Deirdre McCloskey - Table of Contents

Deirdre McCloskey and her Bourgeois Era books

1. McCloskey Week: Conservatism's Big Problem
   We need a discrediting of the One Big Thing ethos
   
   
2. McCloskey Week: Bourgeois Dignity
   About 300 years ago we started to respect the bourgeoisie
   
   
3. McCloskey Week: The Moral Case Against Obamanomics
   The right of people to order their lives without permission from the government
   
   
4. McCloskey Week: It's Not What You Think
   We have to look with tolerance on the projects of the mad projectors
   
   
5. McCloskey Week: The Messenger
   Maybe the shameless transsexual McCloskey is just what we need
   
   
6. McCloskey Wrapup: Big Fact vs. Big Mistake
   Fact: prosperity has increased 30 times. Mistake: we need to control distribution 
   
   
7. McCloskey Again: 787 Pages for What?
   A rehash of Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity
   
   
8. McCloskey Again: Why Not Call the Book "Bourgeois Rhetoric?"
   Apparently both left and right opposed "trade-tested betterment" 
   
   
9. McCloskey Again: The Bourgeoisie is Not That Interested in Power
   Because today, life is not a matter of life and death. Everything is negotiable
   
   
10. "Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry
    But not necessarily for Commoners and Clients
    
    
11. Could Chile's Collapse Happen Here?
    It could, except we Commoners have Donald Trump in our lane
    
    
12. It's Past Time for Merely Defending the Market System. Etc.
    Why not go on the attack
    
    

It's Past Time for Merely Defending the Market System. Etc.

I'm reading Why Liberalism Works by economist Deirdre McCloskey that celebrates her three "Bourgeois Era" books. In those books she establishes the remarkable Great Enrichment of the last 200 years and attributes it to the bourgeois ethos of the seven virtues and also the "have a go" ethos of ordinary people starting in 1800.

Basic to this notion is that "capital" is not something that accumulates, but is created when something new and useful is invented and produced and sold out of a clear blue sky. I suppose the fundamental case for that is the creation of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his Standard Oil. Rockefeller created a company that reduced the price of illuminating oil from about 80 cents per gallon to 10 cents per gallon. Not surprisingly this astonishing achievement shot the stock of Rockefeller's Standard Oil into the stratosphere. Why? Because the present value of Standard Oil discovering and producing and selling oil was enormous. And that was before they discovered oil in Texas in 1901.

I mean: what is the value to the average housewife of the oil that she bought for those cute oil lamps later featured in western movies? That were much safer and useful than the wax candles that really only rich people could afford? (Check out various recent TV series of the candle era in which typically the producers have decided to show the indoor lighting just by candle. Rich-people parties have veritable galaxies of brutally expensive candles. Almost everyone lights themselves to their bedrooms with a single candle.)

Apply the same logic to all the other astonishing things of the past two centuries: trains, steamships, cars, electricity, safe childbirth, computers, internet. This is not accumulation but explosion.

However, I am not sure that I buy the Bourgeois Virtues argument and the celebration of bourgeois culture. I am more inclined to go with the verdict of George Eliot in Adam Bede where she celebrates ordinary rural carpenters and farm girls getting the ethos of Methodist Christianity and the sense of directing their own livesunder the inspiration of God and his divine laws.

In other words, Adam Bede and Dinah Morris were graduating out of the subordinate peasant mentality to think and act as Commoners.

And there is the peculiar marriage of elite science and commoner mechanics marrying science to technique and turning ideas into useful products.

I am more inclined to attribute the Great Enrichment to the ordinary people "having a go" and the elites and governing classes not seeing what was going on until it was too late to stop it.

Think of the Trump election in 2016. The elites thought Trump was a rube and a blowhard. They just had no idea that he could and would connect with the ordinary American Commoner and win their votes and now their trust. If they had known... they would have made sure that Trump got nobbled before he got out of the starting gate. Indeed they did nobble him with the Steele Dossier, but just didn't press home their spying operation, probably because they thought to themselves that "this clown will never get elected."

I guess my point is that it is past time for defending the market system and its recipe for baking the cake of a world without poverty. If you don't get that, lefties and gentry, after all these years, you are a fool and a knave.

When the elite and the left make that elite guidance is needed to keep capitalism just and moderate I think that they are not quite lying but certainly covering their eyes to the reality of the market economy. Certainly any fair-minded judge has a right to feel that the eye-coverers have a vested interest in their blindness.

It is past time to be understanding. I think we should be on the attack, as in this from my Maxims page:

Crimes of the Left: Driving working class off the road to the middle class; misdirecting women in the public square; making war on middle class culture and values; taxing business and ordinary people and enslaving them to ruling-class crusades to save the world.

See, I think that the argument of Marx and subsequent lefties to teach the working class that "we wos robbed" is one of the great crimes of the ages. All in the interest of political power. And then teaching women to have "careers" rather than run the culture from their traditional base in the home, the famiy, and the neighborhood. Now we have the gentry class saying that we need less prosperity! Because Saving the Planet.

Here's a piece about how the Democrat judges are using blatant devices to stall and stymie anything that Trump proposes with tricks like "nationwide injunctions." I don't think that we should give them the benefit of the doubt, and allow that the poor dears just don't understand. If the Obama judges don't understand the monstrous injustice of their actions -- and I dare say they don't -- then they really don't understand law and don't understand that the whole point of law is to be a brake on ruling-class power.

It is far more likely that the Obama are deliberately blind to the injustice of their actions, because they don't want to know, because they have been carefully taught, because to seriously think about their political agenda, to seriously allow that others -- their political opponents -- might have a valid point of view, is not to be endured.

In other words it makes more sense to believe that our liberal friends of all kinds are merely Educated Gentry responding to ruling class anthems that appeal to their taste for ambition, their need for honor, and their consuming vanity. And that the don't have the education, the understanding, and the judgement to think any other way.

When you look at our liberal friends, let's face it, it's all about them. That's what Trump Derangement Syndrome is all about, the utter demolition of the decades old liberal comfort zone.

I mean, anyone with half a brain should have at least considered that 2016 was a change election, after two terms of Obama and certainly after 8 years of very slow growth out of the 2008 Recession, and given the rather limited political skills of Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton.

The very fact of the post-election hysteria was a dead giveway that the average Educated Gentry voter had been led by their leaders and the liberal media into a political La La Land. Because what grown-ups do after a failure is suck it in and determine to do better.

No, the only thing that will teach our Educated Gentry that they have a problem is nothing less than the school of hard knocks, of a 55-45 loss in 2020, a sold Republican Congress in both houses, several high profile criminal prosecutions of Obama administraion officials involved in the spying on the Trump campaign and the half-hearted coup attempt since the 2016 election.

Our Democratic friends have to be treated to the famous line that the coach delivers to his football team after a stinging loss: "Let's get back to basics. This is a football."

And nothing would communicate that something is completely out of joint than for a significant chunk of black and Hispanic voters to start voting like Commoners rather than Victims.

It's past time for merely defending the market system. It is past time for merely defending the American way of life. It's past time for assuming that the Educated Gentry will ever give the Commoners a fair shake. It's past time for cringing before the accusation of racism, sexist, homophobia.

It's time to go on the attack. For the simple reason that all sectors of American society have a right to be heard and to have their needs factored into the political auction.

It is not true that the market system is unjust. It is not true that Commoners are bigots and white supremacists. It is not true that women and gays and blacks and Hispanics and Muslims are helpless victims and need special privileges to get justice in America. And it is not true that Educated Gentry have a right to order the rest of America around.

Until that is conceded, things are going to continue to get pretty hot around here.

Could Chile's Collapse Happen Here?

Here's the thing. "Chile's Collapse Foretells America's If Dems Win." What in the world is wrong with Chile? I thought that since the days of th eevil Gen. Pinochet that Chile had set up a pretty decent free-market economy that was the envy of the rest of South America. But no. Things are not copacetic in Chile these days. Writes Axel Kaiser in the Wall Street Journal about Chile's very own Elizabeth Warren,

The economic pain started with the antimarket reforms of the previous government under Socialist President Michelle Bachelet, from 2014-18. Ms. Bachelet increased corporate taxes by 30%; signed a law banning the replacement of workers on strike, thereby dramatically increasing the costs of labor; increased public spending at three times the economic growth rate; and unleashed armies of regulatory bureaucrats on the private sector.

Of course, I dare say thaat the reduction in copper prices plays a role in this.

Now I am reading Deirdre McCloskey's breezy Why Liberalism Works and you would think, from her, that all good-thinking people know that liberalism, the 18th century Enlightenment one, not the 20th century US version, is the way to go.

