Who Gets to Judge?

If we say, as we did yesterday, that we in western society are dealing with the Two Great Crimes of Modernity, then what do we do about it?

The two great crimes are really quite simple.  Capitalism's great crime is plantation slavery, when business owners got to own the people that worked their sugar plantations, first in Cyprus, then in the West Indian sugar islands and Brazil.  And then there was a fabulously profitable cotton slave plantation play in the good old USA.

The solution to this crime was that the capitalists should not be the judge of their own cause.   A moral movement arose to critique plantation slavery, and plantation slavery is no more.  In the US, of course, it took a civil war to persuade the plantation capitalists to abandon their slave profits.

The crime of the educated class is the totalitarian state.  Any old tyrant can set up as a despot, but it takes an intellectual to come up with the totalitarian state where all aspects of human socialization are collapsed into government and politics, and anyone that uttered a peep of objection got carted off to a slave-labor camp.

Today the hard totalitarianism of the Stalins and the Maos is over and lives on in the twilight of Cuba, but our liberal friends are still keen on the authoritarian welfare state, in which society is half collapsed into the political sector, and liberals get lots of political and cultural power and, in their role as judges of the capitalists, a lot of power over the economic sector too.

How can we get out from under this soft totalitarianism?  It's not that hard.  We must just establish that the liberal educated class cannot continue as the judge of their own cause any more than the capitalists.  Liberals have to choose whether they want to run the welfare state or whether they want to judge it.  They can't do both.

Our liberal friends are rather like Bottom the weaver, the "mechanical" from Midsummer Night's Dream.  They want to play the starring role of Pyramus, and then they want to play all the other roles too.  On top of that they want to tell everyone else how to play their own roles.

I watched the South Carolina debate last night, and so I got to see the key moment, when Juan Williams lobbed the usual race-card question at Newt Gingrich about work and welfare.  Newt knocked it out of the park, both on content and style.  I particularly liked his asides on the taboo of upsetting liberals.  The crowd (becoming more and more an actor in these events) cheered Newt lustily and booed Juan lustily.  Why?  Because Americans (considered in the strict sense of people that do not hyphenate their identity) are fed up with liberals playing Bottom the weaver.

Liberals keep saying they want a national conversation, but you better not disagree with them, or you are a racist.  You had better not critique their welfare state programs, or they will call you a racist.  But then, if you have a political debate on Martin Luther King Day that is supposed to be racist.  If your campaign doesn't buy radio ads that target black radio that is supposed to be racist.  I'm sure that, to suggest that the best way to avoid poverty is to finish high school, get married, and don't have children until you are in your twenties, is also racist, but I haven't actually seen anyone make that accusation.

There is a word to describe something that is so sacred, so holy, that it cannot be mentioned.  It is called a taboo.  But liberals are above all that.

Our liberal friends have a closed system that justifies their soft tyranny as kindness and compassion, and they have erected a remarkable policing system to intimidate their opposition and to control and marginalize any criticism of their rule.  But sooner or later, someone will challenge the liberal culture of fear, someone will break the taboo, and the liberal police state will collapse.

Nobody will be surprised except the liberals.

Two Great Crimes of Modernity

Let's tell it like it is.

Instrumental reason, the Enlightenment, write Horkheimer and Adorno, is a dance of domination, domination over nature and domination over man. "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."

Oh, gee, we already did. in Modernity's Original Sin.   But let us do it again in a slightly different way.

The Original Sin of modernity, the application of instrumental reason to domination, resulted in two Great Crimes: capitalism's great crime and the educated elite's great crime.

The Great Crime of capitalism was the development of plantation slavery.  It was the utter domination of men for the purpose of profit; for the slave plantations, right from the start in the sugar plantations on Cyprus organized after the Crusades, were always business enterprises: production for profit, and if it meant using up a few Muslim slaves, well, the pope said it was OK because the slaves weren't Christians.

