I Think I Finally Get Hegel

Ever since I read F.S.C. Northrop and his notion that knowledge begins with a problem, I have used the idea in everything. It's obvious: if you don't have a problem you don't need any more knowledge. Just keep on keeping on.

But if something is bothering you, if you have a problem, then you probably need to figure it out and add to the great inheritance of human knowledge.

So Hegel had a problem. But what was it? That is what I have been cudgeling my brain about. And I could never figure out Hegel. But now I think I have, thanks to Alexandre Kojève and his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. I read the book not to understand Hegel but because I read that every lefty who has half a brain has read it. So I read the book to understand lefties.

But the result of reading Kojève is that I now think I understand Hegel, and I think I understand the problem he was trying to solve.

Let's start with Newton. His equations of motion suggested that the universe was a billiard ball universe. Everything in the present and the future is completely determined by the past. Determinism.

Then Hume came along and said that you can't prove cause and effect. Just because Sir Louis Scatcherd fell off a horse and then died doesn't mean that the fall caused the death. This opened a crack in Newton's determinism.

Hume famously woke Kant out of his dogmatic slumber to construct his transcendental idealism. Humans couldn't know things-in-themselves; they could not look behind the curtain to find out what was really going on. Humans can only know appearances, how the world appears to them. So how can we humans know anything? Here is how I tackled it back in October 2012 when taking a course in the Philosophy of Kant.

We take formless sense impressions, view them with the forms of intuition about space and time, synthesize them with intuitions, and then own them as ours by applying the pure concepts of the understanding to our intuitions and finally applying judgments.

Or more crudely, we cook up a theory in our heads about the world, and interpret sense impression in the light of that theory. If it works it works.

But there is still a problem. How do we act in the world; how can we change the billiard ball universe and redirect the billiard balls?

That was Hegel's problem, and he solved it with the concept of Negation. When you come up with a new idea, when you change the world with a conscious act, you are negating the world, making it different. And so the whole history of humans is an endless series of negations, changing the flow of history. Until the End of History when the Scientist knows everything about everything, Napoleon has established his Empire, and that is that.

That's the way you have to think about change in a Newtonian world. You know that Newtonian determinism can't be the whole truth, so you have to conjure up something to make free will possible. And Hegel chose Negation.

But today we think this is rubbish, and not just because Marx and his pals made a complete dog´s breakfast of Hegel -- and a dog's breakfast of Russia and China as well. Why is that?

Because today we have quantum mechanics. It says, crudely, that the old Newtonian idea that it is billiard balls all the way down is wrong. At the base of the billiard balls is the quantum state function which is a statement of probability. We don't know what individual quanta are going to do next, and they don't know either, although we can have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen in the aggregate. So our basic theory of life, the universe, and everything says that, at the basic level, everything is contingent.

We know that quantum mechanics is pretty good because scientists, programming their brains with the ideas of quantum mechanics, have invented LED lights and smartphones, and LED lights and smartphones are constructed on the faith that quantum mechanics works.

Newton's theory works at the macro level on and around the earth, provided you don't go too fast. Kant's idea that we form concepts of understanding and intuition about the things-in-themselves that we only experience as sense impressions is right. Hegel's idea of Negation is sorta right: when we make a conscious change we change the universe forever, just like it says in quantum mechanics, only it comes out of the state function and all the other remarkable concepts of quantum mechanics, not Negation;.

Still, Hegel's idea was a good first try. Pity that his idea was so loosey-goosey that his adepts could use his ideas for their foolish and evil political conjuring tricks.

Because Hegel licensed crude ideas that capitalism is the negation of feudalism and socialism the negation of capitalism and so the world progresses along the arc of history towards justice.

And the result of that those ideas was not good. Still isn't.

But at least now I think I understand Hegel.

What Else Could the FBI Do?

Some people say it is the End of the Rule of Law. Others say that Hillary Clinton got a pass. We are talking about the statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on July 5 that "no responsible prosecutor" would prosecute Hillary Clinton for setting up a home-brew email server and then lying about never using it for material that was classified "at the time."

