On the Ground in Detroit

We all know that Detroit, Michigan, is a basket case. But it always helps to see things for yourself, as I did last week when attending the graduation of a son of a friend.

The bottom line news right now is that basket-case Detroit is starting back up, because a bunch of millennials are moving in and taking advantage of rock-bottom prices for everything from the storied 30-storey Fisher Building to bombed-out apartment buildings. The fabulous art-deco Fisher Building, in Midtown on Grand Avenue opposite the old General Motors HQ, sold for $12 million in 2015. It was built for $9 million in 1928.

The rule-of-thumb on apartment buildings is that the rehab costs about 3 times the purchase price. That's because every abandoned building has been stripped of all its wiring and plumbing by looters.

Back in 1928 Detroit was the hottest thing in the world, and when the Fisher brothers -- of Fisher Body fame -- sold their remaining 40 percent of Fisher Body to General Motors for $200+ million, they gave Albert Kahn a check for $30 million to build them a building that couldn't be beat. In the event they only needed $9 million because they scaled back the building from three towers to one. So they go a refund.

But then came the Great Depression, and Detroit plunged off a cliff. Pretty soon we got the Battle of the Overpass in 1937 with the workers battling for their labor union.

Funny how that works. You'd think the workers would be battling the government that screwed up the response to the crash of 1929, but no. They loved the FDR that kept the economy down and dirty for his first term and then gave them a recession in 1937-38. But they hated the corporations that paid their wages. How does that work anyway.

Of course it wasn't the union that got Detroit back on top again. It was World War II and the arsenal of democracy. They tell us that Detroit build 153 cars during World War II, but 44 percent of the munitions, the planes, Jeeps, and tanks.

Still, the post-war period was another glorious era for Detroit, what with the UAW inventing the weekend and pushing wages, benefits, and pensions way beyond what the market would bear.

So when blacks rioted in the Sixties and the Japanese brought in the Toyota Corona, and the union said No Givebacks, the stars all lined up to flush Detroit into the toilet.

The result is everywhere to see, withvacant lots everywhere growing grass, and houses with half-collapsed front porches, dilapidated houses, burned bouses, and vacant apartment buildings everywhere.

It's a pity that the whole city didn't work take Motown Records as a model. That family firm started with an $800 family loan to Berry Gordy Jr, with a studio in the basement of the family home on West Grand Blvd. But in 1972 Motown bailed out of the Motor City and headed for LA.

I guess it is lucky that Detroit is run by a black Democratic city government. Otherwise the whole disaster of the last 50 years would be the fault of Republicans and white racist patriarchs.

But I'd say that Detroit ought to be made into a National Park of Stupid Politics. Because for me the travails of Detroit are as obvious as can be. Political power stinks if you are serious about wiving and thriving is a growing economy.

No, it is not a good idea to mew up corporations with labor unions, because it milks the corporation of flexibility and capital, both of which will likely be needed when the market turns, as it always does.

No it is not a good idea to burn your city down. Capitalists are funny that way. They really shy away from cities that have lots of angry young men with a taste for burn, baby, burn.

And it is not a good idea to turn your city into a loot and plunder operation. Back in the day loot and plunder was cool: you attack your neighboring tribe, kill the men, rape the women, and take all the food. But not any more. Now you need to tend your city like a garden, and make it into a place where corporations want to go and investors want to invest.

But there is good news about Detroit. It is simply this: the bargain hunters and bottom feeders are moving in. Partly these are folks willing to make a bet, figuring that they are buying low, getting the marquee Fisher Building for cents on the dollar, and might well get to sell high. Partly these are young people that can't afford to move to rich-bitch places like Silicon Valley. So they move to Detroit and hope that their sweat equity will convert into a chance to wive and thrive. See, if you can buy a bombed-out apartment building cheap, stripped of everything salable, maybe you can camp out in it while you rehab it, putting in new plumbing and wiring, apartment by apartment, and renting out each apartment to students as soon as you make it habitable.

