Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - THE POLITICAL IMPULSE
Chapter 2 - THE AMERICAN REALITY
Chapter 3 - CULTURE, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, THE AUDIENCE, AND THE ELEVATOR
Chapter 4 - ALCATRAZ
Chapter 5 - LOST HORIZON
Chapter 6 - THE MUSIC MAN
Chapter 7 - CHOICE
Chapter 8 - THE RED SEA
Chapter 9 - CHICAGO
Chapter 10 - MILTON FRIEDMAN EXPLAINED
Chapter 11 - WHAT IS “DIVERSITY”?
Chapter 12 - THE MONTY HALL PROBLEM AND THE CONTRACTOR
Chapter 13 - MAXWELL STREET
Chapter 14 - R100
Chapter 15 - THE INTELLIGENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Chapter 16 - THE VICTIM
Chapter 17 - PURITANS
Chapter 18 - THE NOBLE SAVAGE
Chapter 19 - ADVENTURE SLUMMING
Chapter 20 - CABINET SPIRITUALISM AND THE CAR CZAR
Chapter 21 - RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter 22 - MY FATHER, AL SHARPTON, AND THE DESIGNATED CRIMINAL
Chapter 23 - GREED
Chapter 24 - ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 25 - OAKTON MANOR AND CAMP KAWAGA
Chapter 26 - FEMINISM
Chapter 27 - THE ASHKENAZIS
Chapter 28 - SOME PERSONAL HISTORY
Chapter 29 - THE FAMILY
Chapter 30 - NATURALLY EVOLVED INSTITUTIONS
Chapter 31 - BREATHARIAN
Chapter 32 - THE STREET SWEEPER AND THE SURGEON, OR MARXISM EXAMINED
Chapter 33 - SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH
Chapter 34 - HOPE AND CHANGE
Chapter 35 - THE SMALL REFRIGERATOR
Chapter 36 - BUMPER STICKERS
Chapter 37 - LATE REVELATIONS
Chapter 38 - WHO DOES ONE THINK HE IS?
Chapter 39 - THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE
Acknowledgements
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
SENTINEL
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First published in 2011 by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © David Mamet, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Mamet, David.
The secret knowledge : on the dismantling of American culture / David Mamet. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-51535-8
1. Right and left (Political science)—United States. 2. Political culture—United States. 3. United States—Politics and government—21st century. I. Title.
JK1726.M36 2011
320.51’30973—dc22 2010049347
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This book is dedicated to the memory of my father.
Most initiations are about the devolution of responsibility. At the same time, initiations often double as a long and confused moment of shared truths. Essentially, what the adults, elders, or senior members of the group share with the initiates is the knowledge they possess, and then they admit to a terrible secret, the secret of the “tribe”—that beyond the knowledge the initiates have just been given there is no special knowledge.
—Anna Simons, The Company They Keep
1
THE POLITICAL IMPULSE
All religions stem from the same universal needs. Each contains awe, obedience, grace, study, prayer, and submission. Each religion will order and stress these elements differently, but their root is the same—a desire to understand the Divine and its intentions for humankind.
The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations.
Emotions may elevate practical partisan differences to the realm of the spiritual or doctrinal, which is to say, the irreconcilable—Democrats, notably, are more likely to credit terrorists taken in battle against our country rather than Republicans, and many liberal Jews to believe the statements of Hamas rather than those of Israel.
In the election of 2008, environmental, social, and financial change were the concerns of both parties. The Right held that a return to first principles would arrest or re-channel this momentum toward bankruptcy and its attendant geopolitical dangers. It suggested fiscal conservatism, greater and more efficient exploitation of natural resources, lower taxes, a stronger military. The Left’s view was to suggest that Change was good in itself—that a problem need not be dealt with mechanically (by acts whose historical efficacy was demonstrable) but could be addressed psychologically, by identifying “change itself” as a solution.
The underlying question, common to both sides, was how to deal with this problematic change; the Conservative answer, increased exploitation of the exploitable and conservation of needless expenditure—in effect, sound business practice; that of the Liberals a cessation of the same. Each were and are interested in Security, the Liberals suggesting détente and the Conservatives increased armament; each side was interested in Justice, the Conservatives holding it will best be served by the strict rule of law, the Liberals by an increase in the granting of Rights.
This opposition appealed to me as a dramatist. For a good drama aspires to be and a tragedy must be a depiction of a human interaction in which both antagonists are, arguably, in the right.
My early plays, American Buffalo, The Water Engine, Glengarry Glen Ross, concerned Capitalism and business. This subject consumed me as I was trying to support myself, and like many another young man or woman, had come up against the blunt fact of a world which did not care.
I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad, although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings. I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.
As a youth I enjoyed—indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered—the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system—which is to say by the accrual of wealth—house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.
We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation.
Brecht, an East German, was allowed by the Communists to keep his wealth and live at his ease in Switzerland—a show dog of Communism. His accomplishments, however, must be seen not as an indictment, but as a ratification of the power of free enterprise. As must the seemingly ineradicable vogue for the notion of Government Control.
The free market in ideas keeps this folly as current as any entertainment reviled by the Left as “mindless.” But the fiction of top-down Government Control, of a Command Economy, is, at essence, like a Reality Show, which is to say, a fraud. The Good Causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere.
Who does not want Justice? Each of us, of course, wants justice for himself, and all but the conscienceless few realize that we deserve well from each other.
The question is one of apportionment, for justice cannot be infinite. There is a finite amount of time, knowledge, wisdom, and money—and to tax the mass endlessly, even in the pursuit of justice, must cause injustice somewhere.
One may be just to the trees of the Northwest, impoverish loggers, and raise the cost of home construction; if all prisoners are allowed unlimited and endless access to all courts, whose time and energy is as finite as every other thing, the court system must stint other applicants. One may extend Justice to the snail darter and cripple the Port of New York; and a legitimate aversion to racial profiling may not only inconvenience but mortally endanger the traveling public.
My revelation came upon reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It was that there is a cost to everything, that nothing is without cost, and that energy spent on A cannot be spent on B, and that this is the meaning of cost—it represents the renunciation of other employments of the money. He wrote that there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs—money spent on more crossing guards cannot be spent on books. Both are necessary, a choice must be made, and that this is the Tragic view of life.
It made sense to me. Now, like the Fibonacci sequence, I began to see it everywhere. Milton Friedman pointed out that the cavil, “It would seem that a country that could put a man on the moon could provide free lunches for its schoolchildren,” missed the point: the country could not supply the free lunches because it put the man on the moon—there is only so much money. I understood this because I have a checkbook, and my reading inspired me to realize the equation did not differ at the National Level—there was only so much money, and choices must be made.
Money, I further learned, was just an efficient way of keeping track of the production of individuals—of their work and the capacity of that work to benefit their fellows. The more the money moved around, the more the mass benefited. The Government could do little with this product save waste it: it did not produce. It could tax or confiscate, but it could not allocate with greater justice than the Free Market;1 it could and should, then, provide only those services of which the Free Market was incapable: the roads, the sewers, the Judiciary, the streetlights, the Legislature, and the Common Defense—the notion that it could do more was an illusion and nowhere demonstrable.2 The Government could only profess to do more, its bureaucrats and politicians playing on our human need for guidance and certainty, and, indeed, our desire for Justice. But these members of Government, Right and Left, were as likely to exploit their position as you or I; and, like Brecht, as likely to mine human credulity as to alleviate human need.
Politics, then, seemed to me, like business, a delightful panoply of deceit and error and strife—a brand-new tide pool for the naturalist.
I wrote a political play.
Writers are asked, “How could you know so much about [fill in the profession]?” The answer, if the writing satisfies, is that one makes it up. And the job, my job, as a dramatist, was not to write accurately, but to write persuasively. If and when I do my job well, subsequent cowboys, as it were, will talk like me.
In order to write well, however, the good dramatist must absolutely identify with his subject. This does not mean to be in “sympathy with,” but “to become the same as.”
In writing my political play I realized, then, that I was in no way immune from the folly of partisanship, of muddle-headedness, and of rancor in political thought; that I enjoyed the righteous indignation and the licensed spectacle as much as anyone, for the feeling of superiority it gave me. That I was, in short, a fool.
That, for a writer, is an excellent place to begin.
A friend came to our house for Thanksgiving. She’d flown from D.C. to Los Angeles, and the first-class cabin of her plane had been occupied by two turkeys “pardoned” by President Bush, and sold or lent to the Disney Corporation, to lead its Thanksgiving parade down the Main Street of Disneyland.
This intersection of these two hucksterisms drew me irresistibly to a fantasy.
All people being venal by nature, and politicians doubly so by profession, was it not clear that a President would not pardon turkeys save for some consideration? My fantasy had a despised incumbent, scant weeks from Election Day with no hope of reelection. His party has stopped advertising his hopeless run. He is asked to pardon a couple of turkeys in return for a small campaign contribution. He becomes inspired and tells the turkey manufacturers he wants two hundred million dollars or he will pardon every turkey in America.
So far so good, and here’s the kicker—in order to convince the American People to endorse his ban on turkey, he enlists the genius of his treasured speechwriter. She, a Lesbian, has just returned from China, whither she and her partner had gone to purchase a baby. She says she will write the speech only if the President, in return, will marry her and her partner on National TV. Pretty funny play. And its theme, I believe, is not only that we are “all human,” but, better, that we are all Americans.
Here is Clarice Bernstein (the Speechwriter) reading a draft of her speech to Charles Smith, the President:The fellow or the woman at the watercooler? We don’t know their politics. We judge their character by the simple things: are they respectful, are they punctual, can they listen, “can they get along” . . . we care if they paint their fence. We don’t know who they vote for. We don’t know what they “do in bed.” Who would be disrespectful enough to enquire? If you look at the polls it seems we are a “nation divided.” But we aren’t “a nation divided.” Sir. We’re a Democracy. We hold different opinions. But: we laugh at the same jokes, we clap each other on the back when we’ve made that month’s quota; and, sir, I’m not at all sure that we don’t love each other. (from November)
There is a final reconciliation of Right and Left, straight and gay, and everything is made right by the deus ex machina, Chief Dwight Grackle of the Micmac Nation, who has come to assassinate the President, and the curtain line is “Jesus, I love this country.” As do I. And my love increased the more I thought about it. I considered the play a love letter to America.
A local New York paper tried to close the play. Their fellow was outraged, finding it politically incorrect, in which he was, astonishingly, acute.
Now, the plot thickening, the Village Voice asked me to write an article on the play’s politics. I wrote them an essay titled “Political Civility,” which laid out my views as above. I knew, however, that the Voice (a) has always been the voice of the Left; and (b) that they, over the years, had generally accepted my work only kicking and screaming. So I schemed to ensnare them. I began my essay on civility and consideration with an anecdote about the Village Voice.
Norman Mailer reviewed the first production in America of Waiting for Godot in the Village Voice. He called it trash. He went home though, and thought about it and returned to see the play again. He recognized it now as a work of genius, and bought a page in the Voice renouncing his review, and praising the play. I began my essay with this anecdote.
Aha. The Voice took the bait and published the article. They, however, retitled it “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal.” The New York paper, enraged, rereviewed my play, giving it a worse notice than the first time around, and I was embraced by the Right.
Then I was asked to write a book on politics. And, in the words of Gertrude Stein, so I did, and this is it.
2
THE AMERICAN REALITY
It was observed, and I cannot remember by whom, that “like all prolific writers, he was very lazy.” This is certainly true of me. I am prolific, and look upon my lengthy and various credits as must an inveterate debtor look upon the completed list of his obligations: it fills me with shame. Why? Perhaps because none of it felt like work, but like escape. What sort of sick fool would need to still so many terrifying thoughts by so much production?
