So, US Imperalism is Dead

Let us propose the following idea. After the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, the notion of the US as the global guardian of democracy -- er, Democracy -- is dead.

It's the end of the Age of US Imperialism. And Joe Biden did it.

I don't know exactly when the US ruling class decided it wanted to be the Global Hegemon. I'd say the 1845 annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War that followed would be a bit early. And college President Wilson's entry into World War I would be a bit late. Spanish-American War? Maybe.

The point is that when you are a political entity -- whether monarchical or oligarchic or democratic or Soviet or fascist or tin-pot dictator -- the natural, instinctive thing for you to do is to swagger on the international stage: win a nice little war.

Don't try a World War. Not unless your name is Wilson or Roosevelt.

In my view this aggressiveness in political elites is a vestigial survival of the old reality of politics, that of defending the border of your food-growing territory against an "other" that would like to appropriate your food-growing territory for itself.

The food-growing territory thing is just the same as chimp society, where the males defend the border against males from the neighboring band, and the females munch on the food produced by the food-growing territory as they bear and raise baby chimps: the more food, the more baby chimps. That's how Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn.

You could say that the ultimate description of this ape culture is in Geoffrey of Monmonth's History of the Kings of Britain. Old pal Geoffrey is quite open about kingly conquest and the slaughter and plunder of the defeated. He speaks openly of times when Britain was more or less depopulated after a particularly severe bout on the wrong end of conquest-ology.

But it doesn't matter where the food is grown. Not any more.

But when the universe changes, and owning food-growing territory isn't all that important, then you can expect that the ruling classes will be the last to know. They will still keep on keeping on at their conquest and loot and plunder, because that is all they know.

The point is that it really doesn't matter who owns the food-growing territory any more. Food is for sale; grain from the western Canadian prairies gets put on ships in the harbor of Vancouver BC and gets sent all over the world.

It doesn't really matter where products and produced and manufactured.

Now there are a few caveats. You really don't want to get all your oil from the Arabs in the Middle East. They are a bit late to the modern era and haven't yet cooled their jets in the marketplace. So it's a Good Thing for everyone to do a spot of fracking on their own lands and get the natural gas out and not rely upon the Arabs for their fossil fuels.

You don't really want the Chinese to do all the manufacturing in the world. We need jobs for our kids too.

The point is that expanding your food-growing territory doesn't make you richer any more. It doesn't feed any baby chimps any more. Wealth doesn't come from broad rich acres but from what the World Bank calls "intangible capital." That is to say that wealth is not even the physical capital of buildings and factories. Eight percent of wealth is the intangible capital inside peoples' heads.

So I say that this old instinct needs to be properly sublimated, like with modern business and sports. We don't need men to be strutting the world showing their military stuff. Men need to get their aggressions out on the sports field and as road warriors. And jolly good fun it is for all.

So forget the US Empire. Let's just be a nation state devoted to keeping its people safe and prosperous. And minding our own business.

But whatabout Russia and China? Don't we need to keep them in check? Maybe, somewhat.

But I'd say that what Russia does about Belarus and Ukraine is not really worth going to war over. And I would say it is a good thing for Germany to integrate with Russia on the Nordstream 2 pipeline front.Is Russia really going to threaten to invade Europe as it did in the post-WWII era of the Soviet Empire? I doubt it. But Russia really benefit the more that it gets integrated into the European economy.

And China. China is pretty sure to want to reclaim Taiwan. Because national pride. And it is going to want to bully everyone around the South China Sea. And it seems to want to do a replay of the old China policy of the tributary states around the Chinese periphery, and tie them down with the Belt and Road initiative. Which I expect will be a mixed blessing for the Chinese people.

I accept the need to oppose the Soviet Union and prevent it from its millennial dream of conquering western Europe in fulfillment of Marx's religious prophecy.

But after the end of the Soviet Union the US should have dissolved NATO and gone home. Because the US Empire doesn't make any more sense than the British Empire.

The thing about the British Empire is that is was rather an accident. The Brits and the Portuguese didn't like the high prices for spices and silks available at the western end of the Spice Route and the Silk Road. They figured that they could get a better deal with sailing ships around the Cape of Good Hope and on to South Asia. And they were right.

But then, as they established ports in India and South East Asia, they came into conflict with the local feudal lords, and ended up teaching them lessons. And forming empires. And then they got into the slave plantation thing and set up colonies in South America and the Caribbean, and made a ton of money, for a while.

And, with the instinct to extend the border they established the European colonial empires. But it wasn't the colonies that made them powerful; it was the trading.

And the proof is that after World War II when the European powers gave up their colonies to local native tin-pot dictators the only people that suffered were the locals that got plundered by their new rulers. And a few whites left over in Rhodesia and South Africa. But hey, we got Elon Musk, born in South Africa, and he is reinventing space travel, the rascal, right here in the good old USA instead of in South Africa.

If you look at the awful far-right neo-fascist populist nationalist regimes about which our lordly global educated elite like to expectorate, you don't see anyone bent on world conquest. Not Donald Trump, not Nigel Farage, not Marine Le Pen, not Viktor Orbán. Of course, to our democratic rulers they are all Literally Hitler. But then everything is Literally Hitler to our noble lords of the global elite.

But I admit. A world of nation states run by Trumps and Farages and Le Pens and Orbáns wouldn't be much fun for the educated, credentialed, global elite. Because it would be a boring middle-class sort of thing, with everyone minding their own business instead of strutting out and Changing the World!

Yes, Whatabout Gay-Lesbian vs. Full-on LGBT?

Here's an interesting take. Gay writer Bruce Bawer in "The Great Consonant Shift" wants to know how come, all of a sudden around 2000, the gay-lesbian rights movement transformed into LGBT? See, according to Bawer, gay-lesbians and transgenders are about as different as different can be.

Being gay or lesbian or bisexual is about which sex one is attracted to. To be transgender is to claim that you’re a member of the opposite sex[.]

You see, to Bower it is perfectly natural and physical to have gay marriage, but to have trans rights and the right to transition is completely different.

Probably not. The whole game of modern politics is "rights." That how the educated ruling class justifies its power. It conducts its "over-under" politics by championing the "rights" of some marginalized group against the insufferable heedlessness or active opposition of the booboisie.

I say that some marginalized groups championed by the ruling class are genuinely marginalized; others are "fake," members of the ruling class playing oppression theater and acting the part of a marginalized group. I say that workers of the industrial revolution and the blacks of the Jim Crow era were genuine victims. Feminist women, gays, lesbians, transgenders, post-civil-rights blacks, etc., are fake victims.

Your mileage may vary.

Actually, my question is really: "why gay marriage?" That's because I believe that the purpose of marriage is the protection of women. Men are naturally sexual predators and need to be curbed, and marriage is one of the ways that human society puts the curb on men. But gays and lesbians? What's the point beyond, of course, the question of gubmint benefits.

Oh yeah, I get it. Humans are social animals, and the point of gay rights and gay marriage and the pejorative "homophobe" is to raise the social status of gays and lesbians. Because all the world's a stage for social status games.

Back in the day, before the narrative was changed to tell us that gays and lesbians had been discriminated against and marginalized since the dawn of time, you get Eveyln Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited which represents homosexual love as a kind of Oxbridge-upper-class exoticism: a stage that our hero goes through at Oxford with a troubled scion of the decaying aristocracy.

But Bawer inspired me to check up on the history of human marriage practices, starting of course with our pals the gorillas and the chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee marriage. Chimpanzees are territorial, and the males defend the food growing territory and form a male hierarchy: the higher up the hierarchy the more sexual opportunities with the females. See Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

Gorilla marriage. Gorillas seem to live in bands officiated by a single silverback, and the females seem to attach to a silverback for safety reasons. Gorillas are not territorial like chimpanzees; they just move through the countryside in search of food but do not establish territory. They do not compete for food-growing territory.

Human hunter-gatherers. Scientists say that there is some polygyny -- multiple wives -- but mostly hunter-gatherers live by arranged marriage using "brideprice" or "brideservice," where brideprice is payment by the groom's family to the bride's family and brideservice is "labor performed by a prospective groom or newly-wed husband for the family of the bride."

Agricultural humans. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the agricultural age men had as many wives as they could afford -- until the Catholic Church started asking high-status males the reason why. So high status men had lots of wives. But for low-status men it is clear to me that you were only allowed to get married if you could afford it. That was the whole point of doweries. A guy would only marry a girl if the bride's family coughed up enough of the ready money so he could keep the new family alive. Note that slaves didn't get married except in the Americas where more slaves meant more field labor. And note that domestic servants in all 19th century novels and 20th century TV serials about the good old days were, and remained, unmarried.

