Blame Activism Culture for "Red Hen" Expulsion

Everyone to the right of left-wing lunacy is talking about the expulsion of Trump Press Secretary Sarah Sanders from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.

And the first thing that comes up are the gay wedding-cake incidents, where gays deliberately targeted Christian bakeries to force them to make cakes for their weddings.

The good old Double Standard.

But you may be asking: Why? Why do liberals do this?

And my answer is: the Activism Culture, about which I write from time to time.

There are two events in my life that have crystallized the left-wing activism culture for me. The first was when a liberal friend told me that she had always wanted to get into activism. Wat? I thought. Why would a nice liberal woman with conventional liberal ideas think that? The second was when I read in The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi that after the workers got the vote in England they stopped marching. Why? Because now they were represented in the corridors of power.

Do you see the point here? It is that riot and revolution are the necessary tactics of those who are outside the system. In the mid-19th century, when Marx and Engels issued their Manifesto the workers, now coming into the cities for the first time, were not represented. This was a time of revolutions, marches, and disturbance. But 50 years later, the workers had the vote and the kind of legislation they wanted, a neo-feudal system of rigidly defined labor union rights, free education, and government-run administrative pensions and insurance had been legislated.

When in World War I the workers of Germany, and France, and Britain all fought for their countries, a basic faith of the activism left was exploded: the workers saw themselves as citizens first and workers second.

But leftism was and is a belief system on the holy quest of activism, activism by well-born activists in behalf of the disfranchised who are not represented by the political system. It is, of course, a battle of good against evil, and it makes perfect sense for a political class that has lost its Christian faith and the Christian enactment of the battle of good versus evil in every human heart.

The other thing to understand is this. The whole point of politics is to redirect the battle for justice from the streets and civil war to the election hustings. The point is that politicians, instead of leading their supporters in pitched battles on the street, now conduct their battles in Parliament, with the majority getting the right to tax the nation to deliver benefits to their supporters, instead of the military victors getting to loot and plunder the losers, as in olden times.

Thus I understand leftism and the activism culture as a constant search for new helpless victims outside the system for whom street action is the only option. And this was the genius of the Frankfurt School thinkers. It was they in the 1920s that realized that, with the working class now integrated into the political system, new clients for the well-born activist were needed, and this meant women and minorities.

Of course, by 1920 and the 19th Amendment the US already had universal franchise for men and women, and even minorities. But not exactly in the South. So the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s universalized the elimination of the Jim Crow system in the US South as a glorious liberation for all women and minorities.

But once women and minorities were brought into the system, what then? Well, the well-born activists had to find people who were still outside the system. By the 21st century, in the United States, this boiled down to Muslims and illegal immigrants.

So if you wonder why the left has its knickers in a twist over the unintended consequences of immigration law, in which the children of people applying for political asylum in the US become a custodial issue, understand that for them the whole point of life, the universe, and everything is to do activism for some disfranchised group outside the system. If ever there was no longer some group outside the system then life would lose its meaning for the activist believer.

Now, in my view the activism culture is problematic at several levels.

First, the basis of human life is no longer about access to a patch of food-growing land. When survival is dependent on your tribe's access to food-growing land then the bottom line is the military defense of that patch of land. In hunter-gather societies the entire male adult population is engaged in defense of the patch of land. But in feudal  agricultural societies the defense of territory tended to devolve upon "marcher lords" on the "marches" between one feudal regime and another. If you want to know what a marcher lord looks like, think Shakespeare's Harry Percy, son of the Duke of Northumberland. If you look at a map of Britain you will discover that Northumberland butts right up onto the border between England and Scotland. Today, we call the people that used to live in those borderlands "rednecks." They have a reputation for being quarrelsome and aggressive. But today human life is about finding a way to contribute to the economy by exchanging your skills and your labor for wages; or exchanging your savings for dividends and interest; or starting a new business to make something completely new. And this new world does not seem to need so many marcher lords and other high-status folk to make us safe.

Second, it seems that the market and its prices do a pretty good job of regulating the economy. In other words, it is not usually necessary for political power to step in and decide what to do. Indeed, the record of the last 150 years is that politicians and activists are clueless about the needs of the economy, and usually do more harm and good in their interventions. In other words, the price system tells people what to do and, more important, what not to do. When the price system is telling you what not to do and you fail to pay attention, it is usually very annoying and expensive. People get really angry when the market tells them they have made a mistake, and they often resort to force to register their objection. Businessmen get the government to protect them from competition with tariffs and licensing and regulations; workers go out on strike to object to "give-backs."

