Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt.2

Yesterday we listed four instances of the cruel domination of leftist hegemony in Socialism, in Big Government, the War on Middle-Class Culture, and the War on Religion. But how much can you get through in a single blog post? So let us continue with:

Education. The notion of child education -- extending now into young adulthood -- is so universally accepted and celebrated that you wonder what humans did before universal childhood education paid for by taxes. Clearly, the whole point of education is for adults to get a hold of children's minds. That is what is behind the alleged Jesuit claim: "Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."

Charles Dickens famously represented the schools of his age as vile prisons of mental torture and physical abuse, for which the solution was... what, exactly?

The father of the "common school" in the United States, Horace Mann, predicted in the 1830s that the government school would reduce crime by 90 percent.

Well, we know how that worked out. In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida we discovered that, in order to reduce crime statistics, police and education bureaucrats determined, as recommended by the Obama administration, not to put criminal-suspect children into the criminal justice system. And then one day a kid shot up the school. Way to go, bureaucrats!

What we have, in modern government education, is the elite running a system to educate children according to their model of how children should be educated. But there is not the least effort to discover how the parents of the children want their children educated, least of all poor parents.

Or even a double-blind study to compare different models of education with outcomes by race, class, and gender.

So let me ask you: what do poor and minority parents want for their children? Frankly, I haven't a clue, except that I've heard tell that many charter schools are oversubscribed, and that many minority parents like the high-discipline KIPP academies.

Look, this is not surprising. The ruling class thinks of education from inside its liberal bubble as a preparation for a creative and well-connected life, culminating in college and a master's degree and entry into government-financed education and activism. Anything else is not that interesting to the rulers.

Plus, of course, since education is a government monopoly, it is almost impossible to change it. To implement an education system that would respond to changing times and to parents you would need a fee-paying market-based education system. But any idea like that terrifies people.

My model for education would be mothers in the neighborhood getting together to teach their kids the basics and an end to child labor laws. Yep, why not get Junior running  spreadsheets at age 7? However, I would draw the line at allowing children to operate power equipment. Some fun things must be reserved for adults. For the poor? Billionaire-financed KIPP academies. Most kids would quit school at 12 or 13 and become interns and apprentices. Anyone wanting to go to college would have to crawl over broken glass to get there. And no student debt, because that just encourages colleges to jack up fees and hire administrators.

That is the only way to end the injustice of liberal-dominated education.

Welfare. The current welfare system is a pension scheme to reward supporters of the government; both the actual welfare clients and the bureaucrats and vendors that benefit from the system. That is all.

Otherwise we would have to come to the uncomfortable notion that the whole idea of government welfare is to break up the families of the poor, make sure that the poor never rise up into the working class and get a job. And certainly never rise to compete with the middle class for jobs, housing, and good schools in the tonier suburbs.

In the good old days, welfare was run by charities and by mutual-aid associations. There was a strong notion that you only helped people that helped themselves. The charities had a ABCDEFG system. A is for Affliation: who is responsible for this person? EFG is Employment, Freedom, God.

Really, what else would you expect? Government is an armed minority, using taxes to reward its supporters. What does government care of decency, responsibility, self-respect? As long as the punters are voting for our guy the system is working. That's how a politician thinks.

But here is the real injustice. Imagine what happens to the welfare recipient in a place like Venezuela, presently going down the tubes. What is life like for the welfare classes in Venezuela right now? For some reason I read nothing in the media about that. The fact is that if you repose upon your government benefices you are remarkably ill-prepared for life when the government runs out of money. And it is when the government runs out of money, dear lefties, that people turn to the Man on the White Horse, the evil fascist.

Government pensions. Half a century ago, Peter Drucker (I think) observed that defined benefit pensions (that define the income from a pension) could not work because it is impossible to predict 30 years in advance how much an employee should pay in order to enjoy a defined pension at age 65. Anyone that organizes a defined-benefit pension is allocating the risk of providing the future pension to somebody in the future. For instance just this week it was announced that in Seattle, the city employee pension funds made a series of mistakes in investing their funds. So who takes the loss? The city employees? The managers of the pension funds? The insurance companies providing liability insurance to the pension fund managers? The taxpayers?

In fact, while corporations have abandoned the defined-benefit pension plan for "defined-contribution" plans in which the employer just puts funds into an employee pension account the government is still going strong with the defined-benefit plan, all the way from Social Security to the notorious California government employee pension fund, CalPERS, that is likely to cause the State of California to go bankrupt. Actually the defined-benefit pension plan is the perfect fit for politics because it offers glorious vistas of wealth -- way off in the future when other people will have to deal with the fallout.

Obviously defined-benefit pension plans are a monstrous injustice, what I call "generational injustice." They promise a wonderful cornucopia for people now, but require somebody in the future to cough up real cash in order to make good on the promises.

