Roger Scruton RIP

The most important thing to know about British conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton who died January 12, 2020, aged 75, of cancer is the way that he met his Sophie, the future Lady Scruton. He was riding his gelding Sam in the Beaufort hunt and happened to be standing next to Sophie, riding her mare Petra. Says he in his autobiographical Gentle Regrets,

Usually [Sam] puts his ears back if a horse gets too close to him, anxious to preserve the distance that will preserve safety; on this occasion, however, he stood quietly beside Petra, and then followed her as the hunt moved off. The next Saturday he caught sight of her across a field of 200 horses, seized the bit and cantered across to where she stood, fulfilling simultaneously his desire and mine.

But here's the thing. Not only was Scruton's horse named Sam, but also his family dog when he was a boy and his son. His son. You tell me! Perhaps there is a connection, that Scruton loved his dog, his horse, and his son, so why shouldn't they have the same name?

And another thing. It turns out that his surname Scruton is made up. His great-grandmother, born Lowe, had a son surnamed Lowe, that she decided should be surnamed Scruton. So perhaps his grandfather was conceived on the Scruton estate while his great-grandmother was in service there.

Of course, all this has nothing to do with Trollope's Sir Roger Scatcherd, railway engineer, drunkard, and father of the illegitimate and practically-perfect-in-every-way Mary, in Doctor Thorne. Nor would Trollope, a famous hunter of foxes, ever have dared to introduce a ridiculous plot device like a horse selecting his owner's wife for him.

Roger Scruton was an immensely learned philosopher and writer, son of a left-wing teacher father and a respectable middle-class mother. Born in 1944 he became a conservative in the 1968 student riots in Paris, and throughout his adult life was on the receiving end of the tender mercies of the left. The latest incident was a 2019 New Statesman interview conducted by a young lefty -- who no doubt literally knows nothing -- that monstrously edited and misrepresented his remarks. And got him sacked from the Tory government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission for a season.

Scruton seems to have been a gentle soul, according to many that knew him, and also a courageous one, who went into Eastern Europe in the 1980s to meet with the dissidents that became the government leaders in the 1990s.

Scruton visited Prague [in 1979] to give a secret lecture with the dissident Czech philosopher Julius Tomin. 

When he accompanied Tomin back to his apartment, he found waiting for them at the door a secret policeman who refused to let Scruton in, and then pushed him down the stairs. He was eventually arrested and thrown out of the country. 

“I realised that this was a situation that was completely outside anything in my experience,” he remembered. “And at the same time this was a place which was dear to my heart. The intellectual life was genuinely dangerous. They were being put in jail by a Left-wing police force.”

But actually, Scruton was "put in jail" multiple times throughout his adult life by the left-wing police force of the academy and the culture. It is just that the left-wing police in Prague were a little more direct than our left-wing police in the university and in the culture.

What is wrong with these people? Don't answer that.

Scruton has written about many things, principally in the areas of aesthetics and philosophy. So I thought I would check his notions of my current enthusiasm, Nietzsche. He notes, in A Short History of Modern Philosophy, that Nietzsche, in common with Aristotle, "found the aim of life in 'flourishing':  excellence resides in the qualities that contribute to that aim." Thus,

In each case pride, self-confidence, cheerfulness of outlook, and a desire always to dominate and never to be beholden were regarded as essential attributes of the self-fulfilled man.

The drawback is, of course, the accusation that this is why Nietzsche is "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." But whatabout Marxism, with Marx "the Commies' favorite intellectual?" As Scruton writes in Modern Philosophy: an Introduction and Survey:

If you happen to believe that you are, deep down, an Übermensch, whose powers, energies and talents are frustrated by the little people who tie you with their Lilliputian web of obligations, you will gladly endorse Nietzsche's vision[.]

Or if you believe that you are an activist, fighting for justice for all the oppressed peoples of the world, you will gladly endorse Marx's vision that appoints you as the vanguard of the proletariat.

The massive excuse prepared by Marx for the crimes of the international socialists, was prepared by Nietzsche for their nationalist opponents.

And this makes me think that Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic and Nietzsche's Master and Slave morality are missing the middle.

