Appreciating Life's Blessings

For everything there is a season.

As I return from visting my daughter in Britain, I am reminded of this.

When I was a boy in Britain in the 1950s in the northwest London suburbs my parents would drop me and my sister off down the street at the house of a pair of maiden sisters and drive to Stratford-on-Avon for a Shakespeare play.

Then the day came when my sister and I got to go. We saw Much Ado About Nothing in 1958 with Christopher Plummer as Benedick. I still have a visual recollection of Plummer on the Stratford stage.

Twenty years later we were driving with two daughters to Ashland, Oregon to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for a week of Shakespearing and getting together with my parents.

Then the next year we took our daughters to Seattle Opera for a performance of Don Giovanni. The orchestra was on strike so there were two grand pianos in the orchestra pit. But who cares!

Twenty years later I was driving to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival because my daughter was organizing a week of Shakespeare for her husband and two sons. For some reason her sons were really energized by the fight scenes. Unlike my daughters twenty years before.

Last summer I visited my daughter in Britain and she took me to Stratford-on-Avon to see a couple of Shakespeare plays and visit the schoolroom where William Shakespeare went to school and learned all about the classical figures he featured in his plays. And then on to Bath to check out the Jane Austen scene.

Last night my daughter took me to the Royal Opera in Covent Garden, right next to the flower girls of which you've heard tell, and we saw a fine performance of La Traviata. Earlier in the day we had a cream tea in the cafe at the British Museum where it seemed that everyone was outnumbered by the East Asians.

And so the whirligig of time brings on her revenges. Or the old'uns merely hand off the future to their posterity, in the realization of Burke's dictum that human society is a "contract… between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are to be born." A contract never originally planned, or carefully carried out, or monitored or, at the last, reviewed and judged, but just an unrolling phenomenon from a disappearing past striding forth into an unknown future. And a blessing when you discover that life is giving you much mure than you deserve.

Feeling Up the Elephant of Identity Politics

Here's John Gray mourning "identitarian liberalism" in the modern West. In the good old days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, people were glad to be Austrian, he writes. But then, according to Galician Jewish writer Joseph Roth, born in 1894:

All those people who had never been other than Austrians … now began to call themselves part of the Polish, the Czech, the Ukrainian, the Slovenian, the Croatian ‘nation’ — and so on.

From Roth's point of view,

With all of its faults — including a virulently anti-Semitic mayor in fin-de-siècle Vienna — the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed its subjects to live with one another without having to define themselves as belonging in any particular group.

Well, according to Adolf Hitler the only problem was that everyone did define themselves by National group in the Habsburg Empire whatever intellectual Jews thought and that the minority Germans came out second best. At least from the point of view of a nationalist German like Adolf.

In other words the ruling class of the time thought of itself as above national identity, but wasn't above a bit of divide and conquer on the national identity front.

Now John Gray thinks that there's a problem today, that

Both in Europe and the US, the liberal project has shifted from aiming to enable peaceful coexistence among individuals and groups with divergent identities to one that seeks hegemony for a single kind of identity—that of the autonomous, self-fashioning individual.

Well, I don't think that our liberal friends have ever been in favor of peaceful coexistence between groups, except those that were willing to peacefully protest for the Gentry liberal agenda. That's why the socialists were against the bourgeoisie and for the workers back in the day. 

And that is why liberals today are against Trump-voting commoners and for racial and gender identity groups that vote for liberals.

And as for the autonomous self-fashioning individual, I think that our liberal friends are in favor of left-leaning Gentry individuals that toe the left-liberal line and will cancel anyone that steps out of line.

And I think it is characteristic of chaps like Gray to think that maybe we've got a slight problem, but not to worry.

No, the bigger problem is that autonomous self-fashioning liberals are not people that think that politics is something that we need to keep under a tight rein; they think that politics run by them will bend the arc of history towards justice for autonomous self-fashioning indivoduals like them.

