ShrinkWrapped

The Open Mind V: the Language of Conceptual Clarity

As has been established, Jay gets the last word.  Comments will be closed here and should be left at Jay's blog:

The Open Mind V: the Language of Conceptual Clarity

Shrink sounds like an enlightened, empowering doctor, the kind I certainly want myself. Do not condescend. Explain everything I wish to know, which will be a lot. Enable me, and provide me with options. And please – please – know more than I do.

And the pilots shall fly the planes, and the aeronautical engineers build them. The programmers shall program. The biomechanics shall manipulate genes. And the surfers of the sea shall not aim protons at one another in the Large Hadron Collider like bottle caps in a game of skully along the Pacific Coast Highway. For knowledge is a awesome thing. Unless it is of something soft like political science. (Science? Really, please.) Or sociology. Or history. Or government. Or – good God, man, watch out for the quicksand! – English.

We are all philosopher-kings in the realm of our own perfect wisdom. The tenants do not complain, and no court can seek to impeach us. Our rule is like a pure, sturdy blanket o’er the land, and it is without blemish. The citizens even get rebates. All hail the imaginary land.

It is a truth of human nature that what we can do at all, we will often imagine doing better than others. Familiarity breeds proverbial contempt. After all (in those societies that do), we all speak English. We’re all observers of society and political calculation, and know a tyrant is just a bully with an army. We’ve all read our Federalist Papers, our Smith and Marx and Keynes. (Oh, all right, and Friedman. So Krugman, neah.) We even know our W. Edwards Deming. And we’ve got ourselves a heap of street smarts, as Jimmy styles and praises it.

We can run a country.

It may even be that, roiled enough by the incompetence around us, we seek the mantle of leadership. We have the requisite political or networking skill (already we rise above), we achieve positions of responsibility, elected or other, and with a P an h or a D or some other alphabet soup after our names or none at all, we are become what we despise: we are elite. We are – how do you say? – anointed.

This discussion of elites confuses one concept in three attitudes. Of the first, that toward elites, Nightelf says, “Jay seems to get bogged down in ‘what is an elite?’ The problem isn’t ‘elites’, it’s elitism.” Well, yes, actually, I focused on elites because that is the subject I chose (thanks for noticing) and I chose it because that is the word Shrink and so many conservatives keep using – not elitism. Were there an actual problem with elites per se, it would, indeed, involve elitism. As I wrote

Elitism is “leadership or rule” by an elite, “consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.” These are more or less problematic notions depending on how we unpack, and again, validate them. The core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence. The offensive culmination is in a sense of social or moral superiority.

However, Nightelf, and Jimmy, and Shrink, all go on immediately to complain against the “insufferable arrogance,” the constitutional deviance, and the “statist” beliefs of, not elites, but liberals, even if styled as “liberal elites.” Which is my point exactly. Their complaints are properly lodged against liberalism, not the reality that leadership and governance will always be exercised by some kind of elite – the bus driven, for the trusting and hopeful, by someone who at least knows how to drive, maybe even, pray, by one who can drive at least somewhat better than the others, and who will probably, since it is good and responsible to regulate matters of safety and entrusted lives, have a commercial driver’s license, a kind of professional certification, an established imprimatur of elite status as a driver of commercial vehicles.

This conceptual confusion of what are perceived as liberal ideas and behaviors with the nature of elites mixes, secondarily, with the fact that the latter generally in our meritocracy (though always with exceptions), reach their professional or public state as the consequence of formal education and accrediting and certifying systems. (Imagine, please, the justifiable outcries were matters of professional guidance and public trust not in some way regularly established, reviewed, and certified – how the buses then would drive off cliffs and into walls. But perhaps some conservative, after centuries now, has conceived some better idea than the university and the professional school. Perhaps righteous dissatisfaction and outrage.)

From this mix follows the anti-intellectualism. Shrink offers a definition of “intellectual” serviceable for my purpose here:

The intellectual class is composed of that class of people who make their living, often a very good one, by manipulating language.

One manifestation of a class so represented is that it is, by definition, ubiquitous and vocal: it ratiocinates, writes, speaks, educates, broadcasts, pronounces, declares, informs, congregates and issues statements and reports. You get the idea. It is all around us – what Jimmy calls the “three legged stool (Academia, MSM, Washington DC)” – and if one feels just a little misaligned with this class and its unavoidable voice, ubiquitous can come to seem oppressive. The desire for heads can rise in the blood.

Even many of those who think themselves not of this class recognize the centrality of the idea to human history and achievement – the idea, by nature, manipulated as some form of language. Inherent in this recognition, for some, is a kind of, not class, but status envy. Economic class resentment is anathema to conservative thinking, but the substitute of status resentment is not. Even Shrink, clearly of the intellectual class as he defines it, feels obliged, and apparently comfortable, to state of “Engineers, who actually build things” and “Entrepreneurs, who actually create new products and wealth that enrich all of us” – all of which is, of course, true – that “[t]he average Engineer or Entrepreneur contributes far more to society, and far more that is lasting, than the average intellectual.” We know that the contrary statement of comparative value – the terms reversed – would strike as immediately superior and offensive, but because the acceptability of status envy and resentment, particularly against intellectuals, Shrink’s statement bats no eyes. And so, too, amongst the comments to Shrink’s rebuttal in this debate we are treated to condescending, demeaning and clearly ill-spirited stereotypes of members of the “intellectual class,” some of whom referred to are contingent workers who struggle to cobble together an income of, if they are fortunate, $20-30,000 per year (without, generally, and by the way, health insurance), but who, because shitting on the life of the mind is always in vogue in some quarters, don’t qualify as “the people.”

What Shrink flirts with here is what Massimo Pigliucci labels “a third form of anti-intellectualism, unreflective instrumentalism. This is the idea that if something is not of immediate practical value it’s not worth pursuing.” Of the rejection of intellectualism Pigliucci writes

One can be anti-intellectual also by rejecting intellectualism because it is elitist. Anti-elitism is very peculiar to the American psyche, and it is virtually unknown in the rest of the universe. Most other people recognize that in matters of the intellect, as in any other human activity, there are people who do it better and others who are not quite as good. That does not—and should not—imply anything about the intrinsic worth (or lack thereof) of such people. Astonishingly, Americans don’t have any problem with elitism per se: just watch the adoring crowds at a basketball game and the recursive tendency to set up athletes as “role models” for our youth. The underlying assumption seems to be that everybody can become an Olympic athlete, but that the way to science and letters is only reserved to the lucky few. Ironically, the truth is quite the opposite: while the chances of making it in professional sports are almost nil, a country with a large system of public education and some of the best schools in the world can give the gift of intellectual pursuit to millions of people.

MaxedoutMama (who sends me verbal flowers when she agrees with me and calls me dolt when she doesn’t – but that’s okay, I like her all the time) states

the idea that anti-intellectualism is a necessary consequence of observing that our leadership is incompetent is just plain stupid.

Well, of course, I didn’t say that because it isn’t my thought. I have not said a word about the competence of our leadership, which MoM acknowledges, in her own grievances, encompasses liberal and conservative. I have been arguing that anti-intellectualism is a factor in a misconception of the notion of elites. We can argue about competence and how we strayed from the Constitution in, like 1793, and are now virtually a Soviet republic another time. That is not the topic I chose for our fifth go around. However, MoM does state

You discuss language. The people on SW’s blog are probably looking more at data and results.

She goes on to ask, “What data can you present to show that our leadership (not just political) is mostly competent?” As I say, I am not arguing here about the competence (or lack of) of our leadership, and, anyway to meaningfully respond to her question we would need to – you should pardon the expression – define what we mean, in this context, by competent and mostly. As to the opposition set up between language and data, with – I can’t help but feel – some implied derogation of language in the comparison, even statistical studies and reports, never mind political argument, are dependent upon clearly conceived terms of analysis, consideration, and discussion. Clarity of conception is the foundation for all, and we conceive in language.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to uselessly read a poem. I’ll get back to you with the data on that later.

The Importance of HomoCon

It is rare that the full impact of paradigmatic shifts are appreciated or well understood when they happen.  With obvious exceptions, most sea changes take place in small increments until suddenly an event occurs which precipitates the change.

[This is almost completely irrelevant, but is illustrative of paradigm shifts: I keep bottles of water in my car, which I park outside of the garage.  In the mornings when the temperature gets down to ~16-17 degrees I have discovered a fascinating phenomenon.  If I release the cap the water immediately begins to crystallize, from the top down (reacting to the change in air pressure.)  Depending on the temperature I can watch the crystals grow until the entire bottle is solid.  Alternatively I can shake the bottle and it instantly crystallizes into a mixture of ice and liquid water.  I liken this process to a supersaturated solution in which, once a seed is introduced, the entire solution crystallizes.  My water bottles at 16 degrees are a metaphor for the social change I am imagining.]