Both Marx and Nietzsche are trying to find a Master morality for my People of the Creative Self, today's Educated Gentry. Nietzsche is sneering at the Slave morality of weak people, who just want to combine against the strong.

But I think Nietzsche is missing the middle, what we might call Commoner Morality. In other words, when he complains about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves, he is complaining about the self-reflection that the Axial Age religions promote for commoners. It is a middle way between the self-justification of the "creative" and the collective protective morality of the slave. It is the thought that, in the give and take of commoner life, well, maybe the problem is me.

So that would fit my reductive Three Peoples theory and Yarvin's Gentry, Commoner, Client layers.

Creative/Gentry morality: Creativity involves creative destruction, perhaps of me, perhaps of lesser folk. Too bad.

Responsible/Commoner morality: Life is an interaction and we need to think about how our actions impact other people so we don't have to come to blows.

Subordinate/Client morality: Life is a bitch and we the people have to combine against the powerful to protect ourselves.

Sir Roger Scruton was a remarkable man, gentle, learned, courageous. We shall not see his like for many a year. 

It's Past Time for Merely Defending the Market System. Etc.

I'm reading Why Liberalism Works by economist Deirdre McCloskey that celebrates her three "Bourgeois Era" books. In those books she establishes the remarkable Great Enrichment of the last 200 years and attributes it to the bourgeois ethos of the seven virtues and also the "have a go" ethos of ordinary people starting in 1800.

Basic to this notion is that "capital" is not something that accumulates, but is created when something new and useful is invented and produced and sold out of a clear blue sky. I suppose the fundamental case for that is the creation of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his Standard Oil. Rockefeller created a company that reduced the price of illuminating oil from about 80 cents per gallon to 10 cents per gallon. Not surprisingly this astonishing achievement shot the stock of Rockefeller's Standard Oil into the stratosphere. Why? Because the present value of Standard Oil discovering and producing and selling oil was enormous. And that was before they discovered oil in Texas in 1901.

I mean: what is the value to the average housewife of the oil that she bought for those cute oil lamps later featured in western movies? That were much safer and useful than the wax candles that really only rich people could afford? (Check out various recent TV series of the candle era in which typically the producers have decided to show the indoor lighting just by candle. Rich-people parties have veritable galaxies of brutally expensive candles. Almost everyone lights themselves to their bedrooms with a single candle.)

Apply the same logic to all the other astonishing things of the past two centuries: trains, steamships, cars, electricity, safe childbirth, computers, internet. This is not accumulation but explosion.

However, I am not sure that I buy the Bourgeois Virtues argument and the celebration of bourgeois culture. I am more inclined to go with the verdict of George Eliot in Adam Bede where she celebrates ordinary rural carpenters and farm girls getting the ethos of Methodist Christianity and the sense of directing their own livesunder the inspiration of God and his divine laws.

In other words, Adam Bede and Dinah Morris were graduating out of the subordinate peasant mentality to think and act as Commoners.

And there is the peculiar marriage of elite science and commoner mechanics marrying science to technique and turning ideas into useful products.

I am more inclined to attribute the Great Enrichment to the ordinary people "having a go" and the elites and governing classes not seeing what was going on until it was too late to stop it.

Think of the Trump election in 2016. The elites thought Trump was a rube and a blowhard. They just had no idea that he could and would connect with the ordinary American Commoner and win their votes and now their trust. If they had known... they would have made sure that Trump got nobbled before he got out of the starting gate. Indeed they did nobble him with the Steele Dossier, but just didn't press home their spying operation, probably because they thought to themselves that "this clown will never get elected."

I guess my point is that it is past time for defending the market system and its recipe for baking the cake of a world without poverty. If you don't get that, lefties and gentry, after all these years, you are a fool and a knave.

When the elite and the left make that elite guidance is needed to keep capitalism just and moderate I think that they are not quite lying but certainly covering their eyes to the reality of the market economy. Certainly any fair-minded judge has a right to feel that the eye-coverers have a vested interest in their blindness.

