Race Reality vs. Colorblindness

On the one hand Jason D. Hill writes that whites invented blackness. And Dennis Prager appeals to the notion of colorblindness as the moral ideal.

On the other hand, the ZMan demands race realism.

Those who deny the reality of race are on one side of the great divide, while those who accept biological reality are on the other side of the divide. There is no middle ground. Those who think culture is a manufactured good are on the side of biology deniers, while those who think culture is the product of biology and time are on the side of the realists.

Well. Obviously, I would say, there are physical differences between humans. Humans that lived for millennia in West Africa clearly are physically different from e.g., people that lived for millennia in the high plateaus of East Africa. Humans feel comfortable around people that are like them. They feel uncomfortable around people physically different from them.

But equally, people who are physically alike can differ sharply on ideas and politics. They can enroll themselves into different groups and end up hating each other, much as people who are physically different can hate each other.

And people that are physically unlike can join together and experience a sense of belonging and togetherness similar to that experienced by people that are physically alike and closely related.

I think that the really-real is the attachment to kindred. Humans naturally trust the people closest to them in blood relation. (But they can also get really angry with close relations).

That is why I have come up with the notion of "fake tribalism." Yes, it is reality that people form themselves into the tribe of the kindred. But according to La Wik, a clan is a subset of a tribe.

Clan:

A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship[1] and descent. 

Tribe:

The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan, but smaller than a chiefdom, nation or state.

See what is going on here? Right away, with "clan," we are getting into "perceived kinship." That is what poker players call a "tell."

Let us go with La Wik's hierarchy of clan, tribe, chiefdom, nation. Obviously, I would say, the farther you go from actual local kindred, the more likely the kinship is "perceived" or, more likely, made up and "fake."

If even a clan involves possible "perceived kinship" then all the group designations represent perceived kinship as well as biological kinship.

And that is what I believe. I believe that the natural feeling of groupishness that obtains among people that are closely related can be exploited by political, religious, and cultural leaders to mold humans into an artificial group.

This obtains in particular when men join together in an army to fight some enemy. Men who have fought together experience each other as brothers forever after.

Oh, and "fraternal associations" like the Masons and the Elks are based on an artificial sense of brotherhood that obtains among men that do things together.

But let us get back to practical politics, and winning elections and all that rubbish.

I would say that for conservatives and Republicans the smart thing to do is to accept subnational identities, like black and Hispanic and Jewish and Chinese, and a glorious thing is diversity. But then encourage everyone to think of themselves as Americans, people of all kinds that come together to celebrate the last best hope of mankind on Earth.

There is cunning in this notion. Because while our liberal friends celebrate racial and gender differences, they hate the nation of America. There's gotta be a opportunity in that as big as all outdoors.

Yes, let's be real about race. But let us not forget that you can get humans to feel and act upon all kinds of perceived connection other than race.

Learning from the Astor Place Riot

Wat? What in the world was the Astor Place Riot of 1849? I'm glad you asked.

I only learned about the Astor Place Riot in New York City a couple of days ago while reading Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro, a Columbia English professor.

Did you know that about the only entertainment in 1850 America was the playhouse? And that all classes went? And that the Big Thing was Shakespeare, which all classes enjoyed. For instance, did you know that California gold miners liked to recite Shakespeare of an evening?

And the leading actors of the day were rock stars. And they had feuds with each other.

In the case of the Astor Place Riot there was a Brit actor and a Yank actor. La Wik:

Its ostensible genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, one of the best-known American actors of that time, and William Charles Macready, a similarly notable English actor, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.

Macready's  Brit Macbeth was a mincing take. Forrest's All-American Macbeth was a rough tough hombre. Here's is La Wik's intro on the riot:

The Astor Place Riot occurred on May 10, 1849, at the now-demolished Astor Opera House in Manhattan and left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured. It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances in Manhattan, which generally pitted immigrants and nativists against each other, or together against the wealthy who controlled the city's police and the state militia.

I get the impression, from La Wik and from Shapiro, that riots were a pretty normal feature of urban life in the 19th century.

But now I will get to the point.

The point is that, reading about New York City in the mid 19th century it seems pretty clear to me that it has a two-class politics. There was the lower-class, part native-born Americans -- e.g. "nativists"-- and part immigrant Irish and Germans. And then there was the middle and upper class.

