Dealing with Guilt, Envy, and Indignation

The big problem we face in the modern era is dealing with guilt, envy, and indignation.

The three emotions are what Max Borders calls “The Stone Age Trinity.”

Back in the Stone Age, mankind survived and prospered through the egalitarian culture of the hunting/gathering band. And survival meant sharing the food gathered by the band. There would be no private hoarding, and there would be social pressure applied to those not pulling their weight.

In this Stone Age society, guilt would be used to encourage the slackers, envy would distribute the ill-gotten hoards of the selfish. And then there was indignation. According to Robert Nozick:

That's when you compare someone of a higher station to someone of a lower station, and feel that something is wrong.

This egalitarian culture was also enforced by a culture of humility, writes Lee Harris of Craig B. Stanford in The Hunting Ape.

[E]ven the best hunter must be modest. Humility is a strong cultural tradition in nearly all hunter-gatherer societies. This is an extension of the egalitarian nature of these cultures. Attempts to use one's hunting prowess as an entrée to greater ambitions within the society are usually met with stern opposition, ridicule, and attempts to shame the self-promoter.

Here’s the point. In our modern economy, inequality is good. Hoarding is good. When you hoard food, you have savings that can be drawn down when food is scarce. In our modern economy, envy is bad. People who become rich through inventing a better mousetrap enrich us all.

And so indignation at inequality, the emotion of the left-wing activist, is problematic.

Guilt, envy, and indignation work in a face-to-face society, and modern thinkers believe that the limit of face-to-face society is about 150 people.

So communism, powered by guilt, envy, and indignation, can work up to a group of 150 people. And that applies to any group, including an extended family, a church, or a company. But beyond that, you need another principle.

We know what that is. It is the system of democratic capitalism, the counter-instinctive system where you trust people you don’t know. Writes Borders:

[W]e are likely to remain in a protracted struggle against Paleolithic instincts -- which, of course, translate into the zigzag of everyday politics. None of this is to argue that guilt, envy, or indignation are emotions we would always be better off without in contemporary Western society. But I would suggest that we'd all be better off localizing these urges in the confines of family and community.

Because, in the great society of global economic cooperation, guilt, envy, and indignation lead straight to the killing fields of the Ukraine in the 1930s, Europe in the 1940s, and China in the 1950s.

Let's Break Some Taboos, Hollywood!

So Hollywood is getting braver, according to actor George Clooney. He means, one assumes, that Hollywood is becoming more comfortable making movies that mesh with Hollywood’s political left-liberalism. That’s why Hollywood finds it so meaningful, according to Mark Goldblatt to make movies about

two gay cowboys as star-crossed lovers, a gay writer as a soulful artist, a transsexual as a responsible parent, a Palestinian suicide bomber as a thoughtful, conscience-driven activist, greedy oil company executives as, well, greedy oil company executives, and Senator Joe McCarthy as (gasp) a threat to American civil liberties.

All very noble, and all very courageous, that. Making movies that your peers will applause even as red-state America wrinkles its nose.

But Goldblatt has a suggestion for Hollywood. How about a sequel to the Che Guevara Motorcycle Diaries with the noble Che ordering executions in Cuba?
Or try this:

Ambush at Gush Katif: This film would dramatize the 2004 roadside attack in Gaza on a car driven by Israeli social worker and expectant mother Tali Hatuel.

And then there is this, “based on a true story,” as they say:

The Uneasy Rest of Jesse Dirkhising: A graphic horror film, along the lines of Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it would tell the story of the last hours of young Jesse’s life — a life that ended in September 1999 when he was abducted by two gay men, Joshua Brown, 22, and David Don Carpenter, 38, who drugged the 13-year-old, bound him with duct tape and gagged him with his own underwear, sodomized him with foreign objects, and repeatedly raped him.

Then they took a rest to eat a sandwich and Jess died of suffocation.

You gotta say, movies like that would really create a sensation, wouldn’t they? Because they would break societal taboos, liberal societal taboos.

And liberal taboos are the strongest taboos in America.

No Longer Treated Like a Lady

One of the nasty little consequences of 9/11 is that women find that they are getting treated like prison inmates. We mustn’t profile passengers at airport security checks, so that means that we must subject grandmothers to pat-down searches.

Peggy Noonan doesn’t like it. Secondary screening amounts to what we used to call, 50 years ago, “second-degree sexual assault.”

