The Convergence of Tech

I suppose it is inevitable that the left would want to conquer and subdue the tech industry. After all, that's where the power is.

And the central fact about business and politics since the industrial revolution is that business is a sitting duck for politics. Or rather the goose that laid the golden egg.

And if you are in the political power game, conquering and subduing is what you do.

Used to be that kings and emperors went a-conquering of land. But now the new political power, the educated ruling class, wants to conquer business. Because that's where the money is.

So of course Google would knuckle under to the SJW warriors and make itself into a "converged" company where speech is free as long as you don't speak a word against the secular religious orthodoxy of "diversity and inclusion."

And so it is inevitable and appropriate that Google's VP of diversity and inclusion would email a screed saying that Google is all in favor of free speech, but not speech that is wrong with respect to diversity and inclusion. Of course she did. And of course Google CEO Sundar Pichai fired James Damore for his rather tame piece on diversity.

Hey, apart from the fact that the Obama administration paid Google's loyalty and assistance over the last eight years by a Department of Labor diversity suit in January 2017, these tech  guys are tame followers of the conventional wisdom.

Of course they are. They have put their life energy into tech, not into politics and philosophy. So they just pick up the conventional wisdom and the orthodoxy of the ruling class with their breakfast latte.

And when they hit the big time, they learn pretty quick that they have to play ball  with the politicians and activists, or suffer the fate of the Koch Brothers, and become the whipping boys of the left.

Poor naive Bill Gates thought he was going  to keep Microsoft out of politics. But then the politicians came calling, and the Justice Department sicced an antitrust suit on Microsoft, and Bill Gates immediately understood who was boss.

I think it is a shame, a monstrous shame, that we are being named and shamed for politically incorrect speech. Oh, and fired from our jobs.

Remember when? Remember when the left was outraged about the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted (sorta) back in the early days of the Cold War for being a little too close to the Communist Party. Hey who cares about Brendan Eich or James Damore or Tim Hunt? They had it coming, good and hard.

Well, we know where we stand. It is up to us to change the culture and re-create an America where a guy is free to publish a screed about science and not get fired from his job.

Google Diversity: The Rage for Meaning

We humans insist that life has a meaning. We are not satisfied to be born and to die, to be a link in the Great Chain of Being. We want to be the link in the Great Chain of Being.

Thus is it not enough for Google to be a hugely successful tech company that provides knowledge to the world through its search technology.

No, Google longs for something fuller, higher than that. Indeed Google follows the instruction  of liberal Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. We humans, he argues must follow a dual track, as I retail in An American Manifesto.

First, we recognize the importance of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. Second, we recognize that we all search for something higher and fuller.

So it is not enough for Google to assist in ordinary human flourishing with cool technology and Google Photos and Google Drive and Android and Uncle Tom Cobbley. Google searches for something higher and fuller.

And if you are an ordinary successful tech billionaire in tune with the Zeitgeist, that means diversity. But, argues Taylor

To balance these goals, we must define our moral aspirations in terms that do not “crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity... [and] fully respect ordinary human flourishing.” He proposes to balance the ideal with the practical, to recognize that secular utopianism belongs in the same bin as religious millennarianism: Plato’s Republic, medieval monasticism and the Bolshevik “new Soviet man;” all of them crush and mutilate ordinary human flourishing. 

Hello SJWs!

Back in the old days, liberals used to fulminate about conservatives "legislating morality." Today, we read of people anxious that the Google guy that issued a ten-page manifesto that was equivocal about diversity should be named and shamed and fired for his apostasy.

The French have a  word for this: Plus ça change. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

What I say is that diversity is a grand and noble idea. Except when it is accompanied by force. So, I don't like the idea of government universities playing race and gender politics, because  that means enforcing someone's idea of diversity with force.

And it is the most pathetic conceit for a big corporation like Google to imagine that it is in the business  of anything other than ordinary human flourishing.

It is very hard to balance ordinary human flourishing with something higher and fuller. Time and time again in human history, the folks longing for something higher have spindled and mutilated the folks that disagree with them.

