Now the Lawyers Want to Do Diversity and Inclusion

About 130 years ago Friedrich Nietzsche imagined a world Beyond Good and Evil.  He railed against "the priests," starting with Zoroaster in what we now call the Axial Age. Nietzsche thought it was a very bad thing to repress our natural and healthy tribal hate for the other and instead turn the hate against ourselves, as in Original Sin.

Now, I have to say that I disagree with Fritzi on this, because I think that the idea of Original Sin and Divine Justice was pure genius, because it taught humans living in cities not to blame the other guy all the time and stick a knife in his ribs just to make sure, but to think that maybe the problem starts at home! For city life depends on getting along with strangers, giving the stranger the benefit of the doubt, giving him a chance to prove his good faith before deciding to stick him in the ribs.

Nietzsche prophesied the Overman, the creative chap that rose above good and evil and realized that the real meaning of life, the universe, and everything was to boldly go where no man has gone before, to coin a phrase.

But in fact in many ways the opposite has happened, as government force and religious doctrine have combined in various totalitarianisms to force a single truth about Good and Evil on all humans or else. And you had better not boldly go anywhere without checking with the local SJWs.

You know what we are talking about. There was one totalitarianism that prophesied Workers Good, Capitalists Evil: 20 million dead. Then there was the totalitarianism that prophesied Aryans Good, Jews Evil: six million Jews dead. Now we have the totalitarianism that prophesies Activists Good, Deplorables Evil. There is no telling, yet, what the death toll will be.

So it is clear that we have not got Beyond Good and Evil. Not yet.

Nietzsche prophesied the Death of God, and maybe he was right, but it seems, at the very least, that God has been replaced by a whole underworld of demons. I'm not convinced that the change has been beneficial.

Put it this way: the God of the Bible may have died because fashionable educated people that write books stopped believing in Him, but the need for religious belief has not died.

Don't believe me? Then what in the world do the #WeBelieve yardsigns that sprouted in every liberal front yard after the Trump win in 2016 mean?

These are all religious beliefs, from racist and sexist religious beliefs to immigration religious beliefs, and a curious superstition that the realist world view that went out in the Enlightenment is still valid. Earth to liberals: we have had about three scientific revolutions since the realism of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas went out of style!

Now I have no problem with liberals believing anything they want. What I don't like is that today liberal secular religious dogma is enforced as a kind of orthodoxy of the State Church of the Educated Class, where you had better bang your head on the floor, as the Chinese used to do in front of the Son of Heaven, or else no job for you.

Put it this way. In the bad old days of "the priests," there was at least a nominal separation between the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. But in our modern world, where the enlightened and the educated fondly believe in an "ethical" community, the enlightened and the educated are stupid enough not to understand that they just mean by "ethics" that people like them will make the rules about good and evil, and you'd better not be caught on the wrong side or else.

So, a friend sent me a couple of links here and here about bar associations in the US and Canada instituting professional requirements for "diversity and inclusion," so that law firms would be required to hire lawyers in accordance with some sort of notion about race and gender representation.

Guess what, counselor. That is racism and sexism, straight up. And since it diversity in lawyering will not be Good for the Jews, it is also anti-semitism, straight up.

Back in the good old Sixties when we passed the Civil Rights Acts, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) got into hot water because he refused to vote in favor, on the grounds that the acts did not merely require government to stop discriminating, but private individuals too. As a libertarian, he believed that ordinary citizens have a right to discriminate. The problem was and is government that has and always will discriminate in favor of its supporters and against its opponents.

So if you are going to have a Civil Rights Act, it would be a good idea for it to state that government shall not discriminate on the basis of race or gender, period.

We can see that Barry was right, because the de-facto situation in the United States today is that government discriminates all over the place in favor of its racial, gender, and illegal alien clients in a blatant program of discrimination, whereas ordinary citizens are forbidden to discriminate on pain of administrative harassment by liberal-dominated Human Rights Commissions. And that is unjust.