I was directed, shoeless, into the little pen with the black plastic swinging door. A stranger approached, a tall woman with burnt-orange hair. She looked in her 40s. She was muscular, her biceps straining against a tight Transportation Security Administration T-shirt. She carried her wand like a billy club. She began her instructions: Face your baggage. Feet in the footmarks. Arms out. Fully out. Legs apart. Apart. I'm patting you down. 

It was like a 1950s women's prison movie.

Yes, Peggy, I see what you mean. I hate it too. I hate being treated like a child, moved around by government functionaries. A free people does not submit to government searches except on probable cause.

The question is, of course, just how much should the government do to prevent terror attacks? Should the transportation system be a hermetically sealed environment guaranteed terrorist-free, or should we the people be responsible for security?

When we cede responsibility for anything off onto government, then we are inviting the government to treat us like children. And it does. “Mr. President, is it safe,” we say? Pretty soon we have given up another piece of our independence and our freedom.

That is what I hated about 9/11. I knew immediately that the government would be expected to “do something.” And indeed it did.

What it did was strip the right of American women to be “treated like a lady.” And that is a shame.

What are you going to do about it, ladies?

Patriarchy the Only Answer

For a generation and more we have been told that the patriarchy is the beginning and the end of all our problems.

But now comes Phillip Longman to argue that patriarchy may be our only hope if we want to get out of the current birth dirth.

And this is not some whacko writing in a right-wing magazine funded by the Scaife Foundation. Phillip Longman writes in Foreign Policy.

In The Return of Patriarchy, Longman argues that the people have turned away from making babies before, usually in luxurious ages like our own. There was a birth dearth in the Roman Empire, and why not? Who needs the rigors of bread-winning and putting up with the demands of women?

Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood in a luxurious society — nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses, flute girls, or clever courtesans.

And women in a luxurious society have their diversions too: shopping, education, friends, shopping, travel, and shopping.

The problem is that worldly, secular people that don’t have children don’t have children. They die out. And the people that have children, the people out in the exurbs that attend megachurches, they get to inherit the earth.

This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.

If you look ay the cultural attitudes of a patriarchy, they tend to encourage people, men and women, to invest more in their children. Men want their name to extend into the next generation, and women find that their best opportunities in life coincide with childbearing and childraising. And, of course, the people that have the most children inherit the earth.

Charter Schools Thrive in Minneapolis: World Doesn't Come To End

The big obstacle to school choice is fear. It’s the fear that everyone will flee the public schools for charter schools and voucher schools and leave a disaster behind. A generation of kids will be lost in that disaster.

It’s easy to imagine such a scenario, and that is why the forces of reaction have played it up, fanning fears of chaos among parents.

In Minneapolis the end of the world scenario is playing out right before our very eyes. But don’t worry. The world isn’t coming to an end.

Minnesota has a pretty liberal law for forming charter schools, reports Katherine Kersten,

In 1990 Minnesota allowed students to cross district boundaries to enroll in any district with open seats. Two years later in St. Paul, the country's first charter school opened its doors... Today, this tradition of choice is providing a ticket out for kids in the gritty, mostly black neighborhoods of north and south- central Minneapolis.

OK. Let’s stop right there. Hallelujah!

Something momentous is happening here in the home of prairie populism: black flight. African-American families from the poorest neighborhoods are rapidly abandoning the district public schools, going to charter schools, and taking advantage of open enrollment at suburban public schools. Today, just around half of students who live in the city attend its district public schools.

As this is happening, the city school system is cratering. And the parents and voters aren’t holding their hands and waiting for Armageddon. They are asking why the school district isn’t doing a better job at improving its schools and adapting to lower enrollment.

The district has handled budget cutbacks and school closings ineptly, leading some parents to joke bitterly about its tendency to penalize success and reward failure.

...

Black leaders like Louis King have had enough. He has a message for the school board: "You'll have to make big changes to get us back." He says the district needs a board that views families as customers and understands that competition has unalterably changed the rules of the game. "I'm a strong believer in public education," says Mr. King. "But this district's leaders have to make big changes or go out of business. If they don't, we'll see them in a museum, like the dinosaurs."

That’s the kind of attitude I like to see. All of a sudden, the burden of proof has shifted from the school choice advocates to the defenders of the status quo. The folks in Minneapolis believe that if the public school system is failing it is the schools’ problem not the parents’ problem. You know what? They are right.