But actually they don't. As we know. Because our Educated Gentry are all in favor of race politics, big government politics, gender politics, and canceling anyone that doesn't agree with their secular religion.All over the world.

Now maybe somewhere in Why Liberalism Works I dare say that McCloskey has some winning argument to persuade the Wokies to give it up. But I doubt it. If I had any doubt my mind was made up by the simple notions of Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill."

Yarvin writes that the present ruling class plays beautiful "anthems" -- no doubt on a magnificnt pipe organ -- to the Educated Gentry that appeals to its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

Yarvin's three layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients fits moderately well with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we moderns live in a status hierarchy of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates. When you are a creative the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is all tied up in your ability to do creative, original work.

So the problem with the notion that we should all relax and enjoy it because, Why Liberalism Works, is that there is no "ambition, honor, and vanity" for the Creative Educated Gentry in a minimum government society. Yes, yes. Everyone will be prosperous and happy. But what about the workers, er, gentry? What ambition is satisfied for the gentry? What honor will crown the gentry with fig leaves? What will appeal to their vanity (not that the gentry are vain, oh no)?

Let's take a smart ambitious woman like Elizabeth Warren. Here is a woman that has played the Gentry game to the hilt. She has converted herself from her Commoner origins into a rootin' tootin' Gentry mandarin. She got into Harvard Law as a professor by faking Native American heritage. As a graduate of Rutgers Law School she would never have got into Harvard without the Native American scam.

As a smart ambitious woman she knows instinctively that she is never going to have a top-fight political career humming the anthem of Why Liberalism Works to the Gentry. Or telling the Clients that the trouble with big government is that sooner or later you run out of Other Peoples' Money. No. She's running with her pedal to the metal of Big Government Über Alles.

Or take my Four Laws.

"Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices." Oh yeah? Whatabout the homeless? The children stuck in cages at the border? Let's worry about prices and profits next week.

"The administrative state cannot work because it doesn't have the bandwidth to direct the whole economy." Oh yeah? But whatabout the folks that don't have health insurance? Are we just going to sit here while people die?

"The regulatory state cannot work because of the law of 'regulatory capture.'" Oh yeah? So you are going to let monopolies make obscene profits for ever and ever?

"Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them." Oh yeah? So you are going to put little children back to work in the mines because the education system isn't perfect?

Now I think the problem is even bigger than that.

First is the notion I picked up from the best-seller The Millionaire Next Door. Suppose you are the wife of a businessman that made a nice little fortune with a string of dry-cleaning stores? Whatabout your children? So you send them out into the marketplace at age 18 and tell 'em to work it out? No you don't, because in the world of business many are called but few are chosen and you don't want your kids suffering through the agony of failed businesses and bankruptcy. No, what you do is send your kids to university and get them into nice regulated professions like medicine and law, or you buy them a nice pair of striped-pants for a career in the State Department, where you have to go through years and years of fees and 80-hour weeks before you get licensed to print money.

And then there is the basic fact of politics. First, the political leader is the tribal chief that protects you from pirates and plunderers. Second, the political leader recruits his warriors with the offer of loot and plunder. Got a solution to that age old fact of life?

So when are we going to rise above these wee problems? Next week? Next year? Next century?

Well, I offer hope. Three hundred years ago, people in the west were just beginning to worry about slavery. Then Christian evangelicals like William Wilberforce taught us to be ashamed and we abolished slavery. Then lefties created the biggest slave states in history, the sweeties. But the slave states have kinda dialed down the slavery thing because slavery does not pay, Mr. Gorbachev.

Three hundred years ago, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, the lower orders were indeed regarded by all respectable gentry people as rubbish. And if white people weren't slaves, there were plenty of them that were indentured servants. But now they are Commoners. Although the gentry still sneers at them as racist sexist homophobes and deplorables. And along comes Donald Trump to champion the Commoners.

But the problem is that a world with less government and less Studies degrees and less moral lecturing about toxic masculinity and white supremacy is also a world in which the Educated Gentry has less scope for its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

You think that the proud Educated Gentry is going to put up with a world that crimps their style? In fact, as I argue in my Great Reaction series, the Educated Gentry seems determined to take us back to the past, with socialism as a return to slavery, the welfare state as a return to feudalism, identity politics as a return to tribalism, and all the rest of it.

Me neither.

So could the Dems screw the place up like Chile? Of course they could. And they'd blame "greedy bankers" and white supremacists all the way to the guillotine.

That's why I think that a rude crude rootin' tweetin' bigot like Donald Trump who is focusing his program on the needs of the Commoners is a much better prospect than any of the big-government anti-deplorable Democrats.

"Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry

In her magnificent "Bourgeois Era" books Deirdre McCloskey celebrates the achievements of the western bourgeoisie, and I have written about it. As La Wik says, the bourgeoisie, contrary to its self-advertisement as "prudence only" actually practiced all the Seven Virtues. And its appetite for innovation provoked the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, from $3 per person per day to $100 per person per day. In today's dollars.

In her new book, Why Liberalism Works: How true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all, McCloskey advertises an inclusive libertarianism, and proposes to reclaim the word "liberal" from the progressives.

McCloskey argues for "the continuing desirability of a liberalism conceived in the eighteenth century" and how it has created good things like "economic success" the "arts and sciences" plus "its kindness, toleration, its inclusiveness, its cosmopolitanism, and especially its massive liberation of... people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern." Then there are the critics.

Progressives and conservatives and populists retort that liberalism and its rhetoric also explain numerous alleged evils, such as the reduction of everything to money and markets or the loss of community and God of the calamity of immigration by non-whites and non-Christians. But they are mistaken.

Twenty years ago and more I might have agreed with her. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop, who wrote:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

"Inadequate?" Everything I believed? But what does that mean? At the time I was perfectly happy with the world view of the British Enlightenment. And yet. For one thing didn't German thought lead directly to Nazism?

So I gradually embarked on the study of the Germans. For instance, Kant. He famously developed his philosophy from problems in Hume, especially Hume's showing that there is no warrant for our faith in cause and effect. And so Kant proposed that, contrary to the Newtonian era's confidence in matter and mechanics, we do not know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances, and we construct a world view from information coming in through our senses. Then there were the German Romantics that argued that we know directly that there is more to life than facts and reason. That's what all those Romantic paintings of a young German looking out into a prospect of magnificent nature were about.

Then there was Hegel (that McCloskey dismisses as an inspiration for authoritarianism and national-socialism). Does anyone understand Hegel? I certainly don't. But I rather like his Master and Slave analysis, which suggests that the Master is not exactly master, and the Slave not exactly helpless. And his notion of dialectic proposes that we humans proceed by lurching from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, rinse and repeat.

Then there was German physics that drove the relativity-quantum mechanics revolution. What was that all about?

And Freud-Jung and the mostly German developmental psychologists that invented modern psychology that, amongst other things, reminds us that our fabled rational minds sit on top of an undiscovered country of the unconscious. And it may be that our conscious mind is just a fake image projected like a movie from the unconscious to make us feel good.

Now, I reckon that out of all this came my reductive Three Peoples theory that owes a lot to the developmentalists. And then there is Curtis Yarvin's three-layer picture of modern society as Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

So tell me "Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Commoners. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Clients.

See, I believe with McCloskey that liberalism and the discoveries about how markets work for all of us and have driven the Great Enrichment are true -- as far as anything can be true, given that as far back as Nietzsche we have to understand that our understanding of the world are remarkably constrained by, say, the need of every living thing to stay alive when danger strikes.

The fundamental world view of my People of the Subordinate Self and Yarvin's Clients is that to survive in this world you have to have a patron, a powerful man that can protect you from a cruel world. How does McCloskey's liberalism speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Responsible Self and Yarvin's Commoners is to accept that it is your job to get on in the world, to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, but that in return you expect some sort of protection from the rulers. How does McCloskey speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry is that life is a creative project and a fine thing it is: it is their creative innovation that gave us the Great Enrichment. But the Gentry also seem to believe that the scope for their creativity should be almost limitless and that the plebs should not have the right to oppose their brilliant ideas. Yes, of course, McCloskey is a creative and naturally thinks that creatives should rule the world with "kindness... toleration... inclusiveness... cosmopolitanism" and so forth. But whatabout the people that experience the "kindness" etc. as mere patronizing bossiness?

I call my Three Peoples theory "reductive" partly out of irony, because of course all human knowledge is reductive. Nietzsche: "a priori 'truths' are for me -- provisional assumptions" Or this:

Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time), that concept is reduced to the formulas of mathematics -- with which as one must emphasize again and again, nothing is ever comprehended, but rather designated and distorted. Will to Power §554.

