in that one of these Facebook extremists has just been sentenced to more than two years in prison for “agitating against immigrants.”  That should “get his mind right.”

Anyone who suggests that the government might want to assume some elementary level of control over the borders and pause in implementing its radical policies until the citizens have been allowed to weigh in on the matter is commonly described in the German media as a “hater.”  This is particularly true of any mention of the subject in Der Spiegel.  That’s a bit rich considering that Der Spiegel takes the cake among German hatemongers in this century, and would have gotten at least an honorable mention in the last.

Der Spiegel was in the very vanguard of the lucrative game of peddling hate against the United States during the latest European orgasm of anti-Americanism which reached its peak about a decade ago.  Many of the most egregious examples were documented on Davids Medienkritik, now mothballed but still an excellent source of historical source material.  I encourage readers to visit the site and page back to the posts prior to, say 2008.  Among other things, Medienkritik put together a collage of Spiegel covers that pretty much says it all when it comes to hatred.

Spiegel Covers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have a look and you’ll see examples of some of Spiegel’s favorite quasi-racist anti-American stereotypes.  Of course, the gun nut and religious fanatic are there, as well as well as such favorite themes as Americans exploiting German workers, torturing prisoners, trading “blood for oil,” etc.  Such relentlessly negative coverage of the United States occasionally reached levels that can only be described as fanatical, crowding out virtually all other news on Spiegel’s website.

At the crest of the anti-American wave in Germany, one found similar “news” stories in virtually every German publication worth mentioning, from the left wing Der Spiegel to the “conservative” FAZ to the neo-Nazi Deutsche National-Zeitung.  Standing bravely in opposition to this wave of xenophobic hate, calling for some modicum of rational and fair treatment of the United States, were a few little bloggers.  These people had nothing to gain from resisting the hatemongers, went almost completely unnoticed in the United States, and were subjected to vilification and hacking attacks in their own country.  They certainly deserve our gratitude.  As it happens, one of the most active of these little blogs went by the name of Politically Incorrect.  It’s editor was a reliable voice against the pervasive peddling of hate at Spiegel and elsewhere.  The blog still exists.  It should come as no surprise that it is now taking a stand against the suicidal policies of the German regime.

Of course, according to the editors of Der Spiegel, Politically Incorrect’s resistance to the uncontrolled deluge of “asylum seekers,” land it among the “inciters of the German Volk,” the “promoters of murder,” the “right wing extremists,” the “neo-Nazis,” and, in a word, the “haters.”  In fact, the real haters in Germany are to be found elsewhere.  Readers should find a clue about where to look for them if they take a close look at Medienkritik’s collage of magazine covers.

I noted in my recent posts on James Burnham how well he exposed the sources of the current push to eliminate borders and allow the free movement of human populations across the globe in liberal fantasies of universal human brotherhood.  I can think of no better demonstration of the delusional nature of this goal than the spectacle of the bitter and fanatical hatreds of the very people who are foremost in attempting to force it down the throats of their fellow citizens.  Their hate hasn’t gone anywhere.  They’ve merely found a different outgroup to hate, in the form of anyone who dares to oppose their ideological shibboleths.  And in the end, that’s why their current experiment in destabilizing their own countries is most unlikely to end well.  As the rage of these “anti-haters” against anyone who stands in their way becomes ever more hysterical, they expose themselves as the most virulent haters of all.

…And One More Thing about James Burnham: On Human Nature

There’s another thing about James Burnham’s Suicide of the West that’s quite fascinating; his take on human nature.  In fact, Chapter III is entitled “Human Nature and the Good Society.”  Here are a few excerpts from that chapter:

However varied may be the combination of beliefs that it is psychologically possible for an individual liberal to hold, it remains true that liberalism is logically committed to a doctrine along the lines that I have sketched:  viewing human nature as not fixed but plastic and changing; with no pre-set limit to potential development; with no innate obstacle to the realization of a society of peace, freedom, justice and well-being.  Unless these things are true of human nature, the liberal doctrine and program for government, education, reform and so on are an absurdity.

