Maybe the Real Job of Religion is Making Babies

Here's a look at Singapore, stunningly successful city state, except for one thing. Young Singaporeans aren't having babies. The fertility rate for Singaporean women is 1.3, meaning that the average woman has 1.3 children in her lifetime.

The low-birth pattern is also evident in Singapore’s competitors, notably Hong Kong, where nearly half of young couples believe that they can’t afford to have children. Shanghai, notes Jones, now has one of the lowest peacetime fertility rates ever recorded.

Young Singaporeans say that the decision not to have children is pragmatic. “Having kids was important to our parents,” noted one thirtyish civil servant, “but now we tend to have a cost and benefit analysis about family. The cost is tangible, but the benefits are not knowable or tangible.”

Well, of course. Pragmatically, having kids is crazy, because instead of living a two-income lifestyle in a yeasty urban environment, you have to more to the suburbs and fight with dirty diapers and the impossibility of a work/life balance.

Maybe that explains why religions all tend to be vigorously pro-natal, and create a social culture in which child-bearing and child-raising is highly valued and is part of the religious conditioning shared among the members of the church or sect or cult.

And maybe that's why great empires like the Roman Empire decline and fall. Because if people don't have children then there is nobody to do the heavy lifting when the going gets tough.

Maybe that's why the left's secular religions are doomed to failure, just like the Shakers in the 19th century. The left, going back to Mary Wollstonecraft, has always argued that women have better things to do than waste their lives on domesticity. Because patriarchy. Of course, well-born women have always considered themselves above the drudgery of child-minding, and hired it out whenever possible. Our modern feminism is nothing new; it is just another upper-class movement advocating a cleaner, more creative life for women than merely getting babies on the ground and got out of the nest.

That's one thing you can say for the Islamists. If you sequester the women and cover them in niqabs or whatever, then the only thing women can do is bear children. Lots more fodder for the suicide belts. And guess who wins the future. In Europe, unless they get a clue pretty quickly, the future will belong to the Muslims, because your average Euro, like your average Singaporean, isn't really into children.

In the US, of course, it is a commonplace that conservatives and religious people get married and have families, while liberals hanker after a creative life, maybe as a videographer or something in global health. Or, of course, they go gay or lesbian or trans. Either way, the idea is to spend your twenties in some urban environment, wearing artistical black, and forget about children.

No really. In Japan, the young people are reported to be uninterested in the other sex. In Germany, about 30 percent of adult women are childless. Italy has an abysmal birth rate. What is wrong with these people?

Now, I'm not really religious, but I have a couple of kids. My children aren't really religious, but they have presented me with six grandchildren. How come? It is hard to say. They are, of course, not liberals.

One of the things that I look out for is a religious revival. Yes, I know that God is Dead and all that, and God has been replaced with Gaia and the ethic of earth guardianship. Not to mention Peace and Justice. But I keep thinking about Charles Murray and his Coming Apart. Top 25 percent of Americans doing fine, he says. Middle 40 percent not so good. Bottom 35 percent, the women don't marry much and the men don't work much. Something there has got to give.

In America the top 25 percent get a kind of religion from their education, which inducts them into the culture of creativity so that they take their place as People of the Creative Self. But for people below the creative elite, things are pretty shaky, and the creative elite do all they can to keep religion and the lower orders apart.

Here's my take. If you aren't born with a creative spoon in your mouth, and maybe not even then, you are heading for oblivion unless you get religion. And time is running out.

Because, despite what you have been taught, the only thing that matters is children.

My Bill of Realities

Governments are instituted among men to protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic. But all good things tend to succumb to mission creep, and so it is that governments are now also expected to protect us against the enemies of free trade and immigration.

Here's a piece at Bloomberg about a couple devastated by NAFTA. Randall and Brenda Williams of Scottsdale, Kentucky worked at a plant making electric motors at A.O. Smith, each earning over $16 per hour until the factory closed and Smith started buying motors from Mexico. Today Randall works at a farm supply store and Brenda works at the high school cafeteria.

What do we do about folks like that? Well, we could help them. But how?

Let's be clear about one thing. You could repeal NAFTA and halt immigration but you still would not end the migration of manufacturing from the US to the low-wage areas of the world. We could slow it down. So we are still going to have Randall and Brenda Williamses. Because the folks working in those Third-World plants are right off the farm, and they think that the coolest thing in the world is getting to work indoors.

