The Question of George Washington and His Slaves

My line on slavery is the same as my line on conquest and plunder.  Slavery Does Not Pay. 

And that is why we don't have slavery any more. Not because we are moral giants but because we can calculate profit and loss.

But then I read an interesting biography George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father's Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World, by John Berlau.

Did you know that George Washington started work as a surveyor at age 14? His dad had died and the kids from dad's first marriage got all the money. So the father of our nation had to get a job.

When Washington married his Martha, he was marrying money, for Martha was rich from her first marriage. Lots of slaves and all.

Here's the deal: Washington had a few slaves personally, and when he died he freed them all. This was considered a bit radical in 1799.

But the big thing for me was that George Washington, and a number of other slave-owners, had determined not to buy and sell slaves if it broke up the slave families.

In other words, he experienced his slaves as people, rather than commodities. But, when you experience your slaves as people there are all kinds of other issues, like what do you do about slaves that are too old to work.

That is where the Does Not Pay comes in.

The thing about slaves is that while you get work out of them -- if you are lucky -- you are also responsible for housing and feeding them. And clothing them and I know not what. 

OK, here are the details. In his will Washington stipulated after the death of his wife Martha all his slaves should be freed, and that former slaves unable to support themselves due to advanced age or disability should be clothed and fed by his heirs. And he provided for the education of "many of the former slave children." And no slaves were to be sold.

So if you actually care about them as people, they could cost you a bundle.

In other words, as soon as you start to care about slaves as people, Slavery Does Not Pay.

Do you see how free labor might appeal to the business class? If you are a good guy like George Washington the care and feeding of your slaves is going to cost a bundle. But if you free them and give them wages in return for their work then the responsibility for the care and feeding falls on the now-freed slaves.

So now it occurs to me that my line that conquest and plunder and slavery went out because They Do Not Pay has an important qualification.

If you do not care about the Other as people, then conquest and plunder and slavery are cool. If you conquer and kill, nobody cares about the widows and orphans of the conquered. If you plunder the conquered of all their grain, who cares if they all die of starvation. If you enslave the conquered, who cares if half of them die on the Middle Passage, or the voyage from Kaffa in the Crimea to the harems of the Middle East.

But once you do start to care about the Other as people, then everything changes. And all of a sudden the cost of treating people like people starts to come into view.

So you tell me the answer to this moral dichotomy: which is moral, to have people as virtual slaves and thralls and accept the responsibility to look after them? Or to employ them as free labor and just have to worry about the work they do and how much you pay them?

So, in our welfare state we have struck a middle course. We expect people to get a job, but we also look after the people that fall by the wayside. Is that a middle course, or a muddle? You decide.

Here's an interesting way to look at it. Our wokey friends divide the world up into oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors. Makes life pretty easy, don't it? You care about the "oppressed peoples" and the "allies" -- who are people like us wokies. The "white oppressors," whoever they are, can go hang.

Here's my take on morality. It's a lot more complicated than you think.

What I Believe

I'm going to lunch with some regular guys today, organized by a man that emailed me a couple of weeks back to thank me for my American Thinker articles. So maybe we will talk politics, not to mention "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

So I thought: what do I believe? What is "the meaning of life?" I think that my basic belief is that "we don't know." But everyone feels the need for a purpose, a meaning in life, so we make it up.

Correction: we don't make it up; we pick up someone else's belief system, a religion or ideology, and believe in it. Here is how a Portland stay-at-home mom experienced the woke belief system:

I started noticing [in 2016], throughout the neighborhood, a massive movement. Resistance to everything without an understanding of the issues themselves, the underlying data, what was really happening, it just felt so surface oriented, emotionally driven, and a repeat of media talking points. Yard signs popped up everywhere and are still on proud display. 

I believe that different people have different beliefs, and that this is natural and physical, and comes out of the modern understanding of the human psyche through things like developmental psychology. On this view, you would expect a hunter-gatherer to have a different world view than a college professor. You would also expect a construction worker with a mega pickup truck to have different ideas on transportation and grocery shopping than a college professor driving a Prius and shopping at Whole Foods.