But Gray's heart may be in the right place. Says he,

A 21st-century successor to liberalism would enable devotees of individual autonomy to inhabit the same society as people who define themselves by other values — inherited codes of conduct of settled communities, revealed religionsoor noncommittal pragmatism, for example. Basic freedoms would allow people to move from one identity to another, but there would be nattempt to convert everyone to a life of self-fashioning autonomy.

But first our liberal friends have to release their rigid grip on the controls of political power.

A group intent on impeaching a duly-elected president is not a group anywhere close to admitting politics is not the universal answer to human problems, and that other people have rights too.

The Millennial Cult Problem

Obviously, millennarian cults, prophesying the end of the world, are a recurrent human phenomenon. And I suppose it issues from a fairly obvious cause. There are times when a human community is faced by an existential peril and everyone must respond to the call of the leaders, or the group faces oblivion.

This obvious fact surely underlies every politician predicting doom unless we act now. It obviously underlies all the climate change urgency. Irrespective of the validity of climate change claims or of the time scale involved, the only way to provoke a political response is to say that we face doom unless we act now, or at least within the next ten years.

The point is that any period outside about ten years -- or 12 years in some appeals -- is not a peril that requires the community to act now. It is something that can be put off for a year or two. But the point and the internal logic of every political campaign, every activist movement, is that we have to act now.

Actually the call to action is an incredibly risky proposition, because it is really a call to arms, a call to suspend normal life and enroll in the community's army that will face and vanquish the foe. It is only warranted when there really is an existential peril requiring the mobilization of every person in the community. We, who have lived in the aftermath of the two greatest wars in human history, must surely understand how incredibly risky the suspension of normal life and the conversion of all wealth and activities to the fight against the existential peril can be.

We are talking here about human deaths in the millions, not just in the war itself but in the aftermath. I've been reading in the last couple of days a book about the end of World War II that might be ridiculous conspiracy theory or it might be true. Leaving aside the 6 million Jews, there were probably millions of German soldiers and German civilians that died after the end of the war as they were captured and/or expelled from German-settled areas in Eastern Europe. Apart from the question of "who is to blame" there is another point, that once you disrupt normal day-to-day life and normal human work and interaction, people start to die really quickly unless you take heroic action. The US Army, for instance, liked to have about 100 days of food on hand for its forces in the field during World War II. Hmm. I wonder how many days of food are on hand here in the good old USA during the piping days of peace. Somehow I suspect that there are a lot less than 100 days of supplies in the "supply chain." So what would happen if there was a natural or man-made disaster right here, right now?

My point is that in the political world we make a big deal about all the horrible things that are wrong with society, but seldom think about what has to go right -- and what is going right at this moment -- just to keep everything running day to day, so that we all go to work, buy our food, shop for things, drive around, and do 101 things without thinking that are in fact essential for the day-to-day continuance of life as we know it.

I was thinking about this as I penned yet another look at the Democrat's Failure of Prophecy situation. Here they are, prophesying the end of the world, stopping the usual corrupt progress of politics-as-usual so they can harass and harm the president and also bring all racists sexist and homophobes to book. But meanwhile, life must go on! Otherwise we all die!

And what a remarkable thing it is that normal life does go on. And people make the products, serve the consumers, cook the food, make the babies, feed the children, look after the aged, and all that continues irregardless of the pantings and the shoutings on the hustings and in the TV studios.

My point is that probably we should be listening a lot less to the predictions of disaster and merely keep on keeping on with the daily routine. For the daily routine that delivers food and light and energy and life and health and all the rest is a moment-to-moment miracle, and must be carefully weighed against any proposed frightful peril that requires us to suspend all usual activity and instead fight the foe.

You better have a real foe, Mr. We Must Act Now, or millions of people will die for nothing.

Liberalism Properly Understood

I saw a reference to Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen, and bought the book. And I am glad I did. Not that I agree with Deneen, who accuses liberalism, both in its economic-libertarian and progressive-social versions of being an “anticulture” that destroys the culture of virtue and sense of place of the great cultural tradition from the Greeks to the start of the Enlightenment. Says he:

Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that makes place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning.

