The Impact of Genetic Science

How will the great welfare state power structure come crashing down? Conservatives like to think that the change will come from our unceasing effort to discredit and replace the liberal hegemony with good common-sense conservative ideas and policies.

But maybe the impetus will come from an unexpected direction, from the belly of the beast. That is what Before the Dawn, a genetic history of mankind. “[I]n the history of the human sciences, false trails and dead ends abound,” he writes. There’s been a lot of wishful thinking not supported by facts. But now that scientists have defined the human genome and are beginning to take it apart and understand it in detail, we can start to build a real human history. For conservatives, the delicious thing about developments in genetics is that

many of these results are subversive of the egalitarian, “blank slate,” Standard Social Science Model of human nature cherished by the modern Western intelligentsia. A great superstructure of policies has been erected on the SSSM, in policy areas from education to immigration, from welfare to diplomacy. Countless academic, bureaucratic, journalistic, and political careers are invested in it, together with correspondingly stupendous amounts of money.

For it is the SSSM that provides the real underpinning of the power of the welfare state. Kick away that support, and maybe the whole thing would come tumbling down.

Of course, genetic science may destroy a lot of conservative wishful thinking, too. But we can take it, right?

Episcopal Schism Ahead

Naturally everyone is worried about the prospect for schism in the Anglican Communion. The very liberal faction of the American Episcopal Church just elected liberal bishop Rt Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop of the American church.

Here is Jonathan Petrie reporting that a conservative Texas diocese is already planning to split from the overal American church.

But really, they should get on with it.

In his Acts of Faith sociologist Rodney Stark demonstrates that church believers vary in their need for orthodoxy and “strictness.” The result is a Bell curve. A lot of people want to belong to a moderately strict church, and a few people want to belong to a very liberal church (Unitarian) or to a very strict church (Jehovah’s Witnesses).

On top of that you will usually find that a rapidly growing church is a moderately strict church. It’s a marketing thing. Moderate strictness is where the people are.

The Anglican Communion worldwide is split between the growing, strict church of Africa and the liberal, shrinking church of Britain and North America. Just as the American Church is split between traditionalists and liberals.

The best thing to do is to accept reality and formally split.

But there is the little problem over who gets to own all the churches.

And another thing. The best way to save the Church of England from its decline would be to disestablish it, just like every church in the US except the liberal Church of Positive Self-Esteem.

But that is a topic for another day.

Raise Minimum Wage, but Cut Corporate Taxes

What kind of election is shaping up this November? Larry Kudlow, eternal optimist, thinks that things are not shaping up too well for the Democrats. The door has been wide open, but the Democrats “haven’t been able to walk through it.”

And now President Bush seems to be regaining his stride with good news on the War and the federal budget. And the Democrats seem to be positioning themselves as the party of fear while the president is able to stand for hope.

Kudlow has a good idea on the Democrats’ proposal for an increase in the minimum wage.

The idea of a minimum-wage hike is gathering political steam, and most economists agree that wages can be set higher at the expense of businesses. But this also will mean unskilled workers will have to reach farther to grab hold of the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. However, there is a compromise. A modest minimum-wage increase could be coupled with tax cuts for both large and small companies. This would satisfy low-end workers who have been hurt by rising gas prices, and would also make business more competitive.

That’s a good idea, for US corporate taxation is beginning to look extremely high, with corporate income tax above 30 percent while emerging tigers like Ireland and Estonia have corporate tax rates down in the low teens. If Democrats insist on making US companies and workers less competitive, at least Republicans can take a stand to mitigate the damage.

Conservatives and Progressivism

Two conservative writers this past week addressed what I consider to be conservativism’s Big Problem: How to advance conservatives ideas in a progressive world.

In National Review Jonah Goldberg writes about how for the last century

conservatives have been fighting progressive assumptions about the role of the state, the nature of justice, and the relevance, if any, of the transcendent to public life. With few exceptions, this argument has been almost entirely on the opposition’s terms.

In other words, the language of the public square is the language of the progressives.

