Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Slavery

Everybody knows that the only thing you need to know about slavery is the Middle Passage and Negro Slavery and plantations and white racism.

I'm sure that's what you were carefully taught, to hate and to fear, in school.

I had my first warning that it ain't necessarily so years ago when I read The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

See, back in the feudal era you could ask your feudal lord to make you a slave. Sure, the most notorious source of slaves was war: "conquest slavery." And you could be made a slave for a criminal offence; of course you could, because prisons are expensive. 

But voluntary slavery? Here's how Lacey and Danziger put it.

People surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress, when they simply could not provide for their families any more... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands. No legal document was involved, and the new bondsman would be handed a bill-hook or ox-goad in token of his fresh start in servitude. It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

Of course, this is not particularly scandalous to me, because my reductive Three Peoples theory understands that a lot of people are Subordinates, or people that believe they need a protector. Just like in 1000:

In the year 1000 people could not imagine themselves without a protector. You had a lord in heaven and you needed a lord on earth. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb expands on the topic in his Skin in the Game. It is covered in Chapter 3: How to Legally Own Another Person.

First, Taleb talks about the roaming monks of early Christianity, that were banned and enslaved into monasteries by the edit of St. Benedict. What was going on? The problem is that the vagrant monks were free, and

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run.

But that is not all. Whatabout the corporation and the company man?

Total freedom for your employees is also a very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

Why? Well suppose you have a small airline and the pilots are contracted. Suppose that tomorrow you have a fully booked flight to Munich for the Oktoberfest, and at 5pm your pilot calls you to cancel, because he got a better deal that day from a Saudi sheik. You can see that it would be better to have salaried employees, even if they spend a lot of time sitting around, rather than risk a contract pilot saying, sorry Bob, I got a better offer today. As Taleb says:

People you find in employment love the regularity of the payroll, with that special envelop on their desk at the last day of the month, and without which they would act as a baby deprived of mother's milk.

And so we developed the culture of the "company man" who was guaranteed employment until retirement and then retired with a pension.

The system worked when large corporations survived a long time and were perceived to be longer lasting that nation-states.

But now, Taleb says, in the tech age, the important thing for security is to be "employable," to have skills that employers want.

Here's another curious form of slavery. To employ someone, say in a foreign country, at a salary and benefits way over the market rate back home. "The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status." 

Or suppose you are a high-ranking civil servant. You are terrified of losing your reputation and your sinecure, and so behave exactly as required -- say by the deep state -- in order to keep your status and your perquisites.

Yes, you say, but these examples are not really slavery. Maybe not, but they do illustrate that the dominant narrative -- that back in the old days people were brutally enslaved, but now, in the glorious light of enlightenment those days are gone forever and everyone is free, except for the remaining "oppressed peoples" that we "allies" are determined to liberate -- is a little too simplistic.

And I say, with my Great Reaction notion, that the left, despite its glorious devotion to ending all oppression and domination, is in fact reintroducing subjection: thus I argue that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

In fact, all social animals are hierarchical, not egalitarian. True equality, true freedom don't exist in the real world. Every living thing lives in a hierarchical world and obtains protection from its subordination to the hierarchy and its place in the power hierarchy.

Some people want a lot of protection: at some point the level of protection and subordination approaches what we like to call slavery. Other people want very little protection; they are what we might call "free spirits" after Nietzsche. It ain't black and white, but all shades of gray.

But, of course, we Hegel scholars have always known that. Because, having taken the short cut and read Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we know that the Master and Slave relationship is not as simple as we might like to think. For instance, the Slave knows a lot more about the Master than vice-versa. And knowledge, as they say, is power.

One fine day, I predict, our lefty friends will completely change their minds about slavery. Because their political power will depend upon it. But don't ask me when.

Meanwhile keep your nose in the air, knowing that you know a lot more about slavery than your virtue-signaling Black Lives Matter liberal neighbor.

