Starting into "Voltaire's Bastards"

 I ran across a reference to Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul a week or so ago and thought I ought to read it. Now I'm about 70 pages in and the bastards seem to be "reason" and the "Hero."

This is comfortable for me because I have been influenced by the Jungian movement for which the "unconscious," the pre-rational, is the basis of human life -- even in an age of reason -- and the proper kind of hero is the sacrificial hero, living on the boundary between order and chaos and bringing an understanding of chaos to his fellow humans even at the cost of his own life.

That is not to say that reason is not a remarkable and beneficial tool for humans to understand the universe, and that heros -- Saul means the egoistical Hero like Napoleon and Hitler -- can't make a contribution to life.

But the point is to understand that reason takes you only so far, and does not answer the questions we really want to ask, which is the meaning of life the universe, and everything. Likewise, the hero is an equivocal human. His creativity can be a force for good or a force for evil. The wise and noble hero understands this, and it reluctant to impose his creations upon the world. The egotistical hero is bound and determined to show us the brilliance of his creations, even at the cost of millions of dead.

So then I thought that the combination of overweening reason and the Hero is the lefty activist. Empowered by his faith in reason -- actually the theology of progress -- our lefty friend confidently leads his "peaceful protest" against oppression and inequality, secure in the knowledge that he is pushing the world one step closer to its destiny as a realm of peace and justice.

But it is all really about him, the progressive Hero, and his Ego.

On the other hand, Saul has some curious notions, such as, writing in 1992, that we had been through a 20-year depression, masked only by credit expansion. OK. I'd say that more important were the tax-rate cuts and deregulations and de-feudalizing and de-unionizing of the economy under Reagan that launched the start-up age that continues to this hour.

But then Saul writes about Pascal Paoli, the leader of Corsica in the 20 years between its freedom from Genoa and its conquest by France. Napoleon Buonaparte was one of the young Corsican lords sent to France after the French invasion who, we may say, learned his Age of Reason lessons to a T.

Saul likes Washington, dislikes Hamilton, and likes Jefferson. But it's early days in a 600 page book.

NYT Writer: "Women Did Everything Right"

Back in the day I had a boss that complained about his underlings "going off at tangents." Instead of putting our shoulders to the wheel, and getting on with the job at hand, we would annoyingly engage with side issues. In software, of course, there is always the temptation to polish up the code and make it more elegant.

Of course, there is one little problem with polishing up code. You introduce new bugs into the code. Not good.

So now a good little girl at the New York Times is writing about a 35-year-old lawyer married to a 35-year-old lawyer that is now lawyering 21 hours a week and looking after the kids while hubby works insane hours, 60 hours a week. Says the headline "Women Did Everything Right: Then Work Got Greedy.'"

Then follows a thousand words of feminist conventional wisdom.

Let's put the whole thing in black and white.

The job of women -- human females -- is to put babies on the ground. Everything else is "going off at tangents."

The job of men is to protect a woman and her babies until the babies leave the nest. Everything else is "going off at tangents."

And boy, do we moderns go off at tangents these days. We do it, of course, because we are rich and can afford it.

What sort of tangents? Oh, women like the idea of careers. Men like the idea of a creative life. Women imagine themselves as politicians; men imagine easing off from work. Women like to fluff up their nests; men like to have hobbies. And both sexes are learning to mess about with sex.

All of this stuff is a distraction. Because if women don't have babies, then humans go extinct. If men don't protect their women and their children, then the little ones don't survive to adulthood.

If the last few days I have seen a couple articles about how the decline in religion goes hand in hand with decline in fertility. I wonder if humans need religion to keep them from going off at tangents?

I was talking with acquaintances the other day and one of us was talking about women and careers as if it was the default thing for women to do, and that to hinder a woman in this interfered with the whole meaning of her life.

I said nothing, because what can you say? Folks living in the liberal bubble have no idea. And they won't appreciate someone popping the bubble, especially a racist, sexist, homophobe like me.

I dare say it will all end with a movement of well-born women going back to religion and children and family.

Because even though we humans have a constant itch to go off at tangents, we still know in our heart of hearts what we should be doing.

Notice the headline "Women Did Everything Right." Does that not exactly align with my notion of the woman's Culture of Complaint? For the instinct in every woman is that if she does everything right then, of course, her life should be happy and perfect; and if it is not, someone is to blame.

Yes, Secularists Do Too Have Religion

Over at the Australian Claire Lehman's Quillette they are having a set to about whether secularism is a religion. John Staddon says they sorta do.

My argument is simple: religions have three characteristics: spiritual, mythical/historical, and moral. Secular humanism lacks the first two and is often quite critical of these aspects of religion.

See, I think that the secularists do too have the spiritual and the mythical/historical.

