Lighting the Way with a Dim Lamp

We are out in the Olympic National Park, Lady Marjorie and I, but on the road, at a bookstore in Port Townsend, I picked up the 20-year-old Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn, whose big success is Ishmael.

The Good Thing about Beyond Civilization is that Quinn understands that another "program" -- he is hesitant to say "government program" -- is not going to solve the world's problems.

Programs are sticks planted in the mud of a river to impede its flow. The sticks do impede the flow. A little. But they never stop the flow, and they never turn the river aside.

That's a very good metaphor, although many programs are not just stick, but bloody great boulders dumped right in the middle of a river, and cause flooding and scouring and all manner of harms that end up with millions of people dying.

Actually, I'd say that programs are the actions of politicians that need to appear to be "doing something." But really the only important thing for a politician is to reward his supporters. That is how he wins elections. Programs are just the means to the end of rewarding the supporters.

And Quinn has another good idea. The things that work in this world just work. We don't really know why, and we don't have to.

But on page 5 he falls into an great big Trap for Heffalumps. He observes that, in our culture, "the food is under lock and key... The food is all owned by someone, and if you want some, you will have to buy it."

Well, yes. But that is not a bug, it is a feature.

And do you know why, Daniel Quinn? It is because we moderns have made an astonishing discovery. In the old days, you see, the only way you could get food was by belonging to a tribe and partaking of the food hunted and gathered by that tribe. If you were a member of the tribe you could have your share of the food. If you were not a member there was only one way of getting food from the tribe: by killing the men of the tribe and seizing the food. Yes. The food was still owned, back in the good old days: it was owned by the tribe. And it was still under lock and key: defended by the the men, the army of the whole tribe, to the death. In the feudal age, of course, a peasant got to occupy land and eat the food on it by the grace of his liege lord. So the liege lord rented to key to the peasant, who had to farm the lord's demesne in order to grow and each the food on his peasant patch of land.

So food in human society has always been owned by someone. It's just that in the good old days there was no chance of buying any food owned by somebody else. You had to fight for it.

In other words, there was a very limited market, where humans could buy and sell exchanging one product of human enterprise for another and, most basic of all, exchanging their labor for money with which to buy food and other necessaries. The reason that food is under lock and key today is that we have a remarkable system -- that nobody really understands -- where the whole human race is exchanging everything imaginable through the "mechanism" of the price system. Everyone gets to own things, and you get access to the stuff that other people own by paying them for it.

Only the price system isn't a "system" and it isn't a "mechanism." In our modern age, the post-Newtonian age, we understand that "systems" and "mechanisms" really don't tell us what is going on. The closest we come to understanding the marketplace is through the notion of "emergent phenomenon" that has been developed by the Chaos theory guys.

OK. As usual, I am commenting on a book when I am only part way through. Quinn's big idea is that humans are tribal, so whatever we do to get Beyond Civilization it will be through a reinvention of the tribal notion. And I agree.

But I suspect that Quinn is going to have a real problem imagining that future when he doesn't understand markets and prices, and doesn't understand that the core of the market economy is not just "improve on something, then put it out there for people to improve on," but "improve on something that you think other people will want, and then put it out there for other people to decide if they will benefit." You find out how good your improvement is when people actually show up to buy your new improvement.

If you are right with your improvement then maybe you will be "rewarded with respect, fame, and wealth", as Quinn suggests, or maybe not. John D. Rockefeller, a man that helped flood the world with non-explosive lamp oil -- imagine that: lamp oil that didn't blow up in your face! -- and got to be astonishingly rich. But respect? Not if Daddy's girl Ida Tarbell had anything to do with it.

Quinn also suggests that nobody had any idea about whether the Industrial Revolution would work, and when it did, just we assumed that, of course, it would work.

It's perfectly obvious to us that the Industrial Revolution was bound to succeed.

That's not how I understand the history. For me it starts with this guy in Britain:

Wrote Carew Reynell in 1685: “Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.”

And then there was Adam Smith. His Wealth of Nations was really a work of prophecy, proposing a new theory of markets that the name of the game was not piling up gold, but merely exchange for mutual benefit.

And then came Marx, who said the whole thing was heading for disaster, as the ruthless competition of the market would squeeze out profits and "immiserate" the workers.

