It is by now old news that Scott Adams has been “cancelled” for a “racist rant”. Why did Adams say what he said, and will he succeed in his purpose? Some relevant posts are here, here, and here.
I’m going to focus on the charge of racism. The word has come to stand for something other than its traditional meaning, which is this:
There is a superior race (usually that of the believer in such a thing), and other races are inferior to it (or another, particular, race is inferior to it). Persons of inferior races are to be detested, feared, subjugated, or eliminated. They are not to be associated with unless they are in a subservient position.
The sense of superiority needs no justification. It just exists. A racist is usually a person who has learned to detest persons of a different race simply because they are of a different race. Along with that learning comes pre-packaged rationalizations for detesting persons of a different race.
I grew up — in the North — among white racists. They weren’t the kind who would lynch a black person or organize a mob to terrorize blacks. But they didn’t want to associate with blacks, and they demeaned them in many ways (though usually not to their faces). They would remark on their language (non-standard English), intelligence (without actual evidence of it), “loud” attire, supposed moral laxity, supposed dependence on welfare, “rhythm”, race-based superiority in certain athletic endeavors (e.g., jumping and sprinting), and so on.
Some of those distinguishing characteristics were (and are) true, in general (e.g., average intelligence of blacks vs. whites and East Asians), though untrue in vast numbers of particular cases. But facts and individual differences weren’t what mattered. Most whites were simply prejudiced against blacks, period. And there were certainly many blacks then (as now) who reciprocated the feeling. (Then, as now, white “elites” would eschew overt expressions of racism but evince it through condescension toward blacks and low expectations for them.)
A lot has happened during the intervening years; for example:
desegregation of the armed forces
desegregation of public schools based on race (but no longer — in most places — geographically)
desegregation of colleges and universities
desegregation of “public accommodations” (hotels, bars, restaurants, etc.)
easier access of “minorities” to credit for buying homes and cars and starting or expanding businesses (usually by lowering credit standards directly or setting up special funding carve-outs)
“affirmative action”, that is, favoritism toward blacks in hiring and promotion)
the rise of “diversity” and then “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, meaning that blacks deserve certain privileges because of the color of their skin because some blacks decades and centuries ago were
a long-term shift in the treatment by law-enforcement of blacks — from beatings and violent suppression to standing back from black criminality — with the notable and exploited exception of cases of malfeasance against individual blacks
a long-term shift in the governance of many major cities from mostly white to mostly black, and the concomitant degradation of public services and “law and order” in those cities (or so it seems to the casual observer).
To many whites, even those who have been disposed to helping blacks advance (or, at least, have not hindered or resented their advancement), the story arc looks like this:
1. systematic and undeserved mistreatment of blacks as a group
2. good-faith efforts to end mistreatment, treat blacks fairly, and give them more opportunities to advance socially and economically
3. bad-faith efforts to bestow unearned power and privileges on blacks
4. blaming white racism for isolated (but highly publicized) instances of police brutality and for the persistent social and financial problems of blacks.
I believe that Scott Adams is one of the whites — an anti-racist, supportive one — who has deciphered the story and given up. Like many whites, he has given up because he knows what’s next:
5. growing resentment of blacks by non-”elite” whites, commingled with resentment of and scorn for “elite” whites who are stuck in stage 1 of the story arc and/or seek to signal their superiority to racist whites (whose numbers they vastly exaggerate)
6. continued failure of blacks, in general, to close the income and wealth gaps between whites and blacks
7. more interracial tension and violence, especially black-on-white violence (largely ignored by the media)
8. more efforts by governments and private institutions to mollify and condescend to blacks (e.g., the irritating and glaring over-representation of blacks in commercials, movies, and TV shows)
9. accordingly, more favoritism toward blacks leading to more financial and social burdens on whites (aside from immunized “elites”), including but far from limited to the cost of reparations and the institutionalization of “social credit”
If that is what lies ahead, then it behooves most whites not only to give up on racial “equity” (whatever that is) but to resist efforts to attain it.
None of what I have said in this post is racist or should be considered racist. Unless, of course, you are using a definition of racism which condemns any account of black-white differences as racist if it doesn’t attribute those differences to (white) “racism”.
If Scott Adams would agree with what I have said, he is not a racist. Most likely, he is — like me — a realist. But under the new dispensation, that makes us racists.
Here’s the latest, including the second (February 2023) estimate of GDP in the final quarter of 2022:
The exponential trend line indicates a constant-dollar (real) growth rate for the entire period of 0.77 percent quarterly, or 3.1 percent annually. The actual beginning-to-end annual growth rate is also 3.1 percent.
The red bands parallel to the trend line delineate the 95-percent (1.96 sigma) confidence interval around the trend. GDP has been below the confidence interval since the government-induced pandemic recession of 2020. Come to think of it, the back-to-back recessions of 1980-1982 and the Great Recession of 2008-2010 were also government-caused — the government in those cases being the Federal Reserve. The short recession of 2022, which may soon be followed by another one, can also be chalked up to the Fed.
Here’s another depiction of the general decline in real economic growth:
And here’s another view:
The trend lines, which reflect the rate of growth during each business cycle, are getting progressively “flatter”, that is, the rate of growth (with a few exceptions) is dropping from cycle to cycle.
However you look at it, the steady decline in real GDP growth is the handiwork of government spending and regulatory policies. For much more about that plague, which has existed for more than a century, see this and this.
Unemployment
The government-reported unemployment rate of 3.3 percent for January 2023 is actually 10.5 percent. What the government doesn’t publicize is the labor-force participation rate, which has dropped from its January 2000 peak of 67.3 percent to 62.2 percent. See this post for details of the calculation. Here’s an up-to-date graph of nominal vs. actual unemployment rates:
Consumer Price Index
The index of prices for urban consumers (CPI-U) is the one that gets the headlines. There has been much ado in recent days about the drop in the rate of inflation, which only means that prices (as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) aren’t rising quite as rapidly as they had been.
Here’s how things looked as of January 2023:
I don’t take any solace in the fact that the most recent year-over-year rate — 6.45 percent — means that prices double every 11 years. Back in the good old days when inflation was running in the neighborhood of 2 percent, prices would be expected to double every 36 years. An average Joe — not the idiot in the White House — could live with that. Now, he’s scrambling to pay his bills, probably with credit debt that is becoming more expensive to carry.
Ominously, perhaps, is the 4-quarter average of annualized monthly changes in the CPI. The 4-quarter average had been dropping steadily since hitting its recent high of 14.0 percent in June 2022. But in January 2022 it jumped from the previous month’s value of -0.7 percent to 2.5 percent. Not a good sign, especially give the jump in the producer price index (PPI), which may foreshadow a rise in the year-over-year value of the CPI.
The Stock Market
A bear market is usually defined as decline of at least 20 percent in a broad stock-market index. The S&P 500 index topped out at 4818.22 in January 2022, dropped to 3636.87 in June, rose to 4325.28 in August, dropped to 3491.58 in October — the low (to date) for the current bear market, 27 percent below the January peak.
Since then, the index has risen, dropped, and risen again. Friday’s closing price of 3970.04 left the index 18 percent below its peak. Technically (and arbitrarily), the market is no longer in bear country, but that doesn’t mean that the bear market is over.
Here’s the story to date:
The dashed red line is 20 percent below the January 2022 high. The meandering route of the weekly average (which I use for analysis of long-term trends) has taken the index above the “magic” 20-percent line more than once.
But the end of a bear market isn’t confirmed until two things happen. The first is that the 26-week average turns up and continues to rise for at least 13 weeks. That hasn’t happened, yet. And it may not happen for a while. The low (to date) occurred after the impressive rally of June-October 2022.
The second indicator is the value of a volatility index that I have concocted. It hasn’t dropped into bull-market territory yet. But it can drop suddenly — and unpredictably.
As the man said the market is a random walk down Wall Street. Anything can happen, and it usually does: war, riot, natural disaster, political turmoil, unexpectedly bad or good economic news, etc., etc., etc.
Stay tuned.
Presidential Popularity: Obama, Trump, Biden
I have followed the Presidential Tracking Poll at Rasmussen Reports* since Obama was elected in 2008. The straightforward Approval Index (strongly approve minus strongly disapprove) doesn’t quite capture the way that likely voters assess a president’s performance. So I concocted an “enthusiasm ratio” — the number of likely voters who strongly approve as a percentage of the number of likely voters who venture an opinion one way or the other (thus omitting the voters who are non-committal). Here’s a comparison of the enthusiasm ratios for Obama (first term), Trump, and Biden (through 02/24/23):
You might ask how Biden caught up with Obama. I have no answer other than the fact that most voters have short memories and seem to care little about the consequences of leftist governance. It will take a major change to move the needle downward; for example, irrefutable proof that some of the classified documents found in various places owned or controlled by Joe were used by Hunter in the family’s influence-peddling business. On the other hand, a peaceful resolution of the Russia-Ukraine War would (for no real reason) redound to Biden’s benefit in the polls.
Right Direction or Wrong Track
Rasmussen Reports also publishes a weekly poll in which 1,500 likely voters are asked whether the country is going in the right direction or is on the wrong track. The results, as you would expect, are volatile — reflecting the recent headlines and media spin. Government shutdowns, for example, which are actually good news, are widely viewed as bad news. Here are the weekly results (through last week) since Obama took office in January 2009:
The mood of the voters polled during Trump’s term in office never reached the depths that it reached under Obama. Biden is following in Obama’s footsteps, and he has two more years in which to reach a new low — unless he is impeached and removed from office for his influence-peddling business.
* I follow Rasmussen Reports because of its good track record — here and here, for example. Though the Rasmussen polls are generally accurate, they are out of step with the majority of polls, which are biased toward Democrats. This has caused Rasmussen Reports to be labeled “Republican-leaning”, as if the other polls aren’t “Democrat-leaning”.
The ups and downs of the [Social Security] trust fund just reflect a change in how we finance spending. While payroll taxes > social security spending, which was the case until 2007, then payroll taxes are financing other spending. When payroll taxes < social security spending, then income taxes or increases in debt are financing social security spending, which (graph below) was the case after 2008.* The trust fund just adds up this change over time. But exhausting the trust fund is, in this view, really irrelevant.
That doesn’t mean we can all go to sleep, for two reasons. First, when payroll taxes < Social Security outlays, and the trust fund is winding down, then income taxes or additional public debt must finance the shortfall. The government has to spend less on other things, raise income tax receipts, or borrow which means raising future taxes. And, per the graph, the numbers are not small. 1% of GDP is $230 billion. The extra strain on income taxes, other spending, or debt, happens right now, when the trust fund is positive but decreasing.
Zero matters only because by law, when the trust fund goes to zero, Social Security payments must be automatically cut to match Social Security taxes. That’s the sudden drop in the graph. The program was set up as if the trust fund were buying stocks and bonds, real assets, and would not lay claim on income tax revenues. But it was not; social security taxes were used to cover other spending, and now income taxes must start to pay social security benefits.
What happens when the trust fund runs out, then? Congress has a choice: automatically cut benefits, as shown, or change the law so that the government can pay Social Security benefits from income taxes, or, more realistically, by issuing ever more debt, until the bond vigilantes come. (Or raise payroll taxes, or reform the whole mess.) I bet on change the law….
* In the end,
payroll taxes + income & other taxes + increase in public debt = Social Security spending + other spending.
The trust fund nets out. [See my post, “Social Security: A Primer”, for a thorough explanation of why the trust fund is a fiction.]
It is extremely unlikely that Congress and the president (regardless of party) will allow benefits to be cut. It is extremely likely that the law will be changed so that scheduled benefits can be paid in full. The resulting addition to the federal deficit, as Cochrane says, will be funded by higher income taxes and/or (more likely) the issuance of more debt. (There’s also the possibility of collecting more payroll taxes from high-income earners, but that would be a symbolic gesture with little practical effect on the government’s overall deficit.)
Social Security benefits will be left untouched regardless of the consequences for the cost of funding the government’s debt (i.e., interest payments) or the inflationary effects of a larger debt (monetization by the Fed). The very last thing that Congress and the president (whoever he/she is) will allow is a reduction in schedule benefits (except possibly for “the rich”.) (When I say “very last thing”, I mean that even if World War III occurs, Social Security benefits will remain intact.)
A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) puts the whole thing in perspective:
Primary Deficit and Total Budget Deficit, Actual and Projected
In GAO’s simulation, increasing primary deficits are driving spending and revenue trends.
Spending: Medicare, other federal health care programs, and Social Security are requiring an increasingly large share of federal resources. Under GAO’s simulation, spending for both major federal health care programs and Social Security would account for 85 percent of projected revenue in 2050, up from 63 percent in 2019.
Revenue: Average annual revenue as a share of GDP was lower over the last 20 years than in prior decades. From 2000 to 2021, revenue averaged 16.8 percent of GDP annually, compared to annual average of 17.9 percent of GDP between 1980 and 2000.
Given the way things have been going and will continue to go, the depletion of the mythical Social Security trust fund will be a fiscal non-event. And it won’t have any effect on Social Security benefits.
“Section 230” refers to Section 230 of the 1996 Federal Communications Decency Act, relevant portions of which are reproduced at the bottom of this post. As an article at The American Spectator explains, Section 230
protects online platforms from legal liability for the comments, posts, and videos that users share on social media. Currently, one may sue the person who posts inflammatory or defamatory content but not the companies that own the platforms. Without Section 230, Google, Facebook, and YouTube would face an endless sea of litigation.
What’s not to like about that? Well, the same article offers some dire predictions:
If the legal code treats social media platforms like traditional publishers, then they would face a choice: they could either strictly police content or stop policing it at all. Social media users would find two types of resulting platforms: a) those that are highly moderated and would, of course, anger virtually everyone (and conservatives especially), and b) those that would quickly resemble one’s spam file or an open sewer.
Are there other ways of regulating internet platforms to deter censorship of conservative points of view, either directly (through algorithms and human intervention) or by using excuses such as “disinformation” (i.e., facts and opinions that the operators of platforms don’t like)?
any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected….
The phrases are “otherwise objectionable” and “whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” give platform operators carte-blanche to censor anything. And given the “liberal” bent of most platform operators, they will censor almost anything that seems to pose a serious threat to leftist dogmas and projects, the First Amendment to the contrary notwithstanding.
Why is the First Amendment relevant? Doesn’t it apply only to government? No, it also applies to private actors who are in fact state actors doing the bidding of the state with its encouragement and acquiescence. This is from a piece by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld in The Wall Street Journal (“Save the Constitution from Big Tech“, January 11, 2021):
Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to regulate content because they are private, and the First Amendment protects only against government censorship. That view is wrong: Google, Facebook and Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines. Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.
It is “axiomatic,” the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s what Congress did by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so….
Section 230 is the carrot, and there’s also a stick: Congressional Democrats have repeatedly made explicit threats to social-media giants if they failed to censor speech those lawmakers disfavored [emphasis and link added]. In April 2019, Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond warned Facebook and Google that they had “better” restrict what he and his colleagues saw as harmful content or face regulation: “We’re going to make it swift, we’re going to make it strong, and we’re going to hold them very accountable.” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler added: “Let’s see what happens by just pressuring them.”
Such threats have worked. In September 2019, the day before another congressional grilling was to begin, Facebook announced important new restrictions on “hate speech.” It’s no accident that big tech took its most aggressive steps against Mr. Trump just as Democrats were poised to take control of the White House and Senate. Prominent Democrats promptly voiced approval of big tech’s actions, which Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal expressly attributed to “a shift in the political winds.”
Moreover, as the “Twitter files” exposé demonstrates vividly, Big Tech is sometimes nothing more than a puppet whose strings are pulled by agencies of the federal government (CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice in particular). It is not a coincidence that the string-pulling is intended to subvert candidates, facts, and opinions opposed to the left’s politicians and policies.
Section 230, as it stands, gives Big Tech (and its satellites) a license to censor on behalf of the state. The language of Norwood v. Harrison quoted above, though seemingly dispositive, is drawn from a district-court opinion in a civil-rights case from the 1960s. It is imperative, therefore, that a case be brought to the Supreme Court that directly challenges censorship conducted by Big Tech (and its satellites) behind the cloak of Section 230. (Two recentlyargued cases involving Big Tech are unlikely to go to the heart of the problem: platform operators as state actors.)
Absent a definitive Supreme Court ruling that bars censorship by state actors, Section 230 can be reformed only when (and if) Congress and the White House are controlled by Republicans. The Catch-22 is that absent a substantive revision of Section 230, Big Tech will still hold censorship power that can thwart the GOP’s efforts to regain control of the federal government.
In any event, the fix is relatively simple (in my opinion). The language of Section 230 should be changed as follows, with deletions indicated by strikethroughs and additions indicated by boldface:
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer serviceinternet platform shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer serviceinternet platform shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionabledefamatory of a non-public person or persons, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1); except that
(C)a provider or user of an internet platform may be held liable for any action taken to restrict access to or availability of material for any reason other than those listed in paragraph (2)(A); and
(D) a provider or user of an internet platform may be held liable for denying or restricting the technical means of accessing the material described in paragraph (1) unless the means are denied or restricted for a reason listed in paragraph (2)(A) or for non-payment of a fee that is applicable to all similarly situated providers or users.
The substitution of “internet platform” for “interactive computer service” is intended to reflect the significant changes in the composition of internet entities during the past 27 years. The definition would be changed accordingly:
The term “interactive computer service”“internet platform” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions. “Internet platform” also means any website or means of communication which is accessed through the Internet and which provides or enables communication among users, the sale of products and services, or the exchange and dispensation of news, facts, opinions, or other expressions of ideas and points of view.
The revisions are aimed at the four types of platform that are at the center of this controversy, plus a fifth type that provides the means by which the other four operate:
True social-media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), which afford users a way in which to communicate photos, videos, personal notes, family news, notifications of upcoming events, opinions, etc., with other users.
Commercial platforms (e.g., Amazon and Yelp), which offer products and services for sale and, crucially, also provide venues in which users of products and services may rate and review them.
Providers of information (e.g., Google, Wikipedia, and the internet arms of traditional media companies like The New York Times and NBC), which consists either of “hits” on internet sources deemed relevant to a user’s query, user-generated and user-edited articles purporting to provide authoritative information on a wide range of subjects, or content that is open to comment by subscribers and/or the general public.
