Meaning and the Three Peoples

I am reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, loaded for bear because, like so many people, Pinker does not understand about values and meaning. When you say, as almost everyone does, that you believe in facts and reason and the other guys believe in feelings and emotion, you don't understand.

People bring to the table not fact and reason but their "religion," their world view about what the world is and what it means and what "my life" means in consequence. Steven Pinker believes instinctively in what he takes to be the value system of the Enlightenment, which is that prosperity, freedom, rights, knowledge, safety, are Good Things, whereas religion, conformity, priestly authority, and the marginalization of black people, women, and gays are Bad Things.

Now I have written previously about "What Gods do the 'Three Peoples' Believe In?'," but I haven't really written about Meaning and the Three Peoples, or how each of the Three Peoples finds meaning in life.

But yesterday an email acquaintance explained the whole procedure to me.

[I]f you identify as, say, a BDSM Submissive, but you don’t have a concrete cosmic philosophy about the outside world, then who you are is literally the center of your conceptualized universe. The endangerment of whatever aspect of yourself you most strongly identify AS, is a threat to your whole existence. 

Or, to rephrase in my Three Peoples talk, if you are a subordinate worker or peasant, your whole life falls apart when the lord or the boss says: Sorry, I don't need you to work my fields, or bend tin in my factory anymore; good luck, pal. The meaning of life for a People of the Subordinate Self is all bound up in your physical usefulness to your lord or patron.

Then my correspondent talks about herself:

Contrast that with how I understand MYself as a being entity that exists in a universe to be explored in order to discover its meaning, and in doing so, MY meaning as a member of it that exists within its rules. 

Wow. Do you see what she is saying? She is saying that she discovers meaning by living her life as an exploration of the world. This means that meaning is not already discovered on the tablets, immutable for all time, as religions and ideologies insist, but a mystery to be examined and perhaps understood. This is what meaning means for the People of the Creative Self: meaning is something you explore and discover for yourself, as is proposed in the myth of the Hero's Journey.

And that, I now realize, is what Nietzsche is saying in Also Spake Zarathustra. You must go out into the world and explore it, and get beyond the comfortable certainties of Good and Evil.

But also she is telling us the point of traditional religion and culture; they provide a handhold for the day when your physical world falls apart. She is saying is that the SJWs and identity activists with their victim culture are like BDSM submissives. They have no anchor in a saving religion and its culture apart from their direct instinctive experience.

And this is in my opinion, a key to the difference between conservative students and identity activists on campus. The former is oriented and anchored. Due to a variety of reasons. I suspect, the influences of religion, internalized cultural heritage linked to geography and nation, intact procreating families that cement the child’s early idea of identity around intangible, eternal, enduring love and its effect. The latter on the other hand, is precariously tethered. For the first time, SJWs have my real sympathy. 

 I interpret this to mean that, if you are a People of the Responsible Self, with an Axial Age religion to stiffen your spine, your identity does not collapse when your current status as a peasant or a worker collapses or when someone microaggresses you. You just pick yourself up and say, well, I've gotta suck it in and find another way to earn my living. The meaning of your life is already secured in your religious and cultural faith, and so life goes on.

Right now I am reading a lefty tome by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé about the miseries of English agricultural laborers that culminated in the Captain Swing riots of 1830. The landless laborers had been kept on because they could be employed in manual threshing of harvest during the winter, but their wages had to be supplemented by welfare. Once mechanical threshing machines were invented, the farmers dumped the laborers and that was that. The only thing the laborers could think of doing was rioting and smashing up the threshing machines. And Hobsbawm and Rudé are right there with them. How could the farmers pay them such low wages? How could they humiliate them with the Speenhamland System of outdoor relief? Activism! Protest! That's the answer!

The answer of history, of course, was Shakespearean: get thee to a factory, where, starting in about 1850 workers started experiencing the growth in real wages that, a few economic revolutions later, has brought us to where we are today.