The dirty little secret about discrimination is that most eevil businessmen will set aside their prejudices if the price is right. They may not like black homeboys, but if the homeboy works for less than a nice little teenage white girl, well... And who knows? If the homeboy puts his shoulder to the wheel and learns how to charm the customers the racist sexist homophobe of an employer might even hire one of the homeboy's buddies. By the way, businessmen also hesitate before hiring a minority because firing minorities can end up costing an arm and a leg if the minority decides to protest the firing by filing a complaint to the local civil rights commission. Just saying.

The only good thing is the historical record. It suggests that the kind of moral panic we are experiencing today is bound to be short lived. The various manias that flesh is heir to tend to exhaust themselves because humans cannot live forever at fever pitch. Eventually they instinctively return to wiving and thriving, which is their real life work.

And here is my idea on Good and Evil. The really bad stuff, like murder and mayhem, we punish with the criminal law. But lesser evils, like first trimester abortions, we deputize to priests and counselors selected by the sinners themselves, as in a church community. We do not give the priests of a conservative church the power to punish members of a liberal church. And we do not, as now, give the activists of the liberal Church of Progressive Wokeness the power to punish disreputable Deplorables.

Now that is what I call civilized.

The Inevitability of Identity Politics

Steve Sailer explains our Democratic friends as the Coalition of the Fringes. Or the Margins. It is really simple. As I say, politics is division, between Us and Them. We know who We are, so the only question is to decide who They are. Now, imagine that you have constructed a Coalition of the Fringes, of blacks, women, LGTBs, Jews, and Muslims. OK, fine we know who We are. What about They?

While our society’s growing hate hysteria against straight white men may seem a bit demented, it is actually a logical requirement of the fundamental strategy of the Democratic Party: to mobilize a Coalition of the Margins comprising identity groups—such as blacks, transgenders, Muslims, and Jews—who don’t have much to unite them other than their resentment of old-fashioned Americans.

As they say, this isn't rocket science. Tribal politics is as old as the hills, and it has a very good and ancient purpose, to unit Our People to defend Our Food-giving Land.

As I keep writing, all this ancient tribal instinct and wisdom was swept away by the industrial revolution that made the "patch of land" sneered at in Fabian Essays in Socialism as the horrid forerunner of today's awful property system into an afterthought.

It's an odd thing to ponder. The origin of our modern property fetish was the survival importance of land, and yet now, when food-growing land is no longer a matter of life and death, we have planted its seed and grown a whole tree of property rights and culture to take its place.

In the old days of the "patch of land" there was a simple division between Us and Them. Us is the tribe of people occupying our patch of land. Them is the tribe next door that might challenge Us for possession of the patch of land. Them was the people We might have to fight to hold onto Our patch of land and its life-giving food.

But didn't the We ever descend into fratricidal conflict? No doubt We did, but as the anthropologists point out, We have hierarchy to discourage the war of all against all. In the old days, society was clearly defined by its order of rank, and so internal conflict was kept to a necessary minimum. It had to be if the society was to preserve its strength to defend its patch of land from the dangerous Them next door.

The thing is that now, with the old order of rank demolished in favor of equality, the social hierarchy is much more uncertain; it makes sense that more people than before would be tempted to challenge the hierarchical status quo to find out where they really stood in the hierarchy and how they might rise through a little strategic conflict.

And there is another thing. If the old conflicts over the patch of land are no longer, would not humans maintain their old instinct to defend themselves and their kind from existential peril, and negotiate their place in the hierarchy in a new way?

This is how I am starting to try to understand identity politics. It just makes sense that if the old order of rank has broken down with the modern notion of equality then people will renegotiate hierarchy in a new way.

When you think about identity politics the question of the Jews comes up immediately, because Jews have, down the centuries, tended to maintain themselves as a separate religious and tribal entity even while living as minorities all over the world. Think about it. Jews have managed to survive as a cultural and religious identity even though they have not had their own state since Roman times.

How do you do that?

We tend to view the Jewish question through the lens of anti-semitism, in the way we have been carefully taught, as a scandal of hate and fear. But I think we should realize that it makes complete sense that a nation or other political entity would turn on an identifiable minority in a time of crisis. In a crisis you need unity, and the way you get unity is by defining and mobilizing people against an enemy.  An  internal enemy is  very convenient because you don't have to go to war with them as  you often do with an external enemy. At the other pole, it makes complete sense that a minority group would maintain its identity and unity with a culture of siege, that the whole world is ganging up on it.

