The Damore Case: What Do Liberals Want

The Damore case, of the 28-year-old nerd-head that got mad after a diversity training session at Google, has entered a new phase.

Yes, the new critics say, Damore had a point, but he is naive. He really doesn't get the bigger picture.

One of them, Nicole Gelinas, from the Manhattan Institute says that "the contents of his memo are nothing to celebrate; He said nothing that hasn’t already been said, in tiresome fashion, for decades." And his memo has made Google's job, to "manage the people who make up its business... harder."

Then there is Megan McArdle, who writes that, after working in IT for years with the guys she decided one day at a Monday morning meeting that "fundamentally, these are not my people." It was after her account of a doomed romance and a Saturday concert had been met with dead silence and a guy's account of spending the weekend building a fiber network in his basement. So then she segues into "Sexism is a process" and working in tech is going to be pretty rough for women unless "some pretty heroic efforts are made to counteract all that free-floating testosterone.¨

All of which is fine. But the point is whether the government should be in there with its mailed fist nailing down the details of managing people in every workplace. It is one thing to fine and imprison people for not hiring and promoting women and minorities. It is another thing to bully them into making life comfortable for the pets of liberal activists.

Government is force. Is government force the right tool to manage and regulate corporate cultures? Must the tech industry be made to be comfortable for well-born women, or else? Or does that amount to treating well-born women like children?

Now, I do not doubt that one of the most important things in the world right now is that well-born and well-educated women should all get to feel comfortable in the workplace and able to discuss their relationships in Monday morning meetings, and that the Goolag should be able to force its corporate culture on its employees to protect its $90 billion in the bank.

But let us get down to the nitty gritty. And that means Charles Murray and his Coming Apart. Right now, things are pretty copacetic for the top 25 percent of whites in America, of which well-born women at Google are probably in the One Percent. They have great careers and merger marriages, and the divorce rate is down. But things are not so great for the 40 percent in the middle, where the jobs are not so great and the marriages don't always last. And things are really grim for the bottom 30 percent where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

Now, I declare before all the world that I don't think that any of the well-born women and diversity hires at Google have a leg to stand on when we are doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the bottom 75 percent find a more secure life.

And no. Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and doing single-payer health care and saving the planet from climate change and moving to gender-neutral bathrooms, and all the rest of the progressive liberal rubbish, ain't gonna do it.

The fact is that liberals are totally obsessed with fluffing the pillows in their own liberal Bubble World where things are already pretty comfy. And if you look at the things that liberals say they want, the one thing that comes through is that liberals do not have a clue about what other people want, nor do they care, unless you are a liberal pet and sit up and beg for a doggy treat on command.

The whole Google flap shows that liberals are just like every late-stage ruling class. They are totally obsessed with their tiny aristocratic world and its competitive social events, its liberal equivalents of Royal Ascot, and the one thing they are sure about is that they are better than other people are, publicans and sinners.

I Do Remember the Curve of Hotspur's Butt

Hey kids! Yesterday I went to a performance of Henry IV Part One at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, in which the notorious marcher lord Harry Percy was played by a woman. As was his/her relative the poisonous Earl of Worcester, and Sir Richard Vernon.

In other words, the rebel alliance were all played by women! Hello liberal woman director Lileana Blain-Cruz. You really don't get women as marcher lords raging about everything and damning everyone to hell and back again while they work up a head of rebellion. Not in the real world. Women don't operate that way, which anyone would know unless their education had been confined to sex-denialism at an Ivy League university.

Women get their way in the world by manipulating the current system, as in manipulating tech companies like Google into hiring more women software engineers. They rarely get their way in the world by overturning the system or working at a tech startup. It's the science, baby.

But the bigger problem is that it really doesn't make sense to cast a woman into a role where she is having a knife fight with a man. And it really doesn't make sense to cast a woman into a role where the most notable thing about her is the snug fit of her camo pants. And it really doesn't make the point when the said woman, cast in a role as a quarrelsome troublemaking marcher lord, gets killed and dragged off stage by the coward Falstaff. You see, m'lady, men are expendable, so it doesn't matter if the Percys lose a son or two. But the death of every woman is a debit against posterity. Because the most notable thing about women is that they bear children, and men do not.

And again, why do we have two or three babes in skimpy white-trash low-cut bar-girl getups with a Dolly Parton lookalike Mistress Quickly? Isn't that, like, sexist? Isn't it, like, propagating vile liberal race and gender stereotypes? Shouldn't there, like, be a black rent-boy at the Boar's Head Tavern, just to make it diverse and inclusive? Whatever.

Of course, why would we expect a liberal woman with a double-barrel surname and an Ivy League MFA degree to have the least clue about high politics and aristocratic warfare in the late Middle Ages? Where would she learn such stuff? What masters degrees would be out there? What intern opportunities? What grant prospects? Imagine the microaggressions and unsafe spaces she would encounter in the process!

Never mind. Because after two clueless productions from two clueless directors with Ivy League MFA degrees that mangled two great cultural monuments of western culture into silly putty we got to see, here at Ashland, a numinous performance of The Odyssey, adapted and produced by Mary Zimmerman.

It may truly be said that Zimmerman lived up to the OSF's Mission Statement to produce "illuminating interpretations" on its stages.

Really, it wasn't more than ten minutes into The Odyssey that I turned and said "now we're talking."

Of course, The Odyssey is a corker of a story, with the universal themes of loss and the heartbreak of separation and the emotion supercharge of reunion. But then The Merry Wives of Windsor is a magnificent romp, and Henry IV Part One is a magnificent disquisition on ambition and betrayal and coming-of-age and I know not what.

The point is that the usual idiots can wreck a cultural icon as well as any man in Illyria.  To make the cultural icon come alive and move and illuminate the hearts and minds of the audience takes something more.

And my feeling is that the liberal rage for diversity and inclusion is not just going to vandalize the great monuments of western culture. It is going to end up by ruining liberalism itself. Let us take our text from Eric Hoffer:

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

I think that our liberal friends have got right through the movement stage, have burned through most of the business stage, and are deep in the racket stage. And really, when you are in the racket stage you are  just a bunch of gang-bangers with more testosterone than sense.

As in: three of the plays I have watched here at Ashland over the past three days have been directed by women and minorities with Ivy League MFA degrees.

Does not that smell like a bit of a racket? As in the interview policy of Google with softball interviews for Ivy Leaguers and diversity hires. Only the three directors here at Ashland are minority/women and Ivy Leaguers.

Mary Zimmerman is the daughter of a physics professor and a comparative literature professor. And she went to Northwestern. So strictly speaking, she is not an Ivy Leaguer, although with two professor parents it does count as two strikes against her.

But maybe that Northwestern bit makes a difference. Or maybe it is that Mary Zimmerman has found a way to break out of the liberal bubble and speak to us all.

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.