I should explain that my correspondent is recovering from a traumatic brain injury, and has directly experienced that "who I am, my personality and soul, can be shut 'down.'" Now she is experiencing the world anew as "my ability of processing the outside world has come back in increments," an exploration of meaning.

So here is what I have learned from my correspondent. The meaning of life for the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, is bound up in the physical day-to-day life of subordinate work, and collapses if the work is taken away. The meaning of life for the People of the Responsible Self is encoded in religion and culture and is taken to be immutable reason and logic. The meaning of life for the People of the Creative Self is a journey of discovery, usually involving a descent into the underworld (of the unconscious), and meaning is something discovered in the journey.

Makes sense to me. Steven Pinker, not so much.

Yes. Why Don't Minorities, Women and Gays Praise the Lord Every Day?

I am currently reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. I admit I am looking for trouble because I believe the Enlightenment conceit, that we are all rationalists now, is sick and wrong. No we aren't, and we never will be. Rationalists.

But the basic message of Enlightenment Now is that we should stop complaining (except about Trump) and learn to love the prosperity, the health, the freedom, the peace, the safety, the knowledge, the cultural enrichment (except Trump).

For instance, p.214,

Humans are liable to treat entire categories of other humans as means to an end or as nuisances to be cast aside. Coalitions bound by race and creed seek to dominate rival coalitions. Men try to control the labor, freedom, and sexuality of women. People translate their discomfort with sexual nonconformity into moralistic condemnation. We call these phenomena racism, sexism, and homophobia[.]

Earth to Pinker. The "we" you are talking about are left-wing activists. Those words "racism," "sexism," and "homophobia" are left-wing pejoratives and have no place in polite conversation, because their purpose is to stop conversation. But I guess, Steve, that you have been in the university culture too long to get that.

But, wonder of wonders, we have broken down these cultural horrors, according to Pinker, and racist, sexist, and homophobic opinions are on the decline. Also racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes. Imagine.

What Pinker does not show us is the frequency of left-wing political action against the terrors of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Is it going down in response to improving conditions? Or it is going up, in defiance of reason and rationality? It makes sense that we would be moving on from accusing every second person of racism, sexism, or homophobia. Let's take a look with Google Ngram.
Oh no! It turns out that the concern about racism, etc. has been going up, up, up. Until President Obama was inaugurated as First Black President.

But  Google Ngram only goes up to 2006. Here is my nickel to say that concern about all these issues has skyrocketed since the racist, sexist, homophobic Donald Trump was elected First Deplorable President.

But, I thought to myself. Why?

I mean, according to the left-wing "rights" narrative we have abolished slavery, and given blacks civil rights. So why aren't blacks praising God every day for the blessings of the United States and the Republicans that fought a civil war to break the chains of slavery and then provided the most votes in the 1960s to pass the Civil Rights Acts?

Why aren't women out in the streets every day praising God for their emancipation and liberation from the hearth into the wonderful world of cubicles?

And why aren't gays praising Gaia every day for the end of gay criminalization and the glorious dawn of gay marriage?

Yes, why not?

Well, we know the answer. It is that the whole rights revolution, for its proponents, is not really about the rights but about the struggle. In the "activism culture" it is the activism that matters, and the big problem for every graduate of Activism 101 in college is to find a cause on which to advocate and peacefully protest.

In any movement, from religious to cultural to political, the movement is the thing. Or to put it in proper terms, for humans meaning comes first, and meaning is about doing something, such as advocating for equal rights.

But if your movement actually succeeds, then what? Because the danger is that your meaning in life, e.g., to advocate for equal rights, goes away.

No problem. You keep going as though nothing had changed; you realize that, unless you advocate and peacefully protest as devotedly as ever, those racist, sexist homophobes will take it all away. Give-backs is what they call it in the labor movement.

In fact, in any religious or cultural or political movement, you always maintain your observances to remind the faithful about the Glorious Struggle of the Heroes of the Movement.