Whereas in our time we have the over/under politics of the educated Gentry, with the educated elite successfully selling the lower class with the idea that they are their "allies." In its crudest form this over/under political formula is the Allyship notion of the Allies sticking up for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors.

And it made me think that maybe the staged riots of the present day, sponsored by the ruling class, are better than the unstaged, visceral riots of the 19th century.

In other words, I am saying that the "mostly peaceful protests" that are carried out by well-born products of our glorious universities should be regarded in the same light as the bear-baiting of olden times: boys will be boys and men like a bit of rough trade.

But when you have the nativist lower class and the immigrant lower class combining into a deadly riot -- ostensibly about Shakespeare but really as a way of thumbing their noses at the ruling class -- well, I think that I prefer the modern three-class culture and politics where the upper class struts and frets pompously and conceitedly around acting as though they were the best thing in the world for the oppressed peoples instead of a bunch of idiots that Literally Know Nothing and are Making Things Worse.

And really, what this country needs is a responsible and patriotic ordinary middle class sensibly organized into a nationalist and patriotic party of the middle class that sensibly balances the political scales against the poseurs of the educated upper class. And, needless to say, it is a middle class that gradually enrolls members of the lower class into the national community of the middle class as soon as they are ready to shed their subordinate status as victims and become ordinary responsible One Hundred Percent Americans.

So what I am saying is that we should not grumble about the vile and unjust gentry class that has split this country apart and Made Things Worse. We should go forward with joy and with a spring in our step, luxuriating in the glory of the America we know and love and the possibility of what America might become after the inevitable humiliation and defeat of the delta-minus morons that currently rule us.

We should laugh and sing at our liberal friends, pat them on the head and tell them that they can't help it, having been Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls that learned to hate and to fear as they were carefully taught from year to year in their dear little ear.

And every now and then we should speak to the Little Darlings of the liberals, the "oppressed peoples" of which you've heard tell. And we should ask them whether the liberals are really helping them, or whether they are Making Things Worse.

See, getting the Little Darlings to grow up into One Hundred Percent Americans takes time. Look at the white working class: the liberals abandoned them after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it has taken them fifty years to take down the FDR pictures on the wall and start organizing Trump Car Parades.

Why should it take blacks any longer to realize that they have been had?

Or ordinary women to realize that have been bamboozled into supporting the agenda of upper-class women snobs?

I think we can see that Hispanics are naturally moving out of the Democratic orbit as they move into the middle class.

But whatabout gays? And trans? And they/them? Well, they are all educated class twerps: we don't need to worry about them.

By the way, I was to a dinner with the neighborhood liberals lately, and boy, do they hate Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida.

And who, you may ask, taught my liberal neighbors to hate and to fear Ron DeSantis? I couldn't possibly say.

What Does a Culture of Real Criticism Mean?

In yesterday's post on The Emergence of Criticism I discussed the utter novelty of a society in which criticism was genuinely tolerated.

Normal human society has one myth and one religion and if you don't agree you are a problem.

I interpret this not as a scandal but as a profound understanding of pre-scientific society. In other words, before humans had a developed system of understanding and predicting the common events of life, it was perfectly serviceable to have myths and legends and evil spirits to explain things. If you don't have Newtonian mechanics, what are you supposed to do in the matter of understanding and prediction?

But then, after humans have developed a serviceable system of mechanical prediction, what are we supposed to do about the myth and legend and evil spirits system that got us here for the previous 100,000 years, or however long humans have had conscious minds that could gussie up myths and legends and evil witches.

Obviously, we have to think about it.

Obviously, I would say, humans need a myth that explains the meaning of "life the universe, and everything" for the time being, and we always will.

But, it probably isn't a good idea to burn witches and heretics at the stake or send saboteurs and wreckers to concentration camps. Or imprison mostly peaceful protesters at the January 6 riots for six months while they await trial, or until they agree to cop a plea.

Yesterday I pondered Bryan Magee's idea that Marxism makes complete sense, because the idea of a world in which everything is not tied down by a saving myth -- as proposed for the Era of Criticism -- is too terrifying to contemplate.

Now, our Founding Fathers imagined a cunning solution to this problem, for their time, with the separation of church and state. In that way, in the United States of the time, no one Christian sect could make itself the state church. Of course, when it came to the Irish Catholics in the mid 19th century the political punks of the time -- I mean you Horace Mann -- decided to do an end run around the Catholics with gubmint common schools that would use the Protestant Bible. But God said to the Irish, "first build the school, then the church," and it was so, and the Irish nuns ran the best schools in the nation for the next century.