Lefty Ally-ism, and What Real Allies Look Like

It is a couple of months since I read the definitive word on our current Woke witch hunt and first commented on it. It was from Matt Taibbi's piece on "white fragility." The "antiracism" movement, he wrote, is based on the following three-layer theory of society.

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

Of course, I jumped on it, because of my interest in three-layer theories, which are the typical way that humans understand each other -- that is when they have the sophistication to graduate from a simple Us and Them theory. I lay out the theories in a table here.

I call this meaning-of-life theory "ally-ism." Because, of course, the point of "antiracism" is not being against racism but being an activist force for good, being the ally of "oppressed peoples."

Notice that, like the original Marxism, this ally-ism is not a theory of society but a theory of conflict. In Marx's concept, humans are engaged in an eternal Us vs. Them conflict, feudal lords vs. serfs, and now capitalists vs. proletarians. But there is hope! The Communists, the vanguard of the proletariat, will ally itself with the proles and smash the capitalist domination and hegemony. And then the problem of good vs. evil would be solved for all time.

In the new concept, we have the "white oppressors" dominating and oppressing the "oppressed peoples." But along come the "allies" who heroically insert themselves into this dominatory hellhole and join the battle of the oppressed against the oppressors as the allies of the "oppressed peoples."

Do you see the absurdity of this analysis? That it reduces human society to a war of all against all. Really? So how does the concept of humans as social animals come in?

And by the way, whatabout the notion, that I have advanced with respect to slavery, that some people actually voluntarily place themselves into slavery? Bad boy Nassim Nicholas Taleb updates the notion in Skin in the Game. He suggests that monasticism is a form of slavery. It was invented by St. Benedict to deal with the problem of itinerant monks that were totally out of the Catholic Church's control. Says he (p.96)

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run. Total freedom for your employees is also a very, very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

So, Taleb argues, in this supposed post-slavery age, there are all kinds of dependence going on, especially in the corporate world. By offering security of employment -- and dependence -- an employer buys loyalty. The high-water mark of this was the old lifetime employment deal offered by big corporations in the post-WWII era. That worked when the life of big corporations was sixty years or so. But not in the current era where "firms stay in the top league by size (the so-called S&P 500) for only about between ten and fifteen years."

That's why my maxim about the Great Reaction says that the welfare state is a return to feudalism. It works because a lot of people prefer the life of subordination to the life of responsibility.

In other words, a big chunk of your "oppressed peoples" may be subordinate by choice.

That's why I think that a good three-layer theory is descriptive before it is prescriptive. Who are these "oppressed peoples" these "white oppressors" when they are at home? And who are the glorious white-knight "allies?"

Well, my reductive Three Peoples theory does just that. It describes the Creative people, that want to create something new; the Responsible people that just want to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, and the Subordinates, that look to someone else to tell them what to do.

Let us try to mesh my theory with the Ally-ism theory. I'd say that the "oppressed peoples" align with my Subordinates. But what if, for many "oppressed peoples," their Subordination is a choice. Nobody, for instance, is forcing you to take welfare. In fact, you demand your welfare and your unemployment check and your Medicaid as a right. Really? You mean that your average "oppressed" person has enforceable "rights?" Oh, I forgot: they would have nothing without the heroic assistance of the "allies."

Whatabout the "white oppressors?" Are these graduates of prestige universities and prestige media or NGO jobs? Certainly not? Are they Tech Lords? Certainly not! Tech Lords are for the people. Are they Trump supporters, the kind that often get suspended and censored on social media and can be found enthusiastically cheering at Trump rallies? I think you have a funny notion of oppressor if the average "white oppressor" can be fired for expressing the wrong opinion, James Damore.

And whatabout "allies?" Are these graduates of prestige universities with prestige media or NGO jobs? You betcha! Are they Tech Lords? You betcha! Are they nice liberal ladies in swank gentrified inner suburbs with #WeBelieve yard signs out front? You betcha.