That is what our liberal friends do to mobilize their Coalition of the Fringes for political warfare. They mobilize their folks by whipping up anti-white-male-ism. Each member of the Coalition of the Fringes is encouraged to believe that any moment the whole white-male patriarchy might descend on them.

Of course, for the moment our liberal friends maintain their anti-white-male-ism culture by making it a vile hate-crime for any white male to object to his ghettoization as the fount of all evil. This is immensely cunning, since it makes it almost impossible for any white male to object. And this is similar to the Jews and anti-semitism. It is extremely effective to marginalize anyone that criticizes Jews as a vile anti-semite until the moment that it doesn't work anymore.

Put it this way. Once you have demolished the old feudal order of ranks and substituted the current political culture of identity politics then you are living in a world where everyone is taught to be terrified that if the Other Guys ever get power then it is "curtains" for Us and people like us.

Hey! That explains the #Resistance against President Trump. Our liberal friends have been taught to hate and to fear everything about the racist sexist homophobe deplorables who were, every one of them, poised to descend on the helpless victims of the Coalition of the Fringes as soon as they got the  dog whistle from their racist sexist homophobic leaders. So of course, when Donald Trump won the 2016 election our liberal friends panicked!

I suppose you could say that the old feudal order of ranks has been replaced by an economic order of ranks. In the market economy you are ranked by your net worth as a measure of your value to other market participants. No doubt that explains why our lefty friends have made such a point over the last 150 years of attacking any notion that the verdict of the market is right and just. The whole point of the left is to contest the current order of ranks as injustice, and to keep their Coalition of the Fringes in fear and trembling. The left wishes, through a battle of the identities, to renegotiate the social and economic hierarchy.

Remember in the good old  days when our liberal friends castigated us for our inordinate fear of Communism?

All good clean fun, but I worry about the day when those notorious white males no longer agree to carry the sins of the world on their shoulders.

Nietzsche Liked Europe; Zweig Liked Europe, So...

So here we are with the Brits facing a March 29 deadline on whether to bail out of the European Union.

Really, anybody who is anybody has been pro-European for over a century. So what is the deal? Europe good; nationalism bad! Get with the program, deplorables.

Yeah. Bad boy Friedrich Nietzsche -- the chap that good little girls in the media know was "the Nazis' favorite intellectual," because... Yes, because they have been carefully taught, from year to year, in their good little ears -- was pro-European and sneered at German nationalism.

And I have just finished a memoir by Stefan Zweig, a smart (and rich) Jewish kid and mid-20th-century writer from Vienna, who writes proudly that his "ideas have always been European and not nationalist" and about "the belief in intellectual unity".

But suppose that this notion of a European intellectual community shared by all the great and the good is the root of the problem? Think of it.

First of all there is the language problem. The nations of Europe all speak different languages. I don't know how you create a political community out of communities that don't speak the same language.

Then there is the top-down problem, the conceit of the "European intellectual community" for the last several hundred years that they are the smart people in the room. Really? How would we tell?

From my perspective, I would say about intellectuals: Locke good. Rousseau bad. Montesquieu good. Hume good. Marx bad. But I realize that millions in the "European intellectual community" disagree with me. So who is right?

Well, there is the advice of St. Matthew warning about false prophets: by their fruits you shall know them. I'd say that 100 million dead is a pretty good verdict on Rousseau and Marx. I'd say that the US of A is a pretty good fruit for the Lockes and the Monesquieux and the Humes.

Just sayin'.

One of the key factors in the amazing Great Enrichment of the last 200 years when real per capita income in places like the US increased by 30 times, is that the successive economic and technological and financial revolutions were not decreed from above. They were the result of nobodies with a good idea that, against all probabilities, made it to the big time.

What they were not, almost always, were fashionable ruling-class pet plans offered as a national goal to which all heads would bow. I am thinking Green New Deal.

The basic mindset in the notion of the European intellectual community is that big changes are born of big minds with big ideas. It stands to reason, doesn't it, that we can't just blunder into the future; we need well-worked-out plans using settled science and the best minds in the world.