It is past time to be understanding. I think we should be on the attack, as in this from my Maxims page:

Crimes of the Left: Driving working class off the road to the middle class; misdirecting women in the public square; making war on middle class culture and values; taxing business and ordinary people and enslaving them to ruling-class crusades to save the world.

See, I think that the argument of Marx and subsequent lefties to teach the working class that "we wos robbed" is one of the great crimes of the ages. All in the interest of political power. And then teaching women to have "careers" rather than run the culture from their traditional base in the home, the famiy, and the neighborhood. Now we have the gentry class saying that we need less prosperity! Because Saving the Planet.

Here's a piece about how the Democrat judges are using blatant devices to stall and stymie anything that Trump proposes with tricks like "nationwide injunctions." I don't think that we should give them the benefit of the doubt, and allow that the poor dears just don't understand. If the Obama judges don't understand the monstrous injustice of their actions -- and I dare say they don't -- then they really don't understand law and don't understand that the whole point of law is to be a brake on ruling-class power.

It is far more likely that the Obama are deliberately blind to the injustice of their actions, because they don't want to know, because they have been carefully taught, because to seriously think about their political agenda, to seriously allow that others -- their political opponents -- might have a valid point of view, is not to be endured.

In other words it makes more sense to believe that our liberal friends of all kinds are merely Educated Gentry responding to ruling class anthems that appeal to their taste for ambition, their need for honor, and their consuming vanity. And that the don't have the education, the understanding, and the judgement to think any other way.

When you look at our liberal friends, let's face it, it's all about them. That's what Trump Derangement Syndrome is all about, the utter demolition of the decades old liberal comfort zone.

I mean, anyone with half a brain should have at least considered that 2016 was a change election, after two terms of Obama and certainly after 8 years of very slow growth out of the 2008 Recession, and given the rather limited political skills of Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton.

The very fact of the post-election hysteria was a dead giveway that the average Educated Gentry voter had been led by their leaders and the liberal media into a political La La Land. Because what grown-ups do after a failure is suck it in and determine to do better.

No, the only thing that will teach our Educated Gentry that they have a problem is nothing less than the school of hard knocks, of a 55-45 loss in 2020, a sold Republican Congress in both houses, several high profile criminal prosecutions of Obama administraion officials involved in the spying on the Trump campaign and the half-hearted coup attempt since the 2016 election.

Our Democratic friends have to be treated to the famous line that the coach delivers to his football team after a stinging loss: "Let's get back to basics. This is a football."

And nothing would communicate that something is completely out of joint than for a significant chunk of black and Hispanic voters to start voting like Commoners rather than Victims.

It's past time for merely defending the market system. It is past time for merely defending the American way of life. It's past time for assuming that the Educated Gentry will ever give the Commoners a fair shake. It's past time for cringing before the accusation of racism, sexist, homophobia.

It's time to go on the attack. For the simple reason that all sectors of American society have a right to be heard and to have their needs factored into the political auction.

It is not true that the market system is unjust. It is not true that Commoners are bigots and white supremacists. It is not true that women and gays and blacks and Hispanics and Muslims are helpless victims and need special privileges to get justice in America. And it is not true that Educated Gentry have a right to order the rest of America around.

Until that is conceded, things are going to continue to get pretty hot around here.

A Serious Look at Unserious Elites

I suppose that all elites, since the Dawn of Time, have been unserious. After all the only serious elitist is the chap that storms the castle, and takes it. That guy has serious cojones.

Except that, in the nature of things, there are boatloads of chaps with serious cojones that failed to take the castle. Whatever happened to them?

Then there is the rest of the elite.

I suppose that is the point of Pareto's complicated notion of the "circulation of elites," that the governing elite does not consist of the most able people in the kingdom, and thus, after a while, the current elite gets "circulated" out of office.

Do you think that our current elite is in the process of being circulated out but nobody realizes it yet?

Now that I think about it, the problem is bigger than that.

Politics, as I see it, it about two things. One is to protect us from the enemy and two is to offer loot and plunder to those that enlist with the leader to punish the enemy.

But once you have rallied to the leader and helped him to power and to vanquish the enemy, then what?

Then you have to make up stuff. Because the truth is that Literally Hitler comes along only once in a generation. Or maybe once in a century.

