Transportation and the Lower Classes

For years I've been quoting the Duke of Wellington and his opposition to railways. My quote has been that "railways would encourage the poor to travel around needlessly."

Because there is nothing worse than ordinary people traveling around needlessly and distracting from the vital importance of important people traveling around importantly on important affairs of state.

But I could never find the original quote, and I worried that maybe I was imagining things. Now I understand why. Because in a piece by Will Lloyd at UnHerd.com about the decline and fall of the English eccentric there was mentioned a Col. Sibthorp who, as soon as railways were invented,

began a fruitless war against the railway, complaining that they “encourage the working class to move about.”

Only, when I Googled the quote, I found Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw, and he writes something a bit different.

[Sibthorp] particularly hated railways -- 'the Steam Humbug' -- which he predicted would bring an array of disasters ranging from moral ruin to wholesale slaughter. Sibthorp enjoyed the support of at least one important supporter, the old Duke of Wellington, who was also suspicious of railways because "they encourage lower classes to move about."

Hmm. It just shows how things can get all bollixed up. Bit of a cock-up on the quoting front.

The funny thing is that, today, the Col. Sibthorps and Dukes of Wellington worrying about "moral ruin to wholesale slaughter" are our liberal friends that want to keep the deplorables in high-speed trains and light rail and TGVs and not in their evil SUVs on the nation's highways where they are emitting CO2 and pitching the Earth into runaway global warming and the end of the world as we know it.

Never mind that the cities with mass transit -- along with women and minorities -- were hardest hit by the COVID epidemic.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the book North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, about the textile industry in the north of England in the 19th century, the climactic scene between hero Mr. Thornton and heroine Margaret Hale takes place in a house in London. But in the 2004 BBC TV serial they meet at a train station somewhere between London and Milton where their trains, going in opposite directions, have stopped. So, back in the day, Mrs. Gaskell never thought of a climactic train rendezvous. But in the modern BBC adaption brought to you by North London luvvies, what could be more romantic!

What appeared to be a horror back in the nineteenth century to the high and mighty seems like a walk in the park to today's haughty ruling class. And don't get me started on the eevils of unrestricted airplane travel! Why, I was to Denver last weekend and, let me tell you, the hoi-polloi are back to traveling around needlessly. The concourses are full, the planes are full, and the carbon emissions are outtasight.

Just wait till the cruise industry starts up again. The Horror!

Earth to liberals. Humans are a nomadic species. We like to go walkabout. You liberal swells "fly private" from one vitally important global conclave to another to plan your next "Reset." We lesser mortals fly the commercial airlines, because that's all we can afford. And the average deplorable drives his F-350 crew-cab truck.

Now go back to your regularly scheduled activism and don't let me hear from you again until next time.

Meanwhile, I'll tell you what I think. I think that planes, trains, and automobiles are the best thing since sliced bread. There is nothing I like better than driving north on I-5 and looking at all the folk driving who-knows-where in their personal transportation, unless it is walking down an airport concourse looking at all the average folks waiting for their flight. As far as I am concerned there is a clear penumbra and emanation in the US Constitution that makes personal transportation a basic human right, and I like to see American citizens exercising that right.

And, frankly, I can't wait for the chance to fly to Mars. On vacation.

The Evil Spirits Will Always Be With Us

Even though David Hume disentangled factual truth and moral truth, says Zman, people still conflate them. And then a day later he notes how important simple belief is to humans.

Mysterious forces like privilege and institutional racism drive the public debate. These are not things that can be seen or even described. They just exist. Lives are being changed and public policy is being written on the assumption that these things exist. 

You mean the #WeBelieve signs?

I think it is important to understand that we humans are everything we ever were. We are the interactions at the molecular level, at the DNA level, at the distributed body level where cells are built and destroyed, nutrients are transported across the body, babies grow into adults, adults reproduce, and then grow old and die. We are an unknown complication of instincts, of semi-conscious emotions, of unconscious drives, of rational thought and of creative innovations.

Zman tells us about the importance of writing things down.

People who think the natural phenomena of the world are controlled by spirits are going to live different lives than people who work from a fixed set of religious doctrines. The spirit gods are fickle and unpredictable, while the book of rules is less so. The unpredictability of the holy book is due to the people holding it, not the book itself. It creates a standard of truth that everyone can understand and, more important, uphold collectively.

But, I would say, a wise book religion keeps a continuity with the spirit gods. That is why Catholicism had saints and miracles. And that is why the Reformation and Puritanism, with their iconoclasm and focus on the book to the exclusion of everything else, are a problem. Because here we are, 500 years later, and nice liberal ladies say: We Believe in Black Lives Matter and Love is Love -- not because of a book, but because.