Platforms that host blogs (e.g., WordPress and Substack), some of which allow comments by readers and some of which don’t.
Providers of the internet’s hardware and software infrastructure (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, GoDaddy, and Microsoft).
All such platforms already have in place mechanisms for deleting material and banning users in violation of terms of service, including sub-rosa terms of service that are anti-conservative. I cannot see how the changes that I have proposed would lead to the bifurcation dreaded by The American Spectator:
“highly moderated” platforms “that would, of course, anger virtually everyone (and conservatives especially), and “those [platforms] that would quickly resemble one’s spam file or an open sewer.”
In fact, nothing would change but the ability to publish and read more content that advances conservative views and scientific evidence against such things as mask-and-vaccinate theater, widespread lockdowns, school closures, “gender affirming care”, the psychological damage wrought by abortion, the foolishness and economic devastation caused by “climate change” hysteria — and on and on and on.
What about “misinformation”? True misinformation is all around us, all the time. The left is a leading purveyor of it. The only way to eliminate misinformation is to cripple the search for truth. That, of course, is precisely what the left wants to do because “misinformation”, as used by the left, really means facts and opinions that threaten leftist dogmas and programs.
(1) The rapidly developing array of Internet and other interactive computer services available to individual Americans represent an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources to our citizens.
(2) These services offer users a great degree of control over the information that they receive, as well as the potential for even greater control in the future as technology develops.
(3) The Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.
(2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation;
(3) to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;
(4) to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children’s access to objectionable or inappropriate online material; and
(5) to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish trafficking in obscenity, stalking, and harassment by means of computer.
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
(d) Obligations of interactive computer service
A provider of interactive computer service shall, at the time of entering an agreement with a customer for the provision of interactive computer service and in a manner deemed appropriate by the provider, notify such customer that parental control protections (such as computer hardware, software, or filtering services) are commercially available that may assist the customer in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Such notice shall identify, or provide the customer with access to information identifying, current providers of such protections.
(e) Effect on other laws
(1)No effect on criminal law
Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 [pertains to obscene or harassing phone calls] or 231 [pertains to restriction of access by minors] of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.
The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.
The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.
“Climate change” and “systemic (or systematic) racism”, taken together, seem to explain just about every economic and social problem facing “people of color”. Jane Fonda isn’t the only person who believes such nonsense.
Here’s the latest on the race front from Fox News:
Stars gathered in London for the 2023 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) awards Sunday, a star-studded night later doused by social media users who called out one glaring aspect of the event – every single winner was White.
“Don’t be surprised by #BaftasSoWhite 2023. Film & TV in particular, and the “creative industries” in general, are amongst the most systemically racist when it comes to employment practices. The awards merely reflect this,” film and TV professional Riaz Meer tweeted early Tuesday.
Regarding “systemic racism”, I will repeat myself:
Blacks, on the whole, are not where they are because of whitey, but because of their genes and culture.
Consider the experience of Latinos in America. Latinos are also “persons of color”. They are not only more intelligent than blacks, on average, but they are also, on average, harder working, more self-reliant, and more observant of traditional morality. Instead of whining about their fate, Latinos do something about it.
Consider Jews, who have been subjected to violence and discrimination in this country. (And many of them are survivors and descendants of the Holocaust, which puts slavery in the shade.) Jews are where they are — generally more prosperous, learned, and respected than blacks — because of their genes and culture.
It speaks volumes that the proponents of CRT want to blame not only white slave-holders and white segregationists for the plight of blacks, but also schoolchildren whose only sin is “whiteness”. For shame.
What does that have to do with the BAFTA awards? Not a damn thing, I admit.
The omission of blacks from this year’s list of BAFTA honorees simply suggests another fact of life that the anti-racist industry wouldn’t want to acknowledge: When it comes to acting, script writing, and producing films of high quality — and doing those things in a way that appeals to wide audiences — perhaps white have an advantage over blacks.
As an aside, I consider British films and TV fare to be decidedly better than their American counterparts with respect to acting, writing, and production. Does that make me a “system anti-American”?
Like Marjorie Taylor Greene (and many others), I am a staunch proponent of a national divorce. This is from my post of July 15, 2022:
The loss of the House in November 2022 and (very possibly) the Senate and White House in November 2024 will only intensify the left’s rage. Perhaps — like New England and the abolitionists of two centuries ago — Deep-Blue States will instigate a secession movement.
It would be wise, at that point, for those States with strong conservative governance to propose a national divorce. Leftists could have their own way in their part of the continent, and conservatives could be left in peace in their part of the continent. Let’s call these groupings Governmentland and Freedomland.
There would be some messy details to sort out. Foremost among them would be the question of defense. But it seems to me that if Governmentland shirks its share of the burden, Freedomland could easily afford a robust defense after having shed the many useless departments and agencies — and their policies — that burden taxpayers and the economy.
Further, a Freedomland foreign policy that is unfettered from the United Nations, and based on strength rather than diplomacy, would be a refreshing and fruitful departure from eight decades of feckless interventionism.
Because Freedomland would exist to foster the freedom and prosperity of its own citizens, it would have strict controls on entry. Visitors and temporary workers would vetted and strictly monitored. Prospective immigrants (including those from Governmentland) would be kept out by physical and electronic barriers, and would be vetted before they enter the country. Citizenship would be granted only after an applicant has demonstrated his ability to support himself (and his family if he has one in country), perhaps with the help of churches and charitable organizations. Non-citizens would be ineligible to vote, of course, and would have to have been citizens for 10 years before they are allowed to vote. (By that time one would hope that they would have been weaned from any allegiance to or dependence on a nanny state.)
What about trade between Governmentland and Freedomland? Self-sufficiency should be the watchword for Freedomland. It should not outsource energy, technology, or other products and services that are essential to defense. Some outsourcing may be necessary in the beginning, but there should be a deliberate movement toward self-sufficiency.
Freedomland’s constitution could be modeled on this one, though with some revisions to accommodate points made above.
Finally, why is a national divorce a matter of urgency? Complete victory for the enemies of liberty is only ever a few elections away. The squishy center of the American electorate — as is its wont — will eventually swing back toward the Democrat Party. With a competent Democrat in the White House, a Congress that is firmly controlled by Democrats, and a few party switches in the Supreme Court, the dogmas of the left will be stamped upon the land; for example:
Billions and trillions of additional dollars will be wasted on various “green” projects, including but far from limited to the complete replacement of fossil fuels by “renewables”, with the resulting impoverishment of most Americans, except for comfortable elites who press such policies).
It will be illegal to criticize, even by implication, such things as abortion, illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, or the confiscation of firearms. These cherished beliefs will be mandated for school and college curricula, and enforced by huge fines and draconian prison sentences (sometimes in the guise of “re-education”).
Any hint of Christianity and Judaism will be barred from public discourse, and similarly punished. Other religions will be held up as models of unity and tolerance.
Reverse discrimination in favor of females, blacks, Hispanics, gender-confused persons, and other “protected” groups will become overt and legal. But “protections” will not apply to members of such groups who are suspected of harboring libertarian or conservative impulses.
Sexual misconduct will become a crime, and any male person may be found guilty of it on the uncorroborated testimony of any female who claims to have been the victim of an unwanted glance, touch (even if accidental), innuendo (as perceived by the victim), etc.
There will be parallel treatment of the “crimes” of racism, anti-immigrationism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism.
All health care in the United States will be subject to review by a national, single-payer agency of the central government. Private care will be forbidden, though ready access to doctors, treatments, and medications will be provided for high officials and other favored persons. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace (like that of the UK) will be shrugged off as a residual effect of “capitalist” health care.
The regulatory regime will rebound with a vengeance, contaminating every corner of American life and regimenting all businesses except those daring to operate in an underground economy. The quality and variety of products and services will decline as their real prices rise as a fraction of incomes.
The dire economic effects of single-payer health care and regulation will be compounded by massive increases in other kinds of government spending (defense excepted). The real rate of economic growth will approach zero.
The United States will maintain token armed forces, mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Given its economically destructive independence from foreign oil and its depressed economy, it will become a simulacrum of the USSR and Mao’s China — and not a rival to the new superpowers, Russia and China, which will largely ignore it as long as it doesn’t interfere in their pillaging of respective spheres of influence. A policy of non-interference (i.e., tacit collusion) will be the order of the era in Washington.
Though it would hardly be necessary to rig elections in favor of Democrats, given the flood of illegal immigrants who will pour into the country and enjoy voting rights, a way will be found to do just that. The most likely method will be election laws requiring candidates to pass ideological purity tests by swearing fealty to the “law of the land” (i.e., abortion, unfettered immigration, same-sex marriage, freedom of gender choice for children, etc., etc., etc.). Those who fail such a test will be barred from holding any kind of public office, no matter how insignificant.
Are my fears exaggerated? I doubt it. I have lived long enough and seen enough changes in the political and moral landscape of the United States to know that what I have sketched out can easily happen within a decade after Democrats seize total control of the national government. And it can happen given the fickleness of the electorate.
Now comes David Harsanyi to argue, disapointingly, against a national divorce at The Federalist. His statements (in italics) are followed by my responses (in bold).
Generally speaking, I’m sympathetic to the idea that the political left is congenitally unable to accept a truly diverse nation. Virtually every legislative policy proposal from modern Democrats — and every policy issued by edict — strengthens federal power and economic control over states. Modern Democrats are champions of direct democracy, in an effort to undercut the choices of local communities and individuals. When they don’t get their way, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy steps in to circumvent the will of states. And when courts stop them, Democrats delegitimize and work to weaken the judiciary.
I couldn’t put it better. But …
None of that means a “national divorce” — really secession, since other states are unlikely to concede to a split — isn’t a reckless thing for someone who took a vow to defend the Constitution to advocate.
First, as I have suggested, there may well be a time when the left would agree to a split, out of frustration with a conservative resurgence. In that case, the issue wouldn’t be secession but, rather, how to negotiate a partition of the country. Second, it is not an abandonment of the Constitution to propound a negotiated separation; it is, rather, a defense of the Constitution to seek its preservation in a significant part of the nation. Third, the Constitution doesn’t bar secession, if it came to that. (Chapter and verse about the constitutionality of secession can be found here.)
We aren’t separated ideologically into large geographic regions or even states, but rather urban, suburban, and rural areas.
So? A national divorce wouldn’t have to result in a division of the country that preserves existing State boundaries. But even if it did (and probably would), is it somehow worse to have the citizens of Austin, Texas, live in Freedomland than to have all of Texas subject to the dictates of a hard-left national government?
[W]here will Greene’s Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020 and now has two left-wing senators, end up in this split? How about purple states like Virginia or New Hampshire? Will we have 50 separate referendums? Will there be population exchanges like the one India and Pakistan undertook in 1947? If history is any indication, it’s the kind of situation that leads to political violence and economic ruin.
Greene, and everyone else who lives in a purple State, will just have to battle for a favorable outcome. But whatever it is, there will be a bunch of States that aren’t under the thumb of a hard-left national government.
And, you know, you already have the freedom to move about the nation and find a place that suits your lifestyle and politics.
But, no matter where one lives, it has become impossible to escape the dictates of D.C.’s denizens. And it will only get worse when they attain full and firm control of the central government.
The instinct of the American public is to split power. The organic state of a divided nation is glorious gridlock — which is why the 10th Amendment exists. Now, it’s also true that leftists struggle with the notion of letting people in red states think, speak, and live in ways they dislike. There is a national political and cultural effort to homogenize us. And when Republicans appropriate the existing local power Democrats have used for decades to implement their own choices — as Ron DeSantis has done in Florida — leftists act as if we’re on the precipice of a dictatorship. But they have no power to stop him. Only Florida voters do. This is why federalism exists. It is why some states thrive and others don’t. And federalism is not only a more desirable solution than breaking the country into two, but also far more feasible.
Gridlock never seems to last very long. And the 10th Amendment has become about as relevant as a buggy whip. Harsanyi then goes on (again) to admit the problem, which is the left’s dictatorial impulse. Yes, it’s good that there is a DeSantis (and others like him), but he (and his like) will be unable to survive the eventual all-out onslaught by the left. Get out while the getting’s good.
I’ll stop there. The rest of Harsanyi’s piece is wishy-washy nicey-nicey pablum.
Winston Churchill said, “An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last.” I say that a person who promotes pacifism as state policy is one who offers himself and his fellow citizens as crocodile food.
Bryan Caplan, an irritating twit who professes economics at George Mason University, is an outspoken pacifist. He is also an outspoken advocate of open borders.
Caplan, like Linus of Peanuts, loves mankind; it’s people he can’t stand. In fact, his love of mankind isn’t love at all, but rather a kind of utilitarianism in which the “good of all” somehow outweighs the specific (though by no means limited) harms caused by lying down at an enemy’s feet or enabling illegal immigrants to feed at the public trough.
I don’t like Caplan. I think he doesn’t understand – can’t understand – human nature, and although that sometimes confers a different and interesting perspective, it’s not a royal road to truth. Nor would I want to share a foxhole with him: I don’t trust him.
That’s it, in a nutshell. Caplan’s pacifism reflects his untrustworthiness. He is a selective anti-tribalist:
I identify with my nuclear family, with my friends, and with a bunch of ideas. I neither need nor want any broader identity. I was born in America to a Democratic Catholic mother and a Republican Jewish father, but none of these facts define me. When Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Catholics, and Jews commit misdeeds – as they regularly do – I feel no shame and offer no excuses. Why? Because I’m not with them.
Hollow words from man who, in large part, owes his freedom and comfortable life to the armed forces and police of the country that he disdains. And — more fundamentally — to the mostly peaceful and productive citizens in whose midst he lives, and whose taxes support the armed forces and police.
Caplan is a man out of place. His attitude toward his country would be justified if he lived in the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, or any number of other nation-states past and present. His family, friends, and “bunch of ideas” will be of little help to him when, say, Kim Jong-un (or his successor) lobs an ICBM in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., which is uncomfortably close to Caplan’s residence and workplace.
In his many writings on pacifism, Caplan has pooh-poohed the idea that “if you want peace, prepare for war”:
This claim is obviously overstated. Is North Korea really pursuing the smart path to peace by keeping almost 5% of its population on active military duty? How about Hitler’s rearmament? Was the Soviet Union preparing for peace by spending 15-20% of its GDP on the Red Army?
Note the weasel-word, “overstated”, which gives Caplan room to backtrack in the face of evidence that preparedness for war can foster peace by deterring an enemy. (The defense buildup in the 1980s is arguably such a case, in which the Soviet Union was not only deterred but also brought to its knees.) Weasel-wording is typical of Caplan’s method of argumentation. He is harder to pin down than Jell-O.
In any event, Caplan’s pronouncement only attests to the fact that there are aggressive people and regimes out there, and that non-aggressors are naïve to believe that those people and regimes will not attack you if you are not armed against them.
The wisdom of preparedness is nowhere better illustrated than in the world of the internet, where every innocent user is a target for the twisted and vicious purveyors of malware. Think of the millions of bystanders (myself included) whose sensitive personal information has been scooped by breachesof massive databases. Internet predators differ from armed ones only in their choice of targets and weapons, not in their essential disregard for the lives and property of others.
Interestingly, although Caplan foolishly decries preparedness, he isn’t against retaliation (which seems a strange position for a pacifist):
[D]oesn’t pacifism contradict the libertarian principle that people have a right to use retaliatory force? No. I’m all for revenge against individual criminals. My claim is that in practice, it is nearly impossible to wage war justly, i.e., without trampling on the rights of the innocent.
Why is it “nearly impossible to wage war justly”? Caplan puts it this way:
1. The immediate costs of war are clearly awful. Most wars lead to massive loss of life and wealth on at least one side. If you use a standard value of life of $5M, every 200,000 deaths is equivalent to a trillion dollars of damage.
2. The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain. Some wars – most obviously the Napoleonic Wars and World War II – at least arguably deserve credit for decades of subsequent peace. But many other wars – like the French Revolution and World War I – just sowed the seeds for new and greater horrors. You could say, “Fine, let’s only fight wars with big long-run benefits.” In practice, however, it’s very difficult to predict a war’s long-run consequences. One of the great lessons of Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment is that foreign policy experts are much more certain of their predictions than they have any right to be.
3. For a war to be morally justified, its long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs. I call this “the principle of mild deontology.” Almost everyone thinks it’s wrong to murder a random person and use his organs to save the lives of five other people. For a war to be morally justified, then, its (innocent lives saved/innocent lives lost) ratio would have to exceed 5:1. (I personally think that a much higher ratio is morally required, but I don’t need that assumption to make my case).
It would seem that Caplan is not entirely opposed to war — as long as the ratio of lives saved to lives lost is acceptably high. But Caplan gets to choose the number of persons who may die for the sake of those who may thus live. He wears his God-like omniscience with such modesty.
Caplan’s soul-accountancy implies a social-welfare function, wherein A’s death cancels B’s survival. I wonder if Caplan would feel the same way if A were Osama bin Laden (before 9/11) and B were Bryan Caplan or one of his family members or friends? He would feel the same way if he were a true pacifist. But he is evidently not one. His pacifism is selective, and his arguments for it are slippery.
What Caplan wants, I suspect, is the best of both worlds: freedom and prosperity for himself (and family members and friends) without the presence of police and armed forces, and the messy (but unavoidable) business of using them. Using them is an imperfect business; mistakes are sometimes made. It is the mistakes that Caplan (and his ilk) cringe against because they indulge in the nirvana fallacy. In this instance, it is a belief that there is a more-perfect world to be had if only “we” would forgo violence. Which gets us back to Caplan’s unwitting admission that there are people out there who will do bad things even if they aren’t provoked.
National defense, like anything less than wide-open borders, violates another of Caplan’s pernicious principles. He seems to believe that the tendency of geographically proximate groups to band together in self-defense is a kind of psychological defect. He refers to it as “group-serving bias”.
That’s just a pejorative term which happens to encompass mutual self-defense. And who better to help you defend yourself than the people with whom you share space, be it a neighborhood, a city-state, a principality, or even a vast nation? As a member of one or the other, you may be targeted for harm by outsiders who wish to seize your land and control your wealth, or who simply dislike your way of life, even if it does them no harm.
