Smash the Cathedral!

Last week I suggested that we can't just go out and change America, and that's why Speaker Boehner and the House Republicans couldn't just vote against increasing the debt ceiling and stop the spending.  First they have to win the battle of ideas.  Here's how I put it:

First of all, opinion leaders in the academy and the media must have their come-to-Jesus moment.  (I know: Dream on). They see that for over a century they have been brutalizing and betraying the little people with their rational plans and their race and class politics.  Then purveyors of conventional wisdom like Ron Fournier have to get the message.  Then NYT readers and NPR listeners must start mouthing the new catchphrases.  Then liberal activists and Democratic politicians must be shamed out of their race baiting and class warfare.  Then the rank-and-file entitlement beneficiaries get reeducated.  Then we get to reform the welfare state.

By "opinion leaders in the academy and the media" I mean, of course, the folks that "Mencius Moldbug" calls The Cathedral.  And those folks are not going to have a come-to-Jesus moment without a lot of encouragement.

Now Moldbug suggests that the path to the future is through a kind of national bankruptcy that he calls the "Reset" that turns the US into a kind of limited-liability corporation.  But in real life the US probably turns into Brazil, as Brazil turns into Argentina, as Argentina turns into Venezuela, and Venezuela turns into Zimbabwe.   Because politics is not the same as bankruptcy.

No, I suspect that the way to end the rule of the Cathedral is through a Reformation rather than a Reset.

The proximate cause of the Reformation was Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses against indulgences.  But the bigger picture was the printing revolution had permitted the middle class to get and read their own Bibles, got to be more engaged in their faith and the exegesis of the Bible, and so, as Wikipedia puts it,

[H]is publication of his objections was paradigmatic of the resultant shift from internal to extramural debate on matters that had previously been taken as given.

In our terms, the availability of printed books increased the bandwidth of public participation in religion and discussion of life, the universe, and everything.  People weren't content to leave the exegesis of religion up to the Church.  They wanted in on the discussion.

Could our time, with its own increase in bandwidth through the information revolution, see a similar revolution?  Could a burgeoning Long Tail of engaged citizens dislodge the current ruling class of the Cathedral, the academics and the journalists that have controlled public debate over the last two centuries?  Or will the Cathedral manage to maintain control of the moral-cultural sector and continue its hegemony over the political sector and the economic sector?

The comparison with the Reformation is chilling.  There  were many failed attempts to reform the old Cathedral, from the Waldensians to John Wycliffe to Jan Hus.  And they were all put down. Until Martin Luther came along.

So we should expect that the way to a better world, a world that has emerged from under the hegemony of today's ruling class, will not be easy or swift.

But there is hope.  There is hope because world is full of people of good will that want to participate in their own moral development and take responsibility for themselves and build communities of cooperation and faith.  There is also hope in the fact that every cultural elite eventually decays into hypocrisy and the pursuit of power for the sake of power.  It loses its moral authority in the cesspool of its own corruption and cruelty, and then with its moral authority gone its physical authority collapses.  Surely our elite is well on the path to self-destruction.

The only thing to do is to have the courage to tell truth and shame the Devil.  And have faith that in the end good will prevail.

Hillary Clinton's Course in Pragmatism. Well, not exactly.

Like many Americans I had nothing but scorn for Hillary Clinton's famous judgment on Benghazi.  Said Secretary of State Clinton to a Senate panel:

Clinton: Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?

But a few weeks ago I bought a copy of William James's eight lectures on "Pragmatism," and now I understand what the Secretary was talking about.  Says James near the beginning of Lecture Two:

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable...  The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.  What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true?  If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. (My emphasis). (p.23)

Who knew?  Hillary Clinton as a profound philosophical thinker?

Now the question in the case of Secretary Clinton was not really about a "protest" or "guys out for a walk one night."  Even though it certainly does make a difference if the Ambassador Stevens was killed by a planned terror attack rather than a "spontaneous" protest.  It was about what in the Sam Blazes the Secretary and the President were doing that night and whether there was some action with practical consequences that they might have taken to save the lives of four Americans.   And we can guess the answer to that.  Deer in the headlights, baby.  Or maybe:  the president/secretary is in a meeting.

I like the pragmatic method as presented by William James.  It agrees with my own view that we know nothing about the world as it really is.  We only know that certain things work according to our experience and our theories.  Beyond that be dragons.