But in the face of what man has done and does, it is only an ideologue obsessed with his own abstractions who can continue to cling to the vision of an innately uncorrupt, rational and benignly plastic human nature possessed of an unlimited potential for realizing the good society.

Quite true, which makes it all the more remarkable that virtually all the “scientists” in the behavioral “sciences” at the time Burnham wrote these lines were “clinging to that vision,” at least in the United States.  See, for example, The Triumph of Evolution, in which one of these “men of science,” author Hamilton Cravens, documents the fact.  Burnham continues,

No, we must repeat:  if human nature is scored by innate defects, if the optimistic account of man is unjustified, then is all the liberal faith in vain.

Here we get a glimpse of the reason that the Blank Slaters insisted so fanatically that there is no such thing as human nature, at least as commonly understood, for so many years, in defiance of all reason, and despite the fact that any 10 year old could have told them their anthropological theories were ludicrous.  The truth stood in the way of their ideology.  Therefore, the truth had to yield.

All this begs the question of how, as early as 1964, Burnham came up with such a “modern” understanding of the Blank Slate.  Reading on in the chapter, we find some passages that are even more intriguing.  Have a look at this:

It is not merely the record of history that speaks in unmistakable refutation of the liberal doctrine of man.  Ironically enough – ironically, because it is liberalism that has maintained so exaggerated a faith in science – almost all modern scientific studies of man’s nature unite in giving evidence against the liberal view of man as a creature motivated, once ignorance is dispelled, by the rational search for peace, freedom and plenty.  Every modern school of biology and psychology and most schools of sociology and anthropology conclude that men are driven chiefly by profound non-rational, often anti-rational, sentiments and impulses, whose character and very existence are not ordinarily understood by conscious reason.  Many of these drives are aggressive, disruptive, and injurious to others and to society.

!!!

The bolding and italics are mine.  How on earth did Burnham come up with such ideas?  By all means, dear reader, head for your local university library, fish out the ancient microfiche, and search through the scientific and professional journals of the time yourself.  Almost without exception, the Blank Slate called the tune.  Clearly, Burnham didn’t get the notion that “almost all modern scientific studies of man’s nature” contradicted the Blank Slate from actually reading the literature himself.  Where, then, did he get it?  Only Burnham and the wild goose know, and Burnham’s dead, but my money is on Robert Ardrey.  True, Konrad Lorenz’ On Aggression was published in Germany in 1963, but it didn’t appear in English until 1966.  The only other really influential popular science book published before Suicide of the West that suggested anything like what Burnham wrote in the above passage was Ardrey’s African Genesis, published in 1961.

What’s that you say?  I’m dreaming?  No one of any significance ever challenged the Blank Slate orthodoxy until E. O. Wilson’s stunning and amazing publication of Sociobiology in 1975?  I know, it must be true, because it’s all right there in Wikipedia.  As George Orwell once said, “He who controls the present controls the past.”

James Burnham and the Anthropology of Liberalism

James Burnham was an interesting anthropological data point in his own right.  A left wing activist in the 30’s, he eventually became a Trotskyite.  By the 50’s however, he had completed an ideological double back flip to conservatism, and became a Roman Catholic convert on his deathbed.  He was an extremely well-read intellectual, and a keen observer of political behavior.  His most familiar book is The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941.  Among others, it strongly influenced George Orwell, who had something of a love/hate relationship with Burnham.  For example, in an essay in Tribune magazine in January 1944 he wrote,

Recently, turning up a back number of Horizon, I came upon a long article on James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, in which Burnham’s main thesis was accepted almost without examination.  It represented, many people would have claimed, the most intelligent forecast of our time.  And yet – founded as it was on a belief in the invincibility of the German army – events have already blown it to pieces.

A bit over a year later, in February 1945, however, we find Burnham had made more of an impression on Orwell than the first quote implies.  In another essay in the Tribune he wrote,

…by the way the world is actually shaping, it may be that war will become permanent.  Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution.  One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see more or less what areas they will comprise.  And if the world does settle down into this pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another, although it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war.