Here's another interesting factoid. If you visit The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn you will get to see all the marquee cars of the last century. Each car has its price and also the number of months that the average worker would have to work to pay that price at that time. Back when the Model T came out it was over a year for the average worker to afford one. But by the 1950s the price of the average car was priced down to 5-7 months of the average worker's wage, and that is still true today. I guess those automakers know where to find the sweet spot is in the auto market. Who knew?

Well, we are flying back to Seattle today, and I doubt if I will ever be back to Detroit. But I wish the young folk and the bottom feeders well. They are the true patriots that make the world work. Because they don't just sit there; they do something.

The Big Issue: Reason vs. Emotion

If you read the comments of most conservative on-line sites you will pretty soon encounter someone talking about conservative reason vs. liberal emotion. The idea is, of course, that the commenter sees  the world through the cold light of day, but liberals see it through the fuzz of their passions, silly things.

This tendency is also evident in Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West, where he compares his Lockean individualism against Rousseau's collectivist and romantic General Will, not to mention President Trump's populist nationalism. I have reviewed Jonah's book here and here. The idea is that reason and rational thought are real-world, while post 1800 Romanticism is fantasy.

Of course our liberal friends think that their "our democracy" culture is nobly and truthfully going along with bending the arc of history towards justice in accordance with "science" whereas the racist sexist homophobic white supremacists like you and me are all trapped in the superstitions and oppressions of the past.

But I am here to tell you that they are all wrong, and I am right.

Here is what I believe. We humans, along with all other living things, got where we are today mostly on the strength of our instincts, our emotions, our "affect." On top of this pile of instinct is our particular human quality of conscious thought and reason, which is, of course, very powerful. But here is the thing. We humans developed reason, scientists say, in order to manage our relationships. We tell stories to define ourselves and we use reason to put those stories together. So reason is a human artefact, not the key to the universe. The remarkable fact about this is that reason, that we developed to assist our lives as social animals,  can also be used in our modern science to build a theory of how you can make so-called "electrons" release so-called "energy" in the form of so-called "photons" in a device we call an "LED lamp" and let there be light.

But here is the thing. All this science and theory that, e.g., tells us how to build an LED lamp that uses our knowledge about the universe to create light, does not tell us what the universe IS. Or what it MEANS, if anything. The whole question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything is just as much a mystery as it always has been. In fact, my little joke is to say that our modern knowledge, which enables us to create energy from nuclear fission -- i.e., from our current theories about the nature and the physics of so-called "sub-atomic particles" -- has deepened the whole mystery about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

I mean, if the universe is really as big as we think it is, what on earth is going on out there? The questions multiply without limit.

In the old days humans solved the mystery of how the world works through the notion of spirits. There were spirits in every tree and animals, and they were the hidden something that ran the world. Then we decided that a God created the world, set the rules, wound the whole thing up like a clock, and set everything in motion. Now we believe in a Big Bang in a blinding flash of light followed by "inflation" followed by expansion and condensation of stars and formation of galaxies, etc. Jolly good story, I'd say. Did you know that our Milky Way galaxy has completed about 13 revolutions since the Big Bang? I know: is that all?

I believe in the central dogma of Immanuel Kant, who said that we cannot know "things-in-themselves," but only appearances. In other words, we humans receive sense impressions and them process them in our minds to make sense of the sense impressions. We create a theory of the world. It may be a theory of spirits, of a theory of a creator God, or a divine mechanical watchmaker, or a Big Bang. The nature of the theory depends on our accumulation of knowledge so far, and each of the theories works pretty well for its time. But that is all.

Now you may have noticed that people with sophisticated minds -- such as Jonah Goldberg -- tend to put a lot of faith in their minds and the knowledge they have accumulated in those minds, and tend to view with alarm the primitive nature of the ordinary deplorable in the street. Reality is reason and knowledge, according to these folks, but humans are tribal. What's a sophisticate to do?

I'll tell you: Be very careful. That is my advice to the sophisticated. Because the truth is that we none of us have much of a clue what we are doing.

Right now, for instance, a lot of people are thinking that we can extend human life significantly, and live for a couple hundred years, avoiding the disease of ageing. These are the same sort of people that are deeply worried about increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 0.035 to 0.040 percent of the whole.

