Blundering into Syria

Since I'm fresh from reading Angelo Codevilla's War: Means and Ends, I'm a little bemused by the current Syria flap.  We're going to bomb Syria for three days because of a chemical warfare attack on civilians?



Or is the dirty little truth that we're getting in big time but the only way to justify power politics in these precious times is by playing the humanitarian card and saying that we are only there to stop the gassing?



(Why is it that chemical weapons are such a big deal to our ruling class?  From what I gather, chemical weapons are really not that effective.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe chemical weapons are effective, particularly on civilians.)



Either way, let's at least be clear about what we want in the Middle East.  We want it divided, with no one power dominating the rest of the region.



That's why we went after Saddam Hussein in 1990-91.  Because his attack on Kuwait threatened to make him the regional hegemon.  That's why we went into Iraq in 2003... Yes, why did we go into Iraq?  I hoped at the time that it was to build an effective counterweight to Iran.  Only it doesn't seem to have worked.



At any rate, our policy right now ought to be directed at weakening Iran.  Whether that means leaning towards the Sunni rebels in Syria, or taking out Bashir and the Alawite regime, or building a democratic opposition in Iran I don't know.



But I hope the Obama administration knows.



That's my big worry.  I worry that the Obama administration doesn't know what it wants and is only acting because it has to.  The Big Show for the Obamis, after all, is the war against the Evil Republicans and everything they stand for.



In war as in politics, you don't want to be distracted by side-shows.

Critical Mass on Unschooling?

We conservatives have been whining about the public school system for ages.  Not that we have that much of a problem with schooling.  We just believe in school choice, what you might call the substitution of the administrative principle of the current system with the market principle that would allow schooling to develop to meet the needs of the consumers.

Still, there are lots of conservative parents that approve of homeschooling and its derivatives.

My cranky opinion boils down to the simplistic notion that public schools are government child custodial facilities.

But now comes a wonder.  The liberal Salon.com has an article by an unschooling publicist, Peter Gray, entitled "School is a prison — and damaging our kids."  Gray's book is Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self Reliant, and Better Prepared for Life.

While chaps like me put the blame for prison schools on liberal elitists like Horace Mann, Peter Gray blames the Puritans.

The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them.

And I thought it was all the fault of the Jesuits, who proclaimed "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man."

But never mind.  The point is that the modern schooling movement was based on the idea that we needed to force children to learn the things we needed them to learn so that they would become the right kind of adults.  Jesuits wanted to force children to become good Catholics; Protestants wanted to force children to become good Protestants.  Horace Mann and Co. wanted to force the Boston Irish away from their ignorance and vice and Catholicism.  Experts at the turn of the 20th century were anxious to force children to become dutiful factory workers.  Modern public school administrators want to force rambunctious little boys into good little girls.  And so on.

I emphasize the force, because I think it is important.  Everyone in the education biz seems to have thought that force was necessary.  And yet the evidence belies them.  Writes Gray:

I have spent much of my research career studying how children learn. Children come into the world beautifully designed to direct their own education. They are endowed by nature with powerful educative instincts, including curiosity, playfulness, sociability, attentiveness to the activities around them, desire to grow up and desire to do what older children and adults can do.

And what do these children learn before they ever go to school?

Through their own efforts, children learn to walk, run, jump and climb. They learn from scratch their native language, and with that, they learn to assert their will, argue, amuse, annoy, befriend, charm and ask questions... They do all this before anyone, in any systematic way, tries to teach them anything. 

And system, the oracle tells us, is domination.

We've heard about the tablet computers in Ethiopia, and that in six months illiterate village kids learned how to hack the computers to turn on the camera.  It turns out, according to Gray, that someone has tried the same trick with kids in India.

Another researcher who has documented the power of self-directed learning is Sugata Mitra. He set up outdoor computers in very poor neighborhoods in India, where most children did not go to school and many were illiterate. Wherever he placed such a computer, dozens of children would gather around and, with no help from adults, figure out how to use it. 

 I suppose that we should forgive the schoolmasters of 200 years ago.  Back then books were expensive and teachers were cheap.  So it made sense to pack kids together to learn from a teacher.  Today the whole world, from Wikipedia to Khan Academy, is available on a computer (and remember today's computer desktop was designed by Xerox PARC a generation ago from research about how children learn).

So maybe it's time for a new paradigm.

Anyway, if liberals are getting with the homeschooling paradigm then there really is hope.