Actually, I don’t agree. First, humans have always been in the business of conquering nature. More and more, we learn how even our furthest ancestor mucked about with the Earth. For instance, we have just experienced a moral panic about monster bush fires in Australia, supposedly proof of runaway climate change. Only, skeptics point out, aboriginal tribes have done controlled burning since time out of mind. And all animal breeding and horticulture is a flat out conquest of nature: what are domestic animals but our conquered slaves?

And as for time: certainly it is true that we now think of time as linear, and we used to think of it as cyclical. But we also have cyclical theories of dynasties, such as the progressive dynasty that seems to be showing its age right now and doesn't seem to have the chops to see off the populist rebellion.

Deneen also makes a lot about the sense of place, about humans being rooted in a single place, anchored to land and community. Except that people anchored to place were usually not virtuous souls giving back to the place what they took out of it, but serfs, that thrived so long as weather and the political ambitions of their lord allowed it. And humans are notoriously a nomadic species that wanders the Earth in search of it knows not what.

Like many cultural conservatives Deneen’s ideal is a culture of virtue.

The Greeks especially regarded self-government as a continuity from the individual to the polity with the realization of either only possible if the virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice were to be mutually sustained and fostered. Self-governance in the city was possible only if the virtue of self-governance governed the souls of the citizens; and self-governance of individuals could be realized only in a city that citizenship itself was a kind of ongoing habituation in virtue, through both law and custom.

The only thing, of course, is that all this good thinking was a kind of pious hope. The reality of Greek life was Peloponnesian wars. Followed by the rise of Alexander who conquered most of the known world. Not much virtue there, or a wise recognition of the sense of place and the obligations of community. Just flat out pursuit of power.

In other words, the ancient world through the Middle Ages may have had an ideal of virtue and looking after the Earth and cherishing community and the sense of place. But the Spartans were throwing kids off cliffs if they didn’t look like they were going to measure up to the Spartan ideal of masculinity. The Romans legions were conquering near and far and sending the booty and slaves back to Rome for a jolly old triumph. The feudal age was big on inter-lordly conflict with this lord teaching that lord a lesson. They recruited their armies with promise of loot and plunder.

Now I don’t know if you think of that sort of behavior as nurturing nature or conquering it. And as for a sense of place, well, you’d better have your armed knights and archers ready to defend it.

Let’s interpret that world in this way, as a Two Peoples world. There were the virtuous that had studied the classics or the Bible under worthy teachers and had succeeding in the endeavor of paideia, the education in virtue. But everyday life was superordinate and subordinate, with lords ruling it over their subordinates that looked to them from protection.

What Deneen doesn’t like is the advent of the age of creativity.

If you think of economic liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can learn how nature works and put it to work for us. Conquest of nature, no question. Or as Horkheimer and Adorno put it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. But you know what? We also got the Great Enrichment with an increase in income of 30 times in 200 years. In Africa people are using cellphones for money transfers. How crazy is that? And is it despoiling the Earth? Yes, probably. Only, as the London Economist wrote about 20 years ago, once a country gets to about $10,000 per capita income per year it starts to care about cleaning up the environment. And worry, as we have taught teenagers to worry, about our resource use destroying the planet’s climate. Whatabout the crash of 2008 and unsustainable debt? Well, people that take out debt are anticipating future income; debt is particularly useful in trade where the final sale may be months after production. But there's a problem when the political sector uses mortgage debt to buy votes, for if people can service their debt and/or the collateral on a debt can't be liquidated -- as was direct policy due to the Community Reinvestment Act, then you got trouble, right here in River City.

If you think of progressive liberalism, it is saying that we can do a lot better. We can free people from age-old hierarchy and subordination. We can create our own hierarchy and justice out of the incrustation of centuries. Is there a downside? Certainly. We can screw up and we have screwed up big time. And as plenty of critics have pointed out, the new world seems to be really good for educated elitists but not so good for lesser folk.