But on my view, ageing is not a disease, it is part of the program, to kill off the old 'uns and make way for the young 'uns, and thus the whirligig of genes brings in his mutations, which I understand that scientists believe to be a vital part of our survival.

And here's another thing. I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts today looking at all the pictures. The thing about art is that it is all about the response to the art. And if you ask me, in the centuries since the birth of modern science, art has become rather frenzied about what it all means. Used to be that artists created fairly calm and ordered art about spirits, gods, magnificent aristocrats, or even good Dutch bourgeois housewives. Not any more. Artists seem to be in a frenzy about what it all means and trying to figure out if the world is upside-down or right-side-up.

It is as if the artists of the world are running around trying to rebuild a Map of Meaning from the shards and crystals they find all around them.

But what they all seem to agree upon is that it is feelings, emotion, "affect," the response to the world that really matters. Not reason.

And that is something to think about. Or better yet, feel.

Jonah's "Suicide:" The Bigger Problem

In his new Suicide of the West Jonah Goldberg reminds us of the Miracle of the last 300 years, and the fact that we are still the tribal animals we have been for the last 250,000 years at least. Our modern era is a battle between the Lockean idea of individualism and the reactionary Rousseauean idea of the General Will and the romantic rebellion against Reason. See my piece here.

And Trump, on his telling, is a return to tribalism, the celebration of a tribalism of nation against the left's tribalism of identity. Thus the subtitle of Suicide, "How the rebirth of tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics is destroying American democracy."

Maybe Jonah is right. The only thing is that the failure of Conservatism Inc. to push back the left in recent years means that Lockean individualism and Reason are too weak a reed with which to beat the identity tribalism of the left.

This was made clear to me when I read F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West back in the 1980s. Here is the money quote:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

That was the basis of the very German Romantic rebellion. It said that we can't just be rational Lockean individuals; we are driven by our emotions, as symbolized in paintings long ago of thoughtful Germans standing on top of mountains looking out over Nature's Creation. So ever since I have been looking for a counter-culture to the official counterculture, one would take into account the German critique of rational individualism and start from there.

Or, to put in in Jonah Goldberg's terms, the critique would have to recognize that we humans are still tribal.

And here we are 200 years after the Romantic rebellion, 100 years after the Bolshevik revolution, and we still haven't solved the problem. In fact things are getting worse, with Democrat-identifying Americans exhibiting majority support for socialism, and lefty social media well on the way to declaring that all non-lefty speech is hate speech and therefore criminal.

My point is this. Trump or no Trump, if we non-lefties can't roll over the left in a counter-revolution of ideas and throw their ideas on the dust heap of history then what's the point?

So Jonah gets to the end of his book, and complains about the shrinking role of God in our world, that people can't name the three branches of government, that kids in elite colleges are nice, pleasant know-nothings, that "feeling... has become the live idea about how we should organize our lives" and that life is becoming entertainment.

But modern American conservatism, for Jonah, is supposed to be about "the beliefs that ideas matter and that character matters" and he wails that Donald Trump stands athwart both these notions, and his supporters don't care. So we must rededicate ourselves to turning our barbarian children into citizens, and show out gratitude for our civilization.

We cannot get rid of human nature and humanity's natural tribal tendencies. But we know that, under the right circumstances, our tribal nature can be grafted to a commitment to liberal, property rights, innovation, etc.

Yes. But how? The collapse of Conservatism Inc. in 2016 is surely proof that something is wrong with the conservative movement and its culture. And the fact that a political neophyte could come in and blow up a cadre of 14  professional would-be presidential nominees underlines the proof.

So where do we go, what do we do?

Thanks, Jonah, I'm glad you asked.

As I noted above, F.S.C. Northop pointed to the problem that for a lot of people, Germans and such, Locke and Hume don't do the job. For me that starts with the guy that Hume woke out of a dogmatic slumber: Kant. Kant's big thing was that we cannot know things in themselves, but only appearances. This seemed to suggest that nothing is possible, except that in the hands of Hegel it seemed that anything was possible.