I try to understand this "diversity" through my reductive Three Peoples theory. I use the word "reductive" because of course I know that things are not so simple that you can put all humans into three boxes. But, you have to start somewhere, and dividing humans into three parts is better than the more usual two-part "Us" and "Them."

Thus, I believe that we humans in the modern world come like this. There are, first of all, Subordinate people. These are people that experience themselves as victims, tossed around by indomitable powers. So the answer is to find a powerful lord or political patron and stick to him like glue. Then there are Responsible people. These are the middling sort of people that have a basic competence and skill set that enables them to make it in the market economy of the city. They think it is their responsibility to follow the rules, go to work, and follow the law. Finally, there are Creative people. For these people it is not enough to go out in the world and live a responsible life. As rich-kid Karl Marx wrote,

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Now I think it is important for Creative people to understand that it's all very well to talk about "changing" the world. But what if you are wrong and your plan for change is a disaster? You got insurance for that, pal?

I also think it is important for Responsible people to realize that it is all very well for them to say "get a job" to the Subordinate people of the world. But there is a whole cultural transformation between the life of the subsistence peasant in the feudal countryside and the knowledge worker in the city. I discuss this in my book The Road to the Middle Class.

I also think that it is important for Subordinate people to realize that their feudal lords or elected politicians or woke "allies" don't really care about people like them. Subordinates are what I call the "Little Darlings" of the rulers, at best, and their cannon fodder, at worst. When the day comes that the Subordinates are no longer useful for the lordly political project, they will be cast aside like an aged mistress. Case in point, the white working class, that progressives once loved, and now dismiss as white supremacist bigots and fascists.

Like everyone, I do have plans for how other people should live. For Subordinates, that I experience as people learning how to make it in the modern city, I propose The Road to the Middle Class, a program to learn the ways and the culture of the city, that I define as learning the code of Axial Age religion, education in modern skills, mutual aid rather than government welfare programs, and learning to live under law rather than under a lord. In other words, I recommend growing from Subordination to Responsibility.

For Responsibles, I recommend growing from Responsibility into Creativity, to experience life as not merely living according to God's law and living within set parameters, but learning to create a little, as in creating your own business, trying out some idea of betterment, of doing things better.

For Creatives, I have a plan. See, I think that the wokies -- ever since Marx -- have made a fatal error. They think that the future will be made by Creative people like them "fighting for change." This kind of person I call the Egoist Hero and they think of as the Revolutionary Hero. It is the modern equivalent of the tribal leader leading his people to victory on the border against the dangerous tribe next door. So I have developed my own idea of "The Good Life" which comprehends the wokey approach but reaches higher. 

For Creatives, I propose, the highest goal should be to become a Sacrificial Hero. This notion comes out of Jungian psychology and his idea of "archetypes." As developed by Jungian adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson, the Sacrificial Hero means a person that conducts the Hero's Journey into the underworld of the unconscious, and if he survives this dive into the depths he may return to help his fellow humans, by illuminating the border between Order and Chaos, between the known and the unknown. And he probably sacrifices his life in the process.

The key thing to understand, I think, is that politics is not the way to the future. Politics, in my understanding, is the defense of our tribal patch of land from others that would conquer, plunder, and enslave us.

Only, in my understanding, conquest, plunder and enslavement are so yesterday. No, not immoral, so much as belonging to another age. For the point is that in our world, conquest, plunder, and slavery Do Not Pay.

Why? Because in modern developed countries 80 percent of wealth is "intangible capital" between the ears of intelligent creative responsible people. If you conquer, and plunder, and enslave, you have gained nothing. Because the wealth of the world is intangible.

If only our lefty friends would wake up one day and realize this.

