‘Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticu-ously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government.And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their “child-friendly” policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.’
“7. What is meant by enthusiasm. This I take to be properly enthusiasm, which, though founded neither on reason nor divine revelation, but rising from the conceits of a warmed or overweening brain, works yet, where it once gets footing, more powerfully on the persuasions and actions of men than either of those two, or both together: men being most forwardly obedient to the impulses they receive from themselves; and the whole man is sure to act more vigorously where the whole man is carried by a natural motion. For strong conceit, like a new principle, carries all easily with it, when got above common sense, and freed from all restraint of reason and check of reflection, it is heightened into a divine authority, in concurrence with our own temper and inclination.”
If many folks at NPR could be like the CBC, or the BBC (forced licensing fees since WWII), I’m guessing they would.
True Story: Over a decade ago, there was a story on one of the local Seattle NPR stations I haven’t been able to track down (Seattle or Olympia). The topic was toys imported from China; some potential problems with toxicity.
There was one interviewee. She was neither lawyer nor doctor, nor chemist. She didn’t work in politics, nor in trade policy. She didn’t work in the toy business and didn’t know about freight/transport/toy sales. She might have had a child, but that seemed to be about the extent of knowledge. She had some interesting potential facts and information, but that was about it.
‘This is curious,’ I thought, ‘why is she on the air?‘
Dear Reader, she was an activist.
NPR ethics policy update: Journalists can now participate in activities that advocate for “freedom and dignity of human beings” on social media and in real life. https://t.co/oLe7PSffJjpic.twitter.com/vcLmRhyHgW
An activist is someone who becomes active. Activists activate. Becoming morally and emotionally engaged on some topic or other, for activists, is a good thing. Virtuous, even. Activists have had enough. Activists, of The People, stand up and speak for The People. Activists are in a kind of war with the world as it is, with injustice, and activists are always busy going to war with the truth and knowledge they have, against their enemies.
Whatever your thinking and/or experiences, Dear Reader, inevitably, some questions arise.
What if the activist is wrong? What if the activist has bad or missing information? Would a such a person as the activist, with the incentives and passion of the activist, ever admit to being wrong?
Do they justify violence in the name of their cause?
A bigger problem at NPR: For all my life, before I was born, back when NPR was created in the hoary mists of time and 60’s Civil Rights idealism, the activist has been at the core of their business model. Interview an activist and a guy in the oil industry. Split the difference. Get some jazz musicians and some good photographers and do a money-losing piece on both (I am grateful for these, thanks, NPR). Get a lady from Code Pink in here along with Senator so-and-so to mainline some pure democracy into the discussion.
Well, the activist capture is clearly catching up with them (along with a failing business model).
As this blog has been arguing for over a decade, there might not be much stable ground beneath liberal idealism, enough to maintain the consent of the governed and legitimate moral authority.
If you think, as I do, that human nature generally needs to be constrained, that we have a good Constitutional model to do so, and that Christian thinking (to be viewed with profound skepticism) at least prohibits violence in principle, then the activist model is to be viewed with profound skepticism.
Many of the true and good causes have already devolved into rackets (much Black activist leadership, the ACLU, Civil Rights). Look no further than the think-tank and activist Right to see that such devolution is probably inevitable.
If you can’t see that your own idealism is a point-of-view, then you’ve consigned yourself to be surprised and perhaps, attacked, by thought which disagrees.
‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.’
This is what I think many New Atheists, Men Of System, Men of Reason, Rationalists/Idealists so often miss: A lot of what human nature is, is capable of, even, can’t necessarily be molded by you. At least not in the short and mid-term and not according to many current plans. Where you put your thinking is where your hopes follow. If you find yourself hating what humanity is, then your ideas aren’t good enough to understand humanity.
And they are certainly not good enough to be in authority.
A lot of what motivates those who want change is mobilized resentment against current authority, and this passes for everything that is ‘good.’
You don’t get to speak for all of the public. You don’t get to presume to curate the arts and sciences. You have to survive in a free market, with free speech.
‘In Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (2021), Charles Murray argues that the rhetoric of “systemic racism” in America is mistaken for four reasons.’