Thirdly, given the reduced need to defend the patch of land and the evident self-regulating nature of the market economy, there is now a much-reduced need for political and military power. We humans have barely begun to address this fact. In fact I would argue that in general, political and military power are today both highly damaging, because they are systems of rigidity; their whole rationale is to stop change. And yet the point of the market economy is that its prices are signalling for change every day, and everyone should be responding to the price signals of the economy, every day. Obviously this is a problem. All down the ages, political and military chiefs have been indispensable and have dominated society, and they have dominated it for a reason, because fixed political relationships and defense of the border were the absolute requirements of any society that hoped to survive. But now everything has changed, and what will the robin do now, poor thing.

Let me reiterate: all down the ages, the one thing was to have a patch of food-growing land for your tribe and to successfully defend it. Now, the one thing is to have a skill that can be exchanged in the global economy for money. This is, to coin a phrase, a Great Transformation. To expect that everyone would change in a moment to adapt to the new system is, to say the least, unrealistic.

And so the lefty reactionaries are running riot, utterly unable and unwilling to accept that their old faith and its superstitions are being thrown onto the dust-heap of history.

They also find it impossible to understand how their activism culture and its peaceful protests visit monstrous injustices upon Americans less well educated and less well connected than themselves.

So of course the well-born owner of the Red Hen thinks it right and proper to expel President Trump's press secretary from her restaurant, and then go across the street and "peacefully protest" when the Sander party went to eat at another restaurant. Activism and peaceful protest are her religion.

But, as they say, those that won't listen and learn will eventually learn "the hard way."

Things That Liberals Are Getting Wrong

In his Anatomy of Revolution Crane Brinton argues that the Reign of Terror episode in many revolutions arises because the revolution is failing.

Of course, this is not surprising. Revolutions tend to have an over-optimistic view of the wonders that will ensue when the revolution succeeds. It is terribly disappointing when the millennium fails to show up on cue. So it must be the evil people that are not down with the revolutionaries! À la lanterne, as my mother used to say. In jest.

The current cultural and political situation in the West is that much of the cultural and political agenda of the Left is failing.

1. The Administrative State. The problem with all government programs is that it is almost impossible to reform them. That's because almost all government programs involve a subsidy of some behavior. And once a subsidy is in place, humans will fight to preserve that free stuff.  Plus, all government/administrative programs violate the principle of Ludwig von Mises, that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices.
2. Attack on Bourgeois Culture. You can rail against the patriarchy, against heteronormality, against female modesty, against sex roles, against sexual freedom all you like. But the bourgeois culture of the nuclear family, children after marriage, women mothering their children, men with careers, has a lot going for it, not least that it is a pretty good blueprint for wiving and thriving in the city. But the worst thing is to make it hard for the immigrants to the city to learn the bourgeois code. Put it this way: bourgeois means burgher or city person. So bourgeois culture means city culture, the culture that grew up in cities over the centuries. You wanna  do well in the city? Learn the bourgeois code. When in Rome, etc.
3. Equality under the Law. No doubt non-white non-male non-hetero people suffer under some disabilities. But any political culture that excuses its supporters from the application of the law, as the left proposes as a principle in, e.g., immigration, diversity and inclusion, sex on campus, the homeless, political protest, is experienced by its victims as injustice, straight up. The point of equality under the law is to rectify the problem that political partisans tend to excuse the excesses of their side, and that infuriates the opposition. So the law must apply equally to prince and pauper, otherwise there is no reason to obey the law.
4. Conceding Elections. I remember reading Time, or maybe Newsweek, a decade or so ago in the month after a presidential election, and I think the Republican won. What struck me was that the liberal reporters of that era were writing stories about the peaceful transfer of power and what a wonderful thing that was. Well, the last two change elections where Republicans won were not conceded by the losers and their bribed apologists in the media, not the 2000 election, when Al Gore failed to concede and, even after the Supreme Court ruled for Bush, did not concede gracefully. Then there is Hillary Clinton in 2016, who started the whole post-election "we wus robbed" meme. Sorry, libs and Dems and deep staters. If you do one thing, and one thing only, you concede the election when you lose, and wish the winner well, and say "we are all Americans because we come back together after the divisions of the election campaign." This is important, because the whole point of the peaceful transfer of power, and the alternation of power between the major parties is that it removes the excuse for civil war. With the conceding of elections and the peaceful transfer of power you can say "wait until next time" and actually believe that there will be a next time. So you don't need to prepare for civil war, as must be the case in Venezuela right now.