Goldberg is careful to define what he means by progressive. It does not just mean left-wing, but in a broader secular sense that: “Progressivism takes it as a given that mankind, not God, is the pilot of Spaceship Earth.”

A conservative, I think, would at least say that when it comes to the pilot of the world: We Don’t Know. Wew don’t know what our purpose is here on earth, so we cannot know if we are doing the right thing. Therefore we need the concept of God to provide us with a means of talking about ultimate ends, or what we should do in our time on earth.

In fact, of course, the progressives do have a God. They just don’t admit it. Janet Daley gets close to defining it when she writes about the problem that David Cameron is facing as he tries to make the Tory Party acceptable once more to the liberal, professional middle class in Britain.

The young (and the intellectually lively elderly) are constantly searching for ways to make sense of the world. The appeal of systems that provide inclusive accounts of the human condition, whether political, theological or sociological, is very great.

And these people want not only to make sense of the world but divine our human purpose within it. The educated middle class is attracted to progressivism because it seems to enunciate a purpose for life in the industrial age. It provides a way to move beyond pure selfishness and provides a framework of fairness in which the wealth of the fortunate can be shared out with the less fortunate.

What these educated people do not see, because of their “inadequate understanding of economics,” is that when the state is charged with this sharing out it ceases to be a moral act, but merely an act of political power. It is difficult for the educated middle class to see this because it is they who wield the political power in the welfare state, and it is difficult to experience themselves as mere power actors in the political power game. They think that they are above such things.

The welfare state is slowly demonstrating that sharing and caring run by the government is not sharing and caring at all. But meanwhile, Daley writes,

Conservatives must show that they understand the appeal of that vague dream of perfect fairness which motivates [the progressive impulse].

Because fairness moves beyond a material world of self-interest. It is a metaphysical notion. Fairness is what God wants, or history, or basic human decency wants, the basic human decency of an educated person in the professional middle class.

Conservatives generally think that the progressive world-view is a pretty small and cramped affair, utterly compromised by its self-obsession and self-indulgence.

But if we are to move America forward from progressivism we must master it, so that we can lift it up and set it aside. As Goldberg writes: “Similarly, conservatives must speak the language of progressivism in order to persuade progressives that they are wrong. The danger in this is that you can go native.” Instead of converting the progressives, conservatives could end up as progressives.

Jews' 350 Years In Britain

It was Edward I who expelled the Jews from Britain in 1290. And it was in 1656 that Oliver Cromwell permitted 300 to return. Today British academics are voting to boycott Isreali universities, as reported by Al Jazeera.

So even though British Prime Minister Tony Blair told an audience at the 300-year-old Bevis Marks Synagogue that “it was impossible to imagine the modern United Kingdom without the Jewish community,” the fact is that plenty of left-wing Labour voters can imagine such a thing vividly. They look at the world through the left-wing lens of victimization and right now that distorting lens is focused on the suffering Palestinians and not at the Jews.

Of course, Jews have made a remarkable contribution to Britain. Celebrating British Jews, Charles Moore draws up a little list.

Among the eventual consequences of this re-admission have been Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Arthur Koestler, Alan Sugar, Nigella Lawson, Lucien Freud, Tom Stoppard and Sid James.

That’s quite a list, from philosophers to prime ministers to soap opera queens. And the chap who let them in, Oliver Cromwell, let us remember, was a man who, in today’s world, would be considered a leader of the religious right.

Moore goes on to name dozens of individual British Jews to make the point that “it does seem to my gentile eyes that there is more prodigious ability and energy per Jew than per the rest of us.” It’s a point that needs to be made as a surging Muslim community seems to be upsetting the tenuous safety that Jews have enjoyed in Britain since Cromwell’s time.

Why, we must ask, have Jews been able to live in peace in Britain for 350 years while Muslims take the role of helpless victims who must be appeased?

Moore cites the ingenious differentiation between civil and divine law in the Jewish faith. As long as civil law does not conflict with religious duty Jews are enjoined to obey the civil power.

