Murray Facing Reality, Yes You Liberals

The point of Charles Murray's Facing Reality is quite simple. Whatever you fervently believe with every cell in your activist brain, liberals, human groups are different.

(The bigger meaning of Facing Reality)

That means that if you use government or secular religion to force group outcomes to be "representative" of society as a whole you are going to have to use force. A lot of force.

And even when you use force, it will probably not make much difference.

Charles Murray has spent his life showing liberals how their fervent beliefs are in fact virtue-signalling fantasies -- from way back before "virtue-signalling" became a thing. Let's recapitulate.

In Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, 323 pages, published in 1984, Murray wrote that the Great Society was a wrong turn and failed, and that liberals should know it because they instrumented all the wonderful new programs so they could boast about their successes, so the numbers are all there for anyone that cares. But the liberals didn't want to write about the failures. So they didn't.

In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 845 pages, published in 1994 and co-written with Richard Herrnstein, Murray argued that the future would belong to those with more "cognitive ability." I.e., black Americans would not do well in the job market of the future. Liberals said that Murray was a racist.

In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, 407 pages, published in 2012, Murray wrote that, considering only white Americans, the cognitively able were doing fine with great careers and merger marriages (of cognitive able men to cognitively able women), the middle 50 percent were doing so-so, and at the bottom the cognitively disabled men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.

Now in Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, 151 pages, published in 2021, Murray says told-ya so liberals. Groups that test with lower IQ have worse outcomes in life and work and crime. Period, full stop, science.

For me Facing Reality crystallized two notions that hadn't previously crystallized in my brain.

First, I have known for a while that humans do not give up their fervent beliefs when presented with "science" that demonstrates their ideas are wrong. Not at all. Instead humans go for one more Big Push, a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Only when their brilliant ideas lie around them in graveyards from here to the horizon do people give up on their glorious vision of a better world. So this is it. This is our Great Purge. That is the meaning of "systemic racism" and Wokism and pushing Critical Race Theory into the nation's schools. Liberals instinctively know their ideas have failed. So the response is to destroy their political opponents. Humans always do things like that when things start going wrong. 

Second, "woke" corporations are a natural and physical response by corporations to the double-bind the Civil Rights era puts on them. The original Civil Rights Act in Title VII provided for affirmative action and the idea that the only way to show an absence of bias was by showing that a corporation's workforce "looked like America" from janitor to CEO. Thus, if a traditionally marginalized group is "underrepresented" at any level in a corporation then the corporation is just sitting there, like a rabbit before a coyote, easy prey for any lefty activist group hungry for a nice tasty lunch today. But, because of the distribution of cognitive ability in different groups it is physically impossible to achieve this. So all a corporation can do is salute and contribute to BLM and close the accounts of Republican candidates at their bank.

So, if gubmint programs can't achieve what they promise to do, because reality, what is the point of them? The point is that every government program is a war on some horrid monster, and the noble supporters can expect loot and plunder from here to eternity.

Thus, all politics is about ginning up a war on some frightful enemy and then sharing the loot out among the supporters. There are four ways to do this.

You can declare some small neighboring country an enemy and invade and conquer them, as Bismarck did to Denmark (!) in 1862. This is the best strategy, because it unites the whole country against an insignificant foe that can't really fight back.

You can declare that Japs and Nazis are the enemy and have a world war over it. This is obviously a high risk strategy: what if you lose? But still, you get to unite the whole country to fight the monsters: keep your fingers crossed.

You can declare some large minority to be an enemy and fight a culture war against them, as the left is doing right now against "white supremacists." The danger is that you might ignite a real civil war, as happened in the US culture war of the 1850s. But nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

You can declare a small minority to be the cause of all our problems, and unite the rest of the country against them, as Hitler did with the Jews. Not much fun for the small minority. Hey, I wonder if the current liberal use of blacks as a helpless victim small minority might not rebound in a "backlash."