Oh sure, the secularists don't have a "god" but they certainly have sacred objects. Principally, the sacred object is the Victim. The point about the sacred is that it is beyond criticism, and analysis, at least not by you, chum. Now, you tell me that, for the Communists, the "worker" was not a sacred object. Or that the suffering woman is not a sacred object for the feminists, or the African slave for the blacks. Etc. In addition, the prophets of secularism have attained almost to the status of saints, as a first step towards identification with the immortal. Think Lenin's tomb. Or Mary Wollstonecraft. Or Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is not stretching things too far to suggest that the secularists worship The Victim.

And as for "mythical/historical!" The whole point of the secular left is to construct likely Three Stage stories about the Victims. Back in the day humans were innocent and equal. They lived, you might say, in a veritable Garden of Eden. But then came the Fall. Once innocent humans fell upon each other, stripped of their innocence, and became divided into Exploiters and Victims. Or Patriarchs and sex objects. Or Lords and Serfs. Or Masters and Slaves. Or Capitalists and Proletarians. But now, with the blessings of activism and the holy sacrament of peaceful protest there is dawning a new age that will save us from oppression and exploitation and we will enter into a new Eden of Heaven on Earth.

I am not making this up.

Of course, I come to this from an appreciation of chaps like Jung and Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson. They are saying that myth is universal, and just because we moderns say we have "grown" beyond religion doesn't mean that we aren't lying to ourselves. Jung, of course, was consciously trying to found a new religion, and for that got criticized by chaps like Richard Noll in The Jung Cult.

I believe that it is essential to establish that modern secular beliefs are religion in everything but name. There is a very good practical reason for this, that if modern secularism is a religion then the dicta of the Bill of Rights apply, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If secular cults are religions then they should not be privileged as science and should not have the power to deplatform people that disagree with their expressions of faith and their orthodoxies.

We can expect that our lefty friends will insist, to the last faggot on the auto-da-fé, that their systems and their ethics and their programs are not religious, no sir, not nohow.

Because under the current regime lefties hold a huge tactical advantage. Their ideas and proposals are noble "issues" and "settled science" rather than the crazed doctrines of a whacky religious cult.

If Not Progress, Then What?

After reading of the deplatforming of Polish intellectual Ryszard Legutko at Middlebury College I thought I should buy his book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies.

Demon starts with the argument that both communism and liberal democracy have a progress theory of history: we are progressing towards a better world. Thus more communism, or more liberal democracy, equals more progress.

Obviously this doctrine is pretty reductive. How do you know, lefties?

Obviously, they don't. They have a religious faith, and their faith is faith in progress, as defined by them.

In fact, we all believe in some version of this faith, whether it is faith in economic growth, in more freedom, in more creativity, in more godliness.

In fact, returning as always to my reductive Three Peoples theory, we could say that the People of the Subordinate Self believe in progress towards a level playing field in which the government distributes free stuff more equally; the People of the Responsible Self believe in progress towards a world that rewards people that lead responsible lives obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules; the People of the Creative Self believe in progress towards better opportunities to live a creative life.

What do I believe in? I believe in a government that defends us from enemies foreign and domestic. I believe in social institutions such as churches, and civic associations in which we can develop our faith in the meaning of our lives.

The problem with the faith in progress is that it combines the need for safe spaces against invaders and robbers with the need to act according to a faith in the meaning of it all. "Progress" is, after all, a thing that armies do, as in advancing towards our inevitable victory.

There is a name for this sort of belief system that conflates the political and the moral: totalitarianism.

But, hey, everyone of us is tempted by the opportunity to use force to advance our notions of the just and true, and the meaning of life. There is, after all, no fixed, sure boundary between the need to repel boarders and the passion to elbow all the competing visions of the meaning of life to create breathing space for our own vision.

I suppose it comes down to drawing the line between "must haves" and "nice to haves." We must have protection against what I call existential perils. But not so much against things that would be nice to have, like bike paths that are separate from roads with cars on them.

But what about welfare for the poor? You could argue that it is a "must have" because it keeps the poor down in the ghetto and not peacefully protesting in the streets in what used to be called "bread riots." Or you could argue that it is better for our souls for each one of us to be engaged in relief of the poor instead of letting the government do it.

Here's a notion. Let us insist that nothing the government does relates to progress or the advancement of humanity. Let us merely say that government is there to protect us from existential perils, and it usually and probably forever will do the job badly. But as to progress, to the improvement of the race, to the question of justice, of enlightenment, of creating a better world, that is up to people in their voluntary social groups to work on. And it is up to each one of us to persuade other people to join our voluntary community, rather than force them by government edict or by naming and shaming.

Of course, the problem is that people instinctively know this, and so they cheat. They invent existential perils so that they can get the government to force each of us to enlist in the government's war on whatever: poverty, ignorance, climate change.

And as for curbing the naming and shaming: good luck with that, pal.