On Tues,  Bruce Carroll, aka GayPatriot, reported on his experience at last weekend's CPAC:

The HomoCon Tipping Point: Why CPAC Was a Milestone Weekend for Gays

Alexander McCobin addressed the GOProud/Liberty sponsor issue head-on and praised CPAC for being inclusive and standing up for the principles of freedom and liberty.  McCobin was met with praise and applause for his remarks.

A few minutes later, Ryan Sorba from the California Young Americans for Freedom got to the podium and started a bizarre tirade against CPAC, gays and lesbians, and the audience itself.  Following the incident, information quickly turned up that Sorba has been trying to peddle a manuscript called “The Born Gay Hoax” for a few years now.  In his post-outburst interviews and encounters, Sorba hasn’t revealed whether his CPAC rant was planned in advance or the result of McCobin’s previous praise of GOProud.

...

The conservative crowd quickly turned on him and forced him to walk off the stage.  The ironic part of the crowd support of GOProud is that none of its leaders were even in the room at the time, but in the exhibit hall.  This was a spontaneous rejection of Sorba’s anti-gay rant by the CPAC grassroots.  They drove him off-stage in a moment that quickly became the talk of the conference and the internet.

Left wing bloggers and reporters played out their pre-existing meme that Conservatives, as "everybody knows", are racist homophobes, based on Ryan Sorba's tirade; since none of them were at CPAC, they can be excused for not noticing the crowd's actual reaction to Sorba's rantings.  The release of youtube videos of the events in question should be clarifying to all who wish to know what happened.

I firmly believe that the response to Sorba at CPAC represents a paradigm shift, the significance of which only in part pertains to Gays and/or Conservatives.  I suspect that the ripples of the events at CPAC, dubbed HomoCon by Bruce Carroll, will be far more profound in the larger society.

Support for my premise comes from a noted liberal columnist, E. J. Dionne.  In his article Dionne suggests that the Democrats pay more attention to the young Millennials.  He notes that this is the only demographic that considers themselves liberals and are a natural constituency for a permanent Democratic majority.  It is his explanation for the younger generation's liberalism that is significant:

The Next New Dealers

Then the Millennial generation came along. The Millennials -- generally defined as Americans born in 1981 or after -- are, without question, the most liberal generation since those New Dealers, and they could transform our politics for decades. But this will happen only if progressive politicians start noticing their very best friends in the electorate.

Progressives who doubt this could usefully spend time with the Pew Research Center's exhaustive new portrait of the Millennials that was released Wednesday. The study underscored the new generation's "distinctiveness," and a big part of that distinctiveness is how progressive younger Americans are compared with the rest of the country.

For one thing, they are not allergic to the word "liberal." Americans under 30 include the largest proportion of self-described liberals and the smallest proportion of self-described conservatives of any age group in the country: 29 percent of the under 30s called themselves liberal compared with 28 percent who called themselves conservative.

"In every other age group," Pew notes, "far more described their views as conservative than liberal."

Among Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980), the conservative advantage over liberals was 38 percent to 20 percent. Among Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964), conservatives led 43 percent to 18 percent. Among those born in 1945 or before -- Pew uses the classic "Silent Generation" tag -- the conservative advantage was 45 percent to 15 percent. (Moderates and a few respondents who refused a label made up the remainder in all groups.)

The difference in self-labeling reflects real differences in attitudes. It's well-known that younger voters are more liberal on social issues, particularly gay rights. [Emphasis mine- SW]  But their liberalism also includes sympathy for activist government.

It is a commonplace that the young are more liberal and want government to help make the world a better place.  People become more conservative as they age because they learn that simple solutions don't usually work for difficult and persistent problems, and that government is a blunt instrument, a blunderbuss, while rapiers and smart missiles are more efficient and more cost effective.  Beyond that, our Millennials have also come of age in a world in which personal liberties are taken for granted; they do not yet appreciate how government activism inexorably translates into decreased personal freedom.  Their assumption of personal freedom is part of why they tend to be so supportive of Gay Rights.  Because Gays have not had to remain in the closet for the last 40 years, Millennials all have personal relationships with openly Gay men and women and once you are friends with, or have relatives who are Gay, it is hard to demonize them as anything other than human beings, with the same rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that everyone else assumes.

The erosion of homophobia and discriminatory reactions to Gays has been a slow process, accelerated by the changing from one generation to the next.

[At one time I had concerns about Gays in the military and supported DADT; why can't they (Gay activists) just leave well enough alone, I wondered?  Since that time I have had my Oldest Son spend four years in the USAF and my Middle Son is now in the USN.  Both have assured me there are a fair number of Gay people in the service and no one seems to care.  In fact, they think DADT has been used primarily by people who had second thoughts and wanted to get out of the military relatively painlessly.  In a similar vein, I have worried about the societal effects of redefining marriage.  I have become convinced that our young people do not care and as such, eventually Gay marriage will be here. Beyond that, I know married Gay couples and they do not seem to be threatening the moral fabric of our country. 

(For those who will now bring up the kinds of sex ed being forced upon grade schoolers, that is an issue about the appropriateness of prematurely exposing children to adult sexuality.  The problem is not specific to Gay Sexuality but to adult sexuality.  For a nuanced discussion of some of these issues from a Gay Marriage opponent, see In defense of gay conservatives at Hotair.)

Minds change over time in tiny, immeasurable increments, until one day the full change precipitates in the mind.  This is why the courts should not be the agency of such social changes.  When the process is short circuited, people/society resist change.  Make a moral argument, convince people by the life you lead, and the change will come without the powerful reactive attacks from your distressed neighbors.]

Now consider OneSTDV's comment about the appearance of Steve Sailor's blog: [All emphases his]

VDare Looks like Crap

Social posturing weighs heavily in the decision-making of many individuals. HalfSigma regularly blogs on these indicators of social class, such as the "right" brands of apparel and the appropriate musical choices for one's wedding. Are these entrenched aspects of class somewhat arbitrary? Of course, as one notes the metamorphosis of Tommy Hilfiger from a yachting brand to a prominent component of 90's rapper fashion. In marketing anything, whether that be a tangible item or a foundational ideology, one must couch the "product" in the language of the intended market class. Now these characteristics are sometimes hard to pinpoint, though certain patterns generally appear, as evidenced by Christian Lander's perspicacious profiling of the effete, urbane white middle class.

Conservatism has an image problem, partly due to its most prominent constituency and partly due to the smearing tactics employed by the Alinsky left. While populist movements can gain traction, they always require the partnership of elites. Elites run the country and if they shirk a particular movement, nothing of grave significance will arise. This elite class, even those coming from humble beginnings, will generally adopt the norms of high social classes. They may profess a waffling belief in young-earth creationism or maintain their rural dialect, but they can't fully divest themselves from the pressures of appearing dignified and enlightened.

So what does have to do with VDare? If VDare intends to broaden the scope of its message, if it intends to bring forth discussion of the immigration issue on a wider scale, they have to fix their website. It looks like utter crap, seemingly designed by a dilettantish rube with nary a meaningful thought. Is this fair? Of course not, but the left will seize any opportunity to depict non-PC opinions as fitting only for those of a low social class: the bitter, the angry, the losers of society who have only their jingoism and not a rational, coherent philosophy underpinning their political ideals.

Conservatism does indeed have an image problem.  Conservatism has been successfully depicted in the zeitgeist as filled with homophobes, racists, and religious bigots.  As long as Conservatives are dismissed as bigots, Conservative ideas have no opportunity to enter the closed minds of liberal young people.  An event like the CPAC reaction to Ryan Sorba is enough to unsettle the permanence of the image in the minds of those who are not yet fully committed to the left.  Once a mind is unsettled, it takes a great deal less energy to engage them in thinking about the reality that lies beneath their political weltanschauung.  And once young liberals begin to think outside of the liberal box, all things are possible.

Liberalism has become a thoroughly reactionary force in America, pressing for larger government and decreased personal freedoms.  Once we can entice the young into thinking about Conservatism and Libertarianism, much more easily done when they no longer instantly demonize Conservatives as bigots, we will win the argument much more often than we will lose.