See, I think that the real need for liberals to "face reality" is that there is a good chance that their present way of dividing the nation -- as all politics does -- might work against them. What if whites and Latinos and Asians all decide that low IQ blacks are a problem in the workforce, and a menace on the streets? You can say that the group differences between blacks and the rest mean that blacks are helpless victims. Or you can decide that since blacks commit about 50 percent of all murders that blacks are an existential problem. 

Suppose we experience the US politics of the last 50 years as a continuous effort of liberals to insist that blacks are "helpless victims" and to cancel anyone that disagrees, because raciss.

In the end life, the universe, and everything is a throw of the dice. That's what modern "science" says.

Murray Facing Reality: the Outcome

OK. So the two truths in Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America are that Americans of different races, as groups, have different cognitive ability and they have different crime rates. But what does it all mean?

(Back to Murray Facing Reality: The Setup)

What it means is that liberal governance, based upon the idea that the only just society is a society in which everything in all walks of life should be racially balanced, is going to make things worse.

Let us leave aside the trivial meaning, when it comes to crime. The job of the police is to crack the heads of lower-class thugs whether they are 19th century Irish, 20th century Italians, or 21st century blacks. If you don't police the young thugs then you will get vigilantes and gangs stepping in to keep the peace. And we don't want that, right, liberals?

No, the bigger problem is that the policy of race norming in the workplace cannot work: forcing every corporation, at every level, to display the right proportion of races. In fact, it will make everyone angry, from whites and Asians diversified out of jobs for which they are best qualified to blacks boosted up into jobs beyond their cognitive comfort zone.

Let's look at the problem both at the average and at the extreme.

At the average you have the average black at at IQ of 91 and an average white at an IQ of 103. Now, as Murray says, studies show that IQ is a good predictor of performance. This means that if you hire an average black for a position he/she will perform worse than an average white.

Do you see the problem here? It is that the average white around the office will think that the average black is a fool and a dunce, because the average black in the office with an IQ of 91 will be performing a lot worse than the average white in the office with an IQ of 103.

Let's suppose that science tells us that for a particular job a corporation needs an employee with an IQ of 103 and it hires on that basis. OK, right away it means that the pool of blacks will be smaller than the pool of whites. If our employer is completely race blind and hires only on the basis of IQ that means that blacks will be "underrepresented" throughout the corporation at jobs that require an IQ level of 103.

I don't think that the bean-counters at race-enforcement central are going to like that.

Now let's talk about the extreme. Let's talk about a job that needs an IQ of about 135, such as "a full professorship at an elite university" or "a senior position in the IT industry." What is the talent pool of 25-29 year-olds in the whole United States, by race, for that job?

[You are talking] about 2,800 Africans and 9,500 Latins compared to 50,700 Asians and 160,100 Europeans.

In other words there are 57 whites nationwide that could do the job for every one black. So, if you were conducting a totally colorblind job search then you would hire a black once in every 50 job searches.

Imagine what the race-counters at race-enforcement central would say about that! 

Of course, in fact one third of the hirees would be Asian, because the average Asian has an IQ of 108 to the average white's IQ of 103 even though Asians are only about 6 percent of the population. So Asians would be way overrepresented in the top-dog jobs. Right now, as we all know, the race-counters at Ivy League colleges discriminate against Asians because otherwise they would be the majority of students!

Ok, now let's forget about the race-counters at race central. Let's think instead about ordinary people. Suppose we proceed on our current diversity and inclusion course and preferentially hire blacks for elite positions. What would that mean to the people boosted up into positions for which they do not have the cognitive chops?

Well, we know what it means at elite colleges, which search out blacks to study at their universities. Studies show that blacks -- and kids in general -- fail when they study at a university where the rest of the student body has much higher cognitive ability than they do. I think the gold standard on this finding is Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. They showed that black students -- er, students in general -- do much better when they go to a college with a student body that matches their test results than when they go to an elite college where the other students have significantly higher test results.

If we project this finding from the university to the workplace, then we are looking at blacks who are much more likely to fail at their jobs than their white counterparts -- because they have a significantly lower cognitive ability than the job requires.