I say that leftism is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive, where socialism is slavery, and the welfare state is feudalism, and reparations is revenge. In part, I think this is a reaction against too much book religion and book ideology.

But I claim to understand why this is so. People cannot live by bourgeois rationalism and a dichotomy between factual truth and moral truth alone. In fact, tons of people just don't get the religion of the book and fixed rational rules. Because the only thing they know is the fickle world of the evil spirit that doesn't like them.

Our glorious elite, that lives on its faith in creativity -- not just in making better scientific theories but that humans can "fundamentally transform" society -- likes to regard the simple bourgeois culture of responsibility as backward and shameful. It regards the middle class that lives by the truth of people following the rules, getting a job, and obeying the laws as cramped and oppressive. Whatabout the people that can't get a job? Because disability or racism? Whatabout them, deplorables?

That is why my theory of the Good Life recognizes all three levels of human experience, and is the wisest and the deepest and the truest thing out there. It recognizes that there are millions of people that still live in a world beset by evil spirits. And by the way, what do you call Hitler/Stalin/Mao? If those guys weren't animated by Evil Spirits my name isn't Chris Chantrill.

My theory of the Good Life believes that the great broad middle class lives by rules and responsibility. But that the middle class often can't understand the folks that believe the world is driven by the Evil Corporations, or whatever evil spirits best fit their sufferings and setbacks.

My theory of the Good Life believes that educated people live in the faith of creativity, that we have the power to discover new knowledge and that the highest and best life is to discover something new, whether a scientific theory, a new technology, a new social program, a way to transform the world towards heaven on earth.

What is missing in this world is perfect people that recognize that there are people in the world that don't think like them, people that believe that other people have a right to live in their own way, and a right not to be bullied and harassed and canceled into the right ways -- which mysteriously happen to be just what the perfect people believe.

I say that the German Turn that begins with Kant's dictum that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances, is the way out of the box, because it says that we humans cannot know the minds of the evil spirits, cannot know for sure that our science really describes the world as it is, cannot know for sure that our creative achievements are real rather than imaginary.

In other words, all of us, whether a certified genius, an ordinary schmuck, or a delta-minus moron, are stumbling in the dark. We live our lives in the faith that what we believe, what we are doing, what we dream of doing, is the right thing.

But what if we are wrong?

I would say that to ask that question is the beginning of wisdom. And never mind about the answer.

The Gender Gap in Free Speech

A piece in Psychology Today has recently reported that men are more pro-free-speech than women (from Steve Sailer).

In a 2019 study, 59% of women said protecting free speech was less important than promoting an inclusive society, while 71% of men felt opposite.

But young men have the same attitude as adult women. And a study of online speech found that "women are more censorious than men."

Which all fits in with my "women in the public square" notion that women do not like the open-outcry culture of the public square, because open outcry is a guy thing. The culture of the community of women is one that creates an organic, subconscious pressure towards outward conformity and being outwardly "nice." It is appropriate for domestic society and neighborhoods, where the needs are for people to get on with each other, help each other, and keep the kids alive.

There is, in my view, a need in domestic society to avoid innovation and conflict, because the whole point is to have babies and keep the kids alive.

Or, to argue from the opposite position, in the marketplace the majority of innovations and creative endeavors end in failure. Which is fine in the marketplace as we have seen over the past 200 years of the Great Enrichment.

But, of course, innovation in making babies and raising children is personal. It is no good for me to make innovative changes in raising my children or growing my food, knowing that in the aggregate the innovations will result in a better, more prosperous society. Because if innovation hurts my kid, then that is final.

So that explains why women are more risk-averse than men, why women are more likely to be censorious cancelers in corporate world, why women are less likely to be involved in corporate startups.

It explains why women are more pro-mask in the current COVID dispensation, and more likely to follow the advice of experts. Women are coded for these things.

Whereas men are coded to take stupid risks, because "men are expendable."

My prediction is still that women are going to retreat from the public square and occupy positions and occupations with less risk and that reward conformity. That probably means that they will occupy most of the positions in government and corporate bureaucracy, because those positions are coded for following the established procedure and not deviating from approved norms.

But young men have a problem. If, as the "experts agree," young men are low on free speech approval, it means that they are ill-equipped for male adult life. For one thing, women are better coded for "go along to get along" lives and occupations, so if men choose low-risk occupations they are likely to find themselves outperformed and out-judged by the women around them.

It is interesting to note from another piece, that East Germany was perhaps the most censorious society in history.

If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. 