The mistake of the original 18th century liberals was to assume that everyone would identify with the creative bourgeois ethos. And that ethos is certainly my culture and feels comfortable to me.

But humans are not like that. We humans are social animals that find safety and survival in groupish behavior and instincts. Most humans down the ages, I think, experienced themselves as subordinates in the hierarchy; they submitted to power to enjoy the benefits and safety of being in a community.

And, of course, one of the basic facts of life was that land was life. You, or your group, had to possess food-yielding land, or else. So you had to belong to a group.

Now I think that modern socialism as a prescription for groupishness is a disaster. But clearly there are a lot of people that think it delivers community and safety.

I notice that everyone these days is shocked, shocked by slavery. I ask, instead, why has slavery become, in the last centuries, a scandal? What changed?

I even think I get the Death of God. It is because modern Gentry believe that they are the creators. No God needed.

So I think that the modern problem is how to deal with the fact that people have different ideas of community, of work, of wealth, of rules, of morality. And the place to start, to be able to look at the world from different perspectives, I believe, is with a reductive Three Peoples or three layers theory.

How to make a better world that subordinate Clients will appreciate?

How to make a better world that reponsible Commoners will appreciate?

How to make a better world that creative Gentry will appreciate?

It's a problem!

We are not that interested in power

I admit, I was frustrated with Deirdre N. McCloskey’s Bourgeois Equality. Five years and more since her excellent Bourgeois Dignity I was expecting something to wrap up her Bourgeois Trilogy with a bang.
But she already said it all before, when arguing that the bourgeoisie brought something new into the world, a rhetoric that celebrated the dignity of ordinary people, innovation, and the spirit of “having a go.”

But I admit that the disappointment forced me to do Heidegger’s thing of “what is called thinking.”
What is it about us, the bourgeoisie, the people that I call the People of the Responsible Self that encapsulated what McCloskey has been saying about the bourgeoisie, its virtues, its dignity, its equality? And then, Alger-Hiss-like, cudgeling my brain, I got it.

The point about the bourgeoisie, the middle class, the middling sort of person, is that we are not that interested in power.

And that is a very big thing. Because if you are not that interested in power then you can do things like surrender to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. You can say that you will inquire first how you can contribute to the world before you demand from it you cut, your share. And in that modest submission to the opinions of others develops the whole flowering of McCloskey’s Great Enrichment, the 200 year progress in per-capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day and very likely more. There has been nothing like it in human history ever.

You can describe the people of the Responsible Self any way you like, but I like the notion of Robert Bellah that this kind of person emerged in the Axial Age when religion developed the idea that individual humans could understand the world and could therefore do something about it. And then, of course, they ought to do something about it.

How are we to symbolize this Person of the Responsible Self; who is its poster boy?

Thank you, senator, I can help you with that. But I am afraid that the poster boy is not a boy, but a girl. The poster girl of the People of the Responsible Self is Denise Baudu, heroine of Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, translated in English as The Ladies Paradise and available on Netflix as The Paradise. (But beware: The Paradise in Netflix is a BBC production and so it completely misses the point of Au Bonheur des Dames in exactly the way you would expect from a bunch of North London luvvies.)

Zola’s Denise Baudu arrives as a 20-year-old from Normandy, appearing on her uncle’s doorstep in Paris one morning in the 1860s, orphaned, with her two younger brothers in tow. But her uncle can’t help her because his mom-and-pop drapery business is in the toilet on account of the monster across the street, the growing innovative department store, Au Bonheur des Dames, run by Monsieur Octave Mouret, who has a genius for predicting what the ladies will adore.

OK. If Denise can’t work at her uncle’s shop she’ll work across the street for the monster, and so she does, thin and wan and chétive and casually abused by her boss and co-workers. She goes to work because, after all, Denise must be responsible and provide for her little brother Pépé and bail out her improvident apprentice brother Jean in his frequent bouts of girl trouble.

This being a novel, the boss of The Bonheur takes a shine to Denise in spite of her shyness and clumsiness, and he is right, for as she starts to find her sealegs in the ocean of the Bonheur she turns out to be an excellent vendeuse and really pretty. The day comes when she gets a summons to dinner with Mouret, at which, the according to lore, the invited vendeuse is herself to be the dessert. Only Denise is the perfect bourgeoise, a poster girl for the People of the Responsible Self. She refuses to become the mistress of the boss. She has responsibilities, brothers to provide for. This decision rocks the Bonheur to its foundations. She did what? It cannot be that she refuses the gifts and blandishments of M. Mouret on account of her honor and virtue; it must be her cunning that causes her to refuse the boss’s summons. Denise also rocks M. Mouret to his foundations; her consistent refusal haunts him. Again and again he propositions her, but the answer is always non, toujours non. Are you in love with someone, he demands? Yes, but… Finally she can’t take it any more and quits so she can take her brother and his new wife off to Normandy for a month of honeymoon. And then, on her last day at work, Mouret breaks down and offers to marry her. Oh no, says Denise, she cannot marry because she must care for her brothers. OK, sobs Mouret -- he is really a wreck at this point -- I give up: go to the man you love. So finally we get to the dénouement, as Denise breaks down and rushes into his arms. “Oh monsieur Mouret, c’est vous que j’aime,” she says, sobbing on his neck. Cue wedding bells and everyone lives happily ever after.

Now of course Denise Baudu is a woman so perfect that she never could have lived on this earth. She is so completely and devotedly responsible that she is super-human. But that’s what makes her a poster girl of the People of the Responsible Self. And she is not interested in power. Not at all.

Now, the rest of us are not perfect Paragons of the Responsible Self. So we live in a less exalted realm than a Zola novel. It can only be said of us that we are not that interested in power. Still, that is something.

But our liberal friends, and even more so their pas d’ennemis à gauche, they really are interested in power. In fact they believe in power: political power, cultural power, artistic power, administrative power, naming and shaming power, their power. It doesn’t matter whether they are Enlightenment rationalists, or Romantic artists, or Marxists, or modernists that believe in an overarching meta-narrative or postmodernists that swear on a stack of Power/Knowledge that they abjure all meta-narrative and hegemonies over the “other.” Rubbish. They all believe in power, political power. It is their religion.

But they are wrong. As the bacon billboard might have said: if you believe in power, YOU ARE WRONG.

The whole point about the bourgeois era is the astonishing discovery that if you ease up on the clunking fist of political power, if you allow moderate innovation and keep the established interests from killing innovation in its cradle, if you allow the middling sort of person to “have a go” then, if all the stars are in alignment, some nobody will invent a steam engine to pump out mines, another nobody will invent a machine spinner. Some clerk will develop the oil industry, some telegraph messenger will develop the steel industry, a couple of rural yahoos will invent the airplane, a mechanic will decide to assemble cars on an assembly line. Some rich kid will drop out of Harvard and sell another guy’s PC operating system to IBM. And so on. A Great Enrichment from $3 per day to $100 per day. All that without the vital and indispensable clunking fist of political power. “Inconceivable,” as the son of an iconic New Yorker editor gets to say again and again in The Princess Bride. Who would have thunk it?

But I have a question. I thought we were all postmodernists now. I thought that the whole point of the post-modern turn was the turn away from hegemony and domination of the single answer, the meta-narrative. It was supposed to liberate the “other:” women, minorities, LGBT, and formerly colonialized peoples.

So how come the first thing that gays did when they got “marriage equality”was to beat up on Christian bakers and pizza parlors if they were all postmodernists that would never “other”anyone? How come the crazed lefty Twitter mobs? How come the name-and-shame postmodern university?

How come Obamacare? Surely, in the postmodern era, with its new-found declaration against the one rational solution, the first thing you say is that the Single Payer health care idea is a crock. Because it is the one single solution, and that cannot be in the non meta-narrative society. There must be a diversity of health care provision to allow diverse communities to approach health care in their own way. How come our Democratic friends have not proposed to privatize Social Security because, of course, it is rubbish to insist that all lifestyes should follow a single Fordist trajectory of education, then work, then retirement. Suppose you are a lesbian quilter on your third “marriage equality” marriage? What does the Fordist monopoly government retirement program mean to you? Instead President Obama has proposed a unilateral increase in Social Security benefits. How would he know? Does he have an inside track on the one true answer to retirement provision? Or is he just a power-crazed politician pandering for votes? And is then the postmodern turn nothing but a lie, not merely a lie that our liberal friends have told us but a lie they have told themselves and ended up believing?

I think you know the answer to that.