In any case, I have been granted the dispensation to spend my days making the unpleasant pleasant.
By whom was I granted this right? By the society in which I live, which found my works sufficiently diverting to pay me to sit alone all day and continue as I had begun.
Leisure for reflection, somewhere near the end of a long career, leads me to thank God for allowing me to live in a society sufficiently free of Governmental control to allow the citizenry expression of its true diversity, which is to say, diversity of thought.
For, certainly, my works do not please everyone. But I, discovering that which does not please, am free to chase the market, to persist as before, or to desist entirely. I am, in short, free to fail, which means I am free to succeed, and, if successful, to enjoy any particularities which such success might confer upon me.
This is not only the American Dream—but the American reality, my growing realization of which prompted me to write this book.
I spoke with my first conservatives at age sixty. My rabbi, Mordecai Finley, a centrist, and a founding member of his temple, Endre Balogh, took the time to talk to me. I was impressed not by their politics, which, at the time, made to me no sense, but by their politeness and patience. They gave me a book, and the book was White Guilt, by Shelby Steele.
It brought to mind an old Providence, Rhode Island, answer to a difficult question, “What do you want, the truth, or a lie . . . ?”
Having spent my life in the theatre, I knew that people could be formed into an audience, that is, a group which surrenders for two hours, part of its rationality, in order to enjoy an illusion.
As I began reading and thinking about politics I saw, to my horror, how easily people could also assemble themselves into a mob, which would either attract or be called into being by those who profited from the surrender of reason and liberty—and that these people are called politicians. My question, then, was, that as we cannot live without Government, how must we deal with those who will be inclined to abuse it—the politicians and their manipulators? The answer to that question, I realized, was attempted in the U.S. Constitution—a document based not upon the philosophic assumption that people are basically good, but on the tragic confession of the opposite view.
I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he inevitably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.
The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.3
I saw that I had been living in a state of ignorance, accepting an unexamined illusion and calling it “compassion,” but that there were those brave enough to work their way through the prevailing slogans of their time, and reason toward a consistent, practicable understanding of human relations. To these, politics was not the manipulation of the ignorant and undecided, but the dedication to the defense and implementation of just, first principles, for example, those of the United States Constitution.
I saw that to proclaim these beliefs in individual freedom, in individual liberty, and in the inevitable evil of surrender of powers to the State, was, in the general population, difficult, and in the Liberal environment, literally impossible, but yet men and women of courage devoted their lives and energies to doing so, undeterred not only by scorn but by despair.4
I will now quote two Chicago writers on the subject, the first, William Shakespeare, who wrote “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when Lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink”; the second, Ernest Hemingway, “Call ’em like you see’em and to hell with it.”
3
CULTURE, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, THE AUDIENCE, AND THE ELEVATOR
Culture predates society, as it evolves before consciousness.
Consider, Friedrich Hayek writes, an unwritten law that is universally accepted and practiced and that both predates and gives rise to verbal codification: in a potentially violent altercation, the party nearest his opponent’s home will withdraw.
The Culture, of a country, a family, a religion, a region, is a compendium of these unwritten laws worked out over time through the preconscious adaptations of its members—through trial and error. It is, in its totality, “the way we do things here.” It is born of the necessity of humans getting along. It does not come into being because of the inspiration, nor because of the guidance, of any individual or group, but it evolves naturally: those things which work are adopted, those which do not, discarded. This evolution has been referred to as “social Darwinism,” but, as Hayek teaches, it is not. Darwin observed that the individuals of a species which were better fitted to their environment throve and interbred, thus strengthening their particular adaptation. Those without the effective adaptation died out.
But the evolution of a culture takes place not through the disappearance of those lacking a beneficial adaptation and the interbreeding of its possessors, but through imitation. That culture which has discovered a beneficial adaptation is imitated by those cultures which perceive its worth—the possessors and nonpossessors of an adaptation do not compete on this basis—all may adopt the beneficial behavior and thrive.
The greatest endorsement of my Grandparents’ immigrant generation was “He is my landsman.” Which was to say, “He comes from my shtetl and my lodge (my culture), and I can, thus, predict how he will act.” This is not to say that the landsman was perfect, or that the prediction was infallible, but that, sharing a culture, one could take a large amount of energy which otherwise would have been expended on self-defense, and utilize it more productively. (Cf. the locker room of a jiujitsu academy, where one may safely leave one’s valuables unlocked and in the open; as the more skilled could easily overcome the neophytes, and skill has been gained only through attendance and study—status awarded not only for physical accomplishment, but, as per the tenets of this particular tribe, for honorable behavior.)
The grave error of multiculturalism is the assumption that reason can modify a process which has taken place without reason, and with inputs astronomically greater than those reason might provide.
Sowell, in Ethnic America, points out that the behavior of ethnic groups in America predates their immigration (or transplantation) to this country; and may be seen as growing out of the ancient necessities facing these groups in their original lands. For example, the Jews are an historically stateless people, and so had to invest their time and wealth in that which could be transported without confiscation—education; the Irish, living for centuries under foreign rule and at the whim of invaders, had to form their own hermetic state-within-a-state, to provide support, protection, and justice, hence their introduction of and success with what became known here as ward politics.
These cultural adaptations predate and are the basis for that more conscious, more sophisticated agglomeration called society, which might be said to be the appurtenances growing out of culture.5 Thus, as Sowell writes, the communal culture is a real possession, available to all through the efforts of all, not only in the present day, but historically. This possession, as per Veblen (as above) is little different from the individual inheritance of an actual, material tool—though it is not material, it is a tool, and an inheritance.
The tool of culture is the capacity to predict the operation of the social environment—a property right little different from a right in land or wealth. This cultural right exists not limitlessly—for any property right is limited, by chance, death, inflation, erosion, theft, laws, confiscation, etc. but, as with a material property right, founded upon an abstract concept: predictability, which differs from omniscience, but is of immeasurably greater worth than ignorance. Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.
We have all experienced, for example, the phenomenon of the First Night in a New Home. The myriad bits of information in our possession of which we were unaware: the location and operation of the light switch, the steps-to-the-couch, the meaning of a creak in the floor (is it the house settling, or is it the step of an intruder?), these countless accommodations, worked out over time, and without the individual’s conscious knowledge either of their content or of their presence, are, in the new home, brought to consciousness, and demand energy, consideration, and response. The cultural cursor has been put back to zero, and the mind and spirit complain, “I can’t do all these things at once,” and indeed, we cannot. And the first nights in the new home are spent without sleep, and longing for peace.
See The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (to take another idea and a title from Hayek), prime among which is the misconception that the human mind can (a) conceive, and (b) implement a better way of accomplishing a process worked out over millennia by a mechanism infinitely more suited to the task than the human mind (that process being the interaction of human beings, each of whom want something from the other, and all of whom must live together, which is to say, adapt, which is to say, arrive at a solution).
Our current societal (as opposed to cultural) development is burdened by the presence of “Good Ideas.” These ideas are called Good not because their implementation has led to the betterment of life, but in homage to the supposed goodwill or intellectual status of their instigators. Examples will come to mind based upon the individual reader’s political or moral complexion, but, for the purposes of illustration in this essay, they may be said to include feminism, birth control, “diversity,” free love, and the profusion of “counter-cultural” innovations spawned in the 1960s.6
This joyous extemporizing of a “new social vision” has brought about an effect not unlike the first night in the new home. It exacts a great cost in bringing to the conscious (unprepared and unskilled) mind those decisions worked out over time. One cost is confusion: angry feminists, lonely aging males, full divorce courts, broken families, grieving children, and a growing disbelief not only in the possibility of domestic accord, but of the efficacy of the free market.
The millennia-long evolution of the human family as a means of dealing with the environment was discarded by my generation of fantasists, in favor of a concept not only artificial, but inchoate: “freedom”—the pursuit of which has led to misery. See today’s film and television love stories. They, almost universally, feature a man and a woman who despise each other, but come, at the end of the piece, to see that, nonetheless, they, somehow “belong” together, and will “make a go of it.”
This is a sad inversion of the traditional story of a man and a woman who love each other, and are kept apart by (and eventually united by their ability to overcome), circumstance. (That is, they are awarded happiness through the exercise of their will.)
The “Good Idea” (the unimplementable concept), fails, for it is the product of a consciousness incapable of recognizing let alone assessing possible variables. When it fails, the conscious mind balks at the necessity of spending further energy on that which was once free; which is to say, unconscious: the culture.7 The enlightened, socially aware individual, however, a believer in the primacy of the Individual Mind, now affronted by defeat, regresses to that realm which once supported but has now failed him—his unconscious—and takes revenge. He becomes angry.
One might ask not why mass shootings are happening, but why they are happening in schools. Troubled youngsters from troubled families have, traditionally, had the possibility of solace in those institutions operating in loco parentis. The child and adolescent, denied order and predictability in the home, might find it on offer in the rules of the school; learn your lesson, dress and act appropriately, sit down, shut up. Though the child complains, these are, to him a comfort. For they are predictable, and they are impersonal, and, so, he need not (in contradistinction to the enormities of life at home) take them personally. As such they are the perfect inculcator of a respect for law, tradition, and property without which the child can have no success in the wider, less predictable world beyond the school.
If the school and its subjects, rules and regulations, and expectations are unpredictable, eventual autonomy becomes, to the young, unimaginable, and the wider world which the adolescent knows himself incapable of dealing with becomes not a phenomenon to be faced after the acquisition of skills, but an immediate and frightening exigency. School, in teaching the mastery of skills (the three Rs) gives the child faith in his ability to master other skills—schools devoted to the debatable (social studies, multiculturalism, and other moot topics) weaken the child—for, even as they seem to endorse some inchoate sense of “social justice,” they offer the adolescent hungering for certainty a curriculum of pabulum, and reward him for regurgitating the school’s positions.8
College, once a predictable, practicable course of study designed to fit the individual for self-support, has become, at least in the Liberal Arts, an extension of the bad high school, which is to say, of the terror of adolescence.
The advertisement of “choice”—in curriculum, in behavior (in the glorification of “alternative lifestyles”) while a charming idea to the conscious (pleasure-bent) eighteen-year-old mind, is, actually, to him deeply unsettling. For the eighteen-year-old knows that at some point he must abandon even graduate school, and get on in a world which, he knows, the pandering cry of “choice” is not fitting him for. Gender studies, multiculturalism, semiotics, deconstruction, video art, and other such guff, while attractive to the child, as they seem to endorse his “adulthood,” are in truth, terrifying as his clock ticks on toward the school’s relaxation of its authority, that date on which it will spew the unschooled, confused, skill-less student into a world which, he must know, is uninterested in his capacity for bushwah, and wants to know what he can contribute to the common effort.
Consider college education which, in the Liberal Arts, and in the social sciences, or whatever they may be called today, is effectively a waste of money and time, and useless save as that display of leisure and wealth Veblen called “conspicuous consumption.” A Liberal Arts education is essentially a recognition symbol, which, as such might theoretically facilitate entrance into a higher class, were entrance awarded on the basis solely of that passport; but see the MAs in English bagging groceries. Higher Education is selling an illusion: that the child of the well-to-do need not matriculate into the workforce—that mastery of a fungible skill is unnecessary.9
It spews him eventually, even after the most attenuated “graduate study,” increasingly embraced by the affluent and confused—into a marketplace the lessons of which he is at a vast disadvantage to face, let alone master, having (a) waited too long, and (b) taught himself that he need not stoop to consider the practical.