The problem for our liberal friends is likely to be the unwelcome truth that any future education "system" is likely to mean less political power for liberals.

Sorry about that.

Who Is The President Working For?

Foreign policy analyst Richard Fernandez asks a significant question today.  Who does the president think he is working for?  The answer Fernandez gives is:

[Y]ou work for guys like the mid-Western plumber. The folks who drive Fords, shop at Safeway’s and who may even own a gun or two. The people who elected you.

And that's just the problem.  President Obama does not see himself working to create a decent life for Joe the Plumber, Ford drivers, Safeway shoppers and gun owners.  He has a far higher calling: fundamental transformation.



More than George W. Bush, more even than Bill Clinton, Obama is a creature of the ruling class, the people with Big Ideas for America: Single-payer health care, green energy, financial regulation, outreach to traditionally marginalized communities, and all the other ideas that feature a starring role for the administrative ruling class.



The president has pushed towards single-payer health care because that's what the elite thinks we need.  Ordinary people can't really understand how to structure the health care industry, and certainly can't deal with a big personal health care crisis; it's up to the educated ruling class to do the job.



The president is a green energy advocate because that's what people like him know is needed.  Carbon pollution will waste the planet and we have to do something to stop it.



The president backs administrative regulation of the financial markets, as per Dodd-Frank, because that's what Everyone agrees is needed to stop the con artists and banksters from creating another financial crisis.



The president backs the racist Reverends because he believes that only community organizers and politics can help marginalized communities get justice.  Otherwise inequality and injustice will get worse.



The plumber, the Ford owner, the Safeway shopper: they don't have a direct opinion on these esoteric questions.  They just know that the economy is bad and they are struggling.  They don't know what has gone wrong.



But what should the president do for the folks he is working for, if he should not take the advice of the ruling class?



The conservative answer starts with an act of faith.  Almost certainly, we believe, any political policy that requires detailed administrative supervision of the economic sector is a bad idea and will not work.  So that takes care of single payer, green energy, and financial regulation right away.



You know where that argument comes from.  It is the argument of F.A. Hayek that government simply cannot develop the knowledge to administer the economy, but millions of producers and consumers can and do.



So confine the government to making general rules to make the price system work.



We also believe that any politics that starts with the exploitation narrative -- that "our group" is being discriminated against and the government needs to act -- will do more harm than good, except in cases of egregious discrimination such as that in the Jim Crow South and today in the quotas and diversity culture.



You know where that comes from.  It's a simple application of the workings of the price system.  Imagine a discriminatory world in which black workers are paid less than white workers.  What a profit opportunity for the entrepreneur willing to take a risk on black workers!  After a while, the world will begin to notice that the black workers working for our daring entrepreneur create more profit than higher-paid white workers.  They hire black workers themselves.  Pretty soon the demand for black workers goes up and employers have to bid up their wages.  And so on.  The only thing needful is to prevent the government or posses of angry racists from interfering with the entrepreneurial lust for profit.


So conservatives believe that the government should only act in cases of grievous discrimination.



The only good thing about the Obama presidency is that it will teach the American people to believe that something went wrong in the Obama years.  They won't know exactly what it was, but they will have a feeling that the president wasn't really working for them and their needs.



They will feel, in 2016, that it is time for a change. And they will get it.



Let's give the Fool has the last word:

Why, 'some are born great, some achieve greatness,

and some have greatness thrown upon them.'...

and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

The Fool was speaking to Malvolio, not President Obama, of course.

Seeing the World as System and Lifeworld

When Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, German Jews, looked out at the world as refugees in California they were, even as Marxists, forced to concede that there was something wrong in the program of the Enlightenment.  As they wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment,

What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men.

In other words the program of the Enlightenment, to learn how the world works, ends up as a program to use nature for the ends of man in a much more systematic way that in the practical life skills that we see, e.g., in the hunter gatherer.  And that systematic way ends up as domination.

It's not until we get to Adorno's student that we get a thinker determined to deal with the challenge of Enlightenment and its program of domination.  Jürgen Habermas accepts the systems of Enlightenment and their domination as a fact about our world.  But he takes the concept of Lebenswelt developed by Husserl, or lifeworld, as an opposing possibility.  Whereas domination is coded into the very definition of reason, the intersubjective lifeworld offers a possibility of discourse rather than domination, interchange rather than injunction, emancipation rather than subordination.

