The Amazing Ajanta Caves Near Aurangabad

Today we took a road trip from the city of Aurangabad -- beer, pharmaceuticals, and cars -- to the Buddhist caves near Ajanta. These caves were "discovered" by a British cavalry officer in 1819; of course the local people already knew about them. Maybe they didn't think the Brits ought to know about such things.

It took a couple of hours and more to get from Aurangabad to Ajanta because the road was under construction for the entire 100 km distance, apparently getting expanded from 2 to 4 lanes. You can imagine the traffic chaos of buses, trucks, cars, and motorcycles all dodging and weaving around the construction

About 30 caves were hewn out of a basalt cliff over the centuries, starting in the 2nd century BC. Typically, as you enter the cave you are confronted by a Buddha facing  the entrance across a square hall with columns around the walls to reduce the stress on the ceiling. Many of the caves feature rock-cut sculptures and decorations. But everything is chiseled out of the original basalt. Many of the caves have dry fresco paintings rehearsing the life of the Buddha.

It's all pretty impressive, especially as you go from cave to cave and see yet another Buddha -- or perhaps a stupa -- hacked perhaps 50 feet into the cliff, with columns and small meditation cells around the perimeter of the cave.

There were lots of people there, including a troop of noisy teenage school kids that wanted to do selfies with the exotic foreigners, which we were delighted to do. In fact, it was delightful to share the experience with people from all over the world, including China and the very Buddhist country of Thailand. We did selfies with some charming Thai girls on the bus that gets you from the parking lot to the caves and back.

Yes. It's travel in the modern age: nothing but selfies, selfies, selfies, with all and sundry from all over the world. Whatever will be next?

A Couple of Days in Mumbai

It's a long grind from the west coast to India, whichever way you go, and when you get there the time is twelve-and-a-half hours out of sync. with Pacific Time. We went through Frankfurt, Germany, flying Frankfurt to Mumbai in a big Lufthansa 747-8 with 80 percent Indians on board.

The most startling difference between the US and India is the street scene. Every street in Mumbai seems to be teeming with life: pedestrians, of course, and tuk-tuk cabs and motorcycles and endless traffic. And also a huge cavalcade of tiny stores stuck in front of larger buildings and street vendors everywhere selling from open-air stalls or simply occupying sidewalk space.

What is going on? What is the property situation with all the sidewalk hawkers of endless cellphone protectors and food and juice vendors that seem to just occupy space on the sidewalk?

And it seems like everyone is hard at work on some micro-business. Are these people migrants from the countryside, or smaller towns, or what? There seems to be no equivalent of this seemingly low-value-added business environment in the US. And every real store has a security guy at the door. Is that to police criminals or just keep loiterers away from the customers?

The answer is, of course, that most of the lower-end workers are migrants from the countryside. Kid comes to the city, starts sending money home to the village, and comes home for a rest after he's saved some money. Next time, another couple kids from the village go to the city with him.

And the traffic! It teems, whether in the city or the suburbs, an endless flow of motorcycles, tuk-tuks, cars of every description, and buses, trucks large and small, all jostling and tooting their horns and darting in front of the oncoming traffic and either starting a new lane between two lines of traffic or cutting off some guy that seems to be getting too aggressive.

The kind of Indians we meet, from the hotel breakfast room to the tour guide, all seem to have children who are either in the US working, or in the US going to college, or going to university majoring in IT of some kind. These must be the crème de la crème because the street world teems with people doing all kinds of other things.

When you see a political sign it is always in the local language. But high-end billboards for dream  apartments in new or projected high-rises are always in English. Signs for government and military installations are in both local and English language and all the government sign writers seem to have gone to British bureaucracy school.

Everyone mixes freely in the street, but the bearded Muslim men with white skull-caps and their black-clad wives are a distinctive contrast from the Hindu men that all have mustaches and wear western shirts or t-shirts and western pants or jeans. The Hindu women wear everything from saris to western pants -- but no bare-ass leggings yet, and clearly, the more young and educated the more western the dress.