The trouble is that this sort of top-down ideological control, while benefiting the ruling class in the short term, does enormous damage to the body politic -- including the ruling class -- in the long term. 

If there is one thing we should have learned from the history of the West in the last several hundred years it is that today's rebel is tomorrow's CEO, and that a healthy society permits a vigorous circulation among the elite -- the political elite, the cultural elite, the economic elite.

But that is exactly what women have seldom done, and the current political and cultural elite are trying to prevent. Because they are the good guys, the virtuous guys, and people that don't agree with them are evil and ought to be suppressed.

There is no doubt it will all end in tears, because life, the universe, and everything is a constant renewal that is achieved by the death of the old. The truth of the women's culture of conformity is that you need to keep things on hold to get the kids out of the nest. The truth of the men's culture of competition is that you need to innovate so the next generation will have a world to live in.

How do you balance the two? I have no idea, except to honor women's need for a quiet place and men's need to shake things up.

Missing the Point of Jane Austen

Apparently there's a whole industry out there criticizing Jane Austen for not being woke enough. Or praising her as the world's first feminist. Or taking her to task for not turning her novels into tirades against slavery. That's what I get from a fairly sensible article about "Interrogating Jane" by Lona Manning.

Oh dear. What fools these mortals be.

I want the novels of an era to be drenched in the conventional wisdom of the time. That's because I don't trust history, don't trust politicians, don't trust historians to tell me the truth about the Good Old Days.

Instead, I want to be able to winkle out of the text and the story what was really going down back then. The value to me in Jane Austen is precisely that. That servants don't exist as people. That when Fanny Price asks a question about the slave trade there is a dead silence. That Anne Elliot is good dutiful girl that rejects the marriage proposal of the young Captain Wentworth without a fortune on the advice of elders, and then grows up to marry him anyway. When he is as rich as Croesus.

I want to be able to feel the grinding harshness of life in the English countryside that is described by Thomas Hardy. I want to be able to experience the social crosscurrents in George Eliot's Adam Bede, from the rising young carpenter, to the woman preacher, to the twerpy orphan girl to the twerpy son of the manor. And I want to read about the pride of long-term farm tenants and their tradition of honor and respectability. I want all this without so much as a single fashionable word from today's moral framework.

I want to experience the emergence of the servant as almost a person in North and South by Mrs. Gaskell, in the person of Dixon, the servant of the Hales.

I want to read what Anthony Trollope writes about blacks and creoles and whites and what have you when he travels to the West Indies in the 1850s in The West Indies and the Spanish Main. And I don't want to hear any wokey flim-flammery about his whiteness and his upper-class Victorian sensibility and his apology for European colonialism.

And I don't want to hear a single word about how the slavery in the United States was uniquely evil and has condemned the United States to bottomless perdition forever.

What is interesting is that slavery, ubiquitous since forever, became a scandal during the 18th century. What is interesting is that after the abolition of African slavery in the 19th century in Europe and the Americas the world saw the founding to two slave states held up to the world as the very incarnation of truth and justice. What is interesting is that after the 19th century saw the elimination of whole forests of subordination the 20th century saw the replanting of a sort of neo-feudalism in the welfare state.

What is interesting is that after the righteous elimination of eevil absolute monarchies and their subjugation of the people and commerce for their dynastic adventures, the 20th century has seen the growth of monster state loot and plunder, where the ruling class extracts 40 to 50 percent of the income of ordinary people in order to reward their political supporters -- who are often, but not always, the very people that cough up the revenue.

What will be the fate of today's authors when knowing commentators from the virtuous future bemoan today's moral obtuseness and cowardice. And conclusively prove how today's writers deliberately and hypocritically avoided facing up to the monstrous injustices of our age.

Dems in Cloud Cuckoo Land

I'm at the airport this morning, and let me tell you, America is back. Albeit that all the men have black masks and all the women have pretty masks. Well, almost.

But I have to tell you -- if you will believe me -- that there is no sign of the systemic racism and white supremacy that President Biden warned us about last night. Why, I just saw a black woman and a white woman walking past the gate and they didn't seem in the least angry or frightened of each other.

The question all we racist-sexist-homophobes are asking is whether this is the last Big Push in a century of big government of the educated class, by the educated class, for the educated class, before the whole thing collapses. Or whether the educated class will succeed in sewing the place up into a totalitarian monostate where you'd better behave or you'll be sent to Critical Race Theory Reeducation Camp.

I tell you what. Nobody knows. The Dems are pressing all the buttons that worked for them in the past, from trillions for public works to trillions for women and children to race-card accusations. 