So, 97.2 percent of all politics is making stuff up to justify the continuance in office of the current not-so-cojonish elite.

And that includes everything from oh-no! We Need Medicare for All! to We Need to Save the Planet from Fossil Fuels!

Right now, right here in Seattle, one of our council-critters is proposing a Ban on Tree Removal. Hey, you know what? I think that the opposite is true. We should accord the average homeowner the right to determine when and if a tree on her needs to be removed: because it is too big; because its core is rotted; because if it fell down in a storm it would crash into the neighbor's house. In fact, the only thing I would propose on the Tree Removal front is a law to clearly state that if a tree on your property falls onto the neighbors house or onto the neighbor's car, then You are Liable.

Only that would be unnecessary because I am sure that good old common law already worked the infinite possibilities of trees falling on neighbors in detail for us centuries ago.

Now I am presently reading Why Liberalism Works by Deirdre McCloskey where she points out that everything except a sensible minimal government that respects the decisions of the market and the right of people to "have a go" is foolish and misguided. Great. Only I think she is a hundred years too late. The time for a movement in the "clerisy," as she calls it, to intervene and stop stupid stuff that violates my Four Laws was decades ago. Now we are dealing with the "unanticipated consequences" of a century of "clerisy" stupidity and self dealing and we won't get out of it without some kind of a serious wipeout.

For the question of the circulation of elites does not end with the inevitable circulation but the consequences of their stupidity and venality.

Did I mention my Four Laws? That

• Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices
• Administraive government cannot work because it does not have the bandwidth
• Regulatory government cannot work, because "regulatory capture"
• Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them

Look, I don't blame our elite that much. The problem is that politics is a very imperfect tool with which to rule mankind. Because it has only two modes: Rally to me and I will protect you! Rally to me and I will give you loot and plunder.

Pretty obviously the life of humans has rather more dimensions than the binary of protection and of plunder. And yet, when you are talking politics that is all there is.

That is why I think the Go to Mars project of our billionaires is so beneficial. Because on the one hand, we can focus our politics on protecting us from the Martian Threat. (Yes. Whatabout that Martian Threat? Bet you never thought about it before!) And on the other we can send space expeditions to Mars to loot it and plunder it. Yay! Political problem solved for a generation.

Another thing. One of the charming characteristics of womankind is their reaction to news retailed to them by an intimate friend. I am talking about the two eternal responses: "Well I Never!" and "I can't believe she said/did that!"

What I want is a world in which all the women immediately react to the latest elite stupidity with the universal lament "I can't believe he/she proposed that!" But we do not have that world. Not yet.

Whether the proposal is Medicare For All, Green New Deal, curbing fossil fuels, "reparations," tree removal, regulation of "hate speech," or you name it. I demand that women of the world react with a "Well I Never!" Or else.

Because otherwise we are doomed.

Stop Moralizing About Race, Slavery, Empire

There's a sweet article at The Federalist by Indian-born Paulette Varghese Altmaier who married a white American:

My two daughters, born of my marriage with an Iowa farm boy-turned-Silicon Valley engineer, were brought up with no sense of racial difference, no focus at all on the fact that half their family was white and the other half was not. 

She thought she was living Martin Luther King Jr's dream. So how come "we face a new brand of racism" with whites required to bow to the shame of "white guilt." And then there's slavery.

Altmaier points out that, if you want to talk racism, the Indian caste system is a good place to start. And slavery was going strong in Africa until the start of the 20th century. And imperialism? Everyone was attacking everyone else and didn't think about it.

So what's all the moralizing about?

Well, I suppose it is the self-congratulation of the modern Educated Gentry that thinks that it created the modern moral world and that but for its educated activists slavery, imperialism, and racism would still rule the world.

Allow me to differ. And yes, I come to this with a Nietzschean attitude that says that morality tends to come along after the fact to justify and formalize a new correlation of social forces.

Slavery? How come that slavery was accepted since forever as just the way things are until about 300 years ago? My answer is that up until 300 years ago a feudal system obtained in which the farmers were helpless before any warlike marauder, and had to subordinate themselves to a warrior caste that would protect them. Nearly everyone was a subordinate farmer. And just a few people were proud castellans and warriors. So serfdom, slavery was part of the way things were.