Off to Bollywood, east of Goregaon in the outer northern suburbs. It's in a wooded hilly area, and the sets and studios are curiously weathered and run-down looking, with the usual dust and confusion and piles of debris that are ubiquitousin India. There's a film-city temple at the end of a road which can be painted and dressed up for any sort of religious song-and-dance ceremony. All curiously ordinary and day-to-day, considering the glamorous frenzy that Bollywood presents to the movie-goer. But ain't that the truth: Glamor is all make-believe, pal.

We took an early morning tour in downtown Mumbai, starting with the Sassoon Dock fish market run by the Koli fisherfolk that have been fishing off Mumbai for over 500 years. It's a view back to the past and an efficient distribution system that auctions fish right off the boat to women who then distribute the fish to their clients throughout the city. Then on to the newspaper distribution game just yards from the main railroad terminus, where guys sort newspapers for home delivery. Then the fruit-and-veg market, the chicken market, and the flower market.

A morning visiting the markets provides a view into a world that has been wholly swallowed by the supermarket system in the US, and reminds us that the "local" movement and its weekly farmers markets in the US are yet another liberal conceit, imagining that the low-wage jobs of the old system are viable in today's Amazon-impacted distribution system. Of course, the main reason why such a system has disappeared in the US is that people won't and don't work for the kind of wages you can get from this system of micro-distribution, and the welfare system means that people won't work until it becomes worth their while vis-a-vis what they can  get for free.

But you'd have to say that learning how to hustle in the street distribution systems of a place like  Mumbai provides a very solid education in How To Make It in the City.

All the time, as we drove around Mumbai and its suburbs, I was wondering who lived where. The guide this morning provided an answer. Anyone living in a building is middle class. The poor all live in shanty towns or the equivalent. So there is that.

Today we fly north to cave temples near Aurangabad.

All Politics is Identity Politics, Jonah

The subtitle of Jonah Goldberg's latest book, Suicide of the West, is "How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy."

So Jonah waffles into a column about people who have interviewed him on his book. Everyone is opposed to "tribalism" but "each side thinks only their opponents are guilty of it."

On nationalism, I get the most pushback from the right and the least from the left.

But what does he mean?

However on identity politics,

It's hard for many liberals to understand (or at least admit) that there might be something pernicious about dividing everybody up into categories of race, sex, ethnicity, etc. Meanwhile, many on the right struggle to see how their side might be guilty of doing the same thing.

 Of course the answer to this conundrum is that all politics is identity politics. All politics is division, dividing people up into our tribe and their tribe. Only, of course, our tribe/identity and its memes are good, while the other side's tribe/identity and its memes are bad and threaten the body politic.

All politics divides people into our tribe and their tribe, and all religion, including modern secular religion divides people up into the Chosen and the Rest.

Conservatives in general want to keep domestic politics down to a low roar, in accordance with their idea that government should be limited and politics just a disagreement among friends. But as for those Commies and those Islamofascists...

The left is the same only different.  For the left the question of justice is the only thing, and political power is the one best way to bend the arc of history. But as for the inordinate fear of communism and Islam, well, only racists, sexists, and bigots have a problem with that.

It all makes sense. On matters of life and death, or what we take to be matters of life and death, humans  are intensely tribal and deploy identity politics to rally supporters to their banner. On  other matters, we humans ask "what's your problem?"

It was the Founders and the writers that inspired them that proposed to build governmental institutions that would put roadblocks in the way of political and religious enthusiasts. Limited government and three co-equal branches of government were designed to keep the partisans busy reducing the other guy's idiotic plans to dust. And the separation of church and state were designed to prevent religious enthusiasts from invoking the power of the state in their establishment of a heaven on earth.

And, of course, there is the market, that puts its thumb very firmly on the scales of getting along and trusting the stranger.

I'd say that it's a shame that so many people cannot grasp the wisdom of the Founders and the market and instead live for the revolution and the triumph of the Chosen.

But nobody said that life was easy. And nobody is going to stop the other guys and their evil tribalism with the weapon of our sacred identity and vision of the truth.