Healthcare "Reform" and the Precautionary Principle

With the Healthcare "Summit" underway, it is worth considering one of the less well discussed effects of increased government involvement in healthcare, an increased involvement that is inevitable as the government takes over more and more control of the healthcare system.  One area that has been insufficiently discussed has to do with a fundamental difference between government bureaucracies, medical researchers and business entities when it comes to healthcare.  The fundamental guiding principle of our current healthcare bureaucracy is the "precautionary principle."  The precautionary principle animates much of the government in its metastasizing role as our guarantor of last resort.  Bureaucracies by their nature are risk averse.  After all, no bureaucrat has ever lost his job or faced public humiliation because he impeded the development of a risky treatment.  On the other hand, when patients are harmed by new products, the unfortunate technocrat who approved it faces Congressional scrutiny and public opprobrium.

Yesterday, John Stossel discussed how our regulatory process deprives desperate patients of the admittedly slim chance for cure or remission, by denying experimental treatments, based on the precautionary principle:

Whose Body Is It?

People suffer and die because the government "protects" us. It should protect us less and respect our liberty more.

The most basic questions are: Who owns you, and who should control what you put into your body? In what sense are you free if you can't decide what medicines you will take?

This will be the subject of my Fox Business program (tonight.)

We'll hear from people like Bruce Tower. Tower has prostate cancer. He wanted to take a drug that showed promise against his cancer, but the Food and Drug Administration would not allow it. One bureaucrat told him the government was protecting him from dangerous side effects. Tower's outraged response was: "Side effects -- who cares? Every treatment I've had I've suffered from side effects. If I'm terminal, it should be my option to endure any side effects."

Of course it should be his option. Why, in our "free" country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?

Read the whole thing.

This week, the New York Times has presented a series of articles on the difficulty Doctors and patients have had gaining FDA approval to take experimental medicines which might (and for those lucky few who received it, did) prolong life and improve the quality of life for victims of Malignant Melanoma, a deadly skin Cancer that if not caught early has a one year mortality rate close to 100%.  These patients were not allowed to make their own, reasonably informed decisions, about the risk of taking an experimental drug versus the certainty of death because the FDA was "protecting them."

But it is not only the FDA which impedes medical progress.  Our outmoded medical malpractice system is used by tort lawyers to extract immense amounts of money from the healthcare system.  With the precautionary principle as their guide, they are able to destroy companies and take drugs off the market, even when those drugs are helpful to large numbers of people while increasing the risk of untoward events for a small fraction.  I commented on this in regards to Vioxx when that drug was under siege:

Killing the Golden Goose

The liability crisis is self-explanatory; people who have been harmed by a product essentially find a lawyer who will help them play the lottery, which is our court system, in order to make a fortune out of their injury.  [The outcome] Depend[s] on the venue [and] the choice of jurors (who rarely have any expertise in understanding the complicated physiology involved in medication reactions, and the trade-offs involved in taking medicines, all of which have side effects that can be life threatening for some unlucky people.)

The entitlement philosophy and Nanny state are less obvious offenders.  In both cases, people are implicitly given the message that they are never to be held responsible for the misfortunes which befall them.  Additionally, the philosophical foundation of the Nanny state, which are Utopian, holds out the idea that all needs and desires should be fulfilled by someone else (the Nanny state, deep pocketed corporations, the "rich").  When people are injured or even disappointed, someone must be held responsible.

I suppose it is possible that Merck knew that Vioxx caused heart attacks and kept it on the market for venal reasons, but that is nonsensical.  In our litigious climate, what company is going to risk being destroyed for some short term gain, when they know the trial lawyers are just waiting to get a crack at them.

Much more likely is that in post marketing surveys, an uptick in heart attacks was noticed at some point; in the situation of a new drug, when it comes onto the market and large numbers of people take them, treatment emergent side effects are the rule, not the exception.  It is never clear at first, with small sample sizes, whether an effect is real or an artifact, so the usual practice is to wait until the data become clearer.  In the case of Vioxx, it did become clear that after 18 months of high dose use, the risk of a heart attack doubled (from 1% to 2% in the older population who are most likely to need Vioxx.)  In response Merck panicked (they have lawyers, too) and pulled it off the market.  Their action, rather than helping them, did not protect them from an avalanche of lawsuits.  They are currently 1 for 2 in lawsuit verdicts. 

For some people, Vioxx was the only drug that alleviated their back pain sufficiently to improve their quality of life.  As a result, there are people who are now no longer able to work, taking more dangerous drugs and undergoing more dangerous procedures because Vioxx is no longer available to them.

I am selfishly very concerned with healthcare innovation.  The next 30 years (a period of time of acute interest to me) should see incredible advances in medical treatments.  Reason, at Fight Aging, has discussed this many times:

Envisaging a World Without the FDA

An article that looks at one small part of the destruction caused by the FDA caught my attention, and particularly these snippets:

Since 2005 the FDA has approved 18 new cancer drugs, many of them breakthrough products. But the pipeline contains hundreds more that will never get to market because corporate developers aren't able, or willing, to come up with the money, time, and patients necessary to establish acceptable data.

...

The clinical trial process now is a three-part, years-long effort that effectively kills off all but a handful of once-promising drugs.

...

It would have been the first new drug for prostate cancer in 20 years

Twenty years! Just stop a moment and think about how far and fast biotechnology and medical science has moved in the past twenty years. Think about what the far less regulated computing industry has achieved in the same timeframe. We live in the early years of the biotechnology revolution, with something amazing and new demonstrated in laboratories every week. Yet the dominant regulatory body for one of the most advanced regions of the world has managed to stop the clock at 1988 for a major disease, the subject of research in a hundred laboratories worldwide.

This sitation exists in every field of medicine, and all participants labor under the crushing burdens imposed by regulators incentivized to stop progress from happening.

Regulation, based on the idea that people are too ignorant, simple minded, (ie stupid), or emotional to make informed life and death decisions for themselves are a major hindrance to medical innovation.  It is true that the researchers and physicians at the FDA (and I am singling out the FDA because it is the government agency most involved) have more knowledge than the average layman about the particulars of any drug.  They could use that knowledge to help determine a range of known risks and allow Patients and their Doctors to determine what level of risk (the known plus the unknown risks) are acceptable to any particular patient.  But this is not part of what is being discussed in the Healthcare Summit; such empowerment of individuals is not currently being considered by those who imagine they can make such decisions for us better than we can for ourselves.

The current Democratic plans all include increased government control over healthcare.  The idea of panels to determine treatment efficacy is superficially appealing but the reality is that such guidelines, once established, would serve to entrench status quo treatments (after all, short of billion dollar trials, how could any new procedure be shown to be superior to the traditional, usually cheaper, way of doing things.)  The opportunity costs of the Precautionary Principle in healthcare are extraordinary yet are never made part of the debate, to the impoverishment of us all.

The entitlement philosophy and Nanny state are less obvious offenders.  In both cases, people are implicitly given the message that they are never to be held responsible for the misfortunes which befall them.  Additionally, the philosophical foundation of the Nanny state, which are Utopian, holds out the idea that all needs and desires should be fulfilled by someone else (the Nanny state, deep pocketed corporations, the "rich").  When people are injured or even disappointed, someone must be held responsible.

I suppose it is possible that Merck knew that Vioxx caused heart attacks and kept it on the market for venal reasons, but that is nonsensical.  In our litigious climate, what company is going to risk being destroyed for some short term gain, when they know the trial lawyers are just waiting to get a crack at them.

Much more likely is that in post marketing surveys, an uptick in heart attacks was noticed at some point; in the situation of a new drug, when it comes onto the market and large numbers of people take them, treatment emergent side effects are the rule, not the exception.  It is never clear at first, with small sample sizes, whether an effect is real or an artifact, so the usual practice is to wait until the data become clearer.  In the case of Vioxx, it did become clear that after 18 months of high dose use, the risk of a heart attack doubled (from 1% to 2% in the older population who are most likely to need Vioxx.)  In response Merck panicked (they have lawyers, too) and pulled it off the market.  Their action, rather than helping them, did not protect them from an avalanche of lawsuits.  They are currently 1 for 2 in lawsuit verdicts. 

The Open Mind V: Riposte

Power to the People!

Let me see if I can touch on the key elements of Jay's post.  First he points out that it is not the elites that I object to but their ideas, ie, not the idea of elitism, per se:

What Shrink and other conservatives object to is not the elite nature of these elites – were it not them, it would be others – but a set of modern and liberal beliefs that over recent decades they consider to have taken hold as the prevailing cultural zeitgeist. Fair enough. But characterizing the prevailing beliefs to which they object as “elitist” does not merely mischaracterize the nature of their adversary, it stokes a malformed amalgamation of class, cultural, and social conflict that can have dangerous consequences. 