That is a huge win for school choice.

And, after all, if you can get out, to another school district or to a charter school, why worry? In ten years or so the system will be fixed and everyone will live happily ever after.

Best of all, school choice advocates will be able to point to Minneapolis and say to the fearful: Be Not Afraid. School choice is not the end of the world. They tried it in Minneapolis, and it worked.

Telling the Story of America's Economic Success

Today, twenty years after it became obvious that Ronald Reagan’s economic policy of hard money and low tax rates had succeeded and had dispelled the economic malaise of the 1970s, Democrats still turn their faces away from reality. They still talk about the Eighties as a lost decade of deficits and greed.

That is why conservatives and Republicans must hammer away at the truth, that 1980 represents a watershed for America. The Wall Street Journal edit page folks understand this, and so they put up a column every so often to ram home the point. This month they have Pete du Pont telling the story.

In the 1980 election the American people chose a new course. For the first time in half a century we retreated from the expanding-government philosophy established by Franklin D. Roosevelt and pretty much adhered to by every subsequent president through Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan's emphasis on individual opportunity--as opposed to the liberals' on government-created opportunity--was to have a substantial and positive impact on the prosperity of the American people.

Ever since, Democrats have resisted—to the last welfare recipient—the notion that Reaganomics is the basis of our current prosperity. Bill Clinton ran for president on the notion that 1992 was the worst economy in the last 50 years. Not exactly.

As Robert Samuelson recently noted in The Wall Street Journal, in the 13 years before 1981 there were four recessions lasting a total of 48 months. In the next 23 years--nearly twice as long--there were just two recessions, lasting 16 months.

Yes, Democrats. The 1990-91 recession was a mild one, caused partly by the Saving and Loan debacle (a New Deal era subsidy program going belly up), and deepened by the Democrat-inspired 1990 tax increase. (There’s political talent. A tax increase in a recession!)

Until the Democrats finally give up, conservatives and Republicans must keep hammering the lesson home. The economy can’t be sacrificed to interest group politics, subsidies, privileges, pensions, entitlements, and targeted tax cuts. It needs sound money, low tax rates, and solid property rights.

Chances are that we are still a couple of presidential elections away from the moment when Democrats “give up.”

Senator Clinton Worries Vouchers Could Lead to Jihad Academies

If you were national Democratic politician and a bribed apologist for the teachers’ unions, what would be an easy way to take a cheap shot at school choice in the post 9/11 world?

Well, of course, you’d raise fears that if parents had the right to send their children to the school of their choice, pretty soon people would be spending taxpayers’ money on Jihad Academies.

That’s the argument that Senator Hillary Clinton was making in the Bronx the other day, according to Glenn Thrush, as she spoke to the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp.

"First family that comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher,'" Clinton said. "Next parent that comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist ...' The parent says, 'The way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy. ... You gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, under the Constitution, you can't discriminate against me.'"


As an adoring, if somewhat puzzled, audience of Bronx activists looked on, Clinton added, "So what if the next parent comes and says, 'I want to send my child to the School of the Jihad? ... I won't stand for it."

I see. So, on the off chance that some whacko jihadist parent might turn up and create division and discord we have to keep the rest of American kids imprisoned in the schools coincidentally run by the political supporters of Hillary Clinton.

The truth is it is one-size-fits-all government school systems that create division and discord and not the other way around.

The elitist “common school” movement in the 19th century that created our current school system was deliberately trying to purge the schools of their Puritan culture, and pretty soon they were using their power to try to cure the Irish Catholics of their Catholicism. By the end of the 19th century the schools were ramming a bland Christianity down the throats of Eastern European Jews.

It didn’t work. The Catholics got their revenge by creating their own system of schools. The Jews got their revenge by purging the schools of all religion.

Now, of course, you can’t talk about religion at all in the government schools. Except the religion of positive self-esteem. That just happens to be the religion of Hillary Clinton and the teachers union activists.

We school-choice proponents are in this for the long haul, Senator Clinton. We think that ordinary Americans should have the same right that you enjoyed when you sent your daughter to Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC. We believe that all Americans should have the right to educate their children at the school of their choice.

And for politicians like you, who stand in the school house door like the segregationists of 50 years ago, we have nothing but contempt.