Then Schopenhauer reduced things-in-themselves to one thing, the Will, and Nietzsche declared God dead and looked to a world Beyond Good and Evil. Then we had a complete revolution in physics, mostly led by Germans. Then we had the revolution in psychology with Freud as inspiration for the left and Jung's rather different effort to re-understand the universal meaning underlying myth and religion.

Does all this German thinking mean the end of the world, a demolition of Locke and the dream of an individualism beyond tribalism, or a rebirth into something else?

I don't know, but I'd say it is curious that just this year we see a psychologist like Jordan Peterson, who seems to be connecting to the lost boys of the millennium in his call to responsibility, and whose Maps of Meaning is an attempt to integrate Jung, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and more into a revaluation of the creative, sacrificial Hero's quest.

Oh, and by the way, Peterson argues that we have to stop imagining that we humans are rational creatures, reasoning our way through life. In fact we are driven by "affect," which is a fancy-pants word psychologists use instead of the word "emotion."

And then there is Trump. He may have rallied the right with appeals to the tribalism of nation and America for Americans, but he has governed as a tax cutter, a deregulator, and seems to be heading towards some resolution of the 65-year stand-off in Korea.

Suppose President Trump is a man that understands that humans can only be led by an appeal to tribe, the neo-tribalism of patriotism and the nation state, but also knows that the way the world works comes from the insights of the Lockean revolution.

And if that were true, then Trump is doing what just Jonah wants, recognizing that Americans are still tribal, but using his appeal to tribe to get our permission to lead us into a better place. Only Jonah can't see it. And perhaps more important, neither can the left.

Jonah Rehearses How We Got Here in "Suicide of the West"

Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy is the latest from the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left. In that earlier book Jonah led us through the murky waters of the original Progressive Era, and how it stank with authoritarianism, and, during World War I, descended to what would come to be called "fascist" policies.

But now Jonah is a never-Trumper, and so his new book is tinged with a certain rage towards the Trumpian ascendancy.

But first, Jonah sets forth a pretty decent exegesis of what the western liberal tradition is/was all about. He presents it all as a dichotomy between the Lockean celebration of the individual and Rousseau's celebration of the community, as expressed in his notion of the General Will.

There is also the fact of the "Miracle," what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment, the utterly unprecedented and un-thought-for explosion in economic welfare of the last 200-300 years. To put the whole thing in perspective, Jonah reminds us that 250,000 years ago we humans were "semi-hairless, upright, nomadic apes foraging and fighting for food." If you checked in every 10,000 years since you would report back "no change" to your intergalactic masters. Until the day before yesterday.

Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled  into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world.

This new way of thinking, the Lockean Revolution,

held that the individual is sovereign; that your rights come from God not government, that the fruits of our labors belong to us, and that no man should be less equal before the law because of his faith or class.

Whatever this change represented, it was not "evolution."

[From] the perspective of our genes, we weren't meant to live like we do today, with wealth, rights, and freedom, and all their fruits... [O]ur natural condition isn't merely poor, it's tribal. 

And you see that "young men from dysfunctional homes and atomized communities have fallen in with street gangs for thousands of years in every corner of the globe." In other words, you have to teach humans not to be tribal. But it is not just lower-class young men. Ever since Locke there has been a romantic rebellion against the new culture of the individual, that the new culture is "unsatisfying and devoid of authenticity and meaning." Often the people that feel this way believe that "someone must be responsible": Jews, or capitalists, or "globalists and cultural Marxists."

And for Jonah, this romanticism, this lurch for authenticity and meaning, is reactionary, for it yearns for a return to tribalism. Sure, this yearning cannot be eradicated, but "it can be channeled." Otherwise we will lose our Miracle in a process of "corruption," of cultural "decay, rot, and putrefaction."

And Jonah worries that the rise of Trump is a "catastrophic corruption of conservative principles, and a sign of how deeply the corruption has set in."

Thus Jonah sets up his argument: the culture of individualism that set the stage for the economic Miracle of the last 300 years against the romantic nostalgia for the tribal world of authenticity and meaning. The point is that if we surrender to tribalism we will demolish the Miracle and return to the world of the hairless ape, the world we humans lived for the previous 250,000 years, up until the day before yesterday.