Then came the Fabians who said that the workers would be screwed unless the government came up with "programs."

Then came our current ruling class progressives that say that the only reason ordinary people have participated in the benefits of capitalism is because of the social benefits -- wage-and-hour laws, abolition of child labor, government pensions, government health care -- that noble activists demanded and noble progressives legislated for their benefit.

I'd say that we humans have been spending the whole of the last 200 years arguing about the Industrial Revolution and why it worked if it worked and what we need to do to contain it, or enable it or help it or hinder it.

But I will give Daniel Quinn this: The world works on "vision." Someone has an idea, and occasionally it actually works. When it works we all just scoop it up and use it. People don't have to know how it works or why it works. But they do know whether they want it and whether they want to use it.

Here's something that intrigues me. Quinn says that humans are tribal, and I can see that he is proposing that Beyond Civilization will be a new form of tribalism. I agree. In fact our present "civilization" is the latest in what I call "fake tribalisms" that humans with vision have invented since the dawn of agriculture. Today's fake tribes are things like churches, corporations, political parties, armies, securities exchanges, civic groups, "activist" groups, and so on.

But what will come next? That, of course, is the great question. Let's see what Quinn comes up with.

Is It 1942 Yet on the Culture War Front?

If you are President Obama the Trump presidency is a product of "resentment," as he said in his recent speech: "resentment and paranoia." He lamented, according to Allie Stuckey,

the destruction of the Republican Party and the ensuing demise of America because of the divisiveness and bigotry propagated by the president and those who support him.

But, if you look at it from another angle, the left has been running a secular-religious movement, especially successful during the Obama administration, that has resulted in huge changes in popular opinion, as measuring by the polls. Approval of gay marriage has gone from 31% in 2009 to 62% in 2017. Racism as a "big problem?" It was 26% in 2009. Now 58% percent of Americans agree.

Well, of course. Liberals in the media, in the schools, in the entertainment complex, in fashionable corporations are banging the drum every day for progressive issues like "sexuality, gender, race, immigration and welfare." And you better not express a contrary opinion or you could lose your job and get kicked off social media.

Actually, this is not so much a secular-religious movement as the lefty Secular Office of the Inquisition, enforcing its secular-religious orthodoxy everywhere. And when they show you the instruments of torture, why would you decide to experience the full experience the Inquisition has in mind rather than confess your heresy?

Now, in the face of a religious movement determined to enforce its vision of the anointed upon the deplorables, the question becomes: Is "resentment and paranoia" warranted? Or is it just pure bigotry? And how would you tell?

Let me explain. I have been reading Hitler's Mein Kampf on the internet, and the first couple of chapters explain the whole thing: Hitler's "resentment and paranoia" that he turned into a massive political movement that turned Europe upside down for twelve years.

As a young ethnic German man in Vienna before World War I Hitler experienced the situation of ethnic Germans in that multi-ethnic Hapsburg empire. They were a minority, and were being totally outmaneuvered in Vienna politics, because the non-Germans -- Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, etc. -- were obviously interested in diluting the influence of the ethnic Germans that had ruled the Austrian empire for centuries, and the Hapsburg rulers were trying to keep their whole rickety empire together. Hitler could look down the road and see that things were not going to be too good for ethnic Germans in the Austrian Empire, not when ethnic German votes were split between a nationalist party and a Catholic center party.

Solution? Put all the ethnic Germans together in a Greater Germany. Then no Germans would be a minority subject to the power plays of non-German ethnic groups.

Unfortunately Hitler also believed that this Greater Germany would need more land, because, as everybody knew, a nation couldn't survive on mere manufacturing and trading. A people needed to live on its own land growing its own food, etc.

Now, of course, in the event, the disaster of World War I detached the ethnic Germans of Austria into their own ethnic state. So that was all right, but too late, because Hitler had already made up his mind about what the German people needed. And the economic turmoil of the 1920s, the hyperinflation that was worse in Austria than in Germany, discredited the rulers and created space for troublemakers like Hitler.

In the event, Hitler got to execute on his plan for a Greater Germany and an even bigger Lebensraum for the Germans to get their food and natural resources, right up until 1942 when Germany overextended itself strategically on the plains of the Ukraine and the gates of Moscow.