Activism and a Meaningful LIfe

It's about five years since I started writing about "Activism Culture." One of the first posts was "If Every Young Liberal Longs to be an Activist, What About Conservatives?" That post started with a conversation I had with a woman friend who had quit her job and gone back to school. She was upgrading her skills because she had always wanted to get into "activism."

So here's another monument to "activism." It's an MSNBC producer, Ariana N. Pekary, who quit her job last month at MSNBC. She couldn't take it any more, because media has now become purely a race for ratings, and every moment of every program is evaluated according to how it "rates." Says she:

Through this pandemic and the surreal, alienating lockdown, I’ve witnessed many people question their lives and what they’re doing with their time on this planet.  I reckon I’m one of those people, looking for greater meaning and truth.

That, I am sure, is what my friend was looking for in "activism." And indeed, young people are all carefully taught in our schools and universities, that activism in behalf of traditionally marginalized people is the answer to the question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

You can see the notion in the woke left's Three Layers understanding of society, courtesy of Matt Taibbi:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Allies, you wonder? Listen to this Portland stay-at-home mom, who objected to PTA money funding expensive African drumming classes for minority students at her kids' middle school.

This escalated to the point where they offered white ally trainings so that white parents could understand and learn their white privilege.

This view of society exactly matches the Activism Culture. Activists, on this understanding, are the "ällies" of "members of oppressed groups," And the meaning of life, or in Arian Pekary's words, "greater meaning and truth" issues from acts of allying with members of oppressed groups in political action.

Notice the essential ingredient in this Three Layer theory. It is the "white oppressors." Without the white oppressors the "allies" wouldn't have a reason to fight for the members of oppressed groups. So the whole thing depends upon there really being a category of "white oppressors."

In other words, for a woman who has always wanted to get into "activism" it doesn't make sense unless there truly is a darkling cloud of "white oppressors" out there on the horizon. That is why, of course, our liberal friends are always on about white supremacists and white nationalists and racist-sexist-homophobes and the radical right. Because there must be a Satan behind the clear and obvious oppression of traditionally marginalized groups.

Now, I think that "activism" of Activism Culture means two different things, depending on whether you are a man or a woman, and this issues out of the basic instincts of men as defenders and women as nurturers.

Thus, AntiFa is clearly a male effort, of black-clad street soldiers fighting for justice against the eevil right-wing fascists.

Thus my friend's efforts to help poor southern women register to vote is clearly an effort to be helpful and nurturing.

But what if the "members of oppressed groups" are not really very oppressed? What if the "white oppressors" are just ordinary white middle-class Commoners with no particular economic, cultural, or political power? What if the "allies" are conceited members of the educated Gentry "looking for greater meaning and truth" in the wrong places?

It's a good question. How would you know the answer?

I guess that this suggests the importance of the Jungian notion of the Sacrificial Hero archetype. If your "activism" leads to you being a national hero beloved by all MSNBC producers and executives because your activism builds TV ratings, I'd say that you are probably doing the wrong thing.

But if your "activism" merely illuminated the border between Order and Chaos and shines a little light on a darkling world and your activism doesn't lead to any publicity and the glare of the klieg lights. Well then, probably it is leading to "greater meaning and truth."

For never forget my two maxims about government and politics:

Government is force. 

Politics is division.

It means that whenever you do anything in politics and government, chances are you are making things worse. Because humans as social animals thrive from the reduction of force and the smoothing over of divisions.

Or, more simply, anyone getting into "activism" is playing with fire when it comes to a meaningful life. 

Don't say I didn't warn you!

The Three Peoples and Gubmint Programs

An emailer friend recently sent me a rant on the current riotous political situation, that the problem is "an unlimited food supply for indigent rats."

The cure is to cut off the food supply.  Cut off welfare. Cut all non essential employment. End social security. End AFDC. End EBT.  Debase the dollar value until minimum wage equals the value of labor. Defund all social services. Defund public schools.  Defund police. Defund hospital emergency.  When the supply of labor settles to equal the legitimate demand for labor then calm will be restored.