The Eternal Battle, writes Jonah, is thus between Reason and the Search for Meaning, between Lockean individualism and Rousseau's romanticism.

Actually, I believe, all human endeavor is a Search for Meaning, and  we need to understand, for instance,  that reason was invented by humans as a way of managing their relationships with other humans, in other words to "rationalize" their behavior to other humans.

And I don't think that the battle is between individualism and tribalism. Because, if you ask me the culture of individualism is also a tribalism, the tribalism of individualism. If there is an Eternal Battle -- the title of Jonah's Chapter 5 -- it is between Force and Persuasion. But more of that anon.

But Were Gramsci Marcuse & Alinsky Really as Smart as We Think?

We free spirits, we conservatives, like to wail about the authors of today's left: Antonio Gramsci for his march through the institutions, Herbert Marcuse for his intolerant intolerance -- or is it tolerant intolerance? And then there is Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to teach lefties how to create mayhem in the eevil capitalist bourgeois world and teach the smug middle class a lesson.

Today's left is no doubt the product of all these evil geniuses. In fact, I would suggest that it is the helpless product of their ideas, in the sense that no lefty really knows why they believe what they believe: they just do. Because Activism 101.

And one thing more. I reckon that leftism is more a tactic than a strategy, more a cult than a philosophy, more an insurgency than a blueprint for government. Maybe that is why it has left such chaos in its wake.

The point, after all, of every lefty activist from Marx to Obama is the excuse for political power. He looks around for a warrant for revolution. Are the workers exploited? Yay, demolish the capitalists? Are women complaining? Castrate the sexists! Are blacks sitting in the back of the bus? Whack the racists! And the funny thing is that the more that we sufferers, we middle-class suckers, accede to the non-negotiable demands of the left the more that the left amps up the demands. I mean. We bourgeois started giving the workers their neo-feudal welfare state over a century ago. But are the workers content? We gave women the vote a century ago. Do they care? We did civil rights half a century ago. Are African Americans happy yet?

No. And the reason is that grievance is the whole point. If the whole point of your political movement is grievance, then you never want to let go of your grievance. Otherwise what is the meaning of life?

Hey kids! However dark and dreary things were back in the day, you sure wouldn't know it from the non-stop rhetoric from the left. Which suggests that the point is not the individual issues or the glorious Promised Land, but the pursuit of power.

But I ask: what's the point? See, when Martin Luther King Jr. expresses his faith in the arc of history bending towards justice and when Barack Obama bends this faith towards the lefty effort to actually help the arc of history and do a bit of bending with the help of their activist mobs, there is a curious agenda behind it all.

The agenda is that the noble and selfless lefty activists already know what Heaven on Earth should look like, and are deputized and empowered by the arc of history to make it happen.

Of course this sort of thing is really religion. It is religion that attempts to divine the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Government and politics and even justice are, as they used to say, sublunary activities. That is pompous philosophical talk for the ordinary day-to-day existence on this Earth. Because, as I say, government is force; politics is division, and there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. But the left wants to make the grubby day-to-day work of government, of force, into an incandescent source of meaning, the royal road to justice.

Only there is no such thing as justice, especially when the other guys are in power. There is only injustice.

Yep. That is why the Founders, slaveholders and patriarchs all, thought it would be a good idea to put a bit of daylight between religion and government, church and state. They thought of government in hydraulic terms, thinking how to to limit its power and thus limit the damage it could do if it accidentally broke its bounds and flooded the world. And the basis of that sort of racist sexist thinking by the Founders is that it could be -- perish the thought -- that the last word on justice and salvation and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything has not yet been thought and said.

Especially by the chap that was born 200 years ago in Trier, in the Rhineland-Palatinate hard by the Hunsrück where the German TV series Heimat written and directed by Edgar Reitz was based.

And this is the key. If we moderns have not yet thought the last word on peace and justice, then how much force is justified in implementing our incomplete and human-flawed notions-of-the-day?