Thus Christians celebrate the Eucharist, Christ's Last Supper, as though it was yesterday. We Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, when we declared Independence from those dreadful Limeys. The French celebrate the Storming of the Bastille as if it was 1789. The Bolsheviks celebrated their October Revolution of 1917. The Irish to this day in the US have their St. Patrick's Day parades. And gays have their Gay Pride marches.

The lesson is unmistakable. So long as a posterity lives to remember its past glories, so long will it celebrate the memory of the past. And so long will it insist that evil forces are poised to make a come-back.

As Nietzsche says: Human, All Too Human.

Will the Collusion Cock-up Help Delegitimize the Administrative State?

Yay! The deeply redacted Carter Page FISA court surveillance application shows what we all hoped. The FBI just threw a bunch of mish-mash together from press reports and the Steele Dossier and dumped it on the FISA court.

Of Course, the liberals and the MSM and the deep state are going to be telling us that there is nothing to see here.

When it is all as plain as day. The Obama Justice Department used partisan opposition research -- obtained from a non US citizen in collaboration with, wait for it, RUSSIANS! -- as a justification for doing government surveillance on the opposition party.

It doesn't get more banana republic than that. But wait! "Banana republic" would be racist, because of the race of the last US president. But you get the point. Using the government police power to spy on the opposition party campaign is a real no-no. Unless Democracy! is at stake.

Well, I'd say that surveillance of the opposition party is a no-no unless it was emulating the revolutionary parties of yesteryear, Bolsheviks or Nazis, and was using street violence to advance its  interests.

Oh wait. The Democrats have AntiFa, a masked street gang, to provide a bit of muscle on the political stage.

But here is my take. Maybe this is a chance for us racist sexist homophobes to talk to the American people about the "administrative state." Conservatives have had a beef with the administrative state for a while, because we see it as a way that liberals and the left enact their agenda without getting the consent of the governed.

Also, of course, the administrative state is inevitable when you have big government, because the legislatures just don't have the bandwidth to legislate away all the cock-ups and injustices that crop up in the wake of big government. So the legislature has to farm out the details of legislation to unelected administrative courts and tribunals within the bureaucracy to prevent the whole creaking government establishment from grinding to a halt.

Enter Ludwig von Mises: "socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices." And that goes for the administrative state too, snowflake.

Apart from the bandwidth problem, there is the corruption problem. A big bureaucracy naturally tends to gravitate towards taking care of itself rather than doing its job. And, being lazy and idle, it tends towards identifying with the people it is designed to regulate. There is settled science about this: it is called "regulatory capture."

You can see the problem with respect to the DOJ, the FBI and the Intelligence Community. These chaps have identified, over the years, with the bipartisan ruling class. It is perfectly natural that these folks should regard the growing populist movement from the "right" as a threat to their power. And the natural, instinctive thing for them to do is surveillance on the growing populist movement, which is, after all, a genuine threat to the power of today's bipartisan globalist ruling class.

Only, of course, the administrative state is not supposed to take sides. It is supposed to be a non-partisan elite of experts and thinkers that advise and "nudge" the politicians to do the right thing. The lie about this was exposed back in the Eighties with the British TV show Yes, Minister. It showed the bumbling politician, the Minister Jim Hacker, totally dominated and manipulated by his civil service Permanent Secretary from the deep state, Sir Humphrey Appleby.

The problem with Donald Trump, from the point of view of the Sir Humphreys of our deep state, is that he does not seem to be house-trained, that he is not a dumb cluck like Jim Hacker, but a fearless warrior that might have the courage and the smarts to destroy their deep state. Imagine the rage and the terror that that his election must send through the corridors of power. Why, imagine! There might come a day when all the deep staters are banished from their lifetime sinecures, pensioned off before their time, and not given the honor and respect that is their due. Only today, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is suggesting that maybe President Trump should revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan. What could be worse than that? I'd say that a deep-stater's security clearance is the modern equivalent of the "stars" of the various orders of knighthood that monarchs and the like used to display on their army uniforms back in the day.