Would it be “group-serving bias” if Caplan were to provide for the defense of his family members (and even some friends) by arming them if they happened to live in a high-crime neighborhood? If he didn’t provide for their defense, he would quickly learn the folly of pacifism, as family members and friends are robbed, maimed, and killed.
Pacifism is a sophomoric fantasy on a par with anarchism. It is sad to see Caplan’s intelligence wasted on the promulgation and defense of such a fantasy.
I have written much about the economic and social damage wrought by state action. In this post, I step back from particular instances of state action to explain, in general terms, how it damages the economic and social infrastructure that it is supposed to protect.
I begin with discussions of economic and social behavior and their intertwining. When I have laid that groundwork, I explain the destructiveness of state action when it goes beyond the protection of life, liberty, and property.
ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
There is more to economic behavior than production and exchange at arm’s length. But it is those aspects of economic behavior that usually come to mind when one refers to “economics”. In the narrow view, economic behavior has these facets:
Sellers, anticipating demand from buyers, offer a variety of goods and services at prices that are calculated (roughly or precisely) to warrant the continued production of those goods and services.
Buyers allocate their disposable (after-tax) incomes among the various goods and services (and saving, where possible) according to their personal tastes and preferences, which are influenced by many things (e.g., socioeconomic status, family status, and cultural heritage).
Buyers and sellers interact in “markets” — physical or virtual places — where they fix the exact prices and quantities of goods and services changing hands. (Where sellers don’t bargain on price, their returns are driven by the quantities that buyers are willing to take at set price.)
Quantities and prices change across time, as tastes and preferences change; as goods and services change because of invention, innovation, and variations in resource prices; and as government intervention varies in type and intensity (usually waxing rather than waning).
All of these actions occur dynamically through time.
The main characteristic of economic behavior is its transactional nature. Two or more parties agree to exchange things (goods, money, other stores of value) in an effort by each party to gain satisfaction, pleasure, happiness, or utility (call it what you will). Transactional behavior is an aspect of some kinds of social behavior, in that it is cooperative and meant to be mutually beneficial. (There are kinds of social behavior — murder, theft, battery, etc. — which are neither cooperative nor mutually beneficial.)
ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR AS SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
The kinds of economic behavior listed above typically are studied as “economics,” which — until recent decades — was limited mainly to the explicit exchange of goods for goods or goods for money. But such transactions are not the whole of economic behavior, and are far from the whole of social behavior.
Some kinds of transactional behavior are considered deeply personal — and they are deeply personal — but they involve exchange, nonetheless. One such behavior is friendship; another is sex; a third is loyalty:
Friendship is mutual, so its economic nature should need no explanation.
So is sex mutual, when it is consensual. It may be given for many reasons other than monetary gain, but it is transactional: persons giving each other pleasure.
Loyalty arises from a kind of tacit exchange; that is, loyalty-inducing acts yield loyalty, which can be drawn upon (or not) at the behest of the person who commits loyalty-inducing acts. Loyalty may accompany friendship, but it also may exist apart from friendship.
These and other kinds of “personal” acts are not usually considered to be economic in nature, for three reasons: (a) the medium of exchange is far removed from money (or anything like it); (b) the transactions are so idiosyncratic as to defy the usual statistical-mathematical reductionism of economics; and (c) the transactions are far removed in character from, say, the buying and selling of potatoes. They have emotional content that is of a different kind than, say, allegiance to a particular make of automobile or brand of potato chips.
The distinction between economic and social behavior has almost vanished with the rise of behavioral economics. This brand of economics focuses on the psychological determinants of economic behavior. There is much research and speculation about how and why individuals choose as they do, not only in the spending of money but also in other, more “personal”, types of social interaction.
Formal economics aside, the essential character of economic behavior is, as I have said, transactional. Economic transactions — even those that are deeply personal — are cooperative. But not all social behavior is transactional. In that subtle distinction lies the difference between economic behavior and “pure” social behavior.
“PURE” SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
What is “pure” social behavior? A good example can be found in religion. Certainly, religion has transactional aspects, as in the “giving” of one’s belief in the hope of a heavenly afterlife. But religion, for billions of persons, is much more than that. So is sex in a loving marriage. So friendship can be.
What is this deeper aspect of “pure”, non-transactional (non-economic) social behavior? It is rooted in the capacity of humans for self-generated emotional satisfaction. This can manifest itself as a unidirectional attachment to another person or being, an attachment that does not depend on the actions of its subject. A mundane but not all-encompassing term for it is “unconditional love”. A perhaps more apt term is “needing to belong” to someone or something.
A unidirectional attachment becomes a “pure” social relationship when it is also a shared attachment, as in the case of a loving marriage or a close-knit family. These may encompass transactional relationships, but the bonds between the parties are deeply emotional and transcendent.
Other “pure” social relationships are possible. Especially those that are based on something above and beyond personal relationships. These include membership in a religion, a club, a patriotic organization, or even a neighborhood, where the attachment is to the neighborhood itself, instead of or in addition to neighborly friendships. Membership in such organizations — the feeling of belonging to something “bigger” than oneself — can complement and heighten the underlying unidirectional attachment felt by each member.
POLITICS
Politics, as I use the term here, is simply an aspect of social behavior. It is the working out of the rules (signals, customs, taboos) and roles that individual persons adopt in transactional and “pure” social relationships.
Some rules may be confined to particular relationships; others may spread widely through emulation and necessity. Necessity arises when there is a network of transactional and “pure” social relationships that comprises disparate local sub-groups. Common rules, in such a case, help to ensure that members are recognized, and that their behavior is consistent with the purpose of the social network.
Rules range from the use of secret handshakes (to signal membership in a particular organization) to shunning (as a signal that the target has been ejected from a particular social organization). In between, there are things like religious symbolism (e.g., the way in which the Sign of the Cross is made), deportment (stiff upper lip, and all that), the use of drugs (or not), and myriad other tokens of membership in the overlapping social groupings that comprise humanity. Such groupings include the fraternity of individualists, who despite their individualism, share an allegiance to it and the justifications for it.
Roles denote one’s standing in a social group. Roles are determined by rules and signaled by the observance of certain of them. The role of a wife in many cultures, for example, was (and remains) overt subservience to the edicts of the husband. Subservience is signaled by the observance of rules that include, for example, standing while the husband eats his meal, and eating only when he has finished. The extent to which a particular wife is truly subservient to her husband — bowing to his political judgments or, alternatively, influencing them — is a political matter that lies between them and depends very much on the persons involved.
Here, I must digress about the difference between voluntarily evolved social distinctions and dominance by force. Busybodies are quick to adopt the view that outward signs of subservience — and similar social phenomena that seem to create classes of individuals — indicate the forceful imposition of rules and roles. Busybodies, in other words, cannot (or do not wish to) tell the difference between something as abhorrent as slavery and a time-honored rule or role that, by facilitating social behavior, saves time and effort and reduces the likelihood of conflict. The role of a busybody is to question and challenge everything that is not done in the way he would do it; a busybody, in other words, is a person of limited empathy and imagination. (For more about the proper role of the state with respect to social behavior, see “The Principles of Actionable Harm”.)
THE INDIVISIBILITY OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
Everything I have discussed to this point involves real politics: transactions for mutual benefit, within a framework of voluntarily evolved rules and roles, without the imposition or threat of force by the state.
For example, the dietary laws of Judaism, when observed strictly (as they are in certain sects) affect the kinds of foodstuffs that observant Jews will grow, raise, buy, or consume. Those of us who are old enough to remember when the three top-selling makes of automobile in the U.S. were Ford, Chevrolet, and Plymouth will also remember that the choice of which to buy was (in certain socioeconomic circles and age groups) a sign of membership in a loose affiliation of kindred auto owners. More generally, the demand for certain kinds of clothing, electronic equipment, beverages, automobiles, and so on is determined to some extent by socioeconomic status and group membership. Outsiders may mimic insiders in an effort to increase their standing with peers, to signal an aspiration to belong to a certain group, or as a sign of membership in an auxiliary group (e.g., a fan club, or whatever it is called now).
Thus we have real politics as the lubricant of social behavior. And we have economic behavior as an aspect of social behavior.
There is nevertheless a widely held view that economic behavior is distinct from social behavior. But when the state taxes or regulates “economic” activity, it shapes and channels related “social” activity. For example, the family that pays 25 percent of its income in taxes is that much less able to join and support organizations of its choice, to own and exhibit tokens of its socioeconomic status, to afford better education for its children, and so on. The immediate rejoinder will be that nothing has been changed if everyone is affected equally. But because of the complexity of tax laws and regulations, everyone is not affected equally. Moreover, even if everyone were deprived equally of the same kind of thing — a superior education, say — everyone would be that much worse off by having been deprived of opportunities to acquire remunerative knowledge and skills, productive relationships, and mental stimulation. Similarly, everyone would be that much worse off by being less well clothed, less well housed, and so on. Taxes and regulations, even if they could be applied in some absolutely neutral way (which they can’t be), have an inevitably deleterious effect on individuals.
In sum, there is no dividing line between economic and social behavior. What we call social and economic behavior are indivisible aspects of human striving to fulfill wants, both material and spiritual. The attempt to isolate and restrict one type of behavior is futile. It is all social behavior.
“POWER POLITICS”: OR, ENTER THE STATE
The activity that we usually call “politics” is not politics at all. Real politics, as I have said, is the voluntary working out of rules and roles, in the context of social behavior, which encompasses so-called economic behavior. With voice and exit, those who are unhappy with their lot can try to persuade the other members of their voluntary association to adopt different rules. If they fail, they can choose a more congenial social set (if one is available to them), which may involve moving to a different place. The ability to “vote with one’s feet” is an instrument of persuasion, as well, for it signals the group that one leaves (or credibly threatens to leave) of a defect that may cause others to leave, thus endangering the attainment of the group’s common objective.
What we usually call “politics” is entirely different from true politics. I call it “power politics”. It amounts to this:
A state is established, either by force alone or through a combination of consent, limited to certain social and/or interest groups, and force, imposed on dissenting and uninvolved persons.
The state enjoys a monopoly of force, which it may — in the beginning, at least — apply to limited purposes, usually the defense of its citizens from aggression, intimidation, fraud, and theft.
There is a constant struggle for control of the state, either by force or by the kind of “politics” endemic to the state. The “politics” amounts to non-violent but fierce and often acrimonious struggles for power between and among various social and/or interest groups.
Control of the state enables the winners to override the rules that arise voluntarily through social cooperation. Rules imposed by the state come in the form of statutes, regulations, executive orders, judicial decrees, and administrative decisions.
The effects of the various statutes, etc., are long-lasting because they often are not repealed when power changes hands. Instead, they remain in place, with the result that state power accrues and expands, while — as a result — the scope of social behavior shrinks and becomes less potent.
In other words, power in the hands of the state — and those who control it — is anti-social. Acts of the state are not acts of “society” or “community”. Those terms properly refer to consenting relationships among persons — relationships that are shaped by real politics.
The state, in its ideal form, upholds and defends “society” and “community”. But when it oversteps its legitimate bounds, it commits the very acts of aggression, intimidation, fraud, and theft that it is supposed to deter and prevent. Moreover, it undoes the fabric of “society” and “community” by unraveling the voluntarily evolved social rules that bind them and guide them in peaceful cooperation.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon gathered his top executives in a closed-door meeting last week in Miami. The details of the meeting were leaked to Financial Times. Apparently, Solomon acknowledged his plan to lay off thousands of employees should’ve been enacted sooner.
“As the environment was growing more complicated in Q2 of last year, every bone in my body believed we should be much more aggressive in slowing hiring and reducing headcount,” Solomon said, according to one person with direct knowledge of what was said at the closed event.
Goldman fired 3,200 employees, or about 6.5% of its headcount last month. Many layoffs were in the investment bank’s core trading and banking units. The firings were the largest in its operational history….
Solomon acknowledged at the event that if he were to reduce headcount earlier, such as in early 2022, the number of employees fired would’ve been less drastic.
Twenty-seven years ago and 100 miles from where I am now sitting, I had the same experience. I wasn’t the CEO who dithered. I was the VP who had tried for about a year to get the CEO to agree to layoffs because our company’s main client had cut its demand for our services. I had explained to the CEO, in vain, how many more employees would have to be fired if he delayed his approval of staff reductions on the off-chance of acquiring business elsewhere.
Nothing doing, until the new business didn’t transpire and firings became inevitable.
I ran the division that provided support services to the company (accounting, contracting, personnel, computer programming and computer operations, security, facility operations, document storage and retrieval). The brunt of the firings fell on my division, so as to minimize the firings of analysts who worked directly with the company’s clients.
The “bloodshed” was massive and demoralizing. And far greater and more demoralizing that it would have been if the CEO had been willing to bite the bullet a year earlier.
Where was he when employees were notified of their dismissal? On vacation.
I disrespected him for many reasons, but his handling of the whole affair was the foremost reason.
The story has a happy ending for me (though, unfortunately not for the employees I had to fire). I quit two years after the blood-letting, having a mounted a subtle campaign to arrange the end of my employment on terms favorable to me. The success of the campaign brought a profitable end to my tense relationship with the CEO.
To this day, I am reluctant to reveal the details of the campaign, but I will say this much: I reeled in a big fish by accurately casting an irresistible lure and then playing the fish into my net. The lure was a threat to the CEO’s job that was calculated to invite retaliation against me. I used the (eventual) retaliation to my advantage, having laid the groundwork for that advantage.
The key to the success of my campaign was patience; more than a year passed between my casting of the lure and the netting of the fish (early retirement with a financial sweetener). I celebrate the occasion of my early retirement every year with a toast to myself and a silent curse for the CEO.
The larger lesson to be drawn from my experience is one that Western “democracies” cannot apply because they cannot play the long game that dictatorships can play. The ever-changing cast of characters in “democratic” governments don’t have enough time in which to play a long game. Nor could they do so, even with time on their side, because they are constantly distracted by this and that “crisis” and by the demands of electioneering.
This brings me back to the human cost of dithering. Had “democratic” leaders faced up to the threat of Communism when the Soviet Union was relatively weak, honestly weighed the human and economic costs of waging an inconclusive “cold war”, and taken the initiative against the USSR, the West and the world would be vastly better off today.
The ladder of escalation is an armchair strategist’s concoction. It leads to the frightening final rung: spasm/insensate war — global devastation from an all-out, intercontinental exchange of nuclear weapons.
A more realistic view is that the first nuclear shot, if devastating enough but not too devastating, would be the final nuclear shot. The polity that fires the first shot would attain whatever it sought because the polity that receives the first shot wouldn’t want to retaliate and thereby invite further devastation upon its territory and people.
In the present environment, the polity that fires the first shot might be Russia (to stop U.S.-NATO intervention in its war on Ukraine) or China (to prevent U.S. intervention in its seizure of Taiwan and the South China Sea).
Where do the balloons come in? Suppose they are tests by China of NORAD, the U.S.-Canada early-warning and air-defense system that dates back to the 1950s. Devised originally to deter and defend against Soviet strikes, it serves the same purpose today against a somewhat larger array of potential attackers (Russia, China, North Korea, and eventually Iran).
It’s true that there have been incursions before the recent “spy balloon” incident and its successors. But given the parlous state of U.S.-China relations, these recent incursions could be ominous (in the second meaning of the word).
In addition to Biden’s strange reluctance to shoot down the balloon that spent days over the U.S. (his usual lies to the contrary notwithstanding), there’s his history of military fecklessness: his opposition to the raid that took out bin Laden and his disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The spate of shootdowns after the big-balloon fiasco does nothing (in a potential enemy’s view) to rescue Biden’s reputation. The recent shootdowns would be rightly viewed as p.r. stunts, executed in a vain effort to make Biden look tough.
Even if I’m right about the purpose for the balloon incursions, I’m not suggesting that China is about to throw a missile at the U.S. or a place that the U.S. values. China’s leaders, unlike the West’s, can play the “long game”. What’s done today need not bear fruit for years or decades.
In the meantime, the Chinese have American “leaders” scratching their heads and bickering about what China is up to. On the evidence to date, China’s leaders can proceed with impunity when it’s time to go nuclear. The election of 2024 could well change that view, which suggests that China is likely to act sooner rather than later.
I joined Facebook about 15 years ago. I last posted to it about 5 years ago. My name is still on the account, but only my wife now posts to it. She (technically, me) has three “friends” who are retired teachers. When I take my occasional look at FB, I find long strings of posts by them: cat videos, dog videos, photos of grandchildren, “inspirational” thoughts, etc., etc., etc. My sister is also a “friend”, and she posts the same kind of stuff. If there’s a political slant — and there sometimes is — it’s to the left.
My wife religiously watches NBC Nightly News, a reliable purveyor of doom, gloom, and anti-conservative propaganda. I quit watching network news shows during the Vietnam War, resumed during the Watergate mess, quit again until the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and quit for good after that.
Meanwhile, I keep up with the real world online (I prefer reading to listening and watching) by frequently checking Fox News and my feed-reader. I use the feed-reader to tap into non-mainstream sources of information and opinion. I also have digital subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post for my wife’s benefit. She occasionally sends me a link to a story about literature, the arts, and other (usually non-political) subjects.
My wife and I have a congenial divergence of political views, now that she has finally stopped trying to convert me to the dark side. It also helps that Trump is no longer in the White House because the mere fact of his presence there drove her (and her “friends”) to distraction.
Of the 116 graduates in my high-school class, 54 percent are still living. The graph below traces the survival rate from 1960, the first year in which a graduate died. Also shown, at 5-year intervals, are the expected survival percentages for persons born in 2020 and 1939-41.
Expected survival rates have moved upward to match the longevity of my class, which is far greater than would have been expected when its members were born. The average attained age of class members, living and dead, is 76 years and rising. The average life expectancy of a person born in 2020 is about 80 years. The average life expectancy of class members when they were born in 1939-41 was only 65 years.*
* The life expectancy values are for whites. Our high-school class, like our small city at the time, was all-white. According to the 2010 census, it has remained almost all white; 2.5 percent of the population was non-white and only 0.3 percent of the population was black.
There is a fundamental tenet of law — one that precedes and informs the Constitution — which is that “law” is law only when it serves the general welfare, regardless of its official status as an legislative, executive, or judicial act. Therefore, it is truly unlawful for the national government or any other government in the United States to interfere with the lives, liberty, or property of Americans for the purpose of promoting special interests, however laudable those interests may seem.