The Liberal Arts graduate student has stayed too long at the fair—as the once-nubile career woman finds that her marriage prospects at forty-five are not the same available to her twenty years previously; and as the middle-aged roué discovers that the possibility of domestic love and security have receded with habits formed by decades of dating and “freedom.”
Conservative reasoning asks, “What actually is the desired result of any proposed course of action; what is the likelihood of its success; and at what cost?” (The last, importantly, including the costs of possible failure.) These are, to the social tinkerer, unknowable, their sum being expressed, euphemistically, as “the law of unintended consequences.”
School shootings and the increased enrollment in postgraduate Liberal Arts studies may be seen as two unconscious attempts at adaptation of a culture evolving away from the exigencies of staffing a trained workforce. For though much has been made of the necessity of a college education, the extended study of the Liberal Arts actually trains one for nothing. And the terrified adolescent, abandoned by society, coddled by society, may, if unbalanced, turn to rage and (a) kill; or, if merely clueless, (b) hide in college, as he does not possess the strength to grow up and leave.
Which brings me to the elevator.
A group of strangers enter an elevator. They arrange themselves according to not only conscious, but unconscious patterns of deference. Contributing to the arrangement are unconscious recognitions of size, gender, age, wealth, social status, and education (as evidenced by dress and attitude), vocation (as suggested by dress and appurtenances), sexual desirability, perceived threat (a function of size, age, race, demeanor)—not only of the individual, but of the individual in that particular group. For an individual will be given preference, deference, or the lack of same based not solely on the above per se, but in consideration of the admixture of persons in the elevator, the time of day, the likelihood of many or few stops; a pattern which changes with each new arrival and departure from the car, at which point the entire company redistributes itself.
This, the preverbal, pre-intellectual process of accommodation, is the basis of all culture. It evolves through the accomplishment of shared but unconscious small objectives, which may be collectivized as the preconscious understanding that “We must get along.”
Civilization is preceded by culture, which is worked out by innumerable interactions over ages.10 Culture may be obliterated by revolution (at which point it is, predictably, superseded by Terror), but it will and can evolve only at its own speed, and in a direction shaped by its own countless interactions—neither in response to individual nor to communal will, but through the mechanism of unconscious interaction and toward an unknowable end.
Tolstoy, in the epilogue to War and Peace, wrote that the savage, on seeing the railroad train, believes that the train is caused by the puff of smoke, for he sees the smoke first.
But the smoke, he wrote, does not cause the locomotive, and five million Frenchmen could not have marched into Russia because Napoleon suggested they do so. Obviously, then, there must be some deeper force at work, a force we cannot ever understand.
The actual operations of a culture are deeply mysterious.11
Those of us in show business spend our lives trying to understand, subvert, and predict the actions of the audience. It cannot be done.
Not only will the audience endorse what it chooses irrespective of cajolery, but it will communicate its preferences instantly and without apparent intervention of traditional forms of discourse or of cogitation. For the audience reacts preconsciously; it will laugh, cry, fall asleep, gasp, or leave, without reference to reason, as a conjoined entity making its decisions in an unpredictable fashion, according to unstatable goals.
The choices of the audience, of Napoleon’s army, of the folks in the elevator, are the working out of a mystery. It may be glimpsed, it cannot be understood, and to tinker with its processes is to court great risk.12
4
ALCATRAZ
I was in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, looking out of a big picture window at Alcatraz. I asked my ten-year-old, “Do you know what Alcatraz is?” He said, “Yes, it is a tourist attraction, but it used to be a federal prison.”
Things change. Isn’t it interesting how kids learn? I got my information from Warner Bros. movies; where did he get his information from?
In my racket, show business, one learns through doing and through watching. The second assistant cameraman spends years watching the shot being set up, lit, and prepared. Eventually he learns and advances toward the day he will be director of photography.
There is no way to approximate the experience of failure in front of an audience. It has nothing to do with the censure of teachers who are, after all, paid to be nice to one, or at least, to keep one’s custom. Actors and writers stay in school to spare themselves that lesson. And they stay in school because they do not know any better.
Temple Grandin, an animal behaviorist, cattlewoman, and designer of livestock systems, is autistic and writes extensively about the similarities between autism and animal thinking. Both think in pictures. Both learn through observation. A hand-reared animal does not know how to behave in the wild, what is food, what is threat, and how to behave toward its superiors. Stallions, she writes, have a reputation for viciousness but are not vicious because they are stallions, but because they, being valuable creatures, have been raised in isolation. They have never learned the submission and dominance patterns of the group.
College, while it may theoretically teach skills, also serves to delay the matriculation of the adolescent into society. He, thus, does not get a chance either to submit to nor to observe unfettered human interaction. This student, not surprisingly, develops a sense of immunity which, after graduation, often results in either a string of failures and rejections, or in his retreat to the exclusive coterie, and extended college-like atmosphere of protection, this last if he is blessed with the crippling curse of not having to make a living.13
As we live by our brains, and as our brains function best through observation, the absence of actual experience of the world opens the student to formation of some conclusions which have no or only harmful application outside the halls of ivy. If he is rewarded by pleasing the teacher, that is, by repeating an endorsed behavior, he, like any other animal, is going to take his learning out into the world. “George Washington, Father of our country—have a pellet of food . . . Thomas Jefferson, third President, but owned slaves and kept a mistress—have an appointment as a graduate instructor.” Light comes on, pull lever, get pellet of food. This is fine for the rat, for the rat lives in the lab. In the wider world, however, the path to food is more demanding and its signals cannot be learned inside the lab. To keep pulling the lever when the technicians are gone is called the Cargo Cult.
The Trobriand islanders profited from the presence among them of the Allied Forces in World War II. The forces left, but the islanders kept building driftwood airplanes in the hopes of luring back the food and support.
“Thomas Jefferson, third President, adulterer, slave owner.” In the lab—get a pellet. Out of the lab—no pellet. Obvious answer—never leave the lab. But the Left may supply the pellet for the ex-student. It is now not a grade, but the protection of the herd.
The problem for the ex-student, however, may be different from that of the rat. The rat pulls the lever, but the college student has to supply a phrase, and the phrase has semantic content.
Semantics is the study of how words influence thought and action. “Sit down” will have a different response than, “Sit right down,” “Sit the hell down,” “Oh, sit down,” “Please sit down,” and so on. The college student is not merely pulling a lever, but repeating ideas. He, of course, comes to prize the ideas whose repetition rewarded him. He thinks these ideas themselves are good. How could he think otherwise? For they have brought him food, and so are good. And so unquestionable.
But like the rat in the wild, looking for something shaped like a lever, the released student/intellectual will and must look for opportunities to exercise his learned behavior, and win a reward. The reward may be status or position. It is, more usually, safety in the group.
Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever.
Why, then, should the student, raised in captivity, examine either the content or the consequences of this connection?
He is of that group, and rewarded for being of that group which knows that slave-owning is bad. But everyone knows that slave-owning is bad. The owners did as much as the slaves. There is no actual wider benefit or merit in being able to repeat it, so its repetition is useful only as a recognition symbol, allowing its utterer access to those whose thinking process is similarly limited.
Group recognition symbols are essential; that’s why we all play, “Oh, do you know . . . ?” That’s how our animal minds know whom to trust and whom to kill. But a further cost of these intellectual recognition symbols is a membership in a group trained to repeat rather than to consider.
Thomas Jefferson was an adulterer; so was every President, most likely. That’s why men get into politics; it gives them power. Power brings sex, just as it was in the cave days. Politicians are supposed to have a wife. With increased success they can have all the sex they want, so they are invited to commit adultery. And those who do not steal (and many do not, but some do), will bend the laws, some for personal benefit, for contributions, for the benefit of friends, some in the service of their Country, some through folly. Because they have power.
What else does power do? How might one abuse power? How does one seek it? Knowing the nature of power, why is one inclined to abdicate any power or reason, blindly praising a person or idea?14 Ideas may accrete into a philosophy, which is a coherent ordered view of the world, or they may accrete into an elaborated recognition symbol, a series of degrees like that of the Masons.
Che Guevara was a mass murderer; we have his depiction on the walls of our children’s rooms. We do not have there the picture of Charles Manson. Why? Che “sought power for the People.” How does one know? One has been told. But wait, as a politician, he was probably no different from Thomas Jefferson, which is to say, he was just a man. Is it different, being a mass murderer and being an adulterer? “Ah, but I have seen Che’s photo on the bedroom wall of my son.” Would I so mislead my son? Why not? It was done to you. And me.
Kindness is good. No doubt. What, however, is kindness? Kindness to the wicked is cruelty to the righteous. As a child I read of the Tibetan monk who left his home, walked a thousand miles and discovered, hidden in his robe, an ant which only existed in his home village. So he walked the thousand miles back to replace the ant, to avoid doing it violence. But how many ants did he step on on the way?
“Practice random acts of kindness.” Is it kindness to give a few dollars to a beggar who is likely to spend it on alcohol? Do I have the interest or ability to determine actually what his problem is, and if I should, how I should help him? Or is it just easier to give him the money? Of course it is, for it makes me feel good, as I may call it kindness.
Is it kindness to pass a real estate bill, which while rewarding some, harms most and brings our country close to bankruptcy?
The problems of the real world are real problems, and most of us are overprotected beings. You and I may pull the lever of Reward Me for the Right Answer—so far so good. But the effects will be far reaching, as our rewards have a semantic content, and our learned responses which we understand as “basic truths,” and, so, beyond question, will affect not only ourselves but others.
“Capitalism is bad”? Not the capitalism that founded and supported Stanford or Harvard or Penn; not that which makes our clothes, and cars and guitars, and brings the food and so on, and not that which employs and supports us, or has supported the parents which supported us; and not those businesses we, in our dreams, would like to create (“Gosh, I’ve got a billion-dollar idea”). But we have gotten the pellet for repeating that capitalism is bad, Thomas Jefferson was an adulterer, and the loop is closed because we have been rewarded. So let us vote for higher taxes on business, although if we look around, California, with the highest taxes in the country, is broke, having taxed business away. And let us vote for a top-down economy, for certainly Government, which destroys most everything it touches, can run the auto industry better than businesspeople can. But by what convoluted logic does it make sense that a man who never made a car can make cars better than an industry of carmakers? Do you want your surfboard made by a surfboard maker or an oceanographer? But Thomas Jefferson had slaves.
And this is a racist country. Q. Are you a racist? A. No. Q. When was the last time you heard a racist remark or saw racial discrimination at school or work? Ah yes, but I got the pellet. The pellet was fine, but it came with a price. The price was a limited ability to see the world. Do African Americans think it is a racist country? I’m sure they see subtle and not-so-subtle bias and prejudice every day. A Jew is aware of anti-Semitism of which the non-Jew is not. But under the law, this is not a racist country, and what other choice would you have? De facto, and de jure, this is a nonracist country, and the only other test I can see is that any taint of bias, any potential bias, whether it results in discrimination or not, must be eradicated at all costs. So let us enact hate crime laws, as if getting beaten to death were more pleasant if one was not additionally called a greaser. And let us ensure that the Government, to eradicate “hate speech,” will become the arbiter on all speech—that same Government whose very return address on the envelope awakens fear. Let’s give them more power, because I pulled the lever and I got a pellet. It’s a racist country, America is an exploiter. Capitalism is bad. Israel is corrupt.
If we identify every interaction as possessing a victim, (find the victim, get a pellet), we are training ourselves away from the ability to ask what are the issues, how do I know, what are the biases of the reporters, how do the issues affect me, what, if any, is my responsibility?15
Perhaps there is another view of the world, in which every transaction need not be reduced to victim and oppressor. What would such a worldview be? What skills might one need to see the world thus, as a flea market rather than a slave market? Identity politics reduce the world to victims and oppressors. But is there another way of looking at the world? Do we want, for example, to judge the rights and wrongs of the Middle East conflict on the basis of the predominant darker tint of one of the party’s complexions?