And one thing more. If corporations hire unqualified people for their top jobs then the performance of these folks playing out of their league is going to lower the performance of the corporation as a whole and that is going to affect the lower-level employees -- not to mention the customers.

We are actually seeing this work out in real time at shops like The New York Times where "midwit" journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones -- of the "1619 Project" -- and Mara Gay -- troubled by American flags on Memorial Day weekend -- make fools of themselves by parroting the elite conventional wisdom without having the chops to perform on the elite stage.

And that is to say nothing of the ordinary middle-class whites that get shouldered out of the ordinary middle-class jobs for which they are qualified in order to satisfy the moral preenings of the educated ruling class.

There's another problem with race-conscious hiring, particularly in government: "aggressive affirmative action" at the city level means less competent police, prosecutors, health-care workers and K-12 public school teachers. It's the science.

The presence of incompetent or marginally competent people in those jobs is only occasionally important to members of America's upper middle class... The burden... is borne overwhelmingly by America's poorest and most vulnerable populations.

You may say that the poorest and most vulnerable populations can do something about that by voting the rascals out. You may say that our liberal friends are devoted above all else to government services that help the poorest and most vulnerable. I couldn't possibly comment. 

Let us give Charles Murray the last word.

The problem, he says, is that "affirmative action" morphed from "initiatives... to seek out qualified Blacks who were being overlooked" into "government-sponsored preferential treatment in determining who gets the educations and the jobs."

The solution, he says, is to "Eliminate all forms of government-sponsored treatment by race."

And the place to start is "to restore the American creed as the ideal shared by a consensus of the electorate." 

The Democrats need to treat racial preference policies "as pragmatic measures to deal with residual racism... and disassociate himself from the rhetoric of systemic racism."

The Republicans "must stop posturing as the guardians of true Americanism and instead say... that the people who love this country have always been on both sides of the political spectrum and still are today."

I said I'd give Charles Murray the last word. And I will, for today. But not tomorrow.

Murray Facing Reality: The Setup

I had an aha moment in the first chapters of Charles Murray's short polemic Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America. Nothing remarkable really. As he says in the introduction:

American White, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

That was what The Bell Curve was all about back in the 1990s.

American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.

Sorry liberals. Those are Facts, backed up by Science. And you are the Party of Science, remember?

His book made me realize what "systemic racism" and wokism is all about.

It is about the fact that to our liberal friends it cannot be true that the whole liberal project is a steaming pile of ordure. 

America's problems cannot be because ruling-class liberals have been wrong and wrong again and that their vision to make America into a just and equal society will never work. No, it's all the fault of those racist sexist homophobic evil white supremacists and right-wing extremists.They are what holds us back. It must be, because liberals are the good guys.

The point is that, over fifty years since the civil rights acts, it is intolerable to our liberal friends that there are still large group differences in America, particularly between white and black. Their faith was and is that civil rights law would eliminate group differences, and inaugurate a new era of equality. Somebody, somewhere, somehow has sabotaged the holy quest, and they must be stopped.

The whole point of Murray's book is to tell liberals: No. Your vision was always fatally flawed, and the last 50 years has proved it. Humans are different, liberals, and the differences mean different outcomes, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away. The next big push... No Child Left Behind in 2001 or a campaign to root out systemic racism in 2021 will change things.

Remember "Big Push?" That's what the Brits called their failed offensives on the western front in World War I. 

So Murray says no to the next Big Push. "[M]ean differences between groups are a reality and will be with us indefinitely." But against that is the saving faith, not just for liberals but for conservatives who say:

"The differences must be temporary. If they aren't... but they must be."

Sorry Charlie. There are real differences between the races in America. And there always will be. And that means different outcomes. You know what happened with the Big Pushes of World War I? They killed off the flower of youthful Britain. And France and Germany too.

OK. Let's get down to race. Just a social construction, after all.