What could we do? We could reduce immigration; we could raise tariffs a bit. We could help workers laid off; we could help with relocation expenses.

But of course, as Barack Obama told a meeting of donors in 2008, most of the people laid off from some electric motor factory in the boondocks will try to hang on, bitter clingers, using welfare and disability, because they really can't imagine a life away from their old home town. By the way, there is no mention of the Williams' children in the article. I wonder what happened to them.

The best solution for the Williams couple would have been for A.O. Smith to cut their wages to the point where it wouldn't quite make economic sense for them to close the plant. But that is one thing that you cannot do in this world. Ever since the industrial revolution, workers have reacted to "cuts" with rage. So instead, employers just close uneconomic factories. Workers demand and get their "good jobs at good wages" and the union and the benefits until the day that the plant closes and the jobs are gone.

You can rail about NAFTA, about immigration, about greedy bankers, about uncaring CEOs outsourcing American jobs all you like. You can fiddle about at the margins with political promises and handouts to favored constituencies.  But in the end you have to deal with reality.

Reality #1. In the end, you have to mark your wage or your price to market.

Marxists like to talk a good line about "commodification," the idea that we now treat wages and prices as if they were real commodities, available for sale on the market. But, to coin a phrase, most of Marxism is "mystification" and their talk about commodification and reification is just that. Wages and prices are just another thing that we have abstracted out of the real world and understood with resort to theory. Just like gravity and quantum mechanics. Today we survive and thrive by constant adaption to the dictates of the market. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Reality #2. Capitalism is the permanent revolution of "creative destruction."

In the Garden of Eden of the Marxists, people worked "for use" and were not subject to the vagaries of the exchange market. But that meant, of course, that a bad harvest meant that they starved. There was no "creative destruction" in the good old days. There was simply disease and starvation. The implacable conservatism of the peasant was witness to this. You kept doing things the same old way because otherwise you starved. But today we survive by constant adaption to the dictates of the market. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Reality #3. You may not like capitalism but capitalism likes you.

In the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years under capitalism, per-capita income after inflation has risen from $1-3 per day to over $100 per day in the capitalist countries. There has been nothing like this before in history. Ever. And when a country adopts capitalism, like China in 1978 and India in the 1990s, per capita income immediately starts to rise. Fast. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Reality #4. There is no free lunch.

If you are riding high, with a "good job at good wages" it does not mean that you are set for life. The whole point of capitalism, the way we got from $1-3 per day to $100 per day, is from constant economic revolution. In fact, if you are enjoying high wages you should think that you are vulnerable, because your high wages mean that people are thinking and working right now on some brilliant idea to economize on people like you. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Reality #5. There is no such thing as "we are owed."

Don't think about what the world owes you. Think about what you can give to the world. That is the basic principle of economic life that goes back to Adam Smith and the invisible hand. Think about what you could do to serve the world, with a new service or a new product, or just your labor. Then you will find out if you have a good idea or not. If it turns out that your idea is not good enough, then the world is telling you that you should come up with a better idea. Any politician or activist that pretends otherwise is lying.

Capitalism is a funny thing. It has buried humans in a cornucopia of wealth and health. But everyone hates it. I understand why. Capitalism and its price system amount to a constant cold shower of reality, and cold showers are good for other people, but a bit too bracing for ourselves.

Brussels is the End of the Line for Identity Politics

I've already written that the West has the means and the power to deal with the Muslim threat. But, I wrote, the big problem is the cultural and political problem, to wage cultural and political war on the radical Islamists and make all the world know that their holy war is a dead end.

But now let us back up and ask another question. How come "we" allowed Muslims to come into our world and build an oppositional subculture and live in no-go areas where western law and culture doesn't obtain?

The answer, of course, is our foolish and conceited ruling class and its culture of identity politics. All politics is a game of divide and conquer, that we know. Thus a wise ruling class knows that faction and division is dangerous, and must be handled carefully. You never know where it will end up.

In the old days, politics was "segmental." People belonged to tribes, regions, guilds, and left the leaders of the segment to negotiate with other power actors. Nobody tried to mobilize the individual members of society for political conflict. Not until the modern era.

The modern era, according to Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power, is organized by nation state and classes. He means here classes in the sense defined by Marx, that is, according to La Wik,

a class is those who share common economic interests, are conscious of those interests, and engage in collective action which advances those interests.