Liberals Legislating Liberal Morality

One of the really frustrating things for a conservative these days is that our liberal friends are so busy "legislating morality."

Yeah. Remember the days when liberals were howling about conservatives "legislating morality?" The morality they were objecting to was what we would now call "Judeo-Christian" values: things like banning pornography and public nudity.

Today, of course we are drowning under a tidal wave of left-liberal attempts to legislate morality, from recycling and banning plastic bags, to the marginalization of Christian bakers that don't like gay marriage, to the whole ethos behind the Green New Deal that fossil fuels are eevil.

How do we get away from this universal rage to instantiate our values and morality into the statute book and utterly object to the other guys doing the same?

The answer is: we can't. That's because, as Jordan B. Peterson says, we see the world through the lens of our values. Our values imagine a world as it should be, not as it is, and humans are inclined to fight to the death to be able to fight for the world as it should be.

After the last great Wars of Religion, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, that culminated in the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany, the various parties agreed to ease back on the legislation of morality, and then, as the Enlightenment proceeded, various thinkers proposed devices such as religious toleration -- for other religions -- and the separation of church and state as means of avoiding the religious war of all against all.

Great idea, and it got instantiated in the US Constitution that was ratified in 1787. But right before Congress passed the Bill of Rights in Sepetember 1789 the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 and guaranteed the right to free speech and denied the state the power to found a state "establishment of religion." That was two years before the beginning of the French Reign of Terror and Virtue in 1793 which established the cathedral of Notre Dame in September 1793 as a Temple of Reason not with fire and the sword as in olden times, but with guns and La Guillotine.

And as we know, the French Revolution was just a walk in the park compared with what came after it in Russia and China and Eastern Europe and Vietnam and Cambodia.

Of course, all these new secular religions are adamant that their beliefs are not religious but founded on reason and logic.

Actually everyone thinks that their beliefs, their world view, their religion -- call it what you will -- is founded on reason and logic. St. Thomas Aquinas deduced the whole of Christianity with Aristotelian reason and logic. Marx called his notions "scientific socialism." Our modern cult of environmentalists call their opponents "science deniers." Your alt-right chappies are also firm in their attachment to reason and logic.

What's the answer? Well, I would have everyone admit that their attachment to reason and logic is really their adherence to their religion, their faith in some cult leader's attempt to understand "the meaning of life, the universe and everything." But I don't expect that to happen any time soon.

The best that I can hope for is for all parties to sit down and ink out a peace treaty, that only the very worst acts are to be subject to the criminal law and the power of government. And that most anti-social -- or immoral or unethical -- acts be regulated by social disapproval.

It's the difference, if you like, between peacefully protesting the campus speaker you don't like and physically preventing the speaker from speaking on campus.

But what will it take for our SJW pals and campus safe-spacers to back off their current attempts to deplatform anyone that makes them feel "unsafe?"

It will take a Trumpian renaissance that starts shutting down universities that don't allow free speech. So that our liberal friends will start worrying about "legislating morality" again.

For nobody objects to their own side legislating morality. They only object to the other guys doing it.

And that is why I say that there is no such thing as justice: only injustice.

Melinda Gates Validates My Theory of the Sexes

Over the course of a rather sheltered life, I have come to believe two things about men and women. Men have a Culture of Insult; women have a Culture of Complaint. That is to say: men and women are not equal; they are different.

The men's Culture of Insult is obviously related to the question of Honor. As related by James Bowman, in Honor: a History, honor among men is the reputation for courage, the courage to stand in line with his brothers in battle. To publicly doubt a man's courage is an insult that must be defended. Thus the Culture of Insult, in which men cunningly doubt each other's courage, but below a threshold that must be defended by force of arms.

Women, as I said, are not equal; they are different. Honor among women is the reputation for chastity, and I mean this not just in the sexual sense, but in the larger sense of being a good little girl that never does anything wrong. Thus the women's Culture of Complaint, in which one woman complains to a second woman about a third woman's behavior.

Don't doubt me on this. Just go abroad with an open mind, and see how often I am right.

Enter good little girl Melinda Gates, wife of the billionaire. She's a feminist, dontcha know. (But not so much of a feminist that she has forsworn hypergamy). Oh no. Not that!

According to Nicholas Kristof (H/T Steve Sailer) Melinda found the office culture at Microsoft toxically masculine.

One of Melinda’s first challenges came in the harsh, male-dominated techie culture at Microsoft. “It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point,” she writes.

See what I mean? Culture of Insult, going full throttle, pedal to the metal. And Melinda as a woman didn't like it.

So what did she do? She complained to another woman.

Then she found a woman colleague, Charlotte Guyman, who felt the same. “It’s not O.K. for women to cry at work, but it’s O.K. for men to yell at work?” Guyman once asked.