Industrial humans. The whole point of the industrial era is that it is the era of the Great Enrichment. The economy was no longer static, founded upon the food from food-growing land. Anyone could get married and hope for the best. Exit arranged marriage and enter romantic marriage, because the chances are that any young man and young woman could make it, because economic growth.

See, my line is that in the post-industrial era we have sexual freedom because we can afford it. Not because we are advanced and evolved and special. We can afford to have gays getting it on with multiple partners because AIDS vaccine. We can afford to have lesbians living together because we don't need a male around the house to do the plowing. We can afford to have childless couples because we don't need child labor on the farm any more.

And we can afford to have the scions of the educated elite running around getting into "activism" and gay rights and transgender rights and "1619 Projects" not just because of Adam Smith's old maxim about "a great deal of ruin in a nation" but because we can afford to have a lot of people running around doing stupid things. At least, we think we can.

Of course, I believe that modern politics is a domestication of the old warrior ethic. Just like chimpanzees, territorial human males had to defend their territory from other groups. The defenders were heroes and were rewarded with high status. But now we have brave road warriors competing for market share; we have brave startup entrepreneurs risking everything on a business idea; we have brave "activists" challenging the bigots and the oppressors and demanding their "rights." And we have a new feudalism as many people choose the low-risk neo-serfdom of work at a corporation.

The interesting question is what happens next. I think that modern "rights" politics and its domesticated "activist" warriors has gone about as far as it can go. I think that "liberation" especially in sexual matters is probably going to reverse itself, because I think that women instinctively hate the sexual free-for-all: they expect to be protected. I think that the big-government welfare state with its domesticated form of loot and plunder has gone about as far as it can go.

But I doubt if we will see the end of the "rights" activists in our lifetime. They are having too much fun. So the question really is:  what comes after "trans"?

I suspect that in another twenty years we will be reading articles by transgender activists that are mortally offended by whatever it is that comes next on the gender front.

The Decline and Fall of the Progressive Empire

Today I am starting a new topic, the decline and fall of the present ruling class. But let's steal the words of Edward Gibbon, he of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Why did the Roman Empire decline and fall? According to academic Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power, it began to decline when its modus operandi no longer worked. Up until the second century AD the Roman Empire fed on conquest and slavery. Its army would conquer a new province and the empire would feast on the plunder and the slaves. But then the Empire got too big, and the frontiers too far away from the center. And so the potential for conquest and plunder started to dry up.

But whatabout the empire in which we live? And what do we call it, anyway? Liberal Empire? Lefty Empire? White Supremacist Empire? Capitalist Empire? Empire of the Educated?  I think I will stick with Progressive Empire for the time being.

The reason I prophesy the decline and fall of the present regime is that its anthems, its agendas, are getting rather threadbare.

There seem to be two justifications for political power. The first is the promise of physical protection. This obviously goes back to the apes, that the males protect the band and its food-growing territory from invaders. I consider this a male thing. The second is the promise of protection from evildoers within society, the backstabbers and gossipers that are the bane of every woman's life. I consider this a female thing.

In the last century, the century of the educated ruling class, our rulers have heroically defended us -- or rather we have defended our rulers -- from the menace of Kaisers, of Hitlers, or Commies, of oil sheiks. Golly, where would we have been without them! But now our leaders are promising, at enormous expense, to protect us from climate change.

You know what I think? I think our rulers are running out of reasons to protect us. This climate change thingy depends on the predictive computer models of gubmint scientists -- which are completely different from the divinations of the temple priests and soothsayers of old, completely different. In other words, climate change looks and feels like a scam.

In the last century, the century of the educated ruling class, our rulers have heroically defended us -- or rather we have defended our rulers -- from the internal menace of monopolists, exploiters of labor, Southern racists, and now patriarchs, white supremacists and the menace of systemic racism.

You know what I think? I think our rulers are running out of moral menaces with which to terrify us. The proof is in the moral narrative of "allyism," that America is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." What "white oppressors?" Educated white liberals in the schools, universities, and journalism? Heavens no, those are all allies. Evil corporate moguls? Heavens no, those all pay their indulgences to Black Lives Matter. Would they be Trump Car Paraders and crazed Qanon cultists wearing viking costumes in the US Capitol? Yep, that must be it.

But why? Why is our ruling class singing such ridiculous anthems to their rule? What is really going on? Is it a conspiracy?

I think it is because the basis of human social cooperation has been transformed.

I think the old system, of male defense of the border, and female defense of the hearth, made complete sense back in the days of the chimps: that's what Nicholas Wade says in Before the Dawn. And more or less sense in the days of the hunter-gatherers, and even down through the agricultural age. You needed brave warriors to defend the food-growing land, and you needed moral arbiters to sort out troublesome youths and quarreling women.

But not any more.

Loot and plunder of the neighbor's lands? But wealth today is in intangible capital, ideas and techniques.  Loot and plunder does not pay, except in the internal taxation and regulation systems by which today's rulers fleece their own sheep, not the neighbor's sheep.

Calling sinners to repentance? But today's market economy rewards trust and names and shames cheaters and defaulters in a hundred different ways. Oh yeah, we need a few cops to crack heads here and there; but the vast majority of people go with the program, because there is a huge benefit in doing so, and a huge penalty for being identified as untrustworthy.

Obviously this new situation is so brand new as to be breathtaking. It has really taken hold only in the last 200-300 years, whereas the agricultural age extended for, say, max, 50,000 years, and the hunter-gatherer age a million or so, and the chimps for tens of millions of years.

We cannot expect our rulers, our neighbors, and ourselves to have suddenly adapted to the new setup. We are programmed for another age.

Instead, we should expect everyone -- from noble lords to cathedral priests to young punks to the nice ladies next door -- to keep punching the old buttons, and being completely flummoxed when the old actions don't have the desired effect.

But, "scientists say," the future belongs to those that adapt. And the number of people adapting, "experts agree," will be a minority. This will mean, "ethicists believe," a profound change in human society.

Because, as I say, every story is a survivor story.

Why the Good Guys Always Lose: It's Not Their Fault

One of the perennial complaints of guys like me is that our conservative and Republican leaders are wusses, that they always roll over for the Dems.

Like with the current stolen election. Like with cheap foreign labor for Big Tech. Like with climate change. Like with systemic racism. Like with the eternal entitlement programs.

I'm here to say It's Not Their Fault. Let me count the ways.

Ruling Class Argument -- There is a ruling class in America and elsewhere in the world and it's a kinda club. You wanna be a member? Well you better wear the right clothes, express the right opinions, support the right programs, or you can't advance to higher "degrees." Just like in the Masons. Right now the ruling class is the "educated class" that has been to all the right selective colleges. 

So, if you didn't go to the right college and express the wrong opinions you just aren't going to get ahead in the ruling class.

Cathedral Argument -- Curtis Yarvin argues that reality in the western world is defined by a Cathedral, a quasi-religious cultural establishment that defines what you think and feel.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

And now, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Google's YouTube is establishing an Index of proscribed videos. You are not allowed to post videos suggesting that the election was stolen.

Truth is, all societies make it very difficult for visions of good and evil that compete with its Cathedral orthodoxy. Usually such visions are considered heresy.

There Must Be An Enemy Argument -- Since whenever, human communities have had to defend themselves from the Enemy. Now, you may think that, in this day and age, we are past all this, because chimps, for chimps survive by defending their food-growing territory in which the females and young can eat and grow, as argued by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. True, because now you can buy food, not grow it. But you think that the defense instinct, that goes all the way back to chimps and beyond, is going to wither away in the two centuries since possession of food-growing land hasn't mattered?

Actually, when the rulers don't have a foreign enemy to rally their people, they invent a domestic one. That's what our rulers' "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative is all about.

The whole point of this argument is to rally the males, because all males are instinctively defenders of the border. It goes with the male Culture of Courage/Insult.

Yes, right now, the enemies of the state are people like you.

All Good People Agree Argument -- If you are a good person everybody likes you; if you are a bad person then everybody hates you. If you are a good person you will go to Heaven; if you are a bad person you will go to Hell. If you are a good person you may be a saint; if you are a bad person you may be a witch.

And if you get on the wrong side of the good people you may find that you have become one of the bad people.

The whole point of this argument is to get all the women conforming to the ruling class narrative, for women must, for good reasons going all the way back to our chimp ancestors, get along as they live with each other every day preparing food and caring for the children. Women have a Culture of Conformity, which is enforced by the women's Culture of Complaint.