But when a market system arises, with cities and free exchange and trading, then, in my opinion, people start to realize that slavery does not pay and in fact free labor is much more profitable. Sorry, lefties. No glorious moral apotheosis for you.

Imperialism? How come that warfare and empires and subjugation were normal and ubiquitious right through the agricultural age? And why should imperialism suddenly become scandalous? My answer is that up until about 300 years ago the only wealth was in land and gold. If you invaded the neighbor's land and took his land and his gold, you were better off, and never mind about the neighbor's dead and dying.

But when trading takes over the world, and wealth starts to become "intangible capital" it doesn't do you any good to wipe out the neighbor because you also wipe out his "intangible capital." So, the Brits in India were, from the beginning, interested in trading. The expansion of their empire occurred because they were continually annoyed by some predatory prince raiding their trading empire, of which the Maratha Confederacy chiefs were the principal perps. Plus, of course, when you are an industrial power, what's the point of planting your flag in some fly-blown outpost that is 50 years from developing a modern economy? Raw materials? Not really. You can buy raw materials for money. So, in our modern era, imperialism does not pay.

Racism? Again, in the old days when agriculture ruled the world, it made sense to develop a tribal identity of us against the world. Because your food-growing land was life and to be conquered meant being sold into slavery.

But when trading takes over the world, the possession of food-growing land doesn't matter much any more. People are now organized into religions, nations, and corporations. And what matters is not your race but whether you can be trusted. And now, with the 5-star rating system used for just about everything and everyone on-line, it is your reputation not your skin color that matters. And so now racism does not pay.

But, for a season, the accusation of racism, imperialism, and slavery does pay.

Until we Commoners get a pair and tell the lefties to go take a hike.

But here is the real mystery. Why are our lefty friends so intent upon a Great Reaction, in which socialism is the new slavery, the welfare state is the new feudalism, identity politics is the new tribalism? What is wrong with these people?

Could Chile's Collapse Happen Here?

Here's the thing. "Chile's Collapse Foretells America's If Dems Win." What in the world is wrong with Chile? I thought that since the days of th eevil Gen. Pinochet that Chile had set up a pretty decent free-market economy that was the envy of the rest of South America. But no. Things are not copacetic in Chile these days. Writes Axel Kaiser in the Wall Street Journal about Chile's very own Elizabeth Warren,

The economic pain started with the antimarket reforms of the previous government under Socialist President Michelle Bachelet, from 2014-18. Ms. Bachelet increased corporate taxes by 30%; signed a law banning the replacement of workers on strike, thereby dramatically increasing the costs of labor; increased public spending at three times the economic growth rate; and unleashed armies of regulatory bureaucrats on the private sector.

Of course, I dare say thaat the reduction in copper prices plays a role in this.

Now I am reading Deirdre McCloskey's breezy Why Liberalism Works and you would think, from her, that all good-thinking people know that liberalism, the 18th century Enlightenment one, not the 20th century US version, is the way to go.

But actually they don't. As we know. Because our Educated Gentry are all in favor of race politics, big government politics, gender politics, and canceling anyone that doesn't agree with their secular religion.All over the world.

Now maybe somewhere in Why Liberalism Works I dare say that McCloskey has some winning argument to persuade the Wokies to give it up. But I doubt it. If I had any doubt my mind was made up by the simple notions of Curtis Yarvin in "The Clear Pill."

Yarvin writes that the present ruling class plays beautiful "anthems" -- no doubt on a magnificnt pipe organ -- to the Educated Gentry that appeals to its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

Yarvin's three layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients fits moderately well with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we moderns live in a status hierarchy of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates. When you are a creative the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is all tied up in your ability to do creative, original work.

So the problem with the notion that we should all relax and enjoy it because, Why Liberalism Works, is that there is no "ambition, honor, and vanity" for the Creative Educated Gentry in a minimum government society. Yes, yes. Everyone will be prosperous and happy. But what about the workers, er, gentry? What ambition is satisfied for the gentry? What honor will crown the gentry with fig leaves? What will appeal to their vanity (not that the gentry are vain, oh no)?