It really is appropriate that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic candidate for president this year. Because the Democratic Party, like its liberal culture, has descended into an endless swamp of lies. And so the Democrats, true to their last, have nominated a candidate that was first fired for lying when she was a young lawyer on the Watergate committee in the 1970s. Then she lied about cattle futures. Then she lied about the White House travel office. Then she lied about Whitewater. Then she lied to cover up her husband’s career of serial sexual harassment, telling us that the real story was a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Dear God, if only! But there’s a problem. We righties are not that interested in power. So we really wouldn’t know how to create a little conspiracy, let alone one so vast… And now she is lying about her stupid e-mail server, a truly Talleyrand moment that is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.
\
Up to now, I have been dealing with the importance of the bourgeois ethos, we are not that interested in power, at the macro level of rich kids wanting to get into activism and politicians wanted to impose a top-down one-size-fits-all administrative cramdown on health-care, Christian bakers, what have you. But what does this mean to you and me, down on the street, where ordinary people try to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. I will tell you.

The gospel of we are not that interested in power requires of us a very small thing. It is that when things go against us in the normal course of life, we do not go to government and demand that government save our job by hobbling the innovators that are putting us out of a job. Instead the gospel asks us to be true to our last as People of the Responsible Self. It asks us, in the words of British politician Norman Tebbit, to get on our bike and take the loss and do the responsible thing and overcome our fear and disappointment and go and find something else to do that can provide a service that other people are willing to pay for.

This may be a very small thing, but it is very hard thing for people to do. We know that because of the intersection of the Trump phenomenon and the sudden discovery by the social-science experts that the white working class is dying of despair.

Of course, liberals are to blame for the despair of the working class as well as everything else. It was they that told the working class that they were horribly exploited, they that comforted the working class with a mattress of wage-and-hour laws, they that saddled the white working class with a boatload of payroll taxes payable in the future with wonderful entitlement benefits, they that helped the white working class infect their employers with the economic parasite called the labor union, that ends up killing its host, as well-ordered parasites in Nature do not do, they that turned on the white working class as racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers in the 1970s.

Back in the years of the French Revolution, Condorcet wrote that “a good law must be good for everyone.” That was easy to say, but hard to realize. We know better now, and so in the light of modern experience I propose the following catchphrase to check anyone proposing a new program: Government is Injustice. Of course, not all government is injustice, and occasionally a government does pass a good law that is good for everyone. Most of the time, alas, governments pass laws to reward their supporters, and the rest of the people, on the receiving end of the new law experience it as the clunking fist of injustice. And it stands to reason that the more government you have the more people are going to be on the receiving end of its taxes, its regulations, its men with guns, and will experience government as injustice directed particularly and with malice aforethought against them.

This truth is understood, I think, in the basic position of the postmodernist turn. No meta-narratives. No othering. The logic of the postmodernists would lead them to think that government action would often result in negative results for the “others.” And, moreover, if government power is deployed in the interest of the "others" then the ordinary "us" will get othered. And so the hills are alive with the sound of rage. So what went wrong?

What went wrong is that, for everyone except the bourgeoisie and the People of the Responsible Self who are not that interested in power, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

You can see where I am going with this. I am saying that the problem with our liberal friends is that they are interested in power. And like all regimes only interested in power, starting with the Soviet and Maoist disasters, and continuing with the Nazi disaster and all the other stupid human sacrifices to the god of power in our time, power ends in asphyxiation and strangulation, and not infrequently a pile of skulls. There is a simple reason for this, and it issues from the basic problem with a society dominated by power. It cannot adapt, and no wonder. The whole point of government is to stop change. The particular change that government is designed to sop is the attack on the homeland by foreign enemies. That is why government has the right and the power to mobilize the populace to fight the enemy, foreign or domestic, whether the people are a village, a tribe, a feudal realm or a nation state. In such an existential Fight to the Death all the populace must be enrolled in the armed forces or the war machine to fight the enemy and defeat him.

That is all very well, but what about the instances when the homeland is not facing an existential threat, but merely the disruption from some new technical innovation? This is the rub. Governments do not stop at fighting the change imposed by invaders and pillagers and plunderers; they also like to fight against any change, social or economic or cultural, that threatens their power and the status of their supporters. They find it hard to differentiate between real existential perils and mere threats to their regime supporters.

All this is, as Hegel says, about the Fight to the Death. Either you Fight to the Death or you will submit to Work as a Slave. That is what awaits the nation that does not repel the invader. So who would be a Slave and submit to the power of the Master?

Well, we all do, because we are all enslaved to the Masters of the ruling class. But all is not lost, because through Work we learn to overcome Nature, while the Master sits in his castle and learns nothing except more Fighting.

Of course, Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic is fanciful in the extreme. But Hegel is at least valuing the Work of the Slave above the Mastery of the Master, just as Deirdre McCloskey teaches us to value the virtues and the dignity of work celebrated by the middling sort of people, the People of the Responsible Self.

Eventually the world of Work finds a way to overcome the option of the Fight to the Death or Slavery. Eventually the two opponents of the Fight to the Death learn to replace it and Mastery and Slavery with mutual recognition. And in the overcoming, something happens. The supremacy of power begins to wane.

In the world of the Fight to the Death the only thing is power. But in the world of Work there is the possibility of recognition and cooperation. And in that world, it is possible to live by not being that interested in power.

Our liberal friends, alas, are primitives; they are still living in the old world of the Fight to the Death. That is what their sacraments of "peaceful protest" and "armed resistance" are all about, whether we are talking about Marxist liberals, modernist liberals or postmodern liberals. The only thing that matters to them is to be the Master, der Herr. And the rest of us are Slaves, die Knechte, who must submit to the Master and learn to Work, to obey the wage-and-hour laws and pay our payroll taxes. Because power is everything. And that goes for everyone, patriarchs, privileged whites, and victimized "others."

But we, the People of the Responsible Self, have a dream. We dream that one day the world will be peopled by humans who are not that interested in power. We do not imagine a fantasy world, totally emancipated and liberated, in which power has been banished and surmounted by a world of perfect responsibility and community. We do not believe, either, that there will ever be a world of perfect Denise Baudus, so utterly devoted to responsibility as to even deny themselves the joys of love until the last page. We do not believe in a Heaven on Earth.

We just think that things would be a lot better for humans if more of us were not that interested in power.

The Paradox of Power and Not-so-Power

In the last week or so, while cudgeling my brain, like an Alger Hiss, over the newly published Bourgeois Equality by Deirdre McCloskey, I used my dissatisfaction with its 787 pages to come up with a new catchphrase.

I asserted that the notion that ties the bourgeois experience together -- its rhetoric, its innovation, its having-a-go -- is that the middle class is not that interested in power.

The "post-1848 clerisy" -- liberals and progressives and lefties --  are very interested in power, and especially political power. The Judgment of Marx in 1848 was that the economic power of the bourgeoisie, upon which rested the superstructure of its political power, could only be reduced by a countervailing political power organized by a revolutionary avant-garde of chaps like him. Liberals and progressives and lefties have not changed their opinion since.

For the left, the first and last and only way to change the world is through politics.

The counter argument, proposed down the ages, is that while political power has its moments, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- not forgetting the Key to All Mythologies -- is the limitation of political power.

Deirdre McCloskey makes this clear in her oft-repeated assertion that the last 200 years has seen a Great Enrichment in per-capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day wherever capitalism -- or innovation or "trade-tested betterment" or "having a go" -- was allowed to germinate and grow by the local political power structure. And there has been nothing like it before in history. Ever.

Her point is that the norm in human history is that the political powers-that-be have tended always to smother any signs of innovation in their cradles. That's because innovation and Schumpeter's "creative destruction" always threatens the status quo and the established interests, the regime supporters that get rewards for their support from the ruling class. And really, what is the difference between innovation and rebellion, from the point of view of the ruling class and its regime supporters?

The point is that enrichment is only possible when the political class takes its clunking fist off the brow of labor and allows it to innovate and creatively destroy the status quo. The more the ruling class believes in power the less it is likely to allow innovators and have-a-goers to innovate and have a go (and by the way, the less that the economy will throw off lovely lucre and tax revenue to increase the power of the state). The opposite is also true. The more a ruling class is not that interested in power and the more that it allows innovators and have-a-goers to have a go, the more enrichment will occur (and, by the way, the more that the enrichment will throw off lovely lucre and tax revenue to increase the power of the state).

Here we see the fundamental error that the "post-1848 clerisy" has been living for the last 170 years. The answer to the problem of injustice is not government power, because government is injustice. The answer to the problem of poverty is not yet another Poor Law, because the best solution to poverty is more enrichment from innovation and having-a-go.