We may say that capitalism, like Buddhism, has its Hinayana, its contemptible lesser vehicle, in industrialization, the harrowing process by which a rural population of farmers is transformed into a competent wage-earning workforce.

The Great Crime of the educated elite was the development of the totalitarian state.  The totalitarian state of fond memory was the utter domination of men for the purpose of an idea, a vision of the perfect society, for the totalitarian state, right from its start in the Terror of the French Revolution, was always a soteriological secular religion, saving the world from exploitation and molding it into heaven on earth.  If it meant using up a few rich peasants or the whole bourgeoisie, well, you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.

The French Revolution and its Terror represented the totalizing of the Age of Reason.  The fascist states represented the totalizing of Romanticism and its union with nature.  The communist states represented the totalizing of Marxism and it class-war ideology.  But the totalitarian idea has its Hinayana, its contemptible lesser vehicle, too.  We may call it, with Jürgen Habermas, the "authoritarian welfare state."

The educated class is like any group of men for "men like power and will seize it if they can," in the words of Nicholas Wade.  The educated class uses instrumental reason applied to the technology of state power to dominate other men.  Only its goal is not profit, like the capitalists, but to rule the world as the benevolent and beneficent Oz.  The problem is that instrumental reason is a tool for domination, and the means that the educated class uses for domination is the canonical tool for the domination of other men:  politics and government.

Government is force, and politics is threatening force.

Over the decades, we have found ways of taming capitalism.  Today's capitalists fight over market share, and when they succeed they benefit almost everyone.  Their products benefit the consumers, and they share their extraordinary profits with their supporters, who are their investors and employees.

There has also been a taming of totalitarian educated elites, but not by much.  If the full-on totalitarian state engulfed the whole of society into a soteriological political crusade and oceans of blood, the authoritarian welfare state, at least, only engulfs half of society, or at least its GDP, into the maw of the state and the projection of political power.  But we cannot say, when government dominates all our worthiest cooperative instincts--the care of the aged, the care of the sick, the raising up of children, and the relief of the poor--that we have really tamed the totalitarian urge.  The lesser Great Crime of the educated class still oppresses us as the industrial capitalists used to dominate the industrial working class.

Plantation slavery was ended by the rise of a great moral and religious movement that anathematized the exploitation of men and women as mere slavish cogs in a profitable production machine.  We have yet to see the full development of a moral and religious movement to end the Hinayana of totalitarianism: the authoritarian welfare state and its reduction of all cooperative and caring instincts to a mechanical nexus of blind political power.

In my view this moral and political movement, that I believe begins with Edmund Burke in the 18th century, has yet to come to fruition because it has failed to inspire the people who will most benefit and socialize a world free from totalizing educated elites:  women.  When we talk of the authoritarian welfare stat reducing the care of the aged, the care of the sick, the raising up of children and the relief of the poor to care-less, compassionless centralizing, compulsory government programs, we are talking about all the best instincts and concerns of women reduced to bureaucracy and mind-numbing rules.

You can reduce capitalism to rules; that makes sense because capitalism is about sublimating the aggressiveness of human males to a fierce battle over market share, and men are always asking us to draw the line for them.  But to reduce care of the most vulnerable to rules and regulations is insanity.  Every woman knows that her aging mother needs health care that adapts to her individual need.  Every child is unique, and it is ridiculous to fit armies of children onto the Procrustean bed of the government child custodial facility.  And every poor person needs the personal attention that will turn mere relief into reintegration into the larger society.

Come on girls.  You have a world to win, and nothing to fear except the chains--of suffocating government rules and regulations.

Happiness: Is Virtue Sufficient

Our good friend Aristotle defines happiness (eudaimonia, the good life, or human flourishing) as "activity in accordance with virtue."  But is virtue sufficient for happiness?

Obviously, we can say, it is not.  In the first place, he considers virtue as the springboard of happiness.  If you want to have a good life, your actions must be done in accordance with virtue.  But virtue is the accumulation of habits and education, not to mention contemplation.  They are the necessary means by which we can build the necessary facility, the aptitude, skills, and attitude necessary to a good life.