I think that in the Obama era you cannot expect any bureaucrat with a wife and children to go against Mr. Big. Because if you do "you will never work in this town again." It is not just that the media is Democratic. It is not just that bureaucrats are lifers. It is clear that the Obama people use "the Chicago way" to intimidate and to silence.

Still, Director Comey did basically lay out statements that Hillary Clinton lied about using her email system for classified communication. That gave the Trump campaign the opening to produce a video comparing Comey's words and Clinton's words. When I viewed the video the night of July 5 it had 3,4900,000 views; the morning of July 6 it was at 6,700,000 views. By 11:00am PDT it had been taken down by Facebook (Oh wait, here it is, now at 8,900,000 views). So somebody is paying attention.

So it's up to the voters in November. Do the voters think that, in the hack phrase, "law is for the little people," or do they want to send a message about that?  My guess is that voters will split three ways, according to my Three Peoples theory. The People of the Subordinate Self will vote for Hillary Clinton anyway, because they do not see the rule of law as dispositive. What counts for them is a powerful patron to protect them from the world and of course you can't expect a powerful patron to obey the law. What counts is that he (or she) gives you a cut of the loot. The People of the Responsible Self will vote against Hillary Clinton. In their responsible lives the important thing is trust, and trust depends on people following the rules and obeying the law.

But what about the People of the Creative Self? Do they take the attitude that classification and official secrets are part of a discredited nationalism implicit in the dominatory and imperialistic concept of the nation state? Or do they regard Hillary Clinton's lies as merely creative license, acceptable in anyone battling against the racist sexist bigots? Or do they take the position that the arc of history bends towards justice so no action is needed?

It's rough being a Person of the Creative Self. It is not easy to determine how you should think and feel.

Over at The Daily Beast Joel Kotkin is writing about the Great Rebellion against the neo-liberal crony capitalist order in Europe and in the US, from the Brussels bureaucrats to the Clinton Crime Syndicate.

But, of course, things aren't so simple, because even the rebels want the free stuff from the welfare state, the pensions and health care. They -- we -- just don't want to share it with immigrants and we certainly don't want them coming in and taking our jobs by working for lower wages that we are accustomed to command.

Meanwhile, the FBI did the best it could. It laid out the Clinton criminality for all to see. It just knew that the Obama Justice Department would never prosecute.

Storm Warning: To you lowly bureaucrats and members of the armed forces. Do not try this at home. You are the Little People, and the law still applies to you in full force.

Election 2016: Is It All Over Bar Shouting?

My grandfather had a couple of good lines. The first was "I like the cut of his jib." This is a nautical term, for you landlubbers, suggesting that you like the sails on a ship, a jib being a headsail out in front of the mast. Just what this means when you are talking about the "cut of her jib" I refuse to answer.

My grandfather's other saying was "it's all over bar shouting," which speaks for itself.

Based on what I am reading, a lot of people think that the presidential election for 2016 is all over. Bar shouting.

Here's piece by David Catron in the American Spectator about data denial syndrome. It's about the wishful thinking of Republican supporters in 2012, when they thought the media was undercounting Republican supporters in the polls before the election. Same thing is happening today as Trump supporters accuse the pollsters of undercounting their people. But data guy Nate Silver gives Trump a 20 percent chance of winning.

Then there is the Trump naive beginner syndrome from "Willis Fumbleton," again at the American Spectator, purporting to report a Trump staff meeting.

My guess is that these folks are right, provided that this election turns out like pretty well all elections since Ronald Reagan (2008 excepted). Those elections, from the first Bush to the second Obama were small-ball elections where below-the-radar commercials and turnout efforts won the day.

If 2016 is a small-ball election then the professional electioneering skills of the Democrats will eat Donald Trump alive. I'd say the professionals are betting on a small-ball election, which is the smart way to bet.

The way Trump wins is by transforming the general election the way he transformed the Republican primaries, by playing on the fears of the voters about immigration and the Muslim threat and an out-of-touch political elite that doesn't care about people like me. Then the Joe Soptic ads and the Big Data turnout machines and the elite media narrative don't matter.