And if they don't work? The record of the past is that you can't expect the old warriors that knew how to fight the old way to suddenly reinvent themselves. So when they realize that the old levers and buttons don't work it will be too late. Of course, if they hammer on the old buttons hard enough, you never know.

After reading the reports on the Biden speech last night I'd say that the strategy of bashing all the buttons at once may not work too well. After all, the political art of loot and plunder requires that you tell you supporters that they are going to get their share. But you really don't want to rile up the opposition with too much taxation and sequestration and outright insult. I suspect that if President Biden were a little more on the ball his agenda would be a little less pedal-to-the-metal on every left-liberal wish list.

I'd say that one problem with the liberal interest-group / activist organization culture is that with every organization superbly organized to trumpet its issue to the reverberate hills there is a real problem getting any of them to cool their jets for the larger liberal interest. I always remember Nancy Pelosi confidently talking about AstroTurf during the first few months of the Tea Party. Of course she did, because every single liberal organization is a fake pretense at Representing the People, and instead is a special-interest scam.

But my belief is that the populist rebellion of the last ten years is organic, from the grass roots and not the AstroTurf plastic.

And that is the problem that is going to change the world. That the ordinary American can't take it any more and the average clueless rulers just don't have a clue.

A Panorama of Slavery: The Privateersman

Captain Marryat, he of The Children of the New Forest, was a naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane. His last naval adventure novel was The Privateersman, which turns out to be a reflection on slavery, for our hero, a disinherited gentleman from the north of England gets tricked into the slave trade, is then enslaved and then... Well you shall read the story.

The story opens in media res with a series of naval encounters in the Caribbean while our hero is a crewman on the privateer Revenge commanded by Captain Weatherall. First the Revenge captures a Frenchman, then is overwhelmed by a French and a Spanish ship acting together, then our hero is freed by the Hero and sent to hospital in Port Royal, Jamaica to recover. Then it's back to Liverpool, England and he meets the owner, Mr. Trevannion, of the privateer on which he had served in the Caribbean.

Now he sails as mate on a ship trading to Senegal, but is wrecked and captured by "natives" and carried off into the desert and sold as a slave to a fierce Negro desert king. But one of the king's women, Whyna, takes pity on him, and he becomes her personal slave. But then he and his companions are ransomed, return to the coast and sail back to Liverpool.

His time with the Negro queen excited interest in the gentry of Liverpool but soon it was time to ship out as first mate on another trip to Senegal. He uncovers a plot to capture the ship, foils the conspirators and sails back to Liverpool.

After a trip to London our hero gets command of his own ship for a bit of privateering. But first he takes some escaped Jacobites to Bordeaux, France and makes the acquaintance of the French that he fought in the Caribbean. Of course the Frenchie wants another fight, but our hero beats him and takes his ship as a prize back to Liverpool. But then he is arrested for helping the Jacobites escape. After being condemned to death and a short stay in the Tower of London as a traitor condemned to death he is pardoned and returns to Liverpool.

But his imprisonment in the Tower of London has persuaded our hero Elrington that privateering is not for him, and so he tells his employer -- in the hearing of the employer's daughter, the fair Miss Amy Trevannion, who is much impressed. He agrees to one more privateering cruise in which he captures three ships. But first he rescues a drowning man from a sinking ship that turns out to be his younger brother, Philip.

His employer is so pleased with him that he proposes to take him into business after a year's trial, but at the end of the trial Elrington refuses partnership because his employer's business is privateering. Miss Trevannion is cold towards him, and yet our hero observes her, later, weeping.

After numerous trials and excursions Elrington -- did you know his real name was Musgrave? -- heads to London to enroll his pal Captain Levee's ship to sail for the Royal Navy as a naval rather than a private ship. Then he captains a ship to Senegal for his employer, to take advantage of a special deal in elephant tusks and gold dust. 

But then Elrington gets the fever and when he wakes up his crew has exchanged the tusks and gold for slaves and they are on their way to Brazil and he is a prisoner of the mate Olvirez who hatched the slave plan. And when the ship arrives Rio de Janeiro in Brazil Elrington is sent off to a government diamond mine, for life, as an effective slave. But of course, he gets released by an extraordinary coincidence, and soon gets on a ship to return to England.

Only the ship gets wrecked on an island off North America. Elrington and the captain repair the ship enough to float it and get off the reef but they and the crew are captured by pirates and stripped of everything from clothes to money. The pirate soon anchors off the coast of America and cut the captives adrift in a rowboat.

By the way, did I mention that Elrington -- or Musgrave -- had scored a diamond from the diamond slave mine that he hangs around his neck in a leather pouch?