That's certainly fair enough, though incomplete.  I do object to the "statist" ideas of the liberal elites.  I also do wonder how "characterizing the prevailing beliefs to which (I) object as “elitist” ... mischaracterize{s) the nature of (my) adversary" but I'll read on.  Jay warns about the anti-intellectualism that can be a component of populism and points out that liberals do not have a monopoly on condescension:

What conservatives fail to observe in themselves – and I have had opportunity to experience this in large doses in recent months – is their own condescension toward their political adversaries, upon whom they heap an array of demeaning and otherizing labels and perceptions, including the deluded belief that they’ve got liberals’ number, while liberals don’t have a clue about them. Accordingly, they tell themselves that liberal objections to Sarah Palin arise profoundly on the level of cultural snobbery, and there is, indeed, an element of that.

As a member in good standing of the intellectual class* and a Jew, I am sensitive to the ease with which populism in the hands of unscrupulous politicians/leaders can become suffused with envy and arouse hatred toward designated scapegoats.  Jay is correct to warn of such proclivities, though to my perceptions attempts to scapegoat have been more prevalent thus far on the left than the right in recent years.

[*My definition: The intellectual class is composed of that class of people who make their living, often a very good one, by manipulating language.  This is in opposition to the masses, which include such "lesser beings", like, oh, I don't know, Engineers, who actually build things or Entrepreneurs, who actually create new products and wealth that enrich all of us.  For those who are immune to sarcasm, please note that I value the productions of Engineers, Entrepreneurs, et al, much more highly than most of what passes for intellectual ideas these days.  The average Engineer or Entrepreneur contributes far more to society, and far more that is lasting, than the average intellectual.  (My singling out of Engineers and Entrepreneurs has almost nothing to do with the fact that my beautiful and very smart daughter-in-law is an Engineer and my less beautiful but equally smart son-in-law is an Entrepreneur; occasionally these kinds of coincidences just show up; go figure.)]

I haven't written much about Sarah Palin.  My initial reaction when she was nominated by John McCain was positive.  Here was a seemingly genuine person who had, through grit and determination, made her way to a Statehouse and apparently done a pretty good job.  During the campaign, she showed herself to be not-ready-for-prime-time, which was a concern for someone "a heartbeat away" but she didn't seem any less prepared than Obama (who I was told repeatedly was brilliant, his comment that he visited 57 states notwithstanding), with his lack of actual accomplishments in the real world, and Sarah Palin was clearly less of a buffoon than Joe Biden. (One need only consider Biden's comments about FDR going on TV after the 1929 stock market crash to reassure the country or his host of inane comments before or since.) 

In any event Jay goes on to assure us that the liberal elite's objection to Sarah Palin was not because she was a political threat or represented something that was anathema to prevailing liberal elite ideology but because of "her deep and disturbing ignorance."  Now, I am not all that interested in Sarah Palin at the moment.  I think she was treated terribly by the Media, a treatment that stood out for its contrast with the kid gloves with which they approached Barack Obama (and had the MSM done their jobs a bit more assiduously, Barack Obama might have actually been tested more on the campaign trail, which would have stood him in good stead for his current travails.)  Sarah Palin is apparently a decent speaker, seems to have decent political instincts and may, if she does her homework, be a viable candidate in the future.  I don't think she is a viable candidate yet because, whether warranted or not, the image of her as an ignoramus has stuck; only she can change that and it will take time.  (I can't help noticing how similar her experience has been to Dan Qualye's experience; he never escaped his image.  We shall see if Sarah Palin can.)

The one place I might take issue with Jay's post is his representation of "elites"; in three places Jay delineates what he means by elite:

An “elite,” by definition, is the “choice part,” of something, the “best of a class.”

Elitism is “leadership or rule” by an elite, “consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.” These are more or less problematic notions depending on how we unpack, and again, validate them. The core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence. The offensive culmination is in a sense of social or moral superiority.

It is the pride of American history, culture, and society that more than any nation ever, we live in a meritocracy.

I actually agree in part with all three statements but I do not think the "core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence."  The core problem is that what defines our elites is only quite peripheral to what is actually importnat in our scoiety.  This is an important point that I alluded to in my humorous (well, at least the intent was to be humorous) aside about the intellectual class.  The "elites" and this includes Republican elites and Democratic elites, are defined by their belief that they know what is best for all of us (just look at the ongoing insistence by the Obama administration to jam a top down, healthcare "reform" down the throats of a resisting populace) at the very same time that they have become far removed from the lives of the people they deign to represent.  Historian Walter Russell Mead suggests the Tea Party movement is the heir of a long and honored American tradition of anti-elitism. [All emphases mine-SW]

Do Soldiers Drink Tea?

The Tea Party movement is the latest upsurge of an American populism that has sometimes sided with the left and sometimes with the right, but which over and over again has upended American elites, restructured our society and forced through the deep political, cultural and institutional changes that from time to time the country needs and which the ruling elites cannot or will not deliver.

... you don’t have to buy every line item (or even any line item) in the emerging Tea Party program to see the movement’s potential.  Its ruling passion is a belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help’ of experts and professionals.  No idea has deeper roots in American history and culture and by global standards Americans have historically distrusted doctors, lawyers, bankers, preachers and professors: everybody who presumes that their special insider knowledge gives them a special right to decide what’s best for the rest of us and historically no political force has been stronger than the determination of ordinary Americans to flatten the social and political hierarchy.

The United States has rarely been in greater need of rapid transformation than we are now.  The information revolution, the rapid development of the global economy, the shift of cultural and economic power from Europe toward Asia, the enormous wave of immigration that since the 1960’s has been remaking the body politic once again, the breakdown of the progressive or blue social model as industries and financial markets rise and fall with a velocity not seen in the last 100 years: these changes are taking place all around us, but our institutions and policies are very far from keeping up.

Elites are becoming much less necessary as people become more and more empowered.  For just one example, at one time patients came to a Doctor unsure what was wrong with them and ignorant of their treatment options.  They hoped to be referred to someone competent who could offer them an appropriate treatment so that they could regain their prior functioning and good health.  Today we expect patients to come into the office armed with knowledge of their condition (or what they believe they are suffering from) and with great knowledge of their treatment options.  When patients suffer from rarer disorders, they often know more than their Doctors about their ailments.  The wise Physician sees his job as assisting his patient in finding the proper treatment and managing that treatment rather than as dictating from "on high" how the patient must behave. 

Our patients are not passive recipients of treatment but active participants who must be made allies against their disorder.  No one can ever know more about your life than you can and with the increasing complexity of the modern world, this aphorism can be extended.  We are flooded with information.  Markets, even when they work poorly, remain our best tool for summing information.  Nothing so much defines our present day elites (on the left and the right) as the belief that they understand current conditions well enough to legislate solutions to social problems.  This was a fantasy even in the good old days of Progressive rule; it is nonsensical now.  Accelerating change means that top down approaches cannot possibly incorporate enough information to predict chaotic systems.  Not only can initial conditions never be adequately established, but by the time our cumbersome bureaucracy has measured conditions they are already far different than predicted (which is why so many government statistics include gigantic fudge factors, ie corrections and assumptions.) 

If the Tea Party movement succeeds it will because it has been able to articulate a program designed to minimize government intrusions into markets and facilitate the return of power to the people.  Now that I think about it, "Power to the People" could be a terrific, catchy slogan for the Tea Party movement!  I wonder what Jay would think of it?

The Open Mind V: the Language of Black and White

Jay Adler has returned from his extended vacation and returns to the Open Mind fray with a new post, complete with pictures!  All comments should be left at his site, and all previous posts in this series can be found at The OPen Mind archives. 

The Open Mind V: the Language of Black and White

Ah, siddown. Holster your resentments. I’m not talking about that black and white. I’m referring to the fallacy. (Murmer, murmer, grumble, murmer.)

Sometimes labeled, parthenogenetically, the fallacy of bifurcation, more commonly known as the either/or fallacy, this form of thinking also sports the “black and white fallacy” moniker. You get the idea. There are only two alternatives, in all the world. Choose one. And these would be, proffers whoever is doing the proposing of alternatives – regardless of the subject and just sose you know – mine or the wrong one.

Generally, I prefer the either/or label. (From my selfish copulater’s perspective – not such a fan of parthenogenesis.) Commonly, people stumble into either/or thinking rather obviously, when they present us with an explicit two-horned choice. You remember back in the Sixties – America: love it (uncritically, was the implication) or leave it. Or, not to wax nostalgic, more recently, when it seemed the conservatively voiced dilemma over what to do about Afghanistan entailed making a quick decision (or be a witless ditherer) to go all in, for all time, or be a punk. (Of course, Democrats are punks these days, but for different reasons.)