In our day the end-run Horace Manns are the lefty activists that are too stupid to understand that their activism and their cancel culture amount to an establishment of wokey religion: worse, a combination of religion and politics that we have learned to call totalitarianism, and as such a very present danger to the Republic and in simple terms a monstrous and evil injustice perpetrated on all Americans that don't worship at the church of Woke.

And the worst thing of all is that the wokeys have No Idea. They have No Idea that their activism is really a religion. And they have no idea that politics leads directly to injustice, do not pass Go. And they have No Idea that the conjunction of their activist politics and government is totalitarianism, straight up. No Idea.

I think that the answer lies somewhere close to elevating the Culture of Criticism to a Holy Writ. It is interesting, of course, that our lefty friends believe that their Critical Race Theory does just that.

It is comical, really, that in fact the lefty implementation of critical theory in fact does the opposite, and far from being a genuine critique of the ruling class and the ruling narrative is is fact a cunning way of bullying all narratives critical of our present ruling class out of the public square.

But here's the thing. The point of Popper's notion of falsification and the notion of knowledge -- beginning with a problem that requires the imagining of new theories and their testing and probable falsification -- is that in the modern world the path of the single myth and narrative fails every time it is tried, Joey S, and Mao Z.D.

The only way to avoid disaster and killing fields and utter failure is to abandon the Single Narrative notion and let a thousand ideas bloom, and set forth the idea that the only way forward is by trying things out and correcting the errors and then doing the whole thing over again.

And that means the end of political supremacy and cancel culture and "disinformation" findings and naming and shaming and shunning, and marches through the institutions and faculties that are 95 percent liberal and silly woke girls in publishing houses deciding not to publish "controversial" authors.

Not because it is wrong, but because, you silly ignorant liberals, it will end up in disaster for you and your ideas.

Why do you fools and knaves not get this?

It seems to me that the key to all this is that Americans be taught to believe that wokism is a religion. And that wokeys be put on the rack until they agree that their beliefs are a religion, and as such must not be established in the government as a state religion.

So let's do it.

Karl Popper: The Emergence of Criticism

Karl Popper is famous for his notion of falsifiability. La Wik:

Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments.

Or, as my guy F.S.C. Northrop wrote: "knowledge begins with a problem," or when existing theory doesn't work in a particular situation. In his Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper Bryan Magee explains things thusly.

The old model of scientific method was:

1, observation and experiment; 2, inductive generalization; 3, hypothesis; 4, attempted verification of hypothesis; 5, proof or disproof; 6, knowledge.

According to Popper, it goes like this:

1, problem...; 2, proposed solution, in other words a new theory; 3, deduction of testable propositions from the new theory; 4, tests... observation and experiment; 5, preference established between competing theories.

Actually, I describe the process a little differently, as 

1. Problem with the old theory;
2. propose a new theory;
3. Make predictions;
4. Survive attacks on new theory. 

Until a new problem emerges. And it will. And I think that my description of the problem is better than Magee's. Maybe you have a better idea.

But then Magee goes on to say how radical this new approach is, not just in science, but in life. He calls it "the emergence of criticism."

[A]ll, or almost all human societies of which we have knowledge seem to have an interpretation of the world which was articulated in some myth or religion, and in primitive societies any questioning of its truth is usually punished by death.

There is One Truth, and you'd better not mess with it, peasant. 

But let us be fair. There was a very good reason for that in the days Before Science. Supposed you, Farmer Joe, changed the routine of farming that had successfully brought food for the table to your household. What's the odds that your brilliant idea is wrong, and your family starves?

We can see how this works in the recent COVID experience. The government and its bureaucrats decree what is going on and what to do about it. Any disagreement is banned by the media as "disinformation."

Nothing new here.

But we live in a critical age. Magee:

Popper believes that... the first schools to not only permit criticism but encourage and welcome it were those of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece... This spelt the end of the dogmatic tradition of passing on an unsullied truth, and the beginning of a new rational tradition of subjecting speculations to critical discussion.

In the old days, if society had a wrong theory, the whole society would die. Under the new dispensation, where criticism of existing theory is permitted, the wrong theory dies instead of society.

It is important to understand how radical this is: to allow heretics and intellectual rebels to argue their point. Humans are not programmed that way. We want to believe in the truth of our religion and our way of life, and it is extremely frightening to allow an open discussion of competing ideas. 