That's how Ronald Reagan won in 1980. To the ordinary voter things were coming unstuck. Inflation, recession, gas lines, riots, and the Soviets seeming to advance all over the world.

(Yes, you young'uns. Back in the 1970s we had gasoline price controls and lines at the gas stations.)

In other words, the ruling class wasn't "keeping us safe." It wasn't accomplishing the basic (and really only) function of government, and the people were ready to try something else.

Is it 1980 all over again? There is a simple answer to that: We Don't Know.

But I'll tell you what I think. I think that at some point the political temptation to make a "keep us safe" issue out of Islamic terrorism is going to become irresistible. Why? Because keeping us safe is the only job that government can actually do: keeping us safe from enemies, foreign and domestic. Everything else is rewarding ruling-class supporters.

If you want to understand liberal politics you have to understand that politics must have an enemy. If there is no foreign enemy -- as liberals insist, because western imperialism and colonialism -- then the enemy must be at home, in our native born racists, sexists, homophobes, "haters" and xenophobes. There Must Be An Enemy.

But right now, for liberals, foreigners cannot be enemies, because historical imperialism and colonialism, and Muslims can't be enemies because they are a traditionally marginalized minority.

Now I get to be around quite a few nice educated liberal women. And right now they are still drinking the "hate" and xenophobia KoolAid.

At some point these liberal ladies will get frightened. I don't know what will do it; that's why I'm a lone wolf nobody crying in the wilderness.

The penultimate chapter of Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex is titled "The Independent Woman." That is a lie. There is no such thing as an independent woman. Woman's safety and security is dependent upon men with guns. It could be a husband or a lover. Or it could be the government and its men with guns. One way or another, women insist on being protected, for absent a protector, women are fair game; they always have been and always will be. If you want to understand more about that go read The Iliad. The whole thing revolves around a captured princess, Briseis, the spoils of war, and whether she belongs to Agamemnon or Achilles. And that's just the beginning where women are concerned.. If you don't want to understand about that, then don't read The Iliad and keep on keeping on at NPR and The New York Times.

Of course, there is no such thing as an independent man either. Men rely on society working as much as women. But not quite. The difference is, of course, children. A woman with a young child is uniquely vulnerable; she must have help and protection. And this is why feminism is so anti-natal; its fantasists imagine they can remove female vulnerability by avoiding childbirth. Sorry girls: whatever you think, There Must Be Children. Children are the reason that men are expendable, and women are not.

Meanwhile we have the presidential election of 2016. Will the "is it safe" moment arrive before November and transform US politics for a generation?

The answer is simple. We don't know.

What Do We Mean by "Empower?"

In my e-mail conversation with liberal Craig Greeman he proposes that progressives are interested in the empowering of people.

I'd be willing to bet that, if we defined "progressive" more narrowly in some ways -- as, perhaps, someone who *is* interested in power, specifically, the *empowering* of other people -- then conservatives might also agree with others.  After all, conservatives are interested in individual freedom and responsibility; and to enact that, individuals need to have the power to choose and accomplish, whether that's on a market or in a civil situation.  Of course, the question is how far to get the government involved in empowering people (as you said in your blog responding to my little piece, one man's "help" is another man's tyranny).  But I think that if we could agree on that, that both progressives and conservatives are interested in empowering of the individual, then we'd at least have a place to start.

I think that the key phrase that stops me is "how far to get the government involved in empowering people." I suppose Craig means that when the government enacts a Ten Hours law to regulate working hours that empowers people because employers can no longer demand that they work 12 hours a day.

But does that wage and hour law have anything to do with empowerment? The Lady Marjorie's mother presently lives in a retirement community where she is attended 24-7 by aides. Each aide works a 12-hour shift. But recently the State of Florida passed a wage and hour law requiring time-and-a-half for more than 40 hours a week. The response of Lady Marjorie and the agencies she uses to deliver these services was to cut the hours of the aides so they wouldn't be going over 40 hours per week. Is this empowerment or just jerking around?