OK, that's enough for now. More in the future.

The Many Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

This is all in accordance with my doctrine that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

I mean merely this. If you are railing about justice, you are really complaining about the real or perceived injustice that you experience at the hands of the ruling class. But suppose that, as a result of your activism and peaceful protests that you actually acquire political power. I guarantee you that many people will experience your beneficial legislation to bend the arc of history towards justice as the very opposite, as injustice, straight up.

Now our liberal friends have been telling themselves for over a century that they are an insurgent movement from below that is nobly and sacrificially bending the arc of history towards justice by the use of political power, reversing the injustices of the ages.

I believe the opposite is true. I believe that the progressive movement, the left, has been a top-down tyranny, using the excuse of injustice to impose an unjust order upon the people of the western world, to replace the partial tyranny of feudalism and the apparent tyranny of industrialism with a quasi-military mobilization of society into an administrative hierarchy that is tyrannous, totalitarian, oppressive, exploitative, and ultimately ruinous.

The idea has been that the industrial era has introduced new and frightening monstrosities upon a hapless people, that the left are the chosen ones to fight these monsters and protect us all from their evil spawn. And the means appropriate is politics and government and administrative system.

Unfortunately, as I insist, government is force; politics is the art of unifying "Us" to fight against the dangerous "Them"; and system, administrative system, is domination. So you would expect that no good would come of the left's efforts.

Socialism, the ownership of the means of production and distribution in common. This notion is a nostalgic dream to return humans to the alleged community of the tribe, where nothing is owned and everything is shared. And indeed you can see the survival advantage of sharing food in the hunter-gatherer band. But in today's world of cities far from the production of food, socialism does not work because there is no survival advantage in sharing food with the neighbors. And there is the little problem that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. So what? Well, the purpose of prices is to tell people what to do next, in other words, change their behavior in accordance with the scarcity of goods and services. That is the point of the market economy: every moment people are adapting their contributions to the economy based upon their experience of prices. And the point of government is to prevent change, particularly the kind of change introduced at the point of a spear by rapers and pillagers. The problem with socialism is that when prices and individual ownership are forbidden then there is no way to adjust production in response to developing problems; the socialist managers at the top of the administrative hierarchy are not going to see developing problems until they have become disasters. So socialism at the scale of the nation state is not a survival advantage but a road to ruin. Hello Venezuela. But the big problem with socialism is that it can only operate by force. The natural thing for humans to do is to barter and trade, and then produce a little on the side, and then improve the product and then borrow from a neighbor and then expand production and then start selling to folks in the next village. All this is forbidden because it trespasses on the power of the government's socialist managers. And that is unjust.

The Neo-Slavery of Big Government. All across the west, governments spend about 30 to 50 percent of GDP. This means that about half of the economy is directed not by market forces but by government force. This is unjust, for it forces every individual to fund his master's political project, which is to tax the people to reward his supporters. In effect, people are forced to support a vast political project as the price of earning a living. But it gets worse. It is clear that every government is eager to invent new spending to reward new supporters, but every government quails before the prospect of ever reducing spending. Indeed the only way that government tend to reduce spending is through the trickery of inflation and devaluation of the currency. If slavery is unjust, then Big Government is unjust.

The War on Middle-Class Culture. It seems likely that the bourgeois culture, of companionate marriage, of the nuclear family with married parents living with their children, of distance from the extended family, is a recent phenomenon. It is founded on the notion of individual responsibility and it is hard, because young men move out from under their father's domination (and experience), and young women are free of the influence of their mother-in-law. It means, to a great extent, that young people starting out a family are on their own. It is obviously harder to make a success of this when government is getting you into debt for college and sequestering up to 50 percent of your income. More than that it is clear that the sexual revolution, that stigmatizes female modesty, and abortion, that empowers male sexual appetite, and non-binary genders, that makes a zoo out of sexuality, all combine to confuse and demoralize ordinary middle-class people. That is the whole idea of war, to confuse and disorient the adversary.

You can read that this war on the middle class is a Jewish conspiracy, or the natural program of the ruling class to make the people dependent. But I rather prefer the verdict of my Three Peoples theory. Our ruling class, the People of the Creative Self, believe in creativity à outrance. That's French for creativity to the max. So you get existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir advertising a life of creativity in everything, including sexuality. They seem to believe in complete personal reinvention without any credit for tradition or the way it used to be. The only problem is that if you try that you will probably ruin your life as, arguably, Sartre and Beauvoir ruined theirs. Indeed, the whole story of the universe is that it does not wipe the slate clean with every generation, but it builds upon itself. It may break out in a new direction, but almost always it will build on previous knowledge (encoded in DNA) and practice (encoded in culture). Anyway, it is cruel and unjust to make war upon a people's culture, whether the culture is hunter-gatherer or 20th century bourgeois.