All bifurcations are not so obviously either/or, however. Sometimes it is not a specific argument we are getting, offering us an explicit pair of Chinese menu options; sometime the fallacy is embedded in the language with which we more generally converse about a subject, language that engenders the black and white thinking of stark and undiscerning alternatives. For example, when last I was heard from among the pixels at ShrinkWrapped, I was offering a comment there regarding the use of the word “elites,” a term of far-reaching opprobrium as Shrink and some other conservatives use it. It is a simultaneously loaded and vague term that leads us directly into the night and day of black and white thinking.

An “elite,” by definition, is the “choice part,” of something, the “best of a class.” All perception focuses on the meaning of “best” and the nature of its validation. The best scientists are those who do more of the most innovative work. The best runners are the fastest or those with the greatest endurance (along with some strategic wiles). These are the elites of their class, and they are elites born of meritocracy. All things being even (which, of course, they are not always, and to the extent that they are regularly not, we have a sociological and then political problem) if you have the skill, you join the elite.

Elitism is “leadership or rule” by an elite, “consciousness of being or belonging to an elite.” These are more or less problematic notions depending on how we unpack, and again, validate them. The core problem is that of “snobbery,” entailing unearned access to elite status and expected privilege as a consequence. The offensive culmination is in a sense of social or moral superiority.

We go astray when we confuse elite class snobbery with earned elite class status. Roger Federer does a pretty good job of being inoffensive about his tennis superiority, but if you listen to him talk enough, it is clear, of course, that he knows not just that he is superior to everyone else, but quite how superior he is. When this knowledge pokes through his inherent decency, it can catch for a moment the sensibility of the mere mortal who knows not what it is to walk on such a height, but as any good tough conservative Darwinian might say, “That’s life. He is better. Deal with it.”

It is the pride of American history, culture, and society that more than any nation ever, we live in a meritocracy. To the degree that that meritocracy is not absolute, that all things are not always even, we have much significant political debate, and a lot of political preening, about which party and what philosophy really represents the interests of those segments of society that are unfairly deprived of the respect and rewards, whatever they be, of natural individual merit. An elite that would deserve the scorn, as an elite, with which Shrink, and many of his readers, use the word, would be an elite structurally embedded in society, as, for instance, England long had, with the remnant consciousness of which it stills struggles. The closest the U.S. had to such an elite was a WASP moneyed class and what still tries to pass for “society” in New York and some quarters of New England. The great immigration of 1880-1920 and the meritocratic rise of its offspring has much demolished the estate of that elite, and the immigration of recent decades will finish the job. Look at our government, our financial and research centers, our universities, and the occupants are in very large measure the children and grandchildren of a risen working and middle class. How well individuals or intellectual coteries do their jobs is one matter of consideration, but by and large, in one manner of competition or accomplishment or other, they earned their way there.

What Shrink and other conservatives object to is not the elite nature of these elites – were it not them, it would be others – but a set of modern and liberal beliefs that over recent decades they consider to have taken hold as the prevailing cultural zeitgeist. Fair enough. But characterizing the prevailing beliefs to which they object as “elitist” does not merely mischaracterize the nature of their adversary, it stokes a malformed amalgamation of class, cultural, and social conflict that can have dangerous consequences.

The contrary concept to elites, providing us our black and white, is masses. Some conservatives use that term too. Oddly, in the ongoing radicalization of American conservatism, the almost substanceless shell of the Marxist lexicon comes into vogue. At the objectionable heights of power, we have an elite; rising up in opposition, in new consciousness, we have the masses, always mystically imbued, by left or right, with a direct line to salt-of-the-earth wisdom and moral centeredness. Here is Leon Wieseltier:

“I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person,” [Sarah Palin] recently told Chris Wallace, which is just as well. And she added: “I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist, because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America feel like we just don’t get it.”

At the Tea Party convention in Nashville, Palin made a similar claim for the moral superiority of ordinariness, twangily championing “real people, not politicos, not inside-the-Beltway professionals,” and “everyday Americans,” and finally “the people.” Palin is packaging herself as the perfect image of the American mean.

The invocation of “the people” sounds inclusive, but it is a technique of exclusion….It is based upon a particular definition of “the people.” How do Palin and the partiers know who the real Americans are? The mystical certainty of her divisive intuition reminds me of what intellectual historians used to call the “epistemological privilege” of Marx’s proletariat, his reprehensible old idea that access to truth is a feature of class position. Palin, too, is idealizing the proletariat for the uniqueness of its understanding, though her economics is starkly indifferent to its tribulations. And if you throw in Palin’s views on the “social issues,” on the questions by which we measure the decency of our society, then it is clear that this is an anti-elitism that is not egalitarianism, a common touch without genuine commonality, which is quite an accomplishment.

The danger in these muddled concepts is in the anti-intellectualism that always immediately grows out of them, and this too has been a feature of many Marxisms, from Mao to Pol Pot, with those of intellectual achievement – elite in that area and sense only – pilloried, stripped of their work, even murdered. Did wonders for those societies too. Conservatives often rail against that liberal condescension, toward the “common folk,” and it does exist.

What conservatives fail to observe in themselves – and I have had opportunity to experience this in large doses in recent months – is their own condescension toward their political adversaries, upon whom they heap an array of demeaning and otherizing labels and perceptions, including the deluded belief that they’ve got liberals’ number, while liberals don’t have a clue about them. Accordingly, they tell themselves that liberal objections to Sarah Palin arise profoundly on the level of cultural snobbery, and there is, indeed, an element of that.

George will observes that Palin “has been subjected to such irrational vituperation — loathing largely born of snobbery.” He then immediately returns the favor by noting that “America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism.” Down with down snobbery, up with the up, and this coming with delicious irony from the bowtied Ph.D. in political science who is as established in the elite as a Doric column.

Speaking as an insider, however, (shh!), I am here to reveal that the overwhelmingly primary reason liberals so object to Palin – despite some clear skills in a number of areas – is her deep and disturbing ignorance. Conservatives are now so in the grip of anti-elite fever, with its attendant derision of intellectual accomplishment, that they will not credit the value of that accomplishment and thus will not credit the genuine reason Palin is objectionable to the left. Energized by the passion of the Tea Partiers, they lose historical perspective – it is only seventeen years since the last round of populist revolutionary fervor – and fail to place themselves in a continuum. Here is Will again, who, if he hasn’t been purged and tried yet as an independent thinker, certainly has lost his party office:

But the reaction against [Obama] must somewhat please him. That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.

After William Jennings Bryan’s defeat in 1908, his third as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, this prototypical populist said he felt like the man who, thrown out of a bar for a third time, dusted himself off and said, “I’m beginning to think those fellows don’t want me in there.” In 1992, Ross Perot, an only-in-America phenomenon — a billionaire populist — won 19 percent of the popular vote….

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election. But today’s saturation journalism, mesmerized by presidential politics and ravenous for material, requires a steady stream of political novelties. In that role, Palin is united with the media in a relationship of mutual loathing. This is not her fault. But neither is it her validation.

Will is here converging with Wieseltier, but he is just another elitist, too.

There is also the rather immense hypocrisy of Palin and many other populists. Anyone who has run for the vice presidency, and has published a monster bestseller, and appears regularly on television, and will run for the presidency is a member in good standing of the American elite. Even lesser attainments of prominence and success confer the same loathed status. The anti-elitists in the Republican caucus in the House and the Senate, and in the conservative commentariat, and in the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute–they are anti-elitists in the elite….

The wisdom of a policy is not determined by its social origins. There is a distinction between populism and “the people,” though most populists do not want you to know it. The populism that bases its criticisms on a preference for one segment of the populace is merely another special interest, its denunciations of special interests notwithstanding. This does not mean that its criticisms are wrong; but when they are right, it is because their reasons are moral, not sociological.

But justice is not well-pursued by resentment. The anti-politician politicians who seek the favor of angry Americans are deceiving them, because anger is nothing more lasting than a political consultant’s contract. Emotions are stoked by elections and are spent by them. What remains after the great manipulation is the increasingly Sisyphean task of public reason, which is its own kind of insurgency.

What he said.

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part I

Over the weekend I finally saw Avatar (on IMAX 3D) and it struck me, on the most superficial level, that we are one step closer to fully immersive virtual reality.  The movie was, as so many have commented, visually stunning in its depiction of a new planet with a complex biology (although the biology, for all its complexity, seemed rather animal-species poor and the waters appeared to be uninhabited.)  On the other hand, the story was simple and simple minded.  James Cameron is a brilliant film maker but the movie suggests he knows next to nothing about the complexities of business or military affairs, religion, biology, or a host of other disciplines, which is why his humans and aliens are so one dimensional. 