Note that today Germany is an ethnic German state sitting in the middle of Europe as the primary manufacturing and trading nation in Europe and it doesn't matter that it doesn't have a hinterland for food-growing and resources extraction. So it didn't need Hitler at all to get where it is today.

But, the point is that when you have a multi-ethnic state then the obvious thing for politically ambitious people to do is to appeal to people on the basis of their religion and ethnic identity. Cue Lee Kwan Yew, first Prime Minister of Singapore, that in "multiracial societies... you vote in accordance with race and religion."

We know that our liberal friends think that, given another 30 years, America will be a majority-minority country and that white people will no longer dominate US politics.

There are, of course a number of assumptions that liberals are making.

Liberals are assuming that their coalition of the minorities will still obtain down the road. Will it? Will Asians and Latinos and blacks all still vote the same ticket? Perhaps all the non-black minorities expel the blacks from the minority coalition, because anti-black racism, and the Democratic Party becomes a rainbow coalition and the Republican Party a white-black party.

Or will East Asians join the Republican Party, as a party that respects East Asian family values and business success?

Perhaps Latinos and blacks will finally get up into the middle class and become deplorables and champion the traditional family and turn against lefty gender rainbow politics.

The risk, of course, is that liberals court the disaster that happened to Germany in 1945. And everything was going so well, as late as the spring of 1942!

When you listen to President Obama and the lefty progressives it all sounds as if we are just a couple of elections away from progressive triumph. Maybe they are right. Or maybe they are just as delusional as Adolf Hitler, who got a couple of things right, and a lot of other things completely wrong.

And anyway, to complain about the other side's "resentment and paranoia" is a little rich. Isn't the game of every politician to pump up the resentment and paranoia of his own partisans? Isn't that what Democrats did when they ran the Solid South? Isn't that what Democrats did when they championed the working class against the "malefactors of great wealth?" Isn't that what Democrats do when they appeal to the racial identity of African Americans and the gender identity of feminists and gays and transgenders, and the atheist identity of post-Christian educated liberals?

Look, all politics is about "us" and "them." Liberals do a politics of "us" as the educated elite and the marginalized races and genders and the "them" of deplorables.

President Trump is doing an "us" of America the nation, as in Make America Great Again. His "them" is unfair foreign trading nations, illegal immigrants. So his "us" is basically the whole of America except for the illegals.

Frankly, I'd say that Trump's idea of America is higher and nobler and more diverse and more inclusive than the liberal version. As Hillary Clinton so ably said, her division of America puts an irredeemable 25% of "them" beyond the Pale, because "you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables."

So what would Hillary Clinton say to Salena Zito's middle-aged woman in Grand Junction, Colorado, that has worked all her life at a candy factory, rising in 20 years from seasonal work as a contract worker to full-time work to supervisor to product manager?

What does Barack Obama have to say to her?

There is an old saying: live by the sword, die by the sword. I dare say it applies to a lot of other things, as in: "live by identity politics, die by identity politics."

Just saying.

Activism Culture Leads to "Spartacus Illusion"

Last week in the United States Senate we were privileged to experience a United States Senator, protected and privileged by the full power of the most powerful nation state the world has ever seen, likening himself to a 1st century BC Thracian slave, leader of a failed slave revolt: Spartacus.

Hey, How come a Jewish kid, Kirk Douglas, got to play Spartacus in the movie? Couldn't they find a Thracian to do the job?

This event excited me, because it puts the capstone on my "Activism Culture" concept.

My idea is that if you want to understand the left, and why every well-born good little girl from college wants to get into "activism," you need to understand the basic game that the left is playing.

We start with the warrant for government: It is to protect our people from the invaders. That is the warrant for any state. We must defend the borders from invaders that would come and steal our grain, kill our men, and ravish our women. If there is no such threat, then there is no warrant for government.

So if you are a well-born rich kid, with an urge to make a name for yourself, what do you do? What do you do when you live in a society that is basically at peace and where there is no threat from the Huns or  the Mongols? Moreover, in the modern state, we have separations of power, checks and balances, strict rules limiting the powers of the government that protect people from the power and pride of the ruling class. How is a rich kid to make a name for himself?

