The Problem with Our Gentry Experts

The biggest scandal coming out of the Wu Flu epidemic is the Nursing Home Scandal. It appears that many states set as policy that COVID patients released from hospital should be transferred to nursing homes.

Now everybody is saying that this was cruel and heartless of Govs Cuomo in New York, Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania, and Karen Whitmer in Michigan. But they are wrong.

Back at the beginning of the Wu Flu epidemic crisis "experts agreed" that the big problem was that hospitals would be overwhelmed with patients. Why did they think that? It was because "scientists agreed" from their reading of epidemic models that there would be millions of COVID cases. 

President Trump responded to this judgement of "experts agree." He sent two US Navy hospital ships to the two biggest US cities, New York, and Los Angeles to help avoid, or at least reduce, the demand on hospital beds.

Only, it turned out, the computer models on which the "scientists agreed" were wrong. The demand on hospitals was about ten percent of the forecast.

But nobody thought to change the policy with regard to nursing homes, not until thousands of nursing home patients had been infected with the virus. So, it turns out, the overwhelming majority of COVID deaths in blue states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have been elderly residents at nursing homes.

The problem is not that New York and Pennsylvania and Michigan had a cruel policy to send COVID patients to nursing homes to recuperate. The problem is that they failed to adapt their policy fast enough in light of the reality that hospitals were not going to be overwhelmed.

Now, I get the feeling, reading about the WuFlu thingy from day to day, that our lefty media seems to think that science and expertise is a "thing." Listen to the experts, they say, and wait to be told what to do.

But if you have read the books that I have read, you might think that knowledge and science and expertise are not Holy Writ, but a fudge. They are useful, but not divine.

See, what I have come to believe is that the Universe is way more complicated and hard to understand than we can imagine, or ever can imagine. Our knowledge and our science of which we moderns are do proud is but a paltry attempt to understand the daunting complexity of the reality. 

Moreover, we do not accumulate knowledge in a noble and sophisticated attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." We create knowledge because we have a problem. Indeed, as F.S.C. Northrop wrote many moons ago, "knowledge begins with a problem." If there is no problem, there is no need for knowledge, and no need to leave off wiving and thriving and partying.

This means that the point of knowledge is simply that it is a way to take the data flooding in every moment and decide which data is important and which data should be a guide for action and what action is warranted, given the data and the interpretation based on knowledge and science.

The best understanding of this process is the OODA loop, a concept developed by a USAF pilot, Col, John Boyd.

When you are fighting a battle -- against another army or against a virus -- you are continuously going through a process of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And the faster and the better you can do it, the quicker you will defeat your foe -- or avoid defeat.

But our educated Gentry seems to think of knowledge and expertise as a static thing, a status thing -- better left to the experts. It is rather like the old days of computers. You would punch up your deck of cards and submit them to the computer operator, who would stick the deck in the card reader and return your results from the printer, all in good time, peasant.

And, of course, the folks in an expert bureaucracy are not in the game of action; they are in the game of status. They acquire their education and their degrees and their titles not because they want to solve problems but because they want status. We see this with the transgender Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine taking time out from the vital task of fighting Wu Flu to reprimand a media person for "misgendering" her.

First things first!

Or whatabout the current riots and looting in Minneapolis, in response to the death of a suspect under arrest. How come the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota didn't act in minutes to fill the streets with policemen and, if necessary, the National Guard, or failing that the NRA, with a show of force to stop the rioters?

I will tell you. It is because modern progressive politics is not about protecting people or taking action, it is about moral posturing.

And we moderns know better. We know that the way to get things done is through the market and its price signaling and its rewards for the guy that solves a problem, any problem, before the next guy. The market doesn't care what college you went to, what degree you got, what your title is, or what your race is. It just cares about what you have done for the consumer lately.

You can see that many of the Democratic politicians are really at sea in the current epidemic. They did not go into politics to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, again and again, but to sit upon a golden throne, make pronouncements, and receive the adulation of their courtiers.

I suppose this is true of all mature political and religious and cultural regimes. Everyone is completely engaged in the proper practice of the ritual, and has completely forgotten the problem that the ritual was invented to solve.

With the virtue of hindsight we can say of the Nursing Home Scandal that someone in the health bureaucracy below the exalted rank of Governor or Health Secretary needed to have the responsibility and authority to act on nursing homes.

Guess what. The Germans figured that out a century ago in the carnage of World War I. Given the chaos of battle and the fact that everyone was hunkered down in the trenches hey realized that they needed to push responsibility down as far as possible and empower junior officers and NCOs with the responsibility to act, based on their individual knowledge of developing local events. Thus Gen. Hans von Seeckt proclaimed his intention

[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier. 

How many of your modern experts are completely"verantwortungsfreudig?"

And then there is the advice of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Britain at the turn of the 20th century, on the question of experts.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Lord Salisbury was notable for conducting foreign policy out of his back pocket and completely ignoring the foreign policy experts at the British Foreign Office. 

Understanding the Power of "Fascism"

What exactly is fascism? It has been such a bugaboo for so long that a guy wants to know. Why should we be so terrified of it? Why should all good people want to cut it down the moment it appears? Why do the young lefty thugs of AntiFa choose anti-fascism as their escutcheon?

I read a piece about fascism at Quillette and I'm still not sure. Obviously, fascism as a monster was created by Stalin in the 1930s. Why, exactly? Because fascism was a rival to Communism? Because Stalin needed an enemy for his Bolsheviks and for other lefties to hate? No doubt, as Paul Gottfried has written, fascism is a

slur “hurled at anyone who holds what are now unpopular opinions.”

And, I suppose, anyone that wants to occupy the commanding heights of culture or politics tends to need a convenient lightning bolt to hurl at the despicables and the deplorables.

And, I suppose, after the glorious victory of 1945 both the ruling class of the US coalition and the Soviet Union found it convenient to have something "that must never happen again." Still, what exactly was it that we were supposed to fear?

Even in the 1940s, at a time when genuinely fascist dictatorships threatened to extinguish freedom over much of the world’s surface, George Orwell noted that misuse of the term had rendered it “entirely meaningless.” Decades later, American journalist Tom Wolfe would note the “morbid tendency” of his colleagues to apply the word to everything from Christian revivalist movements to hippies.

Maybe the meaning is just as Tom Wolfe described it in "The Land of the Rococo Marxists."

Anti-fascism, he wrote, “became a universal ray gun, good for zapping anybody, anywhere, from up here… on the intellectuals’ Everest of Indignation.”

Really, then, it is no different than the universal kill-shot, the accusation of racism. The whole point of calling someone a racist-sexist-homophobe is to shut them up, because there is no defense against it.

So the accusation of "fascism" or "Nazism" is just a ranging shot, because if you say a word in its favor then you are obviously in favor of killing Jews.

I suppose that is why I have developed my usual "across the grain" aphorism, where I say that

Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.

For you can also say that "fascism is the idiocy that people grab for when the usual idiots have screwed up."

But really, I think that fascism is much more cunning than socialism or communism. Because fascism and Nazism exploit the obvious power of nationalism, the identification that ordinary Commoners have with the nation state. It is a powerful combination of the ancient and the modern.

The power of socialism as an idea is its lurch to the primitive. We all have programmed within us the yearning for the community of the kindred, where people are as one and are perfect social animals. And we all have the other primitive instincts, that if something goes wrong there is a fault at the bottom of it, either our own fault of the malevolence of another. And the solution is vengeance or the scapegoat of Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred.

But we humans have learned over the last 500 years to identify with the community of the nation. So when things go wrong we look to the leader of the nation to lead us back to safety. The lesson of World War I was that the workers of Germany, supporters of the Social Democratic Party, identified first as Germans before they identified as the class of proletarians.

And the lesson of World War II is that when Stalin wanted to rally the Russian people he did it by appealing to them as Russians and not as Communists. Hey, guess what: Stalin (and Bukharin) came up with the notion of "socialism in a single country" in 1924! According to La Wik.

So, when the rubber hits the road, even socialists need to rally the workers to the nation. Because that is what works.

Really "fascism" is just a pejorative that people with cultural power use to shut other people up. 

So, the only question is: how do we respond? And I would say that we should understand that all lefty 

heroes are really fascists, national socialists at heart.

So the way to respond is to say, if you are a man, "Whatabout Obama? Here was a progressive trying to bend the arc of history towards social justice in one country. Fascism, in all but name."

For "Obama" you can substitute any Democratic leader that seems appropriate, from FDR to Speaker Karen Pelosi (D-CA).

If you are a women, you say, "I can't believe you said that." And then you text your friend to complain.

Deep Sixing the Socialist Idiots

Today Dinesh D'Souza has an excerpt from his book The United States of Socialism. He asks why the economic failures of socialism haven't made socialism a dead letter all over the world. Why do the AOCs and Co. still believe?