We’ve continued to see the application of quantitative reasoning, and applied mathematics, to many fields pursuing knowledge and truth of our interior lives (psychology), how we act in groups (sociology), where we might have come from (anthropology) and not merely how to buy and sell stuff, but markets themselves (the quants on Wall Street). Much of this will be highly useful knowledge, new knowledge even, with a lot of truth to it.
At the same time, however, the further pursuit of not merely quantitative reasoning, mathematics, the natural sciences and computer sciences, but the (R)ational, is in conflict with the (I)rrational, the nihilistic, The Will and Will To Power. The (S)elf is a primary conception alive in the West today, and thus does the postmodern (S)elf permeate the arts, art movements, and the (C)ulture at-large. The Hegelian conception of (H)istory, and its re-appearance in Marx, provides intellectual backdrop for many ideologues and ideologies active in many American institutions.
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In the meantime, maybe pick up a hobby? Maybe it’s poetry, or music, or off-roading, or mining, or photography. Learn how bad you are at something, as you slowly become better through hard work. Come to appreciate those who worked hard and came before.
‘Other Muslims have romanticized the time of the early caliphs—but by occupying a large area and ruling it for more than a year, the Islamic State can claim to be their heirs more plausibly than any recent jihadist movement. It has created a blood-soaked paradise that groups like Al Qaeda contemplated only as a distant daydream.’
And IS is creating a very dangerous security threat, as they’re operationally and tactically smart, tend to learn from their mistakes in battle, and are quite aware of their message enough to recruit thousands of fighters from the West, possibly sending them back here.
‘Muddled though the region is, the basics are fairly simple. Iranian influence through Assad and his thugs in Syria, through Hizballah in Lebanon, and through the hopefully retiring Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, has widened and radicalized sectarian conflict in the region, and the growing weakness of most of the Arab states in the face of this multi-year offensive has led to rogue groups like ISIS taking up the slack.’
And a grand bargain with the Iranian regime is presumably what Obama is still betting on, as well as withdrawing our influence from the region on the idea that we can no longer lead as we have in the past.
Are you on board for a grand tour of the historical development of the Western State via Fukuyama’s intellectual conception of that State?:
‘There is one critical point of continuity between Huntington’s analysis and my own, however, which many recent development theorists seem to have forgotten. The bottom line of Political Order in Changing Societies could be summarized as follows: all good things do not go together.’
Fukuyama has a considerable investment over the years in a Hegelian Statism I’m not comfortable with. One can find there a belief in the betterment of man towards some teleological end-point through the perfection of the State and those who work for their own self-interest in it.
What might Fukuyama have right about the development of the State in the rest of the world, and Western influence upon that development?
Williamson suggests we should look to Helsinki, Finland, at least when it comes to technology and transportation:
‘Notably, the Helsinki model would end some transportation monopolies (the rail service would no longer have a monopoly on ticket sales, for instance) and would rely on competition among private providers to match resources with consumer demand.’
The larger principle he uses to get there:
‘American progressives love railroads and hate cars, and that is not without a political dimension: Railroads tell you where to go, which is very appealing if you see society as one big factory to be subjected to (your) expert management. And that’s really the basic question of liberalism in the better, classical sense of that word: Is the state here to tell you where to go, or is it here to help you get where you are going? And how to get there?
If you believe that you have a right to your own labor, and that your time is your labor, then why would you need a large, unresponsive, oft politicized monopoly deciding how much time you spend in transit now that technology is making other options available?
One appeal of the libertarian argument is simple: Don’t you want to pay less for a ride when you can?
Another appeal is also pretty simple if you believe in the above: Free citizens need to put the moral justification back onto the current laws, political players, and monopolies from time to time, forcing them to justify their involvement in our lives and in the markets. After all, beneath lofty ideals gather real interests seeking to bend the laws towards their own ends, and with a lot of self-interest besides.
Incentives matter, and while I’m guessing safety and public safety guide a lot of moral justification by local governments, and which a lot of citizens generally support, it’s necessary to do some house-cleaning now and again.
Airlines are partially de-regulated as Williamson points out (more responsive to consumer demand these days, so flying is much cheaper and more accessible and thus probably more like taking a Greyhound), but not all the way de-regulated. Yet, where is the money going again exactly? Who’s doing what and how much are they getting paid? Aren’t these regulations creating dead zones where technological innovation lags?