Of Course Lefty UW Students Hate Conservatives

Imagine this: At the University of Washington in Seattle:

Many left-leaning students at the University of Washington-Seattle harbor feelings that Republicans and conservatives are "evil," "inhuman," or "not even a person," according to a new study led by a team of UW psychology professors.

Well, bust my buttons, who'd a-thunk it?

Well we know why. It's because the young heads full of mush were carefully taught exactly that! By their lefty professors. For college credit.

And by the way, let us not forget that forming a mob to take out some jerk you dislike is the most delicious thing in the world. And by the way, per Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the key tactics of the Bolsheviks was to portray their enemies as animals: insects, vermin.

Remember back in the day?

Back in the day, liberals were all wigged out about innocent Hollywood scriptwriters and directors being blacklisted -- blacklisted! -- because of their Communists sympathies. Back in the day liberal playgoers thrilled to lefty playwright Arthur Miller descanting on the horrors of witch-hunting in 17th century Salem with The Crucible -- not to mention the dead-end life of the salesman. Back in the day liberal musical-goers were nodding wisely at songs in South Pacifice about race and hate:

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

Get it? Nudge, nudge? Back to the Future? Witch-hunting of noble progressives, or Communists or socialists, horrible racism, or whatever the nom-de-jour for fashionable lefties was back then?

Actually, that "carefully taught" thing is more liberal baloney. According to the "minimal group paradigm" getting people to hate and to fear the people in the out-group is the easiest thing in the world. Humans are pre-programmed to hate and to fear! Any fool lefty teacher can make it happen!

And notice how the report on left-wing student bigotry mentions that, while all students became more tolerant during the study as they were mixed together with out-group students:

But when re-surveyed a month later, the students, especially liberals — who reported stronger feelings of manichaeism in the first place — basically went back to hating their political opponents.

Today liberals are engaged in ideological warfare on anyone that steps out of the progressive line. On anything. And you may not express your hate speech on social media. Because hate. And it is perfectly obvious that our liberal friends are absolutely clueless about what they are doing.

But I think that liberals are going to be surprised at what happens down the road.

See, I think that the reason that folks back in the day developed the idea of innocent until proven guilty, and rules of evidence, and limited government and freedom of speech is not because they were good guys but because life in any settlement bigger than a face-to-face village requires it. If you don't have those rules then you can't have a successful, prosperous society.

It's fine to have your vicious little lefty cult at the university but when you get out into the real world of capitalism you have to face the fact that you will deal every day with people who are not in your in-group. Then what? Are you going to put on your AntiFa artistical black gear and spit in their face? The overwhelming fact of capitalism is the idea of amicable transactions with strangers, people who most likely are not like you and do not like people like you. And that goes double with foreign trade. If you do not deal pleasantly and amiably with everyone then you ain't gonna rake in the bucks, and your employer is going to say Sayonara, pal, I can't use you. In capitalism, the pressure is on, every day, to get on with people, all people.

So I think that, despite the predictions of gloom and doom and predictions of secession and the splitting up of the US, pretty soon our lefty friends will find that their ideological reign of terror is going to be costing them big time.

Look at it from the perspective of the ruling class. For the ruling class, law and rules of evidence are really good for keeping the plebs down on the farm feeling that they can get justice at your ruling-class courts of law, and thus not starting to chafe under the injustice of a regime that does not care about people like them.

For the ruling class free speech means that you get to know about the dumb hotheads and potential troublemakers out there without having to spend a lot of money on FBIs and infiltrators.

For the ruling class, it is not such a good idea to have raving witch-hunters running around looking for racists, sexists and homophobes behind every Twitter user. People feel really resentful when their in-group members are being targeted by the well-born thugs of the regime. They might even start to grumble about injustice. Most people want to put the high-school mean girls and jocks behind them once they get out of high school. (Actually, mean girls and jocks are a good reason to abolish high school).

Again, the fact is that liberal in-group members have no clue, no clue, how their shenanigans play to the normals and deplorables. Only one thing will convince them: that their totalitarian tactics -- totalitarian? who me? -- turn off American voters and prevent good progressive folks from getting their hands on the all-important levers of power.