Quite. Except that was the line of the Marxists and the Fabians. They had a horror of people just going out and doing stuff without the proper forethought.

Except that the grand plan of a California bullet-train just got shelved by uber-liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom. Because all the grand planning added up to a big fat zero.

We humans long for a world of perpetual piece, where hardship and struggle have been eliminated, where people can finally live together in harmony.

We imagine the perfect community where people all work together for the good of all.

The joke is that while the great and the good of the last two centuries have been conjuring up grand plans to transform society and usually filling the graveyards with victims, the market economy, of individuals conjuring up new ideas and submitting them to the verdict of the market, has transformed human life beyond recognition. And all it takes is for the great and the good to get the heck out of the way and stop trying to boss everyone around.

And nobody saw it coming.

And yet here we are, raising up good little girls like Sandy the bartender and carefully teaching them the ideas that have yielded poverty and death every time they were tried. And because they are good little girls they believe everything they were taught.

We don't need a European idea. We  don't need a planetary idea. We just need people to go about their business and accept the verdict of the market -- as modified by common-law judges trying to pick up the pieces after something goes wrong.

But what would the European intellectual community do then, poor things?

The Left's Power of Silence

Here's a piece by a teacher in New York City's public schools that finally couldn't take it any more. As I understand it the problem is that the refusal of school officials to enforce discipline has led to a culture where the students passively resist any and all learning. They talk among themselves; they don't do homework; and they punish students that do want to learn. And the teachers are unable to do anything  about it.

Of course,  the Obama administration's policy of stigmatizing high discipline rates among minority students has a lot to do with this problem. Education bureaucrats found themselves under a mandate to reduce discipline numbers for minorities and so they did.

But where are our journalistic truth-seekers on this?

We see endless media about the sorrows of  poor LGBT sufferers but not a word about the collapse of marriage and work in the underclass. Remember, Charles Murray's Coming Apart noted merely that among white people the lowest 30 percent of men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much. Coming Apart was about white people because Charles Murray had been ritually humiliated by making the point in The Bell Curve that in a knowledge economy that rewards intelligence any racial groups with sub-par IQ was going to lose out. To write this was accounted the worst racism in the world. So in his next book Murray wrote about how white people below the salt were getting screwed. No racism here, no sir. Now the only people that talk about it are racist sexist homophobes like me.

Where are our journalistic truth-seekers on this?

We have had full-on interest that amounts to mob action in respect of a possible sexual assault by a teenager in connection with a Supreme Court nomination. But we do not see much passion in defenestrating Ralph Northram, Democratic Governor of Virginia and other Democratic state officials in Virginia.

Where are our journalistic truth-seekers on this?

The fact is that today's journalists follow along on the latest left-wing activist enthusiasm, and nothing else. We are seeing breathless coverage of Lefty's Green New Deal, which would basically put the United States on a war footing, with the entire economy drafted into the ruling class's war on fossil-fuel energy. You can see the effectiveness of the campaign. CampusReform sent a cameraman out to interview students about the Green New Deal. The kids were all in favor of the Green New Deal until they found out what was in it. So, in their day-to-day lives these youngsters had heard about the Green New Deal, but not what was in it.

Where are our journalistic truth-seekers on this?

It's a big problem. The only thing we get to hear about are the left's current enthusiasms, for racial justice, for gender justice, and environmental justice. We don't hear much, e.g., about how minimum wages hurt low-skilled minority youth.

But we don't hear a discouraging word about the cratered public schools.  We don't hear a peep about the cultural and economic wasteland of the underclass. And we don't hear a peep about corruption in the left-wing ruling class.

There is a perfectly simple reason for this. Our journalists are mostly left educated, and they basically go with the left agenda -- for instance the #WeBelieve agenda of race, environmental, gender, and immigrant rights. All other matters in the world are uninteresting or embarrassing, so the journalists don't cover them.

Most ordinary people -- including the educated classes -- don't encounter anything outside the day-to-day media. And they don't actually "read a book." Stacy McCain, who keeps an eye on LBGT madness so we don't have to, inadvertently scored a bulls-eye on this:

Incidentally, here’s something about me: I don’t watch YouTube videos. If you want to tell me something, write it. For any literate person, reading is far more efficient than listening to the spoken word. I am an extremely fast reader, and could fully comprehend the transcript of an entire 15-minute video in less than two minutes, and why should I waste that additional time? 