They are on a grand quest, and they refuse to look back. The[y] insist that they are the champions of a moral ideal. The only way to refute them is to refute their moral ideal, to expose their dream as a nightmare, to capsize their utopia. 

But, he writes, there is a problem. How to persuade people that Socialism is a fantasy? The problem is that, for humans,

a fantasy continues to hold its appeal even when it is exposed as a fantasy. So we have to expose the socialist utopia not as an illusion but rather as a racket.  

This approach would have the advantage, of course, of tying into Eric Hoffer's notion that

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

So, with socialism we would say that it starts with St. Simon, Fourier, and Marx as an incandescent dream. It becomes with social democracy and the welfare state a business of votes for benefits. And it became with Communism and now Wokism, the dull thuggery of: "nice little job you got here, real shame if it got canceled for Wrong Think, James Damore."

Of course, my Great Reaction notion is designed to be an all-fronts attack on leftism. And my Four Laws notion is designed to show that a government-run economy cannot work.

And my study of Prophecy indicated that prophetic failure does not extinguish the prophetic cult, not right away. But, hey, you'd think that after all the prophetic failures of socialism it would be about time for Good Little Girls like AOC to reject socialism. But they don't.

Well, we know why. Because the education system teaches Good Little Girls that socialism is good. Nobody is teaching the Good Little Girls that socialism is a lurch back to the primitive, that it is always cruel and unjust and always will be, that is always leads to poverty and famine, and that it imagines a world that can never be, not in this world and not in the next world.

This is actually not surprising, because with a government-dominated education system of course the system is going to shill for the ruling class and teach little children the wonders of a government-dominated society.

I guess the attack on socialism needs to operate on several levels. Let' s call it Routing the Left.

1. We need a meaning of life, a religion that appeals to educated Gentry more than the current over-under ideology that makes the educated Gentry into a convocation of saints trying to bend the arc of history towards justice. My idea, in A Vision of the Good Life, that we should teach the educated Gentry to be Sacrificial Heroes rather the Egoist Heroes, is one such effort.
2. We need a new common-sense, set of aphorisms that marginalizes the socialist fantasy. My Four Laws is one such, saying that socialism cannot work, because this and that and the other.
3. We need an ideological offensive that cuts across the grain of socialism putting everything about the left in a bad light. That, I believe is the role of my Great Reaction notion.

Hey, this is not rocket science. We need to engage people at all levels: at the prophetic vision level, saying here is a vision of the good life better than socialism; at the logic and reason level, saying that socialism cannot work, because reasons; and at the gut level, saying that anyone that believes in socialism is an delta-minus moron.

Why Can't We Satirize Our Ruling Class?

I think that we Americans have a real problem: a problem that goes right to the heart of Who We Are. Do you know what it is? No, no. Not the deficit. Or the debt. Or Trump's tweeting. The problem is much more basic than that.

We Americans, or, if you prefer, we 'Muricans, are not allowed to satirize the sacred cows of the ruling class.

Hey! What's the matter with our ruling class? Are they so insecure that they can't abide jokerology? I mean, even Shakespeare said there was no harm in an allowed fool.

In the good old days, the ruling class seemed to be OK with satire. My favorite example is the laughs that Charles Dickens has at the expense of the Circumlocution Office in the Britological government in London, staffed by the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings.

Yes. Things haven't changed. The world is overrun with government employees hanging onto their jobs like grim death, er, barnacles, so that they can do their 30 years and get that gubmint pension. And as for the Stiltstockings! What are all the stuck up journalists and politicians and activists and aides and Deputy Assistant Program Directors but modern Stiltstockings? Find me another name that better describes them, if you can.

Even as recently as the 1980s the Brits put the interesting interface between the Civil Service and the politicians on TV in Yes, Minister. The joke was that the clueless Minister of Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker, was totally bossed around by his suave and educated Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby. And we have seen that happen in real life as Prime Minister Theresa May was clearly bossed around by her Civil Service underlings in respect of Brexit. Note that the present Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a take no prisoners aide, Dominic Cummings to keep the civil servants down to a dull roar. Maybe Cumming is in charge of the removal of "handles" as they call orders and knighthoods ver in Britland.

Back in the stuffy old Victorian Age, Gilbert and Sullivan famously staged a whole string of comic operettas that satirized the upper class and the aristocracy. In H.M.S. Pinafore, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, had no experience in ships. He started out as a clerk in the bureaucracy. In The Mikado we have the Lord High Executioner who is a nobody, and the Lord High Everything Else, who runs the show. And so on. Maybe the stuffy Victorians weren't as stuffy as we are.

But in our day in the US we have had West Wing. But it wasn't a satire. It glorifies the president and his noble liberal effort to bend the arc of history towards justice. Yes, really. Can our liberal friends not see how such a putrid effort diminishes them and the noble art of bending arcs of history.

See, I think we should have comedies and tragedies on the stage and screen that slay all the sacred liberal cows. For instance, we could start with satirizing the unspoken requirement to have diverse casts, with blacks as wise advisers -- or computer whizzes -- and women as superheroes. Then we could make fun of, gasp, high-born feminist women and fake-victim LGBTs.

Hey, I know. Whatabout making fun of Medicare? Of the various follies in education? We could have a sitcom about education bureaucrats busy trying to make life hard for homeschoolers, assisted by monster Harvard professors.

Whatabout climate change? We could have a sitcom featuring a really weird Swedish girl on the spectrum acting out the women's Culture of Complaint and a rather nice and thoughtful German girl who is the soul of level-headedness advocating for the eevil science deniers.

Whatabout discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard? And the millions of useless Karens in the bureaucracy and HR?

Yeah, and all the stereotypes that our liberal masters impose upon us, from race to sex to immigration. And #MeToo. And the amazing way that our news media are all over sex scandals when Republicans are involved but just give the guy a break when a Democrat is involved. We have seen that now at the presidential level with Bill Clinton, when a feminist offering to put on her knee pads to service him, and now with Joe Biden, where feminists are willing to be outraged by his hair sniffing, but still vote for him.

Remember when Candidate Trump's admission that women were more than willing for him to touch them intimately utterly outraged all proper suburban housewives?

What? You say that making fun of intersectional politics is not fun, and you don't see how anyone could seriously laugh at it? Oh really?

How about a skit about female software analysts at Google? The idea would be that the girls spend all their time being outraged by toxic masculinity and planning woke activism, except when the boss comes by and then they pretend to be deeply absorbed in their Big Data project.

Or how about the girls at Google reading an anodyne article about the profound differences between the sexes, footnoted and all, and conspiring together to get the author fired?

How about a skit about the censors at Facebook getting utterly outraged by some anodyne conservative post, but cheering on some lefty AntiFa post proposing to "peacefully protest" some right-wing gathering, and discussing what kind of Molotov cocktails and brass knuckles they will need?

How about a side-by-side skit on a group of Black Power Matters activists planning a noble black protest, intercut with some Proud Boys planning an eevil white supremacist protest?

This is not that hard. But somehow nobody dares to do it. Odd, don't you think? Could it be a conspir-i-cy?

Point is, if the ruling class and their bribed apologists in the media and the activism community don't have the cojones to be able to deal with actual criticism and people laughing and sneering at them in the time honored way of satire and cocking a snook at the pompous rulers, well then, really, they aren't ready for Prime Time, and they ought to go back to the nursery and play with their dollies until they get a clue.

The point is that politics is about power. If you use your power to stop other people from speaking, then what is wrong with your ideology and your politics and your culture that you can't take criticism? I mean, surely your ideas are so good that 97.2 percent of people agree with you, right?

And even more to the point, what is wrong with you, pal?

Or, if you are a woman, "I can't believe you can't take criticism."

But I wonder. Maybe the rule is that only the Gentry is allowed to do satire. Maybe God has forbidden satire by Commoners? Or maybe history demands that deplorable Commoners keep their traps shut.

You think?

A Memorial Day Without Memorials

In recent years I have visited my daughter on Memorial Day and attended the parade and observances in her small New England town.

This year the parade and the observance are canceled. Because Wu Flu.

And The New York Times, with staggering stupidity, has filled its front page with the names of Wu Flu victims.

Maybe that is good, that the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls at The New York Times have No Clue. Because if they did have a clue they could do more damage to our nation than they do with their ignorant and conceited blundering.

Because I have come to appreciate in recent years the meaning of Memorial Day and Veterans Day. That it is all about telling the mothers of the Fallen that is was all worth it and that their sacrifice of their darling son is honored and appreciated for evermore.

It's all lies, of course. There can never be recompense to the mothers of the sons sent to fight the rulers' stupid wars. Because all wars are the result of the stupidity of the current rulers and the vauntings of the current ruling class. At least ever since, say, 1800, when the economic benefit of loot and plunder for the victors was canceled by the loss, to victor and loser, of the benefits of ordinary peacetime trading.