The assumption of a Gramsci, and his march through the institutions, is that we already know what needs to be done. It only remains to occupy the territory and implement the vision. The assumption of a Marcuse, in the implementation of his intolerant tolerance, is that we already know that we lefties are good and the fascists are bad, and therefore the only thing to do is to sicc the activists on the remaining fascists and mop them up. But didn't Nietzsche say that God is Dead and that means we are Beyond Good and Evil? Whaddya think of that, Herbie?

And then there is good ole Saul Alinsky. His whole work is tactics, making life miserable for the capitalists and the bourgeoisie by actually turning up outside their houses. Cool idea Saul! Make those capitalists squirm! (But don't you try that, and show up outside the house of some State Attorney General recently exposed for sexual harassment. Oh no. Activism is not for the likes of you.

But I tell you what. Suppose that after a century of so of this lefty activism the aforesaid bourgeoisie got fed up to the back teeth with assuming the good faith of your local lefty activist? Supposing we deplorables eventually get around to realizing that, hey, this is war, and we ain't gonna take it anymore?

See, I reckon that the common assumption of the lefties is that the bourgeoisie is too nice, too civilized to trade blow for blow. And up to now they have been right. That is, of course, because middle-class people are socialized to operate in the market economy where you trust and deal fairly with everyone, and because, as I say, the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power.

But I tell you. At some point it becomes time to say: enough. I don't know about you, but I have a feeling that that moment might come somewhere in between America electing its First Black President and its First Woman President.

And then what would be the point of the Gramscis and the Marcuses and the Alinskys if, in the end, they just pushed us too far?

Jordan B. Peterson's "Maps of Meaning:" It's a Start

I finished reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning a couple of weeks ago and have been wondering since how to write about it.

Let me tell you what I think Peterson is trying to do, consciously or unconsciously. He is trying to find a way out of our current western dilemma, the apparent stand-off between the stolid bourgeoisie, who I call the People of the Responsible Self, and the artists, writers, and activists of the educated elite, who I call the People of the Creative Self.

And the people that are going to have to change are the People of the Creative Self. Their current line is that they are called to save society from its racism, sexism, and homophobia through transgressive humiliation of the stolid bourgeoisie and government grants to do activism to help the marginalized and the oppressed.

Peterson's Maps of Meaning says that this sort of thing, this salvation of the poor and weak, is not done by regime-approved activism and grants. It is done in the old way, in the constant theme of myth and religion, through the tragic witness of the sacrificial Son and Hero, who redeems a society out of joint with his selflessness, his witness, and his courageous suffering on the border between Order and Chaos.

By the way, there is a YouTube video series of Maps of Meaning.

The constant theme of Maps of Meaning is the play of opposites (hello Hegel?): Order vs. Chaos; What Is vs. What Should Be; Security vs. Tyranny; Creation vs. Destruction; Base Matter vs. Gold; Known World vs. Unknown World.

For Peterson the humans that inhabit this world of opposites are not the rational actors of our modern understanding. In saying this he is merely continuing the narrative that began with the Romantic reaction against the Age of Reason. Instead of rational actors we are creatures of habit that live almost unconsciously until we experience something that shatters our Known World. Peterson illustrates this point with the story of a young executive that thinks his career is going great guns until one day HR calls him in and tells him he is fired because everyone else finds him impossible to deal with. Bam! The whole world of the young man is destroyed: all his assumptions, all his plans, his whole world view is shattered. Until he can figure out what went wrong and develop a better understanding of the world.

On Peterson's view this encounter with the Unknown must be the way of the world. It's the way that the whole of creation except for mankind must live, because our rational-actor model is predicated on the reality of our conscious mind which, we believe, is not available to the rest of creation. This is the meaning of the great instincts like Rage and Fear; they arise at the moment that the world surprises an animal, humans included, and these emotions, these "affects," force us to confront reality and do something about it.

The normal thing for an animal to do, after being surprised, is to freeze, and then to begin to explore the world around it to figure out what went wrong and what to do about it. That is what the young man mentioned above did. And that is what we all do.

