CONTENTS
More about the Transgender Fad
The Academic Enemies of Liberty
The High Cost of Untrammeled Immigration
Civil War II
Are Americans really in the midst of Civil War II or a Cold Civil War? It has seemed that way for many years. I have written about it in “A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?”, “The Culture War“, “Polarization and De-facto Partition“, and “Civil War?“.* Andrew Sullivan, whom I quit following several years ago for reasons that are evident in the following quotation (my irrepressible comments are in boldface and bracketed), has some provocative things to say about the situation:
Certain truths about human beings have never changed. We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death. We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope. We can numb the pain with legal cannabis or opioids, but it is pain nonetheless.
If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species [but they are not “societies”], and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge. Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either. In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel….
… Within the space of 50 years, America has gone from segregation to dizzying multiculturalism; … from homosexuality as a sin [or dangerous aberration] to homophobia as a taboo; from Christianity being the common culture to a secularism no society has ever sustained before ours [but mainly within the confines of the internet-media-academic complex, except where they have successfully enlisted government in the task of destroying social norms]….
And how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? [How self-centered to you have to be to dismiss the fact that much of that “unprecedented freedom” has been bought at the expense of freedom of speech, freedom of association, property rights, and advancement based on merit — things that are at the very heart of liberty?]….
If the neo-reactionaries were entirely right, the collapse of our society would surely have happened long before now [Strawman alert: How does Sullivan know when “society” would have collapsed?]. But somehow, an historically unprecedented mix of races and cultures hasn’t led to civil war in the United States. [Not a shooting war, but a kind of civil war nevertheless.] … America has assimilated so many before, its culture churning into new forms, without crashing into incoherence. [Strawman alert 2: “America”, note being a “society”, doesn’t have a “culture”. But some “cultures” (e.g., welfare-dependency, “hate whitey”, drugs, political correctness) are ascendant, for those with eyes to see.] [“The Reactionary Temptation“, New York, April 30, 2017]
All in all, I would say that Mr. Sullivan protests too much. He protests so much that he confirms my view that America is smack in the middle of a Cold Civil War. (Despite that, and the fatuousness of Mr. Sullivan’s commentary, I am grateful to him for a clear explanation of the political philosophy of Leo Strauss,** the theme of which had heretofore been obscure to me.)
For other, more realistic views of the current state of affairs, see the following (listed in chronological order):
David French, “A Blue State ‘Secession’ Model I Can Get Behind” (National Review, March 19, 2017)
Daniel Greenfield, “The Civil War Is Here” (Frontpage Magazine, March 27, 2017)
Daniel Greenfield, “Winning the Civil War of Two Americas” (Frontpage Magazine, April 4, 2017)
Rick Moran, “War Between U.S. Government and Sanctuary Cities Heating Up” (American Thinker, April 10, 2017)
Angelo M. Codevilla, “The Cold Civil War” (Claremont Review of Books, April 25, 2017)
Solitude for the Masses
Paul Kingsworth reviews Michael Harris’s Solitude in “The End of Solitude: In a Hyperconnected World, Are We Losing the Art of Being Alone?” (New Statesman, April 26, 2017):
Harris has an intuition that being alone with ourselves, paying attention to inner silence and being able to experience outer silence, is an essential part of being human….
What happens when that calm separateness is destroyed by the internet of everything, by big-city living, by the relentless compulsion to be with others, in touch, all the time? Plenty of people know the answer already, or would do if they were paying attention to the question. Nearly half of all Americans, Harris tells us, now sleep with their smartphones on their bedside table, and 80 per cent are on their phone within 15 minutes of waking up. Three-quarters of adults use social networking sites regularly. But this is peanuts compared to the galloping development of the so-called Internet of Things. Within the next few years, anything from 30 to 50 billion objects, from cars to shirts to bottles of shampoo, will be connected to the net. The internet will be all around you, whether you want it or not, and you will be caught in its mesh like a fly. It’s not called the web for nothing….
What is the problem here? Why does this bother me, and why does it bother Harris? The answer is that all of these things intrude upon, and threaten to destroy, something ancient and hard to define, which is also the source of much of our creativity and the essence of our humanity. “Solitude,” Harris writes, “is a resource.” He likens it to an ecological niche, within which grow new ideas, an understanding of the self and therefore an understanding of others.