Hmm. I am getting a sneaking suspicion that the Mary McCarthy Rule applies here. You remember Mary McCarthy. She said of Lilian Hellman:

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

I'd have to agree with Mary, since the day I saw Lilian Hellman's play "The Watch on the Rhine" at the Berkeley Rep. 

Against this putrid philosophy I offer an notion of real Ally-ship. It is based on my Three Peoples theory and recognizes that different people need and want different things. 

I'd say that Subordinates -- or "oppressed peoples" -- need a decent support from society but should be encouraged to lift themselves out of dependency. That's what I think a real ally would do.

I'd say that Responsibles -- or "white oppressors" -- need to be allowed to just be ordinary people and go about their business without being hassled by credentialed "allies" and accused of being monsters when they are not. But Responsibles also need to be encouraged to rise above mere responsibility and try something new. That's what I think a real ally would do.

I'd say that Creatives -- or "allies" -- need to be encouraged in the courage of creativity, but not if it means running about being white knights and beating up on "white oppressors." True creativity means being willing to sacrifice yourself rather than sacrifice others, to be a sacrificial hero rather than an ego hero, and Creatives need to be told that in no uncertain terms. That's what I think a real ally would do.

Now let us look at the bigger picture. In our era, the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, the wages of cooperation have been immense. Take just one statistic: there are 3.8 billion smartphone users in the world today. In a world of 7 billion humans.

Just sayin'. How oppressed can you be if you have a smartphone? For one thing, it means that if you are one of the Factory Girls in southern China you can text with your friends about the best -- and the worst -- employers.

Now I think that the emergence of the Great Reaction, of well-born allies that went to selective colleges proposing to right the wrongs of the world with politics, is a sign that the Age of Politics, the age of using force to make people get along, is coming to an end. It is clueless scions getting the wrong end of the stick. It is a sign that the rule of the educated Gentry is coming to an end. Because we Commoners can get on perfectly well without the supervision of our Betters. Why? Because with smartphones and credit scores and cashless transfers there is a gigantic "nudge" encouraging each of us to be faithful and trustworthy in every life transaction.

In other words if there is a crisis in the modern era it is the crisis of people that are not trustworthy: people that crash their credit scores, that can't keep a job, that get pitched out of the circle of trust because they demonstrate untrustworthiness. The Fools.

Back in the day, the untrustworthy could disappear. A Brit could take a ship to the Americas. A New England Puritan could disappear and head Out West. People could give themselves a fresh start. But today, I'd say, the penalties for untrustworthiness are huge.

Hey, Wokies! How about a program for you guys to go out in the world and teach the "oppressed peoples" how to earn the badge of "trustworthiness?"

But meanwhile, we "white oppressors" will do our thing with the "oppressed peoples" and give them jobs and reward them for trustworthiness. And in the fullness of time they may become rabid Trump voters too. 

That's that I call real allies.

Taleb on the Sacrificial Hero. But Whatabout Women?

I just finished up Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Actually, it's a bit of a hot mess. The key concept, he says, is "ergodicity." What does that mean when it's at home?

Ergodicity: In our context here, ergodicity holds when a collection of players have the same statistical properties (especially expectation) as a single player over time... Absence of ergodicity makes the risk properties not directly transferable from observed probability to the payoff of a strategy subject to ruin...

But he does say something very significant that complements my Good Life philosophy, in which the highest, best person is the Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live. He writes that 

Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours.

He has a six-layer hierarchy as follows:

Ecosystem
Humanity
Self-defined extended tribe
Tribe
Family, friends, and pets
You

Now that fits right into my notion of courage being honor among men. The courage to fight a duel, I would say, is not a sacrifice for the survival of the group. Or, as I say, the Ego Heroism of Nietzsche's Übermensch is not the highest form of courage.

But, I thought, all this is guy stuff. Whatabout women, you sexist? As we know from James Bowman's Honor: A History, honor among women is the reputation for chastity: broadly, the reputation for being a good little girl. So how would women fit into Taleb's notion of courage as sacrifice for the bigger community?