See I don’t believe that things were nobler and more virtuous and wise in the old days. People may have had a dream of virtue, but there wasn’t much around. Let us say that the Enlightenment with Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and all started the rot. But what about Henry VIII who disarmed the nobles in his reign of 1509 to 1547? His nobles forthwith threw out a good bunch of their peasants because they were no use as potential soldiers. I don’t think that had anything to do with virtue and lordly noblesse oblige. It was a simple power play: Henry VIII on his nobles to keep them from causing trouble. And nobles looking out for Number One and deciding that they didn't need no stinkin' peasants any more if they weren't going to be used in their private armies.

Now, I agree that the problem with getting all creative, economically and socially, is that you certainly throw out a lot of babies with the bath water. Untrammeled creativity is indeed what Nietzsche described, free spirits going all out for a bit of Wille der Macht before breakfast.

The interesting thing to me is that after Nietzsche described and celebrated pedal-to-the-metal creativity, the dialectical opposition of creation and destruction, the folks that came after him dug up the old wisdom about creativity, that it must be implemented through the agency of the Sacrifical Hero who has been on his Hero’s Journey into his personal unconsciousness and its demons and come back sadder and wiser, ready to explore on the border between chaos and order. And give his life so that others may live.

But however high we may reach into the creative empyrean we are still humans, and many of us merely want to hang on to some powerful lord for his protection -- not to mention a bit of free stuff. A good proportion of middling folks aspire to responsibility and virtue, learning how to live a good life. But what happens if the world changes, but conquest or by invention? What do the sensible Hobbits of the world do then? The truth is that life is full of challenge and tragedy and learning the virtues is not enough. You also have to suck it in in the hard times and perhaps up sticks and leave your beloved home and journey to a new land.

There is no doubt that modern liberalism in all its facets is a hot mess. And there is no doubt that the economic titans with their constant chop and change cause ordinary people much heart ache. And the progressive wokerati and their secular religions have caused untold misery, and it some cases a return to slavery. The whole thing could yet end in utter failure and disaster just as the climate change enthusiasts insist.

Or we may muddle through.

What I say is that we, the educated, the wise, the evolved, the people that have had an education in paideia and the virtues, need to understand that our own agenda is not all there is. The world is not here just for creative geniuses and creative knuckleheads. Creative people are destroyers as well as creators. Nor is it just for people what want to hold on to the culture and the accumulated virtues built up over the past. You can’t hold onto the past: it can disappear in the twinkling of an eye. And if you just want to hang on in the retinue of some powerful lord or onto your well-paying union job and its guaranteed pension and shelter from the icy blast, be warned that the day will come when you are no longer of use to the lord's power project. You do have a backup plan ready? Right?

Liberalism is a hot mess. So is every creative project. The only problem with creativity is for the creative folks to insist, as they do all the time, that creativity is the only thing, and beat up the ordinary mortals that just want to wive and thrive and get kids on the ground.

But hey, nobody needs to figure that one out. The Trumps and the Brexits and the Borises are teaching the creative geniuses a lesson and all we have to do is sit back and watch.

These creative guys, liberals of the market and liberal of the wokerati are so brilliant that they didn't see it coming.

Imagine that!

When the Ruling Class Decrees Only One True Religion

Here's a piece in Quillette about how in Canada kids hockey coaches have to take non-binary gender classes in order to coach ice hockey. One parent said no.

Or whatabout Australian Margaret Court, the greatest woman tennis player of all time? She's in trouble because she thinks that transgenders should not be allowed to compete in women's sports. Oh, by the way, Court is now a Pentecostal minister, and some of her offending comments were made in sermons. You can see the problem with this Guardian headline: "Margaret Court: astounding champion who found God and lost the respect of a nation." The Guardianistas cannot endure the notion that maybe there are other ideas in the world.

Now, it is not that hard for me to fit this onto the Procrustean bed of my reductive Three Peoples theory.

If you are a Gentry or a Creative you think that people are supposed to be creative and that anyone that prevents people being creative is a hater and a bigot and should not be permitted in the public square. One of the more obvious ways of being creative is to step out of traditional sex and "gender" roles, for instance as a feminist or as an LGBT. Since Gentry people believe, as part of their secular religious tenets, that gender creativity is morally a Good Thing then people that promote traditional gender roles are doing a Bad Thing.