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On that note, one of the main arguments behind the push to pass Obamacare was the idea that you don’t own a right to your own labor nor time enough to prevent the socialization of that labor when it comes to health-care: It’s no mere commodity nor economic exchange. You will have a tax/penalty levied and part of your tax dollars will now go to a centralized, redistributionist, oft politicized set of experts and enforcers promising to make sure everyone gets health-care on some level (ignoring many of the structural problems at the VA and various other incentives that prevent responsiveness at other bureaucracies).
Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t exactly worked as advertised so far, with a lot more bumpy road likely to come.
The Scandinavian welfare-state was held-up as a model by many progressives for Obamacare, so Williamson does try and justify his use of Helsinki as a model for deregulation here in the U.S.:
‘Imagine trying to implement such a thing in New York City or California — imagine the union friction alone — and you’ll have a pretty good indicator of why European-style policies are unlikely to produce European-style results in the United States. It is not as though Helsinki is a free-market, limited-government utopia — far from it. But on the liberty–statism spectrum, it matters not only where you are but in which direction you are moving — and why.’
Intentions matter as much as actions?
On the statism/liberty axis, I’m guessing many progressives believe that we need more Statism in order to secure more liberty, but from the libertarian perspective, such a definition of liberty is so utopian and idealistic/ideological that it can never be reached, only promised and over-promised. Many progressives also likely believe their intentions are pure enough for government work and during the last two Presidential elections, it seems a fair number of Americans agreed with them for a time.
Delingpole, a British libertarian and anti-environmentalist, interviews Jim Steele, a conservationist who’s worked in the Sierra Nevada who has come to doubt the motives, science and incentives of many people claiming to speak for nature and science.
A heretic?
That’s probably too strong a word and there’s some hyperbole and some ideological rigidity on Delingpole’s part during the interview, but I found myself agreeing with both men often.
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As this blog likes to point out, there are many ideological discontents to whom green is a good fit apart from the natural world and the sciences: It’s become a touchstone for many secular humanists, statists and collectivists (including some extreme anti-humanists and radical activists). I’ve come across some anti-theists as well as ex-nihilists and rationalists who want to see (R)eason enthroned while flirting with dangerous totalitarian impulses. At environmental protests, it’s not hard to find your garden-variety anti-industrialists and anti-corportatists either.
The list is long.
I’m guessing there’s a large pool of sentiment that drives many to align their pre-existing emotional and ideological commitments to green causes. Some of these people knowingly or unknowingly seek to supplant even science in the name of progress and their ideology.
Whatever you may think about conservation and your relationship with the natural world (beyond value judgments?), the environmental movement has become big business, big politics, and big money.
‘Mayor Bill de Blasio’s promise to ban New York City’s iconic horse-drawn carriages could backfire, exposing what the newly-elected mayor’s critics suggest is a corruption scandal masquerading as an animal-rights crusade. Defenders of the carriage industry point to a real-estate executive who is one of de Blasio’s major campaign donors as the driving force behind the effort to abolish the carriages.’
You may not be in for Albert Jay Nock’s anarchism, but in the hopes of appealing to liberal-minded folk in a way that DeBlasio’s further Left coalitions probably can’t:
I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend:
‘But I was chiefly interested in the basic theory of Liberalism. This seemed to be that the State is no worse than a degenerate or perverted institution, beneficent in its original intention, and susceptible of restoration by the simple expedient of “putting good men in office.”
I had already seen this experiment tried on several scales of magnitude, and observed that it came to nothing commensurate with the expectations put upon it or the enormous difficulty of arranging it. ‘
“It takes a brave man to take on Albany, New York,” said Mr. de Blasio as he introduced Mr. Soliman, who joked that he had his “hard hat” and “fatigues” ready to go “for my most recent deployment up to our state capital.”
The City Council takes the smoking ban (get Big Tobacco!) a step further:
‘But the real problem with e-cigarettes, according to Farley and other supporters of the ban, is that they look too much like the real thing. “E-cigarettes threaten, in my opinion, to undermine enforcement of the Smoke-Free Air Act,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said last week. “Because many of the e-cigarettes are designed to look like cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion or confrontation.”