It is said that President Obama said to Ben Rhodes shortly after the 2016 election:

“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe...”

"Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

This demonstrates the fundamental contradiction at the center of the liberal and the lefty world view. First of all, these people think they are the avant-garde leading humans to a glorious future. Second, they do not understand that the path they have chosen is in fact a neo-tribalism. In other words, they actually believe that their identity politics, that defines and organizes everyone by their tribe, is leading us to a future without identity and tribe! And it demonstrates a fundamental self-ignorance. Do you not understand, President Obama, that your affirmative action, followed by diversity and inclusion, is experienced by people like me as racism, straight up? No, you don't. Because at the center of your belief system is that you and yours are the educated, evolved ones, and other people are the racist sexist homophobes, period.

See, Mr. Obama, people like me never doubted that America was ready for its First Black President. I was shocked when a liberal friend said to me in December 2016: isn't it wonderful we elected the first black president! I thought, but did not say: Racism! If anything Obama's election was the gate to liberation from the vile accusation of racism, to be able to say: OK, we elected a black president; now let us stop the divisive and destructive identity politics that has poisoned the culture for the last 50 years. But no. What we learned, after you got elected, was that this was just the beginning. Echoing George Wallace, you and your chaps were saying: Diversity today, diversity tomorrow, diversity forever.

Oh, and by the way, it's one thing for a vile bigoted Christian baker to decline a custom commission to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but quite another for a highly evolved cousin of Meryl Streep to decline service to the woman press secretary of President Trump. How does that work, Mr. President?

The one saving truth of left-wing politics is that the recent immigrant to the city is not yet ready for full immersion in bourgeois culture and it is unjust to chuck them in at the deep end. So it makes sense to provide neo-feudal institutions like the labor union and government insurance to provide safe spaces for people not yet ready to take the bourgeois oath of surrender to the market.

The trouble is that the understandable temporary notion of providing a refuge from the bourgeois responsibility culture has become a war against the bourgeois culture, and the educated, evolved ruling class everywhere teaches children and adults to resist it.

This war on the middle class culture of responsibility is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.

At Jordan Peterson's Road Show

Last night, June 21, 2018, I was to Jordan B. Peterson's road show, publicizing his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos. Every seat at Seattle's Moore Theater was taken.

Of course, it's ridiculous to suppose that you will learn anything from such an event. Read the book, kid.

On the other hand, in the format of a 70 minute monologue, an author is bound to try and reduce his ideas to their foundation. And Peterson was clearly focused on that, the fundamental point he is trying to make, since he was scheduled to debate on the morrow with atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith.

Peterson's fundamental point is that we see facts through a lens or a matrix of value. In other words, if you are a Thomas Gradgrind from Dickens' Hard Times and you say you believe in "facts, facts, facts," you are deceiving yourself. Whatever you think, you start out in the morning with a Theory of Everything, a story about what the world means, what your life means, and you look at facts in the light of the meaning you make of the world.

An example of this would be the media frenzy about The Children in last week. From the point of view of facts, facts, facts, what does it matter that children of illegal aliens are being separated from their parents at the border of the United States? What do we care?

But we do care. The fact is that we humans do not look upon children as facts. We see them through the filter of our beliefs about children. In other words: first comes the value, the story about children, then comes the fact.

It is Jordan Peterson's contention that religion issues from this "fact" about human life. If we humans all view life through the lens of our values then the values we hold and express are the most important thing in the world. You may say that religion is the story about value by humans, the social animals.

If you think about it, it must be so. It is true that we moderns have accumulated an astonishing trove of facts about the world. Only they are not facts; they are theories that have an astonishing ability to predict sense impressions. And what exactly are theories? I would say they are the way we make a connection between Kant's unobservable things-in-themselves and our sense impressions of those things-in-themselves.

But humans lived long before we had developed sophisticated theories about a solar-centric universe and curved space and quantum mechanics.

Whatever our human fund of knowledge at any point in time, we must live our lives with what we have. So the ancients had spirits in trees, the Elizabethans had nine circles of Heaven and nine circles of Hell. And we have... Yes, what do we have?

Enter my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you are a Person of the Subordinate Self your religion is the religion of Homer's Iliad. The gods decide everything, just like your local lord decides everything. There is really no occasion for agency, because you are not an agent; you do not have the right or the power to decide anything about yourself. Agency belongs to your lord.