Another thing I am thinking. Do you think that, maybe, the release of the heavily redacted FISA application on Carter Page is part of the President Trump's midterm election strategy? After all, if I were Trump and I knew that the whole Russia Collusion business was deep-state skullduggery, what would be best for me? It would be to expose all the deep-state skullduggery in the runup to the midterms, to demoralize the deep state and the #Resistance and add members in both the House and the Senate. You don't want to drop that bombs too early, because the voters might forget about it by election day. And you don't want to do it too late, after the election: that would never do.

So here we are, at the end of July, and the Carter Page FISA application has dropped. What is going to drop in mid-August? And what in mid-September, right after Labor Day? And what October Surprise do the Trumpers have in mind?

You might think that the Trumpers have it all set up ready to roll. I couldn't possibly comment.

And then, with bigger majorities in Congress, and Steve Scalise, shot by a Bernie Bro, as Speaker of the House? Well, maybe we could do a number on the administrative state and reduce its powers.

Maybe.

Why I Could Never Be an Appeals Court Judge

Two Republican United States Senators have just torpedoed the nomination of Ryan Bounds to the US Court of Appeals. They don't like something Bounds wrote 25 years ago as a student at Stanford University:

“During my years in our Multicultural Garden of Eden,” he wrote, “I have often marveled at the odd strategies that some of the more strident racial factions of the student body employ in their attempts to ‘heighten consciousness,’ ‘build tolerance,’ ‘promote diversity’ and otherwise convince us to partake of that fruit which promises to open our eyes to a PC version of the knowledge of good and evil. I am mystified because these tactics seem always to contribute more to restricting consciousness, aggravating intolerance and pigeonholing cultural identities than many a Nazi bookburning.”

Oh no! Bounds accused lefties of being Nazis! As a kid! Twenty-five years ago! Whoever heard of such a thing! I can't believe he wrote that! Why everybody knows that it is a crime against humanity to write such a thing. But it is OK to accuse anyone to the right of lovely Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of being a Nazi.

But really, we all know that there is one crime that cannot be forgiven, and that is the crime of telling the truth to the ruling class.

I mean: I write things like that every day! But then I can afford to, because I am not running for anything, and I am not hoping to get preferment to some black robed sinecure. So I can afford to tell the truth as I see it.

But to get back to Ryan Bounds. This guy wrote this truthful analysis of the utter folly of left-wing politics -- not to mention its vile reign of terror -- twenty-five years ago when he was a student at university. For this he is to be denied entrance to the Holy of Holies, a seat on the United States Court of Appeals? Come on Tim Scott and Marco Rubio! Surely you have more serious things to do than punish a guy for telling the truth 25 years ago! How about punishing someone for something true that he wrote last year!

Or maybe Scott and Rubio are playing Senate politics and paying back some other senator for meddling with some pet project of theirs. I hope there is some such good political payback reason for this.

If there is one thing this nation needs to do it is to banish the vile racism and divisions of identity politics, and to utterly demoralize and demonize the vile culture of "activism" that now reigns supreme in our universities. The frightening thing is that it is clear that the kids are doing this because they are being carefully taught to do so.

Indeed, given the apparent utter ignorance of the lovely Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about basic economics -- this from a Boston University BA graduate in Economics and International Relations -- it is clear what is going on in the university. Nothing. Except activism studies. Yes, apparently Ocasio-Cortez was active in student politics while at BU. And I imagine didn't have much time for economics, supply-and-demand, market prices and all that stuff.

This is surprising to me, because I once knew a Good Little Girl that went back to school to get an MBA and was flabbergasted by her economics courses. She had no idea! But apparently economics courses left absolutely no trace on Ocasio-Cortez. Does that mean that BU students can avoid capitalist economics and merely take courses in Marxist or Democratic-Socialist economics? Or does it mean that Ocasio-Cortez was a minority student active in activism on campus and that any grade lower than B+ was evidence of instructor racism? Or does it mean that Ocasio-Cortez is as dumb as a post and forgot  everything she learned the second after the final exam?