I reckon that the lefty Kavanaugh shenanigans probably cost the Dems a couple of Senate seats, and maybe the chance of retaking the Senate. Was that really worth it?

And, of course, even when they do get their hands on the levers of power it all turns to dust, because in the market age we don't need so much stinkin' political power. You'd think they'd get the point: Bolshevism: disaster and famine and massacre. Maoism: famine and terror and poverty. Fidelism: endless poverty and enslavement. Chávism: 20 percent economic contraction last year and the same this year. Are lefties really that dumb that they don't no nothing about historee?

But the truth is that religious cults are the most amazing high. The leaders and their henchmen and their inquisitors just love it. How do you penetrate their tiny minds and teach them to be sadder and wiser engines?

The Question is: What Us and Them Works for Us?

I've been writing recently about tribalism, and what I call "fake tribalism." I started out with the conventional notion that, in the old days, people were organized in tribes of the kindred, people related to each other by blood. I proposed that everything since then -- empires, nations, class politics, modern identity politics -- is fake tribalism, the transfer of the old idea of belonging from the tribe of the kindred to artificial tribes based on completely new ideas of belonging on a larger scale.

But then, reading C.R. Hallpike's How We Got Here, I realized that tribalism has always been a movable feast. Yes, the hunter-gatherer bands were defined by bands of the kindred, but if you got in a row with your band you could take off and join another one. Ditto with pre-state agricultural villages. Tribes were not cast in concrete, but merely sticky like porridge.

On Hallpike's narrative it was only with the invention of state-based agricultural empires that we get a rigidification of identity, and the mobilization of the various inhabitants of a region into a self-conscious people around whom arbitrary boundaries are set and from whom there is no exit. The boundaries were important, I suspect, because because most of the people in the agricultural era were serfs or slaves, a pretty universal characteristic of agricultural age culture.

Oh dear. That means that full-on tribalism only developed when it had already become fake, the various artificial creations of kings and Nietzsche's pals "the priests" of the great agricultural empires that were inventing fake tribes to match their glorious empires. Back to the drawing board. Now what?

Now what is the "minimal group paradigm" developed by Henri Tajfel. Tajfel discovered that you can set up any kind of artificial group -- say in a research project -- and the people in each group will immediately identify with and favor their in-group. That explains why, e.g., liberals all believe everything they read in the New York Times and NPR and know that everything in conservative land is racist sexist homophobic "hate" and conservative believe what they read on right-wing websites and know that all mainstream media news  is "fake news." Liberals know that people like them are outraged by Trump tear-gassing migrants at the border, and conservatives know that without a defended border you don't have a nation. Both groups define themselves in terms of the unconsciously agreed agenda among people like them.

I found this immensely liberating. For it means that you can create identity with anything. Identity doesn't have to be race or gender or class as we have been carefully taught. Identity can be anything. It is up to the founder of the identity to find people willing to identify with the new identity that he just created out of whole cloth. This happens most obviously with the founders of religious cults, a St. Paul or a Luther or a Calvin or a Joseph Smith. It also happens in politics with Marx inventing the new idea of "the workers."

It also happens with  the idea of "nation." Liah Greenfield proposes that the idea of the English nation began after Henry VII won the battle of Bosworth Field and created a bunch of nobles from the common folk. Used to be, in the "society of orders," that there were the higher orders like kings and nobles who defined the nation, and then there were the "people" in the lower orders. With Henry VII "people" and "nation" were merged. To put in in terms of my "fake tribalism" notion, Henry VII needed a new kind of fake tribalism to symbolize his new regime, and to define the boundaries of the in-group. He defined his fake tribe as the nation of England. Shortly thereafter Henry VIII completed the job of nation-building by disarming the nobles and creating a national army. Ever since, the national army in a nation has symbolized the nation.

In our time the global educated class wants to define identity as anything-but-nation. So they have invented a new "society of orders" with the educated ruling class as the savior activists, the middle class as the deplorable bigots, and the lower orders as helpless victims who the savior activists are called to save from racism, sexism, and homophobia.