But you knew that.

Positive and Negative Identity Politics

We live in an age of identity politics, but I had never thought that identity politics comes in two flavors. There is positive identity politics and there is negative identity politics. That is the argument of ZMan in "Positive and Negative." Here is how he presents the principle:

Identity movements, as cultural or even political phenomenon, come in two flavors. One is positive and the other is negative. A positive identity is one that exists independently and in isolation. It is true in all times and all places. Its logic is entirely internal and only modifiable by those within it.  A negative identity, in contrast, exists only in context, usually in relation to or in opposition to something else. It is dependent on some outside thing. Its logic is external and modifiable by whatever exogenous thing upon which it depends.

OK. What the heck does that mean? The easiest way is by defining the negative identity politics of blacks in the United States.

[S]ub-Saharan Africans come to America and refuse to call themselves black or even African-American. They have a different identity, their own identity. Black Americans are defined by the fact that whites needed farm equipment and brought blacks over to the colonies to work the fields. Everything about the black experience is in relation to this history and its alleged effects on the present. To be black in America is to be defined entirely by your relationship to white America. 

Icelanders, according to ZMan, define themselves as Icelanders.

Blacks, in contrast, do nothing but complain about whites. They define themselves in relation to whites, mostly in how they are treated by whites. 

This, in the opinion of ZMan, is not a good idea, because if you are a black you need whites around so you can complain about them. What if whites went away? What would the blacks do then, poor things?

Now, in the opinion of ZMan and others, what is coming is some kind of white identity politics, whether we whites like it or not. The thing to avoid is negative identity politics, defining white identity by "complaining about blacks and Jews."

Or complaining about liberals.

The way to avoid the negative road,  defining yourself against somebody else, is to form a "cultural movement," writes ZMan. Like the Progressives.

But actually, Progressives, and the left generally, define themselves against the bourgeoisie, against the middle class, conformism, God, and the patriarchy, and now cis-het-normativity. The purpose of liberals driving Priuses and shopping at organic grocery stores is to differentiate themselves from the mainstream, because liberals are Pharisees and not like other men are, publicans and sinners.

In many ways, therefore, the conservative movement of the post-WWII era was a negative movement against the liberals, or progressives, or whatever the left was calling itself at the moment. And the reason we have Trump is that this movement did not define itself in positive terms to be anything other than a reaction against liberalism. Without liberalism, conservatism would be nothing.

So what do we do?

The answer is obvious. The new cultural movement must identify itself as "American," like the black Americans that showed up at the great Tea Party rally in Washington DC in 2009. Don't call be a black American, they said. Call me an American that happens to be black.

So maybe the strategy for the alt-right and anyone else planning a new cultural movement is to create an American Identity politics, not  a white identity politics. This politics would celebrate America, from the Puritans to the Revolutionaries to the Founders to the separation of powers to the undergrowth of voluntary social organizations to the spirit of Having a Go, to the toleration of all races and creeds.

This movement would believe in one simple thing: America is the best there is, and we will make it better.

Anyone can join, provided that they the only thing they want is to Make America Great Again.

Hmm. The whole point of my American Manifesto, which starts here, is to re-establish the idea of America as the best there is, and to imagine how to make it better, in the life after Liberalism.

Another Thing That Marx Got Wrong

I attended a neighborhood Block Watch party the other night and got to talk with the lefty girl across the street. She was worried that the tech kids working at Amazon were not interested in social justice and politics. Imagine!

That got me to descanting to the neighborhood folks that people in business have never been that interested in politics: John D. Rockefeller retired from Standard Oil at age 50 and invented modern philanthropy. Today's billionaires want to go to Mars. Etc.

But somehow that led me to an epiphany. It is this.

Marx in his Communist Manifesto imagined that the rising bourgeoisie and the capitalists were in the process of replacing the Old Feudalism of lords and peasants with a new feudalism of capitalists and workers.