In other words, most of the time most people go about their lives not thinking of themselves as "the proletariat" until some would-be dictator of the proletariat teaches them that they are workers and they should combine in labor unions and Labour Parties and fight for workers' rights against the capitalist exploiters. Only when you organize and mobilize people in this way can you use them as a formation in the army of war-by-other-means of politics.

In the late 19th century it because a conceit of educated youth that they could lead the working class and transform society using the mobilized working class as their army of the streets, maybe even as an international movement that would transform the world.

World War I taught educated youth that they were wrong. The workers identified with their territorial kings and prime ministers more than their worker identity, and fought for their countries in the trenches. So the post-war educated youth came up with a new idea, what we now call identity politics. Would be dictators of the proletariat would now appeal not to the workers, who were anyway starting to move up into the middle class. Instead they would appeal to people on the basis of race and sex, and make them self-conscious of their race or sex, and mobilize them on the basis of their race and sex. In other words, the political activists would organize and mobilize people and deploy them in the political wars not on the basis of class so much as on the basis of race, and gender, and sexual orientation.

Of course, the educated youth and the activists, being evolved and wise, would always keep this identity politics under control, using the power and wisdom of their education and their compassion and their judgement, so that was all right.

And really, it has worked pretty well, up to now. Our Democratic Party with its race politics has corralled over 90 percent of the black vote, and kept African Americans in terror of Republicans bringing back Jim Crow. Gays have been a remarkably effective weapon for Democrats, and feminists have helped keep women single and dependent on big government and voting for big government. What's not to like?

Well, the next step in the identity politics game was Muslims. Muslims were the new marginalized group and, just as to utter a discouraging word against liberal race politics meant you were a disgusting racist, so any worry about Muslims meant you were a disgusting Islamophobe.

What could go wrong?

The problem is that our ruling class and its educated youth are really not as evolved and educated as they think, and certainly not wise enough to keep their poisonous identity politics bottled up and under control. They are like the managers of a laboratory that uses radioactive nucleotides but really don't understand enough about nuclear science to develop protocols to keep the lab safe. So the whole thing is coming unraveled and the ruling class really hasn't a clue about what to do. The Muslims are playing them like a fiddle but they don't know any other tune.

The good thing is that the peoples of the West are coming to realize that their leaders are clueless and they are getting ready to elect new ones.

And I personally believe that the jihadi cult is self liquidating. That's because I believe that the secret to success in the modern post-industrial world is to get on with everyone rather than build a jihadi army to conquer the world and force every human under the knout of a world-wide Caliphate. Socialism was the previous plan for world-wide conquest and a world-wide Caliphate and it failed in the economic dysfunction of the Soviet Union and the famines and terrors of Maoist China, not to mention the pathetic poverty of the Castro Brothers' Cuba.

My view is that the modern global capitalist era is a fundamental transformation of human social cooperation and that the various rebellions against it, from socialism to jihadism, are reactionary belches that are doomed to failure. Unfortunately, as we saw with socialism, it takes a while for a death cult to collapse from its internal contradictions. We don't want our children and grandchildren to have to suffer while the jihadis are learning the bankruptcy of their ideology the hard way.

Here's my little idea. We are learning that the recently arrested mastermind of the 2015 Paris bombings lived on welfare in Belgium.

Why not make welfare self-limiting, so that chaps like terrorist masterminds have to go out and get a job. It's not that I want the jihadis to stop living off other peoples money. My point is that I want the jihadis forced into the capitalist culture where you have to work with other people and learn to trust people who are trustworthy and learn to serve the consumer and get indoctrinated in some corporation's corporate culture.

Back in the days of the slave plantations the slave owners eventually got to realize that the more they treated their slaves like humans, the better they worked. Back in the days of the factories the bosses learned eventually that the one thing you wanted to avoid was pissing off the workers enough so that they formed a labor union, for a labor union amounted to a parasite that ended up killing the host. After World War I the German army decided that it didn't want soldiers as disciplined automatons; it needed soldiers that were resourceful and responsible. See what I'm getting at? In today's world we need people that are open and friendly and resourceful and responsible. Others need not apply.

It is the height of cruelty and injustice to warehouse people in no-go areas where they moulder away without jobs and without the skills to work and thrive in the modern global capitalist economy. We need a new ruling class that thinks beyond the old paradigm of identity politics. Let's call the new order "work-and-thrive politics."