Yeah, what is going on at the university? If Ryan Bounds was writing about "strident racial factions of the student body" 25 years ago, what, do you suppose, is  going on today?

Well, we know.  The attitude of university administration to left-wing student activism clearly demonstrates that the university is right there with the activist  students and their non-negotiable demands and their mostly peaceful protests.

And there is only one way to stop it. To take away their money. That is what bureaucrats and time-servers understand.

Because here is the bigger problem, as told by Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore, also known as Harry Lee (his first language was English).

In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

Or, to put it in a different way, on my maxim that politics is division, in a single-race society politicians divide people by class or religion or ethnic origin as used to be the case in the United States. In a multi-racial society politicians divide people by race and religion. QED.

The thing is, in the United States for the last century, the politicians were clearly dividing people by ethnicity and religion. Thus, if you read the history of presidential elections you find authors talking about the Irish vote, the Catholic vote. Or in Miami the Cuban vote. Now we talk about the black vote, the Latino vote, and the white working-class vote. Nothing has changed.

The other approach to politics, that Donald Trump has used, is to divide the electorate by loyalty to America, as in Make America Great Again. This is a transparent tactic to appeal to ordinary people that don't have any fancy ideas about activism and driving Priuses and saving the planet, and utterly to be deplored and banished from polite society.

And I would say that anyone with the least bit of education and evolvement should utterly condemn Trumpian divisive politics and completely eliminate from judicial preferment anyone that so much as whispers support for such racist sexist homophobia. 

Of Course Trump Has "a Distorted Vision"

Yesterday I dispatched Steven Pinker and his Enlightenment Now for not realizing that his "reason" is a religion, or more exactly that science and wealth and long life are just artifacts and ways of looking at and understanding the world; they are not the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Today I am taking on conservative icon Roger Scruton, who takes to The New York Times to disparage Donald Trump. Let us let him have his say.

Conservative thinkers have on the whole praised the free market, but they do not think that market values are the only values there are. Their primary concern is with the aspects of society in which markets have little or no part to play: education, culture, religion, marriage and the family... [things that] cannot be bought and sold: things like love, loyalty, art and knowledge, which are not means to an end but ends in themselves.

Well, yes. Which is another way of saying with John C. Wright that politics [and the market economy] is downstream from culture is downstream from religion. But Trump is not a true vessel of conservatism, writes Scruton.

About such things it is fair to say that Mr. Trump has at best only a distorted vision. He is a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion. And perhaps the principal reason for doubting Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials is that being a creation of social media, he has lost the sense that there is a civilization out there that stands above his deals and his tweets in a posture of disinterested judgment.

Well, bless my soul. Imagine! Trump is but a ordinary mortal, and does not have the magic answer that will bring "education, culture, religion, marriage and the family" into perfect harmony with our "artistic and philosophical" traditions.

But, in fact, on the testimony of Steve Bannon, Trump is consciously trying to move away from the technocratic market-only globalist vision towards some kind of populist nationalism that thinks about the actual cultural context of the people rather than the intellectual conceits of the ruling class. Here is Bannon (he really spanks the interviewer: gotta love it):



But here is my beef with Scruton, that Trump "is a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion."

No doubt, Rog. But the fact is that the conservative heirs of Edmund Burke have singularly failed to provide the Trumps of the world with a bullet list on which to raise our "artistic and philosophical inheritance" back up to the level of a Goethe and a Beethoven, and then to raise it to greater heights still. We got Obama and his "fundamental transformation" because conservatives don't have a better idea that inspires  the best and brightest to leave progressivism and its echoing graveyards in droves and aspire to something higher and better.