You can expand the notion, if you like, to the idea that the rulers should be honoring the fallen resulting from every government stupidity, from the lives blighted by stupid government education to the lives blighted by stupid government-caused recessions and depressions.

In that light, I suppose that you could excuse The New York Times and its list of the COVID fallen. Only not on Memorial Day, idiots!

Memorial Day originally began as Decoration Day, when the mothers of the fallen soldiers of the Confederate army decorated their sons' graves. I suppose, back in the day, the graves were decorated by mothers other than the actual mothers of the fallen, since in the late 19th century it was hardly possible for an ordinary Commoner mother to travel hundreds of miles to the battlefield where her dead son was buried. But then, since I expect more soldiers died of disease than wounds, maybe many of the dead sons were buried where they were being trained. Or maybe buried somewhere on the route of march, from a disease contracted from the usual unsanitary conditions of army life.

But I wonder whether we shouldn't start instituting various Idiots Days, to deeply ponder the mistakes and blunders of politicians and activists that got us into wars and depressions and hardships in which ordinary people suffered and died for no fault of their own, and ruling class idiots got celebrated as saviors of their nation.

But that is a thought for another day. Today is Memorial Day, when we remember the soldiers that died in the nation's wars. And we honor their sacrifice that can never be repaid, and the sacrifice of their mothers who can never be consoled.

For the truth is that all the Memorial Days and parades and flags and speeches can never be much more than a patronizing pat on the head of those whose loved ones suffered and died in consequence of various rulers and their conceited posturing and blundering.

And that, I believe, should be the real understanding of Memorial Day, even if it is too horrible to contemplate and to speak about in public.

Humans are Ruled by Public Opinion, Not Science

Everybody says they are on the side of science. But the other guys are led by superstition.

Then there are the guys that say they believe in logic and reason, while the other guys are ruled by their feelings.

But I think it is pretty clear, from the experience of the last two months of Wu Flu, that humans are ruled by the notions that are in the wind, particularly the notions that are being ventilated in their particular ideological bubble.

For instance, what I would call the standard line of the epidemiologists, that in any epidemic, you eventually need to get to "herd immunity" was all very well in the abstract, but when politicians got the word -- from flawed epidemiological models -- that millions might die unless we "do something" they opted, from President Trump on down, to do something, from canceling flights from China and Europe to closing bars and restaurants and schools and "non-essential" businesses.

And beaches!

How much science was involved in all that? Not much, I would say. (OK the science of telephoto lenses was involved in the beach closings). Why so little science? Because humans are not driven by science and logic and reason but by memes, maxims and aphorisms floating around social media and amplified by news media and politicians.

And this is not scandalous. It is because humans live and act in the here and now, and cannot spend half their lives researching the evidence and the science. They conduct their lives using notions they got from their parents, from their peers, from school, from media, from politicians. And most of the time -- almost all of the time -- it works pretty well.

This is most obvious if we think of the higher animals that don't have the conceit of a "conscious mind" or science and reason. How do they live? Yes, how do they live without our triumphant reason and science? Well, they do OK. They go about their business as we do, and if something unexpected happens they stop what they are doing and deal with the unexpected. Exactly as we do.

And when you think about it, this animal behavior is exactly what we do. We putter about in our routines as unconcernedly as seagulls, and then stop dead in our tracks if something unexpected happens. Do we then apply science and reason? Not really. If anything we call up our friends, or we turn on the news, or we take a look at social media. And then we act, or don't act. So, how much reason and science went into that? Not much? Exactly what you'd expect from social animals; we take our clues from our fellow social creatures.

Now in the United States in the present time we also take our cues from our political tribe. Liberals and experts are clearly going big time for an administrative solution with rigid rules and instructions from on high and nobody moves without permission. Conservatives and small-business people are clearly more in favor of people making their own decisions about what is appropriate.

And hanging over all is the basic instinct that government is there to protect us.

But there is another thing that comes out clearly to me, that a lot of what we call "science" is really thinly veiled prophecy and divination. Would you be insulted if I suggested that modern science is really the heir to religious prophecy and fortune-telling. La Wik:

Divination can be seen as a systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand.

Am I right, or am I right? The point about science is that it is a very systematic method "with which to organize... facets of existence." But it is also true that it is much easier to predict the trajectory of a moon rocket than the behavior of a modern consumer. Or to predict the future, or the stock market, or elections. Or an epidemic.

Should we be discouraged that opinion rules and not science? Not at all. Opinion is really processed science, knowledge boiled down to maxims and rules of thumb. The better they are, the more people  will adopt them. But there is still, and will always be, a "marketplace of ideas," where people pick and choose what rule of thumb should work for them.

In the best of all possible worlds, the good ideas will win out in the end, and the bad ideas will fall by the wayside. And so they do, in the end.

But in the meanwhile, people are really attached to the ideas that they have adopted, and it often takes a real blow to the solar plexus, metaphorically speaking, before people will abandon a particular rule of thumb that isn't working out so well.

As we see every day.

The De-domestication of Woman

If men have been progressively domesticated over the millennia and the recent centuries, whatabout women?

Good question. If we believe the feminists, women have been domestically oppressed since the dawn of time. Until yesterday when women came forth into the public square and demanded their rights. Women had been forcibly domesticated by men except for occasional liberations like the Amazons of myth and legend.

Only, if we believe social scientist Georg Simmel, the emergence of women into the public square has more to do with the reduction in work at home to keep food on the table and babies in the crib than a reduction in oppression.

Or, if we believe Martin van Creveld, the emancipation of women occurred because men felt sorry for them. As in, whatever the little woman wants. You realize what that means, ladies? It means that the dreaded era of white male supremacy has been replaced with a new era of white male patronage. Eeuw!

Also, the domestication of men has resulted in a less dangerous public square. Used to be that unescorted women were fair game. Not in the capitalist city, where the coin of the realm is trust. Hey, maybe part of being a trustworthy man is to be trustworthy around women.

But as Georg Simmel wrote, the emergence of women into the public square would result in a change to the public square as women transformed it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

But now, as I have written, I realize that women are not interested in a public square, because the public square is a domesticated version of the male one-one-one duel and the medieval tournament, that are predicated on the male cultures of courage and insult. Did you know that there are lines on the floor of the British House of Commons that the members are not allowed do cross? The distance between the two lines has to do with the length of swords back in the day. Modern politics is a domesticated version of civil war -- civil war by other means. It is where men can strut and fret in parliament without actually coming to blows, mano a mano. Women don't do duels, or open outcry in parliament, or dueling op-eds. Because women have a culture of complaint.

So I interpret the emergence of women into the public square as women just complaining again. It looks really cool to get out of the house, especially as a way for well-born educated Gentry women to differentiate themselves from low-born Commoners. But when you actually get out of the house and find out how the public square works, well, I can't believe it's like that.

But of course it is. Men have a culture of courage when they are being good boys, and a Culture of Insult when they are being bad boys. So the public square they built is a domesticated form of the old culture of combat and insult. Bloody brilliant, if you ask me, because the whole point of social animals is the reduction in violence, because violence is expensive, and the more you can reduce violence to a dull roar, the more social the animals and the more they can survive and prosper and wive and thrive.

So the interesting question, for me, is to figure out how women will retreat back into domesticity, since the open outcry of the public square is just not their kind of thing. Let's just try to imagine how this will work.

Actually it's not that hard to imagine, because all we have to do is look around us as women have demanded an end to micro-aggressions -- i.e., trivial insults that any man would take in stride -- and safe spaces from uncomfortable ideas. Women really are not into face to face combat, and not into direct insult. Their Culture of Complaint is indirect rather than direct, with Woman A complaining to Woman B about Woman C.

Perhaps schools will become girls and women only. Schools used to be places where little boys were roundly spanked and disciplined until they got with the program. But since girls and women have emerged into education they have utterly transformed it into a Kaffee Klatsch that is profoundly unfriendly to boys and men. But actually, with on-line learning and the internet and home-schooling I expect that men will create a new education system better suited to the male sensibility. One thing that might help would be to reinstitute apprenticeships.

Perhaps men will develop a new public square, parallel to the present one, where men can be men and do not get named and shamed and canceled for hurting someone's feelings, leaving women in charge of the old public square that nobody pays any attention to.

Perhaps men will develop a new -- domesticated -- culture of courage and insult based on the online video games that young men are presently addicted to. I have a feeling that a good way to understand video games are as a rehearsal for the real world of the public square, a place where young men can hone their courage, develop their tactical skills and, for the talented tenth, their strategic sense.

Perhaps girls and women will come to dominate the safe sectors of education and work in established administrative structures where the culture can be adapted to the feminine sensibility of one-on-one conversation and the disciplinary culture of naming, blaming, shaming, and canceling, leaving men to dominate the new domesticated wild west of the new public square.