So Popper explains the emergence of Marxism. Marxism is a religion that pretends to be scientific and to predict, with scientific precision, that society will trend towards a perfect world because Marx claims to have discovered the "Natural Laws of capitalist production...  [and to] lay bare the Economic Law of Motion of modern society." You could call it the last stand of Newtonian mechanics.

It is natural, Magee says, for the modern "emergence of criticism" to inspire an opposite faith, in the One True Marxism. That's because the responsibility of searching out the best path to the future is terrifying, and most of us would rather leave the heavy lifting to the priests and the politicians.

Only, of course, if we leave everything to the priests and politicians, then when they are wrong we will all die. Hey Mao! How yer doin' pal?

Popper argues that the culture of criticism requires that we go forward piecemeal. We discover a problem, we propose a solution, we find it works, sort of, but not quite, so we admit our error and revise the solution. It's all very messy, and we humans don't like mess.

Indeed, I argue, the problem with churches and governments and hierarchies is that the leader is not allowed to admit a mistake. In the recent retreat from Afghanistan you can see this operating. President Biden cannot admit that his plan to withdraw was an absolute clown show.

It's not just that Biden made mistakes; the point is that social leaders down the ages have never been able to admit mistakes. The problem is nicely illustrated in the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven. If things start going wrong in China it is a sign that the emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and that means the end of the dynasty.

That is the old world.

But in the new world we accept that things are going wrong all the time, that we will be butting up against the limit of our knowledge all the time. But that's OK. It's not the end of the world. In the new order we try to figure out what went wrong and come up with a better idea, and try it out.

In a way, the Apollo 13 disaster shows us the modern can-do spirit in action. Two days into the flight in 1970 an oxygen tank in the Service Module failed, and this meant that there wasn't enough oxygen to sustain the crew in the Command Module. What happened next is that a team back on Earth went into a room with all the equipment available on the spacecraft and figured out how to jury-rig life-support for the crew long enough for them to return to Earth.

In other words, "Houston We Have A Problem" is the very essence on the modern culture of criticism and adaptation. We something goes wrong we don't all start pointing fingers at each other. Instead we figure out a way to solve the problem, and when anyone comes up with an idea, we test it to see if it will work.

Tell that to the politicians and activists.

There's a piece in Unherd today that acts as a corrollary to this. "Life is one big status game" is about how people always listen to socially dominant people, and how people are always taking advantage of social dominance to beat up the peasants with virtue-signaling. This is Old World.

New World is that techy nerds are out there in Nowheresville thinking up whacky ideas, and that every now and again one of them comes up with a whacky idea that works.

New World is adapting to climate change rather than completely changing energy use in accordance with a grand plan of Building Back Better from the rich guys in the World Economic Forum.

New World is ten thousand different schools trying out how to educate kids, rather than slavishly following the latest One Size Fits All No Child Left Behind ukase from on high.

Monoculture's Effect on Women

Over at National Review Carrie Gress writes about "Why Don’t We Tell Women What’s Making Them Miserable?" It's time to take a look at the mess of women's lives after feminism's "long march through American culture"as in:

Item: Women's mental health: "women are struggling: suicides, depression, substance abuse, and sexually transmitted infections have all increased dramatically over the last five decades."

Item: women at crisis-pregnancy centers live a life where they are "being trafficked, pimped, addicted, incarcerated, abused, and on and on."

Item: "Rarely is the suggestion made that women have been sold a poisonous lifestyle and the behaviors implied in that lifestyle are what actually need to be changed." For college freshmen "Heavy doses of gender exploration and safe-sex practices, and heaps of contraceptives, are all part of the welcome at most U.S. college campuses."

Hey, writes Gress, whatabout the basics:

Don’t sleep around, don’t do drugs, don’t have abortions, stop blaming the patriarchy, find a purpose outside of yourself, cover up some of that skin, don’t overspend, and figure out what is truly good, not just what celebrities say. 

But, of course, you are not allowed to say that. Thanks to feminism, "a carefully constructed closed system has been created so that anything outside its boundaries is almost unthinkable. "

But more-satisfying ways to live do exist, ways where dignity is honored, health is truly valued, body parts aren’t ignored or rendered useless, and relationships — which are at the true heart of most women — aren’t fleeting or shallow, useful or convenient, but deep, abiding, and life-giving. If only we could find a way to tell this to every woman.