Yes, right now all the bad people are people like you.

Failed Revolution Argument -- All religious and cultural and political movements eventually face a "failure of prophecy" moment. Because they are all confidently predicting a glorious future that almost certainly will not show up. The more cunning religious movements prophesy that Heaven and Paradise are the reward for a virtuous life after death. Our modern socialist and culture war religious doctrines prophesy Heaven on Earth.

What do lefty movements do when the promised Heaven on Earth doesn't arrive? They usually amp it up, to keep the sect together. In politics, the ideologists amp it up with a Reign or Terror or a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eventually the amp-up collapses, because, as Crane Brinton says in The Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live forever in a state of ideological fervor. Eventually we have to get back to wiving and thriving.

Yes, right now our Wokies are amping it up. Nobody knows when normal programming will resume.

Creative People Gotta Create Argument -- In my reductive Three Peoples theory I suggest that, for Responsibles, God made the Heaven and Earth and the job of humans is to responsibly wive and thrive on the Earth that God created. But I argue that Creatives are called to be gods, to create the world anew.

This means that for Creatives, if they are not creating, doing something new, bending the arc of history towards justice, advocating for traditionally marginalized people, imagining a new and better world, they are nobody.

Yes, right now if you are not creatively advocating for a better world, you are a nobody.

Stupid Ruling Class Argument -- A good ruling class knows that it must refresh its membership with talented people from the lower classes. A good ruling class creates a "political formula" that values all the people in the realm. A good ruling class keeps a weather eye on the passions and the obsessions of the "masses." A good ruling class knows that it is a minority, and that if the people ever got serious they could kick the rulers out in a New York minute.

A stupid ruling class knows that it knows best and it makes sure the plebs keep quiet. A stupid ruling class thinks that only members of the ruling class are smart, and that the lower classes are stupid. A stupid ruling class lives and entertains itself in the Capitol and doesn't get out much. A stupid ruling thinks that the ordinary people are too stupid ever to form a head of rebellion against their wise rule.

Yes, right now we probably have a fairly stupid ruling class.

Why to the Good Guys always lose? I would say that over the last 50 years we have had several political moments where our rulers could have altered their rule to accommodate various populist moments: The Silent Majority in the Nixon years, the Reagan Democrats in the Reagan years, the Ross Perot moment in 1992, the Republican Congress in 1994, the Tea Party in 2010, the Trump election in 2016. But they didn't.

The point is that, of course the Good Guys are going to lose, short of an actual rebellion and civil war, if the ruling class refuses to accommodate to their grievances. The rulers have the upper hand; that's why we call them rulers. And It's Not Their Fault if the rulers outmaneuver the suckers every time, using all the bolded arguments I have listed up above.

And so it goes. Until the day that it doesn't.

Your Health Care Provider is Not Working for You

I was to the girly site Quillette this morning reading a piece complaining about the lack of Wu Flu testing, written by a "single mother, writer, and secondary school teacher" and MFA.

I have been thinking, rather than complaining, about this, and as I have a telephone appointment with my Kaiser Permanente "Care Team" today I plan to ask what "the protocol" is at Kaiser regarding:

• Wu Flu testing
• (Hydroxy)chloroquine cocktail treatment at Kaiser
• (Hydroxy)chloroquine as a prophylactic

I wonder what the answer will be. Because I am on Kaiser as a Medicare Advantage person, which means that Kaiser gets a fixed fee from the gubmint for my care. And because I am an unreformed racist-sexist-homophobe I understand what that means. Kaiser is not working for me, but for the gubmint.

That's the problem with all gubmint programs. The folks you deal with aren't working for you. They are working for some darn politician. And the politician isn't working for you; he is working for the special interests that contribute to his campaign.

So. Why do we do it? Why am I, an unreconstructed racist-sexist-homophobe, signed up with Kaiser for my health care when I know that Kaiser works for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and not for me.

Well, I'll tell you. For me, it's because getting the very best of care and living to age 110 is not that important to me. I have two daughters and six grandchildren and I think I am the luckiest man alive. I really don't want my health provider spending billions to keep me alive till next time. And I don't want the bother of the complicated billing that comes with regular Medicare with a Medicare Supplement.

I realize that for most people gubmint health care is good because, 1) it is free, or freeish, and 2) it means that you don't have to make morally agonizing life-and-death decisions. The protocol does it for you.

I keep reading Instapundit Glenn Reynolds boosting the latest research to extend human life, and I always think that he's missing the point. The whole point of life is that the old'uns die off. It is not a bug that old people have dry skins and dicky hearts and dementia. It is a feature! The longer the old'uns hang on the more the young'uns have to wait around drumming their fingers with impatience.

Hello Nancy Pelosi, aged 80, and Joe Biden, aged 77!

And Donald Trump, aged 73, for that matter.

Really, if you ask me, headline politicians should be in their 50s. Of course, at that age they might be a teeny bit too energetic and get us into unnecessary wars. Or not.

Of course, the whole question of the woman's Culture of Complaint and its basis in the fact that women expect to be protected is fascinating to me.

Because I think that if women are truly to become liberated, the liberation will come when they emerge from out of their Culture of Complaint and stop expecting anything.

But, as I have written again and again, women don't really want that. They want to complain about stuff, and they want to cause trouble at work, but they really don't want to march towards the sound of the guns. And they expect to be protected.

There is nothing right or wrong about this. It is just the way that women are programmed, and you can see why when you study chimpanzees where the males do nothing except protect the borders of the troop's territory. The females do everything else, bearing and raising the baby chimps. That's the line of Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

And that is the really important work: bearing and raising the next generation. And then getting out of the way, Nance and Joe!

Of course, I'm not complaining. Oh no!

But if you want to complain about Trump and the gubmint's response to the Wu Flu epidemic, go right ahead.

Just don't forget that the only people working for you are the people you actually pay, directly. Those are the people that might, just might, bend the rules a bit for you.

And paying your taxes to the IRS doesn't count.

Looking at the Good Side of My Culture-of-Insult/Culture-of-Complaint Notion

Here was I, cruising along unconcernedly as a seagull with my notion of the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint when suddenly I realized I had got it all wrong. Or at least only half right.

Because the male Culture of Insult and the female Culture of Complaint are only half of the story.

And I shoulda known it. What a fool! Fortunately my unconscious mind got me sorted -- as the Brits say -- about 4:00 am a couple days ago. Really, what would we do without our unconscious minds pointing out the "glitch" in the Matix?

What I realized was that, with the notion that honor in men is courage, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, that there are two sides to the coin. Let's reproduce the key quote again.

[I]n spite of the discrediting that honor has undergone, the basic honor of the savage -- courage for men, chastity for women -- is still recognizable beneath the surface of popular culture that has done so much to efface it.(p.5)

(But as late as the movie On the Beach in 1959, with Gregory Peck as the captain of a nuclear submarine in the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon, the male characters are all constructed around the courage archetype and the female characters around the chastity archetype.)

Obviously, I now realize that male honor -- courage and the reputation for courage -- comes in two cultures. There is the positive side and the negative side. There is the Culture of Courage in the Hero and there is the Culture of Insult in the Adversary. I get that from Jordan B. Peterson in his Maps of Meaning.

So, when men are hurling insults at each other, they are not as good as they could be. Because the Man of Courage, the Hero, is above all that.

Hmm. And here I have been encouraging men to throw the insult of racism right back in the face of the pathetic liberal pejorator (perjorator is one who hurls pejoratives: I just coined it). Obviously, in the Culture of Courage, our Hero would not throw the insult right back. On the other hand he would not cringe either, and whine that he was not a racist, no, because some of his best friends are black. Still, to throw an insult at a vile liberal pejorator requires a significant degree of courage, particularly if the liberal pejorator gets in touch with HR and gets you fired.

But what would the pure Hero, sans peure et sans reproche, do? I'll have to think about that.

Now let's get to the female side of the equation, where honor is chastity and the reputation for chastity. Here, obviously, we have a Culture of ChastityPraise and a.Culture of Complaint. But whatabout the archetypes? I don't know where this will end up, but I think we have to start with Good Girl and Mean Girl. The practitioner of the Culture of Praise is the Good Girl, the Virgin, that is pure and innocent and sees nothing but good around her. The practitioner of the Culture of Complaint is the Mean Girl, of high school memory, who is always poking holes in the chaste pretentions of the other women in her community of women. That, after all, is what the iconic "I can't believe she..." remark is all about. Don't imagine that the the girl next door is a sweet innocent, 'cos I got the goods on her.