But actually, the people rioting are not the indigent rats, but the educated youth wing of the Democratic Party. The rats are doing fine, if you assume that, like the bottom 35 percent of white Americans, their men don't work much and their women don't marry much.

The problem with the indigent rats is the problem with George Floyd, with Rayshard Brooks, with Michael Brown, with Trayvon Martin, that they are young black men that have never twigged to the city market economy. They are not employed, not married, medicating themselves with drugs, etc. And, as with George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, they are terrified of being arrested and sent back into jail.

Anyway, it go me to thinking. What do people want? Or, more importantly, what do each of my reductive Three Peoples want out of government?

Let us start with the People of the Responsible Self, the Commoners. Our defining characteristic is that we don't want power, and we don't want to be under someone else's power. Or, as Sarah Hoyt writes in "Vive La Bourgeoisie," 

You neither want to be ruled nor to rule.  You want to rule yourself.

Or, to reframe what my friend wrote, We Commoners want the responsibility and dignity of saving for our own Social Security and old age. We want to supervise and pay for the education of our own children. We want to do our own health care and not have to dodge through all the crumbling monuments of "free" health care. As for the poor? We are willing to step up and help. But first, we think they should get a job, and that starts with an end to the minimum wage and all the gubmint programs that discourage the poor from getting with the program and learning how to become good middle-class wage-earners and accept the rules of the market economy.

Whatabout the People of the Subordinate Self, the Clients, the victims, the "oppressed peoples?" The defining principle of their lives is the belief that the world is a brutal place and the only way to survive is to find a powerful leader and serve that leader in return for the safety of his protection. You do what you have to do to earn his protection. In our society that means voting for the lefty party that offers free stuff, from  welfare to to EBT to social services to Social Security and Medicare. It's a cold cruel world out there, and you have to find a warm hearth to keep warm.

Whatabout the People of the Creative Self, the educated Gentry? The defining principle of the Gentry life is to elevate yourself above the herd. Mere responsible behavior is not enough. You must "make your mark" in your chosen field. One of those fields is "activism" bending the arc of history towards justice for the traditionally marginalized, or the "oppressed peoples" of the world. And the way to do that, as has developed over the last century or so, is to create government programs that assign the responsibility for human welfare to wise, educated bureaucrats, politicians and activists. Thus the whole array of gubmint programs.

Now I say that the reason for Trump and Brexit and the populist nationalists in Europe is that the current welfare state is great for the educated Gentry, who have awarded themselves lots of remunerative and satisfying creative gigs. (Case in point:  when I went to an engineering conference in Switzerland in 1990, all the European academics there seemed to have some EU grant or gig. They were all as happy as clams). The welfare state is great, at least on the surface, for the Clients and the Victims, because it puts off the evil day when they knuckle down to the fact of the market economy and start down the Road to the Middle Class.

But the current setup is not so great for the People of the Responsible Self, the Commoners. For one thing, the educated Gentry likes to imagine us all as racist-sexist-homophobes. For another, the politics of the Gentry is all about nice gigs for themselves and free money for the Victims. But they never think about how their policy "plays in Peoria."

For instance, if Commoners weren't putting payroll taxes into Social Security and Medicare and unemployment insurance, they could be saving their own money for retirement and then using it on the way to start a business or buy a house or educate the kids. If we didn't have the gubmint housing programs with 80 percent down 30 year loans then we would be back to the pre-WWII rules where you probably put 50 percent down with a ten-year mortgage. If that were the case, then housing prices would be a lot lower and ordinary people could afford to buy houses. Especially the ordinary people that saved a little money for a big down payment.

I want to dwell on this housing thing. "Everybody" thinks that we need the government and Fannie/Freddie to make housing affordable for ordinary people, especially minorities. But all the subsidies and 80 percent loans and 30-year stuff means that more people can afford to spend more on housing, and that bids the price up. Is that good or bad? Is it affordable? You tell me.