But if you are a Commoner or a Responsible you believe that people are supposed to obey the law and follow the rules. That is what traditional Christianity teaches. That is what "Sin" is all about. Expert theologians and prophets, inspired by God, have decided for you what is good and what is bad. Just obey the law and follow the rules and you will go to Heaven. In particular when it comes to sex.

Now, it seems obvious to me that both the Gentry/Creative and the Commoner/Responsible positions on sex are declarations of faith, worked out by the prophets and the philosophers of their faith traditions. There can really be no compromise on this, because each doctrine is one religion's attempt to determine "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

Let me reiterate. If you are a Gentry/Creative you probably believe that the whole point of life is to be a creative artist or activist, and you believe it is ridiculous to live a life where you just abide by the rules and roles of your parents. If you are a Commoner/Responsible you probably believe that the rules of the good life are instantiated in your religion and in the tradition of your family. It is unconceivable to step out of that tradition and imagine a life that breaks with the rules and roles you have inherited.

Of course, it would not matter that Gentry people do not understand Commoner people if it weren't for governemnt. There is, you may have noticed, a tendency for religions and governments to join up. Government is force, and the government governs best that governs least. So it really helps government govern if God is on its side.

But what if there are competing religions in the lands governed by a particular government?

Well, our Founders recognized that this could be a problem. So they decreed that there should be a separation of church and state and wrote into the First Amendment that there should be no state establishment of religion. That way people could profess different religions and would not be allowed to impose their religion on the rest of the nation. In the phrase invented by our liberal friends, the government would not be allowed to "legislate morality."

But when the Canadian government requires coaches of children's sports to undergo LGBT sensitivity training the government is legislating morality. It is imposing the religion of the Gentry/Creative class on the rest of the nation.

What, the lefties say? We don't believe in religion. We are past all that. All we are trying to do is establish justice for traditionally marginalized groups.

That, of course, is the great problem of the age. Lefties do not understand that their beliefs are religious beliefs, that they have a god, even if it is not a traditional Axial Age god. And they do not understand that most of what they do is legislating their lefty morality on the rest of us. Or else.

And, on top of that, they are saying that you will believe in our Gentry/Creative class religion and only that religion. All other faiths are superstition and bigotry and hate and will be driven from the public square. In particular the Christian faith of Commoners and Responsibles is not to be endured.

Yes, but, the lefty believers insist. We believe in facts and logic and reality. And these other people are reactionaries and patriarchs and gay-baiters. Are you standing up for haters? You must be a racist, sexist homophobe.

Yes. Well. Every half-baked fool believes that she believes in truth and the other people believe in lies.

I believe that we are all searching for "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" and because we do not know we have to make it up.

Let me reiterate this. I believe that nobody knows "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." But every religion and every activist group is claiming that it does.

The beginning of wisdom is to understand that different people will have different understandings of "the meaning of life, the universe and everything."

And as a practical matter it is probably a good idea to let other people practice their faith in peace and not get in their faces. Because there is this nasty thing called religious war. Or, if you prefer, using the argot of the 20th century, ideological war.

And when humans engage in religious or ideological war, millions of humans die. the Nazis declared ideological war on the Jews, and the official word is 6 million Jews dead. The Commies declared war on wreckers and saboteurs and kulaks and rich farmers. The official word is 100 million Russians and Chinese dead.

So I say to the wokerati, stop this nonsense of forcing your creative religion down everyone's throat. Because you chaps are provoking a rebellion, and you won't like what happens if it actually gets going.

The Politics of Sticking It to the Other Guys

The basic format of US politics for the last 100 years has been the elite, the Gentry, advocating on behalf of the Subordinates: workers, women, minorities. The basic game has been to guilt-trip the ordinary middle class into funding various government programs to deliver loot and plunder to the said workers, women, and minorities.

With the middle class getting a cut of the action in accordance with Irving Kristol's rule that if you want to help the poor you have to deal in the middle class.