The point about the Hero and the Culture of Courage is, to return with Bowman to the savage, the defense of the border which can be psychologized into the border between Order and Chaos. The point about the Good Girl and the Culture of Praise, with Bowman, is the management of the hearth and home. If we go back to our chimpanzee friends, the males are defending the band's territory so that the females can bear and feed and rear the baby chimps. That's according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. The Good Girl is doing all the things that need to be done about the hearth -- Latin: vesta, as in Vestal Virgins -- or, as we say, keep the home fires burning.

The point is that in the Culture of Praise the Good Girl is getting on with the things that need to be done with good cheer, while in the Culture of Complaint the Mean Girl is busy critiquing all the other women because they aren't doing the things that need to be done, according to the judgement of the Mean Girl. The Mean Girl is perfect, of course.

So, in this analysis, the Culture of Insult and the Culture of Complaint are both perversions. The Insulter is faking the courage of the Hero, and the Complainer is faking the innocence of the Good Girl.

Notice that Insults and Complaints are easy peasy; anyone can do them. But what does the courageous Hero do? What does the chaste Good Girl do? Good question.

See, living the life of Courage or of Praise is hard. That's why the Hero has to go on a Hero's Journey to find out what it really means to be a hero. And the chaste Good Girl? Despite the pretensions of the Heroine's Journey and all those unbelievable superheroines around these days, the life of a woman is lived moment to moment; she doesn't get to go off into the underworld for a spell. That is why women are eternally agonizing about the right thing to do. There's a word women use for this, but I have forgotten it.

Well, obviously this is just the start. Who knows where it will lead?

Keeping a Proper Distance: A Strategy for Foreign Policy

About four years ago this crazy orange-haired businessman ran for President of the United States on a platform of putting America First. As Conservative Tree House puts it, this whacky guy proposed:

1. The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States.  A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
2. The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States.  A return to economic independence.
3. The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products.  China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.

Well I Never! Whaddya think of that, here in the US and A on March 12, 2020?

What I want to know is: who is the brains trust behind President Trump? Is it really Trump himself? Or his son-in-law Jared Kushner? Or who or what?

Because today it looks almost like divine intervention, the old saw about God taking care of children, drunks, and the good old US of A.

The alternative is to accept that Donald Trump has an astonishing strategic mind. And that is impossible, right, geniuses?

The point is that Trump has been pretty cagey about a lot of things. We were all taught to believe that his 2016 campaign was a complete amateur hour. Then, after the election, Brad Parscale appeared on FoxNews and talked about their social-media campaign and how they targeted this and that, and so on.

What! I thought that Trump was supposed to be totally winging it. And yet managed to target exactly the states that put him over the top -- with the help of Parscale who was creating websites at the Trump Organization back in the day.

Now, with the "foreign virus" -- yeah! Call me a xenophobe! -- he is looking like a genius. What! You mean to say that nearly all our antibiotics are made in China? Who knew? We oughta do something about that!

When you look at the three principles listed by CTS above, you see that Trump is arguing for a certain distance between the US and other nations.

But the question is: how distant? I have an idea.

Take President Putin's latest announcement, that allows him two more terms as president of Russia. I'd say that the US needs to keep a distance from nations that have presidents-for-life. Nothing personal, you understand.

So that would also mean we keep a distance from China, with President-for-life Xi.

Nothing personal, you understand. Nothing xenophobic. Heavens no. It's just that any guy that signs himself up to be president for life is missing the point. In fact he is dumb as a post, and dangerous for that reason.

You see, politics is a blunt instrument, basically designed to defend the border from the baddies. It doesn't take a genius to do that. But the dirty secret about border defense is that the defenders expect to be paid for their trouble: loot and plunder. So the longer the current leader gets to run the border-defense racket the deeper will be the corruption of his regime.

And since politics is usually a succession of one stupidity after another, it can't hurt to change one idiot for another.

Plus, we democratic societies have found, after about a decade of one chap in power, the voters start to feel it is Time for a Change.

So we Yanks should keep regimes at arm's length that go in for president for life or for mullahs for life. Just not our kind, darling.

Here's something to think about. How about the European Union, that seems to be a bureaucracy for life? Yeah. Good point, senator. Maybe we should keep a certain distance from those chaps too. Not as much as the presidents-for-life, of course, but still...

Here is my thought on politics. In chimpanzee society it makes sense to defend the border to the death, because the whole troop depends on the food -- and baby-chimp -- growing capacity of the troop's territory. That is according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. But as soon as you get humans on the job the absolute necessity for enough food on the land becomes less important, because humans trade, and human trade seems to go back about 200,000 years before even the Dawn of Agriculture.

Still, right through the agricultural era, the basis of wealth and security was food-growing land with a bit of trading on the side. So humans put a high priority on defense of the homeland.

But now, food is something you put on grain ships in the harbor of Vancouver, BC, and send across the world.

But do you see? The less that the food-growing capacity of our sacred land equals survival the less we need warriors on the border and charismatic leaders to lead them.

Put it in a different way: the less important food-growing becomes to our well-being, the less we need brave warriors and a warrior elite to protect us.

Thus, to say that a President Putin is so essential that he must stay as president into his 80s is baloney. Russia doesn't need to be led by a charismatic leader. Same with China. Just get on with producing stuff and selling it. And never mind being the charismatic leader.

But whatabout the danger of Donald Trump, the charismatic leader?

Good point. But see, here in these United States we have a Constitutional Amendment restricting presidents to two terms. And we also have a cultural and political elite that would take poison rather than allow Trump a third term.

So, no worries. And anyway, I dare say that Trump will have a recession in his second term, and everyone will agree that we need the Democrats in office again.

And in 2021 Trump will leave office and everyone will live happily ever after.

Is the Left to Blame for All the "Hate"?

We had a couple of shooter attacks against religious groups over the weekend: one in New York City against orthodox Jews and one against megachurch Christians in Texas.

I don't want to get into the gun control argument, because I think it is a politics-downstream-from-culture issue.

No. I blame the larger leftist project, which, in my view, is going backwards, by elevating politics to a sacramental level when we should all be "moving on" and relegating politics to the basement.

Politics/government is what we humans have developed to help us all come together to face an existential peril that threatens to destroy our community.

So, in my view, politics should be locked away in a glass cabinet with the notice "In Emergency, Break Glass."

You can see the point of politics with our relatives the chimpanzees. The males patrol the borders of the troop's territory and attack and kill any male trespassers, and for good reason. The food that grows within the troop's territory is what sustains the females that bear and raise the young. The more territory, and more important, the more food, the better for the troop. That's how Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn.

And thus it ever was until the day before yesterday, when trade took over the world: I mean, in particular, with wage labor in which everyone enters the cash economy, exchanging labor for money rather than growing food for the immediate family as subsistence farmers outside the market economy.

The market economy means that we should interact faithfully with anyone that behaves in a trustworthy fashion. This is a radical transformation from the old days when anyone outside your territory was an enemy just waiting for a chance to catch you unawares.

Obviously, this gigantic cultural transformation is not going to be completed by next week.

But still, the job of the educated and evolved, the people that have already absorbed the cultural memes of the post-agricultural culture, is to help people adapt to the new reality.

Only they don't. And that is why I write about a Great Reaction. It is an amazing thing, that the most educated and evolved are people that have developed a religious faith in politics in the Old Ways -- and have organized groups into ideological combat, from race to gender and everything in between, on issues large and small.

See, what the left did, starting in the mid 19th century, was to encourage newly arrived groups in the city to trust only their own, to condone urban gangs that recreated the old days of border warriors defending their turf from the neighboring tribe, and to teach workers that their interests and needs were diametrically opposed to the employers that hired and trained and paid them.

You can see how this works a treat for the power project of the educated and evolved. If you believe in the saving grace of politics then it makes complete sense to divide off lower-class groups from the national community and use them as shock troops for the wars of your religion of politics.

And then your educated and evolved gentry decide that the members of their client groups can't really be held responsible for their "rage," arising out of generations of oppression and marginalization, rather than from their inherited culture of defending the borders.

So, if you are a member of a scheduled victim group, you might get the idea that it's OK to act out your rage on other people. For instance the latest Crime Victimization Survey  says that whites are 62.3% of the population but are 50.2% of the violent offenders in violent incidents, while blacks are 12.0% of the population but 21.7% of the offenders in violent incidents.

In other words, whites are slightly underrepresented in the national violent offender community, while blacks are grossly overrepresented in the violent offender community. Talk about a crisis of diversity!

And what is the reaction of our liberal friends? To make victims out of blacks that attack "white Hispanics" and white policemen.