The worst we can say about Trump is that he is a little Dutch boy with a finger in the dyke, trying to hold back the progressive flood. But he is just a politician, albeit a politician that "[keeps] your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you." Which means he is downstream from culture, which is already there and over which he has no control and which right now is in the hands of his political enemies. And that is to say nothing about religion.

See, the fundamental thing about our age is that it is an Axial Age in which new religions are aborning, just like the Axial Age of three thousand years ago. What do you think the SJWs are doing? What do you think the left has been all about? These are the rude and crude attempts to find a new religion, a meaning of life, the universe, and everything, or in Scruton's argot, rebuilding an "artistic and philosophical" tradition on the ashes of the old good-and-evil one that Nietzsche declared was dead over a century ago. And naturally, there is quite a lot of witch-hunting and naming and shaming as people get a little too enthusiastic for the New Truth.

As you know my view, on my Three Peoples theory, is that the religions of the People of the Subordinate Self and the People of the Responsible Self are fine. The problem is the religion of the People of the Creative Self, the people who are in Nietzsche's phrase trying to figure out what religion looks like "Beyond Good and Evil." Not surprisingly 97.2% of their efforts have been bloody failures, consigning hundreds of millions to death and devastation as is normal when people are trying to develop something new.

So what Trump is saying is that you globalists and progressives can get on with your glorious plans for a new religion, but not on our dime. We want to live in our nation states with our welfare states, and our families and jobs and children. Come back when you have something real. And it better be better than your Communism, your Socialism, your Nazism, your Stalinism, your Maoism, your Castroism, your Bolivarism, your globalism, oh, and your Obamism.

Just saying.

People Don't Want to be Enlightened, They Just Want to Believe

I read a review of Steven Pinker's latest, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress on NRO, and realized that I ought to read the book. The reason? That Pinker went out after religion.

OK, I said to myself: so what is Pinker's religion? Fortunately, he answers the question on the first page of the book, by answering a question put to him by a young woman: "Why should I live?" Says he:

In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live!

And the reasons? The "potential to flourish" and the "sense of sympathy." So,

[Y]ou have the responsibility to provide for others what you expect for yourself... life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress.

So, using Cathy Newman dialectics, what he is saying that if you have convictions around notions like flourishing and sympathy, then the reasons for your convictions are that they make a better world for you and everyone else.

This uses the word "reason" in its original pre-Greek sense, as a rationalization of your convictions. Yeah, Stevie, reason wasn't invented back in the Enlightenment with dear old Kant and his "Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch." Reason is an integral part of all religion, pal. That's why we sneer today at Catholic theologians back in the day arguing about how many angels you can fit on the head of a pin. Or why the Jewish Torah typically features on each page a few verses in large type surrounded by tons of rabbinical argumentative commentary in small type.

So, I get it. Steven Pinker believes in basic human flourishing. So do I. He believes in "sympathy," or what we might call social animals. So do I.

So the difference between him and me is that I believe that my convictions, my sense of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is my religion. And he does not. Because, I suppose, he imagines himself above all that.

He is wrong, of course. He is wrong because nobody knows the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- if it has a meaning. But we humans cannot live without an answer to the question: "why should I live," and that answer, always and everywhere, is provided by religion.

To answer the religious question, some people immerse themselves in books, or go off into a wilderness to meditate, or "go into isolation" with Nietzsche's Zarathustra. But most people get their religion prepackaged from a church or a sect; they prefer it that way. Steven Pinker seems to want the prepackaged religion of the Kants and similar folk who wrote in the mid-to-late 18th century. And for him that has nothing to do with "the 19th-century Romantic belief in mystical forces, laws, dialectics, struggles, unfoldings, destinies, ages of man, and evolutionary forces that propel mankind ever upwards towards utopia."

OK. So the Romantics were half-crazed. But their basic religion was that Reason and Enlightenment could not be the whole story: it did not exhaust the possibilities of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. There had to be something else. But what is that "something else?" That's a good question, Senator.

