Coach to Conservatives: This is a Football

Back in the day, George W. Bush campaigned for a kinder, gentler America. It reflected his own personal decency, and the need for Republicans to soften their image, carefully burnished by Democrats, as witch-hunting bigots.

Looking back, I’m not sure the tactic was such a good idea. In retrospect it looks like an act of unconditional surrender in the culture wars. It has ended up meaning that liberals and activists can call out anyone they want as racists, sexists, homophobes, and conservatives and Republicans can’t. Because racism, sexism, homophobia.

Then along comes Donald Trump with his insult politics and the whole white working class prairie catches fire. He catches the rest of the field flat-footed. The other candidates are all house-trained and know, from experience, that a wrong word can trigger a media avalanche that buries their campaign and their career.

Corporations know which way the wind is blowing; that’s why Starbucks pushes its lefty Civility campaign, and activist outlets like Color of Change are busy intimidating corporations from advertising on FoxNews or sponsoring the Republican National Convention.

It probably makes sense for Starbucks to go all lefty. After all, the coffee-house and artists and writers go together like Sartre and Beauvoir.

So how does the right fight back for the right to stand without fear and intimidation in the public square?

If you read a lefty tract like Michael Mann’s Sources of Social Power you are shown a world in which the capitalists are engaged in a class war with the proletarianized working class, and the middle class in the middle has to decide which army to join. The very heavens are politicized. In reality, most people are people and they just want to get on in the world.

John D. Rockefeller, the clerk at a commission merchant, starts a business buying and selling barrels of oil, then expands into transportation, then pipelines and railroad unit trains and refineries, and pretty soon he’s put whaling Capt. Ahab out of work and taken over the whole illuminating oil business. Did John D. Rockefeller want to take over the world with his Standard Oil in a global power play? No. He retired at about 50 and invented modern philanthropy. Did he accumulate a vast fortune and then watched it trickle down to the workers and the traditionally marginalized? No. He made a fortune because he reduced the price of illuminating oil from about 80 cents a gallon to 8 cents a gallon, and successfully “scaled up” his business to meet the extra demand he provoked by reducing prices by 90 percent.

Was this capitalist di tutti capitalisti trying to screw the working class? Was he hatching a cunning plot to seduce the middle class into supporting his designs by giving them corporate pensions? No. He was just a kid that stumbled into a way to create a safe, inexpensive illuminating oil and had the smarts and the luck to make it big. Along the way, of course, he had to learn how to play politics, because state legislators didn’t think you should get rights-of-way for pipelines from Pennsylvania oil wells to New Jersey refineries without paying $200 to Pass Go, and because farmers didn’t think that oil unit trains should get lower rates than their carloads of grain.

Corporations and capitalists, whether they like it or not, have to live in the public square and deal with governments that want to loot them and activists that want to bully them. This means that cultural leaders need to counter the leftist shame-and-blame culture with a counterforce. It is a measure of the failure of libertarians and conservatives to do this in the face of the cultural Marxist identity politics that it took a complete political neophyte like Donald Trump to cut the Gordian knot and send the lefty culture warriors scurrying to their burrows for a magical moment.

And it is completely reasonable that Trump should have excited the white working class above all others in his wrecking-crew campaign. It is the white working class that has borne the brunt of leftist identity politics in the last half century, and they have been dying from despair.

I have always felt, ever since the Reagan years, that the Reagan politics of supply-side economics and deregulation was vulnerable to a lefty counterattack because it was not based on a cultural revolution that could marginalize the leftist culture of identity and the internal colonialism of adminstrative, bureaucratic government with something that could inspire Americans, and especially young Americans to reject the shabby top-down compulsion of big government. And so it is: when auditing courses at the University of Washington in recent years I kept encountering good little girls that parroted the lefty line that politics equaled a protest march to City Hall.

What would it take to create a moral cultural movement that created a generation of good little girls that parroted the idea that freedom and responsibility were the highest and best things for a good little girl to aspire to rather than to wave a sign at a TV camera in the safe space of a community-organized rent-a-mob?

The fact is that the so-called conservative movement has failed to do that, and the Trump phenomenon has announced that fact to the world. There is a feeling that we must all start over, reciting the coach’s age-old insult to his defeated team: “This is a football.”