The new lords of commerce, Marx prophesied, would rule over business and politics the way that the great barons of the land ruled over the world in their day. Of course they would, liquidating the incredible wealth of their capitalist enterprises into the ready coin of political power.

But Marx was wrong, because the new lords of commerce were not that interested in power. Instead of building themselves into a new ruling class they retired from business and invented modern philanthropy.

Here is where my epiphany comes in. Marx was not completely wrong about the rise of a new feudalism. He wasn't wrong about predicting that the workers would become the new serfs and peasants.

What Marx got completely wrong was that he imagined that it would be the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy of the market, that would step into the space vacated by the aristocracy of the land. In fact, it was the aristocracy of the word, the new educated sons -- and eventually daughters -- of the bourgeoisie that would eventually lord it over the industrial serfs.

Why would what be? Because unlike the capitalists, who were not that interested in power, the educated sons of the bourgeoisie were very interested in power, and they wanted it for themselves so that they could fundamentally transform the world -- or failing that be the chaps issuing the orders.

When you think about it, it made a lot of sense. The brutal fact about being the son or the daughter of a successful capitalist is that you are probably not going to repeat the combination of cunning, hard work, and luck that your father had. So what do you do to make your life meaningful? Hey, you mount up on a white horse and promise to save the world with the most basic and instinctive means, a political army to smash the evils and injustices of the world.

The awful truth is that this New Feudalism is a stunning success. Nearly everyone is perfectly happy being a subordinate peasant in the new estates of the new political magnates of ideology. Oh, people complain about "them," how "they" haven't built a pedestrian crossing here, or a bike path there, or a gender-neutral bathroom at the Opera House. But they do not imagine anything; they just accept an eternal subordination to the aristocracy of the word, the cultural elite that rules our minds as though it were the most natural thing in the world, because after all, it was ever thus.

Well, I for one believe that the age of industrial subordination is coming to an end. That is how I interpret the prophecy that AI will take over the world. You won't be able to sit like an automaton doing a repetitive job all your life, because all such jobs will go the way of the farm laborer.

In the future people will have to imagine how to serve their fellow humans and then do something about it. But here is the dirty little secret about this. Almost all humans are skilled communicators and cooperators, because those are the basic skills of social animals, that we learn as children just by being children and learning to talk and learning to play with other children. People are thinking that only geniuses will have jobs in the new world that is to come, but I suspect that they are wrong. Yes, we will still put geniuses to work solving impossible scientific and logical problems; but the rest of us will be as busy as bees doing regular human stuff: interacting, talking, exchanging, cooperating.

And maybe, maybe, we will prove Marx completely wrong and build a society without the eternal yoke of feudal subordination.

I am not talking about a perfect society where people paint in the morning, and politic in the afternoon and then talk philosophy in the evening. I am just talking about a society where the center of gravity occurs around a culture of cooperation and personal responsibility.

Why is Average Household Income About Same as Per Capita Income?

A reader of my AT piece on foreign policy in the light of GDP asks the following question:

If per capita GDP in the US is about $53,000, then why is "household income... about the same, if a typical household is 4 people?"

Well, according to Google, average household income in the US in 2014 was $73,300. And the average household size is 2.54.

Let's try the simple math, and see how it comes out. There were 147 million employed persons (from USBLS Household Survey), and 2.54 in the average household in 2014. That seems about right, because 2014 population is 319 million. So that makes 319 million / 2.54 =  125 million households.

Per worker GDI is $17.5 trillion / 147 million = $119,000.

Per household GDI is $17.5 trillion / 125 million =  $140,000.

So what's the difference? Why are these back-of-the-envelope estimates about twice the official number?

Maybe it's because total personal income is about twice raw salaries and wages, as from the BEA, where 2015 US "Personal Income" is $15.3 trillion and "Wages and Salaries" are $7.7 trillion. The difference is things like employment benefits, capital and interest income, and government transfers.

Or maybe the bean counters are looking at an entirely different way of figuring household income, and I don't have a clue what is going on.

