Yes, But Who Defines "Good"

Conservatives like to paint the difference between conservatism and liberalism as the difference between absolute values and relativism. Hence George Neumayr in The American Spectator on the aftermath of the baseball shootings.

All of the post-Enlightenment ideologies that inform modern liberalism reject a divinely mandated moral law, which in the end is the only real prohibition on violence. If man’s will is the measure of morality, everything in principle is permitted and politics becomes a game of power that culminates in totalitarianism.

Under liberalism, the central question of politics shifted from goodness to power, from God’s plan for his creatures to man’s unfettered will.

This is all very well, except that liberals deny that there is a God and that there is a divinely mandated moral law. Also, liberals do not say that "man's will is the measure of morality." Rather, they would say that the so-called "divinely mandated divine law" is nothing more than God's will or, worse, the will of some priest determining that he had discovered the mind of God. On that view the "mandated divine moral law" is merely some conceited human's will demanding to be taken as the measure of morality.

The whole point of the Enlightenment was to rethink human society on the basis of human reason, rather than God's will.  Thinkers engaged in an effort to replace morality that issued from God's will or some prophet's will to morality based on the truth discovered in reason. But there is obviously a problem with this. Any great philosophical system is no less an expression of human will than the revelation of God's will in the mind of a priest. And in fact the Enlightenment did in fact birth some of the most horrible human "mandated moral law" in history in the disastrous socialist experiments of the 20th century.

Let us take the principle proposed by Martin Luther King Jr. and echoed by President Obama, that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." That would be a beautiful notion, but many people get the idea that the moral universe needs a bit of agency. That is how President Obama understands it when he says that "you can bend the arc of history in a better direction." Who is "you," Kemosabe? Obviously President Obama did not have Donald Trump in mind as the "you." Who gets to define "justice," and what powers shall they have?

In my view there is a way to get around this: it is to admit that any idea an individual human or a group of humans may have about the "moral law" or about "justice" is going to be incomplete, and that experience will show it to be incomplete and error-ridden. So we must start with the notion that whatever brilliant ideas we come up with for divining the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything," they are bound to be riddled with errors. Moreover, I would argue, any attempt to bend the arc of history is just as likely to bend the arc towards injustice as towards justice. Thus any human effort to discover the principles of the moral law and/or justice must start from the humble admission that "we" don't have all the answers. Or, as some wag said, the ideas of big minds can always be improved by small minds.

OK. So what does this mean? Well, it could mean that the best way to implement "change" is to follow the example of the business "start-up," by starting small and then, after solving the teething problems at a small scale, scale up to a larger size. It could mean that the wrong way to do "change" is to introduce a comprehensive and mandatory government program that starts at full scale, like Obamacare. It could be that capitalism is a very useful system because it is based on the price system that signals to all participants every day what is working and what is not working so that they can discover errors in their thinking and correct them. It could be that government programs in general are a very bad idea because it is almost impossible to change government programs on a day-to-day basis; indeed it is almost impossible to fix government programs when they break.

Today is the birthday of Adam Smith, famous for two works: The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. According to Fred Smith, these books develop two ideas that have decisively shaped the modern world.

Smith noted that humans’ evolved self-interest trait encouraged people to seek wealth-creating exchanges. That was the key element of his famous work The Wealth of Nations. But Smith also realized that such exchanges require that each party have some knowledge of what the other party seeks and what it would view as a fair deal. And that realization led Smith, in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, to focus on another human trait, empathy.

Self-interest and empathy. We need them both, and both are entwined with each other, in the Hegelian sense where the positive and negative are related to each other. Our own self-interest, in a world where piracy and plunder are discouraged, provokes us to think about other people: what do they need and what are they prepared to pay to satisfy their needs? To serve our own self-interest we have to empathize with the Other and think about what whey want and need in the process of getting what we want and need.

So maybe we discover the nature of the Good by serving our own self-interest through empathizing with the needs and the self-interest of the Other, rather than by divining moral laws and arcs of history.

The Liberals' Parallel Legal System

The rich are different from you and me. They get a better break from the legal system. But then you and I get a better break from the legal system than the average inner-city gang member.

This is not really scandalous, writes ZMan. Of course rich kids like Joe Biden's niece are going to get a better deal out the legal system: they have more money and influence.

But we are seeing the rise of another legal system, in parallel with the official government legal system, and you might not like the justice you are likely to get from it. It is the system that is, e.g., sanctioning men for sexual behavior on campus incompatible with progressive values. Like the case of the four Michigan football players.