But I think that James rather betrays his principle when it comes to Kant.  He pooh-poohs Kant's idea of space and time as intuitions when they are "constructions as patently artificial as any that science can show."(p.79)  Hmm.  But the point Kant makes is that we don't want to think of space and time as absolute and equable in the way that Newton taught us to think.  As "forms of intuition" we learn to think of them as something we have conjured up in our brains.  Space and time might be something completely different than we think, and so it turned out with Einstein and space-time.

Then James goes on to whack against Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and Hegel for being "utterly sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes."  Well, maybe they seemed that way, back at the turn of the 20th century.  But I'd say that the contribution of critical philosophy and skepticism is that it keeps us precisely safe from the "dogmatic slumber" that Kant wrote about.  They remind us to keep our wits about us and expect the unexpected.  My view is we couldn't have got relativity and quantum mechanics without the radical skepticism of the empiricists and critical philosophy of the Germans.  It's telling that Germans made pretty well all the early running in the physics revolution that started with Einstein's two papers in 1905.

Why would that be?  It would be because German philosophy had kept German minds radically open to anything.  So when it appeared that however you measured the speed of light, it was always the same, a German Jew was ready to suggest that, if the speed of light was always experienced as constant it meant that, as far as the math were concerned, space and time were relative.

And James agrees with this at the beginning of Lecture Eight on Pragmatism and Religion.

On pragmatic principles we can not reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it.  Universal conceptions, as things to take account of, may be as real to pragmatism as particular sensations are.(p.119)

You can see where this is leading.  It leads to God and Reason and the Absolute as conceptions that men down the ages have certainly regarded as useful.  It's just that we keep changing our minds.

And why not?

Beyond Arthur Brooks' Social-Justice Agenda

Arthur C. Brooks is a real good guy.  He's the one that wrote Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism and found out that it wasn't liberals that cared.  And now, writing in Commentary, he's found out that people that believe in redistribution don't give much to charity.

According to the 1996 General Social Survey, those who strongly agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” gave away $140 on average to charity. Among those who strongly disagreed, the average gift was $1,637.

But still, he says, conservatives believe in redistribution to the extent of a basic government safety net, and more.



A proper conservative social-justice agenda should include -- well what exactly?  Somebody decided to ask the poor, and this is what the poor wanted:

The real answer is both simple and profound. They need transformation, relief, and opportunity—in that order. On these three pillars, conservatives and advocates for free enterprise can build the basics of the social-justice agenda that America deserves.

So off goes Brooks into an enumeration of the programs that would be needed to do that.



But I'm not so sure.  Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) gave an education speech recently "Making Higher Education Affordable Again." According to Daniel Doherty Rubio starts with a "Student Right to Know Before You Go Act." Oh Good.  That sounds just like the Affordable Care Act that isn't.  Rubio then proposes that employers step in and start to invest in education for their employees with equity deals, etc.  But surely the problem is bigger than that.



In fact I would imagine that any conservative social-justice agenda for the poor must start with zeroing out the middle class entitlements.  Why?  Because otherwise we get right back to where we are today, where the middle class entitlements completely dwarf the goodies going to the poor.



What do we see today?  The poor get shafted when it comes to education. The schools in the "inner city" -- meaning more generally wherever the poor send their kids to school -- are dreadful.  So what's the point of government education?  The middle class will find a way to educate their children.  In fact the latest fad is for home-schooling that does not plan any specific program.  It assumes that middle-class kids will pick up what they need to know as they grow up just as they teach themselves to speak their mother tongue.  So we have an education system that was  originally intended to make the poor literate, and instead it amounts to a middle-class baby-sitting service.



Then there's welfare, which seems to be intended as a middle class jobs program rather than relief for the poor.



It would be nice, e.g., to have government assistance to the poor for retirement income and health care.  But instead we have the monster Social Security Medicare/Medicaid system that's a feast for the special interests, privileges the middle class, and elbows out the poor.  Well-to-do middle-class grandmas make a hobby out of visiting their cardiologists for their heart problems and their neurologists for their Parkinsons problems whenever the mood takes them: meanwhile the poor have to hope to elbow their way in at some government clinic.



It seems to me that Point Zero is to say that, whatever it is -- education, retirement, health care -- the middle class ought to be able to do it and afford it on their own.  If it takes government for the middle class to afford it, as in health care, then the whole thing is screwed up so bad with government programs that we need to start again.



So that's why I can't get too excited about a conservative social-justice agenda that starts tinkering away with the current subsidies and government programs.  I don't believe that we'll end up helping the poor if we do that.



First of all, we've got to get us, the middle class, off the government teat.  Then we can start to talk about a conservative social-justice agenda for the poor.