The book is full of examples of the genius that springs from silent and solitary moments. Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Einstein, Newton – all developed their ideas and approach by withdrawing from the crowd….
Yet it is not only geniuses who have a problem: ordinary minds like yours and mine are threatened by the hypersocial nature of always-on urbanity….
So, what is to be done about all this? That’s the multibillion-dollar question, but it is one the book cannot answer. Harris spends many pages putting together a case for the importance of solitude and examining the forces that splinter it today….
Under the circumstances – and these are our circumstances – the only honest conclusion to draw is that the problem, which is caused primarily by the technological direction of our society, is going to get worse. There is no credible scenario in which we can continue in the same direction and not see the problem of solitude, or lack of it, continue to deepen….
… Short of a collapse so severe that the electricity goes off permanently, there is no escape from what the tech corporations and their tame hive mind have planned for us. The circle is closed, and the net is being hauled in. May as well play another round of Candy Crush while we wait to be dragged up on to the deck.
Well, the answer doesn’t lie in the kind of defeatism exemplified by Harris (whose book is evidently full of diagnosis and empty of remedy) or Kingsworth. It’s up to each person to decide whether or not to enlarge his scope of solitude or be defeated by the advance of technology and the breakdown of truly human connections.
But it’s not an all-or-nothing choice. Compromise is obviously necessary when it comes to making a living these days. That still leaves a lot of room for the practice of solitude, the practice and benefits of which I have addressed in “Flow“, “In Praise of Solitude“, “There’s Always Solitude“, and “The Glory of the Human Mind“.
More about the Transgender Fad
Is the transgender fad fading away, or is it just that I’m spending more time in solitude? Anyway, is was reminded of the fad by “Most Children Who Identify As Transgender Are Faking It, Says ‘Gender Clinic’ Psychiatrist” (The College Fix, April 17, 2017). It’s a brief post and the title tells the tale. So I’ll turn to my own post on the subject, “The Transgender Fad and Its Consequences“. Following a preamble and some long quotations from authoritative analysis of transgenderism, I continue with this:
Harm will come not only to those who fall prey to the transgender delusion, but also to those who oppose its inevitable manifestations:
- mandatory sex mingling in bathrooms, locker rooms, and dorm rooms — an invitation to predators and a further weakening of the norms of propriety that help to instill respect toward other persons
- quotas for hiring self-described transgender persons, and for admitting them to universities, and for putting them in the ranks of police and armed forces, etc.
- government-imposed penalties for saying “hateful and discriminatory” things about gender, the purpose of which will be to stifle dissent about the preceding matters
- government-imposed penalties for attempts to exercise freedom of association, which is an unenumerated right under the Constitution that, properly understood, includes the right to refuse business from anyone at any time and for any reason (including but far from limited to refusing to serve drug-addled drag queens whose presence will repel other customers)….
How did America get from the pre-Kinsey view of sex as a private matter, kept that way by long-standing social norms, to the let-it-all-hang-out (literally) mentality being pushed by elites in the media, academy, and government?
I attribute much of it to the capitalist paradox. Capitalism — a misnomer for an economic system that relies mainly on free markets and private-property rights — encourages innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. One result is that a “capitalist” economy eventually produces enough output to support large numbers of persons who don’t understand that living off the system and regulating it heavily will bring it down….
The social paradox is analogous to the capitalist paradox. Social relations are enriched and made more productive by the toleration of some new behaviors. But to ensure that a new behavior is enriching and productive, it must be tested in the acid of use.* Shortcuts — activism cloaked in academese, punditry, and political posturing — lead to the breakdown of the processes by which behaviors become accepted because they are enriching and productive.
In sum, the capitalist paradox breeds the very people who are responsible for the social paradox: those who are rich enough to be insulated from the vicissitudes of daily life, where living among and conversing with similar folk reinforces a distorted view of the real world.
It is the cossetted beneficiaries of capitalism who lead the way in forcing Americans to accept as “natural” and “of right” behavior that in saner times was rarely engaged in and even more rarely flaunted. That restraint wasn’t just a matter of prudery. It was a matter of two things: respect for others, and the preservation of norms that foster restraint.