I was pondering this in the middle of last night, as I am wont to do. And the answer from my unconscious came pretty quickly. The answer is: Forgiveness. 

If women don't forgive, then the community of women is all bollixed up with destructive Mean Girl competition and the seminal "I can't believe she said that." Because women play-acting at chastity are the first to name, shame, and shun other women as whores. And as we know, women can hold a grudge for a lifetime.

Indeed, I remember distinctly a acquaintance reciting how, whenever he did something wrong, his wife would rehearse The Catalog of all the things he had done wrong since he and his wife first met 40 years ago -- for which she had still, it appears, not forgiven him.

This notion came upon me pretty strongly while watching the Polish movie version of Quo Vadis: a Narrative of the Time of Nero. In the DVD version it is a six-part series. 

Quo Vadis is all about Nero sending the Christians to the lions after Rome burned. The book was originally written by a Pole, Henryk Sienkiewicz, so you can see why the post-communist Poles would be eager to do a movie version.

But the big scenes occur when someone does something really bad and St. Peter forgives them in the name of God. This concept of forgiveness absolutely knocks everyone for a loop in good old pagan Rome. They never heard anything like it in their lives.

But that's the highest thing for you, ladies. Forgiveness. But whatabout a recipe for living?

Taleb has a three-point program for a guy to live as if he had Skin in the Game:

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never engage in rent-seeking
3. You must start a business

Obviously, this is a guy thing. But whatabout for women? As a starter, I would say

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never say "I can't even!"
3. You must learn to forgive

Whaddya think of that, sports fans?

The Tell: Cheating When You Start to Lose

When do businessmen start cooking the books? Exactly: when they have sustained a horrific loss and need to hide it from the CEO or the stockholders or the bank.

When do politicians start to cheat? Exactly: when their glorious movement, for some reason, starts to fade.

When did the Democrats start their tactic of Borking Republican Supreme Court nominees? Right after they won back the Senate, in 1987, after six years of Ronald Reagan.

When did the current wokey cancel culture really get started? When the First Black President failed to bring in the millennium, and when the Tea Party populist revolt of 2010 indicated that Something Was Rotten in the State of Progressive Denmark.

When did the current social media censorship begin? After the unthinkable election of Donald Trump. And why has social media suddenly decided to censor an October Surprise? Because it targets the Democratic candidate.

Yesterday, I quoted a bit from Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, written in 1843-44, where Dickens satirizes the New York City press of the day. He comments on that well-known paper, the New York Sewer, and writes of

the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse.

Charles Dickens went on a tour of the United States in 1842. So his experience was fresh in his mind when he wrote Chuzzlewit. But really, after the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fight, with accusations of high-school shenanigans, not to mention the tales of Mitt Romney's high-school bullying antics, you can see that nothing has changed.

But you see, I think all these Supreme Court nomination shenanigans, and social media censorship shenanigans -- not to mention the Democratic attempts to muck around with the voting system -- criminal as they are, are worse than a crime, a blunder. They are attempts to reverse the tide of history. 

But nobody knows the meaning of history, or what it will do next. The only thing we can be sure of is that a high tide is likely to be followed by a low tide.

Progressives have had a pretty good run since the 19th century. They have enacted huge government programs, they have erected huge regulatory bureaucracies, they have turned education into a progressive seminary, they have turned sex against gender and race against race. And yet the millennium has failed to arrive.

Instead, all over the west, populist movements have arisen to counter the rule of the experts and the educated. In general, these populist movements have been rather inchoate: unorganized movements of Commoners, middling sorts of people, that just feel that something is wrong and nobody is listening to them.

But our progressive friends just can't get their brains around this. I remember back in the days of the Tea Party, Nancy Pelosi grumbled about "AstroTurf" groups, fake groups ginned up presumably by right-wing billionaires. Do you see? Nancy had no idea. Nobody had any idea; the Tea Party just happened. Republicans were just as clueless about the Tea Partiers as Democrats.