If you want to dish the global educated ruling class you have to come up with something better, a political movement to which you can rally enough people to overpower the global educated ruling class. It is pretty obvious that this is going to be "nation." The only question is whether some damn politician can rally the middle-class deplorables beyond its base of the white male deplorables known for their racism, sexism, and homophobia by hiving off enough women and minorities into a larger identity of nation.

You can see that Donald Trump is trying to appeal to voters on  the basis of an identity politics of American nationalism while his opponents want to claim that his American identity politics is really the evil and divisive racist sexist bigotry of which you've heard tell.

The point that I get from the nationalism analysis of Liah Greenfield and the minimal group paradigm of Henri Tajfel is that you can create identity out of anything. Just get a bunch of people together and bind them together with a set of group identifiers. There is nothing that establishes for all time that kindred, or race, or sex, or nation is the natural form of identity. Humans are groupish and it is up to would-be group leaders to define the parameters of the group and create and grow that group.

Simply stated, all politics is tribal, and all politics is about "us" and "them." Humans are designed so that a leader can organize any group of them into a group of "us" and lead  them to war against the evil  "them." The only question is what works.

There are Two Kinds of Liberal Programs

Way back in the dim and distant past Irving Kristol, the father of the one we know, wrote that if you want to help the poor with government programs, you have to deal in the middle class. Unfortunately, that piece of wisdom doesn't appear on Google Search, so everyone has forgotten about it. Except me.

The idea is that if you want to help the poor in old age with a pension program then you'd better make the pension program include the middle class, as Social Security did. Otherwise no-go.

The corollary of this theorem is that it is impossible to reform entitlement programs because doing so will negatively impact the middle class.

Armed with this vital knowledge I remember in 1993-94 thinking that HillaryCare would never fly because the middle class already had health insurance. In other words, there was no way that the Dems could deal in the middle class with their program to beef up health care delivery to the poor, because the middle class had already got what they wanted. I remember the day I heard on NPR the liberal women reporters marveling that ordinary Americans didn't like HillaryCare, because they didn't see how it would benefit them. In fact I remember exactly where my car was at that moment: it was on the I-5 Ship Canal Bridge in North Seattle.

Thus, in 2009-10, President Obama had to lie his head off about Obamacare promising that the average person would benefit and that they could keep their doctor. And Nancy Pelosi had to frog-march the moderate Dems through the lobbies to get them to vote for it. And the Dems had to do some shenanigans in the Senate to get it through. And then the Republicans won back the House  in  2010 with the biggest "wave" in decades and nearly all those moderate Dems lost their seats.

Now to the present time. Do you notice that almost all the stuff liberals are pushing is stuff that benefits some liberal identity group but that does not deal in the middle class?

There is illegal immigration and open borders. Almost no average American citizen, white, black, or Hispanic supports this. Really, only lefty activists and their billionaire supporters favor Open Borders.

There is Muslims. Ask any non-Muslim in America, and I bet they'd tell you that Muslims should get with the program. But all the liberals are running around expostulating about Islamophobia.

There is LGBTQ. Really, nobody outside the educated class has a clue what all the fuss is about. As I say, LGBTQ is about getting creative about sex (because we are all creative, right?) and the only people into that are the People of the Creative Self of my reductive Three Peoples theory. And now, according to Ben Shapiro, a transgender has insisting on joining a gym -- would that be Curves? -- that caters for women that prefer not to have men floating around. Of course the trans man-to-woman wants to change in the women's changing room. Of course. Ask any woman in America what she thinks of that!

There is climate change. This is yet another elite plan to kick the middle class out of their cars and force them into buses and trains. Who benefits?  All the scientists and regulators in the educated class that get grants and lifetime employment out of the scam, and also crony capitalists that know how to play the subsidy game for electric cars, wind and solar. But ordinary Americans get screwed.