America is multiracial America. Murray dissects it in three different ways: overall, Big City America, and America Outside the Big Cities.

Murray	Colloq.	Total US	Big-City	Rest of US
Total Population		325m	127m	198m
European	White	60%	45%	71%
Latin	Hispanic	18%	25%	14%
African	Black	13%	17%	10%
Asian	Asian	6%	9%	3%

You can see that America is still majority white, overall and in the rest of America. But whites are a minority in Big City America.

Now Murray gets down to brass tacks. Specifically:

1. When Africans, Asians, Europeans and Latins take cognitive ability tests, their "mean" results are different.
2. Race differences between Africans and Europeans in cognitive ability have not changed since the 1980s.
3. The tests predict future outcomes.

Do you see the point here? It is that you cannot expect populations with different cognitive abilities to have similar performance.

And you can see why our liberal friends are foaming at the CRT mouth. If we have been spending hundreds of billions every year on "helping" the marginalized and the oppressed it cannot be -- it cannot be -- that in the case of Africans (blacks) the whole effort is a big fat zero. There must be "malevolence" preventing it, because, per Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

There must be a fault. And since it can't be the educated, evolved liberal elite, and it can't be the helpless victims of the marginalized. Well, you get the point.

The test scores between Africans and Europeans are about one standard deviation, between Latins and Europeans is about 0.7 of a standard deviation. And Asians test about 0.25 of a standard deviation better than Europeans.

That mans that Asians are going to outperform Europeans are going to outperform Latins are going to outperform Africans. Period.

The point is that if you, the ruling class, want to make the proportions of workers in jobs and professions "look like America" you are going to have to go beyond affirmative action and diversity. You are going to have to blacken the entire white America as systemic racists and send them to the back of the line.

And here are the latest IQ numbers:

	IQ
European	103
African	91
Latin	94
Asian	108

If you construct bell curves of the IQ distribution of each of the four race categories there is plenty of overlap. So there are plenty of bright Africans, and plenty of dumb Europeans. But...

Since the most prestigious, powerful and highest paying jobs are so concentrated among people on the right-hand side of the [bell curve], a variety of important social and economic consequences... are inevitable.

In other words, there is no way in hell that it is possible for average people to succeed at the demanding jobs leading great institutions, creating new businesses, and ruling the nation. And that is what our liberal friends cannot allow themselves to think, let alone to admit.

And it gets worse. But that is for next time.

Is Forgiveness in Politics Ever Possible?

At American Greatness today Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. proposes in "Grievance and Forgiveness or Civil Strife" that the only way to end the current race war is for blacks to forgive whites for the crime of slavery and Jim Crow.

Really? Forgiveness? How often does that happen in the world of politics and love and war?

Then at Spiked! Frank Furedi deplores that "The culture war is real and it's getting worse" even while the left proposes that the whole idea of a culture war is a fantasy. But it makes sense that the left insists "there's nothing to see here; move right along."

Not being open about the existential nature of their crusade is integral to today’s cultural warriors against Enlightenment values. They prefer to convince the public that the culture war is a myth rather than admit that they are engaged in an ‘all or nothing’ struggle against some of society’s most important values and achievements.

This, a day after I commented on Gregory Clark at the end of his The Son Also Rises that maybe we still need some kind of gubmint effort to do something about inequality -- even though there has been precious little success on the 200-year gubmint war on unequality.

So, I am inspired to do my double Ike-Einstein act, and make the problem bigger, while making it as simple as possible but no simpler.

We must understand that men are only united when they are fighting an existential battle against annihilation. The rest of the time they are bickering among themselves. And the folks that are ginning up divisions and grievances and rage are generally classified by the cognoscenti as "politicians."

(Women are always bickering among themselves, only they won't admit it.)

Why is this? It is simple, really. The job of human males -- and it is their only job -- is to defend the homeland, the food-growing territory of the band from marauders. Alternatively, they can be pre-emptive and raid the neighboring band and kill the men and enslave the women and loot the village before the neighboring village does it to them.