Of course, as David Ingram reminds us, system and lifeworld are not independent entities; Habermas himself writes about the "colonization of the lifeworld."  Indeed, a recurring Frankfurt School theme is the analysis of the way that the system's mass media colonize the lifeworld of the home and the family.  System and lifeworld are opposed to each other as much as they complement each other.

But what do they mean?  Habermas injects the idea of the philosophy of consciousness and the philosophy of language as a means to understanding.  The philosophy of consciousness, from Descartes ego to Kant, thinks in unipolar terms, of the observer in the world.  That outlook necessarily reduces the human relationship with the world to a strategic, instrumental outlook described above by Horkheimer and Adorno.  But if we define the world through a philosophy of language then we define our knowledge of the world as necessarily social and shared.  It is not the single consciousness that lives in the world but all of us together, and we test and share our experience of the world in conversation with each other using the language we share.

On this view, system and lifeworld cannot exist without the other.  You may construct the most amazing system of knowledge imaginable, but it means nothing until it is communicated to the world.  You may develop in conversation the most amazing dialog, but it does not count in the world until it is developed into a system with the power to replace the old ways of thinking and doing.

We are seeing a huge test of this notion right now in the rollout of Obamacare.  The Democrats went into a room together and wrote a bill.  But they did not bring it out into the light of day to have a conversation about it and give people a chance to critique it and improve it.  They just rammed it through by force.

Now Obamacare is rolling out and the beautiful system is revealed as a solipsist nightmare.  The single Democratic ego imagined a wonderful health care future, trusting in the unified liberal consciousness to create the perfect system.  But system is nothing without lifeworld, without people conversing and adjusting to individual circumstances and needs.  So the president has to resort to extra-legal acts of force to fit the square peg of Obamacare into the round hole of reality.

What our liberal friends cannot admit is their dominatory administrative systems are doomed to failure.  What they cannot bear to confess is that the free market is the answer to the cruelty of systems and administrations, because it ceaselessly adjusting between system and lifeworld.  It constructs the most imposing systems, but it is always responding to the feedback, expressed through the price system, of the individual.  And the great commercial systems are always getting pruned back by some new group of innovators that got together in a coffee shop to come up with something new.

Instinctively, you know that this must be so, because otherwise liberals and their clients wouldn't be insisting on the perfection of their system and pretending that the daily diary of domination, in Obama administration scandals, is merely "phoney."

What Use is "Use-value?"

What makes a thing useful?  What makes a human useful?  And then, how do we put a value on that use?

Philosophers and economists have long pondered this enigma of value, and come up with brilliant explanations.  By the end of the 18th century the classical economists had come up with the dual doctrine of use-value and exchange value.  You can see that some things, like food, have value because they are directly useful for maintaining human life.  But other things, like diamonds, have value only because people want them and are willing to pay money for them.

Eventually the marginalist economists decided that the attempt to make an issue between use-value and exchange-value was a chimera.  People establish value when they buy and sell and express their preferences by their actions.  Why a person values a particular item is known only to herself and to God.

But Karl Marx, outraged by the economic turmoil of the 1840s, decided to make a scandal out of the difference between use-value and exchange-value as it applied to labor.  From Wikipedia:

Marx emphasizes that the use-value of a labor-product is practical and objectively determined,[4] i.e. it inheres in the intrinsic characteristics of a product which enable it to satisfy a human need or want. The use-value of a product therefore exists as a material reality vis-a-vis social needs regardless of the individual need of any particular person. The use-value of a commodity is specifically a social use-value, meaning that it has a generally accepted use-value for others in society, and not just for the producer.

It was precisely this idea that the marginal economists exploded: the idea that there was an objective use-value to anything.  Moreover, it denies the fact that every human act is social, or potentially so.

Think of a peasant scrabbling a life on the side of a mountain.  For him, the use value of the corn he grows is expressed in the corn-meal, the tacos he can get out of his harvest.  But suppose our peasant discovers a fertile valley that can produce much more for the same amount of labor.  Now he can feed the corn to domestic animals and eat meat instead of tacos.  Or he can exchange some of the corn with the chap in the next valley for salt, which is not available in his valley.  The use-value of the corn is different than before.  And now some of it is exchanged.

When Marx critiques the system of wage labor, the fact that under industrial capitalism the worker exchanges his labor for wages rather than produce directly for his own needs, he proposes that the worker is thereby "alienated" from the product of his labor, which is now owned by the capitalist.  And this alienation is exploitation.