And yet, the “laws” under which Americans labor are, in the main, enactments that serve special interests and the power-lust of politicians, bureaucrats, and judges. In sum, I want my country (and its various parts) to return to the true “rule of law,” which is to promote the general welfare by
protecting all Americans from their enemies within and without
ensuring the free movement of all Americans
ensuring the free exchange of goods and services
and nothing more.
An insidious way in which government subverts liberty is by exercising a subtle but powerful form of thought control. It is not the business of government to tell us what to believe or how we must arrive at our beliefs. But government — which puts its imprimatur on the vast majority of educational institutions and much of the “factual” information in many fields of endeavor — does all of those things. Thus, contrary to the intentions of the Founders, we have become a nation imbued with official beliefs about matters ranging from the origins of the universe to the goodness of our enemies to the climatic effects of (puny) human endeavors.
One of the key beliefs instilled by government — directly and through those who are in its thrall — is its beneficent role in our economic and social affairs. It never seems to occur to the proponents of governmental interference — or to its relatively few of its opponents — that there is a living, breathing case study which disproves the beneficence of economic meddling.
When government spending and regulation played a tiny role in the economic affairs of the United States — from the 1790s to around 1900 — inflation-adjusted GDP grew at an annual rate of more than 4 percent. Now, with the regulatory-welfare state fully upon us, inflation- adjusted GDP grows at an annual rate of 2 percent (and falling). The difference between those two rates — when compounded over a generation, a lifetime, or a century — ranges from significantly large to enormous. The road to economic lassitude is paved by the purportedly good intentions of those who tax and regulate us.
Liberty — part of which is the right to make mistakes and benefit from the resulting lessons — is a collateral victim of regulatory zeal. Liberty is a victim of government spending, as well, because it deprives individuals of some portion of the rewards for their labor and capital, and the full enjoyment of those rewards.
With respect to social matters, there is only one way to put it: Government is an enemy of society. Its main mission, when you think about it for more than a minute, is to supplant voluntary and beneficial social arrangements with schemes hatched in the vacuum of intellectualism. It is as if there were nothing to the eons-long learning that is expressed in the Ten Commandments and Golden Rule, and embodied in churches, clubs, and other voluntary, private associations. We must, instead, take our social marching orders from elites, who have their own peculiar views of what is right and just: serial polygamy, pederasty, and infanticide, to name just a few things. The social engineering favored by intellectualoids arises not from the wisdom of tradition, which fosters stable, trusting, and supportive social relationships, but from idle theorizing and a large dose of adolescent and post-adolescent rebellion.
Now, after a more than a century of “progressive” destruction of the Constitution and its restraints on government, Americans no longer enjoy the protection of government and the self-policing restraints of social custom. Instead, Americans suffer the fads and whims of the self-anointed, whose legacy lingers after their departure from the scene.
Now, after more than a century of “progressive” interference in the economic affairs of Americans, our progeny face unaffordable financial commitments, which they will be expected to honor even as their standard of living withers under the assault of taxation and regulation.
Now, after more than a century of social experimentation in which anti-social behavior has been exalted and long-standing social arrangements and institutions have been stripped of their authority, too many Americans are bereft of a moral anchor. They wallow, instead, in the realms of drug-abuse, dangerous sexual experimentation, moral obtuseness, and dependence on Big Brother.
In “Our Enemy, the State”, I explain that economic behavior is just an aspect of social behavior. The long-standing treatment of economics as a statistical-mathematical phenomenon exemplifies the rationalism that dominates “learned” discourse. It is my sad duty to report that “liberals” do not hold a monopoly on rationalism.
A rationalist, as Michael Oakeshott explains,
never doubts the power of his ‘reason … to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action. Moreover, he is fortified by a belief in a ‘reason’ common to all mankind, a common power of rational consideration….
… And having cut himself off from the traditional knowledge of his society, and denied the value of any education more extensive than a training in a technique of analysis, he is apt to attribute to mankind a necessary inexperience in all the critical moments of life, and if he were more self-critical he might begin to wonder how the race had ever succeeded in surviving. [“Rationalism in Politics,” pp. 5-7, as republished in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays.]
Thomas Sowell puts it this way:
One of the things intellectuals [his rationalists] have been doing for a long time is loosening the bonds that hold a society [or a nation] together. They have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, have long been treated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia….
Under the influence of the intelligentsia, we have become a society that rewards people with admiration for violating its own norms and for fragmenting that society into jarring segments. In addition to explicit denigrations of their own society for its history or current shortcomings, intellectuals often set up standards for their society which no society has ever met or is likely to meet. [Intellectuals and Society, pp. 303, 305.]
Sowell’s attack is aimed at left-wing intellectuals, but it could just as well be aimed at pseudo-libertarian sophists.
Nowhere is the rationalist mindset more evident than in a contribution by “libertarian” Brink Lindsey to a Reason debate, “Where Do Libertarians Belong?” Lindsey argues that libertarians — as he defines them — should once and for all back away from Republicans and conservatives:
[A] clear-eyed look at conservatism as a whole reveals a political movement with no realistic potential for advancing individual freedom. The contemporary right is so deeply under the sway of its most illiberal impulses that they now define what it means to be a conservative.
What are those impulses?
First and foremost, a raving, anti-intellectual populism, as expressed by (among many, many others) Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Next, a brutish nationalism, as expressed in anti-immigrant xenophobia (most recently on display in Arizona) and it’s-always-1938-somewhere jingoism. And, less obvious now but always lurking in the background, a dogmatic religiosity, as expressed in homophobia, creationism, and extremism on beginning- and end-of-life issues. The combined result is a right-wing identity politics that feeds on the red meat of us versus them, “Real America” versus the liberal-dominated coasts, faith and gut instinct versus pointy-headed elitism.
Lindsey, in his next (metaphorical) breath, confirms his identity as a pointy-headed elitist and a rationalist, to boot:
This noxious stew of reaction and ressentiment is the antithesis of libertarianism. The spirit of freedom is cosmopolitan. It is committed to secularism in political discourse, whatever religious views people might hold privately. And it coolly upholds reason against the swirl of interests and passions. History is full of ironies and surprises, but there is no rational basis for expecting an outlook as benighted as the contemporary right’s to produce policy results that libertarians can cheer about.
And yet, just a few paragraphs earlier, Lindsey was cheering:
Without a doubt, libertarians should be happy that the Democrats’ power grabs have met with such vociferous opposition. Anything that can stop this dash toward dirigisme, or at least slow it down, is a good thing. Seldom has there been a better time to stand athwart history and yell “Stop!” So we should rejoice that at least some conservatives haven’t forgotten their signature move.
To put it baldly, Lindsey wants to piggy-back on conservatism’s renewed resistance to big government, but he wants to be sure that no one mistakes him for a Palin-esque, Beck-ish kind of conservative. Have no fear on that score, Mr. Lindsey, for you are not even a libertarian worthy of the name. You have revealed yourself as a politically correct, pseudo-libertarian, thought-nazi.
Is it not a tenet of libertarianism that people ought to be free to speak their minds, so that their listeners can make up their own minds about the issues under discussion? Why then, should anyone — libertarian or otherwise — stifle his views about religion and matters related thereto? In order to save you the embarrassment of hearing about things you don’t want to hear about? How libertarian of you!
Let us examine the robustness of Lindsey’s objections to the Palin-esque, Beck-ish side of conservatism:
“a raving, anti-intellectual populism” — I don’t know about the “raving,” but if it is anti-intellectual to resist and criticize the emissions of the leftist-dominated academy, the leading lights of which have resulted in the bloodless near-victory of communism, anti-intellectualism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
“a brutish nationalism, as expressed in anti-immigrant xenophobia (most recently on display in Arizona)” — If it is “nationalistic” to oppose illegal immigration and its consequences for the safety and tax burdens of citizens, let nationalism reign. Lindsey, like too many libertarians, wants a borderless world because he imagines that liberty is something that just happens, absent the protection of a limited government. It would surprise Lindsey and his ilk to learn that many Americans cling to “nationalism” precisely because they prize liberty and wish to preserve what little of it has been left to them.
“it’s-always-1938-somewhere jingoism” — Here’s another pseudo-libertarian theme: Only war-mongers prepare for war. Well, it was “1938” in 1941, when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, encouraged by vocal isolationism and lac of preparedness on the part of the U.S.; in 1950, when Truman’s foreign policy invited North Korea to invade South Korea; in 1961, when JFK’s withdrawal of support for the anti-communist invasion of Cuba led to the installation there of Soviet missiles aimed at the U.S.; in 1979, when Iran’s radical Islamic regime took Americans hostage, knowing Jimmy Carter’s fecklessness; in 1993, when the bombing of the World Trade Center by terrorists was treated as a criminal matter and not as a hostile attack on the U.S.; in 2001, when the official U.S. response to the WTC bombing and other terrorist attacks emboldened Osama bin Laden.
“dogmatic religiosity, as expressed in homophobia, creationism, and extremism on beginning- and end-of-life issues” — I wonder if, in Lindsey’s brave new world of pure libertarianism, there would be any room for religion or the public expression of religious views. I wonder if he understands that the enforcement of “gay rights,” will most assuredly lead to the denial of the right of conscience, as has been the case with contraception and abortion. I wonder if he truly believes that it is “extreme” to defend life against arbitrary termination. Or should we leave our fate in the hands of the very kind of irreligious leftists that have brought about the near-victory of communism and who are itching to make the world (or at least the U.S.) safe for genetic cleansing through late-term abortion, post-term abortion (i.e., infanticide), genetic engineering, and death panels (i.e., single-payer health care)?
Then there is Lindsey’s charge that
[m]odern conservatism has always had an illiberal dark side. Recall the first great populist spasms of the postwar right—McCarthyism and opposition to desegregation—and recall as well that National Review founder William F. Buckley stoutly defended both.
“McCarthyism” may have been excessive in its methods, but it was aimed in the right direction: the identification of a threat to Americans and their liberty. After all, to the Lindseys’ of this world, there are no threats, just the dire imaginings of those “jingos” for whom it’s always 1938. Inconveniently, for that point of view, the information unveiled by the Venona project
show[s] that the US and other nations were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. Among those identified are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Alger Hiss; Harry Dexter White,[18] the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie,[19] a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin,[20] a section head in the Office of Strategic Services.
As for segregation, it is anti-libertarian when it is a government-ordered way of conducting one’s life and business. But segregation as a fact of life is just that, and nothing more. Lindsey practices a kind of segregation when he distances himself from Republicans and rightists. And, like the rest of us, he probably practices other kinds of segregation with respect to where he lives and with whom he associates.
Desegregation, properly carried out, removes the influence of government and renders it neutral with respect to race. But desegregation is neither neutral nor libertarian when it is used as an excuse for depriving persons of liberty by denying their freedom of association, freedom to work, and property rights. Is it any wonder that conservatives opposed the way government went about desegregation?
It’s interesting that Lindsey should point to what he calls the “illiberal dark side” of modern conservatism. Perhaps there’s a bit of projection at work there; in the next paragraph he recalls with fondness the “good old days” of censorship by the media cartel:
To be visible at all in the nation’s public debate, conservatism was forced to rely on intellectual champions whose sheer brilliance and sophistication caused the liberal gatekeepers in mass media to deem them suitable for polite company. People such as Buckley, George Will, and Milton Friedman thus became the public face of conservative ideology, while the rabble-rousers and conspiracy theorists were consigned to the shadow world of mimeographs, pamphlets, and paperbacks that nobody ever reviewed.
How “liberal” of you, Mr. Lindsey! It was all right for “liberal gatekeepers” — many of them beholden to the FCC — to inundate the unwashed with their left-wing views, as long as they kept those same unwashed from hearing conservatives of whom you disapprove. Perhaps you would like the federal government to suppress right-wing talk radio and equivalent web sites. Would you then find public discourse sufficiently civilized?
I have encountered Lindsey’s type before. It is left-libertarian, which is to say not libertarian at all. A left-libertarian wants “liberty”, but only if it yields outcomes favorable to certain groups, and to hell with the liberty and property rights of others. Theirs is a dangerous flirtation with political correctness (PCness), which includes unblinking support of open borders, head-in-the-sand opposition to defense spending, “gay rights,” and premature infanticide.
Some “libertarians” have become apologists for PCness. Will Wilkinson, for example, suggests that
most PC episodes mocked and derided by the right are not state impositions. They are generally episodes of the voluntary social enforcement of relatively newly established moral/cultural norms.
Wilkinson grossly simplifies the complex dynamics of PCness. His so-called “newly established … norms” are, in fact, norms that have been embraced by insular élites (e.g., academics and think-tank denizens like Wilksinson) and then foisted upon “the masses” by the élites in charge of government and government-controlled institutions (e.g., tax-funded universities). Thus it is no surprise that proposals to allow same-sex marriage fared poorly when they were submitted to voters. Similarly, the “right” to an abortion, almost five decades after Roe v. Wade, remained far from universally accepted and met greater popular resistance with the passage of time.
Another issue that inflames many libertarians against political correctness is the issue of speech codes on campuses. Yes, many speech codes are daft. But should people really enjoy exactly the same freedom of speech on university property that they would rightfully enjoy on their own property? Why, exactly?
If the answer is that the purposes of a university are best served by an atmosphere of free exchange of ideas — is there no validity to the claim that certain kinds of speech might tend, through an intimidating effect, to undermine just such an atmosphere?…
At my university [Auburn], several white fraternity members were recently disciplined for dressing up, some in Klan costumes and others in blackface, and enacting a mock lynching. Is the university guilty of violating their freedom of expression? I can’t see that it is. Certainly those students have a natural right to dress up as they please and engage in whatever playacting they like, so long as they conduct themselves peacefully. But there is no natural right to be a student at Auburn University.
Long — who describes himself as a “left-libertarian market anarchist” (whatever that is) — makes a clever but fallacious argument. The purposes of a university have nothing to do with the case. Speech is speech, except when it really isn’t speech, as in sit-ins (trespass), child pornography (sexual exploitation of minors), and divulging military secrets (treason, in fact if not in name).
Long is rightly disgusted by the actions of the fraternity members he mentions, but disgust does not excuse the suppression of speech by a State university. It is true that there is no “natural right” to be a student at Auburn, but there is, likewise, no “natural right” not to be offended.
Yes, legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 involved some interference with private property and the right of association, but it also did away with a great deal of state-sponsored discrimination and was, in my view, a net gain for liberty.
Well, some parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, together with its progeny — the Civil Rights Acts of 1968 and 1991 — did advance liberty, but many parts did not. A principled libertarian would acknowledge that, and parse the Acts into their libertarian and anti-libertarian components. A moral scold who really, really wants the state to impose his attitudes on others would presume — as Horwitz does — to weigh legitimate gains (e.g., voting rights) against unconscionable losses (e.g., property rights and freedom of association). But presumptuousness comes naturally to Horwitz because he — like Lindsey, Wilkinson, and Long — stands high above reality, in his ivory tower.
Wilkinson is sympatico with Horwitz in the matter of state action:
Government attempts to guarantee the worth of our liberties by recognizing positive rights to a minimum income or certain services like health care often (but not always) undermine the framework of market and civil institutions most likely to enhance liberty over the long run, and should be limited. But this is really an empirical question about what really does maximize individuals’ chances of formulating and realizing meaningful projects and lives.
Within this framework, racism, sexism, etc., which strongly limit the useful exercise of liberty are clear evils. Now, I am ambivalent about whether the state ought to step in and do anything about it.
Wilkinson, like Horwitz, is quite willing to submit to the state (or have others do so), where state action passes some kind of cost-benefit test. (See “Utilitarianism vs. Liberty”.)
In any event, what more could the state do than it has done already? Well, there is always “hate crime” legislation, which (as Nat Hentoff pointed out) is tantamount to “thought crime” legislation. Perhaps that would satisfy Long, Horwitz, Wilkinson, and their brethren on the “libertarian” left. And, if that doesn’t do the trick, there is always Richard Thaler’s “libertarian” paternalism (with its statist slant). And there is Thaler’s partner in crime, Cass Sunstein, and his proposal for policing thought on the internet.
Pseudo-libertarianism — as it is found in the writings of Brink Lindsey, Will Wilkinson, Roderick Long, and Steven Horwitz (among others) — is no better than any other kind of rationalism. It simply posits a sterile, abstract standard of conduct — one that has nothing to do with the workaday world of humanity — and finds wanting everyone but those who pay lip-service to that standard of conduct.
That is not libertarianism. It is sophomoric dream-spinning.
Where is libertarianism to be found? In conservatism, of all places, because it is a reality-based political philosophy.
But what does conservatism have to do with libertarianism? I have in various posts essayed an answer to that question (here, here, here, and here, for example), but now I turn the floor over to John Kekes, who toward the end of “What Is Conservatism?” says this:
The traditionalism of conservatives excludes both the view that political arrangements that foster individual autonomy should take precedence over those that foster social authority and the reverse view that favours arrangements that promote social authority at the expense of individual autonomy. Traditionalists acknowledge the importance of both autonomy and authority, but they regard them as inseparable, interdependent, and equally necessary. The legitimate claims of both may be satisfied by the participation of individuals in the various traditions of their society. Good political arrangements protect these traditions and the freedom to participate in them by limiting the government’s authority to interfere with either.
Therein lies true libertarianism — true because it is attainable. Left-libertarians believe, foolishly, that liberty is to be found in the rejection of social norms. Liberty would be the first victim of the brave new disorder that they wish for.
It is fitting and proper to close this post with my version of Russel Kirk’s six “canons” of conservatism (summarized here):
Belief that political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.
Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and egalitarian and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
Conviction that civilized society requires order.
Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic leveling is not economic progress.
Faith in traditional mores and distrust of “sophisters and calculators.” Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man’s anarchic impulse.
Recognition that change and reform are not identical.
[a] left-libertarian wants “liberty”, but only if it yields outcomes favorable to certain groups, and to hell with the liberty and property rights of others. Theirs is a dangerous flirtation with political correctness (PCness), which includes unblinking support of open borders, head-in-the-sand opposition to defense spending, “gay rights”, and premature infanticide.