You can see that in our own time, when food-growing land isn't a big deal -- as the twelve grain ships usually anchored off West Vancouver, BC waiting their turn to load up at the grain terminals mutely attest -- there is a problem. What are the men to do?

Well, they can fake it. OMG those bloody Nazis, Commies, Ay-rabs, whatever, if their taste is for foreign wars.

Or, OMG those bloody racists, bitter-clingers, deplorables, white supremacists, if their taste is for civil wars.

Finally, for the really cunning that just want to unite the people on the cheap without a foreign war or a civil war, there is the small minority as the enemy, OMG those Jews. Or overseas Chinese. Or Copts.

And because every man is really a pirate inside, the wise leader of his people will offer loot and plunder to his supporters.

You will notice that every election -- every election  -- comes down to the perfidious behavior of the "Other" and the rightful reward of loot and plunder to the voters of the winning side. That is why, for instance, Donald Trump offered tax cuts and tariffs to the voters of 2016 and today Joe Biden is offering trillions in loot and plunder which is partly "infrastructure" but mostly straight out grants to every liberal interest group imaginable.

But, of course, politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion and so it is usual for political movements and parties and ruling classes to dress up their naked war-plus-loot-and-plunder politics as a religious and moral war on evil to make sure that the evil get their just desserts and have to pay just reparations forever. Then, of course, there is no question about getting second thoughts about plundering the chaps next door. They are evil! They had it coming!

That is what the culture war is all about. It is a war against the middle America of responsible Americans, because the ruling class of the educated and evolved needs an enemy for their over-under politics of race and gender. And notice that nobody is proposing that we all just get together and work it out and forgive our enemies. The solution to the plague of white supremacy is for whites to confess their sins and take the knee.

But when will it ever end?

The lesson, I think, comes from the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. The idea was that the various peoples should take their religion from the religion of their ruler; otherwise shut up or move to the German state with your religion. But this idea was not reached in rational and logical debate by enlightened and evolved philosophers. It was reached in the exhaustion and horror of a frightful war fought mainly over the German lands in which, it is said, 30 percent of the German people lost their lives.

The equivalent for the United States would be that the Civil War of 1861-65 resulted in 10 million dead instead of the advertised 700,000, or a civil war in our time that resulted in 100 million dead.

I would imagine that a civil war here that caused 100 million dead might cause the various culture warriors to cool their jets for a couple of years. But don't worry: they'd be back.

So yeah. Don't expect any forgiveness from blacks in the current row over Black Lives Matter and reparations. And don't expect any relief from the culture war. That's not how the world works.

The bigger question is whether we can figure out a way to domesticate our politics in the same way that we domesticated our men from piracy and dueling into organized sports.

There's gotta be a way. I just don't have a clue how to do it.

OK, Inequality is Bad. But Can We Do Anything About It?

After 286 pages in The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility showing that despite the determination of western elites to eliminate inequality it is alive and well, from Sweden to the US to China and especially India, Gregory Clark, professor at a gubmint university, ends his book with a the usual blather in the passive voice suggest more gubmint programs to end inequality.

Even though he admits that the competition among elite parents for places at elite schools probably doesn't make much difference.

Even though he admits that gubmint interventions like Head Start don't make much difference.

Even though he proposes that assortative mating has limited benefits to elites.

Says he:

A better, more humane, less competitive, social world than ours may exist, but it is not that obvious how we will attain it in a world where people have such strong aspirations for the social success of their children.

Would it?

Let's do a Great Reset on the inequality front.

Let's say that, most likely gubmint programs won't really do much about inequality. Want to know why?

It is encoded in my understanding of politics and government, that politics is war, Us against Them, because "They" are an existential threat, and government is force.

You think you are going to solve inequality by war and force? By taxing people and then having bureaucrats handing out loot and plunder to the supporters of the elite?