Or, as I like to put it, Charlotte complained to Melinda, "I can't believe the way that the men yell in meetings."

Believe me, I am not making this up.

Which brings me to my Georg Simmel gambit, that women coming into the public square would adapt it to suit "a more feminine sensibility." That is exactly what Charlotte and Melinda proceeded to do at Microsoft.

With other women employees, they began to create oases in Microsoft where courtesy was not seen as a sign of weakness. A critical mass of women employees helped civilize the company.

Am I right or am I right?

Now my second-hand take on Bill Gates -- what I have heard -- is that he was a holy terror in meetings. If you brought some idea or project to him that wasn't up to snuff he would say that it was the most stupid thing he had ever heard. I dare say he is still like that, unless the fair Melinda is in the room.

But here is the question. Was it a good idea for Charlotte and Melinda to "civilize" Microsoft? I'd say: it depends.

The point about Bill Gates and also Steve Jobs is that they were both impossible people heading up tech startups that changed the world.

Bill Gates' effort with MS-DOS enabled IBM to put its PC into every office. I was there; it was transformative. And then Gates did it again with Windows. What about Microsoft in recent years? Well I'd have to say that it is steady as she goes. In the 15 years from 2000 to 2015 the stock went sideways. Now it is going exponential again, under South Asian management.

What about Apple? Under the turbulent leadership of Steve Jobs, it produced amazing products, and magnificent failures, but ended up with the earth-shattering technology in the iPod and the iPhone. All the evidence is that Jobs was impossible to work with: not "civilized" at all. And since Jobs' death? Well, right now it is doing fine under the civilized leadership of Tim Cook.

What does it all mean? I think it means this. If you are talking about business startups, you are talking about men. If you are talking about steady as she goes, you are talking about introducing a more feminine sensibility into corporate culture.

Then there is this. Joseph P. Schumpeter described capitalism as a process of "creative destruction." In other words each technological revolution that transforms our lives is built on the wreckage of the old technology and the old ways.

If women had been in charge we would not have experienced the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years.

In my view men are adapted to the creative destruction aspect of things, and women are more adapted to the preservation of things. This is unremarkable, since the job of men is to defend the border, even unto death, and the job of women is to bear children, to stay alive and keep the home fires burning until the children leave the nest.

“Bill and I are equal partners,” Melinda Gates said. “Men and women should be equal at work.”

That is not what Charles Dickens thought. His Mathew Bagnet, former soldier, basically deferred to his wife -- "the old girl" -- in all things. But never admitted it: "discipline must be maintained" he told his army pal Sgt. George in Bleak House.

And frankly I think that Chuck knew a lot more about the world than Good Little Girl Melinda Gates whose main claim to fame will always be that she married the richest man in the world. The old-fashioned way.

The Limits of Free Stuff

Our Democratic friends are having a real festival of free stuff these days, offering the voters Medicare For All, free college for all, minimum wage, reparations, you name it.

Of course that is all in accordance with the principle enunciated in my aphorism:

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

Doesn't matter what the government is, as you can see from the following table:

Robber gang	Your money or your life
City gang	Nice little business you got here. Pity if something should happen to it.
Lefty guerillas	Kill the capitalists!
Center left	Make the rich pay their share.
Center right	Cut taxes now.
Trump	Mexicans pay for the wall.

If you want a more philosophical take, there is the doctrine of Irving Kristol that if you want to help the poor, as with Social Security, you must deal in the middle class. That is why Social Security is called the "third rail" of US politics.

As I said, back in 1993, the problem with HillaryCare was that the middle class already had health insurance, so there was no way they could be included in the loot handed out to the folks that were suspended between Medicaid and employer-paid health insurance.

Then, with Obamacare, the Obama guys had to flat out lie, and tell us that we would save $2,500 and if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. All lies.

Now, the question is: Does the free-stuff program still work? Put it this way. Is there still something that government can give away for free for which the majority of people will think they are getting free stuff?

OK. Look at this chart of government spending in the US since 1900, expressed as percent of GDP. Do you see what I see?

Apart from the spending surge in response to the Crash of 2008 government spending in the US has been rocking along at about 35 percent of GDP since the early 1980s.

I wonder what that means. I wonder if it means that the majority of voters do not want any more government spending because they suspect that any increase in government spending is free stuff that will go to other people, and not to them.

Anyway, it seems to me that in 2020 we are going to get a test of my notion. The Democrats are out in full force offering free stuff to their primary voters. But will they be able to sell the general election voters on their free stuff?

Will general election voters think they will benefit from Medicare For All?

Will general election voters think they will benefit from free college, and college debt forgiveness?

Will general election voters think they will benefit from the Green New Deal?

Will general election voters think they will benefit from reparations to the descendants of slaves?

And so on.

My guess is that the average voter will think that all these ideas are going to cost them.

I wonder if I am right.