Let's take a smart ambitious woman like Elizabeth Warren. Here is a woman that has played the Gentry game to the hilt. She has converted herself from her Commoner origins into a rootin' tootin' Gentry mandarin. She got into Harvard Law as a professor by faking Native American heritage. As a graduate of Rutgers Law School she would never have got into Harvard without the Native American scam.

As a smart ambitious woman she knows instinctively that she is never going to have a top-fight political career humming the anthem of Why Liberalism Works to the Gentry. Or telling the Clients that the trouble with big government is that sooner or later you run out of Other Peoples' Money. No. She's running with her pedal to the metal of Big Government Über Alles.

Or take my Four Laws.

"Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices." Oh yeah? Whatabout the homeless? The children stuck in cages at the border? Let's worry about prices and profits next week.

"The administrative state cannot work because it doesn't have the bandwidth to direct the whole economy." Oh yeah? But whatabout the folks that don't have health insurance? Are we just going to sit here while people die?

"The regulatory state cannot work because of the law of 'regulatory capture.'" Oh yeah? So you are going to let monopolies make obscene profits for ever and ever?

"Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them." Oh yeah? So you are going to put little children back to work in the mines because the education system isn't perfect?

Now I think the problem is even bigger than that.

First is the notion I picked up from the best-seller The Millionaire Next Door. Suppose you are the wife of a businessman that made a nice little fortune with a string of dry-cleaning stores? Whatabout your children? So you send them out into the marketplace at age 18 and tell 'em to work it out? No you don't, because in the world of business many are called but few are chosen and you don't want your kids suffering through the agony of failed businesses and bankruptcy. No, what you do is send your kids to university and get them into nice regulated professions like medicine and law, or you buy them a nice pair of striped-pants for a career in the State Department, where you have to go through years and years of fees and 80-hour weeks before you get licensed to print money.

And then there is the basic fact of politics. First, the political leader is the tribal chief that protects you from pirates and plunderers. Second, the political leader recruits his warriors with the offer of loot and plunder. Got a solution to that age old fact of life?

So when are we going to rise above these wee problems? Next week? Next year? Next century?

Well, I offer hope. Three hundred years ago, people in the west were just beginning to worry about slavery. Then Christian evangelicals like William Wilberforce taught us to be ashamed and we abolished slavery. Then lefties created the biggest slave states in history, the sweeties. But the slave states have kinda dialed down the slavery thing because slavery does not pay, Mr. Gorbachev.

Three hundred years ago, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, the lower orders were indeed regarded by all respectable gentry people as rubbish. And if white people weren't slaves, there were plenty of them that were indentured servants. But now they are Commoners. Although the gentry still sneers at them as racist sexist homophobes and deplorables. And along comes Donald Trump to champion the Commoners.

But the problem is that a world with less government and less Studies degrees and less moral lecturing about toxic masculinity and white supremacy is also a world in which the Educated Gentry has less scope for its "ambition, honor, and vanity."

You think that the proud Educated Gentry is going to put up with a world that crimps their style? In fact, as I argue in my Great Reaction series, the Educated Gentry seems determined to take us back to the past, with socialism as a return to slavery, the welfare state as a return to feudalism, identity politics as a return to tribalism, and all the rest of it.

Me neither.

So could the Dems screw the place up like Chile? Of course they could. And they'd blame "greedy bankers" and white supremacists all the way to the guillotine.

That's why I think that a rude crude rootin' tweetin' bigot like Donald Trump who is focusing his program on the needs of the Commoners is a much better prospect than any of the big-government anti-deplorable Democrats.

"Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry

In her magnificent "Bourgeois Era" books Deirdre McCloskey celebrates the achievements of the western bourgeoisie, and I have written about it. As La Wik says, the bourgeoisie, contrary to its self-advertisement as "prudence only" actually practiced all the Seven Virtues. And its appetite for innovation provoked the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, from $3 per person per day to $100 per person per day. In today's dollars.