Happiness is not just a man living a life of virtue in isolation; it requires what Aristotle calls self-sufficiency.  He means, by this, living not just in solitary virtuous splendor, but in a family, responsible for women, children and slaves, and the community of the city-state, "for man is born for citizenship."

And Aristotle tells us that happiness must extend over the whole of life.  It is not just a moment.  We cannot call a man happy if he has been buried, like Job, in unspeakable miseries and has lost everything: wife, children, camels, goats, and sheep.  But we do not wait to call a man happy until we are sure that his descendants will also be happy.

Aristotle seems determined to confuse us when he suddenly turns from his assertion that the practice of political science in legislation is the highest good.  in NE X 8 he ups and tells us that, "perfect happiness is a contemplative activity.  This seems a rather unworthy descent into special pleading for his own function and profession.  Do not plumbers think that the world begins and ends under the kitchen sink?  Do not economists tell us that the world would be a better place if politicians listened more to economists?  If the best life is a life of contemplation, where then is "activity in accordance with virtue?"  He is getting close to the east Asians who tell us that the best is Nirvana, the absence of all striving and acting.  In this case, of course, happiness as virtue collapses precisely into a trance of philosophy, and activity of life reduces to mere intellectual irritability.

Charles Taylor speaks of the best life in two dimensions: a basic human flourishing, of course, but also an attempt to reach for something higher, something transcendent.  Perhaps Aristotle, in his bios theoretikos, his life of contemplation, is making his own reach for transcendence, for "the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative."

In that case happiness is just virtuousness, dissolved into blissfulness.

Barack Obama, "Vulture Capitalist"

What is Mitt Romney going to do to scotch the job-killer label?  His Republican rivals have been ramping up criticism of the doings of Bain Capital, some have labeled him a "vulture capitalist."  If that's how Republican candidates think, then who knows what the Chicago guys on Obama's team will come up with.



Hugh Hewitt has a clever little sound bite on this.  He says that blaming Mitt Romney for job losses is like blaming the lifeboats for arriving too late at the sinking of the Titanic.



My own view is to try a health-care metaphor.  Corporate turnaround outfits like Bain are like surgeons.  They try to cure companies diagnosed with cancer.  Usually, of course, they only come in when the cancer is well advanced, because like people with a pain in their abdomen, the patient is in denial.  That's a pity, because advanced cancer often needs radical surgery.  It's almost always best to get cancer  in its early stages.



That's the business that Mitt Romney was in.  Diagnosing sick companies, coming up with a treatment plan, and then executing on the treatment plan.  Often times, of course, the treatment plan doesn't save the patient, or only provides a temporary improvement.



The Romney team evidently thinks that a direct attack on the president is the answer. Here's Romney in an airplane aisle.

Well, I’d like to look at Barack Obama’s record, and so as we talk about my experience in the private sector, I’ll talk about his experience… he’s now been a venture capitalist in Solyndra, Fisker, the Tesla… and he’s been a private equity guy in General Motors and Chrysler, so I’ll be talking about his record when I’m facing him.

That just shows why I'm not a campaign manager.  It hadn't occurred to me that Solyndra was just waiting there to neutralize the "vulture capitalist" smear.  But the Human Events reporter is livid with Romney's sarcastic answer.

Barack Obama is not a “venture capitalist” with a “record in the private sector.” The compulsory extraction of funding from taxpayers by force, to fund massive expenditures on politically favored companies run by top Obama campaign contributors, is not “venture capitalism.” It’s not really capitalism at all, although the term “crony capitalism” has become popular for describing it.

Quite right, of course.  Actually, there is a bigger problem with Romney's comment.  Most Americans really don't know the different between a "venture capitalist" and a "private equity guy."  But maybe they will after the 2012 election.  And that would be a good thing!