It was the genius of Marx and Engels to figure this out. You advocate for people outside the system that are not represented in the councils of government. Suppose you are a Captain Swing rioter, a landless agricultural laborer in Sussex in 1820 facing oblivion as you observe the farmers buying the new threshing machines that are going to put you out of a job and out of a livelihood. Do you go and talk to your local Member of Parliament? Hardly, because you don't have the vote. So your only option is the option of the cornered rat. You lash out, and smash the threshing machines, because the alternative is just to curl up and die.

In 1848, when Marx and Engels issued their Communist Manifesto, the workers did not have the vote. So the coolest thing that the son of a prominent lawyer and the son of a prominent textile manufacturer could do with their lives was to say: Yeah! We support the workers! Justice for the workers! And imagine themselves leading the workers through bloody revolution to the Happy Isles of emancipation and justice.

But as I keep saying, the rising bourgeoisie of the time, that was beginning to be the dominant political class, was not that interested in power. They were perfectly happy, with a bit of prodding, to give the workers the vote, and even submit to the workers' legislative agenda which would do nothing for good middle-class responsible citizens except raise their taxes.

Do you see the problem for the Marxes and the Engels? If the workers had got the vote, and thus their political views were getting a hearing, then there was no need for young rich-kid activists to lead them to revolution and death or glory at the barricades.

That's when we come to Leftism, Phase 2, courtesy of the rich kids of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s. They came up with the cool idea that activist rich kids should lead women and minorities, who were then without the vote and civil rights and were oppressed and exploited, to revolution and liberation and emancipation. Revolution Baby, was the cry of the lefty rich-kid followers of rich-kid Frankfurt School alum. Herbert Marcuse in the fabled Sixties.

But Oh No! The bourgeoisie led by noble liberals gave women the vote, and civil rights to non-whites, so just about everybody was not within the system, and could get the ear of politicians and the Man and didn't need to riot in the streets to get the attention of the ruling class. Now what?

Perfectly simple. Gays! It was monstrous that gays didn't have the right to marry just like heterosexual homophobes. But then gays got their gay marriage. So now what?

I know! The only people outside the system are now illegal immigrants and Muslims. So let's advocate for them and break down the barriers of hate and xenophobia and fill the streets with AntiFa and women's marches and cut the haters and the extremists off from social media!

Do you see the point? If there is no oppressed group outside the system there is no warrant for the clunking fist of government and no need for well-born rich-kid activists to mount the barricades for Justice!

And that would mean that well-born rich kids would have to get a job. Or do something much more difficult than the "activism" of spending other peoples money on politics: like doing the Peter Thiel thing of Zero to One. In other words the real hard thing to do is to find something that nobody has thought of and make it into a successful business, creating jobs for ordinary Joes and Janes and some fantastic new product for the masses.

But really! What well-born rich kid wants to do something that difficult? It's much easier -- and much more fun -- to get into politics and find something that needs the application of force, because you are fighting some existential peril. Something like climate change, refugee kids, or bike lanes, or plastic straws.

The point is that behind all these busy attempts to find something that justifies a political movement is the moral and ethical problem of being a well-born rich kid. How can you justify your lust for political power?

Even being a rich kid advocating for the underprivileged is a bit of a hokey thing. Charles Dickens could see it over a century ago with his Mrs. Jellyby who was all worked up about the plight of natives in Africa while neglecting her kids and the natives right there in London were shivering and going hungry.

So it is not surprising that the well-born rich kids reimagine themselves. They are not haughty Lady Bountifuls spreading charity among the poor and the homeless. Oh no. In reality they are fearless slaves challenging The Man: "I am Spartacus."

Only, of course, the well-born rich-kid activists are lying to themselves, lost in a Spartacus Illusion. Because They are The Man.

As any racist sexist homophobe deplorable can tell you.

Our Big Woman Problem. Again.

Over a century ago, the German sociologist Georg Simmel opined that women were going to change the world. Given the decline in the need for women to do domestic tasks by hand women would venture out into the public square, and inevitably they would change it.

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." 

Our modern default assumption is that this would be a "good thing," both for women and for men.