Whatabout the Trump Car Parades? This NPR story tries to be as negative as possible, but certainly suggests that the parades are spontaneous efforts by ordinary Commoners. Are they? Maybe after the election we will find out who the evil genius is that came up with the idea.

Maybe, despite the best efforts of the social media giants, conservative Commoners are finding ways to organize and find each other.

You can see why the left would be ignoring the elephant in the room. In their simplistic religion of Ally-ism, of "allies" helping "oppressed peoples" in their fight against "white oppressors," there is no existence, no category, of just ordinary people that aren't allies, aren't oppressed, and aren't oppressors.

So, when you have a simplistic world view like that you are simply not going to notice things that don't conform to your expectations.

And yet, one of the things that humans are supposed to be good at is "noticing" when something unexpected happens. But, in part, the whole point of religion is to help people ignore unexpected or frightening things, because, for the believers, everything is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, Candide. Nothing to see here, move right along.

But should we be cavalier about this, about the damage that the woke left might cause? I think that, a century ago, when the left was fresh and new, we should have been. But now the left is old and corrupt, an ancien régime. I expect the left to stumble and bumble in their efforts to wound and deflect the populist rebellion.

Rather like the efforts of Twitter and Facebook to censor the reports of Hunter Biden's corruption and his father's involvement in his son's shenanigans. Now it's the Chinese!

Unfortunately, as happens when failing businesses cook the books, the efforts to stave off disaster usually make things worse as the cheaters double down.

And so the only question is: How big the butcher's bill?

Victorian "Darker" Novels

Anthony Trollope is the author of the much-loved Barchester novels, about the sweetie-pie Rev. Septimus Harding, cello player, and his bumptious son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantly. And of course he wrote the Palliser novels about another rather sweetie-pie character, Plantaganet Palliser, and his decimal coinage plan for Britain.

In these novels Trollope examined the rights and wrongs of Britain through the lens of comedy.

But there are darker novels, which really take a whack at British society. I am thinking of The Way We Live Now, featuring really nasty characters like the swindler, and probably Jewish, Augustus Melmotte and the worthless young Sir Felix Carbury.

Or The American Senator, in which Trollope cunningly uses a pompous American US Senator to illuminate many unjust corners of British life. But it's all perfectly harmless, because, ha ha, how can you take offence when it's a blow-hard American Senator complaining about Britain!

Or the harrowing Linda Tressel. It is set in Nuremberg, and is about a young 21 year-old girl raised by her super-religious aunt, who decides one fine day that Linda is to marry her long-time 50-year-old lodger. The aunt puts enormous moral and religious pressure on Linda to agree to the marriage so that eventually Linda runs away, gets sick and dies. Again, perfectly harmless, because we are talking about those crazy Germans in Nuremberg. Could such a thing happen in Britain? Never mind.

We all like to criticize Charles Dickens for his overdrawn gargoyles. But maybe there was a method to the madness, that we could happily ignore the brutal reality of life in Dickensian London because his characters were so over the top. Truth is that, compared to the nice comfortable world of middle-class novel readers, life was nasty, brutish and short for most people back in those days.

And don't get me started on Thomas Hardy. His novels are full of the darkness of life, from Jude the Obscure to Far From the Madding Crowd to Tess of the Durbervilles. Then there is The Well-Beloved that is so dark I could not finish it.

But whatabout today's writers? Why am I not engaged in their critiques of society? Maybe it's because I think that, e.g., Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale is rather missing the point. Yes, there might be a time where eevil white Christian men are breeding with handmaid concubines, but I think we could rather go to work on the manifold hypocrisies of our present educated Gentry in religion, in culture, in sexuality, in politics before we get to work on crazy Christian bigots. On the other hand, when Atwood is writing about university culture in Life Before Man, she nails it. 

Somehow, with Tom Wolfe dead, there seems to be nobody around to pick up the torch of satirical social analysis.

(I except, of course, my own daughter, the writer Beatriz Williams, whose oeuvre is a magnificent critique of modern society, but done more in the Victorian style of suggestion rather than modern wokie bludgeon.)