Of course, we should not be so hard on the "post-1848 clerisy." They are not the only people that think the solution is power. Almost anyone that gets into politics ends up following the sterile road of power. Politics is about power, and it is a contradiction in terms to run for office and political power by promising to reduce the incidence of political power. Donald Trump is proposing to use the power of government to teach the Chinese and the Mexicans a lesson. His opponents in the Democratic Party are proposing the usual list of new expansions of government power to teach the One Percent a lesson.

And when we turn to the American people they always call for politicians to "do something" rather than "undo something."

It is, of course, a paradox that in order to promote enrichment the ruling class needs to lighten up on political power. It also makes complete sense.

The best way to increase the power and scope of the human experience is that you are not that interested in power.

McCloskey Again: The Bourgeoisie is not That Interested In Power

I've been blogging and writing about Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality for the last week. It was a disappointment to me because it didn't take the argument beyond The Bourgeois Virtues  and Bourgeois Dignity.

McCloskey's big idea is that the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years, from $3 per day to $100 per day, did not come from capital accumulation and/or institutions but from rhetoric. People started to dignify the occupation of trader and innovator and refrain from smothering innovations in their cradles. And the result was what we see around us.

But I wanted something more, and I didn't get it. So I blogged my complaint here and then wrote about it in today's American Thinker piece: "Attention Deirdre McCloskey."

But the McCloskey dead end forced me to think. What is it about the bourgeoisie, you and me, that McCloskey is missing? And then I got it.

The bourgeoisie is just not that interested in power.

So I wrote in the AT piece:

When you are not that interested in power, you find that the whole world opens up to you. Now the way is clear to get into “virtue” and “create a rhetoric” to “dignify” innovation and “having a go,” and watch the Great Enrichment sweep across the world. Now the way is clear to free the slaves and enfranchise the working class, and even indulge upper-class women and sexual adventurers in their shallow enthusiasms and conceits. All because you are not that interested in power.

All down the ages, rulers have been obsessed with power. In Nicholas Wade's memorable words: "men like power and will seize it if they can." And so, down the ages, men have been at each others' throats, and mankind has been half throttled.

But what if a race of men arose that were not that interested in power? They would be men -- and women -- that did not feel the need to slip the stiletto in the other guy's ribs first, just to be on the safe side. They might be men that lived according to the iterated Prisoners Dilemma, and believed that you generally offer trust and reciprocity to other people, on principle. But if they show they are untrustworthy then you stop dealing with them right now. This new race might be men that thought about what they could offer to the world before they started to think about what they wanted from the world. They might be men that surrendered to the verdict of the market and did not, like union workers and crony capitalists, go running to the government for a sweet use of force whenever things went against them. They might find, to their amazement, that such behavior would result in a Great Enrichment, as per McCloskey, that increased per capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day in 200 years while also increasing human population from one billion souls to seven billion souls.

Then we get to understand the fatal mistake that our liberal and lefty friends have made. They think that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is power. Power to the people. Power to educated evolved people like us. Power to government. Power to the experts. Power to peaceful protesters. Power to traditionally marginalized groups. Power to suppressed voices. Power to silence "hate speech." And so on.

And it is not just wrong. It is folly. Worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

You can see where this faith in power comes from. It comes from Nicholas Wade's words, that men like power and will seize it if they can. It seems to be the answer to everything and maybe it was in the old hunter-gatherer days. If you want food, you better grab it before someone else gets it. If you want to eat you must defend your territory, to the last man.

But the market system changes all that. Because all of a sudden, things aren't a question of life and death, of kill or be killed. Now everything is negotiable. Now the question is what you can make that other people want to buy. Maybe it is a product, maybe it is a skill. Maybe it is just labor.

Hegel in his dialectic of Master and Slave has a parallel analysis. When two men meet in the wilderness, it is a question of kill or be killed, a Fight to the Death, unless one of the combatants surrenders and becomes a Slave. What humiliation! And yet it is the Slave that benefits from the relationship, because he learns how to master Nature in his Work for the Master, and then he begins to desire freedom. Yet that will be achieved not by another fight to the death, but by getting the Master to recognize him, the Slave, as another person, not just as a subordinate Slave.

Our lefty friends, unfortunately, cannot seem to escape from the dead end of Mastery. They must be Masters, that is all.

We are seeing, at this very moment, the problem with Mastery. Nicolás Maduro is Master of Venezuela, and a lot of good it is doing him and the Venezuelans.

Imagine what Venezuela and even the United States could become if the rulers and their supporters just weren't that interested in power.

Just like the bourgeoisie.

McCloskey Again: Why Not Call The Book "Bourgeois Rhetoric?"

Deirdre McCloskey has finished her magnum opus Bourgeois Trilogy with Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. And now I've finished the book, all 787 pages.

Start over: Conservatism's Big Problem.

I'm afraid I have a problem. What was the point of the third volume? McCloskey has said it all already. Here is how I understood her message five years ago after Volume Two hit the stores, in answer to the question What did it? What made the Bourgeois Era?

The key thing that changed, according to McCloskey, was not technological change, but a cultural, rhetorical change. About three hundred years ago, around the North Sea, societies started to respect the commercial bourgeoisie and the things that it did. It allowed, for the first time, the bourgeoisie to do what comes naturally, to innovate and change things.

I already went through saying that I didn't think she had anything new to say a couple of days ago. But I hadn't quite finished the book, all 787 pages, back then.

So when I got to the end of the book, I read that the Bourgeois Revaluation "came out of a rhetoric that would, and will, enrich the world." You mean, just like she said back in 2010 in Bourgeois Dignity?

OK. So why not call the book "Bourgeois Rhetoric: How I am right and the Guys That Say It Was Capital or Institutions are Wrong." Because that's what the book is all about, picking fights with other academics and going into the long grass with the Oxford English Dictionary to show when "innovation" ceased being a pejorative.

I tell you what I am looking forward to. I am looking forward to the day when racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe is no longer a liberal pejorative, but a pathetic joke.

McCloskey invokes Edmund Burke as an enemy of innovation, which I regard as a bit of a low blow, perhaps intended to hit the nostaglic Russell Kirk. Burke wasn't opposed to innovation so much as opposed to "sophisters, economists, and calculators," the Newtonian mechanics of materialism. As an opponent of mechanism and materialism he was on McCloskey's side. And his life centered around four great campaigns that fit right into the Bourgeois culture: for Catholic emancipation in Ireland for which he lost his seat in Parliament representing the slave port of Bristol; for the anathematization of the plundering imperialist Warren Hastings; for letting the North American colonies go their own way; and for predicting that the French Revolution would end in the gallows. Nothing very innovative there, of course, just Russell Kirk presiding as a loving lord over his neo-feudal estate at Piety Hill.

Throughout the book McCloskey is likes to equate right wing with left wing opposition to her "trade-tested betterment." I suppose there are righties down the last two centuries that have pushed against the Great Enrichment, chaps like Carlyle and, in the last century, Russell Kirk of Mecosta, Michigan. But their influence has been minuscule compared with the influence of McCloskey's "post 1848 clerisy," the Left. To keep asserting "balance" by hitting the right and left equally is distracting, and pandering to the New York Times set ("My people" in The Bourgeois Virtues).

And here are some more problems that I have with McCloskey. She represents Zola's Germinal as anti-capitalist. So it is, perhaps, in a superficial reading. But in Germinal Zola humanizes the bourgeois owners of the coal mine who know and hate that they are hurting the miners. But prices are down, so what can they do? And Étienne, the community organizer that leads the miners in the strike that destroys their livelihood, leaves the miners at the end of the book and sets off for his next community organizing gig in another town. Did Zola nail the nascent left-wing "activism" culture or what? Maybe I am reading too much into it, for after all, Zola must know that bashing the bosses sells books.

In The Ladies Paradise (now a BBC TV series) McCloskey is equivocal, quoting a bit of anti-Semitism that may or may not come from Zola himself. The hero, M. Mouret, is a counter-jumper brimming with innovative ideas for bringing retailing into the 19th century and inventing that ladies' paradise, the big department store. Among other things, Mouret learns how to use the haute bourgeoisie, including a a rich-bitch mistress and a financier, to grow his business. The heroine, Denise, is the compleat bourgeoise, utterly principled and virtuous in the full seven virtues celebrated by McCloskey in The Bourgeois Virtues. McCloskey equivocates, but I experience The Ladies Paradise as a celebration of innovation and everything bourgeois even as it does not shrink from showing the miseries of the small shopkeepers, that Mouret sees as fools, driven to bankruptcy by the innovations of the big department store.