Coincidentally, Clare Spark posted on The Glenn Beck Problem on Saturday:

This blog is about the danger of allowing media personalities to do our thinking for us. As my long-time friend political scientist Stephen Eric Bronner wrote in one of his first books (this on German Expressionism), making a passionate work of art or viewing it, though valuable in itself, cannot substitute for the thoughtful study, investigating, organizing and other activity that resists illegitimate authority. [Emphasis mine-SW] Professor Bronner wrote enthusiastically about Rosa Luxemburg too, as well as other radical social democrats who were associated with the Second International. These activists were called left-wing social democrats, because they meant to educate the masses in the most advanced industrialized societies and through majority acquiescence (as opposed to bureaucratic centralism) make the transition from capitalism to socialism. Luxemburg herself was an anti-Bolshevik and argued with Lenin about issues that are still red-hot today, such as supporting anti-colonial social movements that were antidemocratic and backward. (I am updating the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin, originally about the nature of imperialism, and about self-determination in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, not about Third World dictatorships of today. (Thanks to Steve Bronner for the correction. But as Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson taught the debate in a session I audited, the issue concerned  left-wing alliances with antidemocratic entities, so I extrapolated to the present, when the hard Left does ally itself with dubious entities.) 

[I have been reading Clare Spark's blog for quite some time and can't figure out her politics, beyond a baseline Libertarianism, which is either an indictment of my powers of discernment, an indictment of her writing, or a tribute to her thinking, which is my preference.]

Now, consider these comments about Ted Kaczynski from a June, 2000 profile in The Atlantic: [HT: CBDenver, in a comment to my post Friday on Terror and Terrorism.]

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber

It was at Harvard that Kaczynski first encountered the ideas about the evils of society that would provide a justification for and a focus to an anger he had felt since junior high school. It was at Harvard that he began to develop these ideas into his anti-technology ideology of revolution. It was at Harvard that Kaczynski began to have fantasies of revenge, began to dream of escaping into wilderness. And it was at Harvard, as far as can be determined, that he fixed on dualistic ideas of good and evil, and on a mathematical cognitive style that led him to think he could find absolute truth through the application of his own reason. [Emphasis mine-SW]  Was the Unabomber -- "the most intellectual serial killer the nation has ever produced," as one criminologist has called him -- born at Harvard?

By this time you might reasonably be wondering what common thread I could have possibly found between Avatar/James Cameron, Glenn Beck, and Ted Kaczynski/Harvard?

Splitting is the quintessential mental function which becomes the quintessential primitive defense mechanism.  It is based on the earliest operation of the differentiating mind as the infant begins to recognize the difference between himself and an external world filled with other minds.  As the child matures, his sense of those who fit into the primary categories of "self/like-self" and "other/like-other" becomes more sophisticated and nuanced.  A fully mature adult appreciates that there are many people who live in his tribe(s).  "Like-self" begins with the family and then over time enlarges to include his friends, his classmates, his communities (social, religious, business, professional, political, sports, etc), his state, his country.  All through development, the core organization of self/not-self persists, overlain by more mature mental organizations, but always existing in potential for expression during periods of stress induced regression. 

The tendency to resort to splitting into "all good" and "all bad" objects and their derivatives is ubiquitous.  In an immature person, who lacks the leavening afforded by an appreciation of the complexity of people and the world, or who needs to simplify his experience in order to mitigate anxiety, the basic defensive splitting can overwhelm intellectual knowledge and lead to extreme views.

Anyone who is engaged politically must struggle with their own tendency toward splitting.  Confirmation bias is an aspect of splitting that is recognized and manageable when done in moderation but can become the source of significant problems when unrecognized or unmodified.  (We see the edifice of AGW crumbling primarily because the proponents became so convinced of their correctness in the absence of adequate significant data that they systematically elided inconvenient data and eventually began to invent data in the service of their "greater truth.")  Political partisans will almost always have an initially positive reaction to proposals from their "side" and negative reactions to proposals from their opponents.  It takes mental and psychological effort to consider the actual proposals themselves; it is easier and requires far less energy to accept or dismiss an idea because of it's provenance.

The Atlantic story on Ted Kaczynski (which I came to for the first time this weekend) is a classic story of a young person following the logic of his beliefs, unaware that his immaturity led him to rely on his perception of the world filtered through a prism of splitting.  The author, Alston Chase, believes that Kaczynski was started on his intellectual road to despair and animus (which reinforced his emotional bleakness) by the Gen Ed program at Harvard, meant to inculcate the Judeo-Christian ethic but used by the sophisticated Harvard profs to teach the opposite, that there is nothing more than a relativistic morality; from Part II:

According to a study of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that included Kaczynski's class of 1962, conducted by William G. Perry Jr., the director of the university's Bureau of Study Counsel, the undergraduate curriculum had a profound impact on the emotions, the attitudes, and even the health of some students.

According to Perry, intellectual development for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates typically encompassed a progression from a simplistic, "dualistic" view of reality to an increasingly relativistic and "contingent" one. Entering freshmen tend to favor simple over complex solutions and to divide the world into truth and falsehood, good and bad, friend and foe. Yet in most of their college courses, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, they are taught that truth is relative. Most accept this, but a number cannot. They react against relativism by clinging more fiercely to an absolute view of the world. To some of these students, in Perry's words, "science and mathematics still seem to offer hope."

Nevertheless, Perry wrote, "regression into dualism" is not a happy development, for it "calls for an enemy." Dualists in a relativistic environment tend to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude "requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any 'establishment'" and "can call forth in its defense hate, projection, and denial of all distinctions but one," Perry wrote. "The tendency ... is toward paranoia."

As is evident in his writings, Kaczynski rejected the complexity and relativism he found in the humanities and the social sciences. He embraced both the dualistic cognitive style of mathematics and Gen Ed's anti-technology message. And perhaps most important, he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) "there was no logical justification for morality."

It is not a surprise but worth reinforcing that the distinction between the soft sciences and hard sciences represents a basic (and illusory) split in our mental apparatus between emotion and reason.  It requires mental work to struggle against the easy splitting and maintain complexity; few consistently succeed and the lies people tell themselves to celebrate their embrace of a complexity they fail to grasp are telling.  The idea, for example, that morality must be all-or-none is itself a result of splitting.  Morality can neither be wholly relativistic (which can easily lead to anarchic social organization) nor can it be puritanically inflexible (which can lead to the Talibanization of society.) 

This is already long enough and has only scratched the surface of the problem of duality/splitting and the development of a functional morality; further, both the story of Ted Kaczynski and Avatar, in their own ways, share a failing that is worth its own post: both fail to appreciate the need for Integration and Synthesis. 

To be continued...

Terror and Terrorism

Over the last several years there has been a consistent tendency for various authorities to announce, immediately after a terrorist attack, that there is no evidence that the atrocity was terrorism.  Yesterday's incident fit the template:

Man Crashes Plane Into Texas I.R.S. Office

Leaving behind a rant against the government, big business and particularly the tax system, a computer engineer smashed a small aircraft into an office building where nearly 200 employees of the Internal Revenue Service were starting their workday Thursday morning, the authorities said.

...

Within hours of the crash, before the death or even the identity of the pilot had been confirmed, officials ruled out any connection to terrorist groups or causes.

Following the incident, once the perpetrator has been identified and his "reasons" for attacking have been elucidated, there is a follow-up announcement that the attacker was a lone, unstable individual.  This is the template applied to everyone* from Theodore Kaczynski to Major Hasan.   Occasionally the template is accurate but more often it obfuscates the key distinction between the lone lunatic who terrorizes and terrorism.

* When there is a clear connection to Right wing hate groups (see McVeigh, Timothy) the MSM and authorities make the connection with alacrity.  This is the exception to the rule.  Note as well that if the perpetrate is a White male efforts to connect him to the Right occur immediately, as the various commentators alleging the airplane crasher was part of the Tea Party Movement.

Armed Liberal almost gets it right in his description of the airplane crasher as a failed human being:

I'm hearing things from reliable sources that suggest that what we're seeing is more the fallout from the collapse of a life - a broken marriage, failed businesses - than a passionate blow by some antigovernment ideologue. I'd carefully watch the news tomorrow on this before taking a position...

...and this ties into David Niewert, who is anxious to tie this into his "big truth" about Angry White People.

Because we have a problem; we are growing muckers, who individually may just decide to go shoot someone, or a cop or four, or people in an airport. Or they may get together with a few others - in a kind of crazy underground cell - and blow up a building.

Or fly their small plane into one.

And some of these muckers are bound by ideology...white nationalist, black nationalist, salafist...and they tend to find each other (the Internet is very good for that.