Obviously, in the last 200 years, the Age of the Educated, the elite has strongly believed in its power to change the world. Its power strategy, becoming more and more naked over the years, is an over-under strategy, of justifying political power because it helps the underdog. And the Educated Class gets to distribute the loot to its supporters -- er, worthy underdogs.

Does it? Gregory Clark shows, it seems to me, that the Rule of the Educated seems to have made very little difference to the lower classes. On the other hand, we know from the Great Enrichment that the operations of capitalism, which nobody really understood 200 years ago, has increased per capita income by 30 times in real terms. What did the Educated Class have to do with that? Nothing.

Suppose we approach the question of inequality by another way. Suppose we say, for a start, that the social problem of inequality -- specifically the problem of the lowest class that tends to be vagabonds, or "Travellers" or homeless -- should be solved by social methods, by people working together to help other people, and not by Educated Class educrats ginning up yet another gubmint program that ends up being nothing more than a program of taxation collecting loot that is handed out to regime supporters. And all imagined by gubmint professors at gubmint universities using gubmint research grants to propose another gubmint program. What could go wrong?

My effort in this department is Road to the Middle Class, first put on the internet in April 2004. My idea was that, to wive and thrive in the modern world, the underclass needed to acquire cultural skills: religion, law, mutual aid, and education. Religion and law are of course the necessary cultural framework to make the commercial city work. Education is needed because you need literacy and numeracy to do useful work in the city. Mutual aid is the welfare state society of the 19th century when "everyone" belonged to the Masons or the Elks or the Oddfellows and dozens of others. These mutual-aid societies provided, first, death benefits. Then they looked after widows. Then they had "lodge doctors," young doctors just out of medical school who would help birth your child for a song.

But let us look at other means of helping the lowest class.

Voluntary Slavery. Yes, did you know that back in The Year 1000 you could go to your feudal lord, place your head between his hands and become his slave -- and get food and lodging? But you already know about this. It's called "Welfare."

Servant. If you read 19th century novels or watch 20th and 21st century TV series about the good old days, you will notice that everyone either had servants or was a servant. That ended after World War II and the beginning of the full-on welfare state. One thing about servants: they weren't allowed to marry, and they weren't allowed to have "followers." Do you think we could serve the poor better by giving them jobs as servants?

Apprenticeships. In Shakespeare's time you went to work at age 8 unless you went to a grammar school like young Bill. Later "everyone" went to work at 12 or 13 as a servant or an apprentice. Thing about apprenticeships was that the employer was supposed to supply practical education to the apprentice. You think that might suit the average teenager and the lower-class teenager better than the gubmint teacher thingy? Notice that we could have Big Woke & Co. pay for all this. Actually, right now, at Walmart stores there is a back room where employees can take on-line courses and up their skills. And get more money. Then there is Walmart's $1 a day college program. Maybe this would be better than more taxes.

Thing is: hierarchy, or inequality, is universal. That was the point about Jordan Peterson's lobster thingy. Even lobsters have hierarchy, and the reason is because it reduces violence on the lobster front.

The question is: what kind of hierarchy is beneficial and what kind of hierarchy is harmful.

My guess is that most kinds of gubmint wars on inequality in fact have the opposite effect, and entrench and create new, harmful hierarchies. That is, after all, the lesson of socialism, that equality leads to a brutal hierarchy and millions of deaths.

So let's think about how we can create and adapt hierarchies that are beneficial and actually helpful to the less fortunate.

Yes, Whatabout Gay-Lesbian vs. Full-on LGBT?

Here's an interesting take. Gay writer Bruce Bawer in "The Great Consonant Shift" wants to know how come, all of a sudden around 2000, the gay-lesbian rights movement transformed into LGBT? See, according to Bawer, gay-lesbians and transgenders are about as different as different can be.

Being gay or lesbian or bisexual is about which sex one is attracted to. To be transgender is to claim that you’re a member of the opposite sex[.]

You see, to Bower it is perfectly natural and physical to have gay marriage, but to have trans rights and the right to transition is completely different.

