The Cultural Problem at the Heart of Ashland

Here at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, the festival program declares that

We include a diversity of people, ideas and cultures in our work, enriching our art, our relationships with each other, our audiences and our community.

That means that OSF is always careful to include black actors and a black play every year -- August Wilson seems to be a go-to playwright, as elsewhere in the liberal drama world. And last night, at a performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor played with a female Sir John Falstaff, there were blacks, Hispanics, and East Asians playing minor parts and an occasional Spanish phrase to demonstrate diversity and inclusion.

But really, should a Shakespeare festival give a damn about "other cultures?" Shouldn't its Mission Statement say that "we celebrate Shakespeare" rather than

Inspired by Shakespeare's work and the cultural richness of the United States, we reveal our collective humanity through illuminating interpretations of new and classic plays [etc].

Which is to say that "we are liberals" and our job as white educated liberals is to treat everyone else on the planet as our beloved pets, except for nasty cis-hetero-white deplorables who violate our Code of Conduct. They will be named and shamed and fired like Google's James Damore. Probably, that would never happen at a place like OSF because Deplorables don't have a chance in racist sexist homophobic hell of being hired in the first place.

I know. It really isn't as simple as that. OSF's audience is politically liberal and it expects the proper genuflection to liberal gods, and the artistic and administrative corps of the festival are also liberals that naturally enact and celebrate the canons of the liberal faith. So stop complaining, you whiner.

And the reality is that OSF doesn't do illuminating adaptions of anything. What it does, especially in these latter days, is dumb the plays down, and indicate, by a wafting a hand past the backside, when a fart joke has been made in Elizabethan English.

And because all its practitioners live and worship in the liberal bubble, OSF puts up stone-blind productions like a recent Julius Caesar as a woman CEO surrounded by Roman senators dressed as actors attending rehearsal in artistical black. Yeah. That's real illuminating. For rather more illumination try HBO's Rome on Netflix, which somehow, even though designed for a TV audience, manages to get the power politics of the patricians of Rome. No women CEOs, just aristocratic rich bitches manipulating things from behind the scene, as the aristocratic rich bitches have attempted to do from time immemorial.

Oh well. Today in Henry IV Part One, the Falstaff will be a man. But the Hotspur will be a woman.

Yeah. The most testosterone-fueled character in all of Shakespeare, including a duel to the death with who's-a-naughty-boy-then Prince Hal, will be a girl. Hey, why not? Wonder Woman can outfight any man in Illyria. So why not a woman as the Great Northern Hope of the Percys, the Earls of Northumberland, marcher lords since whenever whose job was to keep out the Scots.

Well, you really can't expect these liberals to know anything. They are idiots and they are faithful communicants at the Church of Diversity and Inclusion, or you lose your job.

Meanwhile, I was reading that the later Dukes of Northumberland, no relations, assumed the surname Percy. Gee, I wonder why?

Why Is Our Ruling Class Denying Reality?

Why did Google fire that guy that dared to question corporate orthodoxy on diversity? Why did the Google diversity heretic's HR abbess insist that he was wrong on diversity and inclusion?

In fact, why do our rulers insist that we are all equal, or they will make us so, per equality politics? And why is it heating up?

Because the ruling-class denial of racial differences is going right into the toilet because of gene science. ZMan:

As people come to accept the reality of gene editing, even if it is just to make better dog breeds, it is much more difficult to maintain the mythologies of the blank slate.

The point is that gene editing is coming. That means that we will be able to make babies with a genetic makeup that differs from the possibilities they could have inherited from their parents. That means that the insistence on equality of results by government force will be ridiculous when you can adjust genetic inheritances with just a little tweaking.

And yet right now our ruling class is going crazy forbidding anyone from mentioning sex and race differences.

As science makes clear the realities of human biology, our rulers scream ever louder to the contrary. Instead of simply ignoring the new information, they are waging pogroms too root out anyone not fully committed to their biological denialism. Every week were treated to some new scandal where a heretic is brought forth and punished for acknowledging reality.

What is going on here? ZMan reminds us of the growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

As the people began to embrace the new religion, the rulers tried to crack down on it. This only made the new religion more popular. 

It was the genius of Constantine to reverse course and put the ruling class on the side of the new religion. And so some politician is going to do the same with regard to biological denialism, the blank slate, diversity politics etc. Because why get all worked up about inequality when a little DNA editing can solve the problem with a nip and a tuck?

OK, but why is our ruling class so committed to diversity politics and why are they bullying the Googles of the world and the wedding cake bakers and Uncle Tom Cobbley and forcing everyone to bow the head to their ideology? What's the point?

I guess there isn't a point really. It's just that the rulers, by instinct, always want us to bow the knee  to them, as a ceremony of their power. They are the rulers; we are the subjects. Rulers rule, and subjects bend the knee. There has to be some issue around which this ceremony of domination is solemnized.

Right now it is diversity, and I wish it wasn't.

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.