Is There a Politics of Less?

I have a question. Is it possible to run for President of the United States offering less government? Or, to put the question more forcefully, can any politics succeed if it is proposing to reduce the amount of government?

Because if you look at politicians and governments, they are always in the business of doing more, or at least doing something.

And that is why, I think, the conservative agenda of less government never goes anywhere. Because really, where is the punch in a policy of, well, chaps, we really ought to wind Social Security down over the years and replace it with a genuine individual savings program. Here’s a better idea. Today’s Social Security is fundamentally unjust to gays and transgenders! We must reform Social Security to bring justice to gays and their partners!

You can see why I am thinking this. It’s all about Trump.

When I read the anti-Trump stuff, like today’s piece from the Knight of the NeverTrump Table, Kevin D. Williamson, he is perfectly right. Trump is clueless about “policy.” He reduces everything to vague calls to action. But, the conservative policy analyst inquires, what is Trump actually going to do about big, bloated government?

The point is, conservatives aren’t going to win the presidency with a carefully nuanced analysis of the issues. You win elections with promises of Change. Affordable Health Care! Make American Great Again! Justice for Seniors!

After the election is over, of course, it is back to the slow grind of policy, of this or that policy change forced through against some sort of opposition, won with the help of a few power players whose support is shamelessly bought with other peoples’ money.

If you reduce government you will kick over a hornet’s nest. That’s what I wrote about yesterday, retailing to you the story of the British Chartists in the 1840s. After the passage of the Great Reform bill in 1832 -- which you can read about in George Eliot’s Middlemarch -- Parliament passed an agenda that suited the newly franchised middle-class electorate. Free trade and Poor Law reform. But that infuriated the Poor Law recipients and the artisans that were making a decent living out of the old guild-privilege economy. And they took to the streets.

That is the problem that conservatives face. We want to do entitlement reform. But don’t tell seniors. We want education reform. But don’t tell teachers and parents. We want welfare reform. But don’t tell the tens of millions of EBT recipients. We want to repeal Obamacare. But don’t tell the 10 million or so that are presently enjoying the subsidies.

When you get into the weeds, like on the National Labor Relations Board or climate change, a conservative government can probably make changes. No doubt Big Labor and the greenies would get The New York Times and NPR in a fine froth about that. They will scream that it is the end of workers and the end of the climate as we know it. But the average American won't really care.

The dirty truth about government is that the only thing it can do is some shameful and crude thing to get out of the jam its previous policies has caused. So government totally screws mom-and-pop savers with its zero interest rate policy because it keeps the deficit down. Government passes Obamacare to paper over the royal mess caused by half a century of government meddling with health care.

And so it goes. Until the government runs out of other peoples’ money.

And then what will it do? It will take the easy way out, the one that puts the costs onto some group that isn’t well organized, or can’t really grasp what is being done to it.

That’s how I make sense of the Trump effect. None of the conservative candidates had a clear and persuasive message to go up against Trump’s promise to shake things up and make America great again. Why is that? It’s because nothing that conservatives propose has the gut-level appeal of Trump.

Or, for that matter against the Democrats’ appeal to Fight for Us and make the one percent pay for free college for everyone.

How to Make America Great Again

In the current presidential election year Donald Trump is busily promising to Make America Great Again with an end immigration and bringig jobs home to the United States while Democrats are promising to jack up the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Michael Tanner reminds us that none of that is going to help. Good old 1950s manufacturing jobs are going away not just because of China but because of automation. And also because American companies want to manufacture products closer to their foreign markets.

Tanner has another idea. We can’t reset the economy to the 1950s, but

What we can to is prepare for a vibrant new economic future. That means cutting taxes and regulations to boost entrepreneurship. It means breaking the stranglehold that the teachers’ unions have over our schools so that we can educate future workers for future jobs. It means embracing economic growth as a goal. And it means understanding that free trade contributes to that growth and ultimiately produces more winners than losers.

But, of course, when people feel they are losing, their first resort is government. And to the only thing that government knows, and that is force.

I am reading about an interlude of force in my ongoing tramp through Michael Mann and The Sources of Social Power. Right now we are in the middle of the rise of the British working class between 1815 and 1880, and specifically the Chartist movement.