There's another thing.  Brooks' three ideas, of "transformation, relief, and opportunity," are great.  But let's think about how we can get government out of it.



In transformation, of course, we are talking "personal moral transformation."  That means government must have nothing to do with it, because of the separation of church (meaning any morally oriented organization) and state.



Then with relief we must deal with the basic problem that the poor climbing out of poverty and dependency face the highest marginal tax rates of any Americans, often over 50%.  Every time a poor person works, they face the removal of some benefit.  So if a poor person is receiving government benefits, then that poor person is facing severe fiscal headwinds.  The less the government is handing out relief and the more that the private sector (that means you and me) is stepping in the more the marginal tax problem goes away.



Then there is opportunity.  Writes Brooks:

An opportunity society has two basic building blocks: Universal education to create a base of human capital and an economic system that rewards hard work, merit, innovation, and personal responsibility.

Really?  I'd say that an opportunity society is one that goes out of its way to make it easy to learn and to work.  I'd say it combines education and work.  Right now we have a government education system that doesn't educate and we have extensive workplace regulation and taxation that makes it very difficult for marginal workers to get ahead.  The current system puts barriers in the way of people that want education, and puts lead weights on the feet of people that want to work.



I'd say that what the poor need is child labor.  Yeah!  Poor children need to get into work early and start doing something useful.  Then, when they are still young they might start to see that a bit of education could really help them live a productive and well-paid life.  OK.  Let's provide lots of ways for people to get their Three Rs under their belt.  And they might do that before they have gotten socialized into the dead-end inner city school and before getting socialized into the local gang culture.



Actually, I'd say that -- never mind the poor -- most children, excepting only the professional and creative elite, would thrive with a combined work-and-education system.  It is only the hot-house flowers of the elite that benefit from an academic education, kids with Tiger Moms that are destined to live by the written word, because Mom said so.  But most people learn by doing; they are kinesthetic learners rather than auditory or visual.  Check out Learning Styles at Wikipedia.  So why in the world have we forced everyone into a audio-visual system?  I'll tell you why.  It's because system is domination and the point of today's government education is not to educate but to dominate.



Of course all this is way too scary for policy analysts like the excellent Arthur C. Brooks and good presidential candidates like Marco Rubio.  They have to appear sound and sensible to brain-dead liberal media types.  But you and I are not public figures.  We can afford to think big, think beyond the conventional wisdom, and try to think of a world beyond the failed world of the administrative liberal welfare state.



And we should.

Get a Clue, Panama

The Panama government is in a deadlock over money with GPUC, the Spanish/Italian construction consortium that's building the Panama Canal expansion for $3.1 billion.  They want about $1.6 billion to finish the job.



It's a big deal, because the bigger locks in the expansion will allow canal revenue to increase from the current $1 billion a year to a projected $4 billion a year, according to Dan Molinski.



Panama chose a Spanish/Italian consortium to build the canal expansion for $3.1 billion, and you can see why.  To select mega-construction firm Bechtel would mean letting the Yankee imperialist nose back inside the tent.  Nobody in Panama wants that.



But, according to Bechtel Group Inc. whinings to the US State Department unearthed by Wikileaks, the European consortium bought the job.  The "consortium couldn't even 'pour the concrete' for the accepted $3.1 billion bid," according to a Bechtel memo.



OK chums, but compare $1.6 billion against the $3 billion per year in increased revenue from the new locks, which will allow ships 1,400 ft long by 180 ft wide to use the canal, compared with 1,000 ft by 110 feet at present.  Get a clue; get the expansion finished!



Mind you, the ships using the canal even now are BIG.  You may read about the miserable Panamax limititation, that is hog-tying today's shippers and shipowners.  But even Panamax ships look amazing  and enormous as they transit the the Gatun lake and approach the Gaillard Cut, the narrowest part of the canal, just before the canal hits the locks on the Pacific side of the canal.



Visiting Panama, I can see the problem.  The Panamanian government is a small affair, a thing of luxurious SUVs and comfortable sinecures.  Visit the foreign ministry and its cool central courtyard surrounded by bureaucratic offices.  But the courtyard's dominating feature is a ramp down to the SUV garage, and it seems that high-end SUVs are continuously appearing from and disappearing into the garage.



Panama has inherited the canal as a working enterprise, a cash cow, from the US.  What does it know about big construction, and high risk construction projects?  So you'd expect that the rough tough construction guys would overmatch the SUV-and-sinecure softened Panamanians.