Suppose Your Were a Kid in 1930s Germany...

One of the conceits of our time is that the baby-boomers were rebels, taking on the tired establishment of the time with their questioning and their critique of establishment hypocrisy.

Of course, this is rubbish. Young people are not brave warriors against the status quo but blind dupes of a cunning ruling class. That is the whole purpose of government schools and government universities, to make sure that young people learn the approved opinions and develop the approved enthusiasms. Baby-boomers went along with peace, love and all the rest because everyone else was doing it.

We may say, perhaps, that the baby-boomers were the dupes of a rising liberal ruling class -- but then the liberals had been in the ideological ascendant since the early 20th century: the federal income tax and the direct election of senators, passed as constitutional amendments, were at the center of the Progressive Era agenda.

And given the purging of conservatives and Christians all over the education system and culture industry, it is less likely today that any kid would dare to profess unsound opinions, or even know about them.

So it is salutary for me to be reading A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika by Alfons Heck. Heck was a kid in the Rhineland during the Hitler years, aged 10 in 1933, and of course he was an enthusiastic Nazi. That is what kids do; they inhale the sweet aroma of the new thing, and enthusiastically exhale it, joining the Hitler Youth and believing everything handed down from on high. Just like our modern social justice warriors know nothing beyond what they learn from their lefty "studies" teachers.

We conceited, enlightened folk like to lecture the Germans about their guilt, and we have been so successful that German women have mostly stopped having children. But really, what is an individual supposed to do? A ten-year-old is supposed to avoid joining the Jungvolk like everyone else? And then get into a sophisticated analysis of the Versailles treaty?

So, should a kid in our US government schools get into an argument with his unionized teacher about diversity and/or transgender rights? Or, for the really courageous, about climate change?

Nobody, but nobody is really in a position to challenge the ideological status quo at age 10, or 16, or 26 or indeed any age. Nobody challenges the status quo except foolish cranks, that have veered off the road by reading other cranks, who have gussied up critical political and cultural ideas not because they are geniuses, but because they are cussed.

If the crank turns out to be right, 20, or 30 or a hundred years in the future, it merely blind luck. The rest of us must keep our powder dry and make our peace with the current ruling class.

The best any secret rebel can do is keep a weather eye out for storms.

But then, how can you know the political weather when the ruling class is faking the weather reports? Put it this way. Right now, any ordinary American had better make pretty sure that nobody denounces them as a racist, or sexist or homophobe. Or they could lose their job. Suppose you think that the current policy of the United States government is in fact profoundly racist, in that it categorizes people by race and judges events not by how they benefit designated race categories? What do you do?

In other words, how do you fight government racism when to do so would subject you to denunciation as a racist?

First of all, you would have to be a ideological genius to see through the lies and propaganda of the ruling class, and how many of us are equal to that? Then you would have to be the kind of person that didn't give a damn about  people calling  you nasty names, and how many of us have the thick skin for that? You would be the kind of person that didn't care if they went to your boss and had you fired, and how many of us are willing to be that much trouble to our bosses?

How many people are like that? 0.02 percent? Or 0.01 percent? We humans are social animals, and that means that we go along to get along, because that is how social cooperation works.

I'd say that true genius is the ability to keep your powder dry and emerge at just the right moment, when the ruling class and its ideology are in trouble, and knock over its equestrian statue at just the right moment when it looks like you are incredible brave, but in fact the ruling class leaders just left town in the middle of the previous night. Emile Zola evokes that rather nicely with his Fortune of the Rougons, about how the successful coup of Louis Napoleon in 1851 played down in the provinces. The way it works is that you have to have back channels so that you know what is going down before the other folks in town.

For most of us, Candide's famous phrase applies: il faut cultiver notre jardin. We need to go work in the garden. Anything else will get us ground to dust under the wheels of history.

The Left's Syllabus of Errors, Part One

I experience the left as a reactionary and nostalgic movement that arose at the time of the industrial revolution with the goal of turning back the clock to an imagined golden age of perfect and equal community.