The point is that nothing is carved in stone -- except what Jung carved in stone at his lakeside retreat at Bollingen -- and all our convictions that we protect with a bodyguard of reason are probably wrong, at least in part.

For instance, Pinker clearly thinks that material progress is a good thing, provided we protect against environmental damage, blah, blah, blah, because it promotes "life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace." And little children get to live, and people are not enslaved and women are not patriarched etc.

But the environmentalists correctly point out that this cannot go on forever. They tell us that we will run out of fossil fuels. And they are right, except it won't be next week. Or that we will "climate change" the Earth and destroy the planet. And they may be right. But it won't happen for a century or so, whatever the fake models tell us. Meanwhile, let us wive and thrive and survive, for tomorrow we die.

Here is something even more dreadful. I read years ago someone who said that the human use of energy, increasing at about 3 percent per year, will eventually exhaust all the energy in the universe --  in a few thousand years. Why, because 1.03**3000 equals 3 times 10**38, or 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Which is quite a lot. See, on the notion of entropy, we are stealing energy from other folk -- the animals we eat, the crops we grow, the fossil fuels we mine, the nuclear energy we generate. And it will all come to an end some day. If our notion of entropy is correct.

You can see that the scientists' notion of entropy has a lot in common with religious notions of the End of the World, Armageddon, and the Millennium.

Steven Pinker's answer to that good little girl is correct, as far as it goes. Wiving, thriving, surviving. Good idea. Social cooperation with other humans. Good idea. But, it might all turn out to be a dreadful mistake some time in the future. What he proposes, in my view, is a pretty decent religious testament, based on what we know today about life, the universe, and everything, only he lacks the intelligence and wisdom to realize that his "reason" is really religion. The missing link in his religious testament is that we do not know what we will know in the future. What we learn in the future may make us completely change our minds about what constitutes the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. And that may be too late for some people. Or all people. Or everything on the planet.

It makes complete sense that today's religion for educated people like Steven Pinker is different from the religion of chaps like Martin Luther half a millennium ago, and Luther's religion is different from the religions put together in the Axial Age three thousand years ago, and the Axial Age religions are different from the religion of the Greeks of the Iliad camping on the shore before the city of Troy. When we develop new knowledge then we change our religion.

I believe that Steven Pinker is a man stuck in the past, still infatuated with the religion of the Enlightenment and its superstitions while I have grown out of that benighted age, having read as much as I could of people that have lived since the Enlightenment and have produced credible critiques of the religion of the Enlightenment.

And what I have concluded with my infallible reason and intellect is that we need a religion for chaps like Steven Pinker that includes as a central doctrine a sense of compassion and understanding for all the folk that aren't quite as intelligent and creative as Steven Pinker.

Because, of course, I am right and he is wrong. And these are my reasons...

The Left's Errors: The Programs

Do you know that today, July 17, 2018, is the centennial of the killing of the Russian Czar and his family? Marking the occasion , Seth Barron writes,

Studying the years that led to that savage night, it’s hard not to want to shout across time at the last Romanov, to wake him from his walking stupor. His feckless rule was marked by indecision and half-steps at political reform, the necessity of which was obvious to everyone. Sergei Witte, the brilliant diplomat and reformer who engineered Russia’s first constitution, warned Nicholas in 1905 that “Russia has outgrown its existing governmental forms. . . . You must give the people their constitution; otherwise, they will wrest one away.”

Well, yes. Of Course the Czar should have known. But it is in the nature of late-stage dynasties that they don't have a clue. Come to think of it, it is characteristic of mature capitalistic corporations that they never quite get around and Do Something to avoid decline and bankruptcy. This week, Hello Sears. My whole series on the Left's Errors is really about this, about the late-stage welfare state cluelessly going on its way even though "everyone knows" that things just can't go on like this.