See, I think that our liberal friends think that they got their pensions and health care and education programs enacted because of their glorious virtue, because justice and the arc of history. But really their programs were just bribes paid to the middle class. So our liberal friends don't really get that today's lefty agenda has a fatal flaw: it doesn't benefit the middle class.

Notice the left's response to their quandary: to deplatform anyone that disagrees with them and banish them from the public square as a racist, sexist homophobe. This strategy shows that instinctively, liberals understand that their agenda is unpopular and that the only way to advance it is by totalitarian oppression of the opposition. It may work for a while, but I predict that in the end it will create a huge movement of rejection, boiling with a sense of injustice, that overwhelms the left in a vast realignment of politics.

Yeah. There are two kinds of liberal programs: the ones that deal in the middle class and the ones that don't. And I think that a clever politician ought to be able to figure out how to take that all the way to the White House and a fundamental realignment of the electorate.

Understanding World History Through the Lens of Nationalism

Just as the foolish and superficial Emmanuel Macron of France declares nationalism bad, patriotism good, Liah Greenfield writes "The World That Nationalism Made" in American Affairs. "Nationalism is the cultural framework of modernity," she writes.

She also wrote a book about it: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1992) and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2001). Maybe I should take a look.

How did nationalism start, Greenfield asks? With Henry VII in England after the Wars of the Roses.

The [Wars of the Roses] was protracted, but it is enough to mention that, by the time it ended in 1485, both branches lost all their males, and the English feudal aristocracy was physically destroyed. A very distant relation of the Lancaster branch took the throne as the Tudor king Henry VII. In need of an upper class, he soon recruited a new aristocracy from the common people.

So, the old ideology of the "society of orders," of blue-blooded aristocrats versus the "lower orders," got ditched. Here were all those newly minted aristocrats, who just yesterday were just commoners. What did it all mean? The world demanded an answer.

Nationalism was the answer to this demand. It resulted from a linguistic-semantic innovation: the equation of two terms that had previously belonged to two unconnected semantic fields: people and nation. The specific meaning of the word “people,” as discussed above, was “commoners,” the lower classes. The word “nation,” meanwhile, meant an elite, representatives of cultural and political authority.

So in Britland "people" and "nation" became the same thing, because the people, the commoners, had become part of the elite, "representatives of cultural and political authority."

Jolly good fun for the Brits, but in due course other peoples got to feel resentful, because they were not organized as nations and they felt depraved on account of they were deprived: French, Germans, Russians, and now, of course, Arabs.

Want to understand the problems of the world for the last 200 years? It is about folks wanting to be nations and hating the world that don't give them no respect.

But what about China? China, writes Greenfield, is finally defining itself as a nation.

In the last three decades, nationalism has finally taken root within China’s giant population, animating this previously inert, enormous mass of humanity with competitive, nationalist motivation. For the first time in its long history, China demands from the world the dignity due to it, and insists on being recognized by all as the Middle Kingdom.

But China is not filled with Nietzschean ressentiment.

China, however, is different from most other participants in this competition: it belongs to another civilization. Unlike Russia, unlike Arab countries, it has never seen the West as a model. It does not envy the West, and so, ultimately, could never consider itself inferior to it. Its identity is self-sufficient, and its internal dignity does not depend on the respect accorded by the West. For this reason, it can borrow from the West piecemeal, customizing its imports in the process.

Well. That's encouraging. And what about India? My experience of Indians is that they are untroubled by comparison with the West. They seemed to shuck off British rule with remarkable sang-froid, inventing their own Indian National Movement that successfully threw off the British Raj with astonishingly little violence.

The problem is the western elite, which does not understand the national idea -- and the resentments felt by those playing catch-up -- and imagines itself high above such mean and pitiful things.

The spark that ignites the mixture of inferiority, envy, and desire for recognition, which feeds ethnic nationalism, is being lit by the delusional thinking of Western elites. These elites, ignorant of and unwilling to learn from history, refuse to understand nationalism, disregard the psychological dynamics behind it, and continue to rationalize their existence via a belief in a History with a grand purpose. 

So our western elite doesn't have a clue. But we knew that.