Notice that there was a cunning indirect approach in this. The Gentry did not tell the Commoners: you are scum, now give us more money. No, they set up their Clients -- workers, women, minorities -- as helpless victims, liable to enternal oppression and marginalization unless we act now. And then they handed out some of the loot to the middle class.

But I think in the last 10 years or so that the Gentry has changed its front. Now it is not so much doing a guilt trip as saying: You Commoners are dirt, and we will run over you.

An obvious example is the newly Democratic state legislature of Virginia passing a bunch of gun-control measures. These measures are not exactly a response to a crisis in the streets; they are not an effort to come to a compromise that lets all parties go home and feel that they got something out of the deal. It seems to me that the purpose of these measures is not to make Virginia safe but to stick it to the rubes.

It all makes sense when you call the opposition, as a matter of routine, racist, sexist homophobes: in a word, deplorables. You are good; they are evil. They deserve everything you shovel at them.

Suppose we presume that, all along, the strategy of the Gentry was to stick it to the Commoner rubes. In that case the strategy to say that, hey, we have no beef with you middle-class folks; we just want justice for the helpless victims: that is brilliant. It is, as they say, an indirect strategy that deceives the targets into believing that they are not targets.

OK, maybe after half a century of this, the people on the receiving end are going to be wondering about the shells landing all around them all the time.

But when you actually start saying that all white people are white supremacists, and all white men are toxic masculinists, and all ordinary middle-class people are a basket of deplorables, then you have switched to a direct strategy. And you shouldn't be surprised that people on the receiving end start to take notice and start to organize against you.

Only you are surprised. More than surprised, you offended and outraged! Why, we are the good guys, the educated, evolved, ethical guys! How dare, how dare the rubes, the ignorant and bigoted rubes, dare to answer back!

And in Virginia, a day after 22,000 people demonstrated against more gun control, the Democratic state legislature went ahead and passed more gun control measures.

To say that this is worse than a crime, it is a blunder misses the point. It is a deliberate attempt to humiliate and marginalize the other party. It is not an attempt to find some sort of a compromise that everyone can live with; it is a statement of "our way or the highway."

OK, OK. I get it. For a generation and more all the Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls of the Gentry have gone to college-as-lefty-seminary. They have not been exposed to "the best that has been thought and said." They have instead been rehearsed in lefty apologetics. So all they know, like AOC, are the memes of the lefty Gentry culture.

And that means that they "literally know nothing" about the larger world. It means that they don't know how to deal with other world views, except to shut them down.

The point is that when your politics is reduced to sticking it to the other guys, because they are scum, then you are prodding the other guys into forming a head of rebellion against your regime of injustice. That is why people form a head of rebellion: they feel that they have been ignored, humiliated, and robbed, and they decide that they have nothing left to lose so they might as well burn it all down.

But, if my understanding is correct, our Gentry friends have no idea what they have been doing to average Commoner Americans for the last 50 years. They have no idea that people are angry, and why. They have no idea that their diversity and inclusion philosophy is a monstrous injustice. They have no idea that their identity politics is dividing the country like you wouldn't believe. They have no idea that President Trump, far from being a bumbling oaf, seems to be a man with an extraordinary ear for the voice of maligned Commoner.

The best we can hope for is for the impeachment trial to go down pronto. For Trump to win decisively in 2020, for the Republicans to win the House and for Democrats high and low to ask: What Went Wrong? And then come up with a New Bill Clinton in 2024 that declares himself a New Democrat just as the original Clinton did in 1992.

But I doubt if things will be as simple as that. They seldom are.

Liberals with Nowhere to Go

Right now I am thinking about what comes next. I take it as given that the Enlightenment mechanical world-view and its notion of a final paradise on Earth, whether of the right's market equality or the left's political equality, is a dead end.

In particular I react against the notion that we are all alike and all want the same thing, or should be forced to.

That's because the billions of humans on this Earth all want different things.

However, that is much too complicated. We need to simplify. And what humans do when thing are too complicated is we simplify things down to a Rule of Three: Past, Present, and Future. Garden of Eden, The Fall, and Heaven.

That is why I have come up with my reductive Three Peoples theory, reducing all the billions of world views down to three. I know, what presumption!