But what we humans can also do is strategize about our situation, and develop a rational plan in addition to our hastily acquired knowledge about the world that just surprised us. This human ability is obviously a very big thing.

But whatever the rational plan may be, it must sit atop the more primitive and immediate reality of instinct and affect and, above all, Meaning. Peterson argues that the way to understand this is by studying the great hero narratives of myth and religion and their reality of great opposites: Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, Creation and Destruction. The world of opposites is a world of Meaning.

But Peterson does not present us with a 12 step method to save the world, as he does in his later book. For there are no slick answers on the border between Order and Chaos. There is no telling what may happen after the hero descends into the Underworld there to confront the Dragon of Chaos within his own breast. Nietzsche echoes this in his Beyond Good and Evil where he writes that suffering -- not good and evil or pleasure and pain -- is the real coin of the realm:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering -- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?

 So, in Peterson's story, it all comes down to two Hostile Brothers:

One of these "hostile brothers"  or "eternal sons of God" is the mythological hero. He faces the unknown with the presumption of benevolence -- with the (unprovable) attitude that confrontation with the unknown will bring renewal and redemption...

The other "son of God" is the eternal adversary. This "spirit of unbridled rationality," horrified by his limited apprehension of the conditions of existence, shrinks from contact with everything he does not understand... His weakness, in combination with his neurotic suffering, engenders resentment and hatred for existence itself.

But who of us knows whether inside of us dwells the hero or the adversary? The answer that Peterson proposes is that the hero is willing to sacrifice himself. I think that Peterson's famous refusal to obey Canada's C-16 law on non-binary sexual pronouns is his way of living out this heroic path. You have to be ready to sacrifice your job, your reputation, your life, in witnessing to the truth in the face of the mob and the rulers. In this event, his refusal made him into a cultural hero, and now he is traveling the world giving lectures and signing books.

Still, Maps of Meaning was a mild disappointment to me. It does not end in a rousing coda, but subsides almost in confusion. But it ends like this:

The human purpose, if such a thing can be considered, is to pursue meaning -- to extend the domain of light, of consciousness -- despite limitation. A meaningful event exists on the boundary between order and chaos. The pursuit of meaning exposes the individual to the unknown in gradual fashion, allowing him to develop strength and adaptive ability in proportion to the seriousness of his pursuit. Meaning is the subjective experience associated with that contact, in sufficient proportion. The great religious myths state that continued pursuit of meaning, adopted voluntarily and without self-deception, will lead the individual to discover his identity with God. This "revealed identity" will make him capable of withstanding the tragedy of life. Abandonment of meaning, by contrast, reduces man to his mortal weaknesses.

It hardly needs saying, I think, that this "meaning" cannot be found in the vile snake-pit of microaggressions, safe spaces, and accusations of hate speech from the left. Nor can be be found in the retreat to mere nationalism on the right.

Really, the current culture war is about warring notions of safety, either in the identity politics of race and gender or in the identity politics of nation. Of course, humans have always been tribal. The question is whether we can find a way emerge from our various safe spaces to transcend our current tribalisms and reinvent them at a higher, more heroic, level.

David Brooks' Conventional Wisdom

Assuming the conventional wisdom that Trump and the Republican Party represent an ageing minority party, David Brooks tries to imagine what the next emerging Democratic majority would be like.

It couldn't be a Clintonian or Obami moderation: the only game in town on the left is "Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren-style progressivism." So what would that look like? Well, it wouldn't be Marxist, because

My sense is these ideas have been rejected by most on the left. It’s become clear, to those on the fair-minded left, that global capitalism has produced the greatest reduction in poverty in human history.

No, Brooks is  confident that on the economy the left would be working on the margins, rewriting "rules to redistribute wealth... [and] raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour."

But then there is tribalism, and on the left that means "the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez," and even for the left that means more nationalism, such as Bernie Sanders's opposition to open immigration and the ever-present identity politics. So the left's governance is bound to circle back into us-against-them economic war of the oppressed against the oppressors with progressives calling the shots, only this time not on a class base but a race/gender basis.