And, of course, the government must deal with the Panamanian people, who don't want some greedy capitalists making money off "their" canal.



Well, I'd say that it's time to finish the canal, get the revenue from those Panamax-plus container ships, and start to work on the infrastructure, which is clearly pretty old and second rate.  Then Panama's glittering billion dollar mile of 40-storey high rises can transform into a trillion dollar mile, and more where that came from.

Microagression: Liberals' latest Double-O Prefix

Remember the good old days of 007?  That Double-O prefix was James Bond's "license to kill."  Har, Har.  That Ian Fleming guy had quite a sense of humor.



But it seems pretty clear that there is nothing that liberals like more than their own self-awarded Double-O prefix.  In their case it's not a license to kill, but a license to accuse anyone they want or racism, sexism, homophobia, hate speech.



And now there's "microaggression."  There's even a page on Wikipedia.  It's a beautiful concept, because it depends entirely on the eye of the victim.



Suppose you are a white student studying for a calculus test and you ask the nearby Asian student for help, writes Alec Torres.

The Asian student agrees to help, but for some reason feels uncomfortable with the way the question was asked.

Yeah.  I mean.  Such a racial stereotype!  Everyone knows that all Asian students are good at math!  There's your microaggression.



And you can see how it is supposed to work.  If you are a liberal darling -- a women, a minority, an LGBTQ or whatever the liberals come up with next week -- then you have a license to take umbrage at anything your little liberal darling heart desires.  And if you are in any kind of big institution you can go whine to the Diversity Office or HR or whatever the hate speech police are called in your neck of the woods.



That's the liberal game, of course.  Or we should say, the Cathedral's game.  The Cathedral gets to define orthodoxy in the liberal secular state church.  And you'd better get with the program, Jenkins, because otherwise we can make life difficult for you.  Because you wouldn't like to be accused of racism, or hate speech or microaggression or -- whisper this one -- heresy!



If it all weren't so sad, it would be funny.  Here we have liberals, enlightened, evolved, tolerant and all the rest of it.  That's what they say.



But the reality is that they are running their own gigantic Holy Office of the Inquisition, to enforce uniformity of thought, to propagate orthodoxy, or politically correct thought.



And just as in the good old days of the Spanish Inquisition, it is usually enough just to show the heretic the instruments of torture.  No actual torture required.



How modern.  How enlightened.  How tolerant.  How evolved.  How disgusting.

How Did We Get Here from There?

Here's a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger story about the republic of France.  Did you know that foreign investment in France has gone down by 77 percent in 2013?  Writes Tom Rogan:

That figure isn’t just bad, it’s unambiguously catastrophic. But the costs of President François Hollande’s failure aren’t simply economic. They’re also societal. Galvanized by popular disenchantment with the establishment, the French far Right hopes to win major victories in forthcoming local elections.

In short, the Fifth Republic isn’t looking so great.

Oh no, not Fascism!

But the question is: how can France be so stupid?  How can it build such a gigantic state and do nothing about it?  What is preventing it from declaring victory over Big Government and getting on with life?  Well, the answer is simple: chaps like Hollande from the grandes écoles.

The problem can't really be the people.  As Joseph Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy back in the 1940s, Democracy is not the rule of the people, for the people clearly cannot rule.  Democracy is the rule of the politicians.

So why don't the politicians Do Something about the mega-state?

Perhaps democracy isn't the rule of the politicians.  Maybe it's the rule of someone else.

What about Andre Codevilla's Ruling Class?

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity...  America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

Good enough.  But that suggests the "New Class" of Milovan Djilas, once an associate of Yugoslavia's Tito and Vice-president of Yugoslavia.  Djilas's New Class was "the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist Party functionaries" the "nomenclatura" that possessed not just power over the economy but over a nation's politics as well.

People like me are dissatisfied with this analysis because it does not address the idea that, in the aftermath of the death of God, the New Class or Ruling Class also operates as a kind of established secular church.  In our present society moral leadership and moral creativity comes not from divines but from people in the academy.

The trouble with the academy is that we are not talking about the detached moral leadership of medieval philosophers and scribes.  As Julian Benda claimed in The Treason of the Intellectuals in 1927, today's thinkers are not universalists; they have betrayed their calling.  Roger Kimball:

The “treason” or betrayal [Benda] sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.” The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether.

In other words, today's intellectuals are not just ivory-tower thinkers.  They come down from the mountain and use their ideas for political purposes in the street.  They now count political commitment as a virtue, not a conflict of interest.