I think it is dirty trick for our liberal Educated Gentry to make excuses for blacks. It's hard enough as it is to make the transition from rural tribal culture to city market culture. But to represent the problems that blacks experience in adapting to the city culture as the fault of the majority culture is worse than an error. It is a profound injustice, and not particularly to whites but to blacks who are not getting acculturated to the trust culture of the city and its commerce.

I don't know where the left's culture of victimhood and activism, the raising of political activism to the level of holy pilgrimage and sacrament, will end up.

All I know is that at the very least, the activism culture has delayed the adaption of many millions of people to the culture of the market and its trust of anyone that demonstrates trustworthiness. At worst it has provoked millions of innocents into a cruel culture war where nobody will be the winner.

See, I think that our Educated Gentry has got everything wrong.. It has rewarded people that behaved like victims; it has sneered at responsibility, and it has ludicrously valued creativity as a human right.

In fact, the opposite is true. Victimhood is a miserable hell, and everyone should be encouraged not to think of themselves as victims; responsibility is the basic skill needed to navigate the market economy; and creativity is a very dangerous business that should only be attempted only by people prepared to make the Hero's Journey into the unconscious and battle with dragons.

The lesson of life in the world is that a single mistake is very often fatal. But when almost everything you believe is wrong, you have to wonder what the upshot will be.

So, to blame the left for all the "hate" it has created is to miss the point. The point is: what we can do to help the victims of the left's power project and help them graduate from subordination in the victim culture to responsibility as ordinary Commoners?

The Pure Theory of Tribalism

I was writing a piece about patriotism vs. nationalism, and experiencing them as "fake tribalism" over the weekend, and in the middle of it got started into Amy Chua's World on Fire and her "market-dominant minority" meme. Her notion is that economically successful minorities like the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia tend to find themselves cast as the enemy of the impoverished ethnic majority. Well, not exactly. It is more that democratic leaders "opportunistically whip up hatred against the resented minority" and propose to loot them and return the country's wealth to the "true owners of the nation."

Why not just say that all political leaders need to establish themselves as the protectors of "us," our tribe, and thus almost inevitably need to advertise a threat from "them," real or imagined, for which the leaders propose to mobilize us in order to prevent our annihilation by the threatening foe. If you are a nationalist leader of a nation not actually threatened by the Huns or the Mongols or the Commies then you have to invent a threat, otherwise what's the point?

So let us begin.

Humans are tribal. We are tribal because hunter-gatherers needed to protect their "patch of land" (as they put it in the Creation story in Fabian Essays in Socialism) from the neighboring tribe. The way this works is that the tribal leader is the first in a band of brothers that unite to fight to protect the patch of land from the enemy. They must fight to the death because if they lose they will be slaughtered by the enemy tribe next door, and their women and children taken over by the neighboring tribe.

Actually, it turns out from War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley that hunter-gatherer tribes did not have pitched battles, because they could not afford the casualties as we can. Instead they had dawn raids and massacres, both driven, I imagine, by the advantage of surprise. Given that hunter-gatherer tribes had an annual violent death rate of 500 per 100,000, two orders of magnitude greater than our violent death rate here in the good old US and A, you can see that they were right not to go in for pitched battles.

So all the young men in hunter-gatherer tribes were the border police. Their job was to protect the border and stop any dawn raids and massacres. Naturally they developed a warrior culture, and the acme of warrior culture is the concept of Honor, described in Honor, a History by James Bowman as the reputation among men for standing shoulder to shoulder with the tribal brothers to defend their patch of land and not breaking ranks and running away. You can see that this is no accident. Any armed group must be a band of brothers that will always stand together and never flinch when the going gets tough.

Also, each tribe had its shaman, a man that connected the tribe with the meaning of life, the universe and everything through what Jungians would call his connection with the unconscious. So each tribe really had its own religion, as explicated by its tribal initiations, its tribal animal mascot, and the peculiar talents of the local shaman.

The important thing to remember about the tribe is that it was a group of people related by blood. They were all brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts. We all know how, the closer that people are related, the more likely they are to help one another when in difficulty. That would be real helpful in the blood-related hunter-gatherer tribe.

The important thing to realize is that all humans have lived this way from the Dawn of Man down to the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Studies of chimpanzees described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn indicate that they have a similar culture, occupying food-growing land and defending the border by means of young males attacking any border violator in a three-against-one massacre.

So the notion of the tribe united against threats and dangers from without is programmed deep into our DNA. It must be so, because without a defended food-growing territory it is, as Bugs Bunny said, "curtains."

However, in the last 12,000 years, with agriculture, and more recently industry, humans have created a society where the men are not all enrolled into the border protection force. Most men in the agricultural age became farmers, converting their strength and aggression from defense into plowing and reaping. Most men in the industrial age have "jobs" and work in the exchange economy for wages. This is a far cry from the hunting and border defense of the old days, and humans have had to learn to adapt and live in new ways.

But under it all we are still tribesmen; we men still respect men of courage. And we are still ready to rally to our brothers if called by our tribal leaders to face the foe.

It stands to reason, therefore, that as mankind moved into the agricultural era and now the industrial era, we would need to adapt our tribal ways to the new realities.

And the most important thing we did was to adapt our tribes and tribalism to the new order. We invented new ways of belonging, not just to the old tribe of the kindred, but to new "fake" tribes, where people not related by blood came to experience each other as the moral equivalent of blood brothers.

We shall see next how this worked in the agricultural age.

Contra-deBoer: Feminist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016 (start here). My third piece was "Antiracist". Now we look at his "Feminist."

deBoer's approach to sexism is the same as his approach to racism. But he asserts that "gender discrimination is a unique form of injustice that has been ubiquitous in human history" [my italics], not just in the modern world. It is a "uniquely destructive injustice... the domination of women by men."  The same remedy is required: "addressing material inequality and material injustice" and pursuing a politics of "equal rights, equal power, and equal dignity for all gender identities."

But I'd say that we have a category error here. The notion of "gender discrimination" only makes sense in a state society with a justice system that reaches into tribes and families. Prior to the state, people lived in families, men and women, and the patriarch was law. It was the Roman Empire that made the first significant effort to penetrate the patria potestas with the state's law and an environment where discrimination had any meaning.

Actually, the domination of women by men goes all the way back to our ape ancestors. In the society of chimpanzees all males outrank all females, and the males are not slow to remind the females of this fact. There is also a complete division of labor between the sexes. The males defend the border of the troop's territory, and the females bear and raise the young using the food available within the troop territory. That's how Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn.

That is where we began. Since then there have been some changes made. For one thing, modern men have been socialized from border wars to wage labor. For another, the lives of women are no longer completely consumed by childbearing and childraising, and for over a century they have been coming out into the public square. This public square, as the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote a century ago, was defined by men for men. But he predicted that women would, in time, transform the public square to suit a more feminine sensibility. Now that the majority of university students are women, I think we can say that the current rape crisis on campus reflects a more feminine sensibility at work both in the administration and the student body. Has that happened spontaneously because individual people have adjusted their individual lives to new conditions on the ground, or because of the left and its activism? I suspect a bit of both.

I'm just a humble racist, sexist, homophobe, but I wonder if the rhetoric that deBoer uses is not dominatory in a male-centered, and Enlightenment rational sense -- which was critiqued by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Do women really talk and think in terms of material inequality and equal rights, equal power, etc.? In my experience women, unless they have been carefully taught, think much more in terms of relationship, in giving and receiving, and above all in caring for those they love. How would that work in the relentlessly political world imagined by the left?

For you will search in deBoer's manifesto in vain for the word "child" or "loved one" or "family". Forget "husband" and "wife" or "spouse" or even "partner." There is not a whisper of that. It is all very well to talk about rights and power and material security, but it rather elides the central fact of human life, that it is not about politics and government and a moral social system, or of economic reproduction, but of living and human reproduction and growing and dying.

Let us concede the point that women have been dominated by men since the dawn of time. But what do we make of the rich women of the Middle Ages that were married young and remarried and often lived to a ripe old age enjoying dowers from three separate dead husbands? What kind of domination would allow old widows to enjoy the fruits of the patriarchal estate in such a way while important dynastic questions were being weighed in the balance. A real patriarchy would have stripped the widows of their extravagant dowers without compunction. What do you make of the writings of women like Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Willa Cather? Were these women just writing fantasies of feminine empowerment, or were they writing about women and situations they knew?