White nationalist and black nationalist ideology have been to a large extent marginalized in our country and in the world.  Despite the ongoing efforts of the liberal establishment to make the Tea Party movement a frightening "right wing extremist movement" most people are quite cognizant of the fact that it fits well within the mainstream.  The greater problem is with radical Islam, not just Salafi radicalism but Shia radicalism, as well.  In the case of radical Islam, there is a large transnational, state supported structure that supports a supremacist ideology that expressly advocates the use of terror to destroy and intimidate the infidel.  Major Hasan may have been a failed human being (despite his academic success) and a lone actor (though he was in close contact with a radical Yemeni Imam) but he was acting out his murderous rage within a structure that condoned and celebrated his terror. 

We will never be fully free from the Ted Kaczynski's of the world.  There will always be the rare disturbed individuals who fail at life and blame the external world for their failures.  Some tiny percentage of life's losers will enact their rage at others and murder and kill in a vain attempt to alleviate their internal distress.  Perhaps some day we will find ways to identify and help these people before they explode.

Sadly, we will also never free ourselves of the Major Hasan's of the world if we continue to misdiagnose the problem as residing primarily within the individual.  Major Hasan can successfully achieve status in his community, changing from a loser to a hero, by murdering innocents in a socially approved manner which civilized people consider terrorism but which his chosen community considers holy war, Jihad. 

As noted many times, Politically Correct thinking that prevents us from accurately identifying the problems we are facing will continue to cost lives until we cure ourselves of the thought disorder.

What Are You Willing to Die For?

[Update at end]

In post-religious, secularized Western countries, the answer to the title question tends to devolve to "nothing" beyond the self and its interests.  Western elites are fond of instructing their inferiors to sacrifice for their Utopian ideal of the moment but sacrificing one's life for the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" for others is typically seen as the province of less well educated, less sophisticated, non-members of the elite.  America still has enough young people who value what this country has to offer that they are willing to put their lives on the line for us, but Europe has long since surrendered to the progressive forces of history and eschews self-defence of their ideals.   For Western elites, people who are motivated by religious beliefs, usually overlapping with those too ignorant to avoid the military, are essentially the equivalent of cannon fodder, ie, they do not count.  Our elites pride themselves on their functional atheism.  Politicians may from time to time profess their deep religious convictions but most often on the left this is a rather transparent attempt to appeal tot he rubes and when a politician appears to have genuine religious convictions, as for example Sarah Palin, they are savaged by the elites in media and academia.

Because religious belief has been so discredited by our elites, they tend to see anyone who believes as either a charlatan (using their beliefs to scam people) or as at best ignorant if not overtly intellectually limited.  The idea that there exist people whose religious beliefs motivate them to kill and die for their deity does not reach the threshold of consciousness for our elites.  They may occasionally give lip service to the idea (though less often since we are no longer at war with Islamic terrorists) and may admit that the Islamic foot soldiers of Iran, al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah are religious radicals, but they insist that the leaders of such groups can be approached as rational actors.  Greg Sheridan, in the Australian, points out how we fool ourselves by imagining our enemies to be rationally motivated:

Tehran on path to our destruction

Iran has been determined to acquire nuclear weapons for a long time. It is, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes it, something of a military dictatorship, with the Revolutionary Guard assuming more and more power. It is still also, however, a theocratic dictatorship. The purpose of the state is to serve theological ends.

Most Western analysts refuse to take Islamic religion seriously as a factor in geopolitics, assuming there must always be a rational national-interest explanation for any state's behaviour.

The truth is that history is littered with states behaving irrationally and pursuing irrational ends, and doing so in often self-destructive ways. In Mao's China tens of millions of people died in famines directly caused by state policy. North Korea has driven its people into starvation. Pol Pot not only committed genocide on his own people, he then attacked Vietnam so that it would destroy him. Saddam Hussein was such a canny, realist calculator of the odds that his regime ended up gone and he ended up dead.

It is intensely ahistorical to believe political regimes will always act according to Western conceptions of enlightened self-interest.

Melanie Philips' comment on Greg Sheridan's article is apt:

It is striking, to this British observer at least, how very unlikely it would be to encounter anywhere in the British media such a well-informed, realistic and intelligent analysis of the Iranian crisis and the paralysis of the west.

Even among seasoned and reasonable observers who have been involved in thinking about the Middle East for a very long time, there is an implicit assumption that the belief structure of the enemy can be approached using rationality.  In the course of an article about Andrew Sullivan's antipathy to Israel* and himself, Jeffery Goldberg notes that he has for a long time worried about Israel becoming complicit in its own destruction:

Andrew Sullivan is Going to Tear Me To Shreds

I've been writing since 2004 that Israel will one day be considered an apartheid state if it continues to rule over a population of Arabs that doesn't want to be ruled by Israelis. That is why it is vital for Israel to establish permanent, internationally-recognized borders that more-or-less adhere to the 1967 border. Unlike Andrew, I believe that Israel has tried to free itself from ruling these Palestinians (the pull-out from Gaza is an example, as is Ehud Olmert's recent, unanswered offer to the Palestinians to pull out from virtually 100 percent of the West Bank). But the reality remains: It will be very dangerous for Israel to engineer this pull-back, but it will be, over time, fatal for it to stay in the West Bank.  Anyway, more to come, eventually.

According to this fairly common point of view, Israel has the choice of continuing to "oppress and occupy" West bank Palestinians, which will inevitably lead to the delegitimization of the Jewish state or they must engineer a (unilateral) Peace agreement which would be tantamount to Israeli suicide.  There has never been any indication that any Palestinian leader, no matter how "moderate" would be willing to accept a Jewish state.  The current favored Moderates of the PA insist upon an unlimited right of return and indefensible borders for Israel. 

It is sophistry to pronounce that a Peace can be accomplished in which the Palestinians accept some financial inducements and a token right of return in exchange for permanent Peace.  There is no evidence, zero, that any Palestinian could cede the right of return and survive, let alone continue to rule.  To believe otherwise is delusional, an invention of the Western, rational mind.

Unfortunately, this is the current choice; there can be no compromise with people who believe that compromise, and the continued existence of the state of Israel is an anathema to their deity.  They are certainly willing to kill for their beliefs, more significantly, they are willing to die for their beliefs.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can not end until the Palestinians, and their Arab backers, accept the legitimacy of Israel, yet they cannot do so and remain loyal to their religion.  Islam believes that it is the superior faith, that the Koran is the final, perfect word of Allah.  An independent Jewish state, especially one that has repeatedly humiliated the Arab world (in War and in Peace) threatens to destroy Islam merely by its continued existence.  After all, how can Allah be supreme when the hated Jews, who proclaim their G-d the one true G-d, remain victorious over Islam?  Islam, in its current form, cannot survive and adapt to he modern world; the very religious foundations of the faith are at risk every day that Israel persists.  The struggle to eradicate Israel and the Jews can only accommodate Peace if it temporary and in the service of the final solution.  This is not something I am simply making up out of whole cloth, it is what our enemies say on a daily basis, if we only choose to listen. 

Of course, for the West to accept this truth would be a deeply unsettling recognition.  Yet once we come to understand the reality, the solution becomes clearer, albeit one that makes our elites most uncomfortable.  A long term minimization of violence with occasional reminders by the West/Israel to the violent ones that we know where they live (ie, the current status quo) is the only way to keep the forces of destruction under control.  Allowing the Muslim world's most extreme variants to gain power and strength is a path to disaster.

* The question of whether or not Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite is a non-starter.  Andrew Sullivan has been increasingly using language which is indistinguishable from classical anti-Semitic tropes as filtered through the post-modern lens; after a while whether or not he entertains any particular antipathy to Jews is immaterial.  Others may disagree but ultimately it hardly matters.  The mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes is ongoing.

Update: In an excellent article today Barry Rubin points out that the complementary (mirror image?) of the ubiquitous blindness to the reality of radical Islamic religious ideology occurs in the views that  "Moderates" have of Israel:

Why Isn't There Peace? One Reason: Few People Know How Much is Being Offered

Among Palestinians, as more broadly with almost all of the public in the Muslim-majority world and a lot of the elite classes in Europe, there exists a mythical Israel, reminiscent of the fabricated antisemitic stereotypes of the past, that has little to do with reality. They believe Israel isn't interested in peace, doesn't offer the Palestinians anything, opposes any real Palestinian state, intends to keep the West Bank (until Israel's withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip they would have added that territory as well), and is led by intransigent hardliners. Such a conception was comprehensible--if not fully accurate--describing the situation in parts of the 1980s but has nothing to do with the last 20 years.