Here’s some left-libertarian “reasoning” that compels comment. I begin with an old “favorite”, Bryan Caplan, whose post, “The Libertarian Penumbra”, at EconLog offers these bits of “wisdom”:
[L]ibertarians have many beliefs in common that have little to do with the consequences of liberty. They’re just part of our vibrant, iconoclastic intellectual subculture. A few examples:
Most libertarians accept the validity of IQ testing. A perfectly good libertarian could reject IQ tests as “culturally biased,” but few do.
Libertarians have favorable views of home schooling – even though conventional private schooling is equally consistent with libertarian principles.
Libertarianism implies opposition to government population control, but it doesn’t imply another view common among libertarians: that population growth has major economic benefits because people are “the ultimate resource.” Notice: A statist who took this idea seriously could easily argue for government intervention to raise the birth rate.
Why should one reject IQ tests as “culturally biased”, and under what conditions? I have no doubt that there is some degree of cultural bias in IQ tests, but so what? As an employer, I may want employees who are not only capable of carrying out certain kinds of mental tasks but who also are attuned to the culture in which I operate my business. If that rules out, say, inner-city blacks who prefer rap to Bach, who wear outré clothing, and who speak a language other than standard English, so be it. Thanks to the kind of PCness that has been foisted upon American business by leftists (libertarian and otherwise), it is difficult for private employers to be selective about whom they hire, and therefore to serve consumers and shareholders as well as they should. There is no hope at all for governments and universities, where the rule of PCness gobbles up tax dollars and inures to the benefit of third-rate minds.
Caplan’s second item — about home-schooling — puzzles me. Is one supposed to have a less-than-favorable view of home-schooling just because “conventional private schooling is equally consistent with libertarian principles”? Perhaps he is unable to fathom the (libertarian) tenet of subjective value. Some persons prefer home-schooling for their own, perfectly legitimate, reasons (e.g., greater control over the content of what their children are taught). If Caplan has a point, it is on the top of his head.
Caplan’s third point — about population control and growth — is a marvelous non sequitur. Libertarians oppose government population control because it is anti-libertarian. The fact that population growth has economic benefits should be of no consequence to a libertarian qua libertarian.
Another “libertarian” economist, Scott Sumner, weighs in with a comment about Caplan’s post. Sumner offers a list of “libertarian tendencies that make [him] cringe”. One of them is “global warming denial”. First, I object to his use of “denial”; “skepticism” is the operative word. A reasonable basis of skepticism — aside from the fact that there is no “settled science” about global warming — is that the proponents of anthropogenic global warming would use it as an excuse to reshape economic activity along lines that they prefer. That is to say, the proponents of AGW have a strong, unconcealed dictatorial agenda. Any libertarian worthy of the name should “cringe” at that, not at skepticism about AGW.
Sumner also “cringes” at “distrust of democracy”. Does he not understand the history of American politics in the twentieth century? It can be summarized, quite accurately, as follows: promise, elect, spend, tax, regulate, promise, elect, spend, tax, regulate, etc., etc., etc.
The rest of Sumner’s list is even worse. So I turn to Will Wilkinson’s defense of unions in “Libertarian unionism” at The Economist‘s Democracy in America column. I will not bother to recite and refute all of Wilkinson’s claims with respect to unions, when it will suffice to strike at the heart of his argument:
The right of workers to band together to improve their bargaining position relative to employers is a straightforward implication of freedom of association, and the sort of voluntary association that results is the beating heart of the classical liberal vision of civil society. I unreservedly endorse what I’ll call the “unionism of free association”.
Freedom of association is all well and good, but a union is not a social club. It is an organization formed for the purpose of collective bargaining, backed by the threat and use of the labor strike, which are in turn backed by the power of government. Accordingly, Wilkinson’s glib defense of unionism omits several of its anti-libertarian features:
Workers who prefer to bargain for themselves are not allowed to do so; that is, they are deprived of their economic liberty. (If you believe that a union would refrain from intimidating “scabs”, you must believe in the tooth fairy.)
The ability of an employer to hire whom he sees fit to hire is therefore compromised; that is, he is deprived of his economic liberty.
By the same token, the employer is deprived of the right to use his property as he sees fit, in the lawful pursuit of profit.
These objections hold even where the employer is a corporation. Corporate status is not a “gift” of the state, Wilkinson’s implication to the contrary notwithstanding. The essential features of incorporation — the pooling of assets and limited liability — are available through private, contractual arrangements involving insurance pools. The belief that corporations owe their existence to the beneficence of the state is due to the use of the corporation to advance state interests in the era of mercantilism.
I can only shake my head in amazement at the delusions of left-libertarians, who are really pseudo-libertarians.
As much as you need to know, and perhaps more than that.
Using a Q&A format, this page summarizes my writings on abortion in the 18 years, since I first voiced my opposition to it
WHY DO I OPPOSE ABORTION?
My objections to abortion are moral and prudential. Morally, I cannot condone a brutal, life-taking practice for which the main justification is convenience. (See, for example, tables 2 through 5 of “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Qualitative and Quantitative Perspectives”, a publication of the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion organization.) Prudentially, I do not want to live in a country where blameless life can be taken easily, with the encouragement of the state or at the state’s insistence. Abortion is a step down a slippery slope.
There have been serious proposals to allow post-natal abortion — infanticide. The next step, which has been taken in some “civilized” countries (not to mention the Third Reich and Soviet Russia) is involuntary euthanasia to “rid the populace” of those deemed unfit.
Ah, but who does the “deeming”? That is always the question. Given the rate at which power is being centralized in this country, it is not unthinkable that decisions about life and death will be placed in the hands of agencies of the federal government.
If anyone thinks it cannot happen here, think again. No nation or class of persons is immune from the disease of power-lust. The only way to prevent it from spreading and becoming ever more malevolent is to resist it at every turn.
I address the slippery slope toward state-imposed eugenics at several points below.
WHY DO I CALL ABORTION MURDER?
First, there’s the obvious fact that abortion results in the death of a living being. But that’s a mild way of putting it. The methods used in abortion would be termed “brutal” by opponents of capital punishment, who usually are pro-abortion. Consider this (from Wikipedia as of April 7, 2018):
From the 15th week of gestation until approximately the 26th, other techniques must be used. Dilation and evacuation (D&E) consists of opening the cervix of the uterus and emptying it using surgical instruments and suction. After the 16th week of gestation, abortions can also be induced by intact dilation and extraction (IDX) (also called intrauterine cranial decompression), which requires surgical decompression of the fetus’s head before evacuation. IDX is sometimes called “partial-birth abortion“, which has been federally banned in the United States. [Ed. note: One small step for humanity.]
In the third trimester of pregnancy, induced abortion may be performed surgically by intact dilation and extraction or by hysterotomy. Hysterotomy abortion is a procedure similar to a caesarean section and is performed under general anesthesia. It requires a smaller incision than a caesarean section and is used during later stages of pregnancy.
What happens in an intact dilation and extraction? This (according to Wikipedia as of April 7, 2018):
Feticidal injection of digoxin or potassium chloride may be administered at the beginning of the procedure to allow for softening of the fetal bones or to comply with relevant laws in the physician’s jurisdiction. During the surgery, the fetus is removed from the uterus in the breech position, with mechanical collapse of the fetal skull if it is too large to fit through the cervical canal. Decompression of the skull can be accomplished by incision and suction of the contents, or by using forceps.
Almost enough said. For more, go here for an excerpt of an interview of philosopher Don Marquis.
WHY DID THE “RIGHT” TO AN ABORTION BECOME A POLITICAL CAUSE?
Daniel J. Flynn makes this astute observation in a piece at The American Spectator:
Students did not end the Vietnam War. They ended the draft. And once the draft ended, their protests, at least on a mass scale, ended, too.
Wikipedia, not normally my go-to source for history, lists more than 100 major events on its page documenting protests against the Vietnam War. The very last one occurred one week before Richard Nixon ended the draft. Small, scattered protests, of the like that do not appear Wikipedia’s radar—one in Central Park in 1975 involving Joan Baez and others comes to mind—continued. But even as the killing continued the big protests did not because the draft did not.
And it is true that U.S. combat operations continued after the end of the draft. So I must agree with Flynn’s observation.
What does it have to do with abortion? It’s mostly about the “Me” generation — the Baby Boomers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Look at this graph from this article in Wikipedia:
This source addresses some of the causes of the decline in the abortion rate since 1980. There are others, such as easier access to contraceptives and the growing awareness (and fear of) HIV/AIDS.
But the most obvious cause of the decline is the aging of Boomers. A large fraction of the women who were born during the peak baby-boom years (1946-1960) would have been “past it” by the mid-1990s*. And that’s when the abortion rate ended a period of relatively steep decline (see above graph). The abortion rate continued to decline at more gradual rate through the early 2000s, when it leveled off, then began to decline at a faster rate after 2008. (The most likely cause of the steeper decline since 2008 is the enactment by several States of stricter controls on abortion.)
This isn’t to absolve later generations of their sins. Most college graduates and college-goers** of the X, Millennial, and Z generations have drunk the Kool-Aid of “wokeness”. But the Boomers — notable for their self-centered depravity — were and are especially dangerous because so many of them became prominent in politics, the law, and the internet-media-academic complex.
The Boomers (or too many of them) epitomize the left’s arrested state of adolescent rebellion: “Daddy” doesn’t want me to smoke, so I’m going to smoke; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to drink, so I’m going to drink; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to have sex, so I’m going to have sex. But, regardless of my behavior, I expect “Daddy” to give me an allowance, and birthday presents, and cell phones, and so on. “Daddy,” in the case of abortion, is government.
As amply demonstrated by the reaction to the leaked decision on Dobbs (2022) — and the later announcement of that decision — too many persons of the left simply are simply unthinking, selfish adolescents who want what they want: period. The left’s stance on abortion should be viewed as just one more adolescent tantrum in a vast repertoire of tantrums. __________ * The late Norma McCorvey (a.k.a. Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade) epitomized the Boomers. She was born in 1947 and began her eventually successful suit to legalize abortion when she was 21.
** College-goers, as distinct from students who are striving to acquire knowledge rather than left-wing propaganda, and to exercise their critical faculties instead of parroting left-wing slogans.
WAS THE “RIGHT” TO AN ABORTION REALLY THE “LAW OF THE LAND”?
No, not really. The U.S. Supreme Court is not the final arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning.
All branches of government are equally bound by the Constitution. No branch of the federal government— not the Congress, not the President, not even the Supreme Court— can legitimately act in ways contrary to the words of the Constitution. Indeed, Article VI requires that all government officials— legislative, executive, and judicial, state and federal—“ shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” Thus, the idea of a written constitution is closely tied to the idea of constitutional supremacy: In America, no branch of government is supreme. The government as a whole is not supreme. The Constitution is supreme. It is the written Constitution that prevails over every other source of authority in the United States.
Further, as sovereign entities and parties to the constitutional contract, the States can (and should) refuse to implement unconstitutional decrees emanating from the central government.
IS ABORTION A NATURAL RIGHT?
The road to natural rights is through natural law. Natural law is about morality, that is, right and wrong. Natural rights are about the duties and obligations that human beings owe to each other, given natural law.
Believers in natural law claim to start with the nature of human beings, then derive from that nature the “laws” of morality. Believers in natural rights claim to start with the nature of human beings, then derive from that nature the inalienable “rights” of human beings.
A natural law would be something like this: It is in the nature of human beings to seek life and to avoid death. A natural right would be something like this: Given that it is natural for human beings to seek life and avoid death, every human being has the right to life.
Natural law is “discovered” in the sense that it consists of norms that arise from human nature. An example would be the Golden Rule, or ethic of reciprocity. It seems most likely to have arisen from experience and normalized through tacit agreement before it was enunciated by various “wise men” over the ages.
The main alternative to the idea of natural law as arising from human nature is that it preexists in divine ordinance. But the two ideas can be reconciled by saying that human nature, by design, manifests divine intent.
In any event, if the Golden Rule is natural law, it seems not to offer room for a natural right to an abortion, that is, abortion on demand for any reason whatsoever. Doing unto others as one would be done unto would seem to prohibit the arbitrary taking of a life. (This raises the question whether a fetus is a “person” or a “human being”, to which I will come.)
Moreover, if there is a fundamental natural right, one that underlies all others, it is the right to life. There are rare instances in which persons willingly and voluntarily succumb to death, but they are notable exceptions that underscore the basic human urge (natural law) to go on living. This, too, argues against the killing of a fetus.
So, as a general matter (which admits limited and specific exceptions), there isn’t a natural right to an abortion.
WAS THERE REALLY A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO AN ABORTION?
There was, but only in the sense that the U.S. Supreme Court fabricated such a right in Roe v. Wade (1973). As the majority in Dobbs explained at length, the right to abortion was not and is not rooted in the nation’s history.
Abortion was considered murder long before States began to legislate against it in the 19th century. The long-standing condemnation of abortion — even before quickening — is treated thoroughly in Marvin Olasky’s Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America. (excerpt here). Olasky corrects the slanted version of American history upon which the U.S. Supreme Court relied in Roe v. Wade. The criminalization of abortion by most States in the 1800s did not mean that it was generally approved of or thought of as a right at the time of the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It was certainly not thought of as a right at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.
The majority in Roe v. Wade found for abortion by invoking a general privacy right, which had been invented in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). But the Court could not decide whether the right is located in the Ninth Amendment (reserving unenumerated rights to the people) or the Fourteenth Amendment (guaranteeing due process of law). Neither amendment, of course, is the locus of a general privacy right because none is conferred by the Constitution, nor could the Constitution ever confer such a right, for it would interfere with such truly compelling state interests as the pursuit of justice. By the logic of the majority’s reasoning, infanticide in the confines of one’s home would be permissible if the States hadn’t legislated against it before 1787.
The spuriousness of the majority’s conclusion is evident in its flinching from the logical end of its reasoning: abortion anywhere at anytime. Instead, the majority delivered this:
The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. . . . We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.
That is, the majority simply drew an arbitrary line between life and death — but in the wrong place. It is as if the majority understood, but wished not to acknowledge, the full implications of an absolute privacy right. Such a right could be deployed by unprincipled judges to decriminalize a variety of heinous acts.
In sum, the constitutional “right” to an abortion was a fabricated judicial whim. A later Court went part of the way (but, sadly, not all the way) in exposing the Roe Court’s fabrication. I refer to Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). As blogger Patterico noted, Casey
1) upheld the central holding of Roe on stare decisis grounds; 2) stripped the abortion right of its status as a “fundamental right” under the Constitution; and 3) replaced Roe‘s trimester framework with a rule tied to viability.
Stare decisis is a vile legal doctrine that has enabled the long and costly accretion of powers by the federal government. The majority in Dobbs (excluding the pusillanimous chief justice) rightly rejected stare decisis.
I address viability below.
IS A FETUS A “PERSON”?
This question is related to the Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade that a fetus isn’t a “person” — and therefore entitled to constitutional protection — until it becomes “viable” in the third trimester of pregnancy.
The “personhood” issue is legalistic rather than scientific. Personhood is an abstraction, not a physical fact. A human being is created at the moment of conception. It may be a rudimentary human being, but it is one nevertheless. And it has the potential to become a fully formed human being.
If it is permissible to kill a human being who is still in the formative stage, it should be permissible to kill anyone who hasn’t yet reached his full height. Perhaps that should be the cut-off point for “personhood”.
WHAT ABOUT THE VIABILITY ARGUMENT?
There is a phony pro-abortion argument that a fetus is fair game (so to speak) until it is viable. That is, until it could survive (as a newborn child) outside the mother’s womb. But that is a circular argument because a fetus that is aborted before it could have survived outside the mother’s womb would have attained viability had it not been aborted.
The viability argument comes down to this: It is all right to kill a fetus before it becomes viable so that it cannot become viable.
Moreover, when does a human being become “viable’, that is, capable of living without assistance? Certainly not at birth, and certainly not during early childhood. Possibly at puberty, but not in the United States or most Western countries, with their cossetted hordes of adolescents. And not even at graduation from high school for those who take it as their birthright to extend adolescence to age 22 and, sometimes, well beyond it.
WHY SHOULDN’T A WOMAN CONTROL HER OWN BODY?
That question is a dodgy way of trying to get around the fact that a fetus has a life of its own — literally. The fetus may be dependent on the woman who is carrying it, but it is not her body. The fetus is a separate human being, no matter how dependent on its mother. Further, as discussed above, dependency doesn’t end with birth. In fact, these days it often continues until a child is a twenty-something. There are some advocates of post-natal infanticide, but only enthusiasts of euthanasia would extend murder beyond that stage.
There is a similarly slippery argument for abortion. It is the self-defense argument, which is sometimes billed as a property rights argument. A leading example is found in Judith Jarvis Thomson‘s article, “A Defense of Abortion” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1 (1971): 47-66), which is available online here. It goes like this: A fetus is an “uninvited guest” in or “invader” of its mother’s body, which is the mother’s property. The mother may therefore do with the fetus as she will.
But a fetus is neither an uninvited guest nor an invader. Rather, it is a life, and that life — by biological necessity — is (almost always) its mother’s responsibility:
Conception, in almost all cases, is the result of a consensual act of sexual intercourse.
Conception is a known consequence of the act of sexual intercourse.
Life indisputably begins at conception.
A woman who conceives a child by an act of consensual sex has therefore incurred an implicit obligation to care for the life that flows from her act.
Given that the existence of a fetus cannot cause harm to anyone but its mother, the only valid route for terminating the life of a fetus would be a legal proceeding that culminates in a judicial determination that the continuation of the life of the fetus would cause grave physical harm or death to the mother.
A person who argues otherwise can do so only by regarding the fetus a sub-human implantation for which the mother bears no responsibility. Such a person might as well argue for a right to dispose of surly teenage children through involuntary euthanasia. The principle is the same: Kill the life you brought into the world because its presence is inconvenient or irritating. (For brilliant demolitions of arguments similar to Thomson’s, see this by Matt Walsh and this by Glen Whitman.)
IF ABORTION WERE ILLEGAL, SHOULD A WOMAN WHO ABORTS A CHILD FACE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES?
Kevin Williamson infamously said that women who have an abortion are guilty of murder and should be executed. That view, which he stated more than once — before he was hired by The Atlantic — led to his firing by The Atlantic when its spineless editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, bowed to a (figurative) lynch mob.
Where does that leave me? I will answer by repeating (with light editing) something that I wrote almost 15 years ago.