There are serious questions about the feminist agenda and whether it is really as good as advertised for women and other living things. Is the sexual revolution really so good for women? Hasn't it had the paradoxical effect of victimizing women in a humiliating sexual free-for-all? Has the divorce revolution really been so good for women -- or men or children -- or has it coarsened women's lives and thrown them into dependency on government? Does not legal abortion put pregnant women under hegemonic pressure to "get rid of it" for the convenience of the others in their lives?

If you ask me, a real Feminist movement would not be a movement of the left at all, but a vast informal network of communities of women working to serve the best interests of all women, and also the men and women that they loved. It would not be political, because politics is violence; it would not be governmental, because government is force. It would not, for sure, be armed to the teeth with an ideological agenda, ready to lay waste to its enemies. Because, to use a trope of President Obama, that's not who women are.

Next up: "Anti-nationalist."

Paglia's Feminist Foolishness

In looking over the WSJ's "weekend interview" with Camille Paglia, it's hard to decide who is more foolish, Paglia or her interviewer Bari Weiss.

It almost makes you despair that we will ever come out of the utter folly of feminism and the women's movement, which both so totally misunderstand woman and womanhood.

The crowning folly is the notion that the highest calling for woman is a career in the workplace.  Here is Paglia's muddled thinking muddied by the pen of her muddled interviewer.  On the subject of sex education Paglia wants to get away from mechanical stuff and concentrate on life choices.

"I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented."

 What do you mean "career sacrifice," Camille?  Are you suggesting that career is naturally or appropriately the center of a woman's life, or ought to be, or that a woman should think carefully before she steps away from a career?  What makes you think that "career" is so gosh-darned important anyway?

Let us illuminate this folly with a discussion of chimpanzees.  Remember!  The scientists tell us that our DNA is only one or two percent different than our great ape cousins.  So the behavior of our cousins should tell us a lot about ourselves.

Chimpanzees, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, operate a society in which the females devote their lives to food gathering and caring for the young and males defend the borders of the troop's territory.  Both "gendered" roles are essential because more territory equals more food equals raising more young chimps to adulthood.

In our modern notions, we would say that the men were involved in constant border wars and the women lived in a community of women that cared for the troop and its children.

But when the hunter-gatherer age gave way to the agricultural age only a minority of men were needed for border wars.  The rest were needed for the heavy work of plowing (because women get miscarriages from heavy work).  You can still see this gendered role playing out in the paddies of South India, as the men drive the oxen and the women plant the rice plants in the mud.

With the industrial age the need for border warriors is even lower than in the agricultural age, so the question arose: what to do with the men?  The brilliant answer was "careers," from the French "carrière" or racetrack.

Instead of warriors, competing to be the top-dog in the caste of war fighters, men would now compete in the world of bourgeois business.  They would battle for market share, for promotion in government and corporate bureaucracies, for the glory of being the next Steve Jobs, the man that made Apple into a global cultural phenomenon.

Even so, of course, a majority of men would never enter the career stakes.  Lacking the competitive drive to dominate, they would be happy to acquire a skill, get a job, and live a life as husband, father, and provider.

At some point some bright spark decided that men were hoarding all the career goodies for themselves: women should get a share.  Women should get an advanced education, should enter the lists of career advancement, should break the glass ceilings that prevented women from exercising power and influence.

Except that while a majority of men are not particularly interested in a career of power, an overwhelming majority of women are uninterested in a career of power.

Yet here we have a culture and a ruling class that thinks it is doing a good thing by brainwashing every young man into believing that he should go to college and devote his life to a career, whether in business, government, or education.  And we have Camille Paglia dutifully repeating the same meme for 14-year-old girls, to think seriously about whether they should compromise career with children.

Let us get real here.  The most important thing that 90 percent of men and 90 percent of women will do is get married, make a family, raise their children and then get those children off the nest.  Work, career, fame, fortune, they are all very well, but they mean nothing if they do not serve that central purpose of life.

The stunning achievement of the modern age is to have figured out how to sublimate the aggressive instincts of men from war to the fake war of economic competition.  It has taken dominating aggressive males and bent them to the yoke of the market and the organization and made them into gentle husbands and fathers.  Otherwise the surplus population of warriors would just be causing trouble.

Do you not see that this domestication of males is an incandescent achievement that makes the invention of fire a mere footnote?

On this view why should anyone think that the means of domesticating men into the "career" would have any relevance for women, who are already domesticated and need no prompting to get with the program?

In the corporate world they encourage the corporate climbers to extend their "circle of influence."  It makes sense, for the male career is a career of domination, of corporate or market conquest.

But a woman's life is rarely a career of domination.  The women that I know, brainwashed to a fare-thee-well by the cult of career, eventually find themselves reverting to type.  They find that they are less interested in conquering the world and shattering the glass ceiling than in building a "career of care."  They want their loved ones safe and their minds forever return to the care of their loved ones.  Everything they think and do relates to the care and safety of their "circle of care."

And what about Camille Paglia, the feminist firebrand?  She's been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since the 1980s.  Hey, Camille, what happened to breaking the glass ceiling and becoming a dean or a president?  Golly, here's a terrifying thought.  Perhaps Paglia just wants to teach and to write.  That means that she never wanted the great arc of a career, only a chance to write iconoclastic books like "Sexual Personae" and teach other people to become artists.

Eventually, lesbian Paglia and her partner decided that they wanted a child, and now 66-year-old Paglia has an 11-year-old son.  Only Paglia and partner are now separated.

I wonder what the 11-year-old son with think about all this in 20 years.

Tea Party Extremists? You Bet!

The word from the Democrats at this time of partial government shutdown is "Tea Party extremists" and "fairness."  And any Republican or conservative automatically winces.

Because we conservatives are not extremists, and we are not warring on fairness.  Are we?

Of course we are.  We want to reverse the century of progressivism, of administrative free stuff.  And you know what they call that?  Extreme.  And not just unfair to present government dependents, but cruel, unjust, and mean-spirited.

There is a word to describe who we are: Revolutionaries.

Anyone that wants a revolution is an extremist.  You are sidling up to that famous line in the Declaration of Independence, to "pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."  And indeed most of the signers of the Declaration did lose their lives and their fortunes to the American Revolution.

Jeffrey Lord makes things clear this morning.  It's a battle of the crusades he writes.

Mr. Obama and his friends are on a crusade to turn America ever further left than it was when they took charge...

For conservatives, this shutdown and the response to Obama is about nothing less than the life of America itself. A crusade to restore America to the constitutional republic it was designed to be.

But here is the point.  We, the conservatives and Tea Party extremists are the progressives, striving to create a new thing.  The Obamis and the liberals are the reactionaries, reverting back to the old thing.

OK.  What do I mean?

I mean that identity politics and the big man handing out the free stuff -- and 40% of Americans think that Obamacare is free -- is the old way.  You can see it in the story of chimpanzee culture described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn where the males conduct continuous border wars to enlarge the troop's territory.  The result is the free stuff, the food and fruit that is free for the taking for the females.  And the bigger the territory the more baby chimps that grow to maturity.

You can see the old way operating in Homer's Iliad.  Homer's warrior culture was a simple culture of loot and plunder.  And the plunder included well-born women.  The conflict at the heart of the Iliad is the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles over the woman Briseis.  Here's the Wiki story:

Briseis, a daughter of Briseus, was a princess of Lyrnessus... When Achilles led the assault on that city during the Trojan War, she was captured and her family (including her father, mother, three brothers, and husband) died at his hands.[2] She was subsequently given to Achilles as a war prize to be his concubine. In the Trojan War, captive women like Briseis were regarded as objects to be traded amongst the warriors.[3]

That's nice.

The other interesting thing about the Iliad is that the warriors assume, as a matter of course, that they must sacrifice cattle to gain the favor of the gods.  Whenever some warrior wins a fight, it is assumed that the gods are on his side, and the action of the Iliad is constantly interrupted while the gods decide who is to win the next round of the battle on the plains of Troy. 

Isn't that pretty well how Democratic politics works?  You need to "pay to play."  The name of the game is getting in power and using the power of government to hose pensions and subsidies at your supporters.  You use the tribal loyalties of "identity politics" to divide off your constituents from the overall nation, encouraging people to think of themselves as African-Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, rather that 100% Americans.  Wise experts decide who will win or lose.

But conservatives are different.  We are the heirs of a new thing that started around 3,000 years ago.  Karl Jaspers called it the Achsenzeit or Axial Age.  The new idea was that each individual had a personal covenant with God.  The relationship with God was no longer the supplicant buying favors with sacrifice, but a contract with God.  God is no longer playing favorites between the Greeks and the Trojans, as the mood takes him.  He is saying: here are the rules which both you and I should observe.