In 2010 they have no idea what Israel actually offered in the 1990s' peace process, or at the Camp David summit in 2000, or what President Bill Clinton offered with Israel's agreement in December 2000, or what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proffered in 2008, or what is in the current Israeli government's peace offer in 2010. All proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the first three in close to 100 percent and the last three as equivalent to 100 percent (with some small, equal land swaps) in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lacking any knowledge of these offers, or at least knowing only very distorted ones, they can maintain that Israel has offered "nothing" and that therefore the continuation of the conflict is not due to Palestinian intransigence but Israel's alleged opposition to the creation of a real independent Palestinian state. This reminds me of how Mahmoud Abbas, today leader of the Palestinian Authority, responded to some reasonably accurate descriptions in the Palestinian media of what Israel offered in 2000 at Camp David. It is better, he said at the time, not to talk about these things at all, presumably lest some Palestinians might think that it was a reasonable deal.

Anyone who actually lives in Israel knows that--whether they like it or not--Israel is ready to make big conessions and take reasonable risks to achieve peace. They know, whether or not they agree, that the overwhelming majority is ready to accept an independent Palestinian state as long as it is willing to end the conflict and live side by side in peace.

Outside Israel, far fewer people than should do so understand this reality. And that includes journalists,academics, and politicians. If they address the issue at all, they presume that Israel is asking the Palestinians to make some huge or unreasonable concession. Often, as noted above, their understanding of Israeli views is more than 20 years out of date.

Read the whole thing.  The complementary blind spots of our elites toward Israel and the Palestinians (and in a larger sense, toward ourselves and the Islamic radicals)  has important Psychological dimensions; elaboration to follow.

Book Previews

I have just started A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad by Robert S. Wistrich.  It is close to 1000 pages and heavy going.  The subject matter is painful and important, the book is unflinching and in depth.

For an excellent review, take a look at It Will Not Go Away, by Jeffrey Herf, which includes this caveat pertaining to the modern iteration of anti-Semitism:

When Hitler made his famous threat to exterminate Europe’s Jews in 1939, many Western political observers did not believe he meant what he said. It was too incredible and without precedent. No political leader before had so bluntly and publicly announced his intention to engage in mass murder. And so the disgust that greeted Hitler was mixed with disbelief. But the leaders of our own time do not have the excuse of incredulity. As much as any historian can, Robert Wistrich has documented the fact that radical anti-Semitism is in earnest, that its geographic and cultural center of gravity has shifted, and that it has again become a factor in world politics. The advocates of this disgusting doctrine have the power from which to make good on their threats.

This morning I received a copy of Senator's Son, from the author, Luke Larson, a USMC veteran of the Iraq War. 

 

I had planned on making some preparatory comments, but Mark Safranski beat me to it (and has some interesting remarks about the book in its particulars and its place in a larger transformation taking place in our zeitgeist.) 

Just received a review copy of new author Luke Larson’s novel Senator’s Son. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of works of fiction that I have reviewed at ZP, but two things caught my attention about Senator’s Son:

First, the novel is historical realism with a theme of COIN. Secondly, the author Luke Larson is a decorated Marine officer with two tours in Iraq under his belt. Flipping the pages reveals a gritty, sometimes humorous, staccato writing style and military/strategy/policy issues that are discussed here, or at SWJ or Abu Muqawama come to life through the eyes of still learning practitioners. I’m looking forward to reading Senator’s Son and reviewing it in full in late February or early March ( need to finish Carr’s Inside Cyber Warfare first).

Setting aside the book itself, something else occurred to me - that we have reached the point where the war is now appearing not as news, but as literature; Iraq and Afghanistan are proving to be culturally transformative wars for America in ways that the Gulf War or the Korean War were not.

Read the entire post; it is thought provoking.

Like Mark, I have reviewed only a handful of books at SW; I am looking forward to reading and reviewing Luke Larson's first novel in the next few weeks.

Summing Our Irrationalities

From January 25, 2005:

... when either extreme of left or right takes a prominent place in our polity, it presents serious dangers.  Democracy works essentially by summing the irrationalities of its citizenry in ways which tend to cancel out the most extreme manifestations.  [Emphasis added-SW] When it works well, both parties move to the center and try to appeal to the broad, more rational middle.  This depends on a number of important factors, one of which is relatively unbiased information.  The founders recognized how important freedom of information was and codified freedom of the press.  Until Watergate and Viet Nam the press aspired, as part of their ethical core, to be objective.  Once they discovered how powerful they could be, by (in the thinking of the left on campuses and in press rooms) stopping a war and bringing down a President, all bets were off.  The press evolved into yet another power center, one with an overall objective (like all power centers) of perpetuating their power and exerting their influence.  It has become clear over the last 30 years, and crystal clear to all but the most myopic during the most recent election cycle, that the MSM has become allied with the left wing of Democratic party.  The MSM, of necessity, try to move the "center" to the left.  (This is why all religious conservatives are depicted as "right-wing" in the New York Times, for example.)  The danger in this is that the Democrats are left either running stealthy campaigns, where they need to hide their agenda, or they are marginalized.  Since I believe we need a rational opposition party (no one should be foolish enough to ever expect a one party state to remain free for long) this is very troubling.

The MSM is currently responding to the Tea Party movement by trying to make sense of the motivations of its members.  The New York Times offered a 5 page "in depth" study of the Tea Partiers, starting on the front page with a study of a typical Tea Party activist, Pam Stout; reporter David Barstow's lead sentence sets the stage:

Tea Party Movement Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right

SANDPOINT, Idaho — Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. 

The stage is set and the piece does not disappoint:

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.

She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. “I was like, ‘Did I really just do that?’ ” she recalled.

Then she went even further.

Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.

The difference between the Tea Party that David Barstow describes and the one described by Glenn Reynolds should give pause to those who have already begun to form the expected opinion:

What I Saw at the Tea Party Convention

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.

These weren't the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

Mr. Obama made those promises because the ideas they represented were popular with average Americans. So popular, it turns out, that average Americans are organizing themselves in pursuit of the kind of good government Mr. Obama promised, but has not delivered. And that, in a nutshell, was the feel of the National Tea Party Convention. The political elites have failed, and citizens are stepping in to pick up the slack.

Let us grant that David Barstow and Glenn Reynolds both filter their perceptions of the Tea Parties through their own unique, biased filter.  (Glenn Reynolds, like most political bloggers will quite happily offer his political bias for inspection up front while the members of the MSM typically insist they are simply reporting the news straight down the middle; perhaps they are correct but I tend to trust people more who at least show some awareness of their own biases.)   How do we square the circle between the Tea Party of potentially violent Right wing extremists found by David Barstow and the cheerful group of people looking to overturn the stasis in Washington DC via the voting booth found by Glenn Reynolds?

Both Left and Right in this country have long histories of extremism at their margins.  Anti-Semitism, the perception of creeping fascism/totalitarianism in every enlargement of state power, overt paranoia, demands to truncate free speech, calls for revolutionary change and overt demands for criminalizing the opposition, have all shown up at one time or another at the extremes.  When society is stressed, as by the current recession and our involvement in a struggle with violent extremists who-dare-not-be-named, regression into more extreme, often Manichean, belief structures is an expectable outcome.  How the two major Parties incorporate (summate) these extremes is the crucial element that determines if the ship of state will stay in the center verses tacking to one side or the other.  It is clear that Barack Obama has tried to pull the country far to the side of statism and the so-called moderates in the Democratic Party have signally failed to moderate their Party.  This has a parallel in the failure of the Republicans to remain true to their professed values during the Bush years, when government grew at a rate unacceptable to the American people.  The Tea Party movement has only gained critical mass because enough people have become concerned that something essential in the character of the country was at risk in the ever increasing aggrandizement of the Federal government's power. 

Fundamentally the two parties disagree on the appropriate size and scope of government.  If the Republicans can incorporate reasonable ideas from the Tea Party that Glenn Reynolds saw (limiting the size of government, devolving power to the individual, enabling the distributed economy, ie small business, to rebound from the recession) the Republicans will not only win power in November, and probably in 2012 as well, but will deserve their power and keep it until ossification, corruption, and all the other ills attendant on comfort in power set in to destroy them.

If the Republicans are indeed becoming the party of the Tea Party that David Barstow saw, they will frighten and repulse the center and will not only fail to gain power, but if they should ever gain power, would rather quickly marginalize themselves.

My impression is that Glenn has done a much better job of reporting on the summed irrationalities of the Tea Party movement than the reporter from the "paper of record."  David Barstow has such an investment in his own unacknowledged irrationalities that he has missed the summed irrationalities, blinded by the discrete irrationalities that he was predisposed to see.