It is clearly coming to pass, for anyone that has eyes to see, and ears to hear, that in many ways the opposite is true, and I think that there is a simple reason for it.

The culture of women that has developed over the ages is supremely adapted for life in the domestic sphere, and maybe we needed the emergence of women into the public square to really understand this.

What is the supreme goal of the domestic sphere? Obviously, it is to keep everyone in the home alive, with whatever resources that can be obtained. So, even today with women running around in the public square, women are supremely interested in food safety. In keeping their children away from danger. In health care, health care, health care. Here is the foundation of the female Culture of Complaint. Whatever resources are provided by the man of the house to keep everyone alive, it is not enough, and so every woman is always complaining and needing more.

But what about the public square? Obviously, in the old days, it consisted of the men getting together to defend the tribal territory, unto the death. Notice the difference with the domestic sphere. In the domestic sphere, the woman must stay alive if she is to keep the others alive. But for men, they must keep the women and children alive by being ready to sacrifice their lives: men are expendable.

But now, in the modern public square, I think that the watchword is "get with the program, Jenkins." Whatever the market decrees, that is what you do. Whatever your employer needs, that is what you do. There are no sure things, no lifetime jobs, no guarantees. Just Do It. Thus the male Culture of Insult. If you are a man and expendable, and ever needing to get with the program, nothing is sacred, least of all oneself.

With these two ideas in mind, we can analyze the current scene. Here is a piece worrying about the coddling of kids: an interview with Jonathan Haidt. He comments, apropos trigger warnings and safe spaces:

Many people in children’s worlds want to be helpful, supportive, and empathetic. So if we try really hard to seek out the threats that young people face and protect them from those threats, aren’t we being nice? Aren’t we being helpful?

In other words, whatabout keeping everybody safe, as per the woman's goals in the private sphere? Well, it doesn't work, because humans come into the world as unfinished animals and they need to learn a lot before they are complete as adults:

It requires a lot of experience to finish itself. And that experience requires a lot of exposure to small challenges and small risks. It is essential that a young mammal take risks, get hurt, and learn about the effects of its behavior. 

So the more little children are protected from all the dangers of life the less they are prepared for the life after childhood. The reason we are facing this problem of an obsession with safety is that women coming out into the public square bring their culture of the private sphere of safety and staying alive and enforce it in the public square.

Then there is the sexual revolution. And of course we are seeing this week the parading of the Holy Grail, abortion, by the usual progressive suspects in the question of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. These activists don't seem to understand that abortion on demand licenses the unworthy man to say: just get rid of it.

My bigger point is that I don't think women do very well with the "get with the program" culture of the sexual revolution. Here's a tiny example from Suzanne Fields. College football player has what he thinks is consensual sex with a college co-ed, but.

The sweetheart described their sexual encounter to her roommate, remarking that he did not use protection against disease and pregnancy for a couple of seconds... [T]he roommate said that the couple of seconds was rape and reported it to campus authorities.

And the kid is suspended from school until the woman in question graduates.

Sorry Charlie, but women don't want "consensual sex," they want a relationship, and what we are seeing on campus and in the #MeToo movement is women nominally believe in the sexual revolution -- and remember legal abortion means that sex should have no consequences unless you want it to -- but in fact, from deep down inside them where their feelings live, they don't.

But because nearly all women are Good Little Girls they don't have the strategic chops to see around corners and realize that what they are being taught, that you can be a woman and compete in the public square just like a man, is straight-up rubbish.

Here's Christopher DeGroot weighing in on all this and quoting surveys that say that women are less happy than back in the 1970s. Golly! Who knew!

And the problem is that women are getting involved in a project to change the culture using the methods of the private sphere, manipulation and complaint, rather than the open outcry of the public square, insult and the open advertisement of goals, aims, and tendencies.

The problem, if you ask me, is that elite women need to be special, while the vast majority of women want to care for their families although they would like a part-time job to get them out of the house. Elite women are turning the culture upside-down so that they can be special. And they don't give a damn about ordinary women that have to live in the undertow of their elite fashionable specialness.

Of course, one of the reasons we got Trump is that the elite has been doing the same number on men for the last 50 years, and finally Trump came along and got deplorable men to believe that he "cared about people like them."