But I think it makes sense. Creative people want a chance to create a new world; Responsible people want a chance to make work the existing world, the world they are given; Subordinate people just want to be able to hang on to some powerful patron and shelter from the storm till the next check arrives.

Now, a couple days ago I commented in the American Thinker on a John Gray piece in The New Statesman in which he told the cultural wokies that in the wake of Boris Johnson's "stonking" victory their world view had "melted down into a heap of trash."

But then I stumbled over another couple John Gray pieces in UnHerd.com. In first he tells the greenies that, even given that their scientific analysis is correct about climate change -- and he thinks it is -- their strategy for dealing with it won't work. We should be adapting to the changes we have created, not curling up in the face of "unstoppable climate change."

But in 'Liberalism: the other God that failed" Gray goes further and argues that all the Enlightenment ideologies are finished. In the old days, people could import their Christian values into Enlightment equality, and ex-Communists in the late 1940s could return from the Communist ideology and its revolutionary forced march to the perfect future to ordinary liberalism, left or right, and its gradualist walk to the perfect future. Not any more.

When ex-communists became liberals, they shifted from one secular faith to another. Troubled liberals today have no such option. Fearful of the alternatives, they hang on desperately to a faith in which they no longer believe. Liberalism may be the other God that failed, but for liberals themselves their vision of the future is a deus absconditus, mocking and tormenting them as the old freedoms disappear from the world.

Actually this is not surprising, at least not to me. Because I moved on from the mechanical Enlightenment world and its logic and reason view years ago. We are not moving along an arc of history, not towards justice, and not towards universal prosperity. We are living things struggling to live in a changing world, adapting it if we can, and adapting to it if we must. We do not know the correct strategy for survival. Never did, never will. What we will do, what we have always done, is stumble along day to day, and hope that we didn't make a fatal blunder. Some people don't make it, sometimes a lot of people don't make it. But the world goes on.

Actually, the whole history of the last 200 years and its Great Enrichment on the economic front tell us what is happening. From time to time there are world-changing economic revolutions, started by some nobodies, that change everything. Machine textiles, steam power, world transportation, wood to coal to oil to electricity to nuclear, personal powered transportation, computers, internet, smart phones. Each of these has been an astonishing transformation, and yet we are all still here. Do you see how remarkable this is? We have had economic revolution after economic revolution, and yet almost everyone has kept up. More than that, the left-behinds, in China, India, and Africa, are catching up, even as the developed West keeps reinventing the economy. What is going on?

What is going on is humans analyzing the situation, coming up with 101 different plans to Do Something about it, and then letting the chips fall where they may, so that the two or three chaps with plans that actually work get to be billionaires and own the future. For a season.

And that is where my reductive Three Peoples theory comes in. The Creatives are the people that are going to be coming up with the 101 plans for the future. Good for them. Let them experiment with their own money and money that investors and speculators give them, and let the rest of us sit in the bleachers and see who wins the race. The Responsibles are the people that just live their lives as best they may and hope to adapt in a competent way to whatever the Creatives come up with. The Subordinates just sit there and shelter from the storm in the retinue of some great lord or big government.

The problem with the current situation is that the Creatives, the educated gentry, are forever coming up with plans that they want to force the rest of us to pay for and submit to. Because they are special.

They get to create the plans. We get to pay for it. They get the credit if it goes well, and robber barons take the blame if it blows up. Thanks very much.

Obviously, they "literally know nothing" because modern psychology, Jung version, has rediscovered that the way to the future is the Sacrificial Hero living and exploring on the border between order and chaos, and giving up his life so that others may live. The Sacrificial Hero is not the proud activist that gets to create a totalitarian regime that sacrifices everyone else's life so that the proud activist and his minions can live the life of Riley. Not at all.

We will know when our liberal friends come up with a good plan. Because it will be a plan to recognize that the highest and best thing to be is a Sacrifical Hero, and not a revolutionary activist or carping moralist. The plan will make it clear that it will be the Creatives that will do the sacrificing, not the average Commoner or the average Subordinate.