The War on Religion. The reason that "God is Dead" is that the People of the Creative Self do not believe in the God of the People of the Responsible Self. They believe instead in... well I would say that the People of the Creative Self have not yet really found a new God, beyond the faith in their own creativity. But they know that the God of Christianity is sick and wrong. And bigoted, and superstitious, and racist and sexist and homophobic. So it must be driven out of the public square. And that is unjust. As I develop in my book The Road to the Middle Class, the Axial Age religions are an irreducible part of the journey from rural idiocy to urban competence. The point is made clearly by a minister from back in the days of the Great Awakening in the 1700s:

When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the means appointed was a damning sin.

See what I mean? When people make the journey from countryside to cityscape they discover that they need a new religion.  And the religion they seem to choose is the local derivative of the Axial Age religions, with creator Gods that set  up an understandable world book-ended by divine law.

So when liberals make war on Christianity they are building roadblocks and barricades on the Road to the Middle Class. And that is unjust. But that is the way of the world. We humans are pretty good at figuring out what we want and need. But we are a lot less competent at figuring out what other people want and need. And that is the beginning of injustice.

OK. This is End of Part One. More to come.

So-called "Protest" Is Really War

You gotta hand it to our lefty friends: they are really good at the meme war. What used to be called a rioting mob is now called a "peaceful protest" by "activists."

It all sounds so harmless, so innocent, so earnest. Only it isn't. It is vile.

It is telling a lie, that the left is a coalition of earnest activists doing activism to fight injustice and oppression. No it isn't. Instead it is an army of rich kids posturing against the benign modern bourgeois culture. It is a culture of conceit that is working to replace the benign and peaceable bourgeois culture -- a culture founded on the notion that the way to get on in the world is by offering services to the world, and then waiting for the world to put a price on it -- with a culture of force and domination and hegemony.

The story of of the unparalleled economic and political freedom and prosperity of the last 200 years is not good enough for the lefty protesters. No, the benign and kindly world of service and remuneration is not for them. For them the only answer is Justice Now! Or we will tear the place down.

Hey, I get it. Turbulent youth, especially turbulent rich youth, has always wanted to start a rumble. It's in the genes.

Now I like to say that, back in 1848 when young rich-kids Marx and Engels could see Germans dying from the potato famine -- oh yes, it wasn't just an Irish potato famine, it was Europe-wide -- they wanted to do something about it.

Yeah! Hey kids! We gotta chuck those oppressive regimes outta here. And by the way, according to the classical economists, it could have been that the blossoms of the textile and steam revolutions could soon wither. So the Marxist moment was not completely crazy as it now seems with the verdict of history.

Only the blossoms didn't wither. They ripened into the richest fruit in the whole of human history. The economic revolutions continued, and the starving potato-eaters got jobs. And economic growth continued. And the workers got the vote. And more. By the middle of the 20th century an average worker could buy a motor car -- something utterly unavailable to the most powerful emperors in history -- for about five to seven months wages. And what is more, he could pile the whole family into the Chevrolet and take the family on vacation from Chicago to Los Angeles on good old Route 66. You try that, Hammurabi! Yeah. King Tut had five chariots with him in his tomb. So what, pal. Could you drive from the Valley of the Kings to Lake Victoria for a two-week vacation? I thought not.

But all the time, for the last 200 years, the lefty protesters were insisting that this wasn't the best of times, but the worst of times.

Here is the basic fact of our times. For lefties it is all about power: political power, activist power, protest power, community organizer power, administrative power. Power, power, power.

But the bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class, is not that interested in power. And this has been pretty obvious to anyone with an open mind since the middle class gave the working class the vote. And women. And minorities. And let government wreck the good old Gold Standard so politicians could give goodies to the working class. And destroy the old bourgeois sexual rules so that rich kids could kick back a little.

Really, what was the middle class thinking? Why give an inch to the lefty rich kids?

Why? Because in the culture of the middle class, with its experience of the market economy, power is not that important. The important thing is to track the market, to do things that other people want to pay money for. Oh, and you can never go to sleep on the job, pal. No true bourgeois believes that he or she has a right to a living from the rest of society. The idea is that you work and save, following the hints and the nudges of the price system. And if you do that for a lifetime, then you get to retire in modest independence. To make this work you do not need political power. You just need to be trustworthy and to interact with other trustworthy people. That is because interactions based on trust are way cheaper than transactions based on mistrust. They are, in other words, immensely profitable.

What I am saying is that the whole left-wing activist culture is a lie. If there is anything that has been established over the last century or so it is that if you have a problem, and you talk to the middle class nicely, they will try to help you.