The Axial Age heralds the entry into history of what I call the People of the Responsible Self.  When you have a covenant with God then you are responsible for your life.  You cannot say, oh well, I would have been OK but the exploitation done me down.  You cannot say the capitalists or the Jews or the rich or the bankers are to blame.  You are responsible for your life, even in the face of evil and overwhelming power.

My guess is that this revolution in human consciousness was confined to the early cities.  It's in the city that each actor is individually responsible.  It's in the city that contract comes to the fore.  It's in the city that you start to deal with people who are not your kin.

And my guess is that the expansion of the new idea reflects the growth of the city.

But the revolution in consciousness is not easy.  It really is a complete turning over, the revaluation of all values.  That means it is an incredibly hard thing to do.  That's why, as soon as the Industrial Revolution got started, movements of reaction like Marxism and Fabianism began, each with a nostalgia for the comfort of the tribe, and the constant demonizing of the Other that is necessary in the eternal border wars of the hunter-gatherer and agricultural ages.

Only, of course, the old ways don't work any more.  They were perfect for the hunter-gatherer tribes with their hard-won territory, and the feudal states with their vulnerable grain stores.  You had to stick together and above all defend those borders.

We know the old ways don't work because the Soviets conducted an actual experiment in class tribalism and, after unimaginable cruelties, disintegrated in 1990.  We have Argentina, a perennial basket case of charismatic leadership and class warfare lurching from one devaluation to another.  We have Detroit.  We have Chicago coming up.  In the industrial age you simply can't operate on the old patronage/clientage model.

But we humans are still programmed to love that free stuff, and politics is still run on the old Homeric model: join with me and get your share of the spoils.  And so it is with the authoritarian welfare state.

We Tea Party extremists, we revolutionaries, we Few: we want to reverse the backwards lurch to the tribalism and serfdom of the authoritarian welfare state.  We are the People of the Responsible Self and we long for freedom, the freedom to do the responsible thing rather than kowtow to the knout of the welfare-state enforcement officer.

And that is why the battle is joined.  It's a fight to the finish between the nostaglic tribalism that goes under the name of "identity politics" and the universal freedom and responsibility of the thriving citizen in the thriving city.

Call me an extremist for the new way, the Way of the People of the Responsible Self.

What American Exceptionalism is Really About

Since Russian autocrat Vladimir V. Putin raised the question of American exceptionalism this is a good time to remind ourselves what it is all about.

The best way to start is to show that President Obama's idea of American exceptionalism, as addressed in his Strasbourg news conference in 2009, is all wrong and misses the point.  In answer to a question about American exceptionalism he said:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

That, Mr. President, is exactly what American exceptionalism is not about. America is not a tribe or a nation state based upon a state church and a Volk as originally thought up by the German Romantics.  It is a universal state for people that define themselves not by race and ethnicity but as individuals responsible individually to God.

Most people define themselves by their place, their family, their clan, their tribe, their race.  And they experience their national existence as a war against other nations, a fight in a cruel world of scarce resources.  But American exceptionalism tries to put all that on the waste heap of history.  I like to say that we Americans are People of the Responsible Self.

That is why we are individualists: not because we are selfish and egoistic, but because we experience ourselves as individually responsible for our lives, to God if we believe in God and to the people we know, and to society in general.

The reason that President Obama hesitates as he did in Strasbourg is that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism.  Their whole world-view is a revolt against American exceptionalism, its individualism, and the idea of the individual as a responsible self.

Liberals have returned to the idea of the state as a robber band, plundering and pillaging the world for free stuff to give away to its members.  Liberals have returned with their identity politics to the definition of people by their tribal membership -- in race, class, gender -- rather than their universal individual humanness.  Liberals believe in the color of your skin, not in the content of your character. Liberals have turned politics into a scramble for loot and subsidy.  Liberals encourage people to think of themselves as victims, denied their rightful share of the world's benefits.

I like to say that this view of politics goes right back to our chimp ancestors.  In that world, as described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the welfare of the troop depends on the food supply, and the food supply, mostly in fruits, depends exactly on the ability of the males to extend their territory by border warfare.  Obviously this chimp world is a zero-sum world, because the food-bearing territory that the males conquer must be taken away by force from the neighboring chimp troop.

It all sounds very familiar.

The point about the modern world is that everything depends not upon the food-producing land that we occupy, but upon the ingenuity of each individual human to produce good and services for other humans.  Wealth does not consist in land or in natural resources but in "intangible capital," the skills and knowledge of humans and their ability to work together.

But people that have just arrived in the city don't yet understand this.  And so they respond to community organizers that tell them that they are being oppressed and exploited.  They are in a tough place, of course, because they don't yet know how to contribute to society with their skills and knowledge.  That makes them second-class citizens.

Let's give our liberal friends the benefit of the doubt.  They believe in their world view.  They believe that they are doing the right thing by handing out free stuff to the traditionally marginalized.  And it sure doesn't hurt that getting free stuff from the local patron is what the traditionally marginalized understand from their lives in the country as peasants.

But American exceptionalism says we are called to something higher, something better.  We are called to be People of the Responsible Self that think first about what we can do and what we contribute, and only second about what we will get and what we deserve.  This culture seems to have started in the cities in the first millennium BC, at the birth of the modern religions from Hinduism to Judaism to Christianity in the so-called Axial Age.

On this view Islam is something of an outlier, because Islam, in its very name, is a religion of the Submissive Self, not the Responsible Self.  It is a religion of warrior tribes, not cooperative city dwellers.

In How Civilizations Die David P. Goldman says that civilizations die by not having children.  See Europe, Russia, Japan, American liberals, and Islam.  People with a faith in the future have children. People that have given up do not.  American conservatives and American immigrants have children. American liberals do not.  Indeed American liberals worship the idols of creativity and abortion and population control and non-heterosexuality which lead to an empty crib and no grandchildren.

Goldman predicts a glorious future for America.  That's because of our American exceptionalism.  But obviously we can't really get a grip on the future until Obama and his liberal friends exit stage left.

And after the end of Obama the American people will need to declare, with their vote, that they are a People of the Responsible Self.

Liberals and "Violence"

Quick:  Do you think the alleged killing of an Australian jogger by three African American teenagers in Oklahoma is "senseless violence?"  Or "gun violence?"  Or "racist violence?"

Actually, you probably don't know because the liberal media has been a bit slow to report and comment on the black-on-white Oklahoma killings.

We all know what is going on here.  On the assumption that the only justifiable use of force is the understandable rage of the oppressed, liberals regard all acts of force by others as "violence" and a form of disease.

I want to make my peaceful protest against that whole notion.

The resort to force is seldom "senseless violence" but more usually a rational and human act.

Let's start with the three teenagers accused of murdering the Australian college student.  It's perfectly normal for three young men banded together into a proto-gang to look for someone to kill.  That's what young men did back in the hunter-gatherer days.  It even goes back before that.  Three against one is the preferred odds for chimpanzees patrolling the borders of their territory, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.  The whole point of fathers and the socialization of males is to sublimate this instinctive urge to kill into more socially approved channels.  Fathers are usually absent in the African American community.  So you'd expect a lot of unsocialized males to be out on the streets "looking for trouble."

What about Egypt?  Here we have reports of "violence" in the streets of Cairo.  Well, yes.  There's a civil war going on, and people resort to "violence" when they are fighting a civil war.  From the western point of view Egypt is a complete mess, unable to grow enough food to feed its millions and with an economy that cannot produce goods and services to pay for food imports.  What else would you expect in such a situation except bloody war and killing?

What about the whole Middle East?  The western policy has been to apply pressure on the region to reduce violence and advance a "peace process." But is that sensible?  Is not the current utter failure not just a personal failure of Barack Obama but the failure of the entire West to understand the situation of the Middle East culture?

The facts are that human death by violence is on the decrease.   That's what Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature.  Hunter-gathers had 500 deaths per 100,000 per year.  Agriculturalists about 50 deaths per 100,000 per year.  We industrials have about 5 deaths per 100,000 per year.

Why is that?  It is because every male in a small hunter-gatherer band is involved in the defense of the borders.  But in the larger agricultural political unit there's an army to do that.

But in the industrial age, the defense of our food-producing land from the marauding foreigners is no longer the big issue.  Wealth is no longer denominated in acres but between the ears of productive entrepreneurs and workers.  It really doesn't make any sense for today's Greeks to go marauding to Troy.  A modern Hector would not worry about his wife Andromache being sold into slavery if the Trojans lost the war.  No, the best thing after a big war is to do what the Americans did after World War II: put the Germans and Japanese back to work to rebuild their industrial economies, and place a bet that they wouldn't be interested in war.