Obviously, the first error of the left was the French Revolution, and that is where the term "left" was invented. My knowledge about the revolution is sketchy, but it is obvious to me that the French Revolution is an example of How Not to Do It. Whereas the American Revolution and the Constitution are an example of How To Do It. The result of the French Revolution was that French hegemony in Europe was over. For most of us, that was great. For the French, not so good.

The second error was the folly of the socialist communities like New Harmony, Indiana, founded by Robert Owen who bought Harmony from a German Protestant sect in 1824 and tried out his socialist ideas -- for two years until the experiment failed.

The third error is Marxian economics, based on Karl Marx's idiosyncratic reading of classical economics and its dual theory of value: exchange value and use value. Marx published his theory in 1867 and in 1870 it was blown up by the marginal revolution, that there was no such thing as use value and exchange value, only marginal value. But here we are, nearly 150 years after the marginal revolution and Marxists still haven't digested the annihilation of their flawed economics.

The fourth error is the faith in top-down administrative government, started in a big way by Bismarck in Germany and his government social-insurance scheme in the 1880s. It was left to the economist Ludwig von Mises to predict in 1918 that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. But this is true of all government centralized administrative programs. Designed to sidestep the price system, these cunning plans always founder on the fact that they cannot adjust day-by-day to changing circumstances. In fact they are designed to prevent adjustment. Thus they always end up in bankruptcy, injustice and waste, whether in pensions, health care, education, or welfare.

The fifth error is the left's intervention to favor its little darlings. This started with the workers, and ended up with unionized workers bankrupting the industries they had organized. It continued with the left warping the law to favor its feminist and minority clients, thus making both women and minorities worse off. The best way to approach marginalized communities is to start with my catchphrase that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. Thus it is one thing to write civil rights laws; it is another thing to legislate and impose initiatives to benefit "underrepresented" groups.

The sixth error is the left's war on religion. Experts now agree that all humans practice what we would call religion, some way of understanding the meaning of life, the universe and everything, and what to do about it. The deep wisdom of the American founders was to understand that religion and politics needed to be separated. But the left is a secular religion and thinks nothing of installing its preachers throughout the government. There is a word for this combination of religion and government power: totalitarianism.

The seventh error is the left's war on the nation state. With Marxism the left determined to press for a global government based on the class principle, that workers of the world would combine together to fight the capitalists. But World War I showed that the workers identified first with their nation states, British workers believed in Britain, German workers in Germany, French workers in France. In other words the nation state was an astonishing concept that could command the loyalties of humans from all walks of life living in a geographical area, and get them to loosen their blood and tribal and class ties in favor of a single abstract notion of a nation and its people. Then, when the ruling class screwed up in the aftermath of World War I with inflations in the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, ordinary people strengthened their loyalty to nation, and supported Mussolini, Hitler, Baldwin, and Roosevelt that promised to make their nations great again. The ruling class interpreted this loyalty, after World War II, as "fascism" and a disaster which should never be allowed to happen again. But they were wrong. What never should have been allowed to happen again was the ruling class screwing up the economy again, as in the 1970s inflation and the 2000s housing bubble.

The eighth error is large-scale migration. This error proceeds from the ruling class's war on the nation state and its conceit that it can rule over the result. In fact the best political unit currently on offer is the nation state with its fiction of a single people speaking the same language and descended from a common ancestry. The lesson of US immigration down the decades is that the new immigrants always tend to form sub-communities walled off from the national community, and that it takes a war, e.g., World War II, to bring them all together.

The ninth error is climate change, the notion that we are roasting the planet with fossil fuel use. It may be true, but since we are presently in an "interglacial period" in a major ice age, probably not. In any case, humans are good at adapting, and not so good at predicting. When we make a mess, we work to clean it up. We are really bad at predicting what is going to happen next week, or next year, or next century, and spending a ton of money on the assumption that we can predict the future is utter folly.

Well, that's enough for starters. Next, Postmodernism.