I had always thought of the Chartist movement as purely a movement for political rights. But now I stand corrected. Instead, after Mann, I understand it as a response to a Perfect economic and political Storm.

This perfect storm included, first, the deflation after the Napoleonic Wars, as Britain paid off its war debt and returned the value of the inflated pound sterling back to its pre-war parity. Deflation always enrages wage workers and debtors, because the one thing that people hate is having their nominal wages reduced.

Second, Parliament repealed the old Poor Law that went back to the late 1500s, and made welfare much tougher and more shameful.

Third, the government moved against the traditional non-market privileges of artisans and city guilds so that these artisans were forced to compete with the market prices offered by a new generation of entrepreneurs.

Fourth, the textile industrial revolution was changing the terms of trade with economic and technical innovation, so any number of workers’ trades were getting severely affected.

Fifth, the 1832 Reform Bill extended the vote to the bourgeoisie but not the workers. Sixth, the government declared war on unions with laws against combinations in restraint of trade.

All in all, you can see why the artisans of Britain got a bit riled up back in the 1840s.

In the 1840s the government responded to Chartist agitation by using the army to break up demonstrations and insurrections, and since the newly franchised bourgeoisie sided with the old regime in defence of their property, the Chartist movement failed.

But the economic agenda of the Chartists got enacted in the end. Parliament enacted wage and hour laws, which restricted female and child labor and made the workplace much more male. It enacted safety and health legislation. It enacted government education. And eventually enacted privileges that allowed labor unions to represent workers and bargain with employers.

You can see that a wise and all-seeing government would have moderated with six-part storm. But that is easy to say after the fact. Nowadays we don’t believe in running surpluses to pay off the debt; we don’t believe in resumption at the old parity. No, instead we screw the creditors and the holders of inflated currency. So we have replaced one evil with another. We have restored the Poor Law, on steroids. We have regulated and twisted the labor market into pretzels. And we are now proposing to extend the vote to illegal immigrants.

And then we wonder why the economy is in the pits.

In The Sources of Social Power we are subjected to a panorama of power actors down the ages, manipulating and outflanking and blind-siding each other in the endless war of power. Of course Michael Mann is a right-on lefty. Not quite a Marxist, he can view the power politics of kings and barons with detachment. But he is definitely on the side of the workers when the Chartists are in the streets. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that maybe the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is a little moderation in the deployment of social power, including his favorite little darlings du jour.

For Mann, the ideology and the deployment of the free market notions that have erupted in recent centuries are no different than the divide and conquer manipulations of the absolute monarchs. But it’s OK that the workers fill the streets and excite the social consciences of government university professors.

Back to the quote from Michael Tanner at the top. Notice what he is saying. Hey kids! Maybe the answer to our economic problems isn’t more regulation, higher minimum wages, and more government power but making it easier for entrepreneurs to start new companies and reducing the costly regulatory burdens on business. Maybe our education system should be prised out of the cold dead hands of the teachers’ unions. Maybe education shouldn’t be a mechanical government system at all.

In other words, maybe there in a place in this world for methods other than the sweet use of government force. Maybe there’s a way to help the low-paid other than telling their employers how much to pay them. Maybe there’s a better way to educate our children than send them to government child-custodial facilities staffed by lifer trusties.

There is nothing remarkable here. It is just considering the curious notion that the answer to many problems might not the clunking fist of more government power.

In my view the great event of the last 500 years is that we humans have discovered the wealth creating and directing concept we call the price system. But actually, it isn’t a system. It is what we have learned to call, from the relatively new chaos theory, an emergent phenomenon. It is like a biological organism like the human body. There is no boss in the human body, issuing orders throughout the body telling each cell what to do. The body is an emergent phenomenon communicating with itself in ways we barely understand, and the result is that it works. It enables humans to cooperate with each other peacefully, right across the wide world. But it starts with the same principle as the human body. Mostly, you just let the market, like the human body, just get on with it.

Is it possible that we could learn to understand our human society in the same way, or are we condemned forever to think of it as a system, ruled by the four IEMP social powers -- I should say social forces -- identified by Michael Mann: ideological, economic, military, and political?

I do hope not, because, as I like to say, System is Domination.

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.