If you ask me, wage and hour laws are not empowering people; they are protecting them, and mostly protecting them from themselves. The aides looking after Lady Marjorie's mother are immigrants that want to make money, and they are willing to endure considerable privation to do that. Working all night, from 8:00 pm to 8:00 am every day is not my idea of a walk in the park. Maybe "we" should prevent workers from working that hard; maybe we should limit their hours so that other people can get jobs. Or maybe out thicket of helping laws actually makes life harder for people.

Here's a story I heard recently. A 16-year-old high-school girl was sexually assaulted at her home by two boys from high school, but she did nothing about it until her parents found out. They went to the school, but the school basically did nothing about it, and meanwhile the boys and their friends were intimidating the girl with unspeakable verbal cruelty. Finally the 16-year-old girl heard that a 14-year-old girl had been assaulted by the same two boys and determined to go to the police. Today the 16-year-old girl belongs to a rape survivors group and gives interviews.

Now I would say that the empowerment in question occurred when the 16-year-old girl decided to take action and report her rape to the police. That's when she stopped relying on parents and school officials and actually took positive action. At that moment she achieved personal agency.

My problem with progressivism is that is often confuses empowerment with patronage. It is not empowering for liberals to enact social legislation. The workers protected by wage-and-hour laws are not empowered, they just have two masters, the employer and the government labor-law bureaucracy. It is an obvious conceit to imagine that when you are swanning around the world playing Lady Bountiful that you are empowering people.

I don't think so. The book, To Empower People by Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus is subtitled "The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy" and in its second edition "From State to Civil Society." Berger and Neuhaus define empowerment as the development of a civil society of institutions, "mediating structures" between the "megastructures" of government and industry. These mediating structures are not sponsored or patronized by the powerful. They are authentic self-governing institutions occupying their own space in the public square.

This is not to say that government has no role in the adjudication of power relationships. It is just to warn our liberal friends that we humans are capable of extraordinary conceits and delusions. It is to warn our friends that scientists say that humans developed reason in order to manage their social status, not to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

That's why I think that it is best to start with uncompromising ideas like Government is Force; Politics is Violence and go on from there. The whole point of social animals, I like to say, is the retreat of force. Animals within the group don't use force on each other.

The overwhelming fact of the modern industrial era, apart from the Great Enrichment by a factor of ten and more, is its reduction in violent death by a factor of ten. How did this happen? I suggest it is the market that is to blame. In the market you don't have to enforce your will to survive or surrender to a powerful patron to survive; you only have to surrender to the market and its prices: labor prices, product prices, service prices. For many people, liberals and progressives among them, this new surrender to the market is an abomination.

Maybe it is, but I suspect that the concept of surrender to the market is the most empowering thing that has come along since sliced bread.

Don't Forget: Liberal Pejoratives Keep Liberals in Line

After putting out my "hate" and "xenophobia" piece yesterday I suddenly had an idea.

All the liberal pejoratives -- racism, sexism, homophobia, "hate," xenophobia and the rest -- are not just there to shut non-liberals up and put us in fear of our jobs. They have another purpose.

They keep liberals onside.

Think about it. Politics is violence, civil war by other means. If you are running a political movement, you cannot start to take out the eevil white patriarchal racist hetero-oppressors until you have created a committed and disciplined political army. And that army must believe in the cause.

Now the first thing to note about armies is that you can't leave. When you sign up for a shooting army you enlist for a specific period, and until that period is over, you are the property of the army. Sometimes you are enlisted for the duration of the war. If you leave you are a deserter.

But usually armies prefer not to rely completely on the provost marshal to keep the lads in line. They use psychological techniques, from regimental tradition to the age-old male culture of looking out for your buddies, to indoctrinating the troops with the idea that everything is going well and victory is close at hand. The whole idea is to make it unthinkable for you to abandon your post.

Obviously, the same thing applies in politics. You want all women in the feminist movement to think like one on abortion and equal pay. You want all gays to be in line with "marriage equality" and "hate." You want all blacks to fear the return of Jim Crow. If you don't manage to create and enforce unity in your movement you are not going to win and enforce your agenda on the rest of the nation.