Yes, well. But this amounts to a few flabby suggestions. How about something a little stronger.

Where do we start?

First, I think we need to recognize that feminism is an unjust system imposed on all women -- and men -- by ruling-class women. Feminism is a fantasy of life imagined by ruling-class Gentry women who have no right to impose their religion and culture on lower-class women, both ordinary Commoner women and lower-class Client women. See my disquisition on Three Layers, etc.

Let me amplify this: the feminist culture that has been forced on all women is one of the great crimes of the age. Personally, I don't think feminism works for ruling-class Gentry women, but if ruling-class women want to screw up their lives: hey, that's their business. But when they impose their culture on lower-class women, that is unjust; it is domination and hegemony, and it is wrong.

But, I think that even feminists get miserable when they practice feminism. Case in point is Ms. Feminist herself, Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, in which she advertised the notion of the "independent woman." Never had kids with her beau Jean-Paul Sartre. But she hated that he cycled through each of his mistresses every week. And when they died, both the childless Sartre and childless Beauvoir had sorta "adopted" younger people to be their heirs. So, maybe they shoulda had kids together, instead of strutting around as liberated twerps.

And there is no such thing as the "independent woman." Why is that?

I capture this truth is my notion that starts with Sigmund Freud's question "What do women want?"

No Siggie, I say. It's not what women want, it's what they expect, and what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

The proof of this is that whores need pimps to protect them. Even though whores are "trafficked, pimped, addicted, incarcerated, abused, and on and on" by their pimps it is still better to have a pimp to keep all that stuff down to a dull roar.

Feminists to do not need pimps to protect them because they are upper-class Gentry and nobody would dare lay a hand on a Gentry woman. In other words, Gentry women expect to be protected and they are protected. Because privilege.

The next step in understanding the problem is my disquisition on Women in the Public Square. I say that women do not relate to the public square which is a male thing where you engage in verbal fisticuffs with the other guys, and which women Do Not Like, Not At All. Women do not do public verbal fisticuffs; they have a one-on-one chat with a woman friend and say: "I can't believe she said that." And determine never to talk to the third woman again. But you can't do that in the public square.

So Gentry women are trying to destroy the public square, with "safetyism" and the war on "microaggressions." What they are really saying is that they don't want nuttin' to do with the public square.

So, even for Gentry women, the public square doesn't work.

Never mind about Gentry women. Whatabout Commoner women? Guess how Commoner women get to be protected? Oh yeah: by marriage!

I would say that Commoner women are not interested in strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage of a public life like Gentry women. They just want marriage and family and children. That means that they would like a safe world where sex and marriage is bound by fairly strict rules, so that they can be courted by potential husbands instead of being subjected to "relationships." And they are naturally "chaste." Apart from anything else, there is a practical reason why honor for women is "chastity." You get too many sex partners and you are likely to get your reproductive system wrecked by STDs. But Commoner women don't get that protection in the world run by feminists.

I say that the feminist domination and hegemony of Commoner women is a crime. And upper-class Gentry women have No Idea about this.

Whatabout lower-class women, the Subordinates, the Clients? Let us start by reciting the words of Charles Murray in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. He writes that in the lower class of whites the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. I think it is fair to say that this is true for BIPOCs, only more so.

Do you see what is glaring out of the "the men don't work much and the women don't marry much?" It is telling us that unless you yoke lower-class men to the children they sire, by marriage, then they aren't going to work to support the wife and the children. Not much. And, of course, if the woman ain't gonna get a man to marry the mother of his children well, there's always welfare. George Gilder wrote Visible Man about this back in 1995.

I don't think that feminists are the sole guilty party here. The whole welfare state is to blame, liberals. It's another crime of the age, that lower-class women can't expect the fathers of their children to marry them.

Do you see what is precipitating out of this, so that women can get their mental health back together?

For upper-class Gentry women they need a male protector to keep them safe from mental distress in the public square.

For middle-class Commoner women they need rules to govern courting and marriage. So that they are protected.

For lower-class Client women they need a real simple societal rule. Men have to marry the mother of their children.

And then everyone would live happily ever after.

Because I am a kindly sort of chap, I say that we wouldn't jail the feminists that have wrecked the life of women. But we would take them down a peg or two.

The Eternal Temptation of Monoculture

At Quillette Keith E. Stanovich worries about the "Social Science Monoculture." The monoculture's latest wizard wheeze is "faith in science" questionnaires. Only trouble is that the way you score high on these tests is by parroting the liberal line on everything.