Here we have four players accused of sexually assaulting a woman. Instead of the cops treating this like any other criminal complaint, the school is in charge of the investigation and the cops are on the sideline. The school brought in a law firm to do an investigation, provide the cops with evidence and then conduct a wide ranging evaluation of school policy and senior personnel. They have also tried and judged the players, removing them from campus and kicking them off the football team.

Actually this is not as strange as it might seem. You would see the same thing when some church decided to "disfellowship" a member for some action or words incompatible with the church's articles of faith. Thus, offenders "are sent into exile as a warning to those who remain inside." There is nothing worse for Cloud People than to be cast out into the wasteland of the Dirt People.

A similar thing is happening with social media, says Zman. Like all rulers, our ruling class would like to shut us all up, but they don't dare do that, not yet. What they can do is outsource "crack downs on political expression" to media companies.

But can our ruling class succeed with this dual-track legal system, outsourcing moral policing to universities and opinion control to liberal corporations? Zman isn´t sure.

Like so much of the managerial state, it is not clear if it is sustainable in the medium run, much less the long run.

 My guess is that it will end it tears. I say that not because I have any crystal ball in front of me, but because the good old legal system of the bourgeoisie is a good one, that gives pretty well everyone space to be themselves within pretty broad limits. In other words it is pretty relaxed about ideological control.

The whole point of the left is just the opposite: it is about getting serious about ideological control. If only we can control the economy and the public square and the ideas in peoples' minds then we can bend the arc of history towards justice.

Only, as I keep saying, there is no such thing as justice, only injustice, the mailed fist of the ruling class or the Cloud People crushing the bodies and/or the minds of the Dirt People.

Some people think that the Trump election was the first stirring in a while of the Dirt People. But we shall see.

How About That Leftie Eliminationist Rhetoric?

Remember back in the innocent days of yore, when liberals and Democrats liked to descant on right-wing eliminationist rhetoric? Not that any right-wing eliminationists actually did much more than talk.

But you know, when ruling-class notables start blabbing about blowing up the White House (Madonna), or holding up the bloody head of President Trump (Kathy Griffin), or doing a production of Julius Caesar featuring President Trump as the famous Dictator (Shakespeare in the Park), well sooner or later some dull Bernie Bro is going to act on the foolish conceits of the fashionables and the notables and the celebrities.

After all, that's how fashion works. Some pretty rich thing gets photographed for The New York Times doing something fashionable, and pretty soon all the fashionable wannabes and doing the same.

Now, what do you think your average Bernie Bro is going to do when all the fashionables are ragging on President Trump and the Republicans and kicking up a huge fuss about Trump and the Russians?

Why, it's almost like it was in the good old days of McCarthyism when evil Republicans were waving pieces of paper around and foaming at the mouth about Communists in the State Department. Really, that was about the most shameful period in  American history. Now we are all wigged out about Trumpists conniving with the Russians to hack the election.

Which is odd, considering that the election is already hacked, by very relaxed registration procedures, to favor the Democrats. You'd think that the Democrats would be as happy as campers considering how the system is biased in their favor.

But the Democrats decided after the 2016 election that they would do the same as they did after the close 2000 election, decided by the US Supreme Court after the contested Florida recount. I think that, from the liberal point of view, the anti-Bush politics of that era turned out to be a stunning success, with the big wins in the 2006 midterms and the 2008 presidential election. Accusing Republicans of everything under the sun really paid big returns at the ballot box.

But now an enthusiastic Bernie Bro got so worked up about the eevil Republicans he learned about on MSNBC that he decided to go out a shoot him a few. Thus the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).

Now if this were a Tea Party enthusiast shooting the House Minority Whip, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), well, you can imagine that the liberals and the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media would be declaring the end of the world as we know it unless we immediately banned all guns except those in the hands of the security details of prominent liberals and Democrats.

But there were no Tea Party or alt-right enthusiasts involved in the shooting of Rep. Scalise, so really the world is not coming to an end. And, let us not forget, Republicans and Tea Partiers and alt-right are haters and racists and all the rest. So it is not surprising that some overheated Bernie Bro, marinated in the progressive enthusiasm of Democratic politics and of MSNBC hosts, would get a little more enthused about teaching Republicans a lesson than your ordinary peaceful protester or Antifa activist.

Or, as a caller said on Rush Limbaugh's show today: "Rush, I’ve studied Hodgkinson’s Facebook page. His Facebook page looks as hysterical as a 10-person CNN panel on Trump and Russia." Nuff said.