Enter the People of the Responsible Self and the Axial Age religions from Zoroastrianism to Hinduism, to Judaism to Christianity to Islam. The whole point of these religions was expressed by a minister during the Great Awakening in the 18th century.

“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.”

Notice how, for our lefty friends, it is a damning sin to expect agency from their catalog of victims.

Here's another quote, from Robert Bellah:

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.

In my Three Peoples lingo, these Axial Age religions address the existential issues that people experience when they are moving from being People of the Subordinate Self to becoming People of the Responsible Self. They construct a story, a matrix of values, to make sense of life as you leave behind your subordinate life and put on the armor of responsibility.

But what we are interested in is the transition, the existential issues, that people face when they are moving from being People of the Responsible Self to People of the Creative Self. Because if the Axial Age religions arose to respond to the existential issues of people at the Subordinate-Responsible boundary then it stands to reason that there must be religions that respond to people at the Responsible-Creative boundary.

It is my contention that everything from Romanticism to the Young Hegelians, to Marx, to the Fabian Society to feminism to art for art's sake to the activism culture to the startup culture in business to the recent explosion in getting creative about sex are all attempts to navigate the Responsible-Creative transition, to ask the question: What does it mean to live a creative life?  Through what filter of values, with what story should I experience and understand the world?

And I believe that Jordan Peterson's books are another attempt to do that, to illuminate a path for navigation from the world of Responsibility to the world of Creativity.

Up to now, I would say, the most militant of these new religions has been the religion of leftism. It sees the facts of the case through a value filter of bending the arc of history towards justice through politics. If you want to make sense of your lefty friends that is it.

However, I believe that the left's sacralizing of politics is a monstrous error. You are never going to bend the arc of history towards justice using politics. That is because politics and government are not saving truths showing the way to the Promised Land, but necessary evils to keep the peace in this Fallen World. I symbolize this truth with my maxim "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

Peterson is proposing a different road to the Promised Land, through the agency of the sacrificial hero, an archetype that appears again and again in the history of humans and our religions. The sacrificial hero creatively explores on the boundary between order, the realm of the known, and chaos, the lawless world without the law. Yes, and the sacrificial hero usually sacrifices himself so that we might live.

In my view Jordan Peterson fully understands that he is a sacrificial hero. At his road show in Seattle on June 21 he said that the last two years have been terrifying, for he knows that a single wrong word could immolate him in some Twitter inferno and end his public life.

So what is Jordan Peterson saying? He is setting forth the parameters for a religion, a filter of value through which to view the world, that appropriates all the astonishing increase in understanding about the world in the last centuries and that provides meaning for a person trying to live a creative life, a creative life that does not bow to the false god of politics.

And so it is unsurprising that the audience at the sold-out Moore Theater on June 21 were... Well, the only thing for sure is that they were not liberals, or anything else from lefty world. They were not white working class, but many of them could be Trump voters. And I would say they were overwhelmingly 30-40ish.

I believe that Peterson is bringing to the Anglo-Saxon world the results of the German turn. I mean everything from Kant's dictum that we cannot know things-in-themselves and therefore no objective knowledge, Hegel's philosophy of contrast and opposites, naughty Nietzsche's they-are-all-liars effusions, to Jung's reconnection with ancient myth and the notion that our faith and our pride in our conscious mind is negated by the truth that we have almost no idea what is going on in our unconscious mind, that tumbling river of instincts and lost world of archetypes.

It's not a bad idea: construct a religion of lordly tolerance, allowing to the ancestors the dignity of knowing the truth by their own lights rather than stigmatizing their faith as superstition, while maintaining a radical openness to the future as a creative project, an exploration of the border between order and chaos.

What Legal Rights are You Willing to Give Your Political Opponents?

In my American Thinker piece this week I raised the issue of Double Standards. Poor little diddums Hillary Clinton was given every allowance in an FBI investigation of her illegal email server. Donald Trump was hunted down by FISA Court warrants and a Special Prosecutor.

And you will search among liberal commentators a long while before you see a liberal that writes that this is a problem.

So this week, after the release of the IG report, there are a lot of conservatives writing that unless the government observes some sort of equality under the law, for liberal princess as well as for deplorable pauper, we are heading for the cliff. The Zman:

It does not matter what form of government is in place, the rulers, for example, have to maintain public order. Being the tribal chief is useless if your people and lands are in chaos. For that matter, having a tribal chief is useless if it means living in chaos. Therefore, one of the primary duties of all rulers in all times and all places is to maintain public order by enforcing laws and local customs.