I agree. But the fact is that most people are more comfortable with the spoken word. They don't read books!

But, if people don't read books then all they know is what is pumped into their brains from various media. So if they are kids, they just know that the Green New Deal is a cool idea. They know that racism is the worst thing ever. They know whatever is being pumped out, courtesy of the various activists and publicists.

And whatever the left is not advocating about doesn't get discussed. Nobody even knows about it.

And that is a problem.

Donald Trump Pivots to "Father of His Country"

They say there are only two kinds of presidential elections. There is "Four More Years" and there is "Time for a Change." And that is all.

When you are fighting a Time for a Change election you are necessarily running as a heroic band of insurgents against a corrupt, cruel ruling class. You are admitting that you are an embattled minority, but by God, you have justice on your side!

It must be admitted that Donald Trump did a super job of winning a Time for a Change election in 2016 by sticking it to the ruling class, first in the Republican Party and then in the nation at large -- and living to tell the tale. I think that each of the two parts of this equation are just as important -- sticking it to the ruling class as well as living to tell the tale. If you can do both it implies a superhuman power or amazing luck or the special favor of the gods. All of these notions are very powerful and convincing to  humans. We like to follow people like that.

But now the president is running as the Four More Years guy, and that is completely different. Now he wants to make like he is the Father of his People, a Uniter not a Divider. He wants to make like he unites all Americans under his paternal aura and that it would be unthinkable for any brash upstart  to challenge him and the larger American community and sow dissension across the fruited plain.

So that is what all the stuff in the President's SOTU speech is all about. He is celebrating everyone, Jews from the Holocaust, blacks let out of jail, brave Hispanic servicemen. Even women! Getting more jobs than ever before! Because we are all Americans. We are all in it together. We all love our beautiful land and our beautiful people. Don't let anyone spoil it.

And then there is Borders and Babies.

Personally, I think that the Democrats are fools not to give the president his way on the Wall. It would be much better for them if The Wall and Defending Our Borders were not an issue any more. Why? Because the Number One job of government, any government from the village Big Man to the Nation State, is protecting The People by Defending the Borders. This is deep enough that it ought to be a Jungian archetype. It probably already is.

And Babies. One notable consequence of socialism and big government is women having less babies. My guess is that any political community that expects to endure is a political community that values babies very highly and that names and shames anyone that is deficient in the baby-making department. We all love babies; they embody our hope for the future. Of course, the modern swerve away from babies, including the sexual revolution, divorce, and abortion, is a trend that cannot long endure.

I explain the move away from babies in my Three Peoples theory by the notion that for People of the Creative Self meaning is created by the original creation in art, science, letters, business, politics. And not in the more primitive creation of babies, darling, like any common deplorable.

Yep. President Trump is in favor of Borders and Babies, and the Democratic Party is not. I think that this is a monumental divide that may result in President Trump getting the first 60-40 popular vote since Our Ronnie.

You know, Barack Obama could have done that as president, because everyone wanted to be part  of the First Black President. But Obama is a fool, his mind warped by lefty ideology, and so he threw away the opportunity for the Democrats to become America's party.

See, my idea is that you play identity politics when you are in the minority, by trying to hive away various races and genders from the great American community. Once elected, Obama, the fool, practiced identity politics when he could have strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage as the glorious and bountiful harvest of the civil rights era, the Great Uniter that represented everything good and great about America.

But lefties think that America was never great. Really? The nation that had a civil war to end slavery? That fought wars to conquer Nazism and Communism? That enacted civil rights for all Americans? That became the city on a hill that everyone wants to call home? The richest country in the world. That America was never great?

But what do I know?

The Problem of Creative People and Power

The problem about being a creative person, our People of the Creative Self, is that it is hard. And what do humans tend to do when something is hard? We get tempted to take a short cut.

I think that this fact tells us a lot about the educated ruling class of the last 100 years. Oh yeah! Poor old working class, having a tough time in the factories and the sweat shops of the industrial revolution! Let's transform the political system to give them justice! 