The Death of God and the Meaning of Life

While grubbing around HalfPriceBooks looking for a suitable book to buy in their March coupon sale, I came across The Death of God and the Meaning of Life, by Julian Young. Since HalfPriceBooks had priced it at $19.99 and it was selling at #1,485,784 at Amazon, I figured it must be good. So I bought it last Sunday with the 50% off coupon.

Seriously, what attracted me was that the book promised to be a quick round-up of Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Freud, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Derrida. It's a bit like the renowned Edward Casaubon and his "Key to All Mythologies." A book like that might be the key to all philosophers.

No, it's not at all like that because Young, like Mary Ann Evans, has read his Germans. So he tells a very good story about how Kant thru Marx were all trying to revive the "true-world" faiths, the world as a vale of tears, that Newtonian science had demolished. Marx, on Young's telling, was simply continuing Christian eschatology with a heaven in the future in this world rather than in another world. Starting with the later Nietzsche we are trying to make meaning out of life without some sort of heaven where everything comes right in the end. Mostly, these radical continental philosophers offer the idea of living life as an artist, or as if life were a work of art.

(This is why my Three Peoples theory includes the People of the Creative Self).

With Sartre and Camus we come close to a nihilist idea of life as absurdity. But in later Heidegger, Julian Young finds a meaning he can live with. It is the notion of living life as a guardian of the world, rather than an exploiter, bringing forth rather than doing violence, that Heidegger develops in his "Question Concerning Technology."

Of course, I have a bit of a problem with that, because it makes it sound as though environmentalists are the best people in the world, and I'm not at all sure that environmentalists are as good as they advertise themselves to be.

But here is my big problem. The telling thing is how many of the names up above were never married and/or never had children. And I don't recall children as getting a mention in the book. It's easy to say, like Sartre and Camus, who never married and never had children, that life is absurd. I can understand it would look that way if the world began and ended with you and your sexual affairs. But, to quote Edmund Burke, "society is a contract between the past, the present, and those yet unborn." And it is telling that Sartre and his "partner" Simone de Beauvoir each individually semi-adopted younger people as they aged and willed their property to these intellectual executors in place of children.

Another problem is the idea of Christianity as a world-denying religion. Certainly, Christianity has succumbed for centuries to what Rodney Stark calls "upper-class asceticism," but I'd say that following the Great Awakening in the 18th century mainstream Christianity has been world-affirming. It does not say that life is a bed of roses, but it does say that God sacrificed his Son for our sins, so we don't have to sacrifice, and that if you accept Jesus in your life you are saved and go to Heaven. And Christianity is catnip for women, because it says that you can have the best love of your life with God: you love God and God loves you, in the relationship from Heaven.

I'll have to go into the details of later Heidegger in the future, but I'd say that the guardianship notion is defective. It suggests a world past its prime, with a guardian there to keep things going in its inevitable decline. But, following Burke, I'd say that the guardianship applies to the contract with the past and the future. But the contract with the present implies clearing a place in the world to create life and help it thrive, and then leaving a world in which those yet unborn can thrive.

And I don't believe that God is Dead. Perhaps the Homeric gods playing politics on Mt. Olympus with the lives of humans are dead. Perhaps the anthropomorphic God is dead to the intellectuals. But in the light of modern physics and the knowledge about the genome I experience life, the universe and everything as a profound and ever-deepening mystery. Call that mystery whatever you like, but the most obvious word is God.

Brussels: Look on the Bright Side

When the liberals at Vox respond to the Brussels "attentat" by writing that stopping immigration won't solve anything (H/T Steve Sailer), we should applaud.

Because it means that our liberal friends are forgetting nothing and learning nothing.

And the only way we get to solve the Islamist problem is when the liberals get discredited enough to be pushed off the stage.

The basic thing we need to do about Islamist terror is better policing. Call it "broken windows" policing that worked so well to civilize New York City and other US crime meccas. The point is that the police use data-driven methodologies like CompStat and police where the crime is. No more no-go areas surrendered to local militias. This should be easy to do, were it not for liberals that oppose it on the grounds of Islamophobia. So it cannot be implemented until liberals are marginalized and pushed off the political stage.

The next thing we need to do is to militarily defeat militarized Islam. According to German military theory there are three levels of military action: tactical, operational, and strategic. Obviously the US and its allies have the power and the means and the technique to defeat radical Islam at all these levels. It could be messy, but it is doable, were it not for liberals that oppose it on the grounds of colonialism. So it cannot be implemented until liberals are marginalized and pushed off the stage.