Marx forgets that the laborer was never merely producing for his own use.  In the hunter-gatherer band the successful hunter had to share his labor product with the rest of the band; he was immediately alienated from the product of his labor.  In pure feudalism the laborer was alienated from his labor in a variety of ways: he might have to labor on the lord's land; he might pay rent; he might be required to fight and die as a soldier in the feudal host.  How alienating is that?

Perhaps the worker was a guild member in a city.  In that case, as a master, he would have to produce exactly according to the rules of the guild at the price established by the guild.  But most workers were not masters.  They were apprentices, indentured laborers working almost for free, or perhaps paying for the privilege of learning their craft.  Or they were journeymen working for a master.  Or they were outside the comfortable world of the guild altogether, trying sell their labor product while dodging the city officers enforcing the guild rules upon outsiders.

When the young Max Weber studied the economy of rural Prussia "east of the Elbe" he found that the peasants much preferred to work as free workers rather than as the underlings of the local Junker, even though they earned less and had less security than the tied laborers.  How do you measure that?

When you read Marxist inspired work, as I am right now in Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason by David Ingram, you find that the Marxist exploitation narrative is taken for granted.  And you find another thing taken for granted: that government action can relieve exploitation.  Once you do that, the only question remaining is what degree or color of force is appropriate in the fight against that exploitation.

The conservative and libertarian critique of the administrative state denies first of all the argument for exploitation.  The market is certainly ruthless, but it is ruthless in that it forces everyone to produce not just for their own needs but for other peoples' needs.  That is what exchange and the division of labor means.  It means that I produce for other people, not just myself.  How social is that?  If it is exploitative to produce for other peoples' needs then I am all for exploitation.

But the conservative and libertarian critique does not stop there.  It argues that the attempt to solve exploitation and inequality by government subsidy and cash handouts and control of market outcomes is counterproductive.  If you subsidize something then you will get wasteful overproduction, as in green energy.  If you distribute cash handouts, as in food stamps and welfare, you motivate people to reduce their labor output.  That's what the Cato Institute found in its recent study of welfare "A Better Deal than Work".  When you load up labor wages with payroll taxes you reduce the demand for labor and you encourage people to start working "off the books."

The truth is that the whole corpus of left-wing thought, from the labor theory of value to the single-payer health system is a gigantic apology for political power.  It simply says "we know best" and we will force you to obey.  It is, you might say, exploitation, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal".

And what is the use-value of that?

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.

What "Emerging Democratic Majority?"

Ever since 2004 the Democrats have been assuring us that we are on the cusp of The Emerging Democratic Majority.  Yeah, there's a book by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira.



Obviously, a chap like me cannot believe such a thing because if I did, what would be the point of being a conservative?



The basic idea is that minorities, women, and educated young people are all trending Democratic, so look out ageing white men.



But there's just one thing, as TV detective Columbo used to say.



If the whole world is trending Democratic why does the president have to flog the black community into the Democratic column with racist incidents like the beer summit and the Trayvon Martin case?



If women are trending Democratic why do Democrats have to terrify women into believing that Republicans want to take their contraception away?



And if students are trending Democratic why is it necessary to make a big deal about student loans?



Shouldn't it just be obvious that the liberal way is the right way?



If you look at what Democrats do instead of what they say, you'd think that Democrats are scared to death of getting into a permanent minority, so they figure they have to flog every potential advantage from race identity to voter registration.



Which means that they are not in the catbird seat as they pretend.



In fact, of course, President Obama won reelection by only four points.  In fact, the US House of Representatives has a Republican majority.  In fact, state legislatures and governors have been trending Republican for years.



The reason that young 'uns and blacks and women have been trending Democratic is because only Democrats have their ear.  If you're a black then racial solidarity requires to you identify as Democrat.  If you are a single woman, practical considerations require you to rely on the government safety net rather than the spousal safety net.  If you are an educated youth then you've been listening to unionized teachers since kindergarten.  How you you think that unionized teachers with government pensions and tenure are going to vote?



Under the Obama administration these good folks are going to find out that Democratic governance does not improve their lives.  They are going to find out that politicians and their cronies are always and everywhere corrupt unless you tirelessly expose their shenanigans.  They are going to find out that politicians don't have a clue about the economy or education or health care or anything else.



That's because politics is good for only one thing: riling people up for a war.  You can learn that the easy way by reading a few books, or you can learn it the hard way in the aftermath of the inevitable political failures.



Bottom line: look for a reversal on that glorious Democratic majority in the next few years.