Is not the federal Government which we revile the same Government we want to enlarge? Are not the same taxes we want to increase the same taxes we, every one, scheme to avoid, the same capitalism we are taught to loathe the same capitalism which allows us to thrive?
Our task in life is not to guess which lever to pull, but to learn to determine, in the wild, as it were, how to support ourselves. Is this not a return to savagery? Not at all. It is a return to community, for in the free market, success comes only from the ability to supply the needs of others.
We recognize it when the power goes off, or the rains or snow come, and we look to our neighbors for what we need, recognizing we are going to have to reciprocate, and are happy to do so. Will there be abuses? Of course. But our free enterprise system, and the free market in ideas brings more prosperity and happiness to the greatest number of people in history. It is the envy of the world. This envy often takes the form of hatred. But examine our local haters of democracy, and of capitalism, the American Left and their foreign comrades come a-visiting to tell us of our faults. They are here not because we are the Great Satan, but because here they are free to speak. And you will note that when they write they copyright their books, and buy goods with the proceeds.
It is said that you don’t train the new puppy during the training periods; you’re training the new puppy every moment of the day. The puppy is a learning machine, as is the child and the adolescent.
The transition from college marks the end of that period in which the child is effortlessly assimilating knowledge. Past this point, the changing of beliefs will be something of an effort. But there is always new information. Where and how do we learn to think for ourselves? In the world and only in the world. In the free marketplace of ideas, where one can run home neither to Momma nor to the enveloping warmth of the herd which has replaced her.
Who is wise enough to untangle those processes of herd thinking which reward him? This was Freud’s question. How does the mind examine itself? How do we learn zero-based thinking? How do we learn to see things as they are and form our own opinions?
In the free market, we learn to follow those courses which support us. We learn not to yell at the boss, to get along with our coworkers, to consider the other guy’s side of the story. And we love the victim of colonial oppression and capitalism ’til we’re asked to actually work to support or to abide him. And then we may think again, and ask what it will cost; and the vaunted “homeless” of our imagination, on our actual doorstep, may be reidentified as vagrants.
For the Government, that is the men and women, as opposed to the Constitution, is a bunch of slaveholders and adulterers just like you and me.
Society functions in a way much more interesting than that multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.
5
LOST HORIZON
The Liberal young are taught to shun work. They, like Marx and his beneficiaries, the French, find it an exercise both odious and superfluous. How could the young think otherwise, as they spend their four to six or seven years in pursuit of a Liberal Arts Education whose content, let alone whose purpose, no one seems quite able to describe (compare Existentialism, Deconstruction, Theory. Those incapable of recognizing bushwa may assume that someone else surely knows what these things mean. But, sadly, this is not the case).16
These Liberal Arts victims were, fifty or sixty years ago, likely to be subsumed into actual enterprises and given entry-level jobs. Or, harkening back to their parents’ time, taught practicable (or at least merchandisable) skills, allowing them entrance into the various Professions.
Currently, those entry-level or, indeed, make-work jobs once found in business are in minute supply—the economy has shrunk and will continue to shrink. Elective expansion of bureaucracy of both Government and Management has resulted in a decreased ability to accommodate the skill-less (both the children of the well-to-do anticipating a rise by mere heritage and those at the bottom, hopeful of the reality of the American Dream).
The current economic jollity leaves the protected Liberal kid in a more extensive bind: unlike those of the lower or working classes, he will never dream of setting his hand to actual labor.
He will not, that is, learn to be an electrician, a plumber, a firefighter, et cetera, and avail himself of the universal need for these services and their like to supply his living.
No, the luckless product of our Liberal Universities, skill-less, will not touch that item his culture named taboo: work. So we see the proliferation, in the Liberal Communities, of counselors, advisors, life coaches, consultants, feng shui “experts,” as the undereducated chickens come home to roost. Here we find the “energy therapist,” “past-lives counselor,” and those occupations just north of candle-maker, but accorded the respect due a skill or profession by community consent.17
This courtesy is unconsciously extended by the Liberal Community to its unemployable young, as its final gift: they cannot be awarded a job, as there are no jobs, and they are inheriting a country bankrupted by their parents’ spending.
What is this New Age “worker” selling? He is flattering his clients’ vanity through the pocketbook. This is a pretty good example of Mr. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. We gain status, he teaches, through the display of wealth. But there is only so much wealth one can display, and the rich, having accrued wealth too copious for their own individual display, must display it through leisure. Sadly, though one may have innumerable homes, one can only have a finite amount of leisure—one can do nothing only twenty-four hours a day. But one is limited only by one’s purse in employing others to do more nothing on one’s behalf, their number and uselessness a reflection of their controller’s worth and status.
Now we see the Liberal Young not flocking but stampeding into film schools. Why the stampede? The movie industry is bust, television has gone to the dogs (reality programming), and no one has yet figured out the transition to Internet distribution. There are, in short, no jobs at the end of this exhaustive four-year course of watching movies.
There is, however, protection. The film school student is protected, by his community, in his election not to work.
Film, and the Arts in general, have long been exempted from the category of “toil,” and so have been the refuge of the Leisure Class. This, however, was understood, if only unconsciously, as a socially acceptable holding area, protecting the males until they got an actual job (in the real, non-showbiz world), the females until they got an actual male.
The jobs are no more, and the females are unlikely to marry a twenty-six-year-old fellow with no skills and no ambition to acquire them.18 Only the imprimatur remains.
There is an additional effect of the Liberal, learned aversion to actual work: the young “practitioner” can exist only among his own. His specialized skills can be sold only in the Liberal Communities. He, thus, will quite literally never, cradle-to-grave, encounter a Conservative Idea, let alone a Conservative.
These young people have, in the useful if lurid phrase, grown up in a parallel country. They do not know what they do not know, and their insulation, geographically and professionally, ensures their continued ignorance—those they meet, that which they read and see, nothing will induce nor force them to confront their inherited cultural assumptions, of which they are unaware, considering them “the nature of the world.”
The world in which they live, in contradistinction to the America which created the wealth to allow their leisure, does not understand the concept of work. It is not that we are becoming, but that we have become two cultures occupying the same space.
There is a good piece of fiction on this phenomenon. It is a novel by James Hilton, Lost Horizon. In this beautiful fantasy, a flier, blown off course and crashed in the Himalayas, is rescued and taken to a mysterious, inaccessible lamasery in Tibet.
Here he discovers a perfect land—all its inhabitants are artists and philosophers, there is no disease, a person can, indeed, live as long as he wishes to; there is no want, the people of the Valley have for millennia devoted themselves to the care, physical, material, and sexual, of the folks on the Mountain.
This is a sweet tale by a great storyteller. It is also, less admirably, a Fascist tract. For Mr. Hilton’s paradise (he understands, if only subconsciously) can exist only if there are slaves.
Here we see the progression from good ideas to horror, down the path Mr. Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom. We will recall that the sibilant in the acronym NAZI stands for Socialist. They, like the Italian Fascists and the pre-Bolshevik Russian Communists, believed, in their beginnings, in Social Justice, and the Fair Distribution of goods. But these sweet ideas are encumbered in execution by the realization that someone, finally, has to do the work; their adamant practice will quite soon reveal this: “Oh. We will need slaves.”19
These slaves may be called, variously, the Rich, the Jews, the Kulaks, the Gypsies, Armenians, countercultural elements, and so on, but they are chosen not for their odious qualities but for their supine or defenseless nature. And they are enslaved to allow the elite not only exemption from work but exemption from thought.
Originally they are enlisted (fellow travelers, or “useful idiots”) or convinced (taxpayers) in order to allow the ideological an exemption from toil and the malleable exemption from thought. As the money dries up, the ideologues are easily supplanted by tyrants and the malleable chained to their oars.
History provides no counter-example. A country which will not work will fall.
Our Hero (Hugh Conway) in Lost Horizon discovers, midway through the book, that it was no accident which led him to the lamasery; he, like all the inhabitants, was originally kidnapped—chosen for his “readiness” to unquestioningly accept this new, changeless, and perfect life. Like the young of the Left.
6
THE MUSIC MAN
Somebody must have power in the state, and it is idle and academic to debate whether those who have power should or should not also have wealth, since they will, in fact, take it. Either you allow people to have power because they are rich, or they become rich through the possession of power. It does not make much difference in practice. Therefore all the common talk about the new equality and the abolition of privilege did not seem to have much meaning. That talk was usually to be heard from the lips of the left-wing writers and politicians who were at the very moment of uttering it busy with establishing new privileges for themselves and their children.
—Christopher Hollis, Death of a Gentleman, 1937
A subjective system can never be shown to have failed. If its goals are indeterminate, general, and its progress incapable of measurement, how can its performance be faulted?
Karl Kraus makes this point about Freudianism, describing it as “the disease which presents itself as its own cure.” I came across this quote in Dead Aid, by Dambisa Moyo, an economist whose work for her native Gambia led her to identify the country’s problem not as a structural disposition toward poverty, but as international aid. She makes the case that aid prevents the development of a national economy, the exploitation of national resources, the prosecution of national interests, and leads to the subjugation of recipients to the powers of those agencies, international and domestic, who profit from aid, and, thus, from poverty: bureaucrats, dictators, and thieves.
The distribution of alms, she writes, is based, at bottom, on the notion that it will help—actual evidence to the contrary is stilled by those personally interested in graft, profit, or in a subjective feeling of philanthropy.
Why should Gambia et al. be incapable of self-development? Internationally this supposed lack is attributed to a structural cultural residue of colonialism. But what does this mean, and how might such “structural” inabilities be identified, to what attributed (the United States, Australia, and Canada were all once colonies, Britain a colony of Rome), and how ameliorated?
For if these questions cannot be answered, as Ms. Moyo asks of Gambia and Mr. Kraus of psychoanalysis, and if the underlying assumption cannot be challenged, what possible “cure” other than increased and continued application of that which a reasoned and impartial investigation might identify as the cause of the problem?
If, for example, African Americans are to have a special judicial status because of a legacy of slavery, how might one determine, conclusively, that that legacy has dissipated and it is time to welcome the descendants of its victims back into the general population? (Could such a “legacy” exist for a thousand years? Even the most vehement supporters of the idea would probably say no. Then, for how long? And how might one recognize its absence, and upon what authority announce it?) If Latina women are wiser than white men,20 then, in a dispute between the two, to accept the reasoning of the latter rather than the former can always be to risk the accusation of racism.
If a country, a region, a race is in difficulty because of a lack of funds, any new or recurrent failure subsequent to any subvention in aid may be attributed to insufficient aid, and provide the rationale for that funding’s increase. But it may only do so given the acceptance of the nondemonstrable, indeed disprovable theory that government intervention increases wealth. (See also student failure attributable to low teachers’ salaries, resulting in increased salaries and benefits for teachers, when there is no demonstrable correlation between student success and teachers’ salaries.)
Dambisa Moyo asks, of aid, “What would be enough?”
Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?
The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease—the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong.21
It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.22 The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.
7
CHOICE
There is nothing in the world so difficult as that task of making up one’s mind. Who is there that has not longed that the power and privilege of selection among alternatives should be taken away from him in some important crisis of his life, and that his conduct should be arranged for him, either this way or that, by some divine power if possible—by some patriarchal power in the absence of divinity—or by chance, even, if nothing better than chance could be found to do it?
—Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn
Imagine yourself as part of a group placed, magically, somewhere upon the earth in an environment which is foreign to all—in a wilderness. This group’s members have been chosen randomly, they have no common history, or culture of self-government, or religion.