Maybe in another 50 years we will get Trump II when some candidate figures out how to speak to deplorable women and get them to believe that she "cares about people like them."

Tribalism in the Agricultural Age

In my Pure Theory of Tribalism installment I wrote about what tribalism really is: the culture and religion of hunter-gatherers in a small band occupying territory and needing to defend it.

But with the Dawn of Agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution about 12,0000 years ago humans started growing food in fields and they started living in bigger communities.

Actually, I imagine that most people still lived in villages, but their villages were no longer independent; they were subordinate to something else, and that something else was very often an agricultural empire. Think of all those Mesopotamian empires in the Fertile Crescent. And the grand-daddy of them all, the Old Kingdom of Egypt where they built the Great Pyramids at Giza to bury their Pharaohs. I suppose that back in the beginning of the fake tribe era it seemed really important to build up the upstart kings with monumental architecture.

In his Sources of Social Power, Volume 1, Michael Mann talks about "rank societies" where there

occurred a series of transitions, to agriculture, to the domestication of animals, and to permanent settlement, which brought humanity much closer to power relations. Stable, bounded, supposedly "complex" societies developed, embodying a division of labor, social inequality, and political centrality.

Obviously the tribe of the kindred was no longer the defining unit of meaning. What happened was that the tribal leader morphed into the great king, and the tribal shaman morphed into a semi-religious semi-secular priesthood that managed inter-village relations and that also came to be the prop and support of the great king. In these larger political units it was no longer necessary for all the men to be warriors. This became specialized into the job of "marcher lords" and their followers who patrolled the borders of empire: think Shakespeare's Harry Percy.

So what did these new rulers and priests do, sitting on top of these new hierarchies? They reinvented tribalism. No longer did each village have its warriors sworn to defend their tribe, but the king had his royal army of soldiers that owed loyalty to him and not to the local tribe. And the temple priests merged religion with kingship and diminished the role of the local shaman. Obviously all this congeries of humanity needed to be formed into a new demos that thought of itself as one people.

And as for the marcher lord and his own private army -- well, he became a problem for kings all the way down to the invention of modern armies and the point where no local baron could afford it.

So in the agricultural age the kings and the priests created a fake tribalism to try and get the local humans to belong to a fake tribe centered around the king, and religion became a routine affair that depended less and less upon the charisma of individual shamans and more and more on holy scriptures. Yeah. Proto-writing started about 9,000 years ago.

Let us develop this notion a little further. It is said that the natural size of a human community is about 120 persons. This is the size of the military company, the Roman century, and also the natural size of a fundamentalist church, where larger church communities tend to split in two. Thus any organization of a hundred people -- military, religious, or economic -- will need to create hierarchy and fake tribalism if it wants to get any bigger than about a hundred people.

An iconic attempt to create a fake tribe is the effort of the Twelve Tribes of ancient Israel to become the Chosen People of God: in other words to create a fake single tribe out of the twelve tribes of the kindred that used to obtain. It is fair to say that this Chosen People project has been a success.

The Roman Empire seems to have developed a balancing act where tribalism is concerned. It developed the cult of the emperor, but also allowed the conquered territories to continue their local affinities -- so long as there was no rebellion! But notice this: the Roman Empire financed itself with conquest and slaves. Each expansion involved loot and plunder and slaves from the helpless victims of the Roman legions, all of which enriched Rome and the soldiers that seized the loot and the slaves. So the old rules of tribalism still applied, only on a more limited scale, since all-in loot and plunder only applied beyond the border of empire.

Of course, all governments, then and now, practice a routine plunder on their own subjects, requiring taxes on anyone that works, and anyone that buys and sells. But we will not speak about that.

The problem then and now is how to invent new concepts of fake tribe to service the power project of the rulers as they propose to increase their rulerdom.

Let us look at two ordinary fake tribal concepts.

There is the notion of "race." In our era we tend to think of race on a very large scale: "whites" means all Europeans; "blacks" means people from Africa. Of course, "race" meant something different in the past. La Wik:

A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society. First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century the term race began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits. Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, that is, a symbolic identity created to establish some cultural meaning. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race is not an inherent physical or biological quality.