How quaint. Avoiding offense to others, and teaching one’s children that normal behavior helps them to gain the acceptance and trust of others. Underlying those understood motivations was a deeper one: Children are susceptible creatures, easily gulled and led astray — led into making mistakes that will haunt them all their lives. There was, in those days, an understanding that “one thing leads to another.”…
… If the Kennedy Court of Social Upheaval continues to hold sway, its next “logical” steps will be to declare the illegality of sexual identifiers and the prima facie qualification of any person for any job regardless of “its” mental and physical fitness for the job….
… [T[he parents of yesteryear didn’t have to worry about the transgender fad, but they did have to worry about drinking, drug-taking, and sex. Not everyone who “experimented” with those things went on to live a life of dissolution, shame, and regret. But many did. And so, too, will the many young children, adolescents, and young adults who succumb to the fad of transgenderism….
When did it all begin to go wrong? See “1963: The Year Zero.”
Thank you for working your way through this very long quotation from my own blog. But it just has to be said again and again: Transgenderism is a fad, a destructive fad, and a fad that is being used by the enemies of liberty to destroy what little of it is left in America.
The Academic Enemies of Liberty
Kurt Schlichter quite rightly says that “Academia Is Our Enemy So We Should Help It Commit Suicide“:
If Animal House were to be rebooted today, Bluto – who would probably be updated into a differently–abled trans being of heft – might ask, “See if you can guess what am I now?” before expelling a whole mass of pus-like root vegetable on the WASPrivileged villains and announcing, “I’m a university – get it?”
At least popping a zit gets rid of the infection and promotes healing. But today, the higher education racket festers on the rear end of our culture, a painful, useless carbuncle of intellectual fraud, moral bankruptcy, and pernicious liberal fascism that impoverishes the young while it subsidizes a bunch of old pinkos who can’t hack it at Real World U….
If traditional colleges performed some meaningful function that only they could perform, then there might be a rationale for them in the 21st Century. But there’s not. What do four-year colleges do today?
Well, they cater to weenies who feel “unsafe” that Mike Pence is speaking to their graduates. Seventy-some years ago, young people that age were feeling unsafe because the Wehrmacht was trying to kill them on Omaha Beach….
And in their quest to ensure their students’ perpetual unemployment, colleges are now teaching that punctuality is a social construct. Somewhere, a Starbucks manager is going to hear from Kaden the Barista that, “I like, totally couldn’t get here for my shift on time because, like intersectionality of my experience as a person of Scandinavianism and stuff. I feel unsafe because of your racist vikingaphobia and tardiness-shaming.”
Academia is pricing itself out of reach even as the antics of its inhabitants annoy and provoke those of us whose taxes already pick up a big chunk of the bill even without the “free college” okie-doke….
The quarter million dollar academic vacation model is economically unsustainable and poisonous to our culture. The world of Animal House was a lot more fun when it didn’t mean preemptive bankruptcy for its graduates and the fostering of a tyrannical training ground for future libfascists. It’s time to get all Bluto on the obsolete boil that is academia; time to give it a squeeze. [Townhall, April 13, 2017]
Cue my post, “Subsidizing the Enemies of Liberty“:
If there is a professional class that is almost solidly aligned against liberty it is the teachers and administrators who control the ideas that are pumped into the minds of students from kindergarten through graduate school. How are they aligned against liberty? Most of them are leftists, which means that they are statists who are dedicated to the suppression of liberty in favor of current left-wing orthodoxies. These almost always include the coddling of criminals, unrequited love for America’s enemies, redistribution of income and jobs toward less-productive (and non-productive) persons, restrictions on speech, and the destruction of civil society’s bulwarks: religion, marriage, and family.
In any event, spending on education in the United States amounted to $1.1 trillion in 2010, about 8 percent of GDP. Most of that $1.1 trillion — $900 billion, in fact — was spent on public elementary and secondary schools and public colleges and universities. In other words, your tax dollars support the leftists who teach your children and grandchildren to bow at the altar of the state, to placate the enemies of liberty at home and abroad, and to tear down the traditions that have bound people in mutual trust and respect….
And what do tax-paying Americans get for their money? A strong left-wing bias, which is inculcated at universities and spreads throughout public schools (and a lot of private schools). This has been going on, in earnest, since the end of World War II. And, yet, the populace is roughly divided between hard-headed conservatives and squishy-minded “liberals.” The persistence of the divide speaks well for the dominance of nature over nurture. But it does not change the fact that American taxpayers have been subsidizing the enemies of liberty who dominate the so-called education system in this country.