They have, somehow, never learned to respect or to reward industry; they, somehow, have neither the science nor the technology to exploit their land, nor to provide defense against real or potential marauders. They have no wisdom tradition.
So, without science, without wisdom, without tradition, without any form of traditional government, or the culture to establish one, they form themselves into a cult.
This cult, while it produces neither sustenance, peace, defense, nor philosophy, does provide one service, which service unites the group, and to which all other operations of the group are subservient: it provides the reassurance that although the actions of the world may neither be understood nor exploited, fear may be shared out and the stranded group may take comfort in its replacement by denial.
But for denial to replace fear it must be universal, and anyone suggesting notions contrary to those of the group must be shamed, killed, or otherwise silenced—these must be at the very least excoriated as evil. For, indeed, if the group knows neither law nor religion, nor technology, its only good (which is to say its only service) is solidarity. Individual initiative or investigation, thus, is destructive of the group’s essence, and so to them is evil.
Those things which previous tradition or observation revealed as absolutely good must, by this terrified group, be mocked: individualism and ambition called “greed,” development called “exploitation,” defense “war-mongering,” and use “despoliation.”
Inevitable global conflicts are indicted by this group as “nationalism”; strife is brought about by arrogance; and laws sufficiently strict to provide actual guidelines for behavior, “injustice.”
This new group will, of course, like any group in history, create taboos and ceremonies of its own. But to ensure solidarity, (for the group, we remember, lives in fear for the fragility of its illusions), these new observances must absolutely repudiate the old; and the cult will indict these previous observances as, for example, paternalism, patriotism, racism, colonialism, xenophobia, and greed.
And it may indict religion as superstition. But man cannot live without religion, which is to say, without a method for dealing with cosmic mystery and those things ever beyond understanding; so the new religion will not be identified as such. It will be called Multiculturalism, Diversity, Social Justice, Environmentalism, Humanitarianism, and so on. These, individually and conjoined, assert their imperviousness to reason, and present themselves as the greatest good; but as they reject submission either to a superior unknowable essence (God), or to those operations of the universe capable of some understanding (science and self-government), their worship foretells a reversion to savagery.
The laws of the seasons, for example, have been studied since human beings first observed that the seasons changed. But the new man, who fears change above all things, has decided that the seasons are now changing in one direction only, toward oblivion, and that this change must be stopped. How may this incomprehensible and awful catastrophe be averted? Only through sacrifice. So the new group, which is the Left, is prepared and is in the process of sacrificing production, exploration, exploitation of natural resources, and an increasing standard of living upon the altar of something called “global warming.”
But the earth has, in fact, been noticeably cooling for the last decade, and has, at many times during recorded history, and before any emission of manmade carbon, been markedly warmer than it is now or was prior to this cooling trend. This supposed warming is a story known of old as the history of Chicken Little—it means the End of the World. And to the Left, those denying it are classed as heretics, for who but an evil monster would wish the world to end? And, for the Left, to refer its pressing question to adjudication is to hasten the end of the world. The heretics who would do so are marginalized and dismissed and mocked, even though many are renowned practitioners of science—an ancient social development allowing man to differentiate truth from falsehood by the process of observation and measurement.23
See the Left’s inability to discard utterly exploded threats of extinction. In its cosmogony can still be found the theory of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) that overpopulation will soon and inevitably destroy the world—resulting in mass starvation and the destruction of mankind (birth control); that power must come from “natural,” renewable sources (which it, at present, cannot; wind power will not run Philadelphia, and ethanol costs more and pollutes more than gas), and that nuclear power is an unacceptable risk (though it has powered France accident-free for over fifty years); that World Unity and disarmament is the only way to Peace (though the antimilitarism of France and England between the wars led to the conquest of the first, and the near conquest of the second).
All the old canards can be found, as if new-discovered, today on the nearby Volvo: “The Population Explosion: It’s Your Baby”; “Wind Power”; “War Is Not the Answer”; “Coexist.”
No wonder the Left embraces Socialism, the largest myth of modern times and the most easily debunked; for it is a religion, and the tests of actual membership in any religion are likely to include an endorsement of their Foundation Myths: God in the Burning Bush, Joseph Smith’s discovery of the Tablets; the Resurrection of Jesus. This is not to denigrate religions, merely to say that they are all based upon myth and symbol, which is to say that they proclaim at the outset their intention to approach toward the unknowable, and toward that over which we have no power. This is, however, necessary in religion, a rather unfortunate basis for a political philosophy.
Observe that to propitiate an unknowable power, the Left, ignorant or dismissive of any society or history but its own, insists upon the primacy of Trees and Soil, Oceans and Animals—theirs is a return to the nature worship of the Savage. To see that this nature worship is not quite the good simple-heartedness they believe it is, but rather a religion, observe its imperviousness to information: polar bears are not, in fact, decreasing but increasing in population;24 the earth is not, in fact, warming.25
The philosophy of the Left is not, in fact, a love of, but a rejection of wisdom. And it is contrary to common sense.
For where is the wealth to come from? If we are no longer to explore, to drill, to develop or to use the world around us, and those things fashioned from that world; if we are to “cap and trade,” that which is, essentially, an imaginary commodity (carbon emissions do not in any way affect the temperature of the planet);26 if we are to tax and limit growth in service of a fantasy, who is to chance his time and treasure to produce the wealth, and how?
Carbon dioxide is not harmful to the atmosphere. There have, in the past, been periods, much colder than today, when the CO2 in the atmosphere was twenty-five times what it is today. Carbon emissions offer no threat whatever to the planet. And, as the Left is opposed to nuclear energy, how are we to provide power?
Where is the power to come from? Where is the wealth to come from? From nowhere. For the Left, this new tribe, self-sufficient in its knowledge, ignorant of history, and unwilling to observe, does not understand economics—that man produces, that man consumes, that man trades—and that the necessary consumption drives trade and its attendant invention and exploration, which produce a civilization’s wealth.
The Left (as Thomas Sowell points out in Intellectuals and Society) believing in what it calls “social justice,” believes that wealth should be “shared,” but enters the discussion in its middle. For wealth may or may not be shared (in fact, it is shared, as efficiently as possible, through trade), but the a priori question, to the Left, is unasked and unanswered: Where did it come from?
It was not, again, quoting Professor Sowell, descended from heaven, like manna, and spread evenly over the ground. It was created by individual expenditure of effort and individual willingness to undertake risk. The Liberals see wealth as manna from Heaven, falling equally upon all; which, being to them the case, means that for any one to have more of any thing than another, it must have been gotten by cheating—the possessor of “more” must be a thief. To the Left, in spite of one hundred and fifty years of the most extensive and tragic disprovals of Marxism, property = theft.
Rejecting both science and industry, the Left is fearful of man’s ability to survive, so it sees scarcity everywhere, and its one answer is to stop.
As my generation did not live through the Depression, World War II, and the agony of the immigrants who are our grandparents or great-grandparents; as we were raised in the greatest plenty the world has ever known and in the most just of societies, we have grown lazy and entitled (not unlike Marx, who lived as a parasite upon Engels, and never worked a day in his life). The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children—to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation. The religion of the Left is to leave untilled that world whose operations it does not understand and, failing to investigate, fears.
It, therefore, mythologizes uselessness, and praises it.
We have all seen this phenomenon as schoolchildren, in the insecure and self-hating child, raised to think himself weak, who will shrink from effort and from communal activity, attach himself to authorities—the tattletale and the spoilsport, who cannot take the rigors and tests of the schoolyard—the complainer and sanctimonious prig, forever calling out about supposed slights and injustices—his is the all-purpose complaint of the preadolescent “it’s not fair.”
For mine is a generation which never grew up. And we have, in our short lives, dismantled that necessarily imperfect system of industry and government for which our parents lived and died. We have awarded ourselves for realizing its imperfections—as if any human act or combination were perfect—and have created a culture of guilt and shame—corrosively and compulsively shaming where any human act of individuality may be indicted as wrong (which is to say, destructive of equality or equanimity).
But it is the free individual who alone can provide sustenance for the group. For if there is no effort, no use (called “exploitation”), no reward for initiative (called “greed”), where will the food come from? Malthus, before the invention of the improved plow and before scientific agriculture, “proved” that the world must soon starve.
Socialist Europe is held up as a model of “just behavior”; but the Left forgets that for seventy-five years America defended Europe from the Communist threat, and bore the cost, which would have bankrupted Europe, and which, in the event, bankrupted Communism. The Left looks at the peace of Europe since World War II and forgets that it was not only ensured, but created by American military strength and determination.27 And now the Left has elected a President who thinks it good to go to Europe and apologize for our “arrogance,” who proclaims the benefits of appeasement both at home and around the world.
This appeasement, called the antiwar movement, the antinuclear movement, One-Worldism, Code Pink, “the end to American Exceptionalism,” is, to the Left, another example of the Correct Thinking of the never-involved. They believe that our enemies, like the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, will be so moved by some unnamable but real excellence on our part, that they will forswear their desire for our destruction (recognizing it, now, as an unnecessary expenditure of effort) and beat their swords into plowshares.
But the Left does not stop to consider that if we, the most prosperous country in the history of the world, choose neither to exploit nor to defend our property, someone else will take it, and if we announce, indeed, proclaim our passivity, we will only advance that bad day.
The Left insisted that we abandon, in 1973, a war we had just won in Vietnam, and go on home, as the Left today insists we withdraw from Afghanistan and withdraw from Iraq. Leaving to one side legitimate legislative differences over the strategic worth of any one conflict, what real or potential enemy could possibly misinterpret its possibilities of gain in the light of our absolutely predictable absence of resolve?
Just as the Left, geopolitically, does not recognize enmity (other than on the part of the Right), it judicially does not recognize crime; or that which, historically, was known as crime (that is, behavior transgressive of those statutes enacted for the protection of society), calling it “error,” or the effect of “environment,” or searching for any artifice to free itself of the mature human necessity of choice and enforcement. 28 So doing, the Left everywhere relaxes those judicial norms which alone can give some measure of certainty to the populace.
(Note that in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, an 1872 Utopian novel, crime was considered sickness, and the criminal coddled and condoled with, while sickness was treated as crime. I will not belabor the similarity to the Left’s New Age health movement, which, in its charms, potions, and essences and practices, discards science in favor of “ancient wisdom.”)
My generation huddles in ignorance that is felt, on the Left, as a worship of man’s “natural state,” this supposedly being, all human history to the contrary, one of health and peace, ignoring and in fact rejecting both our imperfections as a species and our differences as individuals.
The random distribution of abilities and ambitions, which has allowed human beings to thrive and communities to grow, and which gives to the group strength and to the individual the possibility of achievement and, so, happiness in the approbation of the group, is derided by the Left as nonsense. To them, each child is born a blank slate, and any difference in subsequent individual accomplishment, status, or wealth, must, thus, be due to some maleficent influence, which is to say, to exploitation.29 As if we were created to thrive in a society made exclusively of cobblers, or second basemen, surgeons, or deliverymen. The Left sees trade—the source of wealth—as exploitation; and, each child being born equal, all differences in wealth, again, as theft. (Here forgetting the lessons of the schoolyard—that one child may prefer the orange and the other the candy bar, and, so, both may be made happy by an exchange. Is this simplistic? No, it is simple: left to our own devices, we human beings increase our happiness by unfettered trade, and however much we may vote for Government Supervision [state control] we all delight in barter, and the free give and take of the flea market.)30
To correct this observed inequality, which the Left sees as unnatural, it invented the term “social justice.” But a system of Justice already exists, formulated by Legislature, in supposed expression of the will of the people, and administered by the Judiciary. This is called the Judicial System. What, then, is this additional, amorphous “social justice”? It can only mean, as Hayek wrote, “State Justice.” Here, though the Left will not follow the reasoning out to its end, the State (operating upon what basis it alone knows, and responsible to no law enacted by the people) confiscates wealth accumulated under existing laws and redistributes it to those it deems worthy.