If you see something, say something. Is that a candy cigarette? An asthma-inhaler?
The City Council has added a new law in order to make compliance with previous laws easier. Come on, New Yorkers.
***Please keep in mind this has nothing to do with the latest Left-Of-Center activism either, like GMOs, fracking, the Keystone Pipeline, higher minimum-wage protests etc. There are absolutely no politics involved here. This is just for ‘the Public Health,’ even if e-cigarettes give many people a chance to lead healthier lives. The People’s Elected Officials are representing the General Will. I have been assured they are in possession of the latest (S)cience.
NYC’s immediate future probably involves a lot more of this: Laws on top of laws, higher-taxes trickling-down, burdensome regulations for businesses, and slowed-down processes where convenient for De Blasio’s coalitions. Every citizen shall have a voice, after all.
A video on how e-cigarettes work:
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And now for something related:
So, is Left-liberalism on the rise? Perhaps. There are many streams in which folks can drift along into a kind of communitarianism and collectivism amenable to such idealism regarding politics. Many Americans may have been much more sympathetic to being left alone a generation or two ago.
The below quotation comes from a debate about art and political philosophy. It focuses on a question: Should there be public arts funding, and if so, how much of your money, if any, should go towards it?
David Byrne, former frontman of the Talking Heads and art-house/pop-musician/environmentalist is discussed (there was a Byrne interview featured in the NY Times):
‘I refrain from calling Byrne a socialist, but what goes unsaid here is that our objections are to a prior assumption by believers in state power, namely that because some undertaking is worth doing, that the state ought to be doing it. If Byrne is addressing society in the above quote (and I think he is to some degree, although largely by not making Bastiat’s distinction), he is doing so as if it were an aggregate, even an abstraction. This may be the essence of the statist mind: that an abstracted aggregate of other people ought to be devoting their energies to the effort I deem noble. It’s from there that the demands flow. The collectivist is not asking you to give up expenditures on your hobby to support his (even if his has been fashioned into a career), he’s asking the abstract aggregate to change its trajectory or support the arts or something nebulous and lofty like that. Cargo Culture springs into being when such demands are met.’
The days of wearing a smoking jacket and holding a cigar without being seen as provocative, anachronistic, or signaling irony are probably gone for the time being:
‘But rather than admit their problems, the administration offered confident spin. “States and the federal government will be ready in 10 months,” Gary Cohen, the federal official overseeing implementation of Obamacare’s exchanges said at the end of 2012. The exchanges “will be ready,” he promised members of Congress again a month later in response to skeptical questioning.’
It’s still offering spin. I’m still waiting for more honest discussion about our foreign policy challenges as well, but I’m not holding my breath.
‘So what is ruin porn? Take yesteryear’s environments, our forgotten factories and collapsing hospitals, and airbrush them for public consumption. Here, devoid of their context, we can revel in the beauty of these crumbling sanctuaries.
And they are beautiful – but in ruin porn, the beauty is exaggerated and presented in a way that precludes any thoughtful interaction with the subject.’
For some examples, see Time Magazine’s photo essay by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (less porn-like, more thoughtful).
Our author’s defense here is: Stick to your subject. Be true to your art. Make it beautiful, but don’t make open to criticisms of art as porn, giving too fleeting and superficial a pleasure.
She goes on:
‘Little thought is given to how to reuse as much of our resources as possible, except when it is economically advantageous to do so. The ecological repercussions of our actions have also been largely ignored until recently.’
Here’s where we can argue more clearly over ideas. Some reflection on the fact that industry has consequences is useful when staring at such decay. We have to face up to some grim facts of our condition, including how our economy is changing. Some environmental laws can even help clean up cities if those laws get the incentives right (big business doesn’t always have your interests in mind).
That said, I see the creep of this kind of thinking all throughout our society, and it’s usually presented as though it comes without tradeoffs.
Few people talk about how the ethos of environmental sustainability often precludes sentiment for economic sustainability and an understanding of what made Detroit an industrial powerhouse in the first place. We live in a world of scarcity and lack of resources. There are costs to economic and political freedoms that result from simply relying on politicians and environmental activism to shape the world. It seems to have become a platform of the Democratic party.