Probably not. The whole game of modern politics is "rights." That how the educated ruling class justifies its power. It conducts its "over-under" politics by championing the "rights" of some marginalized group against the insufferable heedlessness or active opposition of the booboisie.

I say that some marginalized groups championed by the ruling class are genuinely marginalized; others are "fake," members of the ruling class playing oppression theater and acting the part of a marginalized group. I say that workers of the industrial revolution and the blacks of the Jim Crow era were genuine victims. Feminist women, gays, lesbians, transgenders, post-civil-rights blacks, etc., are fake victims.

Your mileage may vary.

Actually, my question is really: "why gay marriage?" That's because I believe that the purpose of marriage is the protection of women. Men are naturally sexual predators and need to be curbed, and marriage is one of the ways that human society puts the curb on men. But gays and lesbians? What's the point beyond, of course, the question of gubmint benefits.

Oh yeah, I get it. Humans are social animals, and the point of gay rights and gay marriage and the pejorative "homophobe" is to raise the social status of gays and lesbians. Because all the world's a stage for social status games.

Back in the day, before the narrative was changed to tell us that gays and lesbians had been discriminated against and marginalized since the dawn of time, you get Eveyln Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited which represents homosexual love as a kind of Oxbridge-upper-class exoticism: a stage that our hero goes through at Oxford with a troubled scion of the decaying aristocracy.

But Bawer inspired me to check up on the history of human marriage practices, starting of course with our pals the gorillas and the chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee marriage. Chimpanzees are territorial, and the males defend the food growing territory and form a male hierarchy: the higher up the hierarchy the more sexual opportunities with the females. See Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

Gorilla marriage. Gorillas seem to live in bands officiated by a single silverback, and the females seem to attach to a silverback for safety reasons. Gorillas are not territorial like chimpanzees; they just move through the countryside in search of food but do not establish territory. They do not compete for food-growing territory.

Human hunter-gatherers. Scientists say that there is some polygyny -- multiple wives -- but mostly hunter-gatherers live by arranged marriage using "brideprice" or "brideservice," where brideprice is payment by the groom's family to the bride's family and brideservice is "labor performed by a prospective groom or newly-wed husband for the family of the bride."

Agricultural humans. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the agricultural age men had as many wives as they could afford -- until the Catholic Church started asking high-status males the reason why. So high status men had lots of wives. But for low-status men it is clear to me that you were only allowed to get married if you could afford it. That was the whole point of doweries. A guy would only marry a girl if the bride's family coughed up enough of the ready money so he could keep the new family alive. Note that slaves didn't get married except in the Americas where more slaves meant more field labor. And note that domestic servants in all 19th century novels and 20th century TV serials about the good old days were, and remained, unmarried.

Industrial humans. The whole point of the industrial era is that it is the era of the Great Enrichment. The economy was no longer static, founded upon the food from food-growing land. Anyone could get married and hope for the best. Exit arranged marriage and enter romantic marriage, because the chances are that any young man and young woman could make it, because economic growth.

See, my line is that in the post-industrial era we have sexual freedom because we can afford it. Not because we are advanced and evolved and special. We can afford to have gays getting it on with multiple partners because AIDS vaccine. We can afford to have lesbians living together because we don't need a male around the house to do the plowing. We can afford to have childless couples because we don't need child labor on the farm any more.

And we can afford to have the scions of the educated elite running around getting into "activism" and gay rights and transgender rights and "1619 Projects" not just because of Adam Smith's old maxim about "a great deal of ruin in a nation" but because we can afford to have a lot of people running around doing stupid things. At least, we think we can.

Of course, I believe that modern politics is a domestication of the old warrior ethic. Just like chimpanzees, territorial human males had to defend their territory from other groups. The defenders were heroes and were rewarded with high status. But now we have brave road warriors competing for market share; we have brave startup entrepreneurs risking everything on a business idea; we have brave "activists" challenging the bigots and the oppressors and demanding their "rights." And we have a new feudalism as many people choose the low-risk neo-serfdom of work at a corporation.