The point is that women have always been domesticated, just like chimpanzee females. Their job, and it is the only job that matters, is to birth and raise the next generation. Everything else is just fluff and conceit and the need for high-status humans to differentiate themselves from the common herd.

And my judgement of the feminist movement of the de-domestication of woman is that it is a cruel trick upon lower-status women that do not feel the need to differentiate themselves as special and clearly way above the common herd.

The Domestication of Man

A couple of days ago I read someone talking about the "cult of expertise." Of course, I thought. Why hadn't I thought of that? It's been a Thing for quite a while.

But then I thought about what experts do, especially during the present plague of experts during the Wu Flu.

Experts are prophets; they prognosticate about the future, but from the safety of administrative bureaucracies. Not quite like in the old days when prophets predicted from the entrails of birds. But the fact is that the whole purpose of knowledge is prediction of the future, to understand the behavior of things and agents in the wide world and try to figure out what comes next.

The truth is that the real story of man is his domestication, just as wolves chose to be domesticated into dogs.

Back in the day men were warriors and hunters. They engaged in frightful battles to the death with megafauna and patrolled the borders of their tribal lands to take out any male that dared to present himself on the border. But then humans killed off all the megafauna, and started to get into the domestication of wild animals rather than their destruction.

And war became less of a desperate border battle and more about marching and discipline. High born men started to become courtiers and leave the rough stuff to marcher lords like Harry Percy.

More than that, the deadly business of war and the hunt devolved into sports, probably because men didn't go to war and didn't really rely on the hunt for food. But high-born men needed something to do in between the vital acts of siring the next generation. So war devolved into sports: first the tournament and jousting with lances, and then team sports like cricket and football. And hunting devolved into useless sports like fox-hunting. Heck, we gentry could have left the vital work of the control of foxes or the hunting of deer to underlings. But it was much more fun to go out and ride around the countryside, or get the local yokels to beat the bushes to spring the pheasants and the grouse and bring them before the guns of the gentry.

Notice how there is now a further domestication, driven by women, where "blood sports" are bad, but other sports are OK, for the time being. In Britland the Labour Party when in power recently banned foxhunting. Because. But did they think about poor old Trollope turning in his grave?

We now see an even further domestication of sports. It's not just "blood sports" that are problematical, but now "contact sports," where the players are involved in violent enough activity that they are likely to sustain injury, particularly brain injury. And it is women that are leading the charge against "contact" sports.

Of course the rise of the male "career" is another domestication. Instead of well-born men going into the army they now get credentialed at selective colleges and work at a career, rising up the ranks in some corporate bureaucracy or profession.

There is a further domestication in progress, that occurred to me when I asked the checkout clerk how his friends are doing in the current Wu Flu lockdown. They were doing fine, he said, playing video games all day.

Yes, indeed. Young men are being domesticated from active sports into video sports, where the large-motor activities are reduced to brain function and small motor activities with the joystick control.

Here's another domestication. Used to be that the whole point of men was the war party bent on a campaign of loot and plunder. That's what the Romans were all about, pushing back the boundaries of the Roman Empire and coming home with loot and slaves. That's what the Vikings were all about, too. But then came the Age of Exploration. Now the purpose was not so much loot and plunder as the expansion of the "known world" and the establishment of trading posts. That's what the Brits were up to in India. Of course, the Brits felt honor-bound to civilize the "natives" and bring them the blessings of Western Civilization. What our lefty friends now call colonization and oppression. And of course there was the problem that Kipling raised, about "lesser breeds without the Law" by which he meant empires less civilized than the British: Krauts and Frogs and so forth.

Today, of course, the notion of exploration has become scandalous because imperialism and marginalization. So young men are not supposed to go exploring any more. They are supposed to go a-NGOing or do international development instead.

And don't forget the domestication implied in the notion of the public square, where men can argue and dispute about religion, culture, and politics without resort to fisticuffs. Jolly civilized, if you ask me. The public square is elegantly aligned with the two male cultures, of courage and insult.

The market system is a domestication. Instead of warring, aggressive young men start companies and compete for market share. This was rather shabby back in the day when nobodies were inventing machine textiles and steam transportation. But in our own time we have the "startup culture" in which young men of good families like Bill Gates drop out of Harvard and form new companies and work 24-7 bringing some idea to market and then, hopefully, making a "killing" when they take the company "public" on the stock market. When the whole thing gets going then the young men hire women to run the HR department, and young women like Melinda Gates come aboard and stop the men yelling at each other at meetings.

Now, there is another area of domestication. It is the domestication of the shamans and the priests. Back in the day these shamans were terrifying half-mad creatures that participated in the divine and were almost on the margin of the society of the kindred. But they were seers with an uncanny grasp of the future, and humans sought their advice and their divinations of the future.

In due course these shamans and seers because the priests of the temple culture, more predictable and less terrifying. But they still excelled as prophets and on occasion formed new cults with terrifying predictions of the future to come if we did not repent now. And they often required a constant supply of virgins and eldest sons to sacrifice on the altar of the the vengeful god. What a day it was when Abraham realized that God would be perfectly happy if he sacrificed a neighboring goat instead of the first-born Isaac: call it the domestication of sacrifice.

How domesticated then were the priests of the state church in Jane Austen and George Eliot novels! They could be annoying, like Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, or wise and gentle like Mr. Irwine in Adam Bede. But really, they were completely domesticated and non-threatening.

A further domestication of the shamans and seers are the scientists and the experts. What is the point of scientists and experts but to divine the future with their mathematical runes? Thus we have scientists predicting doom and planetary disaster unless we act now. Or, as in the present emergency, death and destruction from the plague unless we submit to the experts. Good work, if you can get it.

But these are rather small beer compared to the temple priests of the Aztecs that pulled living hearts out of the still living abdomens of their sacrificial victims.

But, even in our own domesticated time, there is still a need for sacrificial victims.

The question is whether this Domestication of Man has gone about as furr as it can go. Who knows. But it is interesting that wild young men like Elon Musk are bucking for space travel, and want to go to Mars. Because how domesticated can you get and still maintain the male culture of courage and insult?

Now, of course, there have always been counter-movements that have critiqued the domestication process as taking the human out of the human. The Great Reaction of the past century, with socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism and identity politics a return to tribalism, is one such. And the feminist movement, that proposes to de-domesticate women and make them into fearsome warriors: "I am woman, hear me roar."

But that is another story.

Scruton on Conservatism

 Roger Scruton's Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition is an attempt to understand the  division between liberalism and conservatism in the modern secular era. 

Prehistory

Scruton begins by stating that "Modern conservatism is a product of the Enlightenment" even though the ideas go back to Aristotle. Modern conservatism has to deal with a new situation,

the emergence of the nation state, the loss of a unifying religion, and the growth of the 'great society' composed of millions of cooperating strangers under a single rule of law.

Scruton sees three forms of human society in the modern era, tribal, religious, and political. He suggests that 

conservatism arose as an attempt to hold on to the values of kinship and religion in communities that were being reorganized by a purely political law. 

For him it is the differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution that created a division between conservatism and liberalism.

In the runup to the division Scruton proposes Richard Hooker and Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594ish) as justifying "a compromise between church and state." 

Then came Hobbes and Leviathan (1651) to suggest that humans would contract among themselves to get out of the "war of all against all... [where life is] 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.'" 

Then came James Harrington and The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) proposing that "republican government in an essentially capitalist society... would be the most stable political system."

Then came John Locke and Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690) with the human understanding of natural law as "an inner sense of our rights." Thus the need for government as a contract, a "social compact" "to accept the curtailments of their rights in exchange for the benefits and security of society." A separation of powers would be a good way to protect the social compact.

Then came Montesquieu and his Spirit of the Laws (1734) and a definition of he separation of powers -- "the executive, the legislative and the judicial -- and that the spheres should be separated as far as possible in order to guarantee the liberties of the subject."

But with William Blackstone and his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) comes the idea of humans "subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom" as set out in the English common law as "solutions, tested by time and custom, to the problems of social conflict and the needs of orderly government."

David Hume in his History of England (1744) attacked the idea of the social contract, writing that "most people [are] inevitably constrained by... ties to stay where they are, whatever the government". He "believed that politics... could be deduced from the study of human nature."

But Samuel Johnson, of the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), believed in orthodoxy, "the exact expression of moral truths... understood and acted upon by all".

Scruton proposes that after these thinkers, a division appeared:

Liberals saw political order as issuing from individual liberty; conservatives saw individual liberty issuing from political order... The question of which comes first, liberty or order, was to divide liberals from conservatives for the next two hundred years.

The Birth of Philosophical Conservatism

The difference between the American and French Revolutions had to do with

the greater influence, in the American case, of conservative ways of thinking, compared with the romantic individualism, the desire to pull down the old order and to make everything anew, that inspired the revolutionaries in France.

