I'm old enough to remember when consumers of conventional wisdom used to opine about the bad old days of religious wars.
I presume that they were talking about the Thirty Years War that devastated the German lands in 1618 - 1648. And maybe the Puritan-driven English Civil War. But I'm not all that convinced about how religious those wars were. The Thirty Years War had a lot to do with dynastic reasons-of-state of the French and Spanish monarchies. And I suspect the English Civil War was not just about Puritanism but the emerging bourgeoisie.
Anyway, I'd say that the biggest religious wars of all time occurred on the secularists' watch. I am thinking of the Napoleonic Wars after the French Revolution, and the Second World War inspired by the secularist Nazi ideology.
Ideology and power have always had a grubby relationship. Back in the good old days when the Franks were pushing eastwards into the Teutonic lands, it is impossible to pull apart the importance of loot and plunder for the feudal supporters of the Frankish kings from the importance of Christianizing the Teutonic tribes.
In our own time we are bedeviled by ideological groups that want to impose their ideology on the rest of us using political power. Maybe the Puritans were mean to Hester Prynne way back then, so that a Good Little Liberal Girl like Margaret Atwood can imagine a Handmaid's Tale in our future. But we have the reality of liberal social justice groups that can't go home after winning their great victories. Fifty years after the civil rights acts, race and gender civil rights groups want to micromanage the workforce into minute race and gender percentages, and gays want to force people to bake cakes for their weddings.
And we have the delicious irony of progressive political icons harassing women for decades because their right-on politics meant that the Cokie Robertses of the world all knew not to get into an elevator with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) but didn't do anything about it.
I get what is going on here. To get traction on anything in the political arena, you need to make it into a moral issue. I don't know about the economics of slavery, but the way to end it was by making it into a moral issue. Same with universal franchise. It is unjust not to let everyone vote for elected representatives! Same with with welfare state.
Now, in my view, it is often hard to disentangle virtue and self-interest. If your politics is based on the government provision of pensions and healthcare to your working-class supporters, you need a rationale that is higher and nobler that the crude notion that you got the votes to tax and spend your way to handing out rewards to your supporters. You need to make a moral issue out of it. But what is your real motive? Helping the folks or hacking your way to political power?
We conservatives have a word for the society that mixes up the political, the economic, and the moral. We call it totalitarian. And it is clear that totalitarianism is an eternal temptation, and an eternal fear -- when the other guys do it.
That is the unsung point of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. A good lefty-liberal like Atwood can easily see how awful it would be for Christian conservatives to acquire totalitarian power and reduce low-status women to become the concubines of the political elite. But the same people are shocked, shocked that powerful liberal icons do the same thing. So where are the iconic movies anathematizing powerful liberal icons that treat helpless victims as concubines? Or worse, like Cokie Roberts, they know all about it and do nothing.
This is what my catchphrase "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice" is all about. Once a glorious moral movement acquires actual political power and starts to use the state to implement its vision of justice, the people on the receiving end of the movement start to experience injustice. And since politics is division, the art of dividing people, and government is force, the art of the clunking fist, it is not too hard to see that any government program involves the creation of injustice.
And it is not too hard to see that the victorious moralists fail to see how their ideas and programs are viewed by the people on the receiving end of their moralizing.
That is why the present cultural and political elite is in a state of disbelief about the Brexit/Trump/AfD phenomenon. Everything the elite does is justified by its moral framework: to help the workers, to help migrants, to help women, to help gays -- and to stop fascism in its tracks.
So why aren't the people grateful? After all we have done for them, out of the goodness of our hearts?
The answer is that there are very real costs to the political implementation of the moral vision of the educated elite. And down the ages, the elite is usually the last to know.
Is it too much to ask that we confine moralizing to religion and reduce the incidence of government force to an absolute minimum, to reduce the incidence of injustice and limit the scope of political moralizers?
It is too much. For, "if men were angels, no government would be necessary."
Over at The New York Times they are determining that all men are brutes. No kidding, girls. That's what all the cultural infrastructure to control sexuality was all about. It was intended to reduce the opportunities for male brutality, and protect women in safe spaces. Some things never change.