Of course, these super-states later made their appearance in Orwell’s most famous novel, 1984.  However, he was right about Burnham the first time.  He had an unfortunate penchant for making wrong predictions, often based on the assumption that transitory events must represent a trend that would continue into the indefinite future.  For example, impressed by the massive industrial might brought to bear by the United States during World War II, and its monopoly of atomic weapons, he suggested in The Struggle for the World, published in 1947, that we immediately proceed to force the Soviet Union to its knees, and establish a Pax Americana.  A bit later, in 1949, impressed by a hardening of the U.S. attitude towards the Soviet Union after the war, he announced The Coming Defeat of Communism in a book of that name.  He probably should have left it at that, but reversed his prognosis in Suicide of the West, which appeared in 1964.  By that time it seemed to Burnham that the United States had become so soft on Communism that the defeat of Western civilization was almost inevitable.  The policy of containment could only delay, but not stop the spread of Communism, and in 1964 it seemed that once a state had fallen behind the Iron Curtain it could never throw off the yoke.

Burnham didn’t realize that, in the struggle with Communism, time was actually on our side.  A more far-sighted prophet, a Scotsman by the name of Sir James Mackintosh, had predicted in the early 19th century that the nascent versions of Communism then already making their appearance would eventually collapse.  He saw that the Achilles heel of what he recognized was really a secular religion was its ill-advised proclamation of a coming paradise on earth, where it could be fact-checked, instead of in the spiritual realms of the traditional religions, where it couldn’t.  In the end, he was right.  After they had broken 100 million eggs, people finally noticed that the Communists hadn’t produced an omelet after all, and the whole, seemingly impregnable edifice collapsed.

One thing Burnham did see very clearly, however, was the source of the West’s weakness – liberalism.  He was well aware of its demoralizing influence, and its tendency to collaborate with the forces that sought to destroy the civilization that had given birth to it.  Inspired by what he saw as an existential threat, he carefully studied and analyzed the type of the western liberal, and its evolution away from the earlier “liberalism” of the 19th century.  Therein lies the real value of his Suicide of the West.  It still stands as one of the greatest analyses of modern liberalism ever written.  The basic characteristics of the type he described are as familiar more than half a century later as they were in 1964.  And this time his predictions regarding the “adjustments” in liberal ideology that would take place as its power expanded were spot on.

Burnham developed nineteen “more or less systematic set of ideas, theories and beliefs about society” characteristic of the liberal syndrome in Chapters III-V of the book, and then listed them, along with possible contrary beliefs in Chapter VII.  Some of them have changed very little since Burnham’s day, such as,

It is society – through its bad institutions and its failure to eliminate ignorance – that is responsible for social evils.  Our attitude toward those who embody these evils – of crime, delinquency, war, hunger, unemployment, communism, urban blight – should not be retributive but rather the permissive, rehabilitating, education approach of social service; and our main concern should be the elimination of the social conditions that are the source of the evils.

Since there are no differences among human beings considered in their political capacity as the foundation of legitimate, that is democratic, government, the ideal state will include all human beings, and the ideal government is world government.

The goal of political and social life is secular:  to increase the material and functional well-being of humanity.

Some of the 19 have begun to change quite noticeably since the publication of Suicide of the West in just the ways Burnham suggested.  For example, items 9 and 10 on the list reflect a classic version of the ideology that would have been familiar to and embraced by “old school” liberals like John Stuart Mill:

Education must be thought of as a universal dialogue in which all teachers and students above elementary levels may express their opinions with complete academic freedom.

Politics must be though of as a universal dialogue in which all persons may express their opinions, whatever they may be, with complete freedom.

Burnham had already noticed signs of erosion in these particular shibboleths in his own day, as liberals gained increasing control of academia and the media.  As he put it,

In both Britain and the United States, liberals began in 1962 to develop the doctrine that words which are “inherently offensive,” as far-Right but not communist words seem to be, do not come under the free speech mantle.