Jews are told: "Pray for the welfare of the government, for, without the fear of it, people will swallow one another alive."

That is an important lesson to remember has Britain confronts its latest immigrants.

In the past half-century, Muslims have come where the Jews came earlier, and in much larger numbers. Like such Jews, they have sometimes experienced the unhappiness that comes when one's religion is misunderstood or derided.

But the Muslims seem to think that such humiliations are insults to be avenged. Maybe they should. But then, of course, life is reduced to a question of who swallows whom alive.

Today in Radlett, the stockbroker belt village northwest of London where I was raised, the old movie theater is a synagogue, and the old Congregational church where I went to pre-school is also a synagogue. Have the Jews moved out from London’s Golders Green because they have become more prosperous, or because it is no longer safe to be Jewish in London?

Let The Palestinians Show Their Stuff

A lot of people are worried about Israel’s “retreat” from Gaza and now, presumably, from the West Bank. They think that it shows weakness and just encourages the Palestinians to be militant and put off making peace with Israel.

But that ignores the significant downside of the West Bank occupation. It allowed a disempowered Palestinian people to act like angry adolescents, blowing themselves up in militarily insignificant but publicity powerful acts of terrorism.

Israel would really benefit if it faces a united Palestinian people with an army. Sooner or later a Palestinian government would be forced into attacking Israel with actual army units, rather than terrorists embedded in the civilian population.

On that day Israel could inflict a decisive defeat on the Palestinians. And that would decisively change the situation on the ground.

It is in that sense that Richard Z. Chesnoff is right to recommend that Israel continues its retreat to defensible borders, “leaving the Palestinians to cut their own throats or make peace.”

But of course, they will not make peace, not until after the throat-cutting is finished and the winner has boldly taken the fight to the Zionist entity, as promised.

The most interesting fact to emerge in the last few months as Hamas has emerged as the chosen government of the Palestinians is the extent to which the Palestine Authority is financed by the West. We find that the EU, Canada, and the United States have been shoveling money by the truckload into the West Bank and Gaza. And during the cartoon crisis we were amazed when the Palestinians trashed the Danish agencies in the Territories. The Danes? They were in the West Bank and Gaza too?

Let the Palestinians form their government. Let it figure out how to built a political system that actually goes beyond mere welfare from the West. And then we shall see.

Why Are the Childless So Angry?

Are you worried about the epidemic of childlessness among the educated elites of Europe and North America? Do you cudgel your brain wondering why your liberal friends are so often childless, or as we might say, exhibiting advanced symptoms of Child Deficit Disorder?

Clearly, one of the accompanying syndromes is Unprovoked Liberal Outrage.

Why else would the childless respond with such rage to an advice column by Slate’s Dear Prudence, Emily Yoffe. After all, what is so exceptional about saying to a childless woman in her 30s, about to get married, and intending to remain childless,

You are about to get married, and as life's circumstances change, it is worth re-examining your goals, especially this one (and yes, I know, I am offending all happy childless people).

No! How dare she!

I expected my answer would annoy people, but I was surprised by the fury of the response. You would think my reply was the equivalent of running around the streets with a turkey baster full of sperm, impregnating happy childless women.

The point is: Why should those childless people care? It’s just a life-style choice, isn’t it? Different people have different values, right? You can choose your own life path, and you can share your ideas about life paths with other people, agreed?

When people disagree violently in this way, then they are telling you that you have threatened their world view or, dare we say, their religious beliefs. They are communicating rather clearly that childlessness is not just a life-style but something more. Or at least they are telling the world that the question of children is a very sore spot for them. Yoffe says it delicately.

What is going on when there is so much scorn for parenthood — the way a society perpetuates itself?

Because what could be more important than “the way a society perpetuates itself?”

Or to make things a bit personal, what could be more important than the way you perpetuate yourself. Some people have given a name to this business of self-perpetuation. They call it immortality.

Other people call it Beautiful Bouncing Babies. But what do they know?

After all, how many babies have you seen bouncing lately (Britney’s excepted)?