But I have a word of advice to my liberal friends. If I were you I would dial down the #Resistance folks and the Antifa guys and gals and the severed heads and the Julius Caesars in the Park featuring the Trump combover. I'm just a deplorabale racist, sexist, homophobe, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this over-the-top Trump fever is going to cost the Democrats at the ballot box.

And that is all that matters, after all.

Middlebury is Feckless, According to Murray

Libertarian scholar Charles Murray has now written down his view of the Middlebury College incident where lefty college students shouted him down before he could give a talk on his book Coming Apart at the college and students later shoved a Middlebury College professor to the ground and injured her. He calls it "Fecklessness at Middlebury."

According to Murray the ordinary students that were captured on video shouting down his proposed talk were given "probation," and the ones that took "an especially prominent role in the episode" are receiving "college discipline."

Murray has a different idea of the discipline that should have been handed down. He thinks that the students identified on video protesting in the hall should have been suspended for the rest of the term, and those involved in the assault on Murray and a female professor, Allison Stanger, should have been referred for criminal prosecution.

I have to say that if this course of action had been followed the SJWs and special snowflakes all across the land would soon have got the message.

When you compare the two approaches to the incident at Middlebury College one thing comes out clearly. The college is encouraging its students to do more of the same. The college is saying, by its actions, that it has to Do Something, for PR purposes, to pretend that the protesters did something wrong. But really the students were doing the Lord's work. Because racism is racism, and must be opposed by all woke progressives else the arc of history will fail to bend towards justice. Certainly Charles Murray should be opposed anywhere and everywhere, because The Bell Curve. Not that any liberal ever read the book.

I was inclined to think that Murray's "fecklessness" headline was giving the liberal bureaucrats too much slack. Because this culture of excusing the street thugs of progressivism from the reach of the criminal law is monstrous. Haven't liberals been telling us since forever how unjust it was for the Weimar authorities in Germany to turn a blind eye to the Nazi street thugs of the 1920s?

But then I decided that "fecklessness" is probably appropriate, because your average college administrator and/or professor is a klueless klot that doesn't know nothing about nothing. All they know is the latest liberal line handed down from the ruling class in the latest vile liberal talking points. They are not thinking about where their unjust application of the law and their betrayal of simple fair play leads, because that is way above their pay grade.

Like I say: the reason for an equal application of the law -- making your side obey the rules as well as the evil other side -- is that the alternative is injustice. If you bear down on the evil racist sexist homophobes and make them obey the letter of the law but give your own supporters the benefit of the doubt, then you are encouraging your opponents to get angry. That's because applying the letter of the law to the good guys while bearing down on the bad guys is simple injustice. It is what ruling classes all down the ages have tended to do, right up until the rebels besiege the royal palace and the army decides not to shoot the rebels and the king and his henchmen are lucky to get away with their lives, unlike Louis XVI who was really a pretty decent guy, with Marie Antoinette who was nothing more or less than your average Dis-e-ney princess. But Louis XVI ran out of other peoples' money. Never do that.

So this is my declaration of faith. I believe that the liberal "resistance" and the liberal assault on ordinary middle-class white guys, and the unjust assault on male college students, and the assault on non-lefty speakers on campus are all a strategic mistake. Whenever a ruling class starts out on a program of injustice, of beating up it opponents and turning a blind eye to the bullying tactics of its supporters, it is almost always favoring the few at the expense of the many. And it is provoking the many to get together and form a head of rebellion.

And who knows where that will end up. Unless the ruling class is prepared to go full Mao or Stalin and terrorize its opponents.

So yes, our liberal friends are indeed "feckless." They really are clueless. And that is going to cost them.

Let's All Hate on the Baby Boomers

Since the Baby Boomers are now munching down on Social Security and Medicare, at enormous expense, it is natural for our younger friends to get a little shirty.

After all, Social Security and Medicare are flat-out generational injustice. The federal government has a compulsory and mandatory program to which workers are forced to contribute, and seniors get to collect on a formula that has nothing to do with what the young workers can afford, as they struggle to get a job, get married, and raise a family.

But Social Security was passed in 1935, before the Baby Boom was even a twinkle in its father's eye. And Medicare was passed in 1965, before the Baby Boom got to vote.

But the Baby Boom could have Done Something about it. It could have reformed Social Security and Medicare; it could have protected the family; it could have rallied against the race and gender politics of the liberals.