History proves that the worthiest in these Marxist schemes are, or quickly become, those in charge of distribution, which is to say “the State,” its constitutional powers usurped by those we know as “dictators.”
To the Left it is the State which should distribute place, wealth, and status. This is called “correcting structural error,” or redressing “the legacy of Slavery,” or Affirmative Action, or constraining unfair Executive Compensation; but it is and can only be that Spoils System which is decried at the ward level as “cronyism,” and lauded at the national level as “social justice.” It is nothing other than the distribution of goods and services by the government for ends not specified in the Constitution; and in response to pressure from or in attempts to curry favor with groups seeking preferments or goods not obtainable either under the law, or through those practices of mutual benefit called the Free Market. What obscenities are created in the name of “social justice?” What could possibly be less just than policies destructive of initiative and based upon genetics? (As Thomas Sowell writes, “Are we to say of two babies, born on the same day, that one is born owing something to the other?”) Can this Social Eugenicism possibly be corrective of anything?
But how, to the Left, to explain the difference in status, in wealth, in happiness, among human beings? (And let us note that the Left, though decrying inequality in the abstract, contains none or few who are willing to redress the differences between their financial state and that of any of their less favored brethren by putting the wealth of the two into one pot and each taking half.)
Proverbs informs us that the poor will always be with us; that, just as one may not, as a judge, favor the rich, neither can one favor the poor, but must do justice according to the law—that is to say, that one must judge whether the law has been transgressed, a consideration in which the state of the offender (past his mental competency) must play no part.
The Bible is the wisdom tradition of the West. It is from the precepts of the Bible that the legal systems of the West have been developed—these systems, worked out over millennia, for dealing with inequality, with injustice, with greed, are reducible to that which the Christians call the Golden Rule, and which was, previously, propounded by Rabbi Hillel: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.”
These rules and laws form a framework which allows the individual foreknowledge of that which is permitted and that which is forbidden. This foreknowledge, a real right-of-property, is that upon which the individual makes decisions. It constitutes a practicable system for dealing with a tragical existence and a deeply flawed human nature: it asserts not the perfection, but the imperfectibility of Man. These assertions (and their attendant investigations and observations, known as philosophy and religion) may be called, in their entirety, the Tragic View.
The Left has abandoned the Tragic View,31 and considers life and man as unconstrained in our ability to understand and to supersede all strife and inequality. The Tragic View, however, holds that life is complicated and man flawed, and so, our actions must be guided by laws difficult both of formulation and of observance; that these laws, being the product of Man, will, themselves, be flawed, that they will not cover all instances, that their observation and correct application will often cause anxiety, and, indeed trauma, but that the health of a society (both moral and material) must rest on the attempt to do so.
The tragic view recognizes that it is possible to obviate the necessity of choice only by surrender of responsibility (worship of a dictator, or charismatic figure, guru, politician, or theory)—that between Good and Evil there is no choice, and thus moral choice means a choice between two evils.
Having renounced the necessity of dealing with complexity, the Left imagines and endorses a “post-governmental” era, in which the individual need not consider the economic and social results of his actions and his vote. He may choose not to choose, and merely endorse “Change,” and reject any request for information about the actual mechanics of this “Change,” by referring to “Hope.”
In this post-societal world of the new cult, we are told we need not produce, but may merely hope, we need not defend, but may hope, we must not consume, but are allowed, somehow, to hope for sustenance—this sustenance, magically, deriving from some unspecified actions of a government which, all observe, is at best incompetent and, more usually, self-serving and corrupt, whoever is in power.
From the Left’s point of view one need not work, and may not only Hope to be provided for, by this government, but may insist upon it. This new post-governmental America, then, may, without guilt, apologize for the arrogance of its prosperity and the beauty of its traditions and culture, and plead with the weak of the world to be allowed to join them.
8
THE RED SEA
There is another possible interpretation of the parting of the sea by Moses.
Rather than intervening to create a path in a unitary substance, it could be said that he demonstrated that freedom lay in the ability to see distinctions; that is, that life could be seen as divisible into good and evil; moral and immoral; sacred and profane; permitted and forbidden—that the seemingly unitary “sea” of human behavior and ambition could actually be divided.
A slave is not permitted to make these distinctions. All of his behavior is circumscribed by the will of his master. The necessity of making distinctions is the essence of freedom, where one not only can but must choose.
This revelation of the long-denied, long-lost necessity was, to the escaping Jews, something of a miracle, inspiring awe, fear, and an attendant shame—shame that they had submitted to enslavement, and shame that they had forgotten the essence of freedom so completely that its possibility seemed to them supernatural. Moses told the Jews to look back at the pursuing army, and said, “Those Egyptians you see today you will never see again”—that is, they would be freed from not only the fact but the shame of slavery as soon as they recognized in themselves the possibility of choice, which is to say, as soon as they entered the sea.
The sea was not the path to freedom, the sea was freedom. The essence of freedom was and is choice.
The Jews spent four hundred years as slaves. They were freed with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, by God; and the world’s three Abrahamic religions are founded upon the wisdom text whose center is this story. But when the Jews, within the lifetime of many contemporary readers of story, were again slaves in Europe, suffering and dying, and when we were freed by the West, and formed our own State, much of the West (including, to our shame, many Jews) rejected the lesson of the Bible, and turned our back on the revelation of the possibility of choice, and called this heresy enlightenment, and denounced the State of Israel.
Is the State of Israel imperfect? All the works of Man are imperfect.
The Jews were led through the Sea of Reeds and, in the desert, complained, and wished to return to Egypt and slavery. Life in Egypt was by no means perfect; its only attraction was the absence of the necessity of choice. But it made all people equal. No slave need choose between good and evil, morality and immorality, all such anxiety had been usurped by or surrendered to the masters.
The Left embraces Socialism, the herd mentality of slavery, as it offers the, to them, incalculable benefit of freedom from thought. There are, to them, no more disquieting choices, no contradictions, there is only submission to the Group in which the ideas of all (being the same) are equal.
The French Jacobins, similarly, discovered a way to do away with inequalities of stature: they cut off the offenders’ heads.
The State of Israel is, in itself, an incurable affront to the Left, for it is a demonstration of the possibility of choice. The slave not only need not persevere in the face of his masters’ displeasure or disagreement, he cannot—it would cost his life; but the free men and women of Israel persevere in spite of the Left’s casuist carping and bellicosity and displeasure, backing their convictions with their lives. An intolerable affront to those preferring equality to liberty.
The urge of the Left to surrender choice and self-government for illusion, to insist upon Statism and Government rule, rather than a Government of Service, is a rejection of the lesson of the Exodus.
For it is obvious to the meanest intellect that the Government cannot make cars, health care, industry in general, better than would individual human beings not only interested in but inexorably tied to the outcome of such operations. The endorsement of the Socialist, Statist system, then, is not a desire for more or better goods and services, but a surrender of this desire in return for an obviation of the necessity of personal choice.32 It is a regression not to the tribe, but to the herd.
(I am indebted to my son, Noah, for his exegesis on the parting of the Red Sea.)
9
CHICAGO
The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.
—Kipling, The Stranger, 1908
Someone once began a question to me commenting that I was from the Midwest, and I interrupted, correcting him, that I was not from the Midwest, I was from Chicago.
It was a rough city, ruled by the Machine Politics, which ruled the state, and currently rules the country. But a turkey at Christmas and a job for your kid on the Force were and are better than the phony-baloney tax rebates, and Alternative Tax “givebacks,” and Government “programs” which, in toto, will be less and less important than the Christmas Turkey and the Job.
Folks in my grandfather’s generation spoke lovingly about Al Capone and his generosity, but, then, in my experience, most criminals are sentimental. But I would rather deal with a crooked cop than a bureaucrat, and I’ve had the experience of both. And I loved the rough, matter-of-fact Chicago of my youth, and preferred it to the clean, orderly, self-packaged city of today. When the streets’ nicknames go up on the lampposts, the city is dead.
The City then was not the promise of snow removal and an absence of litter, but an amalgam of strivers and hucksters, and I found it, thus, either much like myself, or, more likely, I became schooled by its culture, just like the Mayors Daley and then–State Senator Obama and all the governors and councilmen who went to jail, and Hugh Hefner, building whorehouses which sold everything but sex, and the inspired and depraved of that toddling town. For, of course, the athletes and the gunmen and the politicians and the businessmen sat down for a drink together; and the celebrities on the way from New York to L.A. changed trains, and took their doxies to the Ambassador East, and had drinks in the Pump Room with Irv Kupcinet, the talk of the town, and in short it was a growing entity, growing according to the rules of self-interest and self-preservation.
It was so young. When I was born, many were alive whose parents had dealt with the Sauk Indians.33
And there was the Lindbergh Beacon, the most powerful aircraft signal in the world, its light visible for forty-five miles, atop the Palmolive Building, sweeping the sky once-a-minute to make the night safe for air traffic.
Hefner bought the building in 1965 it was renamed the Playboy Building, and they put their logo up, and I used to work there. And the great entertainers worked for him at his Playboy Club around the corner, staffed by the Bunnies in their abbreviated costumes, ears, and cottontails, who were prohibited from dating the customers, but were not prohibited from dating me.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed an open chess pavilion on the beach at North Avenue, and I wrote my first play (The Duck Variations, 1972), about two old DPs, sitting there, looking at the lake. A DP was a displaced person, and it was my father’s term of opprobrium for an appearance insufficiently put-together. “You look like a DP.” Insufficient for what, you might ask, and the answer was “to get on in the world,” for why else were we in Chicago?
Across the drive from the Chess Pavilion was Lincoln Park, and I used to sit out there and write in my notebook. I dated a wonderful girl who worked for the Mob. She lived in the Belden Stratford Hotel, and in the summer she would sunbathe in the park across from the hotel, by the statue of Shakespeare, and every hour on the hour a bellman would bring her an iced coffee. She drove a Mercedes 280 convertible, and she never locked the car, as, she explained, anyone who wanted to break in would simply slit the roof, so why antagonize them?
The back of her car was ankle deep in parking tickets. She would park on the steps of City Hall. And when the tickets got too deep, she’d collect them in a bag, and give them to somebody who would fix them.
One or two nights a week we would drive to Cicero, and I would watch her doing one of her jobs. She had a ring of keys which let her into the various clubs in which her people were interested. She’d let us in to the deserted clubs, at 4 A.M., and she’d go to the vending machines, open them with the keys on the ring, count and then replace the money, lock the machine again, and we would leave.
Her boyfriend followed us, now and then, in his car. She told me he had vowed to kill me, but I’d seen him, and I didn’t believe the threat. I don’t think this was particularly courageous on my part; he just didn’t look the type.
We conceive the world not through indoctrination, but through osmosis: a culture is the amalgam and the sum of the unwritten laws: “This is how we do things here.” And I believe that, in Chicago, I had a very interesting youth. This is how we did things there: one spiffed the mechanic at the cab garage if one wanted to get a working cab to drive; one paid off the cop who pulled you over, as it was much cheaper than going down to 11th and State and paying the fine; the politicians were corrupt—why else would they be politicians? (the absence of this understanding in the minds of the young baffles me); the Governors, regularly, went to jail, how about that?
And through it all one had to make a living, which meant, and means, learning how to navigate in the wider world—learning to take care of yourself.