Sure, Romney didn't go on to spell out what is wrong with Obama's jolly little foray into venture capitalism.  But no doubt he will develop the idea in his speeches, in exactly the way that the Human Events guy did.   When the government gets into "venture capitalism" it isn't venture, it isn't capitalism, it's force, pure and simple; it is government rewarding its supporters with our money.  And the same thing applies when the government plays at the private equity game and bails out GM, the unions, and the banks.  President Obama doesn't risk his money or the money of investors looking for a risky play.  He is risking our money.  And we don't want the government taking big risks with out retirement savings.



The point is that if Mitt Romney can't turn the "vulture capitalism" issue around and make it a liability for President Obama then he's not a good enough politician to be president.

Aristotle's Waffle on the Function Argument

In our western canon there is perhaps no stronger support for reason than Aristotle's "function argument" in Book I, Chapter 7 of the Nichomachean Ethics.  But plenty of people have challenged the throne of reason.

For instance, in the Daodejing, the Chinese challenge to the rationalism of Confucianism, the ideal is not reason but an effortless spontaneity, the Dao, the Way of life.  Everything is downhill from the Way.

When the way is lost, virtue appears;  when virtue is lost, kindness appears; when kindness is lost, justice appears.

And, one might suspect, when justice is lost, then power appears.

Something similar appears in the West with the Romantic rebellion, a reaction against the totalitarian idea that Reason is everything.

In the Ethics, Aristotle hangs his hat on reason, that "the function of man is an activity of soul [anima] which follows or implies a rational principle," and a good rational principle, well executed, at that.

[H]uman good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete.

This would add up to happiness (i.e. eudaimonia, which translates as human flourishing) and that in a complete life.

At the beginning of the Ethics, Aristotle tells us what all this is leading to: the highest good, as in managing the relations between men in the polis.  Here he establishes that the highest good is the combination of subsidiary goods, as the skill of harness-making is subsidiary to horsemanship, and horsemanship subsidiary to strategy, and strategy to politics.  And the highest good is clearly politics,

since politics uses the rest of the sciences... it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from... this end must be the good of man.

 But in Ethics X 8, Aristotle backs up a bit, and, once he has dealt with mere pleasure, and established "happiness is activity in accordance with virtue," he discovers that the highest form of happiness is found in "the man who is contemplating the truth", for he doesn't need money like the liberal man, or power like the brave man.  "[F]or deeds many things are needed" but not for the contemplative life.

Anyway, says Aristotle, the contemplative life is much like the life of the gods, for it is ridiculous to imagine them running around doing absurd things like dispensing justice, signing contracts, or confronting dangers.  No, "Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation."  The gods must "delight in what was best and most akin to them (i.e. reason)" in other words, philosophers, and "the philosopher will more than any other be happy."

This is straying rather far from the simple function argument, that happiness is virtuous action according to a rational principle, and that, moreover, the highest and best form of the good is political science and legislating the good of the polis.

In fact, if you think of philosophy as getting close to the gods, then it must be getting close to some kind of ineffable, effortless spontaneity.  Which is what the non-rational Daodejing was proposing about the same time, only thousands of miles away in China.

Make Some Lemonade, Mitt

Now that Mitt Romney has put his foot in it, saying, "I like being able to fire people," the whole question of his Bain Capital years has been put in play.  As Mark Steyn says,

McDonald’s makes hamburgers, but what does Bain do? Private equity, high-yield assets . . . golly, that sounds less like Main Street lingo and more like Wall Street; less to do with the kind of business built on the virtues of making and doing, and more to do with the kind of too-clever-by-half monkey business that came close to taking out the global economy in 2008.

The fact is, of course, that finance is a critical part of capitalism, and leveraged-buyout operations like Bain are right in there too.  The whole business of turning around failing businesses is a vital part of our economy.



You could say that the LBO boys perform a similar service to the health care industry.  Company gets sick, you send in the docs to figure out what is wrong.  With diagnosis in hand you come up with a treatment plan, which may include surgery, and probably will include life-style changes and more healthy exercise.