Maybe our modern world will be rescued by Chinese writers. Whatabout Kevin Kwan, of Crazy Rich Asians, a delicious romp that dances around the hole in the middle of crazy rich life? Or the excellent Liu Cixin, whose sci-fi Three Body Problem series goes as deep into modern problems as anyone could wish?

Strictly speaking, what with the current wokie ban on all social critique that goes anywhere near the Holy Sanctuary of left-wing culture there ought to be a burgeoning satirical literature that goes just up to the boundary of canceling, but no further. I suppose if I were younger I would know all about it. There is, after all, an eternal yearning in the young to poke at the hypocrisies of their elders and teach them a lesson.

Instead, I am perfectly happy to twaddle around with Trollope and Hardy. And, of course, My Girl George Eliot.

Meanwhile I am chugging through Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, written in 1843. Young Martin has just arrived in New York City and is getting to experience its splendid newspapers, from the New York Sewer to the New York Stabber to the New York Peeper, including "the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse." 

Golly. You mean to say that digging up a politician's past goes all the way back to the 19th century? That the practice of digging up dirt on Supreme Court nominees is old hat? "I literally can't even." As the ladies say.

Taleb's Three Layers of "Skin in the Game"

The best-selling writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb is from what he calls "the Levant." That is, I suppose, to remind us that the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean has been a sophisticated trading culture since whenever. Those were the days when Beirut was considered the Paris of the Levant. Alas, no more and so the refugees from the Levant are all over. There is Taleb in New York, and there is Mexican cellphone magnate and New York Times owner Carlos Slim. And many more.

Taleb worked for 23 years as a financial trader, and made the big time with his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The idea was that every now and again a big event occurs that wipes out everyone's expectations. We all expect minor changes in the world, but from time to time a tidal wave obliterates everything. So, he argued, you need to keep that Black Swan event in mind. What would happen to your life and your fortune -- never mind your sacred honor -- if the unexpected happened?

Now he has written Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, the notion that you can't trust people that don't have skin in the game. But tucked away in the book is a three layer table on page 47 labeled "Appendix: Asymmetries in Life and Things." Three Layers? That's where I live.

Taleb's first layer is "No Skin in the Game," meaning the guy that "keeps upside, transfers downside to others, owns a hidden option at someone else's expense."  This includes bureaucrats, consultants, large corporations, scientists "who play the system," centralized government, politicians, bankers. In other words we are talking about a person that

Seeks awards, prizes, honors, ceremonies, medals, tea with the Queen of England, membership in academies, handshake with Obama.

The second layer is "Skin in the Game," meaning the guy that "keeps his own downside, takes his or her own risk." this includes citizens, merchants, businessmen, artisans, laboratory and field experimenters, governments of city states, writers, speculators, activists, hedge fund traders.

The third layer is "Skin in the Game of Others, or Soul in the Game," meaning the guy that "takes the downside on behalf of others, or for universal values," This includes saints, knights, warriors, soldiers, prophets, philosophers (old-time), artists, innovators, maverick scientists, municipal government, "journalists who take risks and expose frauds," activists, dissidents and revolutionaries. in other words the kind of person for whom

Highest -- even only -- award is death for one's ideas or positions: Socrates, Jesus, Saint Catherine, Hypatia, Joan of Arc.

 Of course this is quite a bit different from my reductive Three Peoples theory -- with its Subordinates, Responsibles, and Creatives -- and Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers, with its Clients, Commoners, and Gentry. That's because all three layers of Taleb's Asymmetries refer to my Creative class or Yarvin's Gentry layer.

Still, you can see that the No Skinners are rather like my Subordinates, especially when you read Taleb basically calling them suck-ups, wanting tea with the Queen, etc. And the regular Skin in the Gamers are like my Responsibles: they don't expect other people to pick up their garbage. The highest and best layer, the Soul in the Gamers, are clearly like the Jungian ideal of the Sacrificial Hero, who gives his life that others may live.