For the Government was going to take care of you at best to the extent that you took care of it: if you wanted X you did Y, if you did not do Y, why in the world would any rational entity give you X?
You wanted to work for the Park District, you kicked back your two weeks’ pay; you wanted your kid on the Fire Department, you got out the vote.
The politicians have not changed, but it seems that the electorate cannot locate its ass with a guide dog.
There was, in Chicago, no such thing as Social Justice, there was the Law, and the Law was both made and administered by imperfect human beings, like ourselves; and the operations of the Law itself could be and were corrupted. There was such a thing as “the underdog,” but anyone demanding that status was merely picking up a convenient club to use in the fight. (cf. Saul Alinsky on being a “neighborhood organizer”: “The third rule is, ‘wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.’ Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.” Rules for Radicals, 1971.)
The White Neighborhoods got better snow removal? Of course they did—it was a segregated city and the councilmen were white. And cries for Justice, the blacks knew, would be less effective than getting a dog in the fight, and getting people on the City Council and into City Hall, and letting the Whites gape slack-jawed at the other fellow being unfair.34
Was it a terrible thing to be a Black in Chicago in those days? Probably. My people came over from Poland to escape the Pogroms, which is to say, fleeing murderers. Did we, the Jews, feel bad for the Blacks? Yes. What did we do about it? We joined the NAACP. Was this effective, appropriate, insulting, paternalistic? How would I know?
Did they do it because they felt “guilty”? The suggestion would have been greeted as psychotic. What did my parents’ generation have to feel guilty about? They came here with nothing, sixty years after slavery’s abolition, fleeing their state in Europe as slaves or semislaves, and scant years ahead of Hitler’s assassins. They supported the NAACP out of a sense of tzedakah, which is to say “righteousness.” Was their response insufficient, or misplaced? No doubt. But it was not risible. And the South Shore Country Club, eight blocks from my house, and Restricted, allowing No Jews, was eventually bought by Elijah Muhammad, restricting all whites, and life goes on.
But I believe I benefited from the absence of sanctimony.
10
MILTON FRIEDMAN EXPLAINED
Each party alleges, and its enthusiasts agree, that it has never done anything wrong, and its opponent has never done anything right. Any failures, catastrophes, or absurdities during its tenure are blamed on late-appearing aftereffects of its predecessor’s enormities.
Most officeholders and candidates are both politicians and lawyers, and so labor under the double anecdotal taint of—I will not say, “mendacity,” but “looking on the bright side.” The bright side is, of course, that which favors their particular interests and aspirations. If bread, it may be identified by the presence of butter.
Let us assume that in all close elections each side will endeavor to steal it (a safe assumption, as it is the case); for what unpatriotic soul would not in the service of National Interest wish to lessen the vagaries of chance?
Let us assume, then, that each party partakes equally of the human capacity for good and bad, for corruption, for misguided compassion, and of overweening cupidity; and that each will suffer failures of projects both good-willed and merely monstrously self-serving.
The question, as posed by Milton Friedman, was not “What are the decisions?”—any human or conglomeration is capable of decisions both good and bad—but “Who makes the decisions?” Shall it be the Government, that is, the State, or shall it be the Individual?
In some cases it must be the Government, which is, in these, the only organ capable of serving and protecting individual liberty and freedom: notably, in defense, the administration of justice, and maintenance of and oversight of Federal Infrastructure, e.g., Roads, Interstate Travel, Waterways, Parks, and so on. But what in the world is the Government doing meddling in Education, Health Care, Automobile Production, and the promotion of dubious, arguable, or absurd programs designed to bring about “equality”? Should these decisions not be left to the Individual, or to a Free Market, in which forces compete, to serve the Individual who will be the arbiter of their success?
But but but, some will interject, “Look at the abuses.” Well, some abuses fall afoul of the laws, in which case the provision has been made for their correction which, if not forthcoming, is in the right of the public to demand. Others fall afoul of custom, and will or can be corrected by censure, withdrawal of custom, or attempts at criminalization. Some must be borne, as they would under any system of government, business, or administration: someone eventually, inevitably, makes what someone else might characterize as “an error.”
But which system, Free Enterprise, or the State, is better able to correct itself?
For this is the essence of the difference between the Free Market (constrained) and the Liberal (unconstrained) view of the world—to use Friedrich Hayek’s terms. It is not a difference of preference for plans or programs—in which either side may not only differ but, equally, be wrong. It is a difference in appreciation of structure.
The constrained view is that neither human beings, nor any conglomeration into which they may form themselves, are omnipotent, nor omniscient, nor omnibenevolent. We are incapable even of knowing, let alone of implementing, engines to alleviate the true causes of, and indeed of understanding the true nature of, many of the problems besetting us. This is, as Hayek says, the Tragic View. We are not only wrong, but most often wrong. The treasured values of one generation (slavery, phrenology, lobotomy, physical discipline of children, women as property, et cetera) are seen now not only as vile but as absurd. As, eventually, will many of the cherished ideas of today. This is tragic, but inevitable.
The question is which of two systems is better able to discard the failed and experiment to find the new; and the answer is the Free Market. It is not perfect; it is better than State Control; for the Free Market, to a greater extent, must respond quickly and effectively to dissatisfaction and to demand—if a product or service does not please, to continue in its manufacture in the Free Market is pointless. (Compare Government persistence and expansion of programs proved to have failed decades ago—farm subsidies, aid to Africa, busing, urban renewal, etc.) On the other hand, in a Free Market, every man, woman, and child is scheming to find a better way to make a product or a service which will make a fortune. The garage mechanic, the housewife, the tinkerer, the scientist, the artist, and their kids—everyone is always looking for a better way. (Compare the Government employee sitting at his desk. Why is he not looking for a better way to do his job? Why should he? A more efficient way might possibly eliminate his job, or that of the superior to whom he owes allegiance.)
Nothing is free. All human interactions are tradeoffs. One may figure out a way to (theoretically) offer cheap health insurance to the twenty million supposedly uninsured members of our society. But at what cost—the dismantling of the health care system of the remaining three-hundred-million-plus? What of the inevitable reduction, shortages, abuses, delay and injustice caused by all State rationing?
There’s a cost for everything. And the ultimate payer of every cost imposed by government is not only the individual member of the mass of taxpayers who does not benefit from the scheme; but likely, also, its intended beneficiaries (cf., welfare, busing, affirmative action, urban planning).
Well, you will say, it’s not Either/Or. And, of course it is not. All civilizations need, and all civilizations get Government. Many have inherited, had forced upon them, or in fact demanded a real or obviously potential dictatorship (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy)—these, and their like, began as Welfare States, dedicated, supposedly, to distributing the abundant good things of the Land to all. But they, and all the Communist States, and Socialist States, operated at a cost, for everything has a cost. The cost of these benevolent dictatorships was shortage, famine, murder, and the eventual dissolution of the State. Hayek calls this utopian vision The Road to Serfdom. And we see it in operation here, as we are in the process of choosing, as a society, between Liberty—the freedom from the State to pursue happiness, and a supposed but impossible Equality, which, as it could only be brought about by a State capable and empowered to function in all facets of life, means totalitarianism and eventual dictatorship.
Is the State to decide for the individual, or is the individual to insist upon a reduction of State powers to that point at which this power is reserved only for application in those cases, as specified in law, where one individual or group abridges the liberty of another?
The latter is the revolutionary understanding of government spelled out in that Constitution elected officials swear to defend. They are elected as public servants, the public granting them only that freedom of action necessary to fulfill that oath. Is it not time for a return to that revolutionary understanding?
11
WHAT IS “DIVERSITY”?
It is a commodity. Parents purchase it for their children; for as much as they might pay to achieve and brag about their children’s membership in a “wonderfully diverse” setting, they all eat in restaurants whose clientele looks just like themselves. As do we all. This is “Pediatric Diversity,” or diversity-by-proxy.
Once, in my younger days, I was asked to help out at some fund-raising event for some good cause. The event was to raise funds to alleviate hunger. All the attendees bought a ticket, but the tickets were numbered one, two, or three. Those getting number one were entitled to all they could eat; the twos, to a meal consisting of five hundred calories (the supposed caloric intake, for the evening meal, in the area to which the funds were supposed to be sent); the threes got nothing at all. I was passing out tickets at the head of the line. I collected the money from a fellow there with his young son. He leaned in toward me and asked me to give them both a three.
I went home after the event and felt something of a fool. What, I wondered, was this charade in which I was participating? If the fellow wanted his son to know what it felt like to miss a meal, couldn’t he have played that charade at home? If everyone had, the event would have had no overhead costs, and everyone would have been able to send all the ticket costs to the hungry. But this fellow was practicing Pediatric Socialism: he, rightly, as a loving father, never wanted his son to be hungry; but, like a loving but overindulgent father, he wanted to purchase for him an approximation of the experience, which, he thought, might make his son a better person.
But how would the two possibly be connected? For the son had not only noticed that a point was made that some people were hungrier than others, and that it was (supposedly) a matter of chance, but that one could appreciate and learn from this unfortunate fact by purchasing a ticket at a game show; and, perhaps (more likely), the son had observed that money and influence could buy anything, even a charade of poverty.
How fashionable to wear clothes which are distressed. The young on the Westside of Los Angeles dress themselves in jeans worn, sanded, and razored to resemble something a six-month castaway might crawl ashore in. Why? They are trying to purchase a charade of victimization, as the ethos of the Liberal West holds that these victims are the only ones of worth. But how to go about it? For the jeans can cost over one thousand dollars (one might buy them at Goodwill for two bucks, but, I am informed, they would be “seen through” and, though a closer approximation to true poverty, they are ineffective as a concomitant display of wealth).
It beats me all hollow.
Look at those Old Rich Guys in their Porsche, the young might say; but the Porsche is perhaps not an attempt to display wealth, neither to recapture youth, but to enjoy that which some years of labor have permitted as an indulgence.
I think quite a bit about higher education, which, to me, partakes of the ethos both of bottled water and of an “evening of poverty”: bottled water because, at least in the Liberal Arts, it is useless; and Ticket Number Three, as the rather universal absence of rigor in courses devoted to “Identity” abandons the children to fantasies of their own omnipotence and oppression (a bad mix). This allows, indeed, encourages them to criticize and dismantle a culture they, in their adolescence, are equipped neither to understand nor to participate in—any more than the young chap receiving Ticket Number Three would have, thus, become an expert on Global Inequality.
I believe the incredible wealth of this country will allow it to survive quite a while on its hundreds of years of production and upon its natural resources and historic culture of productivity. But the Change which Obama’s rhetoric referred to preceded and will follow him, accelerated by him and his policies, accepted by a drugged populace and a supine press. It is the unfortunate descent of a productive nation into socialism, which, as I understand it, is robbing Peter to pay Paul. I don’t think it’s any more complex than that.
12
THE MONTY HALL PROBLEM AND THE CONTRACTOR
There was, and still may be, a television game show called Let’s Make a Deal. Its MC, Monty Hall, brought the contestants down to guess behind which of three closed doors the Grand Prize lurked.
The contestant made his guess (e.g., Door One). Now Monty opened one of the two remaining doors (e.g. Door Two) to show that it did not conceal the prize, and asked the contestant if he wished to stay with his original guess, One, or choose the third door, Three—which had neither been originally guessed, nor subsequently revealed.
The audience would then scream out its intuition: “Change! Don’t change! Don’t change! Change!”
This seemed a logical choice—between option One and option Two—the odds being ostensibly 50 percent of picking a winner; a decision to change or stand pat, resting, then, but upon sentiment. But the odds were not now 50 percent, but two to one, actually, in favor of change.