To wrap up, if you want to understand the present political situation, it helps to see that the educated Gentry is getting what they want and the Clients and victims get their "benefits." But, I would say, ordinary Commoners are told to step to the back of the line, and like it. Because pejoratives.

Or, as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

At the present moment, our educated Gentry has No Idea about this. Because they are wonderful and Commoners are white supremacists and systemic racists.

When you think about it, it shows that the educated Gentry is clueless. Because if they were half as wise as they pretend, they would be on to the fact that the ordinary Commoner has been getting shafted, by them, for years.

The job of any good colonialist is to know when "the natives are restless" and why.

When the White Woke Mob Comes to the Home of a Black Woman Police Chief

As my friend says, "you couldn't make it up." On Saturday August 1, at about 6:30pm a line of BLM vehicles harassed the home of Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best in Seattle's middle-class suburb Lynnwood.

If you are a liberal Seattle resident sporting a Black Lives Matter yard-sign, Lynnwood is, well, precisely the place you would not want to live. But if you are the Seattle Police Chief and you don't get the bennies of working for high-tech, Lynnwood is probably the place where you could just about afford to buy a home.

But guess what. The neighbors of Best assembled to push back against a

crowd of about 200 persons, mostly white men and women in their twenties, were dressed in black with masks and black hoods and carried signs that read “Black Lives Matter.”...

Neighbors aware of Best’s physical home location, established a perimeter to protect her home from possible mischief.  Best was not home at the time of the incident.

After it was all over, the neighbors thanked the county police:

All of the neighbors interviewed by the Lynnwood Times were thankful to the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office for providing an around the clock law enforcement presence.

Then Best thanked the neighbors:

Chief Best personally thanked each of her neighbors for their support and apologized to them for the incident. However, neighbors responded with sympathy to Best for the ordeal she and her staff are going through.

Then the neighbors had a message for Carmen Best.

“She [Best] thanked us all for banding together,” one neighbor told the Lynnwood Times. “It made us feel awesome.  She felt she had to apologize to all of us, that this was happening to us and we said no. We apologized to her that this is happening to her.” 

 Do you feel what I feel, that this is America at its best? Completely different from the hate and the Sturm und Drang of the wokey set? I mean, aren't these white Commoner Americans all supposed to be "white oppressors" and "systemic racists?" And here they are exchanging compliments with a Black woman? What gives?

What gives is that Commoners are all Americans; their tribe is the nation, and their culture is that everyone gets along and everyone lends a hand when things get a little sticky. Anyone can apply and get accepted into this club. The only qualification is the need to get a bit misty-eyed when you see the American flag and hear the national anthem. It's not mandatory, but it helps. Also, it helps to treat other Americans as Americans and not as "white oppressors" or "oppressed peoples."

It's a funny thing, really. Equality. Not equality of result, of course, because that requires force. But equality of address. The idea that we are all in this together, and we are all equal in the sight of God or of Gaia, and nobody outranks anyone else, even if one guy is a white retiree and another is the black woman police chief of Woke Seattle.

More and more I am convinced of my analysis of "activism" as LARPing, or play-acting at revolution. You see this in Les Mis, when it rehearses the Paris riots of 1830. The kids on the barricades are young Educated Youth. But when one of them gets wounded, it takes the former convict Jean Valjean to come into the riot-zone and get him out. Valjean is doing it for his adopted daughter, the saintly Cosette, who was actually born to a single mother.

And as I've said before, LARPing is the motive force in the traditional medieval romance, with its knights on their palfreys and the damsels in distress. This was a time when really the upper crust of the day were courtiers in the courts of the absolute monarchs, and not the rough, tough heroes of yore.

But all this AntiFa noise reminds us that our young people today need a meaning of life more meaningful than play-acting at 18th century revolution when the problem today is that the wokesters' masters are the problem. We need a revolution, not against nobody Commoners, but against The Swamp, the Deep State, the one-party education establishment, the proud and conceited educated elite Gentry: really anyone mindlessly posting a #WeBelieve or Black Lives Matter yardsign.