Which brings us to the real problem, the political and cultural problem. We are not going to deal properly with the Islamic problem until the west (or perhaps the Rest of the World) gets out of its present funk and faces Islam confidently and openly as capitalist, free, and not afraid to say so. This is a challenge, because the West is stuck in an internal culture war between a not very effective conservative movement that is not very good at standing for freedom and justice and the rule of law and a post-Marxist rump that is determined to ram every foolish idea of the last 200 years down our throats.

But this is why the Islamic crisis is such a good thing. Without it, our lefty ruling class and its poisonous race, gender, and gay/trans politics would be sailing ahead, dividing us by race, sex, religion, whatever, without a cloud in the sky. Instead the Islamic moment has revealed that the liberal emperor has no clothes.

The cultural Marxist movement was bad enough when it was just keeping blacks in a racial ghetto, separated from the rest of America by liberal race politics. It was bad enough when it taught women to hate marriage and children and desire to be eternal victims of the patriarchy. It was bad enough when it taught young Americans that the best thing in the world was to create a thing called gay marriage. But when Muslim extremists are represented as yet another marginalized and oppressed group and Americans warned against Islamophobia, then the liberal ruling class really has advanced a bridge too far. Not only that, but ordinary people in Europe and America can see it and that is why they are abandoning establishment politics and moving towards candidates and parties that insist that the government not just occupy territory, tax the inhabitants thereof and reward its supporters, but actually defend the inhabitants from harm.

Yes, I know. The humanity! The idea that governments should go beyond their petty power games of subduing the population and rewarding their supporters and actually do what they advertise and protect the people they oppress with their guns and their regime thugs!

What we need is a Great Awakening that creates a spiritual rebirth in the West. That is hard, and it can't be called to order.

The other great need is to shame the ruling class out of its poisonous secular religions and divisive politics that has done so much harm to poor and unskilled people in the West over the past 50 years, and demoralized the rest of us. This is what conservatism was called to do and has failed to do, as witness the Year of Trump.

My point is that we should not be horrified and disheartened by the rising Islamic terror. It will force us in the West to confront ourselves and clean the Augean stables. If we are up to the challenge we will create a new birth of freedom and prosperity. If not, well, if not, what's the point?

Government is Always Clueless

What with the coordinated attacks in Brussels today, March 22, 2016, for which ISIS has claimed responsibility, western governments are looking unusually clueless. As usual.

And we also have President Obama giving a speech in front of a building in Havana emblazoned with a mural of Che Guevara. Apparently the building is the headquarters of the Cuban secret police. But what would I know? Never mind that. How clueless can the president's advance team be to get snookered into a deal like that? I thought that optics was their strong suit.

But this is nothing new. I am reading The Sugar Barons, by Matthew Parker, and it tells a glorious tale of British government stupidity and corruption. But let's just stick to stupidity.

In 1654, after teaching the Scots and the Irish a lesson Oliver Cromwell sent a naval fleet to Barbados to conquer the Spanish and lead the world-wide opposition to the Church of Rome in his "Western Design." The only problem was that the expedition was "sent out without arms and provisions," and withered away in hunger and disease after foolish attacks on the island of Hispaniola. Then Charles II sent out a fleet in 1666 to the West Indies to deal with the French. Five years of war ended in nothing. Time after time, the Brits sent out a fleet from Britain with regiments of soldiers that promptly died of malnutrition and disease once they got to the West Indies. You think they would have learned. But government never learns.

And so here we are in 2016 with our western governments stumble-bumming around wondering what to do about the Islamic threat that directly challenges their policy of unlimited immigration, their plan for dealing with unaffordable entitlements.

Mr. President! What shall we do? Everyone is now deciding that free trade and immigration are terrible ideas that hurt the American middle class. The only thing is: compared to what?

I grant that free trade doesn't solve anything. But what is the alternative? Once you start down the road of protection then every special interest in the country lines up for goodies. You end up with the Florida sugar industry that's protected from foreign competition. You allow mature industries to keep on keeping on without modernizing and competing full on with the rest of the world. Then you are shocked when they collapse like the auto industry in 2008.