Then there is Laura Hollis writing about "The Real Message Behind the Inspector General's Report."

The risk here is not that Americans will become disillusioned if some rogue FBI or DOJ or IRS agents are penalized for being bad actors or partisan frauds; the risk is that Americans will become disillusioned when they aren’t. Once a critical mass of people no longer believes in the basic integrity of the legal system, the doors are opened to widespread corruption. Power, not decency, becomes the objective.
When that happens, you’ve lost the rule of law. And when you’ve lost the rule of law, you’ve lost America.

 I don't think that our liberal friends have a clue about this right now. That's because they have all been taught that "activism" is the meaning of life, the universe and everything. They are utterly clueless that for millions of people the current political correctness reign of terror and virtue means that any careless word could lose them their job, or worse.

And do you know? People really care about that.

It's fine for liberals to string Trumpists up on the lanterns because the Trumpist microaggressed a woman or minority hardest hit -- and no safe space had been provided -- or a little child is in tears. But what happens if it's a liberal? What would liberals say if that DOJ employee and member of the Democratic Socialists of America that joined the mob harassing Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson got fired? Hey! All she was doing was "peacefully protesting!" OK fine. So what do you call this political action? A mini-microaggression that doesn't rise to the level of genuine microaggression because the DOJ employee  in question is a woman? But wait! The target of the protest was a woman! What about her safe space?

I just think that liberals have no idea the deep waters they are getting into. And the solution is so simple. Merely read, learn, and inwardly digest the following maxim.

There is no such thing as justice. Only Injustice.

As I keep saying, we are in the middle of a rerun of the Sixties when lefties thought that they had died and gone to liberal heaven in the dawning of a new truly just world order.

Only the average working stiff in America hated it. Because the average working stiff just wanted a job, a car, a family, and a house.

And he and she still do.

Because, see above, the basic job of any ruler being to keep order. And that means a rough and ready policy to apply the law equally. Even equally-ish will usually do.

But our liberal friends believe in the saving grace of political power. Because if your objective is just then a few broken eggs don't amount to much in respect of the arc of history.

Nevertheless, liberals. Just what legal rights are you willing to concede to the evil racist sexist homophobe deplorables?

The world wants to know.

Dealing with Activism's Affect of the Week

So this week the "Affect of the Week" is the separation of migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border. And the mainstream media  unison chorus is all singing the same tune about the cruel Trump. Auschwitz! Nazis!

Will this be the issue that determines the midterms? Will it be a one-week wonder? Or is this just a cynical effort of the deep state to take the news off the IG report on the Clinton email "matter?"

I return as always to the century-old words of German sociologist Georg Simmel who observed that, with women coming into the public sphere, things were going to change.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

But what would that mean? I think it is pretty obvious. But let us get our facts straight.

First of all, the way the world works is by "affect." This, we might define as the eruption into "consciousness" of subconscious instincts. It is the way that mammals live, responding to danger and threat through the emotions of fear and anger. We notice that our domestic pets, particularly dogs, are clearly driven by this "affect." So it ain't just us humans.

However, humans also do a bang-up job of filling out our knowledge of the world with magnificent theories of everything. Right now we have fun theories about evolution and the Big Bang that take our rational knowledge and extend it "all the way down."

Just now I am reading a book The Elizabethan World Picture by E.M.W. Tillyard that I picked up at the HalfPrice Books warehouse sale. Yep, in that Elizabethan world there are nine spheres of heaven, populated by Forms, Seraphims, Angels, Archangels etc. And also, for balance, nine spheres of Hell, with Satan, Mammon and the like. But why not? The Elizabethans didn't have all our science to make sense of sun, moons, fixed stars and all. Newton hadn't shown up yet. To say nothing of Einstein and Heisenberg. So they made it up. Just like we make up the Big Bang by extending our theories to the limit and beyond. It's great fun on winter evenings.

Notice how the Elizabethans smuggled in Good and Evil into their picture of the world, what you might call, if you were the local deep-state Pooh Bah, merely "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." Without corroborative detail, what's the point of narrative?

Of course it is not just the priestly and philosophic class that spin pretty stories for our amusement with lots of "affect" thrown in for corroborative detail. Politicians and activists do it too.

Want to see a real master at that? Just watch President Trump's Down the Escalator speech of three years ago.