But this does not apply to the Middle East, which is pre-industrial.  In fact, with its oil, the region is still agricultural: its wealth is sitting there, not on the ground but under the ground.  Its wealth is not denominated in numbers of productive citizens, because its citizens are not productive enough to compete in the world market of goods and services.  So it makes sense that Middle East potentates think like Homeric warriors and medieval kings and princes.

Unfortunately the liberal notion of "violence" prevents us from seeing all this.  We are scandalized by the wars; they prompt us into promoting "peace processes" to end the violence where there is no interest in peace, and where wars are the natural and practical strategy of any self-respecting ruler.

Domestically the problem is the same.  For minority gangs in the big cities, gang wars and killing are the most logical and sensible things in the world.  If we want the "violence" to stop then we have to change the economic incentives and end the fatherless welfare culture.

We could do that.  But it's pretty clear that liberals prefer the current status quo and the political power that comes with it.  Whatever the outcome in "senseless violence."

But conservatives are different.  And we can start by ridiculing the senseless liberal "violence" discourse.

Why Liberals Fight Inequality

Why do liberals keep banging on about inequality?  Look: per capita income has gone from $3 per day to $100 per day in the last two centuries.  After going nowhere since forever.  So why worry that some have too much when everyone is doing better?

It all comes down to my mantra: Government is Force.

Reduced to its essentials, government is an armed minority defending some territory from enemies, foreign and domestic.  And it doesn't matter if the government is a government of male chimps defending their territory for its food, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, or American anti-communists defending the world against godless communism.  The point is you defend against foreign pirates and predators and against the domestic kind too, whether burglars or criminal gangs.

But liberals beg to differ.  They don't think we need to spend all that money on defense.  In fact, following chaps like Noam Chomsky, they believe that the problem in the world is US imperialism not godless communism or Islamofascism.  Nor do they believe that a vigorous pursuit of domestic criminals is appropriate since their violence and criminality is really due to "root causes" like poverty and discrimination.

Good.  So now we can dispense with government completely?  Because if government is force and the traditional functions of government are no longer front and center, then we don't need the armed forces to defend our borders.  Nor do we need the police forces to defend against criminals.

How wrong can you be!  Our liberal friends had already seen the problem a century ago when William James wrote his celebrated essay of "The Moral Equivalent of War."  Without the unifying and character-building of real war, he wrote, we would need to inculcate its virtues with the moral equivalent.  As in a war on want, a war on poverty, a war on cancer.

And now we have the war on inequality.  The president's Osawatomie speech was the official Obamian declaration of war.  And Alan B. Krueger, then Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, backed him up with a speech(pdf) on January 12, 2012.  The just war declaration depends on the following:

• Since "the 1970s income has grown more for families at the top of the income distribution".
• The "median household suffered saw a decline in real income in the 2000s."
• The "top 1% of families saw a 278 percent increase in their real after-tax income from 1979 to 2007, while the middle 60% had an increase of less than 40 percent."

Then Krueger gets to the causes, according to a poll of economists, in declining order of importance:

1. Skill-based technical change, and a "slowdown in the growth of the supply of relatively highly educated workers in the US".
2. "Other and unknown factors."
3. Globalization.  Some have benefited, "but other workers have been left behind by globalization".
4. Union membership has declined, and union membership raises the wages of the lower middle class "so they can make it into the middle class".
5. "Tax changes in the early 2000s benefited the very wealthy by much more than other taxpayers", and only three countries "have tax systems that reduce inequality by less than the U.S."

So what is to be done?  I'm glad you asked that.

• The "Affordable Care Act is already helping middle class families."
• It "is critical to take the steps necessary to ensure that the current economic recovery continues", e.g. through the extension of the payroll tax cut.
• "Regulate excess risk-taking and corrupt practices in financial markets."
• Adhere to the Buffet Rule, where those "making more than $1 million should not pay a lower share of their income in taxes than middle class families."

Oh yeah.  Big deal.

Krueger closes by asserting that "more fairness to the economy would be good for all parts of American society."  Oh by the way, "this isn't about class warfare."  But you knew that.

Notice what doesn't get a mention in this speech?  Right first time.  Government entitlements.  The collapse of the lower-income family.  The retreat of lower-income men from work and marriage.  The penal marginal tax rates on the poor.  The credentialization of work.  The meddling of government in the credit system.

And that's leaving out other things.  Maybe the inequality growth in the 1980s was a delayed reaction to the corporatism of the 1950s and 1960s that fast-froze economic relations.  Maybe it had nothing to do with government, but just reflected the computer and information revolution.  Maybe there were just astonishing profit opportunities (remembering that profit is always unexpected gain) out there and chaps like Gates, Jobs, Dell, Hamm and Co. saw an opportunity and took it.  Notice that, except fort Bill Gates, son of a prominent lawyer, the others were relative nobodies: Jobs the adopted son of a mechanic and carpenter; Michael Dell the son of a stockbroker; Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, started out pumping gas, and often missed school to help pick cotton.

But that's not the point.  The point is that government is force.  When you have decided that you don't need force to defend our borders, then you naturally turn to other things.  Like inequality.  And you never think that, wow, maybe our previous efforts at force haven't worked out too well.  You don't ever think of that.  Your mind just turns to increased taxes and increased entitlements.  And more regulation of the financial markets, which have been only recently wrecked by reckless government actions and subsidies.

Jonah Goldberg writes today that people are pretty commonsensical about local government.  But when we think about the federal government we get all religious:

we've come to see the federal government as some sort of mystical entity empowered to right all of the wrongs in society. If there's a problem, there "should" be a federal response, the costs or feasibility of that response be damned.

Notice the problem here.  We are mixing up church and state.  Mystical entities are supposed to be kept in churches.  Because government is force.  When you combine church and state and start legislating morality to "right all of the wrongs in society" then you get into trouble.

Government is about force.  Religion is about meaning.  When you mix the two you tend to get wars and crusades and the little people get crunched in the middle.

Assuming that you care about the little people.

The Canon of Limited Government

The foundation of the human condition is simple.  Humans are social animals.  We are groupish; we do things together.  In that we are like the chimpanzees where, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the males work together to defend a food-bearing territory, and we are unlike the orangutans, where males are solitary except during the mating season.

It is said that if you put a group of Americans into a room to solve a problem they will do so, and they will solve the problem by trying to take care of everyone's concerns.  My own experience bears this out.  When I was sent into a room years ago with eleven other Americans to try a man for first-degree murder the question turned on two female teachers that weren't quite ready to go "beyond a reasonable doubt."  It took gentle persuasion to get to unanimity, helping the two holdouts to agree with the rest of the jury by satisfying their own doubts about the defendant's guilt.

But there is a serpent in the garden.  "Men like power and will seize it if they can," writes Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct.  Humans are not just social animals, from the Latin "socius" or companion.  Humans are political animals that like power.  So it is that politicians are dividers.  You can put a group of Americans into a room together, and they will likely work out a solution to their problem.  It follows that it takes a politician to keep Americans divided and get them to fight.  That is what an election is all about, to reduce the seizure of power from a real civil war into a civil war by other means, a vigorous exchange of insults and anathemas between two political armies arranged on the field of battle.  But of course a political election has winners and losers, unlike the consensual persuasion of Americans-in-a-room, and the winners get to occupy the seat of government and impose their will on the losers.

Which reminds us that government is force.  The word comes from the Latin "gubernare," to steer.  It is not true, as a video at the 2012 Democratic National Convention proposed, that "government's the only thing we all belong to."  We all belong to the human race; we all belong to society; we all belong on the Earth.  We belong to the government in the same way as soldiers belong to the army: both have the power to force us to do things.  Is that the best that we can hope for?  To belong to an organization with power over us?  Of course not.  We have another name for the "thing we all belong to" when you remove the force: we call it society: from the Latin "socius."  Thus David Cameron's catchphrase: "There is such a thing as society; it's just not the same thing as the state."

Let us return to Nicholas Wade and complete his maxim about men and power: "But if they can't rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them."  That is the calculus of power.  It's great to rule, and men like it when they can get it.  But if they can't rule, nobody else should either.

But how can you decide: between power and the absence of power?  The answer is that government should be limited.  There's nothing remarkable about that.  If we don't like other people seizing power over us, the solution is to go into a room together and hammer out a social contract that limits everyone's power over others, and limits the power of every group over other groups.

And as we know, humans are social animals; we are groupish.  If you put humans into a room together to solve a problem...