Translated, "race" is what the ruling class of the time wants it to mean, to categorize people as Ins and Outs, Us and Them. In other words, it is a fake tribalism.

And then there is "ethnicity." La Wik:

An ethnic group or an ethnicity, is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities such as common ancestry, language, history, society, culture or nation.[1][2] Ethnicity is usually an inherited status based on the society in which one lives. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language or dialect, symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art or physical appearance.

Can you spell fake tribalism?

The problem for any ruler is of course to bring disparate social groups into his power project, to invent a story that will get people to think of themselves as one people. One important means is religion, to get the community of the faithful to think of themselves as One People. It is said that the fierceness of Islam reflects the difficulty of uniting the warring tribes of Arabia into a single unit back in the day. We can understand the temptation of uniting church and state into a single unit, so beloved of all rulers down even to our modern lefties and their desire for the total state.

Now it is my contention that the modern era, industrial and post industrial, has required a whole new dimension of fake tribalism, and we in 2018 are right in the middle of an argument about what kind of fake tribe we want to be.

But that is a story for another day.

Liberal Freakout, Pt. 742

Why are the liberals freaking out about the Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court? Why are they freaking out about Donald Trump? Why are they freaking out about any conservative speech as "hate" speech?

Answer: it is because the liberal project is going wrong.

When a political project starts going wrong (and that goes also for religious and military projects too) the leaders of the movement amp it up. That is why you get Reigns of Terror a few years into a successful revolution. Things start going wrong, and the obvious and only reason must be, in the immortal words of the Bolsheviks, "saboteurs and wreckers."

And when the monster that runs the Reign of Terror dies -- as in Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- then you get rhe "Thermidorean Reaction:" the return, or at least the beginning of a return, to normalcy. That is because, as Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live in the frenzy of an ideological movement forever. Eventually they insist on returning to wiving, thriving, and surviving.

But notice the horrors that all the recipients of modern revolution had to go through. The French had to go through the Reign of Terror and then lose a huge war to the other nations of Europe. The Germans had to suffer through the humiliation of World War II and the guilt of genocide. The Russians had to go through 35 more years of economic stasis after the Death of Stalin. The Chinese finally got to start an economic renaissance after the horrors of Mao.

So I declare that the frenzy of our liberal friends is about the failure of their movement of the last century, in the words of Barack Obama, to effect fundamental transformation, because it was never going to work anyway.

That is because the so-called fundamental transformation has been a Great Reaction trying to resurrect the past, in the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation, and the neo-slavery of the administrative state.

And it was always bound to fail, because the modern industrial era needs less politics and government not more as the left honestly imagines. The reason is that the market economy adjudicates outcomes without the need for force, unlike the hunter-gatherer and agricultural era when a tribe's access to food-yielding land was not just everything but the only thing.

I understand why our liberal friends are beside themselves. Their brand of politics, for the last century, has been based on the educated ruling class having the last word about everything, and it turned out that required the educated ruling class should have the power to resolve all issues at the Supreme Court. So to lose power in the Supreme Court is to lose everything, because everything decided at the Supreme Court is a judicial ukase, not a compromise effected with the consent of the governed.

Instead, conservatives argue, the great questions of politics should be determined by politics, not the judges of the Supreme Court. The "originalist" movement that is associated with the Federalist Society proposes that Supreme Court supremacy is not what the founders intended. Nor, I would argue, is it a solution to any political problem.

Actually, I'd say that the doctrine of the "living constitution" and Supreme Court supremacy is an admission that big government is a bust. On the one hand, the results of elections cannot be guaranteed to yield the results desired by the educated ruling class, and thus the ruling class needs to have a way to annul the decisions of the voters. On the other hand the administrative state is a consequence of the ruling class making government a lot bigger than can possibly be supervised by 535 legislators. With gigantic national political programs from pensions to health care to education and welfare there is no way that mere legislation can resolve all the injustices that are bound to occur under the government's clunking fist.So you end up with adminstrative decrees and administrative courts and the whole unjust apparatus of the modern state.

Notice the hypocrisy. The educated ruling class agitates  to make government bigger, because justice.  Then it decides that government is now too big and complicated for the little guy to understand and therefore the little guy and his vote and his representative must be kept out of the loop.