A major influence in the US was Thomas Jefferson and his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) expounding a theoretical basis for the US Constitution. Then the Federalist Papers (1787-8) applied Locke, Harrington, Montesquieu to the American situation. While liberal, they also raised the conservative question about safeguarding liberty against the growth of government.

Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) expressed a vision central to conservatism. He saw the foundation of human community in "mutual sympathy of sentiments" conscious of ourselves as agents but also as objects of judgement. In Wealth of Nations Smith "provided the first serious defence of the market economy from philosophical principles." The division of labor is the "true cause of economic progress" in part through the operation of an "invisible hand." Market prices are not just prices by "a distillation of social knowledge" by which each of us responds "to the desires and needs of every other."

The French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" was impeccably liberal. But the American Bill of Rights was marked by the culture of the common law, "an attempt to protect the ancient rights and privileges of the people, as defined and discovered by the law." Edmund Burke saw this in his predictions in Reflections on the Recent Revolution in France (1790) which he said was imposed on the people from above by "a literary cabal."

Against this he developed a complex, unsystematic but highly illuminating account of custom, tradition, and civil association... [recognizing] that freedom is always in jeopardy and must be protected by the law.

It is in the "little platoons" of society that traditions form that are forms of knowledge, residues of trial and error and their resulting social solutions, "answers that have been discovered to enduring questions."  As opposed to the "a priori principles of the revolutionaries" derived from abstract reason.

For Scruton, Smith and Burke attempted to describe social membership that put "duty and responsibility... at the heart of the social order." Thomas Paine in Rights of Man (1791-2)  put "the rights of the individual [as] the sole source of political legitimacy." 

Conservatism in Germany and France

Immanuel Kant was a liberal and "made the freely choosing individual into the very center of his world view". But Kant's individual acts "through duty, not desire", and Kant's philosophy "makes no special place for customs and traditions".

Georg W.F. Hegel regarded Kant's "abstract right" as problematic and "without reference to the history or particularity of human relations". "From the confrontation between abstract right and concrete morality the sphere of ethical life emerges." Abstract freedom "is only available in the context of a tradition-governed social order".

But Hegel also influenced Marx. Hegel accepted the French Revolution as "a coming to consciousness of the deep undercurrents of history" and thus, for Marx the idea that "everything can be changed utterly".

Hegel also developed a paradoxical narrative of slavery. For sure, it is the master that commands labor. But it is the slave that actually changes the world. Thus:

The history of freedom survives in the very nature of freedom, and it is a history of bondage.

Then Hegel goes on to see "the tension and conflict between... the family and civil society... and the resolution of this conflict in the state". But Hegel understood that it is a mistake to compare the power of the state to the power of civil associations.

Hegel's vision of an "inevitable march of history form each epoch to the next" has encouraged "the revolution fetish of the Marxists."

Then Scruton proceeds to Tocqueville, Chateaubriand and Maistre.

Maistre wrote that "constitutions are not made, but found" as the American Constitution made "explicit a spirit already present in the Anglo-American common law". And Maistre mourning the passing of the French monarchy and its Christian Catholicism.

Chateaubriand showed, in Génie du Christianisme "that conservatism was a kind of aesthetic and spiritual renewal -- a way out of the dreary orthodoxies of revolutionary egalitarianism."

Tocqueville saw that the culture of equality destroys the faith in the social order and confines individuals "within the solitude of their hearts" unless the "little platoons" recreate "long-standing and genial hierarchies." In The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856) Tocqueville argued that revolutions do not prompt change but are a response to change.

Cultural Conservatism

With industrialization and overseas trade Britain was transformed as a new "working class" appeared in the cities. Within decades the working class had created a culture and identity and demanded Parliamentary representation. Social theories explaining this movement came together in the socialist movement so that by 1900 

it was no longer against liberalism that conservatism was defining itself, but against socialism, and in particular against the socialist conception of the state. 

And British conservative writers began to focus on culture, and the place of Christianity in civil society, while the left was inspired to propose far-reaching programs for human government. In France, Fourier and Saint-Simon proposed a "society reorganized from top to bottom on socialist principles" Comte invented a secular religion, Positivism, to practice these ideas. In Britain, Bentham and the utilitarians with Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) inspired James Mill and John Stuart Mill in a politics promoting general happiness.

Opposed to morality and law as "mathematical puzzles, to be solved by calculation" were a whole movement of cultural conservatives: Britons from Coleridge to Ruskin to Matthew Arnold to T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis and the Southern Agrarians" in the US.

Coleridge felt that "enlightened rationalism... ignored the instinctive relations between people that form the true bond of society". It was important for a learned class to mediate this division. John Ruskin was a "high priest of the aesthetic way of life" and helped found the National Trust.

If Ruskin was a cultural mourner, Matthew Arnold proposed that people should "find from their own resources... the way to maintain the inner order" needed for life. Culture provides "the social knowledge that we need" with or without religious faith. And culture was "essential for the right direction of political power". For Arnold education was about character, "introducing the student to 'the best that has been thought and said'".

The man that got the working class the vote, Disraeli, in Sybil, of the Two Nations (1945) of the need to unite the classes into "one nation,"

But should conservatism focus on politics or on preservation of the past through cultural production? T.S. Eliot promoted that idea in his poetry created a cultural context to revalue "high culture as [a] spiritual resource" as in "Bach, Michelangelo, Tolstoy and Shakespeare", proposing that "in every sphere tradition is a process of continuous adaptation of the old to the new and the new to the old." Socialist George Bernard Shaw thought the cultural conservatives to be "nostalgic cranks" but Eliot and Chesterton and C.S. Lewis remain.

In Germany Johann Gottfried von Herder is the most notable cultural conservative. He was not persuaded by his teacher, Kant, that "guided by the light of reason" we moderns will adopt a "universal moral law". Herder proposed a division between Civilization and its rational calculation and Culture that unites humans in "mutual attachment... language, custom, folk tales, and folk religion." Thus the Brother Grimm and their folk tales (1812). Herder led in 1848 to German nationalism as a shared identity in a single nation state.

In the US cultural conservatism was divided between northern writers like Thoreau who idealized the wilderness in Walden (1854) and the Southern Agrarians led by John Crowe Ransom who advocated "the culture of the soil" and its vocation. Although anathematized as "futile nostalgia" South Agrarianism produced Allen Tate, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Penn Warren, and latterly with Wendell Berry and Allan C. Carlson.

Leo Strauss, a refugee from Nazism, brought an academic conservatism to America, was opposed to "historicism", proposing instead a "trans-historical perspective" judging ideas by their validity. "Straussian" has come to mean "conservative, constitutionalist, and rooted in deep readings of the classics." Straussians obtained influential positions in the the administration of George W. Bush.

Although cultural conservatism attempts to lift conservatism from politics into literature it still has to deal with the political cultural world view of the left, especially when politics dominates everything, including the classrooom.

The Impact of Socialism

After World War I, the cultural conservatism of the organic society was dead. In Austria they mourned, with Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities. Where was the meaning in the inner life when only the "I" remains?

But apart from the mourning, conservatism became no longer a brake to classical liberalism, but a response to the welfare state and its "gargantuan schemes for a 'just' society" based on a "managerial state", the "true defender of liberty" against systems ranging from bureaucracy to murderous tyranny. In this transformation, "the word 'liberal'" changed from classical liberalism of limited government to left-liberalism helping the underprivileged, minorities, and socially excluded groups.

Friedrich von Hayek in his Road to Serfdom (1944) set out the divide between conservatism and the welfare state and, although insisting he was not a conservative, became a hero to conservatives. He went on to write a clarion call against the left in A Constitution of Liberty (1961).

The center of Hayek's thought is the idea of a spontaneous order, guided by the price system and the common law that both respond to changes rather than planning and statute law that attempt to anticipate and control.

[T]he socialist plan [on the other hand] conscripts every institution and even language to its purpose.

 In Rationalism and Politics (1962) Michael Oakeshott points to

the damage done when politics is directed from above towards a goal... The result is inevitably the destruction of compromise and free association[.]

Oakeshott also argued against "ideology" that justifies "the believer in taking charge of the future." E.g., Marxist revolution, the fascist corporate state, and the Nazi philosophy of race. It reduces politics to war: "you are either with us or against us". In On Human Conduct (1975) he argued a theory of 'civil association', against socialist and left-liberal theories that "saw civil society as subservient to... the state." Thus he was opposed to the state managing everything from the economy to poverty, land use, labor law.

As a professor at the London School of Economics Oakeshott built up "a network of sympathetic students and colleagues" that withered away later.

In the United States resistance to the managerial state -- as in New Deal -- is represented by James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers.

Originally a leftist, Burnham ended the 1930s defending capitalism against "New Dealism." In The Managerial Revolution (1941) he "accused socialism of the faults that the Marxists had attributed to capitalism." It created a "managerial elite." In The Struggle for the World (1947) he outlined a strategy for the Cold War, and in Suicide of the West (1964) "he provided conservatives with the language and vision to confront... communism". And he ridiculed the liberal culture of "moral equivalence".