I presume that they were talking about the Thirty Years War that devastated the German lands in 1618 - 1648. And maybe the Puritan-driven English Civil War. But I'm not all that convinced about how religious those wars were. The Thirty Years War had a lot to do with dynastic reasons-of-state of the French and Spanish monarchies. And I suspect the English Civil War was not just about Puritanism but the emerging bourgeoisie.
Anyway, I'd say that the biggest religious wars of all time occurred on the secularists' watch. I am thinking of the Napoleonic Wars after the French Revolution, and the Second World War inspired by the secularist Nazi ideology.
Ideology and power have always had a grubby relationship. Back in the good old days when the Franks were pushing eastwards into the Teutonic lands, it is impossible to pull apart the importance of loot and plunder for the feudal supporters of the Frankish kings from the importance of Christianizing the Teutonic tribes.
In our own time we are bedeviled by ideological groups that want to impose their ideology on the rest of us using political power. Maybe the Puritans were mean to Hester Prynne way back then, so that a Good Little Liberal Girl like Margaret Atwood can imagine a Handmaid's Tale in our future. But we have the reality of liberal social justice groups that can't go home after winning their great victories. Fifty years after the civil rights acts, race and gender civil rights groups want to micromanage the workforce into minute race and gender percentages, and gays want to force people to bake cakes for their weddings.
And we have the delicious irony of progressive political icons harassing women for decades because their right-on politics meant that the Cokie Robertses of the world all knew not to get into an elevator with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) but didn't do anything about it.
I get what is going on here. To get traction on anything in the political arena, you need to make it into a moral issue. I don't know about the economics of slavery, but the way to end it was by making it into a moral issue. Same with universal franchise. It is unjust not to let everyone vote for elected representatives! Same with with welfare state.
Now, in my view, it is often hard to disentangle virtue and self-interest. If your politics is based on the government provision of pensions and healthcare to your working-class supporters, you need a rationale that is higher and nobler that the crude notion that you got the votes to tax and spend your way to handing out rewards to your supporters. You need to make a moral issue out of it. But what is your real motive? Helping the folks or hacking your way to political power?
We conservatives have a word for the society that mixes up the political, the economic, and the moral. We call it totalitarian. And it is clear that totalitarianism is an eternal temptation, and an eternal fear -- when the other guys do it.
That is the unsung point of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. A good lefty-liberal like Atwood can easily see how awful it would be for Christian conservatives to acquire totalitarian power and reduce low-status women to become the concubines of the political elite. But the same people are shocked, shocked that powerful liberal icons do the same thing. So where are the iconic movies anathematizing powerful liberal icons that treat helpless victims as concubines? Or worse, like Cokie Roberts, they know all about it and do nothing.
This is what my catchphrase "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice" is all about. Once a glorious moral movement acquires actual political power and starts to use the state to implement its vision of justice, the people on the receiving end of the movement start to experience injustice. And since politics is division, the art of dividing people, and government is force, the art of the clunking fist, it is not too hard to see that any government program involves the creation of injustice.
And it is not too hard to see that the victorious moralists fail to see how their ideas and programs are viewed by the people on the receiving end of their moralizing.
That is why the present cultural and political elite is in a state of disbelief about the Brexit/Trump/AfD phenomenon. Everything the elite does is justified by its moral framework: to help the workers, to help migrants, to help women, to help gays -- and to stop fascism in its tracks.
So why aren't the people grateful? After all we have done for them, out of the goodness of our hearts?
The answer is that there are very real costs to the political implementation of the moral vision of the educated elite. And down the ages, the elite is usually the last to know.
Is it too much to ask that we confine moralizing to religion and reduce the incidence of government force to an absolute minimum, to reduce the incidence of injustice and limit the scope of political moralizers?
It is too much. For, "if men were angels, no government would be necessary."
Over at The New York Times they are determining that all men are brutes. No kidding, girls. That's what all the cultural infrastructure to control sexuality was all about. It was intended to reduce the opportunities for male brutality, and protect women in safe spaces. Some things never change.
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