Eventually ordinary people start to get pissed off by a government that looks after its own but does not look after the ordinary Joe and Jane. This is not rocket science.

But when the ordinary Joe and Jane start to object the well-born activists, the children of the functionaries of the administrative state, go wild. Because the rebellion of the Joes and Janes threatens their political power -- indeed their privilege -- and their assumed right to make all the decisions for the rest of us.

Now, I suppose it is naive of someone like me to hope that the old ruling class will give up its power and perquisites quietly in response to a couple of election results. After all, the notion of rule by  educated and evolved people from the right schools is the very faith and religion of our ruling class. So even if the Trump GOP party should win the midterms, as now seems unlikely, the old ruling class is not likely to go quietly.

And that is a pity, because, as illustrated in my Great Enrichment page, and in Factfulness by Hans Rosling and family, the last two centuries of the market economy have created prosperity and peace for billions of humans, and there has never been anything like it, ever. And, I would argue, this has all been achieved despite the best efforts of the educated ruling class.

So expect the liberal freakouts to continue, and expect things to get worse before they get better.

And, of Course, Tribes are Sexist

Just after I posted my Introduction fo Tribalism yesterday I happened to read a bit out of Factfulness, by Hans Rosling and family. And he raised at important point about tribes.

Hans was out in darkest Africa, setting up a test in a remote village, complete with blood analyzers and generators. He "was part of a team investigating an epidemic of the incurable paralytic disease called konzo[.]"

All of a sudden he realized that there was a crowd of villagers outside his tent, men with machetes, and they intended to kill him because he "meant to sell [their] blood." Hey, better be safe than sorry where those white devils are concerned!

Er, no, fellahs! We are just conducting tests!

Bit of a sticky wicket, what?

But it was all resolved by a 50-year-old woman who stepped forward, reminded the villagers about their measles shots a while back, after which the kids stopped dying of measles. Then she bared her arm, and said "Here Doctor. Take my blood." And everyone lived happily ever after.

So what does it mean?

It means that the job of tribesmen is to defend the border to the death against the tribe next door. The job of tribeswomen is to keep our kids alive.

I don't know if you have noticed. I do, now that I am older and spend a lot of time listening to women chattering with each other like magpies. They are interested in healthy food, to keep their loved ones, and especially children, alive and healthy. They are interested in clothes, in part for personal adornment, but mostly to make sure that everyone in the family has the right clothes so they won't get cold or hot or wet or sweaty or shivery: to keep people alive. And, of course, women are passionately interested in healthcare, to keep their family members, and especially children, alive.

So what was going on in that remote village in darkest Africa? The men were saying: kill the stranger before he steals from us. The women were saying: work with the stranger so he can help save our children and let them live.

So here are the basic facts of life at the tribal level. Men are fighters; women are lovers. Male honor is about bravely outdaring the dangers of the time by standing in line with the brothers on the border; female honor is about chastity, being a good little girl that does the right thing. Men are about killing the enemy, just to be safe; women are about saving lives, for the children. Men have a Culture of Insult, which I think is probably about chaffing other men and asking, hey, pal, are you really up to standing with the brothers? And women have a Culture of Complaint, which I think is all about prompting the rest of us to supply the food and clothes and medicine to keep family members alive.

I think that all this is important to realize -- to read, learn, and inwardly digest -- because this is exactly what humans were, up to 12,000 years ago. Since then, of course, things have changed radically, first with the agricultural revolution and second with the industrial revolution. But, if the settled science can be believed, we humans have not yet had a chance to evolve much beyond the instincts of the hunter-gatherer era. So that means that men are still fighters, and women are still lovers.

And that means, at the level of national politics, that men are focused on issues about defending the  homeland from border-crossers, and women are mostly focused on issues about keeping us all alive and well fed and healthy. Men say, like Shakespeare's Casca: Speak, hands for me. Women say, as I argue: I can't believe she said that.

Now, in our modern era, these gender-specific instincts are no longer dispositive; they may note even be socially useful. But that is, Who We Are, and who we will be, for many generations yet to come.

This is important, for anyone interested in politics. Because in a democracy a politician has  to appeal to voters  based on who they are. And who they are, by and large, is tribal men and tribal women.