How much jail time? Anna Quindlen asked that question in a Newsweek article she wrote in 2007 about the punishment for abortion. Quindlen observed that
[i]f the Supreme Court decides abortion is not protected by a constitutional guarantee of privacy, the issue will revert to the states. If it goes to the states, some, perhaps many, will ban abortion. If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal.
The aim of Quindlen’s column was to scorn the idea of jail time as punishment for a woman who procures an illegal abortion. It reminds me of the classic definition of chutzpah, given by Leo Rosten: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan”. The chutzpah, in this case, belongs to Quindlen (and others of her ilk) who believe that a woman should not face punishment for an abortion because she has just “lost” a baby.
Balderdash! If a woman illegally aborts her child, why shouldn’t she be punished by a jail term (at least)? She would be punished by jail (or confinement in a psychiatric prison) if she were to kill her new-born infant, her toddler, her ten-year old, and so on. What’s the difference between an abortion and murder? None (see above), except where the life or health (beyond mere anxiety) of the mother is at stake.
Quindlen, who predictably opposes capital punishment, is consistent in her (typical) leftist opposition to justice. The Quindlens of this world somehow manage to make victims out of criminals.
IS ABORTION A STEP DOWN A SLIPPERY SLOPE?
Every time the state fails to defend innocent life it sets a new precedent for the taking of innocent life. Thus we come to the slippery slope.
Ross Douthat uses the Williamson case as a springboard to highlight “liberal” extremism in the defense of abortion:
[M]y pro-choice friends endorsing Williamson’s sacking can’t see that his extremism is mirrored in their own, in a system of supposedly “moderate” thought that is often blind to the public’s actual opinions on these issues, that lionizes advocates for abortion at any stage of pregnancy, that hands philosophers who favor forms of euthanasia and infanticide prestigious chairs at major universities, that is at best mildly troubled by the quietus of the depressed and disabled in Belgium or the near-eradication of Down syndrome in Iceland or the gendercide that abortion brought to Asia, that increasingly accepts unblinking a world where human beings can be commodified and vivisected so long as they’re in embryonic form.
Abortion is of a piece with selective breeding and involuntary euthanasia, wherein the state fosters eugenic practices that aren’t far removed from those of the Third Reich. And when those practices become the norm, what and who will be next? Instead of reflexively embracing “choice”, leftists — who these days seem especially wary of fascism (though they locate it in the wrong place) — should be asking whether “choice” will end with fetuses.
In sum, abortion is of a piece with Hitlerian eugenics. If you consider that to be an exaggeration, consider this piece by Patricia E. Bauer (a former reporter and bureau chief for The Washington Post), whose child has Down’s syndrome:
Many young women, upon meeting us, have asked whether I had “the test.” I interpret the question as a get-home-free card. If I say no, they figure, that means I’m a victim of circumstance, and therefore not implicitly repudiating the decision they may make to abort if they think there are disabilities involved. If yes, then it means I’m a right-wing antiabortion nut whose choices aren’t relevant to their lives….
The irony is that we live in a time when medical advances are profoundly changing what it means to live with disabilities. Years ago, people with Down syndrome often were housed in institutions. Many were in poor health, had limited self-care and social skills, couldn’t read, and died young. It was thought that all their problems were unavoidable, caused by their genetic anomaly.
Now it seems clear that these people were limited at least as much by institutionalization, low expectations, lack of education and poor health care as by their DNA. Today people with Down syndrome are living much longer and healthier lives than they did even 20 years ago. Buoyed by the educational reforms of the past quarter-century, they are increasingly finishing high school, living more independently and holding jobs.
That’s the rational pitch; here’s the emotional one. Margaret is a person and a member of our family. She has my husband’s eyes, my hair and my mother-in-law’s sense of humor. We love and admire her because of who she is — feisty and zesty and full of life — not in spite of it. She enriches our lives. If we might not have chosen to welcome her into our family, given the choice, then that is a statement more about our ignorance than about her inherent worth.
What I don’t understand is how we as a society can tacitly write off a whole group of people as having no value….
And here’s one more piece of un-discussable baggage: This question is a small but nonetheless significant part of what’s driving the abortion discussion in this country. I have to think that there are many pro-choicers who, while paying obeisance to the rights of people with disabilities, want at the same time to preserve their right to ensure that no one with disabilities will be born into their own families. The abortion debate is not just about a woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby; it’s also about a woman’s right to choose which baby she wants to have.
This is not about “having” or “not having” babies with disabilities – the common way of discussing such things, when they are discussed at all. It is about “killing” or “not killing” babies with disabilities. Period.
I myself recall having a conversation with a Down’s syndrome adult who noted the disparity between Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s well-publicized support for the Special Olympics, and his equally well-known insistence that no woman should have to bear the indignity of a “defective” or unwanted child. “I may be slow,” this man observed, “but I am not stupid. Does he think that people like me can’t understand what he really thinks of us? That we are not really wanted? That it would be a better world if we didn’t exist?”
This from a speech given by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1978:
If people are only considered to be economic entities whose value is measured by the quality and/or quantity of their productivity, then what conceivable justification is there for maintaining, at great expense and difficulty, mentally and physically handicapped people and elderly? I know, that as sure as I can possibly persuade you to believe: governments will find it impossible to resist the temptation … to deliver themselves from this burden of looking after the sick and the handicapped by the simple expedient of killing them off. Now this, in fact, is what the Nazis did … not always through slaughter camps, but by a perfectly coherent decree with perfectly clear conditions. In fact, delay in creating public pressure for euthanasia has been due to the fact that it was one of the war crimes cited at Nuremberg. So for the Guinness Book of Records you can submit this: That it takes just about 30 years in our humane society to transform a war crime into an act of compassion. That is exactly what happened.
Not only can it happen in America, it is happening in America. In addition to abortion as a means of selecting “superior” specimens, there is genetic engineering, a more overt and frightening project of super-Frankensteinian scale.
There is the long-standing and partly successful push for voluntary euthanasia (a.k.a, assisted suicide). When and where it becomes legal, it provides cover for involuntary euthanasia. It is better to keep it illegal and let those who are truly desperate find reluctant help than to authorize it and invite all-too-willing help. (See Theodore Dalrymple.)
Another initiative, fortunately sidetracked for now, is forced mental screening of school-age children. Though this endeavor was pilloried as a plot by Big Pharma, it carried the seeds of thought- and behavior-control cloaked in a health-care guise. Something like it will be resurrected when the masters of practical thought-control — the Facebook, Google, YouTube generation — come to full political power.
The place to stop Hitlerian schemes is at the outset, before they gain a foothold and provide an excuse for other schemes that wear superficially benign masks. Every Supreme Court decision that enables interference in the lives, liberty, and property of Americans becomes an invitation to — and excuse for — further interference.
(Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland warned strongly against the evil side of eugenics in “The Death of Hippocrates” (The New Republic, September 12, 2004). The article is now hidden behind a paywall, but I excerpted much of it when it appeared. The excerpts are at the bottom of this post.
In answer, I turn to philosopher Jamie Whyte‘s Bad Thoughts – A Guide to Clear Thinking. Specifically, to one of Whyte’s logical errors, which is found under “Shut Up — You Sound Like Hitler” (pp. 46-9). Here’s the passage to which I object:
Anyone who advocates using recent advances in genetic engineering to avoid congenital defects in humans will pretty soon be accused of adopting Nazi ideas. Never mind the fact that the Nazi goals (such as racial purity) and genetic engineering techniques (such as genocide) were quite different from those now suggested.
Whyte seems to believe that policies should be judged by their intentions, not their consequences. Genetic engineering — which Whyte defines broadly — is acceptable to Whyte (and millions of others) — because its practitioners mean well. By that standard:
Obamacare, which caused health-insurance premiums and medical costs to rise ever higher, was a success because it was meant to cut premiums and costs.
Measures to combat CO2 emissions have been successful, even though they have resulted in higher energy costs and there is no demonstrably significant relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperature (whatever that is), and no well- understood relationship between global temperature and human flourishing. (Though people tend to migrate from cold climates to warm ones, and warming produces higher crop yields.)
I cannot find a moral distinction between such “benevolence” and Hitler’s goal of racial purity.
Whyte, in his eagerness to slay many dragons of illogic, sometimes stumbles on his own illogic. Whyte to the contrary notwithstanding, not all invocations of Hitler are inapt. Genetic engineering, Whyte’s primary example, can be Hitlerian in its consequences, regardless of its proponents’ intentions.
I say “can be Hitlerian” because genetic engineering can also be beneficial. There is, for example, negative genetic engineering to cure and treat particular disorders.
I will continue to invoke Hitler where the invocation is apt, as it is in the cases of abortion, involuntary euthanasia, and the breeding of “superior” humans.
(Speaking of philosophers, see this for a demolition of a pro-abortion philosopher’s casuistry.)
IS THERE A UTILITARIAN OR ETHICAL ARGUMENT FOR ABORTION?
It’s patently absurd to think of measuring individual degrees of happiness, let alone summing those measurements. Suppose the government takes from A (making him miserable) and gives to B (making him joyous). Does B’s joyousness cancel A’s misery? Only if you’re B or a politician who has earned B’s support by joining in the raid on A’s bank account. (For more, see this and this.)
Nevertheless, the world is burdened by “ethicists” like Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Some years ago, Singer sought to exploit the tragic, state-ordered murder of Terry Schiavo, This is from WorldNetDaily:
During the next 35 years, the traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological, and demographic developments, says controversial bio-ethics professor Peter Singer.
“By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct,” says Princeton University’s defender of infanticide. “In retrospect, 2005 may be seen as the year in which that position (of the sanctity of life) became untenable,” he writes in the fall issue of Foreign Policy.
Singer sees 2005’s battle over the life of Terri Schiavo as a key to this changing ethic.
The year 2005 is also significant, at least in the United States, for ratcheting up the debate about the care of patients in a persistent vegetative state,” says Singer. “The long legal battle over the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube led President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress to intervene, both seeking to keep her alive. Yet the American public surprised many pundits by refusing to support this intervention, and the case produced a surge in the number of people declaring they did not wish to be kept alive in a situation such as Schiavo’s.”…
Yes, people say that they don’t want to share Terri Schiavo’s fate. What many of them mean, of course, is that they don’t want their fate decided by a judge who is willing to take the word of a relative for whom one’s accelerated death would be convenient. Singer dishonestly seizes on reactions to the Schiavo fiasco as evidence that euthanasia will become acceptable in the United States.
Certainly, there are many persons who would prefer voluntary euthanasia to a fate like Terri Schiavo’s. But the line between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia is too easily crossed, especially by persons who, like Singer, wish to play God. If there is a case to be made for voluntary euthanasia, Peter Singer is not the person to make it.
Singer gives away his Hitlerian game plan when he advocates killing the disabled up to 28 days after birth. Why not 28 years? Why not 98 years? Who decides — Peter Singer or an acolyte of Peter Singer? Would you trust your fate to the “moral” dictates of a person who thinks animals are as valuable as babies?
Would you trust your fate to the dictates of a person who so blithely dismisses religious morality? One does not have to be a believer to understand the intimate connection between religion and liberty, about which I have written here and here. Strident atheists of Singer’s ilk like to blame religion for the world’s woes. But the worst abuses of humanity in the 20th century arose from the irreligious and anti-religious regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
In a question and answer article published in the UK’s Independent today, controversial Princeton University Professor Peter Singer repeats his notorious stand on the killing of disabled newborns. Asked, “Would you kill a disabled baby?”, Singer responded, “Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole.”…
“Many people find this shocking,” continued Singer, “yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion.” Concluding his point, Singer said, “One point on which I agree with opponents of abortion is that, from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby.”
Let us be clear: Singer admits that it is the people who don’t support a woman’s “right” to have an abortion who insist that there is no distinction between the fetus and the newborn — or the fetus and an old person whose death might be convenient to others. Given Singer’s endorsement of involuntary infanticide — abortion and the killing of “disabled” newborns (“disabled” as determined how and by whom?) — Singer accepts, by implication, the rightness of involuntary euthanasia.
(There is much more about Singer’s “ethics” here, including his obvious support for “death panels”.)
ALL OF THAT ASIDE, DOESN’T ABORTION LEAD TO A LOWER RATE OF CRIME?
This question lends itself to rigorous statistical analysis. I begin with Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt (with Stephen J. Dubner). Here’s how The Washington Postreported Levitt’s findings about the drop in crime:
Freakonomics is packed with fascinating ideas. Consider Levitt’s notion of a relationship between abortion access and the crime drop. First, Freakonomics shows that although commonly cited factors such as improved policing tactics, more felons kept in prison and the declining popularity of crack account for some of the national reduction in crime that began in about the year 1990, none of these completes the explanation. (New York City and San Diego have enjoyed about the same percentage decrease in crime, for instance, though the former adopted new policing tactics and the latter did not.) What was the significance of the year 1990, Levitt asks? That was about 16 years after Roe v. Wade. Studies consistently show that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by those raised in broken homes or who were unwanted as children. When abortion became legal nationally, Levitt theorizes, births of unwanted children declined; 16 years later crime began to decline, as around age 16 is the point at which many once-innocent boys start their descent into the criminal life. Leavitt’s [sic] clincher point is that the crime drop commenced approximately five years sooner in Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York and Washington state than it did in the nation as a whole. What do these states have in common? All legalized abortion about five years before Roe.
Well, Steve Sailer (among others) has attacked Levitt’s findings:
First, Levitt’s theory is predicated — at least publicly — on abortion reducing the proportion of “unwanted” babies, who are presumed to be more likely to grow up to be criminals. The empirical problem with this is that legalization (which occurred in California, New York, and three other states in 1970 and nationally in 1973), didn’t put the slightest dent in the illegitimacy rate, which is, by far, the most obvious objective sign of not being wanted by the mother and father, and has been linked repeatedly with crime…
… [But] the growth in the illegitimacy rate didn’t start to slow down until the mid-1990s when the abortion rate finally went down a considerable amount.
My article [in the May 9, 2005 edition of The American Conservative] offers a simple explanation, drawn from Levitt’s own research, of why legal abortion tends to increase illegitimacy. [Ed. note: Read the whole thing.]
Second, the acid test of Levitt’s theory is that it predicts that the first cohort to survive being culled by legal abortion should have been particularly law-abiding. Instead, they went on the worst teen murder rampage in American history….
For example, the 14-17 year olds in the not particularly murderous year of 1976 were, on average, born about 1960 (i.e., 1976 – 16 years of age = 1960), so they didn’t “benefit” from being culled by legalized abortion the way that the 14-17 years olds during the peak murder years of 1993 and 1994 should have benefited, according to Levitt.
In contrast, the homicide rate for the 25 and over cohort (none of whom enjoyed the benefits of legalized abortion) was lower in 1993 than in 1983.
If the legalization of abortion did result in less crime it’s only because abortion became more prevalent among that segment of society that is most prone to commit crime. (I dare not speak its name.) What policy does Levitt want us to infer from that bit of causality? Would he favor a program of euthanasia for the most crime-prone segment of society? Now there’s a fine kettle of fish for leftists, who favor abortion and oppose “oppression” of the the segment of society that is the most crime-prone.
In any event, if abortion does anything, it leads to more crime by women because it “frees” them from child-rearing. In the following graph, the blue and orange lines denote pre- and post-Roe years (with a one-year lag for Roe to take effect).
In fact, Levitt’s findings are built on statistical quicksand. This is from the abstract of a paper by Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz of the Boston Fed:
[A] fascinating paper by Donohue and Levitt (2001, henceforth DL) . . . purports to show that hypothetical individuals resulting from aborted fetuses, had they been born and developed into youths, would have been more likely to commit crimes than youths resulting from fetuses carried to term. We revisit that paper, showing that the actual implementation of DL’s statistical test in their paper differed from what was described. . . .We show that when DL’s key test is run as described and augmented with state‐level population data, evidence for higher per capita criminal propensities among the youths who would have developed, had they not been aborted as fetuses, vanishes.
Whatever abortion is, it most certainly is not a crime-fighting tool.
BUT IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, ISN’T ABORTION CONSISTENT WITH LIBERTY?
Unsophisticated, self-styled libertarian defenders of abortion hold an “anything goes” view of liberty that is in fact antithetical to liberty. They may call themselves libertarians, but they might as well be anti-war protesters who block traffic or “greens” who burn down ski lodges and sabotage power facilities.
Liberty requires each of us to pursue happiness without causing harm to others, except in self-defense. Those libertarian defenders of abortion who bother to give the issue a bit of thought try to build a case for abortion around self-defense, arguing that a woman who aborts is defending herself, and that no one should question her act of self-defense. But that is a ridiculous argument, as I show above.
Where, then, lies a valid libertarian defense of abortion? In privacy? Not at all. Privacy, to the extent that it exists as right, cannot be a general right, as I have also argued above. If privacy were a general right, a murderer could claim immunity from prosecution as long as he commits murder in his own home, or better yet (for the murderer), as long as he murders his own children in his own home.
A “practical libertarian” might argue that legalizing abortion makes it “safer” (less dangerous to the mother), presumably because legalization ensures a greater supply of abortionists who can do the job without endangering the mother’s life, and at a lower price than a safe abortion would command without legalization. I’m willing to grant all of that, but I must observe that the same case can be made for legalizing murder. That is, a person with murderous intent could more readily afford to hire a professional who to do the job successfully and, at the same time, avoid putting himself at risk by trying to do the job himself. “Safety” is a rationalization for abortion that blinks at the nature of the act.
I am unable to avoid the conclusion that abortion is an anti-libertarian act of unjustified aggression against an innocent human being, an act that is usually undertaken for convenience and almost never for the sake of defending a mother’s life. Murder, too, is an act of convenience that is seldom justified by self-defense. Abortion, therefore, cannot be validated by mistaken appeals to self-defense, privacy, viability, and safety. Nor can abortion be validated (except legalistically) by a series of wrongly decided Supreme Court cases.
A hard-core “libertarian” will take refuge in the dogma that governmental interference in matters of personal choice is simply wrong. By that “logic,” it is wrong for government to interfere in or prosecute robbery, assault, rape, murder and other overtly harmful acts, which — after all — are merely the consequences of personal choices made by their perpetrators.