Whittaker Chambers was a Soviet spy before and during World War II that eventually turned in his fellow spies. In Witness (1952) he wrote about it, and how it infects the soul as a disease.

In France the poet Charles Péguy led a Catholic revival against the defeat of the Franco-Prussian war and decades of secularism. It was Péguy that led to the canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920.

After World War I French intellectual life was polarized between the Catholic revival and Marxism. The conservative side was represented by Jean Giono, Gustave Thibon, and Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa.  Thus Poulenc's opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957). In The Need for Roots (1949) Simone Weil argued for cultural conservatism as a state of mind. Starting out as a secular and Marxist Jew she became a mystical Christian.

Like Simone Weil, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset "addressed the spiritual condition of our civilization, and sought the inner remedy to its decadence." This he achieved in popular books like Invertebrate Spain (1921), The Dehumanization of Art (1925), and The Revolt of the Masses (1930). In Revolt Ortega "expresses a certain disdain for the destructive activities of people no longer obedient to traditional moral and social order".

But all was swept away:

Not much remains of the society whose virtues Ortega lamented, just as  not much remains of the Anglican peace evoked by Eliot, or the enracinement defended by Thibon and Weil. Nevertheless, cultural conservatism remains a significant intellectual movement.

Conservatism Now

 Scruton rehearses the phases of modern conservatism.

[It] began as a defence of tradition against the calls for popular sovereignty; it became an appeal on behalf of religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress[.]

[Then it] has become the champion of Western civilization against its enemies... political correctness... and [Islamic] religious extremism[.]

After World War II everyone in intellectual life knew that conservatism was finished. So when Eric Blair wrote his satire of communism, Nineteen Eight-four (1949), he described himself as a socialist that disapproved of the "smelly little orthodoxies" on the left. He added "certain words to political language that have proved irreplaceable" including "Newspeak... thoughtcrime... doublethink". In Animal Farm (1945) he introduced the memorable phrase:

[A]ll animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

In essence, Orwell prophesied "the political correctness that has since invaded intellectual life in both Britain and America." Conservatives that draw attention to this -- Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) are demonized with the pejorative du jour: "racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc." The question of how to push back against political correctness has become central in conservatism.

Despite the perils, "there was and is a real conservative intellectual class in Britain." It includes Michael Oakeshott at LSE, the Iraqi Jew Elie Kedourie and The Chatham House Version, and Other Middle Eastern Studies (1970). In Nationalism in Asia and Africa (1970) he regarded "ideological nationalism" as "a threat to law and order all across the modern world". 

Hungarian-born Peter Bauer in Dissent on Development (1972) made "the conservative case against foreign aid... [for] rewarding governments for the impoverishment of their people".

Kenneth Minogue, from New Zealand, in The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (2010) argued that democratic values "undermine the culture of distinction and emulation on which a lasting civil society depends." His was one of several attacks on the welfare state inspired by Charles Murray and Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (1984).

These immigrants to Britain found it easier than natives to speak of what makes Britain a refuge "in a smouldering world. For natives, such thought courts "ridicule and ostracism from the left establishment."

Nevertheless, native dissidents existed, including Maurice Cowling of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. He was a champion of Anglican Christianity and regarded conservatism and other beliefs as "self-serving expedients". His magnum opus was Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (vol.3: 2001) and spoke "of the fragility and uniqueness of England" as the "chill winds of secularism swept across it".

Then there was T.E. Utley of the Telegraph, "journalists Colin Welch and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, the novelist Kinsley Amis and historian Paul Johnson". Johnson inaugurated a "class of freelance historians. It includes "Andrew Roberts, Nialll Ferguson and Jane Ridley.

Many of these were inspired by F.W. Maitland and his Constitutional History of England (1908) that began "a century-long attempt to reclaim English history for the conservative cause" arguing that

it is not the Enlightenment that had made individual liberty into the foundation of our political order, but the common law and parliamentary representation. 

Maitland argued that limited government was implied in the common law and that "political conciliation" had been going on since medieval times. It was not the "response to economic forces" of Marxists theory.

America had an advantage over Britain in being "a place where you can confess to being a conservative without being socially ostracized." This is because of the federal constitution so that many things are left up to state legislatures, and there is a tradition of recapturing "powers from the federal constitution". Also, many "institutions and culture... are the product of civil association" as noticed and praised by Tocqueville in Democracy in America.

One effect of civil association is the liberal arts college. So, despite "the most vigorous fumigation from the left" something is always "taking root again in some dank and life-infested corner." Two personalities are outstanding: William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk.

Buckley was, for his generation, "the pre-eminent voice of American conservatism", synthesizing "cultural conservatism, economic liberalism, and anti-communism", beginning with an attack on the atheist university in God and Man at Yale (1951). 

In 1955 he established National Review, which became and remains the most convinced and convincing of the many conservative journals that have arisen in America since the war.

Through the magazine and the TV show Firing Line Buckley sought to define a political movement based on ideas and providing a voice for the religious and social heritage of America.

Buckley may be contrasted with Russian-born Ayn Rand, influenced by Nietzsche and Darwin. She was anti-Marxist and anti-religion. In The Virtue of Selfishness (1864) she argued for the most useful people exercising their skills and talents.

But we all depend on the success of these people, who created and material and moral space in which lesser beings can find their niche[.]

Rand's novels celebrate the Nietzschean Übermensch.

Conservatives went all-in for Barry Goldwater in the presidential election of 1964, and his defeat forced American conservatism into "rear-guard actions ever since." Buckley, in particular, has fought to oppose the Supreme Court's habit of "discovering" rights in the US Constitution such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

In this fight Robert Bork argued in The Tempting of America (1990) that

the duty of the judge is to construe the original intention of the Founders strictly, and not import interpretations that reflect the judge's own desires and prejudices[.]

Bork was a notable "critic of the decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), legalizing abortion" as a federal right.

Assisting Buckley in the founding of National Review was Russell Kirk. He attempted in The Conservative Mind (1953) "to define the conservative position as a comprehensive intellectual posture." According to Gerald Russello, Kirk's philosophy is founded upon:

1. A belief in a transcendent order...
2. An affection for the 'variety and mystery'of human existence;
3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize 'natural' distinctions;
4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
5. A faith in custom... [and that] innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, [and] respect for... prudence.

That conservative thought has had an impact is evident in the need for John Rawls and A Theory of Justice (1970) which justifies "soft socialism" based on "game theory, moral philosophy, and analytical metaphysics." It was libertarians like Robert Nozick that framed the response. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) he states that Rawls, defining justice in terms of distribution, "will always infringe on freedom... and 'justice preserving transfers'" of ordinary life.

In the 1970s the conservative and libertarian standpoints merged into a "New Right," partly as a response to the "New Left" of the 1960s. It was associated with the Reagan-Thatcher politics, a reaction against Soviet aggression, and Marxist attempts to take over the academy, and also a reaction to decades of soft socialist politics. It grew out of Chicago school economics, with Milton Friedman and his Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and James M. Buchanan at the University of Virginia and The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962) explaining the workings of democracy in economy terms, and describing the power-based "rent-seeking" behavior of bureaucracies  to debunk the idea that the welfare state delivers "social justice". 

But neo-liberalism is now associated with globalism that has caused alarm both on the left and on the right. Thus thinkers like Scruton developed a movement

to protect what matters, both from subversion by the socialist cult of equality and from dissolution under the impact of global forces, market forces included.

The movement was centered in the Salisbury Review under Roger Scruton's editorship. Defending national identity and tradition against "multiculturalism" it also linked in the 1980s with dissident movements in Eastern Europe. It defended British culture against mass migration, and specifically the growth of Islam that rejects "crucial aspects of the nation state", trying to educate children "into a secular order that their parents denounce as blasphemous."

[This] defined a new agenda for conservatism, and one that the Salisbury Review adopted as its own in the 1980s, with adverse affects on the careers of its writers and its editor.

 The new movement "is no longer about market economics and free trade, but about the wider global agenda." Samual Huntingdon in The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (1996) predicted that the post cold war era would experience pushback from the Islamic world dealing with Western attitudes, technology, and secularization. But first the West has to regain confidence it itself and its spiritual inheritance. In other words, "cultural conservatism."

Similar points were made by Pierre Manent in La Situation de la France (2015) in response to Islamic terrorism and the murder of the staff of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. We have to find a place for Muslims in western society in the shared loyalty to the nation state. This goes against globalization and the European project to which the French elite is committed and has led to the invention of pejoratives like Islamophobia. There is a conflict between Sunni Islam, "that recognizes neither national boundaries or the rights of his opponents" and the western political community with its legal opposition man-made law, secular government, freedom of opinion, and representative institutions."