Want to know what the Parkland thing was all about? And now the Kids in Cages thing? It is liberal political activists ginning up events full of affect, complete with "orroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

When you want to grab men by the guts you need to stage an event showing existential danger that will prompt them to rush to get their weapons (or their boats in the case of the Cajun Navy).

But when you want to grab women by the guts you stage a show with crying children. It triggers the fundamental instinct of women, which is to keep their kids alive and care for them.

This is why I profoundly disagree with all conservatives and deplorables that write about how "we" are rational and "they" are emotional.

OK, we all have rational knowledge, science, systems of ethics, etc. But when we live moment to moment we are flying along as unconcerned as a seagull until something brings us up short and triggers an "affective" response.

What do you think President Trump is doing when he ventures forth on Twitter? He is trying to tug the affect of his deplorable supporters in the ordinary middle class. But Democrats are playing a different game. They are appealing to the women and minorities hardest hit, of which we've heard tell.

When you hear your liberal woman friend saying that she had always wanted to "get into activism" you are touching the edge of the culture that produces the Kids in Cages affective moments. These nice young urban hipsters know that you don't win in politics by a rational discussion of the issues. You win by winning the game of affect, and that game requires a narrative with heart-tugging affect.

Conservatives and Republicans, up to now, were not very good at this. Because we think of politics as a necessary evil. Here is a chap attacking Jordan Peterson for saying that "thinking is overrated." Says Peterson:

When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself…it’s noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.

And that, says the critic, is all wrong.

But Peterson is right. It is indeed noticing that rules the world. You are on a walk in the woods and you want your wife to see a bird sitting in a tree. She won't see anything until the bird moves. It is the bird's movement that allows her to notice it. That is how the world works. Nothing exists for us until it moves. Then we notice it, and then our affect chimes in to prompt us to react to it.

Nobody paid a blind bit of attention to Kids in Cages until the activists brought it up on the TV news. Then everyone "noticed."

Of course, the question for us deplorables is whether the politics of "Affect of the Week" is a winning strategy. Parkland last month, Kids in Cages this week. Something Else next month. And the purpose is the same as the car crashes and disasters shown every night on local news. To get the eyeballs of women.

It seems to me that the name of the game is to get our theory of everything to be the normal World Picture for people in our society, including, especially, women. Then the affective response to the Affect of the Week will be more in tune with what we believe than the current situation where every child is taught liberal the World Picture in government child-custodial facilities from K thru graduate school.

It is important to get into the minds of women, partly because of Georg Simmel above, and partly because there are more Good Little Girls in the world than Good Little Boys. Which is to say that women are more easily manipulated by the culture than men: sugar and spice rather than snips and snails and puppy-dog tails.

But you can see that the only way we get our theory of everything a chance is to nuke the current school system, K thru graduate school. And that is a tall order.

Hey, I know. Let's publicize the notion, with sobbing girls every week on TV, that no kid is safe in a government school. Because bullying.

The Wages of Politics

I like to characterize politics as the art of division. That's a bit naughty of me, because when you turn to the philosophers they say that politics is either noble or necessary. For instance, Aristotle, according to La Wik, believed that, over the family and the village,

The highest form of community is the polis. Aristotle comes to this conclusion because he believes the public life is far more virtuous than the private and because men are "political animals."

And then there is Plato with his Republic, proposing a Callipolis, the state ruled by the philosophers who educate their subjects into the right channels.

But I would say that these guys are missing the point. The need for politics arises instead after the local lord has become the war lord and successfully beaten off the invaders.

Put it this way. The warrior lord has rallied all the local warriors to his standard, has cooled their competitive ardor for a season, and has led them to victory over the deadly enemy. Now what?

The point is that after the war the tribe/polis/nation or whatever does not now need the super-unifying leadership required to win the war. On the other hand there is the danger that all the lordly warriors that rallied to the standard may now have ambitions of their own -- see Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays.

And politics now becomes a division no longer between us, the local tribe, and the foreign enemy, but now because a game of division between all the heads of power within the tribe/polis/nation. That is really what Aristotle's Politics and Plato's Republic are all about: trying to civilize these rough types and teach them virtue.

And Aristotle and Plato had the notion of designing a system to encourage virtue or educate ordinary people to become good citizens.

Then we come down to the early modern era of Hobbs, Locke, Montesquieu where the separation of powers notion is developed. Here we acknowledge that humans are bad, and need to be diverted into safe channels in their quarrels so that the pride and rage of ambitious men does not erupt into civil war.