In her new book, Why Liberalism Works: How true liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all, McCloskey advertises an inclusive libertarianism, and proposes to reclaim the word "liberal" from the progressives.

McCloskey argues for "the continuing desirability of a liberalism conceived in the eighteenth century" and how it has created good things like "economic success" the "arts and sciences" plus "its kindness, toleration, its inclusiveness, its cosmopolitanism, and especially its massive liberation of... people from violent hierarchies ancient and modern." Then there are the critics.

Progressives and conservatives and populists retort that liberalism and its rhetoric also explain numerous alleged evils, such as the reduction of everything to money and markets or the loss of community and God of the calamity of immigration by non-whites and non-Christians. But they are mistaken.

Twenty years ago and more I might have agreed with her. But then I read F.S.C. Northrop, who wrote:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

"Inadequate?" Everything I believed? But what does that mean? At the time I was perfectly happy with the world view of the British Enlightenment. And yet. For one thing didn't German thought lead directly to Nazism?

So I gradually embarked on the study of the Germans. For instance, Kant. He famously developed his philosophy from problems in Hume, especially Hume's showing that there is no warrant for our faith in cause and effect. And so Kant proposed that, contrary to the Newtonian era's confidence in matter and mechanics, we do not know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances, and we construct a world view from information coming in through our senses. Then there were the German Romantics that argued that we know directly that there is more to life than facts and reason. That's what all those Romantic paintings of a young German looking out into a prospect of magnificent nature were about.

Then there was Hegel (that McCloskey dismisses as an inspiration for authoritarianism and national-socialism). Does anyone understand Hegel? I certainly don't. But I rather like his Master and Slave analysis, which suggests that the Master is not exactly master, and the Slave not exactly helpless. And his notion of dialectic proposes that we humans proceed by lurching from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, rinse and repeat.

Then there was German physics that drove the relativity-quantum mechanics revolution. What was that all about?

And Freud-Jung and the mostly German developmental psychologists that invented modern psychology that, amongst other things, reminds us that our fabled rational minds sit on top of an undiscovered country of the unconscious. And it may be that our conscious mind is just a fake image projected like a movie from the unconscious to make us feel good.

Now, I reckon that out of all this came my reductive Three Peoples theory that owes a lot to the developmentalists. And then there is Curtis Yarvin's three-layer picture of modern society as Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

So tell me "Why Liberalism Works" for the Gentry. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Commoners. And "Why Liberalism Works" for the Clients.

See, I believe with McCloskey that liberalism and the discoveries about how markets work for all of us and have driven the Great Enrichment are true -- as far as anything can be true, given that as far back as Nietzsche we have to understand that our understanding of the world are remarkably constrained by, say, the need of every living thing to stay alive when danger strikes.

The fundamental world view of my People of the Subordinate Self and Yarvin's Clients is that to survive in this world you have to have a patron, a powerful man that can protect you from a cruel world. How does McCloskey's liberalism speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Responsible Self and Yarvin's Commoners is to accept that it is your job to get on in the world, to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, but that in return you expect some sort of protection from the rulers. How does McCloskey speak to them?

The fundamental world view of my People of the Creative Self and Yarvin's Gentry is that life is a creative project and a fine thing it is: it is their creative innovation that gave us the Great Enrichment. But the Gentry also seem to believe that the scope for their creativity should be almost limitless and that the plebs should not have the right to oppose their brilliant ideas. Yes, of course, McCloskey is a creative and naturally thinks that creatives should rule the world with "kindness... toleration... inclusiveness... cosmopolitanism" and so forth. But whatabout the people that experience the "kindness" etc. as mere patronizing bossiness?

I call my Three Peoples theory "reductive" partly out of irony, because of course all human knowledge is reductive. Nietzsche: "a priori 'truths' are for me -- provisional assumptions" Or this:

Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time), that concept is reduced to the formulas of mathematics -- with which as one must emphasize again and again, nothing is ever comprehended, but rather designated and distorted. Will to Power §554.

The mistake of the original 18th century liberals was to assume that everyone would identify with the creative bourgeois ethos. And that ethos is certainly my culture and feels comfortable to me.