Starting over a century ago, the left has been engaged on a project to fundamentally transform western society, from responsibility and liberty to equality, justice, emancipation and liberation. But the means to do that is always politics and government despite the abysmal record of politics and government down the ages in securing anything except death and domination.

Now the meaning of life, the universe and everything, for me, is to illuminate the errors of the left with every breath of my body, on the principle that everything about the left is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Above all, for me, is the truth that the left's agenda always creates roadblocks on the road to the middle class. I believe that the #1 agenda item for the modern world is to help people leaving the farm to learn the culture of the city, and this is profoundly difficult. The city requires us to cast off our culture that trusts only the kindred and learn to trust anyone that is trustworthy. It teaches us to cast off old feudal subordination and subordinate ourselves to the market economy and its prices. It teaches us stop trusting feudal lords to keep us safe and be individually responsible for our safety and welfare.

Yet everything our government does teaches people the opposite.

Social Security is a program that takes money from workers to give a retirement income to seniors. Instead we want to teach workers to save for their own retirement, and retire when they can afford it. But what about people that can't support themselves through no fault of their own? Well, for them there is family, then the charitable beneficence of billionaires, and then, perhaps, the enforced contribution of taxpayers as a last resort. But remember, everything that taxpayers contribute basically lets family off the hook.

Medicare is a program that takes money mostly from high income earners to give to seniors for lifetime health care. Is that a good idea, or would it be better to let the high-income earners keep more of their own money to create new jobs for working Americans? Speaking as a senior, it is nice to have the taxpayers pick up the tab for me. But should they? I mean, anyone that has raised their children to adulthood is not exactly a crucial part of the economy that must be kept healthy, wealthy and wise. Seniors like me are going to end up dying of something, whether a heart attack in our sixties or a combination of physical and mental disorders twenty years later. The point is: how much are the kids prepared to put up? Or billionaires? And what level of care is just? Heroic care? Or palliative care? Or the level of care for which the senior is willing to pay for out of his own savings? If I had my druthers there would be a range of options available to seniors that would allow them to determine just how much health care is enough -- for them.

Medicaid is a health care program for the poor. Yet we find, from the Oregon experiment, that Medicaid does not provide better outcomes than no provision. I'm all in favor of health care for the poor, but I'd would rather contribute to it voluntarily than through the political process.

Public Schools is the program that lets government educate our children in government child-custodial facilities. Do you think it is a good thing for government functionaries to do this job? Or do you think that it provides a way for the government to indoctrinate our children against us? And what about the moral welfare of mothers who would be much better employed educating each others' children than letting government lifers -- "our teachers" -- do the job.

Welfare is the notion that government rather than family, church, and charities should provide relief for the poor. After five centuries of government relief for the poor (starting, for Anglo Saxons, with the Elizabethan Poor Law) I think that the results are in. It is a terrible idea that demoralizes the poor, distorts the labor market, and enrages the taxpayers.

Economic Regulation is the idea that credentialed experts are better at filing down the rough corners of the market economy than prices, the need for corporations to maintain the goodwill of their customers, and the operation of the legal system. The science on this was settled with the theory of "regulatory capture" advanced by economist George Stigler. But for some reason the usual suspects have not yet lost their love for power and privilege.

Racial Preferences arises out of the natural tendency of all ruling classes to reward their supporters. In its cruder applications, government favors its supposedly helpless "little darlings" over the unlabeled Other. But of course, in any governmental enterprise it is natural to hire and reward your supporters rather than the best people for the job. This is because government is not in the business of satisfying the consumers and staying in business but winning elections, rewarding its supporters and keeping congressional appropriators on-side.

My point is that almost everything government does makes things worse. And yet nothing changes.

This is very dangerous because we are in late-stage dynasty where the rulers know that something must be done, but, like the Czar of All the Russias, just can't buckle down and figure what to do. What they do know is that Trump is the wrong man for the job.

The least we can do is talk down government programs every chance we get. Because you never know when a renegade will be elected president and proceed to cut the grass in the meadow.