The interesting question is what happens next. I think that modern "rights" politics and its domesticated "activist" warriors has gone about as far as it can go. I think that "liberation" especially in sexual matters is probably going to reverse itself, because I think that women instinctively hate the sexual free-for-all: they expect to be protected. I think that the big-government welfare state with its domesticated form of loot and plunder has gone about as far as it can go.

But I doubt if we will see the end of the "rights" activists in our lifetime. They are having too much fun. So the question really is:  what comes after "trans"?

I suspect that in another twenty years we will be reading articles by transgender activists that are mortally offended by whatever it is that comes next on the gender front.

Understand Your Liberal Friends and Be There For Them As Their World Collapses Around Them

We merry band of racist-sexist-homophobes, we happy few, have observed the "unfriending" thingy ever since the Dawn of Trump back in 2016.

Liberals get a social-media post or an email from an acquaintance about some political issue and they can't take it. So they "unfriend" the friend.

This happened to me back in early 2017 when a friend I had been going with to coffee for years said he was going away for a couple of weeks. So to speak. And now I am seeing it happening to others. Their liberal friends are angry, and they lash out.

I wonder why.

Well, I was reading a piece on "Lying to Liberals" by Auguste Meyrat at American Mind and he 'splained it all to me. Our liberal friends believe what they are carefully taught. All humans do.

When it comes to the legacy media, well-known technocrats, or leftist politicians, they will default to an assumption of truthfulness. Reporters can repeatedly report lies... Collecting the evidence and doing the work of finding and accepting the truth is much harder than simply trusting them, so people ignore the red flags and contradictions.

But, of course, eventually the truth starts knocking on the window, and it becomes more and more difficult to deal with the glitch in the Matrix.

What do you do when the world is not behaving the way you were "carefully taught?" You get angry. You lash out at the friends that don't go with the narrative. Then you "unfriend" them rather than face up to the fact that your understanding of the world, the "narrative" you go with, has crashed and burned.

I like to think that I have never done this, because, I tell myself, I am actually interested in the ravings of lefty lunatics. I am interested in understanding the narrative they subscribe to and figuring out at what point they have to give up and admit they were wrong. And I am interested in analyzing the lies they believe and trying to figure out the best place for a flanking attack. At least that is what I say to myself. No doubt I am just as bad as everyone else and I cling to crazy conspiracy theories about crazy lefties just as lefties cling to crazy conspiracy theories about right-wing white-supremacist patriarchs.

But I am here to urge my racist-sexist-homophobic friends to be understanding with your lefty friends. This is only the beginning of a long journey through hell for our lefty friends. 

It is telling, I think, that our lefty friends are already so paranoid a mere five months into the glorious Biden-Harris administration. Obviously they must feel, at some unconscious level, that all is not copacetic in liberal-land. OK, sure, they blame eevil racist Trump conspiracy theorists for everything that is going wrong: of course they do. But still, they feeel that something is wrong; something does not compute.

But think how much worse things are going to get for them. Already we are seeing the first uptick in inflation. Guess where that is going to go? We are seeing the push-back on CRT by concerned parents at local school districts. Is that merely the first ripple of a tidal wave? We are seeing surprising elections of Republicans in Hispanic voting districts. We are seeing sweetie New York Times journalist Mara Gray traumatized by Trump car parades and US flags on Long G-island over the Memorial Day weekend.

Think what it will be like for them if the schools and CRT thing blows up into a political hurricane? Think what it will mean for them if Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) switches parties and switches control of the United Senate. Think what it will be like for them if the 2022 mid-terms turn into a Democratic bloodbath. Think what it will be like for them if Trump gets his own social media platform going. Think what it will mean if moderate Democrats panic and break ranks and run for the hills in the months ahead.

See, what I say is: don't "unfriend" your liberal friends in the months and years ahead. Be there for them. They are going to need you as their whole world-view crashes in ruins about them, and they don't know what to do about it.