If the state has any legitimate function, it is to defend the lives, liberty, and property of those subject to its jurisdiction. State sponsorship of abortion is antithetical to that legitimate function. It suborns the killing of innocent human beings whose lives the state ought to protect.
“Liberal” support for abortion is just one more piece of evidence that “liberalism” is the enemy of liberty.
“Libertarian” support for abortion is one more piece of evidence that libertarianism — the dogma — is corrupt and anti-libertarian. (See what happened to Nat Hentoff when he demurred from “libertarian” orthodoxy in the matter of abortion.)
(It would make an already very long article excruciatingly long if I were to elaborate on the preceding point. If you are interested in understanding the anti-libertarian origins of libertarian dogma, go here.)
EXCERPTS OF SHERWIN B. NULAND’S “THE DEATH OF HIPPOCRATES” (THE NEW REPUBLIC, SEPTEMBER 12, 2004)
The exhibition [on eugenics at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington] details the influence of eugenics on determining Nazi policy from the time of the party’s assumption of power in 1933 until the end of World War II….Though some have thought of it as an applied science, eugenics is in fact more a philosophy than a science. Its proponents based their notions on genetics, having as their purpose the improvement of the breed. The word was defined exactly that way in 1911 in a book by the eminent American biometrician and zoologist Charles Davenport, director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York (elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the following year), who called it “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.”
Eugenicists believed that it is possible, and even a good idea, to attempt to enhance the quality of our species by regulating the reproduction of traits considered to be inheritable….
When Gregor Mendel’s forgotten experiments on inheritable characteristics were rediscovered in 1900, a certain biological legitimacy was conferred on these notions, as unknown factors (later shown to be genes) were identified as the source of traits immutably passed on to offspring, and it was perceived that some are dominant and others recessive….
Once the Mendelian laws of heredity were widely known, eugenics movements were founded in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, several of the nations of Europe, and even Latin America and Asia. Eugenics research institutes were established in more than a few of these countries, most prominently the United States, England, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden….
Not unexpectedly, eugenics was a creed that appealed to social conservatives, who were pleased to blame poverty and crime on heredity. Liberals–or progressives, as they were then usually called–were among its most vigorous opponents, considering the inequities of society to be due to circumstantial factors amenable to social and economic reform. And yet some progressive thinkers agreed with the eugenicists that the lot of every citizen would be improved by actions that benefited the entire group. Thus were the intellectual battle lines drawn.
It is hardly surprising that National Socialism in Germany would embrace the concept of eugenics. But from the beginning, there was more to Nazi support than the movement’s political appeal or the promise of its social consequences. As is clear from the exquisitely structured and thoroughly reliable accounting of “Deadly Medicine,” the stage was set for the emergence of a drive toward a uniquely German form of eugenics long before the average citizen had ever heard of Adolf Hitler….
The earliest hint of the coming storm had appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, when the German biologist August Weismann definitively showed that changes acquired by an organism during its lifetime cannot be inherited. Weismann’s findings overthrew a theory promulgated a hundred years earlier by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, holding that such adaptations could be passed down to succeeding generations. So-called Lamarckianism had incited controversy since its inception, and its debunking added fuel to the fire of those who believed that human beings inherit not only fixed physical characteristics but also mental and moral ones….
[M]any [eugenics researchers] were serious scientists whose aim was to discover ways in which the very best of the inherited characteristics might be encouraged and the very worst eliminated, with the ultimate goal of curing the ills of society….”By the early 1900s, proponents of eugenics everywhere began to offer biological solutions to social problems common to urbanizing and industrial societies.”…
To large numbers of its host of well-meaning adherents, eugenics was a scientifically and even mathematically based discipline, and many of them actually thought of it as a measurable, verifiable branch of biology that held the promise of becoming an enormous force for good.
Though it must be admitted that the United States, Britain, and Germany became centers for eugenics in part because of each nation’s certainty of its own superiority over all peoples of the world, the fact is that these countries were hardly more chauvinistic than most others. The primary reason they led in eugenic studies is traceable to a far more significant factor: their leadership in science….
The German-speaking institutions were so far ahead of those of every other nation that leading clinicians, researchers, and educators in Europe, Asia, and the Americas considered their training incomplete unless they had spent a period of study at such centers of learning and innovation as Berlin, Würzburg, Vienna, and Bern, or one of the small academic gems among the many outstanding universities in Germany, such as Göttingen, Heidelberg, or Tübingen….
The Germanic medical establishment was heir to a grand tradition of accomplishment and international respect; when it took on eugenics as a worthy goal, it was convinced of the righteousness of its intent. Even when some of its own members began to voice concerns about the direction in which the research and its application were going, many authoritative voices drowned out the relatively few protests.
The process rolled on within a worldwide cultural milieu conditioned by the universally accepted belief that the earth’s population was divided into races, and further subdivided into ethnic groups within them….
The rising power of the international eugenics movement manifested itself in predictable ways, from anti-immigration laws to compulsory sterilization for those deemed unfit, enacted in such “progressive” countries as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and parts of Canada and Switzerland — as well as the United States, where some two dozen states had enacted sterilization laws by the late 1920s. The most dramatic moment for Americans came on May 2, 1927, when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state of Virginia’s intention to carry out tubal ligation on a “feebleminded” young woman named Carrie Buck, who had given birth to an illegitimate daughter also judged to be retarded, as was Carrie’s mother. Writing the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
To a twenty-first-century sensibility, the equation with vaccination is at the very least questionable, but at the height of eugenic thinking, the eight-to-one majority among the justices reflected the general mood of a nation fifteen of whose states (the only ones of the twenty-seven reporting) would by 1933 have sterilized 6,246 of the insane, 2,938 of the feebleminded, fifty-five epileptics, sixteen criminals, and five persons with “nervous disorders.” More than half of these procedures were carried out in four state mental hospitals in California. In almost every state, the law applied only to residents of public facilities, which meant that lower-income groups were affected far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Some sixteen thousand Americans would eventually be sterilized.
At this time Germany had not yet enacted any sterilization laws, in spite of strong advocacy and much expression of admiration for the American system by the so-called racial hygienicists. All of this foot-dragging ended when Hitler came to power in 1933, and it ended with a vengeance….Between 1934 and 1945, some four hundred thousand people would be forcibly sterilized, most before the war began in 1939. These included, in 1937, about five hundred racially mixed children of German mothers and black colonial soldiers in the French army occupying the Rhineland.
The basis for sterilizing these children was the outgrowth of the notion that a hereditarily gifted nation can retain its greatness only if the heredity remains pure, a thesis that had been widely accepted in Germany (and by many citizens of other countries as well, including our own) for generations….By 1937, the principle of pure blood had manifested itself in many ways, most particularly in the persecution of Jews and the passage of the Nuremberg laws of 1935, officially called “the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” by which marriage and sexual relations were prohibited between Jews and people of “pure” German blood. Shortly thereafter the Reich Citizenship Law went into effect, declaring that only “Aryan” Germans were citizens and Jews were to be considered “subjects.” This law defined who was a Jew and who was a so-called Mischling, an individual of mixed parentage. From these beginnings as an outgrowth of eugenics — itself a misconceived attempt toward utopia — Nazi racial policy would culminate in the murder of millions and the near-annihilation of European Jewry….
The theorists and the scientists who had until 1933 been able, and sincerely so, to claim detached objectivity for their research, could no longer delude themselves about the purposes for which it was being used. With the ascent to power of the Nazis, they had become, willy-nilly, active participants in the beginnings of genocide….
The murder of children was only the beginning. In October, 1939, Hitler authorized euthanasia for adults housed in German asylums….Between January, 1940 and August, 1941, some seventy thousand adult patients were gassed, their only crime being that they were unproductive members of the Nazi state….
But far worse was to follow….On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference established the policy that would lead to the Holocaust, and from then on the real question became not whether but how….
Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, it seems so clear that eugenics had always been a dangerous notion, and that its adherents were either deluded or racist. But the fact is that such a realization was slow in coming, and appeared only after matters had gotten completely out of hand and the stage set on which horrendous events would take place. Among the several reasons that medically trained students of eugenics allowed matters to turn so ugly was their failure to recognize a basic fact about the scientific enterprise, which is well known to historians and philosophers of the subject but continues to elude even some of the most sophisticated men and women who actually do the work. Though this fact characterizes science in general, it is even more applicable to the art that uses science to guide it, namely medicine, which was, after all, the underlying source of the momentum that drove the application of eugenic principles.
The basic fact to which I refer is that neither medicine nor science itself derives its “truths” in the thoroughly detached atmosphere in which its practitioners would like to believe they work. Especially in medicine and medical research, the atmosphere not only is not detached, but it is in fact largely the product of the very influences from which its participants seek to free themselves in order to isolate observations and conclusions from external sources and subjectivity. For an early explication of this, we may with profit turn to the father of Justice Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who was for some years the dean of Harvard Medical School and bid fair to be called the dean of American medicine in the mid-nineteenth century. Here is what the elder Holmes said in an oration delivered to the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1860, titled “Currents and Countercurrents in Medical Science”:
The truth is, that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is as sensitive to outside influences, political, religious, philosophical, imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of atmospheric density. But look a moment while I clash a few facts together, and see if some sparks do not reveal by their light a closer relation between the Medical Sciences and the conditions of society and the general thought of the time, than would, at first, be suspected.
The medical theory of any era–and to a somewhat lesser extent the science on which it is based–arises in a setting that is political and social. Not only that, but its directions and even its conclusions are influenced by the personal motivations, needs, and strivings of those who practice it, some of which may not be apparent to these men and women themselves. Though we would have it otherwise, there is no such thing as a thoroughly detached scientific undertaking. The danger in this lies not so much in its truth, but in the inability of society and the community of scientists to recognize the pervading influence of such an unpalatable reality, which flies in the face of the claims that form the groundwork for our worship of the scientific enterprise….
By itself, each of the small steps taken by the eugenics movement in the early part of the twentieth century seemed not just innocuous but actually of real interest as a subject for consideration. Attached to the names of highly regarded scientific thinkers, the theories intended to improve the general level and functioning of a nation had a certain appeal to men and women concerned about social issues….
At what point would I have realized the direction in which all of this was hurtling? Perhaps not until it was too late. Looking back with unbridled condemnation on the beginnings of racial hygiene does not enlighten today’s thoughtful man or woman in regard to how he or she might have responded at the time….
This is not to say that there had not from the beginning been enough evil men lurking at the ready to push the notion of racial hygiene down the slope whose slipperiness they recognized long before men of goodwill awoke to the reality of what they had wrought. Nor is it to say that — even when the worst was becoming evident — many others did not continue to allow the slide to take place and to accelerate because, after all, those being sterilized and euthanized were so unlike themselves. But it is most certainly to say that there is good reason for so many wags and wise men down the centuries to have repeatedly observed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sometimes “anarchy is loosed upon the world” not because “the best lack all conviction,” but because they firmly and honestly believe they are doing the right thing.
Doing the right thing: there has never been a period in the modern era when our species has relaxed its fascination with the idea of improving itself….A century ago the buzzword was eugenics. Today it is enhancement. Eugenics is meant to improve the breed and enhancement is meant to improve the individual, but they are too similar in concept to allow us to rest easy with either one.
Today’s molecular biologists and geneticists have dipped a very powerful oar into the ongoing stream of debate about heredity versus environment. Every year — every month — we read about newly discovered genetic factors determining not only physical characteristics but those of morals and mind as well. Sometimes we are even told their precise locations on the DNA molecule. No one knows how much of this will hold up in the coming decades, but we can be sure that a significant proportion of it will be confirmed. Some authoritative scientific voices are telling us that we should take advantage of the new knowledge to fulfill our fantasies of improving ourselves and indeed our species.
These new findings — and the enthusiasm of some of our scientists — take us huge steps beyond the ultimately shaky theoretical platform on which the eugenics movement stood. The debate has for several years been raging between those who look to the lessons of the past and shout warnings and those who see only the utopia of an enhanced future and shout encouragement. In a powerful discourse against reproductive cloning — only one manifestation of the brave new world being foreseen — Leon R. Kass wrote in these pages of “a profound defilement of our given nature … and of the social relations built on this natural ground.” At the far other end of the spectrum is Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA and one of the new breed called “futurists,” whose enthusiasm for bio-psychoengineering (Kass’s cautionary term for such feats of creativity) and a post-human future is so unbounded that he has gone so far as to title his most recent book Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. Inevitable! Even more frightening than the confidence of Stock’s vision for his fellow men and women is the title of the book’s first chapter, in which he outlines his image of how the laboratory will come to control evolution: he calls it “The Last Human,” meaning those few of us remaining whose bodies and minds have been formed by nature alone.
This is genuinely terrifying stuff. Not since the first half of the twentieth century have prominent thinkers been so starry-eyed at the thought of controlling the future of our species, or at least that privileged portion of it that will have the financial, cultural, and other wherewithal to take advantage of the offer being presented to us…. Though I admire Stock for his sincerity and the magnitude of his intellect, I am sure that I would have admired more than a few of the early German eugenicists for the very same reasons had I known them as well as I know him. What concerns me is not the progression of the technology, but the inherent creeping hazards in its philosophical underpinning, which is ultimately to improve the breed.
It all sounds very familiar. Looking backward, we can now see the danger in state-enforced policies of improvement, but too many of us have yet to awaken to the equally dangerous reality of improvement that is self-determined. We are once again standing on the slope, from the top of which the future we may be wreaking is already visible. Now is the time to recognize the nature of human motivation — and the permanence of human frailty.
I define society as an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another.
A society coheres around genetic kinship, and is defined by its common culture, which includes its moral code. The culture is developed, transmitted through, and enforced by the voluntary institutions of society (civil society). The culture is the product of trial and error, where those elements that become part of received culture serve societal coherence and — in the best case — help it to thrive. Coherence and success depend also on the maintenance of mutual respect, trust, and forbearance among society’s members. Those traits arise in part from the sharing of a common culture (which is an artifact of societal interaction) and from genetic kinship, which is indispensable to societal coherence. If the foregoing description is correct, there is one aspect of society — and one only — that a society cannot “manufacture” through its social processes. That aspect is genetic-cultural kinship.
The United States, for a very long time, was a polity whose disparate parts cohered, regionally if not nationally, because the experience of living in the kind of small community sketched above was a common one. Long after the majority of Americans came to live in urban complexes, a large fraction of the residents of those complexes had grown up in small communities.
This was Old America — and it was predominant for almost 200 years after America won its independence from Britain. Old America‘s core constituents, undeniably, were white, and they had much else in common: observance of the Judeo-Christian tradition; roots in the British Isles and continental Europe; hard work and self-reliance as badges of honor; family, church, and club as cultural transmitters, social anchors, and focal points for voluntary mutual aid.
The focus of this post is the indispensable contribution of genetic kinship to society. Before I continue, I want to make it clear that I do not use “society” in the loose way that politicians do, that is, as a feel-good word for “nation”, The United States, as a nation, may comprise societies of the kind defined above, but the United States is not a society. It is a contrivance, held together by force, not by mutual trust, respect, and forbearance — which are the operational characteristics of a society.
Mutual trust, respect, and forbearance arise from the emotional force of genetic kinship. They may be mimicked in arrangements of convenience, such as economic ones. But those arrangements last only as long as they are profitable to all parties.
Arrangements of convenience may be facilitated by social bonding, but they cannot replace social bonding. For example, disparate peoples may trade with each other, to their mutual advantage, but they are not bound to each other emotionally. History is replete with examples of peoples who have turned against each other, despite their economic ties. Diplomatic ties are even less binding, because of their superficiality.
Whence the emotional bonds of genetic kinship? Are they found only in the nuclear family? (No.) Do they encompass the extended family? (Yes.) Are they enhanced by social relationships (e.g., church and club)? (Yes.) Do they extend to broad racial-ethnic groupings? (Yes.)
Emotional bonds may be reinforced (or not) by familial and social relationships, but they begin with racial-ethnic (genetic) kinship:
[S]tudies have demonstrated that relatedness is often important for human altruism in that humans are inclined to behave more altruistically toward kin than toward unrelated individuals.[22] Many people choose to live near relatives, exchange sizable gifts with relatives, and favor relatives in wills in proportion to their relatedness.[22]
A study interviewed several hundred women in Los Angeles to study patterns of helping between kin versus non-kin. While non-kin friends were willing to help one another, their assistance was far more likely to be reciprocal. The largest amounts of non-reciprocal help, however, were reportedly provided by kin. Additionally, more closely related kin were considered more likely sources of assistance than distant kin.[23] Similarly, several surveys of American college students found that individuals were more likely to incur the cost of assisting kin when a high probability that relatedness and benefit would be greater than cost existed. Participants’ feelings of helpfulness were stronger toward family members than non-kin. Additionally, participants were found to be most willing to help those individuals most closely related to them. Interpersonal relationships between kin in general were more supportive and less Machiavellian than those between non-kin.[24]….
A study of food-sharing practices on the West Caroline islets of Ifaluk determined that food-sharing was more common among people from the same islet, possibly because the degree of relatedness between inhabitants of the same islet would be higher than relatedness between inhabitants of different islets. When food was shared between islets, the distance the sharer was required to travel correlated with the relatedness of the recipient—a greater distance meant that the recipient needed to be a closer relative. The relatedness of the individual and the potential inclusive fitness benefit needed to outweigh the energy cost of transporting the food over distance.[26]
Humans may use the inheritance of material goods and wealth to maximize their inclusive fitness. By providing close kin with inherited wealth, an individual may improve his or her kin’s reproductive opportunities and thus increase his or her own inclusive fitness even after death. A study of a thousand wills found that the beneficiaries who received the most inheritance were generally those most closely related to the will’s writer. Distant kin received proportionally less inheritance, with the least amount of inheritance going to non-kin.[27]
A study of childcare practices among Canadian women found that respondents with children provide childcare reciprocally with non-kin. The cost of caring for non-kin was balanced by the benefit a woman received—having her own offspring cared for in return. However, respondents without children were significantly more likely to offer childcare to kin. For individuals without their own offspring, the inclusive fitness benefits of providing care to closely related children might outweigh the time and energy costs of childcare.[28]
Family investment in offspring among black South African households also appears consistent with an inclusive fitness model.[29] A higher degree of relatedness between children and their caregivers frequently correlated with a higher degree of investment in the children, with more food, health care, and clothing being provided. Relatedness between the child and the rest of the household also positively associated with the regularity of a child’s visits to local medical practitioners and with the highest grade the child had completed in school. Additionally, relatedness negatively associated with a child’s being behind in school for his or her age.