Yes. Imagine that America's problem is not "systemic racism" or "white supremacy" but "liberal racism" and "liberal supremacy." Not to mention the Reign of Terror aspects of the woke Cancel Culture.

It's easy to get downhearted listening to the drumbeat of woke cancel culture, and even give in to the temptation of despair for America.

But then you read about white neighbors defending the house of a black woman chief of police, and the neighbors and the chief exchange compliments. And, if you are like me, you get a little misty-eyed.

And then you are reminded of my maxims, that

The American People are the best people in the world. 

The USA is the best country in the world. 

And you decide that, maybe, things are not so bad after all. 

My Two Cents on President Trump

Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt has a good piece in the Washington Post(!) enumerating the successes of President Trump. Just in case the Post readers "literally knew nothing."

You know the story: the China menace, judges, tax cuts, deregulation, beefing up the military, ditching the Iran deal, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, USMCA, the wall, and so on.

But at the end, Hewitt gives a inch:

Trump’s brawling, slugging, tempestuous approach to everything in every hour has worn down many, but his road is marked by these accomplishments. 

Not to me, pal. My attitude towards Trump is the same as President Lincoln towards Gen. Grant: "I can't spare this man -- he fights!"

And maybe it is Trump's aggressiveness has encouraged the wokie left to go full cancel culture, which I suspect -- I hope -- will prove to be a strategic mistake.

But one thing worries me. It is that Trump has not advocated the details of his policies. Many policy changes have been implemented as executive orders as a kind of fait accompli, without fighting a battle of winning the idea war.

I get why this is so. It is that, in today's America, nobody has access to the public square except liberals and lefties. Any conservative or libertarian or traditional religious idea gets canceled immediately as racism-sexism-homophobia-systemic-racism, etc.

So there is absolutely no opportunity to have a frank and fair discussion of the issues. And indeed there is a whole culture of left-wing activist NGOs that are tirelessly working on things like climate, urbanizing, diversity and inclusion, as part of the left's activism culture, for which there is no counter argument, because the rest of America is not into activism as a way of life.

Thus, in America right now, there is no public ventilation and development of ideas outside the Overton window of left-speak.

This is wrong, because the educated leftist gentry is a small part of the nation, and the economic interest and the culture and the religion of most Americans is very different from those of the educated elite.

It is also foolish. The whole point of the public square and elections and democratic government is to force the rulers to take into account the views and the interests of a broad spectrum of citizens, not just their own selfish power and cultural interests, and the interests of their supporters. The whole point of all the checks and balances is to stop the government getting too far out of whack, and to rebalance towards the center before the malcontents decide to form a head of rebellion. 

Regarding a head of rebellion I am not talking about the mostly peaceful protesters that are right now rioting in the streets of the wokiest cities. These rioters are regime supporters -- regime street thugs of the Democratic Party -- trying to embarrass the "not to be endured" presidency of Donald Trump.

Indeed the mostly peaceful protesters make a mockery of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" because the wokies already have the ear of the government and the rulers. It is the 62 percent of Americans who are afraid to state their opinions in public that need the right of protest.

But I understand the aggressiveness of the liberal and woke sector. Because they live in the "Blue Bubble" they really have no idea how the other half thinks. Their ideas are the right ones, and everyone else is a white supremacist.

At some point, these liberal castles in the air will all come crashing down. The only question is how much of the rest of America comes crashing down before the liberals cry "uncle."

"Movements" are So Over

In my series on Activism Culture I have been developing the idea that the left's faith in "activism" is a replay of the medieval romance -- King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; Lancelot, Guinevere, Parsifal, rescuing damsels in distress and all.

The point is that, in the days when the medieval romance flourished there were no more knights searching in the undergrowth for damsels in distress. The knights and barons had all become courtiers in the courts of the absolute monarchs. The monarchs liked it that way; it kept the powerful feudal lords under their watchful eye.