Actually, I'd say that Taleb makes an important point:. In every sector of society, from high to low, there are Subordinate Clients who expect to live without having to suck it in on the downside; there are Responsible Commoners, that willingly take the risk of caring for them and theirs; and there are the Creative Heroes, that put their life on the line that others may live.

One thing I would add, because of my notion of Activism Culture. There are a lot of fake Sacrificial Heroes out there. That is why I say that activists are "play-acting revolution." They know that the activist that gives his life for others is the highest kind of person. But if you play-act the Sacrificial Hero then you ain't.

The Accumulation of Liberal Follies

So, today President Trump's nominee for Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, is up before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And, as they say, it is another high-stakes nomination battle, because for liberals everything is hanging in the balance, including abortion and homosexual marriage.

Do you understand, liberals, why having the Supreme Court legislate from the bench is a very bad strategic idea, however cool it may seem from a tactical standpoint?

Do you see how it is rather a bad idea to impose your moral agenda with a Supreme Court majority and then find yourself desperate to maintain that majority by fair means or foul a generation down the road?

No, I didn't think you did.

My standard illustration of this is the Washington State initiative process. Back in the Eighties, if you can believe it, Washington State had a vocal religions right movement that put an initiative on the ballot to restrict abortions. The initiative went down to defeat, and abortion has not been heard from since then in Washington State. Because a vote of the people is dispositive.

It is telling that a cult of personality has grown up around the career of the departed Justice Ginsburg. Really? A cult of personality around a judge? It is telling because in the Anglo-American tradition a judge is a deadly boring crosser of "t"s and dotter of "i"s. Judgeology is about comparing two pieces of legislation and determining how to deal with the contradictions between them. Or about evaluating a piece of legislation in view of the dictates of the Constitution.

Of course, the educated elite always has an inside track in the judiciary. That is understood. But when the educated elite acting through the judiciary imposes its cultural will on the rest of the nation, that is not good.

The point is that when you want to change the law on abortion you need to persuade the nation. Now my belief is that there are two things to consider on abortion. The first is how far the criminal law should go. Is it OK to terminate the life of a newborn child? Nearly everyone will say No. Is it OK to take a drug in the first month of pregnancy to cause a spontaneous abortion? Nearly everyone will say OK.

But whatabout abortion as a moral question? I'd guess that a lot more people would be queasy about abortion as a moral question than as a criminal question.

That is why we have a separation of church and state. The state is all about what we will oppose with police and judges and jailers. The church is all about voluntary moral communities that say Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not, but without the police and judges and jailers to back it up.

As a profound sexist I say that the criminal law is a boy thing: police with nightsticks, judges with the power to send you to jail, jails with doors clanging shut on your freedom. And I say that the moral law is a girl thing, with its naming and shaming and shunning, the "I can't believe she did that," or "Much as I hate to say it..." or "I can't even!" with which women dispose of each other in the community of women.

But I realize that we are a country mile away from my liberal neighbors having even a glimpse of a view of all this. They believe the liberal Zeitgeist and that's all. For them, RBG is a cult figure, because. And, of course, there is the perceived need of a professional woman to control her fertility. If you have a career, you plan your family to fit in with your career trajectory.

But whatabout non-professional women that don't feel the need to control their fertility, that would prefer a moral framework where everyone from husbands to society at large is morally and physically committed to raising every child conceived?

So, the moralization of the Supreme Court is just one in a growing avalanche of liberal errors, liberal conceits, liberal follies, the belief that you can actually plan society like a garden.

I believe that life is much more like cleaning up after mistakes, and that the sooner you realize you made a mistake, the better.

But in real life, as Anthony Trollope shows in his short novel Linda Tressel, the last thing people are willing to do is recognize they made a mistake. Especially when they have strong religious and/or ideological beliefs.

And when you push ahead with your religious or ideological agenda and damn the torpedoes, the only question becomes how big the butcher's bill will be.