Good idea, creatives. Now it happens that the working class of the 19th century was well into developing their own solution to the problem, with labor unions, fraternal associations, mechanics institutes: bottom-up human associations run by the people themselves. So why not help them raise their game with their own authentic institutions?

Somehow, that thoughtful and compassionate project got lost in the enthusiasm for what our last  president called "fundamental transformation."

You can see why. Where is the starring role for what was called in the 19th century "Educated Youth" in a mild project to recognize and support the authentic institutions of the workers? Intolerable! So now we have a massive administrative state that features lots of lovely jobs and power for educated people. And we have an activism culture in which educated people get to pretend like the rioting "lower orders" and call their riots "peaceful protest." Because justice!

But I would like to ask: what is creative about the administrative state? And what is creative about the activism culture and its "peaceful protests?" If you ask me, the love affair that the People of the Creative Self have with politics and protest is about 90 percent the love of power and merely 10 percent the love of  creating a new world of justice.

Because anyone with half a brain understands my maxim that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. The obvious illustration of that truth is when someone goes to law after being tortiously harmed by another. There is obviously nothing the legal system can do to erase the harm and the injustice of the tort. The only possible outcome is some recompense that the victim will rightly say is a poor substitute for never having suffered injustice at all.

When I last discussed the Three Peoples and power I did not mention Nietzsche. That half-mad philosophizer has been carefully pigeon-holed as "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." So don't pay him no never mind, if you are a good little boy or a good little girl that has been carefully taught to hate and to fear anything that our ruling class finds uncomfortable.

I can see why. I interpret Friedrich Nietzsche as the prophet of the People of the Creative Self. He is saying that if you want to be creative you have to be hard. You also have to cast off the Christian culture of Good and Evil. That's because the creative project necessarily goes Beyond Good and Evil. It accepts the basic fact of all living things: the will to power; my life and my posterity over your life and your posterity. If I am to create something new, well, I will have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is perhaps better understood in the Jungian notion that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin; if you are working on a creative project then you are also involved in project to destroy something else.  This was made obvious for the economic sphere when Joseph Schumpeter wrote about capitalism being "creative destruction."

It's curious that our educated ruling class makes a big deal about protecting people from the ravages of the capitalistic creative projects of businessmen but never confront the issue of protecting people from the ravages of their creative projects, in art, in politics, and in culture.

If you seek examples of this problem, just look around you. There are plenty of people in the ruling class that insist that Donald Trump's program of higher tariffs is a destructive disaster. It's a good point. Does his program protect the American people from Chinese economic aggression, or does it beggar us all with the kind of economic war that made the Great Depression worse than it might have been?

OK. So what about Medicare For All? Does it deliver good health care for all Americans, irrespective of  wealth and income, or does it demolish the health care system by making it into a rigid bureaucratic hell? 

What about the Democrats' Green New Deal? Does it get us off the road to disaster by ending "carbon pollution?" Or does it destroy the economy by assuming that increased carbon dioxide (presently a trace gas at 0.4% of the atmosphere) will end life as we know it? And does it ignore that in a century we will likely have found new, presently unimaginable, forms of energy, that makes our current worries seem ridiculous? Do we really know enough about the Earth's climate to justify the gigantic political and economic project of completely transforming the energy economy in a decade? What are the creative possibilities, and what are the destructive possibilities? And what about the Precautionary Principle?

You can see that it doesn't take too much intellectual horsepower to see that the driving force behind all the creative projects of the educated ruling class is the delicious rush of the creative process. Let's make the world anew! And let's put People Like Us in charge!

And they understand my maxim that the only warrant for government power is existential peril. I saw a tweet yesterday making exactly that point, that climate change is an existential challenge. Of course it is; otherwise no warrant for a nice big government program.

Now I've been reading my Nietzsche and I have a point to make about his project to get Beyond Good and Evil. I say: Fine, Fritzi. You creative chaps want to transform the world in your orgy of creative power. But I don't. I think that the regime of Good and Evil is more than a dirty trick of "the priests." I think it was one of the most astonishing human achievements ever.