Observation of the Dolgan hunter-gatherers of northern Russia suggested that, while reciprocal food-sharing occurs between both kin and non-kin, there are larger and more frequent asymmetrical transfers of food to kin. Kin are also more likely to be welcomed to non-reciprocal meals, while non-kin are discouraged from attending. Finally, even when reciprocal food-sharing occurs between families, these families are often very closely related, and the primary beneficiaries are the offspring.[30]
Other research indicates that violence in families is more likely to occur when step-parents are present and that “genetic relationship is associated with a softening of conflict, and people’s evident valuations of themselves and of others are systematically related to the parties’ reproductive values”.[31]
Numerous other studies pertaining to kin selection exist, suggesting how inclusive fitness may work amongst peoples from the Ye’kwana of southern Venezuela to the Gypsies of Hungary to even the doomed Donner Party of the United States.[32][33][34] Various secondary sources provide compilations of kin selection studies.[35][36] [From Wikipedia, “Kin selection”, as of 08/14/12.]
* * *
[E.O.] Wilson used sociobiology and evolutionary principles to explain the behavior of the social insects and then to understand the social behavior of other animals, including humans, thus established sociobiology as a new scientific field. He argued that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is the product of heredity, environmental stimuli, and past experiences, and that free will is an illusion. He has referred to the biological basis of behaviour as the “genetic leash.”[17] The sociobiological view is that all animal social behavior is governed by epigenetic rules worked out by the laws of evolution. This theory and research proved to be seminal, controversial, and influential.[18]
The controversy of sociobiological research is in how it applies to humans. The theory established a scientific argument for rejecting the common doctrine of tabula rasa, which holds that human beings are born without any innate mental content and that culture functions to increase human knowledge and aid in survival and success. In the final chapter of the book Sociobiology and in the full text of his Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature, Wilson argues that the human mind is shaped as much by genetic inheritance as it is by culture (if not more). There are limits on just how much influence social and environmental factors can have in altering human behavior….
Wilson has argued that the “unit of selection is a gene, the basic element of heredity. The target of selection is normally the individual who carries an ensemble of genes of certain kinds.” With regard to the use of kin selection in explaining the behavior of eusocialinsects, Wilson said to Discover magazine, the “new view that I’m proposing is that it was group selection all along, an idea first roughly formulated by Darwin.”[22] [From Wikipedia, “E.O. Wilson”, as of 08/14/12.]
(where b represents the benefit to the recipient of altruism, c the cost to the altruist, and r their degree of relatedness) should be replaced by the more general equation
(rbk + be) > c
in which bk is the benefit to kin (b in the original equation) and be is the benefit accruing to the group as a whole. He then argues that, in the present state of the evidence in relation to social insects, it appears that be>rbk, so that altruism needs to be explained in terms of selection at the colony level rather than at the kin level. However, it is well understood in social evolution theory that kin selection and group selection are not distinct processes, and that the effects of multi-level selection are already fully accounted for in Hamilton’s original rule, rb>c.[20] [From Wikipedia, “Group selection”, as 0f 08/14/12.]
The idea that social bonding has a deep, genetic basis is beyond the ken of leftists and pseudo-libertarian rationalists. Both prefer to deny reality, though for different reasons. Leftists like to depict the state as society. Pseudo-libertarian rationalists seem to believe that social bonding is irrelevant to cooperative, mutually beneficial behavior; life, to them, is a contractual arrangement.
Leftists and libertarians like to slander the mutual attraction of genetic kin by calling it “tribalism”. I have written about tribalism, but I will defer to a (sadly) defunct blog:
People are – in general – tribal. Let’s take it for granted that we all wish that this were not so. Further, let’s take it for granted that some individual people are much more tribal than others.
The fact remains, however, that people are tribal. It’s one thing to suggest that people should not be tribal in their daily dealings with others. Let’s stipulate that this is moral. It does not, however, follow that it would be moral to organize society around the principle the people will in fact act anti-tribally….
Lots of progressives (especially those of the libertarian sort) are fond of saying that restricting immigration is tribal. They simply can’t support immigration restrictions because they oppose tribalism.
There is no better way of demonstrating your high-status in today’s society than proclaiming your anti-tribalism. You should therefore be skeptical of these proclamations. However, many people are indeed not particularly tribal.
Your humble blogger is not a tribal person. There is no sort of person that I see on the street and say to myself, “wow, I bet he and I have a lot in common – we should look out for each other.” Temperamentally, I’m very much an individualist type. But it’s wishful thinking to generalize from my personal preferences to population-wide-shoulds.
Tribalism is, has always been, and likely always will be a feature of human societies.
Occasionally, we get not-so-gentle reminders that people are tribal. We would do well to learn. Here’s a more light-hearted example. Here’s a reminder that democratic politics is always tribal.
You’re free, of course, to consider yourself above tribalism. However, if you do so, you’ll be an idiot when you try to describe geopolitics, local politics, national politics, and public policies in general. By all means, bury your head in the sand, just don’t preach while you’re down there.
James_G makes a nice analogy in this post. He likens anti-tribal beliefs to communist beliefs. It’s true that some groups of humans can function reasonably well under communistic conditions. It’s similarly true that many human beings are not particularly tribal. However, it’s dangerously immoral to generalize from these exceptions to the general conclusions that communism works on a large scale or that all countries should be rainbow nations…. [From “The immorality of anti-tribalism”, July 25, 2012.]
In America, the pursuit of happiness in the form of money has sundered many a tribal community. (See “The Eclipse of ‘Old America’”, especially the 11th and 12th paragraphs.) But tribalism nevertheless remains a potent force in America:
(I haven’t found a more recent version of the graphic. There are almost certainly more “pink” areas now, but the overall pattern is probably about the same as it was in 2000.)
I venture to say that the “Americans” who predominate in large swaths of the South are the descendants of the English and Scots-Irish settlers of the colonial and early post-colonial era. They are “Americans” because their ancestors were (for the most part) the Americans of yore.
Not represented in the graph, because it is based on county-level statistics, are the high concentrations of Jews in many urban areas (especially in and around New York City and Miami), the coalescence of Arabs in the Detroit area, and the numerous ethnic enclaves (e.g., Chinese, Czech, Greek, Korean, Polish, Swedish, and Thai) — urban, semi-rural, and rural — that persist long after the original waves of immigration that led to their formation.
If genetic kinship is such a binding force, why is the closest kind of genetic kinship — the nuclear family — so often dysfunctional? Nuclear families are notoriously prone to strife, or so it would seem if one were to count novels and screenplays in evidence. Novels and screenplays are not dispositive, of course, because they emphasize strife for dramatic purposes. That said, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the American nuclear family is a less binding force than it used to be. But that is to be expected, given the interventions by the state that have eased divorce and lured women out of the home (e.g., affirmative action, subsidies for day care, mandated coverages for employer-provided health insurance).
There are other reasons to reject the (exaggerated) dysfunctionality of the nuclear family as evidence against the importance of genetic kinship to social bonding:
1. Strife is inevitable where humans interact, and family life affords a disproportionate number of opportunities for interaction. (For example, conflicts between the members of a nuclear family — parent vs. child, sibling vs. sibling — often begin during the childhood or adolescence of one or all parties to the conflict.)
2. Blood ties have a way of overcoming “bad blood” when a family member is in need of help. (Thus, for example, children of middle-age and older often are supportive of needful siblings and aged parents out of duty, not love.)
3. Many a person compensates for tense or distant relations with parents and siblings by maintaining close ties to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
This is not to say that the bonds of genetic kinship in America are everywhere as strong as in years past. The state’s interventions, the search for greener pastures, and the inexorable force of cross-racial and cross-ethnic sexual attraction have led to a more homogenized America.
But genetic kinship will always be a strong binding force, even where the kinship is primarily racial and ethnic.
The obverse of of genetic kinship is “diversity,” which often is touted as a good thing by anti-tribalist social engineers. But “diversity” is not a good thing when it comes to social bonding. Michael Jonas reports on a study by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century“:
It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.
But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings….
…Putnam’s work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.
His findings on the downsides of diversity have also posed a challenge for Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp. Suddenly finding himself the bearer of bad news, Putnam has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations.
When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.
“Having aligned himself with the central planners intent on sustaining such social engineering, Putnam concludes the facts with a stern pep talk,” wrote conservative commentator Ilana Mercer, in a recent Orange County Register op-ed titled “Greater diversity equals more misery.”….
The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities, including Boston. Residents were sorted into the four principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships. What emerged in more diverse communities was a bleak picture of civic desolation, affecting everything from political engagement to the state of social ties….
After releasing the initial results in 2001, Putnam says he spent time “kicking the tires really hard” to be sure the study had it right. Putnam realized, for instance, that more diverse communities tended to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents — all factors that could depress social capital independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have.
“People would say, ‘I bet you forgot about X,’” Putnam says of the string of suggestions from colleagues. “There were 20 or 30 X’s.”
But even after statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”
“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes….
In a recent study, [Harvard economist Edward] Glaeser and colleague Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe — Europe spends far more — can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population. Glaeser says lower national social welfare spending in the US is a “macro” version of the decreased civic engagement Putnam found in more diverse communities within the country.
Economists Matthew Kahn of UCLA and Dora Costa of MIT reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Kahn and Costa’s own research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace.
Birds of different feathers may sometimes flock together, but they are also less likely to look out for one another. “Everyone is a little self-conscious that this is not politically correct stuff,” says Kahn….
In his paper, Putnam cites the work done by Page and others, and uses it to help frame his conclusion that increasing diversity in America is not only inevitable, but ultimately valuable and enriching. As for smoothing over the divisions that hinder civic engagement, Putnam argues that Americans can help that process along through targeted efforts. He suggests expanding support for English-language instruction and investing in community centers and other places that allow for “meaningful interaction across ethnic lines.”
Some critics have found his prescriptions underwhelming. And in offering ideas for mitigating his findings, Putnam has drawn scorn for stepping out of the role of dispassionate researcher. “You’re just supposed to tell your peers what you found,” says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank…. [From “The downside of diversity”, The Boston Globe (boston.com), August 5, 2007.]
Putnam’s reluctance about releasing the study and his attempt to soften its implications say much about the relationship that anti-tribalist social engineers (like Putnam) have with truth. Here is more from John Leo:
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”…
Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness….
Putnam has long been aware that his findings could have a big effect on the immigration debate. Last October, he told the Financial Times that “he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.” He said it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that,” a quote that should raise eyebrows. Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings…
Though Putnam is wary of what right-wing politicians might do with his findings, the data might give pause to those on the left, and in the center as well. If he’s right, heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born. Putnam is hopeful that eventually America will forge a new solidarity based on a “new, broader sense of we.” The problem is how to do that in an era of multiculturalism and disdain for assimilation…. [From “Bowling with Our Own”, City Journal, June 25, 2007.]
I turn to Byron M. Roth’s The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature. The following observations, taken from Chapter I, are supported by the rich detail that Roth delivers in the following several hundred pages of the book:
… Multiculturalists … ignore the historical record that suggests that social harmony among different ethnic and language groups is at best rare, and where it exists, tenuous. The history of Europe, whatever else it is, is one long tale of religious and ethnic conflict, almost ceaseless war, and the slaughter and the destruction it entails. The enlightenment, and the scientific advances it engendered, did nothing to mitigate this tale of horrific and bloody conflict, with the twentieth century exhibiting the most lethal and unsparing carnage in European history. In addition, in the twentieth century, class conflict was raised to a level in Europe and Asia never seen before. Communist rulers in Europe and Asia effectively divided their societies along economic lines and managed over the century to slaughter even more people than the ethnically based World Wars I and II.
The breakup of the British Empire led to bloody civil strife throughout the former colonies among the disparate peoples held together by British force of arms. The civil war that led to the partition of India and Pakistan left an estimated one million dead in its wake. Similar terrible and murderous turmoil in Southeast Asia, in for example Cambodia and Vietnam, followed the withdrawal of the European Colonial powers. Among the former European colonies in Africa, even today, civil strife is rampant.
In the wake of the fall of Communism those multiethnic societies that had been held together by authoritarian dictators quickly fell asunder. Czechoslovakia divided in a peaceful and largely amiable way. Yugoslavia, on the other hand, was torn by vicious civil war and genocidal ethnic cleansing. Iraq, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, presents a similar case. The ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a different and bloody example of the difficulties of establishing harmony among groups of differing cultures and religions. Even Belgium, (the seat of the European Union Parliament) is in danger of splitting into its Dutch-speaking and French-speaking halves.8 Canadians of French and English ancestry are grappling with similar problems. In addition, there is a fundamental inconsistency at the base of the multiculturalist program, in that it applauds ethnic minorities who maintain their cultural traditions, but looks askance at majority populations who wish to do the same. Political elites in all Western societies take a negative view of those who wish to preserve their traditional values and patterns of living and question whether those patterns can be sustained in the face of large numbers of newcomers who do not share those values or are actually hostile to them….
[T]he social science evidence that a harmonious society composed of identifiable ethnic groups with different cultural and religious backgrounds can be arranged is, almost without exception, negative. Has some new type of social engineering appeared which would allow this historic pattern to be broken? Has some new sort of human being been born who will not repeat the follies of his ancestors? Will the world find a way to emulate the example of the Swiss? Policy makers should be trying to understand how the Swiss have managed to preserve their experiment in multicultural harmony for so long, when so many others have failed so utterly. Perhaps Switzerland can be a model for the new multicultural societies? On the other hand, maybe Switzerland is a special case that cannot be copied. Switzerland, for all its ethnic harmony, is, in effect, a confederation of separate but closely related European ethnicities who reside in different cantons, who speak their own languages (French, German, Italian, and Native Swiss), and maintain their ethnic customs and tastes. It would be reasonable to ask if such an arrangement could be widely duplicated in very different settings, but few in the multicultural camp appear interested in such a question.
Similarly, the assimilationists who support mass immigration seem equally nonchalant about the evidence for their position. Clearly, the history of immigration to the United States has been fortunate and largely successful. But in the past virtually all successful immigration was from European cultures very similar to that of the original English settlers. In addition, those settlers usually came with similar skills and abilities, often better than those of the earlier settlers, and generally had little difficulty in competing with them. Once in America, they could easily blend in, there being few physical or social features which set them apart. Usually they came in small numbers over an extended period of time and were forced to acquire the language of their host country if they expected to thrive. This was because (except for German and French speakers in some areas) no one group could sustain communities sufficiently large as to be economically independent and thereby sustain their native language for general commerce. As a counterexample, the French community in Quebec did possess sufficient size and was therefore able to maintain its language as well as its ethnic identity.
The United States was so vast and the opportunities it offered so generous that group conflict was generally muted. Conflict among immigrant Europeans was generally limited to the crowded multiethnic coastal cities, and those who wished to avoid those conflicts could migrate to the interior, often gravitating to ethnic enclaves. Even in those less crowded settings, however, conflict was not uncommon, though it usually took the form of political differences over the place of religion in society and the nature of education. Is this an immigration pattern that could be replicated today in modern societies when the immigrant groups come in large numbers from vastly different cultural and ethnic backgrounds compared to the residents of their host countries? Can this model work in crowded Western Europe where land for housing is limited and where unemployment remains at chronically high levels? In other words, is the American immigration experience prior to 1965 an exceptional one? Can it be the model for future immigration cycles or are the conditions today so different as to make the model inapplicable? These are questions that need to asked, but rarely are.
A clear implication of Roth’s analysis is that conflict — political, if not violent — is bound to result from racial-ethnic-cultural commingling — unless the disparate groups are geographically separated and politically autonomous in all respects (except, perhaps, that they each bear a “fair share” of the cost of a common defense).
The idea that society — properly defined and understood — requires genetic kinship is nevertheless anathema to anti-tribalist social tinkerers of Putnam’s ilk. It is ironic (but not surprising) that anti-tribalists often seek connections with “kindred” souls. The leftist groves of academe are notorious for their exclusion of libertarians and conservatives, but an academic mistakes his like-minded colleagues for altruistic kinsmen at his own peril. (I speak from the experience of many years in a quasi-academic think-tank, and as a former “friend” in many a work-based “friendship”.)
Libertarians, who are notoriously individualistic and aloof, also seek to bond with like-minded persons. Libertarians are responsible for the less-than-successful Free State Project and for seasteading (formally neutral in its ideology, but mainly attractive to libertarians). I expect such experiments in coexistence, if they get off the ground, to be as inconsequential as their anti-libertarian equivalent: the commune. Communes have been around for a while, of course, though none of them has lasted long or attracted many adherents. They are, after all, nothing more than economic arrangements with some “Kumbaya” thrown in.
So, yes, genetic kinship is indispensable to society, where society is properly understood as “an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another.” But, as I discuss here, not all societies based on genetic kinship are created equal. Trying to make them equal is a fool’s errand.
A bear market is usually defined as decline of at least 20 percent in a broad stock-market index. The S&P 500 index topped out at 4818.22 in January 2022, dropped to 3636.87 in June, rose to 4325.28 in August, dropped to 3491.58 in October — the low (to date) for the current bear market, 27 percent below the January peak.
Since then, the index has risen, dropped, and risen again. Today’s high of 4195.44 leaves the index only 13 percent below its peak. Technically, the market is no longer in bear country, but that doesn’t mean that the bear market is over.
Here’s the story to date:
The dashed red line is 20 percent below the January 2022 high. The meandering route of the weekly average (which I use for analysis of long-term trends) has taken the index above the “magic” 20-percent line more than once.
But the end of a bear market isn’t confirmed until two things happen. The first is that the 26-week average turns up and continues to rise for at least 13 weeks. That hasn’t happened, yet. And it may not happen for a while. The low (to date) occurred after the impressive rally of June-October 2022.
The second indicator is the value of a volatility index that I have concocted. It hasn’t dropped into bull-market territory yet. But it can drop suddenly — and unpredictably.
As the man said the market is a random walk down Wall Street. Anything can happen, and it usually does: war, riot, natural disaster, political turmoil, unexpectedly bad or good economic news, etc., etc., etc.
Politics and Prosperity 