In other words, for the early moderns, political institutions were intended to keep politics down to a low roar rather than a volcanic eruption.

Then we have the left, where politics becomes a saving faith. We see that in the French Revolution which turned Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason. And we see it in Marx where revolution is to defeat the rising bourgeoisie with the proletariat before it is too late. And good little girls today in the university are being taught that the highest form of life is to become an "activist."

In other words, for today's left, politics is civil war by other means.

But look up to the top of this piece where I said that politics arises after the warrior lord has won the victory against the barbarians at the gate. What do we humans do when the moment for absolute unity has passed?

Notice that in the United States it has been routine for the general of the armed forces in the late war to become president: Washington, Grant, Eisenhower.

May I say that it is another proof of God's existence that we had as president such good men that they did not use their war-hero status to create cults of personality and subject the US to their will, but instead ruled as benevolent monarchs for a season and then left office. Why did we deserve such noble creatures as our presidents?

And both Grant and Eisenhower came from humble beginnings. Grant's father was a tanner, and Eisenhower's father worked in a creamery. No aristocratic virtue and noblesse oblige there.

Now, it seems to me that politics arises after satisfying the need to have a strong military to defend the patch of land against the neighboring tribe, or the barbarians, or the neighbor nation state. Because everything came down to defending our food-growing land. What to do between wars of defense against the raiders? Enter politics.

On this view ancient politics is based on the need to preserve unity for the next war. The need is to keep ambitious men from wrecking the commonwealth with their destructive competition so that the nation can come together the next time it is threatened.

Notice how leftist politics turns this on its head. The problem of invasion is assumed away, because we are all members of the human race, and war never solved anything. Strictly speaking, this means no need for politics. No war, no military, no warrior chief, no warrior class, no need to keep the warriors from each others' throats in the peace. Instead leftist politics becomes a civil war within the political boundaries of the state between class, race, or gender rivals. And, in particular it becomes a war for justice for people unjustly kept outside the gate of the political community.

My point is that if you assume away the original need for the larger community and the need for unity against external threats, then the next thing is you start settling scores within the community. You can afford to do that because war never solved anything, therefore no war.

But here is what I consider the astonishing fact of the modern era. The new middle class, that Marx assumed would be bidding to take its place atop the heap as the feudal lords did in olden times, was not that interested in power.

Thus "activism" politics. The commercial middle class is not that interested in power, so if the activists present some helpless victims for inspection by the media, the middle class will probably act to redress their grievances.

But if this is true, then we really don't need activism politics. All grievances will eventually get reviewed and addressed. Because the middle class is basically good-natured. Because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power.

This is not because the middle class is unusually virtuous, but because the nature of the modern market economy is that you trust anyone that presents themselves as trustable. Life is no longer a question of defending your patch of food-growing land from the neighbor. Now everyone is producing and trading and consuming. And the more people contributing to the market economy, in whatever way they can imagine, the better.

And what, in retrospect, is the point of winning a world war? After World War I the western allies were determined to teach Germany a lesson, and the result was Hitler and World War II. After World War II, it took a couple years for the western winners to decide that a Germany reduced to indigence did nobody any good, because it cost the allies a bundle to feed the Germans. So the Germans were allowed to rebuild their economy from the rubble, and their Wirtschaftwunder commenced.

This is astonishing. It means the complete annihilation of the old culture of loot and plunder: loot or be looted. Instead of your patch of land being the foundation of your wealth, and your neighbor a challenge to your well-being, it is the more the merrier.

It is my belief that this new economic reality is the most astonishing thing in the entire history of mankind, and we have not even begun to consider that the world has utterly changed, and what to do about it.

And the political question is at the heart of it. For if politics is not needed any longer to keep the elite barons from each others' throats during the peace, and there is no need for an activism politics to force justice upon a greedy and bigoted bourgeoisie, then what price politics?

Stay tuned, because we haven't even begun to deal with this astonishing new age and its consequences.

The Wages of Women in Leadership

I am coming to the conclusion that there is a certain kind of human that does not belong in a hierarchical administrative system, and certainly not at the top.

I am talking about woman.

Yes, yes, women can do everything that men can do. Not. But this last weekend there has been a cascade of news about women in hierarchies that don't have a clue.

Yes. I know that men are mostly clueless, but the difference is that nobody is making excuses for them, not at least if they are white males. So we are supposed to believe that dear little Hillary didn't understand the mansplaining meaning of a (C) in a government document. But Trump is supposed to know exactly what all his minions are doing, otherwise it's Russian collusion all the way down.