Now imagine what it would feel like if you were a liberal and someone said to you: "that sounds kinda xenophobic to me."

You can see why the dear old Tea Party wasn't such a stunning success. It wasn't just the kindly administrations of the lovely Lois Lerner. It was that the Tea Party wasn't a disciplined political movement like everything on the left. That's probably because conservatives are not that interested in power.

So, does that mean that we have to become like our enemies and develop disciplined top-down political structures to roll back the progs with every conservative heart beating as one?

Maybe. If you go back to the American Revolution there was a lot of ideological bullying going on, especially with the respect to the lives, the fortunes, and the sacred honor of the loyalists. The revolution was chronically short of funds, and the loyalists were the easiest place to go and find money, as in triple taxation.

But I like to hope that we can turn things around short of actual civil war. The whole point of the Trump phenomenon, in my view, is that it represents a rebellion against the politically correct ruling class.

The reason that Trump emerged as the winner is that he was the one candidate that did not Cringe. Non-liberal voters are utterly sick of leaders that don't push back against the liberals; that's why a majority of Republican voters don't trust their establishment leaders. And I think that every non-liberal in the land is aching for a leader that will Cut the Cringe.

But that only deals with one half of the problem. We the People want to push back against the domination and the hegemony of political correctness. Good for us.

But what about the decent liberals that have been cowed and indoctrinated into becoming foot soldiers in the liberal political army, and don't even know they are too frightened to have an original thought, because they are just as cowed by those liberal pejoratives as the rest of us?

Yeah. Something to think about.

What Do You Mean by "Hate" and "Xenophobia" Liberals?

Liberals react to the Trump candidacy with words like "hate" and "xenophobia."

"Hate," I suppose, is a code word for resisting liberal activism on LGBT. "Xenophobia" is a code word for resisting liberal policy on Muslim immigration.

Do you realize what you are communicating with words like that, liberals? You are saying that your opponents in the political arena are evil. And it does't take much of a leap from that to say that people like that shouldn't be allowed to spew their hate in the public square. In fact they probably shouldn't have a job.

And then liberals wonder why Donald Trump has emerged from nowhere to become the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

I'm not that worried that there are partisans running around using rhetoric like that, damning their opponents as monstrous and evil. That's what partisans do.

What worries me is that this good-vs-evil rhetoric filters down to good people that don't really wish hell and damnation on anyone. But they believe what their party and opinion leaders say, and so they come to think that the folks on the other side are beyond the pale.

It all comes of believing in politics as a force (!) for good, which is what liberals think, instead of as a necessary evil, which is what conservatives think.

Government is force; politics is violence. Once you decide that some issue requires a political response and a government program, you are saying that compromise and negotiation are no good. Only a war and the sweet use of government force will resolve it. OK, you only intend a verbal war, using "activism" to raise consciousness, and you only intend to push the market to do something that it should be doing without the nudge of government. But if at first you don't succeed then, no doubt, your activists will want to up the ante a bit. And if the results aren't forthcoming then, no doubt, your legislators and regulators will want to implement an extra nudge to push things along a little.

And it's a funny thing. You don't ever see partisans and activists saying that, hey, that program hasn't worked so well, so let's revise the program and ease off the spending and the subsidy. The classic case is reported in Charles Murray's Losing Ground. Liberals instrumented their 1960s Great Society programs will all kinds of reporting (jobs for social scientists) so they could show how great they were. When the results came in showing that the programs were mostly failures, liberals did nothing. And most of the programs are still here, 50 years later.

The trouble with the program of the left, I am convinced, is not that its ideas cost a bundle, and create and underclass of women that don't marry and men that don't work. The problem is that progressive politics needs a domestic enemy to fight. Which means that progressive politics is always pushing towards civil war. The great thing about conservative politics is that its enemy (and politics must always have an enemy) is typically foreign, not domestic. So conservatives rally Americans to fight Communism and Islamism, not other Americans.