So the Baby Boomers went 100 percent for sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Of course, doesn't every young generation want to let it all hang out? So the Baby Boomers fought against the Vietnam War -- like the Irish rioted against the draft in 1863 in New York City. Young 'uns generally don't like fighting in their fathers' wars, unless, as in World War II, they have no option.

Let's divide and conquer. Let's talk about the liberal Baby Boomers. The truth is that they believed in everything they did to destroy the Fifties world, because they thought that world was racist and sexist and oppressive. They were taught by their teachers to be civil-rights workers and Peace Corps volunteers and they went out and did it. They weren't perfect -- hello Bill and Hillary -- but basically they were good little boys and girls that learned their lessons well and applied them exactly as ordered.

What about conservative Baby Boomers? Well, we came into the world and didn't like the liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. we agreed with the Cold War and many of us served in the military. We worked, we wived, we thrived, and now we have built a nice retirement for ourselves way beyond the government entitlements. We wanted to reform the welfare state and we succeeded here and there. Of course, we were hypocrites and backsliders and didn't always live up to what we professed. But it wasn't the hypocrisy that beat us, it was that overall, we failed; we failed to change the culture, and now America is roiled in a culture war where it is very difficult for anyone to stand against the liberal hegemony without losing job and reputation.

And then there are the ordinary people, the ordinary middle class and working class Baby Boomers that just did what they could to live their lives, without any thought that they could or should change things.

The truth is that we are in the middle of something that is much bigger and consequential than the post-WWII Baby Boom. We are in the middle of a battle to decide between two great contesting notions of how the world should work.

On the one hand is an unexpected, unsought-for Great Enrichment, from $3 per person per day to the present $145 per person per day, that has issued from the market economy and the failure of the ruling class to prevent innovation from changing the world.

On the other hand is the notion that politics and government can transform the world, that government programs and administrative systems can and should provide a better, more just distribution of the good things in life, particularly the material things in life.

On the one hand we have a faith in social cooperation with the minimum of force; on the other a faith that bold, vigorous experimentation with political and administrative systems is the only way to roll back centuries of privilege and exploitation.

At some point, and it may not be far in the future, these competing faiths will be brought to the proof. For me, the question is not in doubt: the big government philosophy of systems and government domination will run out of money and collapse, à la Venezuela, because nothing less than utter failure will prompt a turning from the big government model and its tempting offer of free stuff.

And yet. The two great socialist states, Russia and China, have abandoned the follies of full-on socialism, but not the faith in ruling-class supremacy, and the right of a ruling class to meddle and loot the people that work and strive for a living.

And governments have not really got beyond the economics of the Dark Ages, when the Carolingian kings thought that markets were a good idea, especially if they charged 10 percent duty on all transactions.

But by all means blame the Baby Boom. we grandpas and grannies are old and cranky, and it is time to set us straight.

It's June, So The May Days are Over

After the debacle of the election in Britain, where Prime Minister May managed to give away a huge pre-election poll lead to a hung Parliament, the only recourse is to Shakespeare.

A couple of weeks ago I read a piece by a British Conservative crowing that the Tories had finally put it all together, economic freedom of Thatcher, the tradition of Lord Salisbury, and the populism of Disraeli.

But now we are reminded, from Macbeth, the truth about politics

      It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

We humans always want to breathe meaning into the world, as in Douglas Adams' memorable line about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." But reality always reminds us that, whatever the meaning is, it has surely escaped us, up until now.

So the Brits will stumble on, governed by the usual idiots, either the cuckservative May or the lefty Corbin.

To hope for anything else, of course, is to become Falstaff, who whimpered to Prince Hal that

I would 'twere bedtime, Hal, and all well. 

Prince Hal tells Falstaff that he owes God a death, and Falstaff goes into a long prose soliloquy about honor in which he decides that he'll have "none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon."

And yet to live with honor is a far, far better thing than to live like als Knecht, as a serf.

We all want our worries and our fears resolved, by bedtime if not sooner, but the truth is that the world spins on in riot and confusion. Perhaps the big problem is our Newtonian science, that delivered a mechanical regularity to planetary orbits and artillery shells, and inspired humans to extend it into the super-mechanical philosophy of socialism and the materialist program of Communism, the fantasy that we could order our affairs on Earth with the mechanical organization of an 18th century platoon with its officers in front and its file-closers in back.