This national loyalty and attachment to the land we share is threatened by Islamist intransigence and by the Left for which the defense of our inheritance is racist or xenophobic.

Scruton concludes by saying that

My own view is that conservatism will be a necessary ingredient in any solution to the emerging problem of today, and that the tradition of thinking that I have outlined in this book should therefore be part of the education of all politicians everywhere.

Lockdowns and Poetry and the Ego Hero

You wouldn't think that the current political crunch over Wu Flu lockdowns and back-to-work has anything to do with poets and creativity. But of course it does. As David Cole says in a racist-sexist-homophobic piece on the innocence of joggers, that one of our fundamental modern beliefs is that

given enough time, love, and charity, every human could write Shakespeare...

For my leftist friends, almost all of whom are in “the arts,” this belief in an innate and universal inner poet is the prime reason they don’t want the lockdowns to end (indeed, why they don’t understand why they should end). You may not recall this, but back in 2010, Nancy Pelosi told Americans that they need to be freed from the burden of having to work for a living so that they can “be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passions, your aspirations.” This wasn’t one of her drunken offhanded comments; it was a manifesto.

That statement -- and why do people keep hinting that Karen Pelosi has a drinking problem? -- reminds us of the fundamental "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" for our lefty friends: it is creativity, artistic creativity.

As you may know, I have developed a searing analysis of the creative artist belief system. I say that the notion of creativity as developed by our lefty friends is only half of the story. I say that lefty creativity celebrates Ego Heroism. It is all about the glorious creativity of the artist, poet, leading the rest of the world to glory and social justice -- as defined and enforced by the lefty.

But that, I argue, is a false god. True heroism is the heroism of the Sacrificial Hero, the hero that uses his creativity acquired on his Hero's journey into the unconscious to explore the border between Order and Chaos to benefit humankind.

He is, you might say, a "social" hero rather than an "ego" hero.

So when Karen Pelosi decrees that people should be free of work so that they can become creative hero she is missing the point. Nothing that any human does has any value unless it has social value, that is, value to other people. Whatever it is that people do, if it has value, it must have value to other people. And whatever people do, it is work.

Actually, even lefties understand that. They understand that the solitary genius is nothing until his creativity becomes manifest and celebrated by other people. But in their world that means celebrated by other lefties in some lefty coterie or echo chamber. Which is the way that Art World operates.

And it is the way that Art World has ruined art and music.

It makes sense that this cult of creativity should arise, at least in my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you are one of the People of the Creative Self you are nothing if you don't have a creative streak and a creative project and you have actually done something creative.

That, you will agree, is a pretty tall order. No wonder people try to take a shortcut and say that creativity is judged by you and your peers in your coterie rather than in the wide world itself.

Another way that this creative culture operates, as we see in the Wu Flu epidemic, is the "cult of expertise." All of our liberal friends are all-in on deferring to the experts, and incredulous that anyone should open up the economy without the say-so of the experts.

Well, yeah, I get it. Except that my Four Laws, item two, says that the Administrative state cannot work because it doesn't have the bandwidth. That is the same as saying that expertise doesn't have the answer to all problems. On the contrary, the market is a congress of both experts and ordinary folks, both dispensers and consumers of expertise. And it takes both to create a society. Experts propose and non-experts dispose.

And also, as we have seen, the experts have been wrong. Again and again. Why? Because life is not expertise, knowledge is not infallible. Knowledge is a rule of thumb that humans use to navigate the incredible complex moment-to-moment world by ignoring 99 percent of the information about the world and focusing only on the information that the human judges to be relevant.

Anyway, we can see that the lockdown culture is starting to fray at the edges as people judge that it is time to get back to work and wiving and thriving.

Because the liberal line about "if it saves just one life" is the usual liberal conceit. Every life is always in the balance and every human takes her life in her hands every time she crosses the street.

But if we all lived that way, what would the experts do then, poor things? And if we expected creative geniuses to be Sacrificial Heroes, what would the people that just knew that their idea could change the world do then, poor things?

At the End of the Gramscian March Through the Institutions

What do you do about stuff like The New York Times "1619 Project" that wants to tell us that the purpose of the American Revolution was to continue slavery?

Do you fight it to the last man? Do you argue against it? Do you sneer at it and make jokes about it?

Because, clearly, the diversity and inclusion crowd at The New York Times are in the business of writing a new Narrative of America, a narrative of shame instead of the one we were taught, of glorious freedom and opportunity.

That is the whole point of the Gramscian March Through the Institutions, to refashion the religious, cultural, and political Narrative so that nothing remains of the old one except shame and despair.

And, you gotta say, the D and I marchers are having quite a bit of success, else why would we be writing about the white working class "dying of despair."

I had my own meeting with the March Through the Institutions over the weekend. I was thinking of contributing $500 to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is now closed for 2020 because Wu Flu.

I thought I would write a letter to the artistic director explaining how, even though I was contributing in the current emergency, I wanted the director to know that I felt that the current Diversity and Inclusion agenda at OSF was utter folly, but that I realized that the folly was industry-wide. For I had recently visited Stratford upon Avon, and the productions are identical to those at OSF in Oregon. Diversity in casting, and especially opposite genders in the second-tier parts. And black themed plays like August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle of plays.

So I looked up the OSF website to find the name of the artistic director to whom I would direct my letter. I found, of course, that I was too late. The current artistic director, since 2019, is Nakati Garrett, an African American and a "graduate of California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in directing."

So much for my contribution; so much for my letter. Why? Because I am a racist? No doubt. But also because I realized that there was no way that such a woman could understand my position, that the current culture of diversity and inclusion and full-on wokism is going to kill stage drama at Ashland and everywhere else it is practiced.

But, I thought, there is good cheer in this. Because, I thought, that the problem with the Gramscian March Through the Institutions is that, eventually the marchers are not up to the mark. The Ashland Shakespeare festival was started in 1935 by Angus Bowmer, a high-school teacher, a nobody, in the grand old American tradition of nobodies.

I mean: What business had this nobody doing Shakespeare out in the wilds of Oregon and trying to resurrect the same stage as the Globe Theatre in London. I mean, chaps, what business had a high-school teacher doing stuff like that? Good Lord, what is the world coming to?

When I first started going to Ashland in 1978 it had built an outdoor theater to reimagine the Globe Theatre, it was producing the best Shakespeare it could imagine, and Angus Bowmer had just died. That was before the Birth of Woke. But in recent years, as I went to Ashland with my daughter and her family, the tone has changed.

There was the Julius Caesar with Caesar as a corporate CEO and the Roman senators wearing artistical black like actors at a rehearsal. That is to completely misunderstand what the great Roman civil war was about.

There was Henry IV Part One with Harry Percy played by a woman in camo with a big fat butt. The most macho character in English drama with a fat girly butt?

On the other hand there was a stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love in 2017 that brought a rather dull movie to incandescent life on the live stage and that had the audience jumping to its feet in an enthusiastic standing ovation at the end.

And then we turn to The New York Times and its "1619 Project" run by African American Nikole Hannah-Jones. The problem with the project is that Hannah-Jones just doesn't have the horsepower for such a project. She is not a Gramscian Marching Through the Institutions. She is just a follower, a journalist that is good enough to staple together a conventional left-wing oppression narrative. But I doubt that the "1619 Project" will change America. More likely it will get adopted in public schools and help further their decline.

Now I was going to suggest to the artistic director at Ashland that they should commission a bunch of plays from George Eliot novels. Why? Because I have come to the realization that George Eliot's work amounts to a remarkable study of the different ways that women could live their lives, from Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, to Dorothea Brooke and Mary Garth in Middlemarch, to Romola and Tessa in Romola, to Gwendolen Harleth and Mirah Lapidoth in Daniel Deronda. What could be more relevant to today's women than to revive the thoughts of a woman who began as the daughter of a estate manager out in the countryside and ended as Britain's incandescent novelist that royalty wanted to meet and greet?

But, of course, I wouldn't expect a Nakati Garrett to have a clue about that, or ever to understand that, at this stage in the "liberation" of women, it might be a good idea to do a retrospective and take a look at what remarkable women like George Eliot were thinking in the middle of the 19th century.

See, I think that the conventional diversity and inclusion culture completely misses the point. The point is how do minorities and women, by hard work and deep thinking, find their place in the 21st century public square? The point is not how do we patronize and pat minorities and women on the head as Little Darlings of the white ruling class and teach them how to repeat the lessons in lefty hate and fear that they were carefully taught from year to year in their lefty schools and universities.

The proof to me that the lefty movement has gone about as far as it can go is that the current Woke culture can only advance itself by naked oppression and injustice; that the Obama deep-staters were reduced to spying on the opposition using the intelligence community, and nobbling Trump himself with specious investigations and harassment. That sort of thing, in my understanding, is the tactic of a failed revolution that just can't believe that the world hasn't turned up roses yet.