On about the same day over at UnHerd Tom Chivers reviews a book from a Harvard professor on trying to convince science deniers -- you know who they are -- that they are wrong in "How not to talk to a science denier."

Hey, maybe the only common thing about these science deniers is that they don't want to take their science from conceited puffed-up liberals.

But I want to know what is wrong with these liberals that they think that their saving faith is the only saving faith, indeed the only truth.

Actually, we know. It was all told to us years ago by Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Despite all their talk about experiments and reason and logic, real scientists act like any other human group: they don't like people that rock the boat and don't go with the program. So, Kuhn writes, scientific revolutions only succeed when the old generation dies off. In other words, the old science is good enough for the old generation.

In a sense every science is a church of its current members. It has an orthodoxy that all sensible church members believe. And the members are not too kind with heresies and the heretics that advance them.

Of course, this monoculture can condense into a war strategy, such as "the long march through the institutions" that La Wik attributes to Sixties activist Rudi Dutschke (I thought it was Antonio Gramsci).

What ties all these world views together is the notion that "we" know the truth, the real meaning of "life, the universe and everything." And it is our sacred duty to preach that truth throughout the world and banish the Evil One from the face of the Earth.

No we don't!

If you remember, one of the Temptations of Christ was when Satan took "him up to an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." And the point is that all that power and all that glory counts for nothing, for less than nothing.

But in every human burns a fierce flame that, if only he or she had the power they could force the world to "get sorted." And everyone would live happily ever after.

No it won't!

Monocultures don't work!

Why? Because the way the world works is by adaptation, by fixing things that go wrong, because even "The best laid plans o' Mice an' Men / Gang aft agley." The world does not work by implementing a prophecy, just like the prophet imagined it.

So if you are an academic department and all the professors are lefty liberals and there is no room for a conservative, then your scholarship will shrivel into counting the number of victims on a pinhead.

If you are science researchers and anyone that disagrees with you is a "science denier" then the work you do is probably rubbish. Because even a science denier can probably point to a problem or two in your magnificent theory.

And when it comes to morality and politics, my reductive Three Peoples theory shows, as clearly as can be, that the different kinds of people in the world need, and naturally turn to, different religions and different politics. And if one group of people forces their religion and their politics on the rest of society, then they are going to Make Things Worse -- for the rest of the world and even for themselves.

It is telling that the two most obvious monocultures are those of a strict religion and of an army. What is telling is that in these strict hierarchical structures the folks at the tip of the spear are expected to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the ultimate, inevitable victory. In other words, it is all about the agenda of the Chief Priest or the General-in-chief. And the job of the lesser mortals is to sacrifice themselves for the good of the order.

The whole point of our American system is precisely to break up all this: to limit government by dividing it into three branches; to limit moral hegemony by separation of church and state. And indeed to separate the political sector from the economic sector from the moral/cultural sector as envisaged by Michael Novak in what I call the Greater Separation of Powers.

Why? Because nobody knows the real, ultimate, God-spoken meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" and anyone that forces the rest of the world to bow to their vision of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will only build a pile of skulls, butcher's bill to follow.

It's fascinating that after a century of mammoth world wars and slave states, our best and brightest still don't get it.

So, US Imperalism is Dead

Let us propose the following idea. After the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, the notion of the US as the global guardian of democracy -- er, Democracy -- is dead.

It's the end of the Age of US Imperialism. And Joe Biden did it.

I don't know exactly when the US ruling class decided it wanted to be the Global Hegemon. I'd say the 1845 annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War that followed would be a bit early. And college President Wilson's entry into World War I would be a bit late. Spanish-American War? Maybe.

The point is that when you are a political entity -- whether monarchical or oligarchic or democratic or Soviet or fascist or tin-pot dictator -- the natural, instinctive thing for you to do is to swagger on the international stage: win a nice little war.

Don't try a World War. Not unless your name is Wilson or Roosevelt.

In my view this aggressiveness in political elites is a vestigial survival of the old reality of politics, that of defending the border of your food-growing territory against an "other" that would like to appropriate your food-growing territory for itself.

The food-growing territory thing is just the same as chimp society, where the males defend the border against males from the neighboring band, and the females munch on the food produced by the food-growing territory as they bear and raise baby chimps: the more food, the more baby chimps. That's how Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn.