The one time that conservatives really went after a domestic enemy was in the McCarthy era, when chaps like Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) were raising consciousness about Communists in the State Department and in Hollywood and in the schools. Some Communists lost their jobs, and Alger Hiss went to jail for lying. Liberals have never let us forget it.

So going after liberals is beyond the pale, even if there actually were Communists in the State Department and some of them were actually spying for the Soviets. But conservatives? Well, no need for conservatives in the nation's universities. Because hate.

Liberals call the fight against radical Islam "xenophobia" and "Islamophobia" and blame the NRA and conservative Christians for the Orlando massacre.

Because that is what they do.

The End of Conservatism as We've Known It

I'm lunching with a liberal friend today, and I'm thinking about what I'm going to say about Trump. What is there to say?

I think the first thing is that Donald Trump has broken the Republican Party that we have had since the end of the Reagan administration. Initially, the party was inclined to concede a few things to the Democrats -- a little tax increase here, a No Child Left Behind there -- but as time went on the party found itself doing a slow retreat, with nothing to show for its good will, before the culture war of political correctness that has done an astonishing job of marginalizing the Anglo-Saxon culture that underpinned the Bourgeois ethos and makes capitalism possible.

Now all that is gone, washed out with the tide. The good old libertarian conservatism that I have professed most of my adult life is broken. That's what the long withdrawing roar of the #NeverTrump folks is all about.

It is all broken because the chief political victim of the last 50 years, the white working class, has suddenly found a voice in Donald Trump. As is usual with politics the Trump promise to Make America Great Again (in the way that benefited the white working class from 1945 to 1973) is empty. We cannot "make it like it was." The world of the future will not be a world of good jobs at good wages with pensions and lifetime tenure. It just won't.

But the world being promised by the Democrats, of benefits and privileges to the favored victims, won't be the world of the future either. I'd say that the benefit state has gone about as far as it can go -- 35 percent of GDP decided by political power -- and any attempts to boost it with new privileges and entitlements and subsidies are likely to break it.

There's a cry in the land right now to end free trade. I don't know quite what people mean by that, but the simple fact is that free trade is just a fancy name for market prices, letting the decisions of consumers rule the economy rather than the political decisions of special interests. We could say that we want to increase good jobs at good wages, but we can't do it by legislating higher wages or forcing manufacturing onshore. Oh sure, we can muck around at the margins and give out a subsidy here and a tariff there. We can ease the pain of the buggy-whip makers. But the basic proposition of global capitalism, innovation and "trade tested betterment" and the sweeping away of the old methods that use more energy and labor, is irreversible.

It is shocking to a guy like me to see Donald Trump promising to renegotiate NAFTA and teach China a lesson. In my experience Republicans just don't do that. But the truth is that politicians tell voters what they want to hear and then go off and do what they need to do, and call it what they want. What will Donald Trump do if he is elected president? We don't know. What will Hillary Clinton do? We don't know.

What we do know is that governments are armed minorities occupying territory that tax the inhabitants thereof to reward their supporters. Republicans haven't done much rewarding of their supporters recently and their supporters are mad. But then Democrats have promised a ton of Hope and Change to their supporters and they haven't delivered much on that either.

There's a lefty piece out by Harold Meyerson today remarking on the hollowing out of the middle class and the prospects for the Democrats to do something about it while the Republicans become white nationalists. The only problem is that, when the progressives started, a century ago, the US governments at all levels were spending about 7 percent of GDP. Now they are spending about 35 percent of GDP. I'd say that the progressive opportunity to reward their supporters tends to tap out at 35 to 40 percent of GDP. So there is not much more redistribution that progressives can do to attract and reward supporters.

The problem for all governments, and progressives in particular, is that supporters insist on being rewarded. That is bad enough. But they get really mad if you ever take stuff away from them. That's how you go Greece or Argentina or Venezuela. It's easy for a government to give the voters money. It is near impossible to take it back when you have ruined the economy with your handouts.

Yet the art and practice of politics is to promise people things that they shouldn't be asking for and shouldn't be getting.

The Trump phenomenon means the end of conservatism as we know it. And probably the end of a lot of other things too that we don't yet know about.