But humans are not like that. We humans are social animals that find safety and survival in groupish behavior and instincts. Most humans down the ages, I think, experienced themselves as subordinates in the hierarchy; they submitted to power to enjoy the benefits and safety of being in a community.

And, of course, one of the basic facts of life was that land was life. You, or your group, had to possess food-yielding land, or else. So you had to belong to a group.

Now I think that modern socialism as a prescription for groupishness is a disaster. But clearly there are a lot of people that think it delivers community and safety.

I notice that everyone these days is shocked, shocked by slavery. I ask, instead, why has slavery become, in the last centuries, a scandal? What changed?

I even think I get the Death of God. It is because modern Gentry believe that they are the creators. No God needed.

So I think that the modern problem is how to deal with the fact that people have different ideas of community, of work, of wealth, of rules, of morality. And the place to start, to be able to look at the world from different perspectives, I believe, is with a reductive Three Peoples or three layers theory.

How to make a better world that subordinate Clients will appreciate?

How to make a better world that reponsible Commoners will appreciate?

How to make a better world that creative Gentry will appreciate?

It's a problem!

Soleimani: Escalation or Lesson to Iran?

The response of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the Trump administration's assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani was that nobody informed her.

The response of Obama foreign policy chappie Ben Rhodes was to hope for the best but worry that there is "serious escalation to come."

The general shock-and-horror response from Democrats makes me wonder: what is going on that I don't understand?

And more to the point, what exactly was the strategic rationale behind the Obama administration's accommodation of Iran -- not to mention the sending pallet-loads of actual cash? (Hey, wanna job as a fork-lift driver?)

I mean, in my view of the world, you look at an expansive ideological power like Iran as something to be resisted: not maybe through all-out war but certainly by throwing sand in the gears. You look at the bigger picture and say, well, chaps, we sure don't want Iran dominating the entire Middle East -- not that there was anything wrong with those Zoroastrians back in the day.

I tell you what is intriguing to me. On the one hand our Democratic friends wage ceaseless ideological war in schools, universities, social media and cake bakers, with no quarter given.

So our Democratic friends believe in ideological war to the knife.

But then, when it comes to international affairs they are always whining about "escalation." Or Jimmy Carter is pontificating about our "inordinate fear of communism."

You mean the communism that caused the deaths of 100 million humans in the 20th century, Jimmy?

OK, I do understand it, in this way.

Our Democratic friends believe in global hegemony and domination by and for the Educated Gentry. They do not believe in the nation state, and the do not believe in the citizens of the nation state, the Commoners. Thus, they instinctively dislike all expressions of the nation state, from Trump to the US imperium. And within the nation they conduct politics by setting one group of Americans against another and conducting a non-stop Olympics of the Victims, which makes sense for them because it weakens the nation state of America.

I do not think that they have seriously thought where all this ends up.

Now, I don't know what is really going on in the Middle East. I don't know if the assassination of Soleimani is a good idea tactically or strategically. But I would say that when Iran-backed "protesters" attack the US embassy, which is a definite provocation and a jab in the ribs to US power, then the US needs to "send a message."

After all, the point of hierarchies is that the order of rank is understood by all and the hierarchy reduces violence and death. So that if someone in the order of rank jabs a chap higher up then the rules of hierarchy require that the higher-up chappie delivers a short, sharp lesson to the lower-down chappie. That restores the status quo ante and the peace of the hierarchy.

Of course, this may be rubbish. President Trump may indeed be stirring up a hornet's nest and starting a global thermonuclear war. You never know for sure.

But my instinct is that Iran cannot afford to torch the whole Middle East, because the outcome would, I suspect, involve the end of the current Iranian regime.

And now a word for you, Speaker Nance.

If you want to get advance word on US military strikes it might help if you weren't weakly allowing a left-wing-inspired impeachment of the president and going along with outrageous use of the intelligence community to bollix up a presidential election. Because when the House is impeaching the president, and when Democratic Party leaders seem to perfectly copacetic with spying on the opponent's campaign with the help of the intelligence community, I would say that it rather lowers the level of trust between the leader of the House and the President.

If you get my meaning, Speaker Nance.

And that is bad for America, Speaker Nance.