The late Andrew Breitbart memorably said the "politics really is downstream from culture."  It's no use trying to change politics if you don't change the culture first.  But what if culture is downstream from religion, whether a transcendental religion such as Christianity or a secular religion such as socialism or progressivism?

So the best way to think about any human community is to think first about the people that are setting the agenda for moral discussion.  And in our society, those people are the professors.  They form, in essence, a established secular church.  They formulate correct opinion; they decide what is beyond the pale.  The media takes its cue from the academy: that is what all those experts are doing on your TV.  And the politicians take their cue from the media.  In other words, the "Cathedral."

The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It's as simple as a punch in the mouth.

The Cathedral operates as the brain of a broader power structure, the Polygon or Apparat - the permanent civil service. The Apparat is the civil service proper (all nonmilitary officials whose positions are immune to partisan politics, also known as "democracy"), plus all those formally outside government whose goal is to influence or implement public policy - ie, NGOs. (There's a reason NGOs have to remind themselves that they're "non-governmental.")

And further,

Today's Cathedral is not a personality cult. It is not a political party. It is something far more elegant and evolved. It is not even an organization in the conventional, hierarchical sense of the word - it has no Leader, no Central Committee, no nothing. It is a true peer-to-peer network, which makes it extraordinarily resilient. To even understand why it is so unanimous, why Harvard always agrees with Yale which is always on the same page as Berkeley which never picks any sort of a fight with the New York Times, except of course to argue that it is not progressive enough, takes quite a bit of thinking.

The point about the Cathedral is that it not only has political power, through the fact that it pwns the minds of the politicians.  Not only does it have cultural power in that it defines what it is to be enlightened and fashionable.  Its primary power is that it has moral power.  It decides what is acceptable to think and say, i.e., politically correct or what used to be called orthodoxy, and it decides what is "hate speech," i.e., politically incorrect or what used to be called heresy.

Mencius Moldbug has lots of ideas.  Some of them are good, and some not so good.  But his idea of the "Cathedral" magnificently encodes the nature of the modern ruling class and our current moral, cultural and political predicament.

Anyone that wants to get somewhere from here has to start with the fact of the "Cathedral."  Because the Cathedral is what has got us to our present moment.

And don't forget, if you want to change things:  As far as the Cathedral is concerned, the world is working pretty well right now.

Liberals! Stop Blowing Things Up!

What with Obamacare a full-fledged disaster and all, commentators are just about united in describing President Obama as "blowing up the health care system" for the sake of the 30 or 40 million or so "uninsured."

Only now it turns out that the uninsured aren't signing up for health insurance, not so you'd notice.  So, the commentators are now saying: we blew up the health care system -- for what, exactly?

When you think about it, liberals are always blowing things up.  And for what?

One hundred years ago they blew up the credit system and substituted the Federal Reserve System.  How's that been working out, as the dollar has gone from $20 per ounce of gold to the present $1,300 or so?

What about the wonders of Social Security?  Well, according to some researchers nations, a pay-as-you-go government pension scheme results in people that seem to stop having children.  And that's apart from the fact that Social Security blows a hole in the savings rate.

Then there's welfare.  That's blown up the low-income family, to the tune of $20 trillion over the last 50 years.

Then liberals decided they had to provide "affordable housing" to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.  That ended up blowing up the credit system in 2008.

What else?  Well there is always the student loan system that is in the process of blowing up higher education.  There is always the war on drugs that has blown up the inner city.

Right now I'm reading Doctor Zhivago, about how the Bolsheviks blew up Russia.  Really, Russia has never been the same since.  Go back before that and read about how the Jacobins blew up France.  Ditto France.  It has never been the same.

The fact is that the only thing government knows how to do is to kill people and to blow things up.  But very rarely is that necessary in the course of human events.

Let's take two present issues: marijuana and abortion.

The problem is that both of these are moral questions, not criminal questions.  People may disagree about the morality of abortion, but it is not a criminal matter that should be decided by police.  Same with drug use.  It would be far better to conduct these matters as moral issues, and make abortion and drug use shameful rather than illegal.

President Clinton famously tried to square the circle on abortion by making it "safe, legal, and rare."  I'd say that conservatives should trump him by making abortion "safe, legal, and shameful."

Ee should use the same strategy on drug use.  We shouldn't make it illegal.  We should make it déclassé, darling.  And that means women getting together and whispering about the friend who's doing too much alcohol, pot, pain-killers, anxiety drugs -- like, whatever.

That's how we solve social problems: socially.

And then maybe we could stop blowing things up all the time.