Yeah. I'll agree that the next progressive government won't be nakedly economic Marxist. But it will still believe that politicians and experts can manipulate the levers of the economy to benefit the good guys and make the bad guys pay. And that was the whole point of Marx's ideas, that it was possible for politicians and experts to create a just and prosperous society. The difference today is that the smarter minds on the left understand that manipulating capitalism is much more effective than abolishing it. But they still think they are smarter than the average business owner.

The trouble is that while manipulating capitalism is not nearly as bad as abolishing it, the Law of Unintended Consequences still applies. Manipulating the economy, whether by interest rates to "stimulate" it or by price controls like minimum wages to help the low-wage worker, always ends up with negative results such as housing bubbles and immense difficulty for low-skilled people to get their first job.

We libertarians and conservatives like to rail at the folly of the left, but if you think about it, why the surprise? We humans are programmed to be tribesmen, alert to the possibility of the young men of the neighboring tribe plotting a dawn raid on us. The only thing to do is to strike first and kill their men and rape their women before they get to come over here and kill our men and rape our women.

But over the last 200 years in the Great Enrichment (or Miracle if you prefer) an utterly radical notion has started to take hold. The chaps in the next town are not an existential threat, but potential suppliers and customers. The only thing to determine is whether they can be trusted and the best way to find out is by trusting them, for one transaction only, and see what happens. The people that have taken up this challenge have wived and thrived; the people that do not get it and maintain their ancient suspicions have struggled.

And this is to be expected. Since time immemorial humans have survived by living in tribes of the kindred, trusting only their kin, and being on guard constantly. The idea that we should throw all that away, the cultural agenda that kept us alive for ages, and trust people from across the world, is very hard for people to understand and to surrender to. Every person migrating from the countryside to the city is a person of the old culture, and it takes a while, a generation at least, before the migrant to the city is ready to trust the trust culture.

That is why the new tribalisms, of nation, of class, of race, even of gender, have rushed in to fill the tribalism gap. When your average rich-kid activist tells the newly-arrived migrant not to trust anyone not of his ethnic origin, and to take up arms against the oppressor, he is mining an ancient vein.

But did you know that there were other tribalisms, of a noble and beneficial kind, that were coming along nicely in the 19th century before the left and the welfare state came along and strangled them in their cradles? I am talking about the fraternal associations, the fanciful brotherhoods of Elks and Eagles, of Masons that never chipped a rock and Oddfellows that weren't odd at all, that were mutual-aid organizations devoted to helping brothers and widows in their need? Sounds like a really cool idea. So cool that the racists got in on the action and formed the KKK after the Civil War to beat up on whites that might be a little soft on the freedmen.

Yeah, really. Why not emulate the KKK and create racist associations like Black Lives Matter and La Raza, and sexist associations like the NOW and Human Rights Campaign to beat up on the Other? Of course, like the KKK these neo-KKKs are not self-help mutual-aid organizations that ordinary people formed in the 19th century but simple political shells for rich kids to practice left-wing activism and tribalism.

Yeah, the left is a curious phenomenon, but hardly surprising. It cannot be true that the lion will lie down with the lamb, because capitalism rewards anyone that is eager to serve their fellow human with useful work. The world must be like the olden times, where every tribe must be on its toes, ready to repel the enemy next door. And people must be organized into neo-tribes to fight against the modern perils of the One Percent, the patriachy, the greedy bankers, the racist sexist homophobes, and worst of all, the xenophobes and Islamophobes.

So  the challenge for you and me is that, given that we humans are still tribal people that instinctively band together against an existential peril, what should that peril be? We have tried the Nazis, the Russkies, the ozone layer, the climate threat, the polar bear extinction, and the ever-present racist sexist homophobes. But we really need an existential threat around which to rally.

No doubt, pace David Brooks, the next lefty administration in the US will launch itself on new follies, replacements for the follies of affirmative action, sub-prime lending, lifetime employment for union workers, bike lanes, wind farms, and all the other failed follies of the last century. What else is new?

But we free spirits need to think about how to invent a neo-tribalism that would unite all humans against some common peril that doesn't require some human Other to defeat. It can't be that hard.