You could say that the ultimate description of this ape culture is in Geoffrey of Monmonth's History of the Kings of Britain. Old pal Geoffrey is quite open about kingly conquest and the slaughter and plunder of the defeated. He speaks openly of times when Britain was more or less depopulated after a particularly severe bout on the wrong end of conquest-ology.

But it doesn't matter where the food is grown. Not any more.

But when the universe changes, and owning food-growing territory isn't all that important, then you can expect that the ruling classes will be the last to know. They will still keep on keeping on at their conquest and loot and plunder, because that is all they know.

The point is that it really doesn't matter who owns the food-growing territory any more. Food is for sale; grain from the western Canadian prairies gets put on ships in the harbor of Vancouver BC and gets sent all over the world.

It doesn't really matter where products and produced and manufactured.

Now there are a few caveats. You really don't want to get all your oil from the Arabs in the Middle East. They are a bit late to the modern era and haven't yet cooled their jets in the marketplace. So it's a Good Thing for everyone to do a spot of fracking on their own lands and get the natural gas out and not rely upon the Arabs for their fossil fuels.

You don't really want the Chinese to do all the manufacturing in the world. We need jobs for our kids too.

The point is that expanding your food-growing territory doesn't make you richer any more. It doesn't feed any baby chimps any more. Wealth doesn't come from broad rich acres but from what the World Bank calls "intangible capital." That is to say that wealth is not even the physical capital of buildings and factories. Eight percent of wealth is the intangible capital inside peoples' heads.

So I say that this old instinct needs to be properly sublimated, like with modern business and sports. We don't need men to be strutting the world showing their military stuff. Men need to get their aggressions out on the sports field and as road warriors. And jolly good fun it is for all.

So forget the US Empire. Let's just be a nation state devoted to keeping its people safe and prosperous. And minding our own business.

But whatabout Russia and China? Don't we need to keep them in check? Maybe, somewhat.

But I'd say that what Russia does about Belarus and Ukraine is not really worth going to war over. And I would say it is a good thing for Germany to integrate with Russia on the Nordstream 2 pipeline front.Is Russia really going to threaten to invade Europe as it did in the post-WWII era of the Soviet Empire? I doubt it. But Russia really benefit the more that it gets integrated into the European economy.

And China. China is pretty sure to want to reclaim Taiwan. Because national pride. And it is going to want to bully everyone around the South China Sea. And it seems to want to do a replay of the old China policy of the tributary states around the Chinese periphery, and tie them down with the Belt and Road initiative. Which I expect will be a mixed blessing for the Chinese people.

I accept the need to oppose the Soviet Union and prevent it from its millennial dream of conquering western Europe in fulfillment of Marx's religious prophecy.

But after the end of the Soviet Union the US should have dissolved NATO and gone home. Because the US Empire doesn't make any more sense than the British Empire.

The thing about the British Empire is that is was rather an accident. The Brits and the Portuguese didn't like the high prices for spices and silks available at the western end of the Spice Route and the Silk Road. They figured that they could get a better deal with sailing ships around the Cape of Good Hope and on to South Asia. And they were right.

But then, as they established ports in India and South East Asia, they came into conflict with the local feudal lords, and ended up teaching them lessons. And forming empires. And then they got into the slave plantation thing and set up colonies in South America and the Caribbean, and made a ton of money, for a while.

And, with the instinct to extend the border they established the European colonial empires. But it wasn't the colonies that made them powerful; it was the trading.

And the proof is that after World War II when the European powers gave up their colonies to local native tin-pot dictators the only people that suffered were the locals that got plundered by their new rulers. And a few whites left over in Rhodesia and South Africa. But hey, we got Elon Musk, born in South Africa, and he is reinventing space travel, the rascal, right here in the good old USA instead of in South Africa.

If you look at the awful far-right neo-fascist populist nationalist regimes about which our lordly global educated elite like to expectorate, you don't see anyone bent on world conquest. Not Donald Trump, not Nigel Farage, not Marine Le Pen, not Viktor Orbán. Of course, to our democratic rulers they are all Literally Hitler. But then everything is Literally Hitler to our noble lords of the global elite.

But I admit. A world of nation states run by Trumps and Farages and Le Pens and Orbáns wouldn't be much fun for the educated, credentialed, global elite. Because it would be a boring middle-class sort of thing, with everyone minding their own business instead of strutting out and Changing the World!