But if you talk to an average American she just wants to "save jobs."  The machinations of the turnaround artists are offensive to her.  People would rather not admit to losses until actual bankruptcy.  And, of course, an old-established firm is usually paying above-market wages to people that are not necessarily performing above the market.



Now that the fat is in the fire, Romney's people have to come out with a good story.  They must tell us that America is in a jam and we have to take bold action to get out of the jam and get the economy moving and return to prosperity.  Where would you look for someone with those talents?  Why, someone that had experience trying to turn failing companies around.  You certainly wouldn't expect a chap from a corrupt city machine to be of any use.



To start with, the Romney folks could make a campaign video to laugh at the "I like being able to fire people" meme.  He can put his "gaffe" up and then flash a picture of President Obama.  Or Harry Reid.  Or Nancy Pelosi.  Or the Goldman Sachs building.  Or some picture that says crony capitalism or bailouts.  Because America isn't going to get better until we've done some serious surgery on the body politic.



Mitt Romney needs to turn his lemons into lemonade.

What's the Story?

I suppose the Republican candidates are all busy fighting each other.  But I sure would like to get a feel for the story they are going to tell the American people come the fall.



It's not enough to be against Obama; you need to tell the story about why he is a disaster for America and why the Republican agenda is good for America.



For instance, I don't think that this Romney retort to an Occupy protester does the job.

“You know what?” Romney said. “This president has caused a deepening recession and is responsible for 25 million Americans being out of work or stopped working or not being able to get jobs, and let me tell you, this president’s been a failure and that’s one of the reasons I’m running is to help you get a job.”

Republicans need a better story than that.  OK, genius, you say, what's your idea?



I think it must start from the basic failure of Obama's presidency, the failure to realize in the transition after the election that the game had changed.  There just wasn't going to be the money to run off all the liberal agenda items that had been kept on ice for 20 years.  Forget the porkulus stimulus to pay off supporters.  Forget the cunning step towards single-payer healthcare.  Forget the uber-regulation of environment and energy.  Forget the wasteful infrastructure plans from high-speed rail to bike paths.



Of course, that would have been impossible for him.  To brush off his liberal supporters in 2009 would have been impossible.  But he could have slipped in a few policies to help gin the economy by lowering the costs of doing business.  He didn't of course, because Democrats don't think about things like that.  They don't think about helping the goose to lay the golden eggs; they just want the eggs.



So I think that the message should hit the truth that President Obama hasn't governed as a post partisan, hasn't worked to heal the divisions.  Instead he has pushed his left-liberal agenda as hard as possible, as if time was short and if he didn't get it done today he'd never get another chance.  Here's what I would say.



"Mr. President, you have wasted your chance.  You were elected at a moment of national peril, when you could have set the US on a new direction.  And you blew it.



"We needed jobs, and you gave us handouts.  We needed energy and you gave us crony capitalists.  We needed reform and you gave your pals bailouts.



"You talked of cutting spending, and you gave us waste.  You talked transparency, and you delivered back-room deals.



"You were elected to bring us together, and you forced us apart.



"You promised hope and change, and you gave us division.



"Your moment is wasted.  Your chance is gone.  America must come together under a new leader, a leader who will heal the wounds and lead us to prosperity.



"America needs a president who will unleash the power of America's workers and businesses and bring in a new age of prosperity.



"Some wail that the Republican agenda is nothing but 'austerity,' as governments are forced to cut back on programs.  I've got news for you, Mr President.  'Austerity' is when the people get less.  'Prosperity' is when the government gets less.



"Frankly, Mr. President, I don't care about the government.  I care about the American people.  And I am going to deliver prosperity.  Not to the K Street lobbyists.  Not to the crony capitalists. To the American people.



"It is the first thing I am going to do.  It will be the second thing I do, and it will be the last thing I do.



"I only care about one thing.  Bringing this economy back, and bringing America back.



"Because America is the last best home of mankind on earth. And America's 's best days are yet to come.



"God bless America."