See also “Academic Bias“, “Politics, Sophistry, and the Academy“, “Academic Ignorance“, and John C. Goodman’s “Brownshirts, Subsidized with Your Tax Dollars” (Townhall, May 20, 2017).
The High Cost of Untrammeled Immigration
The third entry in “Not-So-Random Thoughts (XVIII)” is about illegal immigration. It opens with this:
Ten years ago, I posted “An Immigration Roundup”, a collection of 13 posts dated March 29 through September 22, 2006. The bottom line: to encourage and allow rampant illegal immigration borders on social and economic suicide. I remain a hardliner because of the higher crime rate among Hispanics (“Immigration and Crime“), and because of Steven Camarota’s “So What Is the Fiscal and Economic Impact of Immigration?“ [National Review, September 22, 2016].
I suggest that you go to Camarota’s article, which I quote at length, to see the evidence that he has compiled. For more facts — as opposed to leftish magical thinking about immigration — see also “Welfare: Who’s on It, Who’s Not” (Truth Is Justice, April 16, 2017), which draws on
a report called “Welfare Use by Immigrant and Native Households.” The report’s principle finding is that fully 51 percent of immigrant households receive some form of welfare, compared to an already worrisomely high 30 percent of American native households. The study is based on the most accurate data available, the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). It also reports stark racial differences in the use of welfare programs.
I’ll throw in some excerpts:
Needless to say, the percentage of immigrants using some form of welfare varies enormously according to the part of the world from which they come. Rates are highest for households from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent). Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest rates….
A majority of native black and Hispanic households are on some form of means-tested welfare, compared to just 23 percent of native white households….
A striking 82 percent of black households with children receive welfare–double the white rate. Hispanic families are not far behind blacks….
Among natives, blacks receive cash handouts at more than three times the white rate; Hispanics at more than twice the white rate. Rates for black and Hispanic immigrants are relatively lower due to often-ignored restrictions on immigrant use of these programs….
Among all households, native blacks and Hispanics receive food handouts at three times the white rate; for Hispanic immigrants, the figure is four times the white rate. Among households with children, nearly all immigrant Hispanics–86 percent–get food aid. Native blacks and Hispanics aren’t far behind, with rates of 75 and 72 percent, respectively.
The takeaway: Tax-paying citizens already heavily subsidize native-born blacks and Hispanics. Adding welfare-dependent immigrants — especially from south of the border — adds injury to injury.
As long as the welfare state exists, immigration should be tightly controlled so that the United States admits only those persons (with their families) who have verifiable offers of employment from employers in the United States. Further, an immigrant’s income should be high enough to ensure that (a) he is unlikely to become dependent on any welfare program (federal, State, or local) and (b) he is likely to pay at least as much in taxes as he is likely to absorb in the way of schooling for his children, Social Security and Medicare benefits, etc.
(See also: Bob le Flambeur, “Against Open Borders“, Rightly Considered, February 8, 2017.)
* Sharp-eyed readers will notice that with this post I am adopting a “new” way of using quotation marks. The American convention is to enclose commas and periods within quotation marks, even where the commas and periods are not part of the quoted text or other material that belongs inside quotation marks (e.g., the title of a post). The American convention creates some ambiguity and awkwardness that is avoided by the British convention, which is to enclose inside quotation marks only that punctuation which is part of the quoted text or other material.
** This is from the article by Sullivan cited in the first section of this post:
[Leo] Strauss’s idiosyncratic genius defies easy characterization, but you could argue, as Mark Lilla did in his recent book The Shipwrecked Mind, that he was a reactionary in one specific sense: A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Strauss viewed modernity as collapsing into nihilism and relativism and barbarism all around him. His response was to go back to the distant past — to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides, among others — to see where the West went wrong, and how we could avoid the horrific crimes of the 20th century in the future.
One answer was America, where Strauss eventually found his home at the University of Chicago. Some of his disciples — in particular, the late professor Harry Jaffa — saw the American Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of the self-evident truth of the equality of human beings, as a civilizational high point in human self-understanding and political achievement. They believed it revived the ancient Greek and Roman conception of natural law. Yes, they saw the paradox of a testament to human freedom having been built on its opposite — slavery — but once the post–Civil War constitutional amendments were ratified, they believed that the American constitutional order was effectively set forever, and that the limited government that existed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries required no fundamental change.
Politics and Prosperity 