Another thing. The aristocracy 500 years ago was starting to move away from Hegel's pure Herrschaft. In England, once the Tudors had stripped them of their castles and their private armies, the aristocrats got interested in "improvement," making money by improving their agricultural estates and advancing the agricultural revolution that "hurled" the peasants off the land. So, by 1600 at the latest the landed warriors started to compete in the market economy for the wealth they needed to win at competitive social events in the courts of the absolute monarchs. So the rise of the bourgeoisie did not take place in a vacuum. The king's monopoly on armies meant that the warrior class had to diversify away from war-only. And it did.

But enough of cavil and calumny.

Even though Bourgeois Equality is heavy reading, and does not advance the narrative beyond the first two books, it does not subtract from McCloskey's overall achievement. The Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, that has brought each individual from $3 per day to $100 per day and more, is a stunning achievement, never seen before in history, and the bourgeoisie did it. This astonishing and unique event rests on bourgeois virtues and the culture of the bourgeoisie, that people should have a go at innovation and improvement, and that the established interests should not stand in their way, at least not much. That is something that needs to be said, over and over again, and McCloskey is not too shy to do it.

But what I was hoping for, as I read Bourgeois Equality and its occasional swipe at the lefty "post 1848 clerisy," was an analysis of the clerisy, some theory or depth of understanding that could help us all make sense of the left's negativism and its war on "trade tested betterment." I didn't find that, so I am still pushing my Three Peoples theory, with the People of the Creative Self descending into violence and compulsion to exercise their taste for creativity.

You see, if you have a yen to be creative you have two options. You can innovate and submit your innovation to the trade-testing of the market. Or you can declare war on society and force it to bend to your brilliant ideas. There are two ways to get to Scotland, the high road and the low road. The "post-1848 clerisy," the People of the Creative Self, chose the low road, and for sure, they got to Scotland before ye. But millions of people have suffered and died for their sins by the bonny banks of Loch Lomond.

McCloskey Again: 787 Pages For What?

The third volume of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Trilogy is out, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, all 787 pages of it.

And I am left wondering: what exactly is new in the third volume that had not been thoroughly thrashed out in the first two volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity?

So I went back through my McCloskey Week blogs of 2010 to see what I had understood from reading the first two volumes.

OK, so the first volume was all about The Bourgeois Virtues, that, whatever the bourgeoisie says, it is not a Prudence Only operation, but a culture that embraces all the virtues, the four classical virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Courage, and the three Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love.

There is a lot of stuff in Bourgeois Equality about the limitations of Prudence Only, and a restatement of the need for all the virtues. Frequently.

The second volume was Bourgeois Dignity. Here McCloskey pointed out that the rise of the bourgeoisie coincided with the upvaluing of the middle class and the things that it did.

People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues exercised far from the traditional places of honor [in religion, politics, and war].

Instead people started to approve of innovation, at least until the clerisy started to badmouth it. And so we got the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years from $3 per day per person to $100 per day per person, and more.

So what is left to say in Volume Three, Bourgeois Equality? I think what is left is to lay down a thundering World War I artillery barrage to assert without limit that McCloskey's ideas about the rise of bourgeois virtue and bourgeois dignity are right and everyone else's ideas about accumulation, about technology, about science, about capital markets, is wrong.

What is new is that McCloskey has come up with a new catchphrase to replace "capitalism," which has been a leftist pejorative at least since 1848. She calls our current way of life "trade-tested betterment." She means by that bourgeois entrepreneurs coming up with innovative ideas for betterment, such as, oh, smartphones, and then submitting them to the test of the market.

The villains of Bourgeois Equality are the people of the "clerisy." But the clerisy were marked out already in The Bourgeois Virtues, as the "opinion makers and opinion takers... readers of The New York Times...  book readers... My people. Like me."

So I guess that explains the gratuitous swipes at conservatives as equally to blame for standing in the way of "trade tested betterment" as the post-1848 clerisy. You gotta throw some red meat out to the lefty intelligentsia or they won't read to the end.

But does it work? The New York Times reviewed The Bourgeois Virtues, damning it with faint praise. But Bourgeois Dignity didn't rate a review. However, The Wall Street Journal gave McCloskey a chance to write up Bourgeois Equality last weekend, so that's all right.

I get an eerie feeling, reading Bourgeois Equality, because McCloskey seems to have read the same books that I have. She's all over the Dutch for inventing the modern economy; she's all over the Dutch invasion of Britain in 1688. She takes a strong line against Karl Polanyi and his Great Transformation. She admits coming late to Willa Cather, as I did, and she's dipped into Charles Taylor, as I have.

But she seems to miss out on Hegel. Hey kids. I am talking about Hegel's Master and Slave (Herr und Knecht) thingy from his Phenomenology of Spirit, which I am reading from Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. The big point of the Master and Slave thingy, in my view, is the valorizing of work. The Master, according to Hegel, who wins the Fight to the Death, appropriates the work of the Slave, and lives a life of leisure. But the Slave, forced to work for the Master, learns to transform the world by his work, transforms what is given, and transcends himself and learns about personal autonomy. In other words, the Slave, through his work for another, learns to value freedom and autonomy and learns how to transform the world by his work. He is on the way to becoming a true bourgeois.

Of course, in the real world, men go to work not because they lost the Fight to the Death with the Master but because, as Willa Cather writes in The Professor's House, when a man is "very much in love and must marry at once" he needs a job. It is not the Master that enslaves him and puts him to work but his love for Lillian.

There is not a word of this in McCloskey, and this is a scandal. How is it that I, a mere racist, sexist, bigoted homophobe conservative, can find out that every serious lefty is supposed to have read Kojève and that I should too so that I can understand the mind of the left and at this very moment am reading it faithfully and learning it and inwardly digesting it while shooting star McCloskey completely missed out on it?

I guess it is back to the drawing boards for McCloskey, to get started on Volume Four.

Meanwhile, I am coming up to the last section of Bourgeois Equality and hoping that it will be a Battle of Kursk barrage on the "clerisy." But who knows?

McCloskey Wrapup: Big Fact vs. Big Mistake

The great theme that runs through Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Cycle thus far--in The Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity--is the Great Fact. In the past two centuries the prosperity of the average human has risen from a life at $1-$3 per day to the present $30-$137 per day in constant dollars. For the average human, the difference is at least an order of magnitude. If you isolate on the fortunate United States and you account for improvement in products and services, e.g., airplane travel, the difference is two orders of magnitude, meaning that the average person swings 100 times the products and services that his ancestor enjoyed two centuries ago. This has never happened before in history. Never.

Back to start: Conservatism's Big Problem.

Now you would think that everyone would be sitting back gob-smacked, as the Limeys say, but in fact they are not. In fact just about everyone is pretty peeved about the whole thing, from conservatives that mourn the corruption of manners to Marxians--McCloskey prefers "marxoid"--insisting that the whole thing has been achieved on the backs of the workers. But for me the most telling objection to the Great Fact is the responsible prediction that McCloskey extracts in Bourgeois Dignity from John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy. Call it the Big Mistake.

Mill again: "It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution, of which one indispensable means is a stricter restraint on population."(p.384)

Here we see the foundation of the 20th century and its centralized administrative state, supervised by a wise and disinterested educated elite. Here we see a forthright manifesto of force--benevolent, sensible, avuncular force, of course, but force nonetheless. Mill was saying that the only way to extend the benefits of the industrial revolution to the poor was by force, and the only way to prevent a population explosion was by force.

And Mill was wrong. Dead wrong. At the moment he was writing a nobody of the name John D. Rockefeller was just starting to reduce the cost of illuminating oil from 80 cents per gallon to 8 cents, and a nobody of the name of Andrew Carnegie was about to reduce the price of steel by two-thirds. Not to mention that in 1871 a chap called Orville Wright was born in Ohio. Not to mention that in 1870-71 about four people in four different countries reinvented economics with the marginal revolution.

On the population front, of course, we now know that middle-class people possessed of fantastic prosperity don't fill the world with an excess population. If anything, they need to be firmly walloped with a wet noodle and told to get a life and get some kids on the ground.

What we know today is that all that political force of the last century was unnecessary. The modern economy, driven by a bourgeoisie dignified and free, would have covered the poor in riches without all the government programs because, indeed, the staggering rising tide of the modern free lunch, the free lunch of cheap energy, cheap steel, cheap travel, cheap food, cheap everything, created a world in which the poor are fat and the rich are thin. And all the while nobody noticed. Or if they did, they complained because it wasn't good enough.

Let's say it again. Governments in the United States, as faithfully recorded and broadcast by usgovernmentspending.com, spends the following in FY 2011.

	Government Pensions	$1.0 trillion
	Government Health Care	$1.2 trillion
	Government Education	$0.9 trillion
	Government Welfare	$0.8 trillion

If the poor get rich along with everyone else, what's the point of four trillion dollars of compulsion every year?