The former captives land and separate, and Elrington and a companion find a canoe and paddle up the coast, but then get captured by Indians, escape, and then recaptured. His companion is killed but he is forced to marry an Indian woman: slavery? One day while out hunting with the Indians he encounters a white man and would have joined his ship, except its crew were called the "Jolly Rovers:" pirates. He walks on and comes to a house on a hill. It is a plantation run by a woman who employs two convicts as slaves, and now also our hero, who finds himself once more a prisoner, a slave. But pretty soon he find out he is to be her sex slave as well: marriage or your life. Impossible: because Miss Trevannion! He tries to escape, but is captured and put in irons.

Pretty soon the plantation is attacked by Indians and set afire. He and his mistress run off in the smoke, and then he runs away from her and into the Jolly Rovers and joins their ship. But he refuses to join their crew or become their pirate captain. Even so, it's back down to the Caribbean and Jamaica. On the way they run into the pirate ship that had despoiled Elrington before and capture it. While engaged with the other pirate ship a British corvette shows up and blasts the pirates to smithereens.

Guess who the captain of the corvette is? Elrington's brother Philip.

So Elrington, first name Alexander, real surname Musgrave, makes a swift passage to England, sells his diamond for £38,000, finds out that his baronet father and his two elder brothers are dead, so he is now Sir Alexander Musgrave, and he can go to Liverpool and make his beloved Amy Trevannion into Lady Musgrave.

What a life: enslaved three times, imprisoned twice, captured any number of times. But things are much better now.

The Fourth Turning: Trying Not to Frighten the Rulers

About five years ago (I think) my daughter recommended I read The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and last week I finally read it.

The book makes the unexceptional argument that history goes in cycles, with typically a crisis once a century. Obviously, you might say, any ruling class gets weak and flabby after a century and either gets its back stiffened by an in-group replacement, or the less amiable war and revolution.

But Strauss and Howe butter up this notion with some Jungian archetypes, that the century long cycle is driven by a generations of Prophets succeeded by Nomads succeeded by Heroes succeeded by Artists.

Which, in my opinion, gets a bit confusing and turgid, and allows them to predict anything about anyone.

The key to their argument is the "fourth turning" when the accumulated detritus from a three generations of rule in any political entity creates a mess that provokes unrest and rebellion and/or war. The result is a reset that refreshes the society and begins a new cycle. When the book was published in 1997 the authors were predicting a Crisis era beginning in about 2005 or maybe as late a 2020.

Because a book like this is targeted at an educated audience, the "cognitive elite" that is basically the ruling class, it has to step rather daintily. After all, the reason we are in a mess right now is that we have had about a century of rule by the educated class that has ramped up government spending from about 10 percent of GDP to 40 percent of GDP and we are soon going to run out of money. Plus, as Charles Murray relates in Coming Apart, the last 50 years has been good for people with good cognitive skills, but not so good for the less cognitively able. So life is good for the cognitive, but not so good for the rest.

So I think that all the talk about Jungian archetypes is a smokescreen to hide the unpleasant truth that the Crisis is going to be all about the injustice dished out by the educated elite and experienced by ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives struggling through the brambles that have been sown in their gardens by their educated and cognitive betters.

And, the book is all about the changing fashions and enthusiasms in the ruling elite. I suppose that is inevitable because rebellions never succeed and wars never start without the ruling class -- or a resentful cabal in the second rank -- stepping up to lead. Slave rebellions and peasant revolts never succeed. Even the Spartacus rebellion in 73 BC of 70 slave gladiators that swelled into a host of over 100,000 was put down by the Roman legions. So, the question is what cabal in the ruling class is likely to form a head of rebellion.

We could say that the Fourth Turning in the US started with the Tea Party and the 64-seat GOP gains in 2010 that flipped the House and ended in Donald Trump getting elected president in 2016. The question is whether the rulers can put down the revolt. I suppose that the answer is: they probably can unless a significant splinter of the ruling class decides to go for broke and side with the rebels. Right now they have beaten back the rebels, but only just, with a questionable presidential election and a 50-50 Congress.

But can the Biden people clinch the deal? Can they intimidate Big Business into suppressing the yokels? Can they keep the economy on track and still satisfy their supporters? Can they, er, manage the elections? Can they keep the blacks riled up? Can the ruling class get its act together?

I suppose that is really the question. It's not whether the Deplorables have an argument or that the Commoners of Middle America are getting screwed. The question is can the ruling class stay unified, or will some sector of the ruling class decide to put itself at the head of a movement to "take back America."

And then, of course, the question is how far the rebels are willing to go to make their point, and how ruthless the rulers are willing to be in stopping them.