In our own day of academic safe spaces and trigger warnings, there is certainly no longer anything subtle about this ideological shift.  Calls for suppression of “offensive” speech have now become so brazen that they have spawned divisions within the liberal camp itself.  One finds old school liberals of the Berkeley “Free Speech Movement” days resisting Gleichschaltung with the new regime, looking on with dismay as speaker after speaker is barred from university campuses for suspected thought crime.

As noted above, Communism imploded before it could overwhelm the Western democracies, but the process of decay goes on.  Nothing about the helplessness of Europe in the face of the current inundation by third world refugees would have surprised Burnham in the least.  He predicted it as an inevitable expression of another fundamental characteristic of the ideology – liberal guilt.  Burnham devoted Chapter 10 of his book to the subject, and noted therein,

Along one perspective, liberalism’s reformist, egalitarian, anti-discrimination, peace-seeking principles are, or at any rate can be interpreted as, the verbally elaborated projections of the liberal sense of guilt.

and

The guilt of the liberal causes him to feel obligated to try to do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil.  This feeling, too, is non-rational:  the liberal must try to cure the evil even if he has no knowledge of the suitable medicine or, for that matter, of the nature of the disease; he must do something about the social problem even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem – when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it.

I suspect Burnham himself would have been surprised at the degree to which such “social problems” have multiplied in the last half a century, and the pressure to do something about them has only increased in the meantime.  As for the European refugees, consider the following corollaries of liberal guilt as developed in Suicide of the West:

(The liberal) will not feel uneasy, certainly not indignant, when, sitting in conference or conversation with citizens of countries other than his own – writers or scientists or aspiring politicians, perhaps – they rake his country and his civilization fore and aft with bitter words; he is as likely to join with them in the criticism as to protest it.

It follows that,

…the ideology of modern liberalism – its theory of human nature, its rationalism, its doctrines of free speech, democracy and equality – leads to a weakening of attachment to groups less inclusive than Mankind.

All modern liberals agree that government has a positive duty to make sure that the citizens have jobs, food, clothing, housing, education, medical care, security against sickness, unemployment and old age; and that these should be ever more abundantly provided.  In fact, a government’s duty in these respects, if sufficient resources are at its disposition, is not only to its own citizens but to all humanity.

…under modern circumstances there is a multiplicity of interests besides those of our own nation and culture that must be taken into account, but an active internationalism in feeling as well as thought, for which “fellow citizens” tend to merge into “humanity,” sovereignty is judged an outmode conception, my religion or no-religion appears as a parochial variant of the “universal ideas common to mankind,” and the “survival of mankind” becomes more crucial than the survival of my country and my civilization.

For Western civilization in the present condition of the world, the most important practical consequence of the guilt encysted in the liberal ideology and psyche is this:  that the liberal, and the group, nation or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself.

The inevitable implication of the above is that the borders of the United States and Europe must become meaningless in an age of liberal hegemony, as, indeed, they have.  In 1964 Burnham was not without hope that the disease was curable.  Otherwise, of course, he would never have written Suicide of the West.  He concluded,

But of course the final collapse of the West is not yet inevitable; the report of its death would be premature.  If a decisive changes comes, if the contraction of the past fifty years should cease and be reversed, then the ideology of liberalism, deprived of its primary function, will fade away, like those feverish dreams of the ill man who, passing the crisis of his disease, finds he is not dying after all.  There are a few small signs, here and there, that liberalism may already have started fading.  Perhaps this book is one of them.

No, liberalism hasn’t faded.  The infection has only become more acute.  At best one might say that there are now a few more people in the West who are aware of the disease.  I am not optimistic about the future of Western civilization, but I am not foolhardy enough to predict historical outcomes.  Perhaps the fever will break, and we will recover, and perhaps not.  Perhaps there will be a violent crisis tomorrow, or perhaps the process of dissolution will drag itself out for centuries.  Objectively speaking, there is no “good” outcome and no “bad” outcome.  However, in the same vein, there is no objective reason why we must refrain from fighting for the survival or our civilization, our culture, or even the ethnic group to which we belong.

As for the liberals, perhaps they should consider why all the fine moral emotions they are so proud to wear on their sleeves exist to begin with.  I doubt that the reason has anything to do with suicide.

By all means, read the book.