Yes, you say, but what about government education? Surely that is worthwhile. Not really. Not according to Deirdre McCloskey. Once a family gets literacy, she argues, it never loses it.

Then male literacy in England rose to perhaps 30 percent in 1580 and to 60 percent by... the 1750s... My father was the first in his family to graduate from university... All of his three children did likewise... [B]oth of my two did, and doubtless my two grandchildren will, too.

McCloskey's Norwegian ancestors "were reading by the late sixteenth century, and never stopped." And all of this without compulsory government education.

But McCloskey is perhaps too optimistic. Perhaps there is a way to extinguish literacy. It is called the welfare state. Here is the testimony of police Inspector Gadget in Britain:

I once saw a bloke in custody, who was in my year at Ruraltown Comp[rehensive]. The Sergeant asked him if he could read and write before offering him the custody record to sign. He said he couldn’t. I interjected. ‘I was at school with you buddy, you can read and write for God’s sake’ he said ‘I used to be able to but I forgot how’. He hadn’t had to read or write anything for 20 years, so he simply forgot how. An ‘agency’ for everything, all on a plate. A filthy mean little plate, but a plate none the less.

The reason that most people acquired literacy over the past millennium is that it was useful to them, very useful. It kept them out of the mine and the stone pit. It qualified them for good jobs indoors. But when the government will give you money for nothing, what's the point?

The point is: when you find you are doing something wrong, something stupid, stop doing it.
Three hundred years ago slavery was ubiquitous; 150 years later it had become a scandal. Two hundred years ago, absolute government and its centralized administrative bureaucracy was a scandal. Today it is ubiquitous.

But big government doesn't have to stay ubiquitous. We can change it. We can make it a scandal again.

If we believe in the "bourgeois virtues" and if we believe in "bourgeois dignity" that people should have the dignity and the freedom to innovate for the benefit of each other, then there is only one thing to say about the vast centralized administrative state inspired by the Great Mistake of good old buffers like John Stuart Mill and what we might call the Great Lie of the not-so-good folks like the post-1848 clerisy of intellectuals and activists.

The saying has a familiar ring to it: "This Shall Not Stand."

And now, five years later, Bourgeois Equality, here.

McCloskey Week: The Messenger

The message of Deirdre McCloskey's mammoth Bourgeois Cycle -- in The Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity -- is that good old bourgeois culture and ideas are a mammoth blessing on humankind. Whatever middle-class people say about middle-class prudence, the bourgeoisie is not a One Big Thing class. It practices all the virtues, devoted to the sacred as well as the profane. And it is the triumph of bourgeois dignity, the success of innovation and the good old college try--over aristocratic pride and peasant doggedness--that has elevated humankind from a perilous life consuming $3 per day to the present US consumption rate of $120 per day, a change that has particularly benefited the poor.

Back to start: Conservatism's Big Problem.

But what about the messenger? Deirdre McCloskey is perhaps more interesting than her message, for Deirdre McCloskey started out life in 1942 as Donald. Only in the 1990s did s/he take the plunge and decide to become a woman.

Thus we have the most unapologetic apology for the bourgeois culture and capitalism being written by a transsexual. The conservative heroine of our time is a LGBT chappie or chappette.

And not just that. McCloskey is a multi-disciplinary writer, an economist, expert in economics and economic history who is also well-read in philosophy and literature and culture. On top of that, she affects a girlish style that no woman-writer-wanting-to-be-taken-as-seriously-as-a-man would ever dare to essay.

In my view, we conservatives have needed a Deirdre McCloskey for decades. We have needed a serious political philosopher that knew the foundations of the grand western project but also knew all the ins and outs of recent cultural thought, the modernisms and post-modernisms that leaves most conservatives non-plussed and resentful.

The great question of the coming years is what comes after the century of big government and the centralized administrative state. Its ruling class has been, in McCloskey's words, the post-1848 clerisy, the cultural and intellectual movement that appeared on the radar in the revolutions of 1848 and has dominated culture and politics ever since. Our task is to delegitimize this cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful and deluded movement and substitute something else in its place. We cannot do this without thinkers that "know the best that has been said and thought in the world" in the words of Matthew Arnold, and are not afraid to shout it from the mountain-top.

Something tells me that the utterly shameless Deirdre McCloskey is just what the world has been waiting for. God does indeed play dice, and He does indeed like a cosmic joke. So the idea that the conservative future should be midwifed by a flaming transsexual girlishly arguing for a return to the virtues and a celebration of bourgeois culture and dignity is so crazy that it must be right.

And Deirdre McCloskey has only just begun. Volume three of the Bourgeois Cycle is already written, and three more volumes are planned.

McCloskey calls her books "The Bourgeois Era," but I think she is mistaken. Her project is of Wagnerian scope, and her bourgeois project is just as over-the-top as the Ring Cycle. So, for me, her bourgeois project is nothing less than "McCloskey's Bourgeois Cycle."

Next: Big Fact vs. Big Mistake.

McCloskey Week: It's Not What You Think

What was it that propelled the economic Hockey Stick of the last 200 years, the step change in economic prosperity from $3 per day back than and since forever, versus the $120 per day in economic prosperity we enjoy today?

Back to start: Conservatism's Big Problem.

Never mind that. What about the things it was not, the plausible reasons for modern prosperity that writers from Marx to Weber floated before the world, and that turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong?

Most of the second volume in Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Cycle, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the World, is given over to exploding the "reasons" that the educated class have come up with for modern prosperity. It was not:

• Thrift, Greed, Protestant Ethic. Sorry chum. There is no indication that thriftiness was uniquely in fashion in the 18th century. In fact it is likely that the crucible of the industrial revolution, Britland, has always been moderately un-thrifty. Same with greed. You think that people were less greedy in ancient times? How about the plains of Ilium? And recent scholarship says that Catholics have just as much of a Protestant Ethic as Protestants.
• Capital Accumulation. A lot of people have assumed that the industrial takeoff could not have occurred without a lot of saving, a storing up of capital to finance the takeoff. But it didn't happen. The textile revolution was financed out of personal savings and modest capital improvements.
• Oppression, Stealing. It wasn't financed by starving the workers, or the profits from the slave trade, or the ill-gotten gains of the enclosure movement. For one thing, a lot of the industrial revolution took place away from the center in out of the way places, organized by nobodies, where economic regulation could not find it.
• Transportation. It wasn't transportation improvements, although they didn't hurt.
• Coal. Nor coal. Although it helped.

No, it wasn't all the economic materialist reasons that all the experts want to believe. It wasn't education either, because innovation is typically transfered directly from one person to another.
No, according to Deirdre McCloskey, it all comes down to dignity--just like in Singin' in the Rain. It was dignity and liberty for ordinary people. She quotes Dr. Johnson:

That the attempts of such men [projectors] will often miscarry, we may reasonably expect; yet from such men, and such only, are we to hope for the cultivation of those parts of nature which lie yet waste, and the invention of those arts which are yet wanting to the felicity of life. If they are, therefore, universally discouraged, art and discovery can make no advances.

Any new project, Johnson goes on, exposes "its author to censure and contempt" and if people were discouraged by contempt or stopped by censure nothing would ever get done.

And that is exactly McCloskey's point. If anything is to change in this world, people have to believe in change, and the rest of us have to resist our instinct to prevent it. We have to take the attitude of Samuel Johnson and look with tolerance, even approval, upon the mad projects of the projectors.

Next: The Messenger.

McCloskey Week: The Moral Case Against Obamanomics

Writes Peter Wehner in Commentary and The Weekly Standard about the current political situation:

[I]t does strike me that a compelling moral argument on behalf of conservative economics specifically, and capitalism more broadly, has been sorely missing from the public debate.

Well, you could start with the moral case put forward by Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois Cycle -- The Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity. She says, more or less, that the difference between our modern middle-class society and the previous oppressive regimes is the revaluation of the things that bourgeois, middle-class persons do.

Back to start: Conservatism's Big Problem.

Under the old regime we had an "elite of Brahmins and warriors [living] by the dignified collection of rents and taxes imposed on the lower classes."

So now in the liberal welfare state we have liberal Brahmins and tenured class warriors living on the dignified proceeds of the progressive tax and regulatory system.

What is needed, in McCloskey's terms, is a reevaluation of the worth of liberal activities: taxing, spending, regulating, dividing, blaming, subsidizing when compared with bourgeois activities like innovating, producing, serving, building, anticipating, trusting, cooperating, competing.