So you do not need protests, peaceful or mostly peaceful. You just need to get into the middle-class's trust network and act trustworthy. That is all.

Of course, if you are an immigrant from a non-trust culture then you have to start at the bottom and change your non-trust culture and learn the new trust culture, and that is very hard. But people from all over the world have succeeded at this in America: Puritans from eastern England, Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, and now east and south Asians. African Americans, not so much.

Let us review a few news items to make the left's culture of lies and conceit clear.

First, the Gaza "protests." Sorry chum. Your "Great Return March" is not a peaceful protest, it is an act of war. And I get it. You Palestinians, time after time, have made really bad choices. You coulda been part of Israel, but you followed leaders that wanted war against Israel. Hey, no problem. But war is war, not peaceful protest. If you go to war then you are pledging your whole population in the war against the enemy. You could have been honest about that. But you weren't. So now you are playing lefty activism protest theater and pretending that the children you put in harm's way as a deliberate tactic are helpless victims of eevil Israeli hegemony.

Second, the sweetie-pie special snowflake Letitia Chai that got her feelings hurt at Cornell when she showed up to prep her senior thesis wearing cutoffs. Hey, I get it. When you show up to prep your senior thesis and the professor reminds you not to show up in cutoffs for the real thing and you have passed a couple Critical Theory classes you convert your embarrassment at making a social faux-pas into political rage! Hey why not, snowflake! Why not turn your embarrassment into a peaceful protest? Why not strip off your cutoffs and blouse and return wearing your underwear. Boy oh boy! What a way to show that nobody ain't gonna white privilege you, no ma'am!

By the way, Miss Chai, I can't believe that you culturally appropriate Levis, the authentic clothes of American 19th century workers in a your silly superficial "cutoffs," you nasty superficial rich kid you. How dare you, you willing tool of the leftist cabal.

To coin a phrase,

It is high time that the middle class should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of "oppression," of "exploitation," of "privilege," and of "peaceful protest" with the utter scorn and rejection it deserves.

Whaddya think, sports fans?

Tom Wolfe: Pricker of Liberal Balloons

I don't know if you have noticed, but our liberal friends have a rather high opinion of themselves, their ideas, and the ideopolises where they live in segregated conceit.

But they met their match in Tom Wolfe, writer and journalist, that died May 14, 2018 at 88. Here are the obits, and a telling 1988 Wolfe piece about how Trump Reagan connected with the white working class.

In another proof of God's existence, it was Tom Wolfe that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the liberal self-image was all lies and conceit.

Naturally, he did it with humor. I was watching a Scott Adams instructional video on humor, and he advertises the 2 of 6 rule: any joke must have two out of the six in: mean, clever, cute, bizarre, recognizable, naughty.

My takeaway from Adams' notion is to simplify even more. Humor is a way for humans to say nasty things without starting a riot. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

And a lot of what Tom Wolfe wrote was mean. It was mean of him to make fun of Ken Kesey and the 60s hippies. It was mean of him to make fun of Leonard Bernstein doing a Black Panthers fundraiser in his Manhattan apartment. It was mean to make fun of modern art and modern architecture. And the usual suspects didn't appreciate it.

But that's the point. When you decide to show up the fools and the knaves, the best way, the human way, is to combine the meanness with clever, cute, bizarre, recognizable, or naughty.

OK, I loved The Right Stuff about the astronauts, and The Bonfire of the Vanities about Wall Street bond boys.

But I am Charlotte Simmons really hit me between the eyes, as it evokes of the vileness of the post-sexual revolution college "hookup" culture. The New York Times obituary damns Charlotte Simmons with faint praise.

“I Am Charlotte Simmons” (2004), is about a naïve freshman’s disillusioning experiences at a liberal arts college fueled by sex and alcohol. Many critics found the picture unconvincing and out of touch.

Yeah, I'll bet. Because Wolfe exactly and harrowingly wrote how the hookup culture devastates young women that can't help but be sucked into its maelstrom. Liberals would rather not talk about that, and instead waffle on about "campus rape culture" and #MeToo while failing to confront the basic fact that the sexual revolution has hit, and continues to hit, women between the eyes.

Years ago I remember Dennis Prager having a bunch of college girls on his show and talking about life, the universe and everything. What did they want? They wanted to be romanced.

Gosh. Who knew? Obviously not the critics that found Charlotte Simmons unconvincing and out of touch.

In fact, Charlotte Simmons rather put me off Tom Wolfe; the medicine was too strong. So I have not read A Man in Full although it is sitting on the shelf. Nor have I read Back to Blood.

But Tom Wolfe's passing at the good old age of 88 reminds me to get with the program. HalfPrice Books, here I come.

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.