What we have learned, from the revolution in science that began with Einstein's revolutionary papers on relativity and black-body radiation is that the basic fact of life, the universe, and everything is the uncertainty and improbability of the micro-world, where everything issues from a roll of the dice, or maybe not.

So Theresa May gambled and lost; so the ruling class in the US put up Hillary Clinton and can't believe she lost to a Trump. So we normals would like to get back to simple wiving and thriving and forget the poison of political correctness perched uneasily on top of big government entitlements. So liberals would like to save the planet from plant food, carbon dioxide, and Islamists would like to purify the world for the sake of Mohammed, peace be upon him. So President Trump would like to make America Great Again, and liberals would like to celebrate diversity while denying conservatives the right to speak at their universities. So some of us want to deal decisively with terrorism; so others want to fight hate and xenophobia.

Truly, a tale told by an idiot... and yet surely we must believe in a glorious sunset into which every hero will eventually ride.

Liberals Want to Take Their Dollies Home

For years and years liberals have insisted that conservatives bow the head and submit to liberal hegemony. But now that a Republican has won the presidency and is beginning to roll back liberal policy, liberals are having a fit and are threatening to take their dollies home if we won't play according to their rules.

So California is going to double down on its green energy program, even as it suffers under the second highest electric rates in the nation. And it's proposing to do its own single-payer health plan.

There are two things wrong with this. First, that the whole green energy thing is a scam, a direct equivalent of the revivalist preachers that relieved credulous widows of their savings in return for the promise of salvation. Second, that the single-payer notion is a scam that will deliver VA level health care to the poor and the middle class while the rich go in for medical tourism. It's the science, liberals.

But hey, that's what federalism is all about: let the states experiment all they like, and then see where Americans want to go to live.

But probably California's moves to run its own climate program and its own health care system are half-baked liberal ideas, like the half-baked idea that the Russians hacked the election.

Oh and like the half-baked idea that liberal activist groups should get a payoff from settlements reached by the Justice Department, just terminated by Attorney General Sessions. Imagine the wailing and the gnashing of teeth if conservative activist groups like Judicial Watch got loot from the Justice Department!

Now we have Dennis Prager worrying about a cold civil war turning violent.

Do liberals have a deep and dark plan to neutralize all opposition and create a one-party state?

I suspect that liberals are idiots, and the SJWs are worse.

I think that liberals are operating under a fundamental delusion. That delusion is that they are the guerrillas in the hills valiantly battling against the entrenched forces of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Oh, and hate.

Of course, this is nonsense. Liberal students are running riot in the universities not because they are valiant protesters battling against the system but because their college presidents and administrators have taught them to be activists and protesters, and they are simply good little boys and girls doing exactly what their ruling-class teachers have taught them.

That is why I have advanced my notion that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. Injustice is what the ruling class dishes out through its control of the government and the public square and the good little boys and girls in the university. Disagree with a liberal and you could lose your job, or have your social media accounts suspended. But if you are Black Lives Matter spewing racist bile, no problem. If you are a Muslim extremist spewing religious bigotry, no problem.

Justice is what the outs are fighting for; they are fighting to end the domination and hegemony of the ruling class. But once the outs get in power then all they are doing is imposing their ideas on the rest of society, as liberals do today.

I just think that liberals have no clue what they are doing. They are religious enthusiasts pushing their Truth upon an ignorant hive of superstition. They have no clue what their ruthless deployment of power is doing in the hinterland. They all go to school and learn Activism 101 and think it's great. But activism is stylized violence against the Other, and the Other doesn't like it.

What is more, Activism 101 is teaching a lie. It is not about brave young insurgents risking life and limb battling against The Man and his bribed apologists; it is the ruling class teaching its young scions how to intimidate the rubes.

As I understand history, its periods of activism, of revolutions, of Reigns of Terror, of Awakenings are necessarily short. That's because you cannot keep the fervor up forever. For one thing, as Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, ordinary people hate the mobilization and the regimentation. Pretty soon they want to get back to work, and get married and have children. They are not, and never can be, permanent revolutionaries.

We are in the swing of events right now, and cannot tell what will come of them. My prediction is that liberals are in for a nasty shock, and I suspect that the mechanism for applying the shock is going to be the liberal refusal to defend us against Islamic terrorism.

The remedy for Islamic terrorism is pretty simple. You send anyone involved in an Islamic terror cell back to the Middle East. But liberals won't let us do it, and eventually it is going to cost them.

But meanwhile liberals are in a snot that we normals won't play according to their rules, and they want their dollies back.