Now comes Adam Ellwanger with "On the Decline of American 'Movements.'" He notes that today's "movements" are unlike the great movements of yesteryear.

America has a rich history of movements. No one in 2020 seriously disputes the moral clarity of the abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, or the civil rights movement (in its mid-century articulation). But somehow, today’s “movements” seem less weighty—less substantive—than their forebears. Why?

Well, he says, take Black Lives Matter.

The organization claims to be addressing “systemic racism” and injustice. As many commentators have observed, “systemic racism” is a nebulous concept—it can manifest itself anywhere, in virtually any way. 

In all the current "movements" there is no clear articulation of what the problem is and what to do about it. You can see that the abolitionist movement was clearly about the abolition of slavery; the women's suffrage movement was clearly about votes for women. The civil rights movement was clearly about the prohibition of racial discrimination by the government and individuals.

And the point is that you could do all that by writing a law. Bliss was it to be in that day a political activist! To strike down with one blow, Siegfried, the evil dragon of the ages!

But what exactly does "systemic racism" mean? And what exactly would we do to end it?

What exactly does sexual harassment mean? And what would it mean to #BelieveAllWomen? In courts of law?

It seems clear that BLM activists and #MeToo activists are more nearly Live Action Role Playing, imagining themselves the glorious activists of yore, mounted on their palfreys, rescuing damsels in distress, and reveling in the heady experience of a mass movement and its mostly peaceful protests. Yeah! We are fighting against The Man!

So what has happened?

Suppose we say that the great injustices that we perceive in the age of the market economy have all been addressed?

It is relatively easy to suggest that everything will change, If Only we stop the government and evil corporations from discriminating against traditionally marginalized people.

But what do we do about police brutality against African American males, given that African American males in America commit about 50 percent of the murders? Defund the police? You mean in the face, already, of sharply increased urban violence and urban murders this year? Increase spending on social workers? But didn't we do that half a century ago with unclear results?

My point is that politics and government are very blunt instruments with which to do social surgery. Unless you are dealing with a pretty open-and-shut case, and a pretty clear goal of what to do, then politics and government are not the solution.

And, of course, very often politics and government fail to achieve beneficial goals even when the injustice is pretty clear and the proposed solution pretty simple.

So I say that the Age of Politics, of simple solutions to easily dramatized problems, is over. And the people that think that politics and "movements" and "activism" can solve our modern problems are reactionaries, nostalgically yearning for a simpler time when the problems seemed clear and simple.

Actually, I would argue, the problems were not simple, back in the day, nor did the political solutions do much to solve those problems. End slavery? Yeah! But in the century since, we have had gigantic wars into which elite politicians drafted -- enslaved -- young men as soldiers using the power of government and sent the enslaved young men to their deaths in the millions. But no slavery, no sir!

The answer, of course, is that we must look beyond the temptation of government and force, and look to the solution of religion and persuasion.

In a way, we are doing that. The Cancel Culture is recognizing that force is not the answer; naming and shaming and shunning is the way. But why not have a bunch of Cancel Cultures? Why should it just be a left-wing one? Hey, I know! Let's confine moral lecturing to within the culture of an actual religion that people join voluntarily?

In other words, for the really heinous stuff -- slavery, votes for women, racial discrimination -- we have laws and criminal penalties. But for merely moral questions we have religion: join the religious community of your choice. And, as we know, humans in a community tend to go along to get along. Maybe we encourage people to join the moral community of their choice by channeling various social benefits through them. Kinda like the mutual-aid societies and fraternal organizations back in the day.

Yes, Did you know that back in the 19th century, "everyone" belonged to a mutual-aid society or a fraternal organization? These organizations offered death benefits, life insurance, and "lodge doctors." Imagine.

For at the bottom of it all, we humans are social animals. All that means is that we have a ton of behaviors that avoid the resort to the dangerous and expensive solution of violence.

You can call the ton of behaviors:  religion, tradition, culture, archetypes, community, whatever. But government and force? Not so much, because we are better than that.