See, in the old days, people lived around their close blood relatives, and it is clear that humans instinctively tend to trust people the closer their blood relationship. But what happens when people move to the city and have to deal, day to day, with strangers that are not related by blood. Hey! How about Good and Evil and God's Law and God's Divine Justice! And all the rest of the Axial Age Religions. I think that the Good and Evil menu served as an immensely creative way of dealing with the problem of how to get people to live in peace in the city when nearly everyone is unrelated by blood. It is probably a good thing that we teach good little boys and good little girls not to hate on other people whenever something goes wrong, and to think first that "maybe I have a problem."

So I say that the license that Nietzsche gave the People of the Creative Self to go out and create without thinking about  the possible destructive effect on other people is a problem. I think that the creative culture should be mounted on the shoulders of the Good and Evil culture, and should abandon its project of replacing it.

But how do we teach the People of the Creative Self to have some compassion and understanding for the People of the Responsible Self when they have been carefully taught to practice compassion and understanding only for the workers and peasants and victims of the People of the Subordinate Self?

That is a problem for another day.

A Public Square with a "More Feminine Sensibility"

Some years ago I read the prediction of German sociologist Georg Simmel about women in the public square:

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."

Of course, I said to myself, that makes complete sense. But what exactly would a public square with "a more feminine sensibility" look like? Ever since I have tuned my cultural antennae to be looking for signs and portents.

I last took a look at this in December 2017.

Let us examine the question again, and let us start with the question of honor, from Honor: a History by James Bowman.

According to Bowman, honor is very different for men and for women.  Honor for men is a reputation for courage, in particular the reputation for standing in line with your brothers-in-arms and not breaking line and heading for safety. Honor in women is a reputation for chastity, and I do not mean just sexual chastity, but the broader question of never doing anything wrong, never having made a mistake.

In my view, the notion of chastity in the public square is a problem, because the only way to avoid making a mistake is never to do anything.

And there is another thing. Men bring their masculine sensibility to the public square, both the good and bad. For instance, men have an insult culture, by which they playfully insult each other. This can be good, if insults are truly playful, or bad, if the insult hits a bit too close to home and leads to fisticuffs or the blood feud of the Hatfields and the McCoys.

It stands to reason, therefore, that women bring their feminine sensibility to the public square, both for good and for ill. For instance, women have a complaint culture by which two women chatting together will impugn a third woman: "I can't believe she said/did that." This can be good if the complaint is true, or bad, if the complaint escalates into a mean-girl ganging up on some individual woman in the kind of operation that has come to be called a witch hunt.

It seems to me that these two cultures, the insult culture and the complaint culture, represent two very different ways of dealing with social conflict.

I would say that the political system, with its eternal exchange of insults, is almost irredeemably male. How do you modify it to suit "a more feminine sensibility?" and the underground system of complaints about third parties?  The legal system, with its process of prosecution and defense, is as male as can be.

You can see "a more feminine sensibility" in the politically correct culture of today's university campus, where the students -- and I suspect  the administrators -- are now majority female. It is clear to me that the notions of "microaggression" and "safe spaces" represent "a more feminine sensibility" on campus. Women on campus are saying that it is unacceptable for a woman ever to be offended or challenged by another person. But notice that the effect of the microaggression/safe space" culture is to eliminate any discourse that might be construed by sensitive souls to "give offence."  How, for instance, does a group of people on  today's campus represent their experience of injustice if the feminine powers-that-be determine that their "peaceful protest" "gives offence?"

It seems to me that the male insult culture accepts that there will be disagreements between men that need to be publicly acknowledged and worked out. But if you ask me the women's complaint culture will tend to marginalize disagreements, and has no way of resolving disagreement. The mean girls rule, because they monopolize the air waves, and too bad for the rest of us.

For instance, all the women Democratic representatives dressed up in white at the recent State of the Union speech by President Trump. So how does that make the Republican women feel? Isn't this kind of behavior a microaggression that would make non-lefty women in Congress feel unsafe? Doesn't it send a message to all and sundry that you are either with us or against us?

And if we are talking about white uniforms, what about the KKK? Are we to understand these Women in White as the new street-thug department of the Democratic Party, just like the KKK was in the Jim Crow South?

I think the whole question of women in the public square is a huge issue, and we have just begun to scratch the surface.