It seems, against all odds, as though this is actually happening. That is why the Democrats are sitting around in a state of shock. Because, against all odds, the Great Recession of 2007-2009 has resulted not in a frightened populace eager to be led to safety but an angry Tea Party pointing the finger at bailouts and handouts to favored Democratic political constituencies.

The heart of McCloskey's argument is that it was not thrift, or a Puritan ethic, or the transport revolution, or the piling up of capital, or coal, or the slave trade, or imperialism that created the freedom of the past two centuries. That's not what created the economic Hockey Stick of the last two hundred years that has built an economy where the average American spends $120 per day instead of $3 per day, and can live a life of greater scope and moral depth than under the old daiy necessity of getting food.

The difference was that, for the first time, the bourgeois code of innovating and inventing and adjusting was valued and appreciated rather than considered low and dishonorable. It is not surprising that the central idea in left-wing rhetoric from Marx to the Fabians to today's "progressives" is to damn the middle class, the higgling of the market, and the people that bury us in goods and services, the evil corporations. The whole point of the class warfare strategy is to marginalize the people that respond to market changes, that anticipate the needs of the consumer and make a lot of money out of it.

The net-neutrality push by liberal foundations is a prime example of this. God forbid that internet providers should start charging a premium to people downloading movies and videos. People have rights!

A central argument of McCloskey is that we are what we think. We got the society of freedom and the economy of innovation because people got out there and said freedom is good, innovation is good. Liberals are going around saying regulation is good, free stuff from the government paid for by the rich is good.

The moral case against Obamanomics centers around the moral case for freedom and the right of people to order their lives without getting permission first from the government.

This shouldn't be that hard. Government screws up everything it does, and the policy of force that is buried in every government program always leads to tears. If we conservatives and libertarians can't convince the American people of the moral and practical worth of our ideas for each individual American, then we deserve a generation of Obamas and their big government delusions.

Next: It's Not What You Think.

McCloskey Week: Bourgeois Dignity

What did it? What was the cause of the Hockey Stick? No, we are not talking about Michael Mann's hockey stick, the spurious "hide-the-decline" surge in global temperatures in the last century. We are talking about the real hockey stick, the extraordinary surge in human well-being in the last two hundred years.

Back: Conservatism's Big Problem.

As Deirdre McCloskey reminds us, time and again in her Bourgeois Cycle, right through volume one, The Bourgeois Virtues, and volume two, Bourgeois Dignity, we are talking about a staggering change. In 1800 humans on average subsisted on about $3 per day in today's dollars. Today, in the United States, we each of us get to dispose of $120 per day. That is forty times the spending of two centuries ago.

And even that really underestimates the change. I recently watched the promo movie at the Boeing visitor center at Paine Field, Washington. They had a shot of a Mayflower-style ship. In the days of sail, it took thousands of hours to get from London to Seattle. Now you can do it in ten. And there are a whole bunch of other things we have today which weren't available to the richest and most powerful of humans two hundred years ago.

The key thing that changed, according to McCloskey, was not technological change, but a cultural, rhetorical change. About three hundred years ago, around the North Sea, societies started to respect the commercial bourgeoisie and the things that it did. It allowed, for the first time, the bourgeoisie to do what comes naturally, to innovate and change things.

That's why McCloskey would rather not call our present economic system "capitalism." The real essence of the modern era is not capital, piles of money, or ruthless accumulation. It is the spirit of innovation, of seeing an opportunity and taking it. "I seen my opportunity, and I took it," said the ward-heeler George Washington Plunkitt. We should call our modern system "innovation," she writes. What happened is that, about three hundred years ago, people stopped ragging on the bourgeoisie.

People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues exercised far from the traditional places of honor [in religion, politics, and war].

All of a sudden, the traders and the merchants were according a dignity and a liberty they had never had before.

Even so, people really didn't realize what was happening. In the mid 19th century, the classical economists didn't really grasp that everything had changed. It was Macaulay, the last of the Whig historians, who really understood.

If any person... after the crash in 1720 [had told that] in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams,... that London would be twice as large... and mortality would have diminished to one-half,... that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit... as they gave to Gulliver's Travels.

Of course our lefty friends still don't want to credit what has happened. That is because they can't get beyond the first stage of every capitalist improvement. The first person to benefit from a new idea is the capitalist innovator and his profit. But then the competitors rush in and everyone benefits from the innovation.

[T]he profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich. But in the second act... the poor get better off in real terms.

Of course, some people do suffer from innovation, and we have often not done enough to help them. Our liberal friends, the folks that McCloskey calls the clerisy, in the years after the failed revolutions of 1848--and indeed ever since--insisted upon seeing the capitalist economy as cruel and unjust.

But surely you cannot say that the principal cause of a rise in income from $3 per day to $120 per day was the cruelty of the capitalists in grinding the faces of the poor working class. Or indeed that it was the legislation of the welfare state. The increase in wealth was caused by innovation, middle-class entrepreneurs released from the bonds of age-old prejudice against risk-taking innovation, and allowed, finally, to do their stuff without being put in the stocks.

And when the opponents of the bourgeoisie got their way, in Russia, in Germany, in China, in Cuba, misery and poverty ensued.

You can't say all that enough, and Deirdre McCloskey, in her Bourgeois Cycle, says it. Again and again.

Next: The Moral Case Against Obamanomics.

McCloskey Week: Conservatism's Big Problem

There's a problem at the heart of the modern project of conservatism in America, and it's a simple problem. How can you hope to convince liberals of the truth of conservatism when conservatism is based upon three-hundred-year-old ideas?

F.S.C. Northrop identified the problem precisely in his Meeting of East and West.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Hueman scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

The secular religion and the politics of our liberal friends is based upon this faith. British empiricism and the American founding fathers are all very well, but they cannot speak for the modern era. Hence the need for an educated elite, a "living constitution," and a big federal government. As if to underline this, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot has absolutely no references to Immanuel Kant.

Sorry chums. If the conservative mind has nothing to say about Kant, whose transcendental idealism points in a straight line to Einstein, relativity, and quantum mechanics, then it's not going to appeal to the broad community of thinkers and doers of the modern era.

So what conservatives have needed, like an oasis in the desert, is a thinker to put the conservative case in the context of the entire three-ring circus of modern thought, starting where Hume left off with Kant, continuing through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and the preenings of the postmodernists, and then ending up saying: well, that's all very well, but these chaps ultimately missed the point, and here's why!

I am pleased to announce that this prophet of conservatism has now emerged. Her name is Deirdre McCloskey, and her work is a grand apology for the middle class, an over-the-top Bourgeois Cycle built upon Wagnerian principles just like the Ring Cycle. That is to say: it is long, it is ambitious, it is insufferable, and it is brilliant. And it may never get finished. McCloskey is now 68ish, and has only finished the first two volumes of her multi-volume epic.

OK, so what is all the fuss about?

In the first volume, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, McCloskey argues for a return to virtue, all seven of them. Although the bourgeoisie insists that it is a practical venture, an effort of pure prudence, bourgeois actions belie this. The commercial middle class practices all the virtues, the four cardinal, masculine, pagan virtues of: Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice; and it also practices the Christian, theological, feminine virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love.

The trouble is that the clerisy, particularly the post-1848 clerisy, has turned against a multi-faceted faith in all the virtues, and has plumped instead for the One Big Thing. In Kant, it was Duty.

Kant made a mistake in rejecting as a constituent of ethics the unreasoning particularities of philosophical anthropology or philosophical psychology.

A very guy thing to do, of course. No woman in her right mind would or could come up with a One Big Thing narrative of meaning. Although some have tried.

In Bentham the one big thing is utility. In Marx, the big thing is labor. It is a materialist view of life:

If virtues cannot be connected to self-interest or genetics, to utility or power, they are, in the early twentieth century philosophical term of Vienna and Cambridge, simply "meaningless."

McCloskey calls this the "Prudence Only" approach of the modern era. But Prudence-Only is not how the world works, and particularly not how the bourgeois middle class works. That's important because it is the commercial bourgeoisie and its virtues that has brought the western world from $3 a day of real material consumption in 1800 to $120 a day in the US today. Meanwhile the Prudence Only materialism of socialism and communism has created nothing out of nothing. What is needed is a return to the virtues, as the movement of virtue ethics has been doing since 1958.

You can see, very easily, how this sort of thinking solves the conservatism problem. It is exactly what conservatism has needed. We want a thorough discrediting of the One Big Thing ethos, which for modern American liberals means that liberals get to call all the big shots because they are more educated, more evolved, and more knowledgeable than the average bitter clinger. We want someone who can argue the hind tails off the liberals all day, and then go out and party all night. And now we have got it.

Next: Bourgeois Dignity.