So here are a few examples of female cluelessness. From Powerline, a hospital director at Harvard Medical School is worried about stuff that "might upset women and minorities who are training to become doctors." So,

Dr. Nabel has removed 31 portraits of former department chairmen from the hospital’s Bornstein amphitheater because they are all men and all but one of them are white.

Ya know, I would say that in a major teaching hospital there are 20,000 problems in need of executive action before the vital and important job of moving the pictures around. So this is what female leadership reduces to? Redecorating? Indeed, the dissent of an Iran-born doctor suggests that Dr. Nabel and her "posse" seem suspiciously like your average Mean Girls clique in high school.

Then there is the woman President Deborah MacLatchy of Canada's Wilfred Laurier University. Her faculty sanctioned Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student and teaching assistant, who showed a video of Jordan Peterson in debate with a liberal about gender pronouns. Not for expressing a heretical opinion: just for showing the video. In her suit against the university Shepherd cites chapter and verse of how the faculty harassing her for the thought crime of actually showing a video were violating all the university's bureaucratic rules against harassment, but nothing was done. Does this woman president -- that was finally shamed into disapproving of the harassing actions of her underlings but has since done nothing to fix the problem -- not understand that one of the jobs of any executive leader is to lay down the law to her subordinates pour encourager les autres?

But here's the loveliest one of all. Remember that collision between a US Navy destroyer and a container ship in June 2017? Guess what: the "officer of the deck" (OOD) and the "Tactical Action Officer" in charge of "monitoring the combat radar" were both women.

The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!!

OMG! Like, I Can't Believe They Would Do That!

And they didn't communicate at all on the watch leading up to the collision with the Philippine container ship.

Of course this all precipitates out of the basic difference between men and women. Men are organized to fight for the survival of the tribe on the border. Women are designed to fight for the survival of their children until puberty.

That means that the male strategic mind is thinking about what vital fact about the war plans of the neighboring tribe am I not paying attention to? And the female strategic mind is thinking about what food or dangerous shrub might be threatening the life of my child.

That is why when you walk around Green Lake in North Seattle you hear the men talking about tactical issues at work and the women talking about the health care issues of their friends.

Men naturally self-organize into quasi-military hierarchies, because that is the way not to get killed in the next dawn raid. Women naturally organize into gossip networks because village harmony depends on a consensus of who said/did what to whom and who is to blame.

Again, from James Bowman's Honor: A History, there is a fundamental difference between male honor and female honor: two separate cultures. Male honor is about guarding the reputation for courage; female honor is about guarding the reputation for chastity. Notice the profound difference. For men, it does not matter whether you are right or wrong, but whether you stood in line with your brother soldiers. For women it does not matter whether you stand together, but that you were "right" or "innocent." Thus the universal female complaint: "I can't believe she said/did that."

Now, in my view, taken from Rodney Stark, the original human "informal social control" is epitomized by the female village gossip network. But that didn't work when humans moved from villages to cities and the first stirrings  of the market economy where anonymity started to rear its ugly head. So "formal social control" is all about hierarchical armies and state bureaucracies based in cities. And trials with formal rules about evidence/gossip. Oh and church bureaucracies.--

I wonder if women are really cut out for formal social control. Unless you are Margaret Thatcher with the will to completely reinvent yourself as an Iron Lady.

By the way, the whole culture of microaggessions and safe spaces is a girl thing. The whole point of being a man is to be impervious to minor insults, and not to need a place to hide. Because male honor and the reputation for courage among your male warrior pals. I mean: what kind of a man can't take a insult without collapsing into tears? And what kind of a man needs to hide away from his enemies unless on a modern lethal battlefield?

But I am optimistic. My whole existential worry about the world is that it is impossible to reform any government program, so nothing changes until the whole thing collapses from failing to adapt to changing circumstances.

But with women getting to be top managers of big bureaucratic organizations from schools to hospitals to universities we can expect an increased failure to adapt, because of an inborn inability in women to succeed in a "formal social control" environment. This means that our current bureaucratic monstrosities in health care and education are heading for the cliff earlier than we would expect if ordinary dull men were in charge.

Put it this way. Charles Dickens represents your average male bureaucrat as a "Barnacle" or a "Stiltstocking." Clearly such names just do not connect with women. But what names would be appropriate?

That is the question for today. And I have to admit that I don't have a clue.