Immigration? You certainly don't want the current mess of illegal immigration, in which illegal immigrants are not subject to the law of the land, and compete low-skill Americans out of a job. But it certainly doesn't hurt to bring the best and the brightest here, in moderate numbers, to keep the rest of us Americans up to the mark.

My point is that most economic interventions hurt the economy, because government is stupid and is basically interested in power and revenue and buying up support from the right people. If you put government to work on education, it will wreck education. If you put government to work on health care, it will make it unaffordable. If you put government to work on pensions it will stop people from saving for retirement. If you put government to work on welfare it will fail to relieve the poor.

This spring, in 2016, the best and the brightest are all in a dither about Donald Trump, who doesn't know what he is doing and has no experience of running a government.

But the truth is that the great figures of history tend to be men without experience of government. Instead they seem to possess a sixth sense of how to acquire political and military power and then use it. The ruling classes that they topple are full of seasoned professionals and insiders. But somehow, when it comes to the crunch, the insiders are clueless.

So all the clucking and establishment frou-frou over immigration and ISIS and trade and Trump is just noise. The ruling class doesn't have a clue and never did.

My Theory of Slavery and Other Oppressions

While I was recently visiting the Happiest Dogs in the World in Colorado my sister thoughtfully placed in my hand an excellent history of the West Indies sugar plantations, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War in the West Indies by Matthew Parker. It tells the story of the Brits in the sugar plantation game and the staggering fortunes that were made on this addictive drug, and also the staggering brutality of the slave plantation system.

One big takeaway from the book for me was that the early visitors to the sugar islands like Barbados did not so much rail against slavery as a system as comment on the cruelty and the brutality of the sugar masters towards their slaves.

The point is that cane sugar production was a highly organized and capitalized system. You needed to grow each batch of cane and harvest it at exactly the right moment so that it could be fed into the processing plant, including the "boiling" or reduction of the cane plant juice into sugar. Only the big boys could compete. Sounds just like the factory system that arose about a century after Brit adventurers transferred the Dutch sugar system from northern South America to the Caribbean island of Barbados in 1640.

Here's my take from The Sugar Barons. Slavery was just a part of the way things were up until it got scaled up into a capitalist endeavor on the sugar islands. Then, and only then, did people start to look at slavery with new eyes, and think back from the individual acts of cruelty and brutality to the idea that the domination and oppression of one human by another was an unjust and evil thing.

Same thing with the workers. I am sure that workers in every walk of life have been cruelly treated and exploited by their masters since the dawn of time. But when the industrial revolution brought hundreds and thousands of workers into a single manufactory and subjected them to industrial discipline, then and only then did people start to discover a moral problem with the exploitation of man by man.

Likewise the end of feudalism. I am sure that serfs and peasants were buffed about by their lords since time immemorial, not to mention droit du seigneur and all that. But when the Tudors disarmed the nobles and nationalized the armed forces and the nobles chucked their now useless peasants off the land so they could make money from agricultural improvements, then we had a scandal of landless peasants and predatory vagabonds that prompted the Tudors to enact a Poor Law to "do something" about the problem.

So my theory is that capitalism, with its concentration of resources and its scaling-up of economic activity, creates a scandal out of injustices that were just accepted as the "way thing are" in olden times.

It's one thing to oppress and starve peasants out on the feudal manor, but another thing when the landless are nationalized by the end of feudalism.

It's one thing to have house slaves and harems and beat them and exploit them and rape them, but another thing when you scale slavery up to a sugar plantation and the white overseers are casually raping and beating everything that moves.

It's one thing to starve and exploit your 'prentices in your family shop or business. It's another thing to exploit hundreds or thousands of workers in a big industrial plant.

Notice that I am not saying that we are morally superior to our ancestors. I am just saying that the modern era has shone a light into dark corners and that we have not liked what we saw. So we made the depopulation of the countryside into a scandal; we made plantation slavery into a problem; we made factory labor into a scandal.

One other thing that has been scaled up in the modern era is government. You could say that in the old days the petty oppressions of small governments were just part of the way things are. But now, with big government maybe it is time to shine a light into the oppressions that big government presses onto the brow of modern people. Like the sugar barons, our modern ruling class focuses on its power project; the people it crushes under its heel are just collateral damage.

But if my theory is correct our ruling class has a rendezvous with history. The huge scaled-up operations of modern government are going to bring its casual oppressions into sharp relief. Maybe that's what the Trump phenomenon is all about.