On that note, I wanted to further dip into the culture wars:
Ed Driscoll at PJ Media discusses ruin porn extensively (you pesky nihilists are leading us to Hitler!), and quotes Robert Tracinski’s ‘Why The Oscars Were So Bad.’:
‘This is the dead end of Modernist culture, which sought to break down traditional values and rules but was unable to replace them with anything better. It left us in a cultural void where, as the New York Times piece puts it, everyone is afraid that “serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst.” In the second half of the 20th century, this corrosive Modernist skepticism brought us the ruling concept of contemporary popular culture: the “cool.” Remember the original meaning of the term. To be “cool” is to be emotionally cool, to refuse to be caught up in enthusiasm. Early on, this could be taken to mean a kind of manly reserve, the ability to be calm, cool, and collected in the face of strife, or to refuse to be carried away by momentary or trivial emotions. This is the sense in which James Bond was “cool.” But by the end of the 20th century, the culture of cool increasingly came to mean a studied lack of response to values. It meant refusing to be carried away by enthusiasm about anything.’
I can understand why many conservatives and traditional thinkers are upset about the decline, as they see it, of our culture. They arguably control less of it than before, and have much less influence in the public square than they used to, as does organized religion. Many people with conservative views feel targeted by Hollywood and the media generally, as though it’s turned against them, espousing ideas which undermine the virtues and duties which maintain civil society. Even the technology sector tends to vote non-Republican.
Enough! goes the refrain.
Perhaps we could take a look at hipster culture for some clarification (about much I will invariably be wrong):
Instead of how many conservatives might want individuals to live; looking for meaning and group membership through church and civic organizations, intimacy and love directly through marriage, and vocation through traditional means of work, many hipsters (those who can afford it) withdraw into a bubble of irony, seeming to lack outward enthusiasm for anything.
They tend to seek meaning and group membership (while remaining totally individualistic) through the arts, fashion, music and popular music. There is some real drug-use there, and a few real artists. There are definite counter-cultural undercurrents as well. Intimacy and love are explored further away from marriage, but maybe not terribly far (gay marriage is now the hot topic). Vocation for hipsters often incorporates ideas of the local, communal, environmentally sustainable, and more often anti-corporate. Sometimes it can veer into the collectivist.
Haven’t we seen these folks before? I’ve heard the argument that they are less radical, and milder copies of the beats and original hipsters.
On the conservative view presented above, we’ve gotten sick on Continental philosophy. We’ve been sick for a while, and there are larger, Western forces at work. Just as the Western artist has become increasingly isolated over the past few centuries from his society, so are individuals increasingly isolated in American life from the traditions, civic culture and religious virtues that conservatives think should unite us once again. This drifts us Europe-ward over time.
Continuing this line of thought, the 1960’s in American life were a rough time for conservatism. We broke out into a postmodern flu, which started out as just a modernist tickle in the back of the throat after many long-past nights of romanticism and nihilistic revelry. This flu involved a nasty outbreak of full blown New-Left radicalism which buried asunder the old liberalism. The fever eventually subsided and the patient recovered, but the 60’s generation, including the hippies, feminists, environmentalists and old counter-culturalists have become institutionalized in the media, academia, and in our culture.
During the current progressive administration, under the ascendency of racial issues (progressivism has been around much longer, obviously) the same 60’s groups are now forming larger voting blocs and more powerful lobbying and interest groups seeking to extend their reach through politics and culture. Unions, feminists, rent-seekers, a few crony capitalists and environmentalists all benefit to the exclusion of many others.
All this during a near recession!
In short, conservatives have good reasons to think they are losing the culture wars, and some are thinking there is a larger vortex leading us towards Europe. Detroit ruin porn, hipster culture, the isolated individual, the overall drift of culture, all have conspired to make this a darker time for conservative principles.
I have to admit that upon writing this, it’s clearer in my mind than ever that neither political party has all the answers to our problems, while many people are looking for political solutions to solve many of our problems on the old “greatness” model. This will make for interesting times ahead.
***Meanwhile in Detroit, despite all this talk, it’s declaring bankruptcy. We’ve got problems with municipal bond defaults across the country. Some reflection is necessary.