The current mess over the Wu Flu epidemic, to me, exactly demonstrates the problem. The lefty Wokists think that the answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" is a government program run by credentialed experts like them. Not really, as the incompetence of the health bureaucracies and the incompetent pride of Democratic governors is trumpeting to the reverberate hills. Administrative government by credentialed experts cannot work because it does not have the bandwidth. It demands the One True Solution because that is the only way that an administrative hierarchy can work. But the One True Solution does not work. Alas, our lefty friends will not learn that lesson until they are confronted by the utter ruin of their hopes and conceits. They are, like all of us, humans.

Of course, the left's own devotion to Darwin ought to teach them otherwise. For "evolution" does not have a One True Solution. It proposes instead that the future belongs to those that adapt. But adapt to what and how? That is the point. Nobody knows in advance what is going to work and what will turn out to be a successful adaptation. So we are all victims in Nature's science experiments.

Instead the left is presently proposing a Green New Deal in which credentialed experts will completely redesign the economy just like the Bolsheviks tried and failed to do a century ago.

It's a hard thing to get your brain around: the idea that we humans here right now really don't know what is the best way forward and that this is the universal situation of all life since the Creation -- or whatever Creation myth replaces the current Big Bang theory.

Indeed, the latest theory I read about is that intelligent life is a recipe for disaster, because intelligent beings are more likely to blow themselves up. Better to be a dumb insect than a smart human, if you want your species to grow and prosper.

So be of good cheer. Every dynasty, every hegemony, eventually collapses because the scions of the revolution are not up to the level of the original revolutionaries. And the scions of the scions are even less capable. Lenin was a genius; Stalin was a monster; but Brezhnev was a doofus.

After you have finished Marching Through the Institutions, then what do you do? Well, the only thing that the marchers have ever understood is that then you beat up the plebs until they stop complaining.

Sorry chum. They tried that, and it doesn't work.

The Sacrificial Hero Ancient and Modern

Recently I've been writing a long piece, that I submitted to the edgy conservative site American Mind, entitled "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than Leftism." Don't know if they'll publish it, but I've been thinking about what I wrote.

Because what I wrote about is trying to answer the question: what should educated scions of the educated Gentry aspire to? What should be the vision of the good life for an educated person?

My point is that the old culture of responsibility, of obeying the law, going to work, following the rules of God's divine law no longer resonates with the educated class.

The problem is that the highest and noblest vision of the good life for educated people, ever since Marx, has been to be an activist, nobly bending the arc of history towards justice for the oppressed and the marginalized. And I believe this is a monumental error.

Of course, I have developed a comprehensive and mandatory critique of the left, in my Great Reaction concept that experiences the left as a gigantic lurch back to the primitive. This has become understandable to me since I took a serious look at Jung through his adepts like Jordan B. Peterson. The point of Jung's "collective unconscious" and "archetypes" is to advance the notion that a lot of what we think and do and believe is imprinted in us through eons of evolution as "instincts" or "emotions," etc.

I use quotes because I am suggesting that we really don't have a clue what the so-called "collective unconscious" is. Nor yet an "archetype." Or "instincts" and "emotions." Obviously we have something that influences our actions, and that something is something other than our conscious mind. For instance, as I walked briskly up the hill on N 60th St this morning my breathing "automatically" became deeper and deeper as I struggled up the hill. I wasn't consciously doing that; but something was triggering it. Yes, Sherlock, just what was it?

So, when the educated elite decides that God is Dead, they embark upon a long and perilous journey, as Nietzsche argues, through decadence, nihilism, and the endless hell of the eternal recurrence. Until they find a new god to worship in the revaluation of all values. And that god is themselves.

But, obviously, there will be many mistakes and false turns and disasters on the Journey to a new faith and a new god. And I think that "activism" is one such false start.

My brilliant vision of the good life better than leftism is that the goal for an educated sprout should not be to become an activist, because activists are "Ego Heros." Activism is not really about saving the oppressed. It is about the educated activist feeling good about himself, massaging his Ego, making himself into a kind of Homeric god that orders the world around, not from Mr. Olympus but from Activist Central.

And I developed the notion that this notion of activism is an echo of the knight-errants of medieval romance. I first set this up a while back and now I am reading The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga which deals with the whole question of the cult of the knight and the knight's love for his chosen loved-one whose scarf he carried on his knightly quest. Bologna and balderdash: that is what Huizinga says. The real knights of the Middle Ages were thugs, and life back then was nasty, brutish and short. There was no time for courtly love and damsels in distress, just the brutal game of political and military power. The medieval romances were fantasy, escape-from-reality. Nothing wrong with that: we all like our fantasy literature for breakfast.

But I am saying that the Activism Culture is a fantasy culture, and it probably does more harm than good, because the way to get on in the modern world is to become a responsible citizen that takes responsibility for looking after him and his, and does not expect some medieval lord or activist to do the heavy lifting.

As an example, today Christopher DeGroot this morning writes appreciatively about James Q. Wilson's 1990s proposal that "we" should put single black mothers in group homes if they get welfare, to get them out of the poisonous culture of the ghetto, in at attempt to deal with the poison of children growing up in a world where they "never see a married man working for a living at a legitimate job and supporting his family."

Yes, but. The problem begins with the fact that today we have abandoned the old rule that a woman needs a husband if she is going to be a mother and expect to raise her child to adulthood. The whole paraphernalia of chastity, of not having sex with a man unless he commits to raising his child, of marriage, of middle-class morality, of bourgeois respectability, of stigmatizing a woman having a child outside marriage as in Les Miserables, and so on is that if a woman does not ensure that her child has a father, and if society -- i.e., the neighborhood women -- turns a blind eye towards single parenthood, then you got trouble with a capital T. And group homes ain't gonna solve it.

But it sure feels good being an activist protesting against middle-class morality.

So what I came up with is the notion of the Sacrificial Hero. Yes, I know! Talk about reinventing the wheel, especially since the whole of Christianity amounts to a cult of Jesus Christ, the Sacrificial Hero!

But that is the point. The great truths are timeless, but they need to be reimagined in every age and for every culture, and for every level in the culture.

The question for our time is how the Sacrificial Hero can be experienced in our time and especially by the Gentry class of educated people that very often live and work in cloistered monasteries, like government bureaucracies, university faculties, and corporate headquarters.

This kind of person thinks themself a couple of cuts above an ordinary middle-class Commoner. You can tell this because of the genius of the political idiot Hillary Clinton who coined the notion of the "basket of deplorables" to signify ordinary middle-class Americans that aren't quite into the creative culture of the educated Übermenschen.

The point is that it in my lordly and reductive Three Peoples philosophy, it is perfectly understandable that ordinary middle-class people are not really into creative treatments of race, sex, and gender. People like that just follow the rules, without questioning them. And guess what: it is probably a good thing, because if everyone was determined to "question everything" well... Actually, our liberal friends are clear about that. They get to question everything, but not ordinary "deplorables." No siree.

So, if you follow my notion, you judge people that aspire to creativehood by whether they aspire to be an Ego Hero or submit to being a Sacrificial Hero.

Of course, the ancient form of the Sacrificial Hero that the gods sacrificed as a result of their power games on Mt. Olympus. That is how Sacrificial Hero works for the People of the Subordinate Self. But with Axial Age religions, God provides the Sacrificial Hero in the person of the Son of God, and all humans have to do is venerate God's example and try to live like Jesus.

But for the People of the Creative Self it is each one of them that must try out for the Sacrificial Hero. And so, for those that choose it, the Sacrificial Hero's Journey is incredibly hard and challenging. No wonder most of them choose the easy way out, as Ego Heroes.

I think that the two most obvious Sacrificial Heroes out there right now are Donald Trump and LTG Michael Flynn. The Deep State is throwing everything it can against these two men, and they are baring their chests and taking the incoming rounds. And for what?

Yeah, I know. To a great extent they had no choice. Not for them the convenient leak in the media, the helpful unmasking, the special prosecutor to cover their tracks. They must travel their own via dolorosa and try to keep faith that it will all come right in the end.

And if it doesn't come right in the end, at least they died honorably.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous: Donald Trump the blowhard publicity hound becoming a Sacrificial Hero. Who woulda thunk it? But the truth is that Donald Trump has accepted his destiny with unimaginable courage and seems to get up every day determined to do the best he can.

And if Donald Trump wins the November election he is still not out of the woods, because he will be dealing with the aftermath of the shutdown with its gigantic increase in federal debt, and then the inflation that will follow the monetization of a lot of the debt, and the recession that will come as a result of having to fight inflation.

I doubt if Donald Trump will leave office as a glorious hero. I expect that he will leave as the scapegoat for all our troubles, a sacrifice to our national dignity.

Or some sort of Sacrificial Hero.