A mathematician acquaintance of mine explained this to me some years ago, and though convinced, I, when the conversation was over, reverted immediately to my previous, logical perception: There was a choice between two doors. Door Two had been revealed a blank—the prize must therefore be behind Door One or Three. The odds had to be 50 percent.
Over the years, I would see the mathematician at parties, and ask him to convince me again, and I would again be convinced during the time of our chat.
The problem, called the Monty Hall Problem, I learned, was quite famous in mathematic circles, and had formed the basis for much new and interesting investigation and speculation regarding probability and perception. For it pertained not only to mathematics, but to cognition. It could be proved mathematically, and demonstrated empirically, that the odds were two to one in favor of change, and yet, the lay mind (mine) remained unconvinced. There were two choices; I had picked Door One, Monty revealed Door Two was a blank, and I was offered the choice between my Door One, and Door Three.
But no, I was told, I was offered a choice between Door One, and all the other doors.
But “All the other doors,” I said, “were only one door, Door Three.”
One day, I figured it out for myself. For I thought about it not as a mathematical proposition, but as a confidence trick: Having picked my door, Monty was going to reveal that one of the two remaining was blank. But of course one of the two remaining was blank. One of the two remaining had to be blank, as there was only one prize.
Thus, Monty’s supposedly generous offer was not generosity at all. As far as any benefit to myself, he could just as easily have made his generous offer before revealing the nullity of Door Two. He could have said, “You’ve chosen Door One, you can stand pat, or trade it for Doors Two AND Three. Which, as the penny dropped, I realized, was exactly what he was doing. I had defeated myself by accepting the shiny but destructive misinformation that he, in revealing Door Two, had offered me a gift.
My greed convinced me that I possessed something which I did not in fact possess (more information), and so I seduced myself into a false (and destructive) understanding of the problem. “Oh,” I realized, “I am an illogical being.” This is sobering but helpful information.
I now compare my escape from Monty’s fiendish cunning with my experience with an architect.
My wife and I were renovating a house, and the architect said that there were two ways to figure his payment. We could pay him on a cost-plus basis; or we could pay him on an hourly basis.
This seemed to me very sporting, and I was surprised when, near the end of the job, and facing the outrageously mounting costs associated with any building process, I was wrathful and sullen. But no, I reasoned, correct yourself—the fellow gave you a choice, the choice was yours (I’ve forgotten which scheme I chose), and now it is your part to live with it.
Which I did. Until some years later it occurred to me that I had (as with the Monty Hall Problem), misconstrued the nature of the choice offered me.
For why, I reasoned, would the architect offer a client a choice which was a fifty-fifty proposition to lose him money? The architect knew or would figure how to best reward himself in whichever scheme I picked. I do not suggest duplicity, but merely human nature—if paid on a cost plus basis, he (or you, or I) would indulge a natural passion for the most expensive materials—why not? The house would have his name on it, and expensive materials could only redound to his credit. If paid on an hourly basis, he would express this same passion for perfection by working himself and his staff more hours. It was impossible that it should be otherwise. Neither you nor I would do otherwise.
But why, then, offer me the choice? Perhaps to offer the client two options, each of which would lead to different enthusiasms and the disagreements potentially resultant therefrom.
Perhaps, that is, to dissuade against recriminations. But not, though it might so appear, to offer a bargain.
My greed blinded me to the offer’s nature: Had the offer been of a bargain, that is, had it contained any possibility of my gain, the architect would have offered me the choice after the fact: that is, at the completion of the job. The architect then might have said, “There are two ways to figure my compensation, you will note that one is higher than the other, which do you choose?” But why would a rational architect offer me a choice which must redound to his loss? He would not. There was a choice, but only the illusion of a bargain. Which is the essence of a confidence game.
Someone, and it may have been William Styron, said that a drinking problem is like a little Latin—sooner or later, it will find its way into your writing. That’s how I feel about the Monty Hall problem—I worked for it, and darned if I am not going to use it in my writing.
The human body is 55 to 75 percent water, and an equal percentage of our endeavors, after food, clothing, and shelter, are nonsense. I play soccer with my dog, but I cannot fool her, for she cares nothing about my elegant and deceptive movements; she is only looking at the ball.
That Iraq was “not another Vietnam” can only be interpreted as a proclamation of identity—else why make the comparison? See also, that the foreseeable bust of 2008 was “not another 1929.” There are only so many ways in which things go wrong; there are only so many things one may do with his money, health, and talents. Many make a living suggesting that they hold “the Magic Feather,” possessing the hidden knowledge which will spare us toil and grief (Bernie Madoff). And we late-appearing Moderns, and the Trobriand Islanders of 10,000 AD, fall for it every time, e.g., “the New Economy,” “Change,” “Compassionate Conservatism,” “Shark Cartilage.”
There was a book called Sharks Don’t Get Cancer, which recommended that one concerned should buy and ingest shark cartilage in order to avoid the disease, his reasoning contained in the book’s title. But neither does a Buick get cancer, and who would suggest the afflicted go lick a bumper? No, we are a crazy bunch of monkeys. We have survived through the adaptive mechanism of a brain which is always trying to find the easy way out, and our devotion to our special skill, having allowed us to flourish, will surely, in God’s Good Time, kill us off and allow for another variation.
Quantities may have different meanings. It is hard to divest oneself of their connotations. This may, I think, be accomplished in mathematics, where values are set, but, as the task of philosophy, it is certainly difficult to use reason to determine reason’s operations and their worth.
There is, historically, much rancor on the Left against the existence of the State of Israel. And frequent mention is made, and, more destructively, implied, of Israel’s “aggression.” But what does the State of Israel want? To be left in peace within its borders. What does the Arab world want? To destroy the State of Israel. Whatever allegations or sympathies may otherwise be adduced, these demands, as above, are observable, oft-proclaimed and incontrovertible; Western Sympathy for the Arab cause, then, can only rest upon a sliding scale of Humanity—the Arabs, and, thus, their demands, being of a weight sufficient to nullify those of Israel, though the former wants slaughter and the latter peace. How can we know? Return to the mathematic certainty: Israel has no territorial demands (or was willing in negotiations with Arafat and after to concede any scant and still-disputed land). The Arabs want all of Israel.
There can be a sentiment of sympathy with the Arabs only based upon a pre-facto assessment of them (rather than their cause) as “better” or more worthy than the Jews.
This illogical sentiment, which can only be called “racism,” is found again in the Liberal love of the idea of “apology”—that the Government should apologize for Slavery, Japanese Internment, Coolie Labor, and so on. But the Rabbis teach that no apology is legitimate unless the offender (a) expresses remorse stating specifically what he has done; (b) makes restitution; (c) refrains, in similar circumstances, from again committing the offense.
But upon even the first of these, a governmental apology founders. For who is the “we” and who the “they” of the apology?
Is the American Government of today guilty of slavery? If so, are those African American members of the Government equally guilty? Or, are the American People alive today guilty? If so, which citizens? The Black as well as the White? Is the guilt heritable, or not? If so, then would not those (the great majority of) Americans whose ancestors did not arrive until after slavery be exempt from apology? Are the ancestors of the 300,000 white males who died to defeat slavery excepted from apology? If not, on what basis are the descendants of slaves entitled to it?
Is one entitled to apology by genetics? If so, then those making the apology must be tainted by their own blood. Is this an American concept?
How is it that, sixty-some years after the West defeated Nazi Racism, we are enmeshed in a race-based culture, and making governmental decisions on the basis of genetics?
Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, had, as his second in command, Erhard Milch. It was pointed out that Milch had a Jewish father, and so should not be employed as a Nazi, but rather executed as a Jew. Goering replied, “In Germany I decide who is a Jew.” Equally, to indulge in any racial preferences is not to award to a Race, but to the State the power to create differing classes of citizens, and to rule on who shall belong in each class. For all our blood is mixed. Our country, like all in recorded history, engaged for a while in Slavery. It also produced the white, northern males who enlisted and died to eradicate Slavery during the Civil War, and fought it and, again, died during World War II; and the white males who voted in the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. Is it not evident, after a clinical look, that the desire for Justice cannot be served quite so easily, and that a reduction of human beings to classes deserving differing grades of the same is the beginning of the end of Democracy? It costs politicians and legislators nothing to apologize, but costs us citizens much to award them or ourselves credit for the indulgence.
13
MAXWELL STREET
Her conclusion was that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any organization, and from this she never varied.
—E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910
Most legislation aimed at eliminating unhappiness and discontent has resulted in misery. Human beings are flawed, and as unlikely to create contentment with amended or increased legislation as they were to create perfect legislation in the first place. The best we might do would be to create a set of laws which made allowance for the imperfection not only of the legislation but of the judges and the administrators who would pass and implement it, and, indeed, of the Electorate.35
Within the memory of many, groups who believed in their own rationality voted for laws against miscegenation. They did not do so because they were white, but because they were human, which is to say, flawed—betrayed by their belief in their own rationality, and compromised by reliance on their own indignant and righteous feelings.
Government is an organic cultural organism. It lives by growing, and it grows by accretion. It will arrogate to itself all the power it can by the apparent mechanism of legislation and the less apparent but more virulent operation of bureaucratic growth, by usage, and precedent.
The Constitution reserves to the Congress the power to declare war. But Roosevelt declared war on Japan and asked the Congress to affirm that this state of war existed. The act was reasonable and defensible as a pro-forma inversion of the usual process. But ever since Korea and Vietnam and the War Powers Act and so on, the President has achieved the de facto power to declare war, enshrined not in law but in custom.
The Written Law says Congress has the power, but the Unwritten Law, by which the written law is understood, is that such power has become the Executive’s. But, defenders might say, the President may declare, not a “war” but a “police action,” or a “widening of the sphere of defense,” under such and such conditions and various new stipulations. Such an elaboration of detail may stem from a desire for Justice, or from a desire to protect the “spirit” of the Constitution, but it, by demanding an accompanying elaboration of oversight and bureaucracy, merely exacerbates the problem it pretends to address, for it entrenches a new, bigger, more powerful class of bureaucrats, paid by the State to deal magically with the issue of when it is acceptable for a President to declare a war by simply calling it something else (the answer, now, “always”); to enforce new rules, which is to say, to meddle and obstruct the possibility of simple rules of human interaction (e.g. “The Congress shall have the power to declare war”).
The Liberal state, in the worthy desire to exorcise greed, poverty, and unhappiness, has given birth to a radical view of the world: that it is the responsibility of the State to protect anyone who may claim to be powerless. But what check is upon these champions? And what inducement do they possess to refrain, since to refrain is to diminish their power and, so, their livelihoods? Is it not evident that to be accused before the bureaucrats of OSHA, Equal Opportunity Commission, FDA, Consumer Safety Board, and so on, is to be found guilty, for the organization’s first and only responsibility is to grow, and, in contrast to the free market, it is not the populace, but the government which characterizes failure and success, and that all government programs must not only expand after success, but expand after failure, in order “to bring about eventual success.” Note that all this hocus-pocus is taking place with the money actually earned by hardworking individuals.
We have abundant natural resources. But if there were a system in which there was no waste, we would all be wearing the same clothes, for our clothes would be chosen for us on the basis of the theory of maximum conservation of resources. As would our cars. But suppose someone wanted a different car. Could he alter it? With what resources, if the State had decided that he had “all that he needed”? But suppose he foresaw a way to make his car even more efficient. Could he experiment on it? Again, using what resources of time or energy? But perhaps as a Hobby. But what if his Hobby required more energy or time than that deemed useful by the State?36 Could he stint himself of sleep and food? Why should he, if his eventual invention were to be taken by the State—appropriated for the Good of All? And if his subsequent fatigue robbed the State of his exertion in those activities it deemed more useful?
A fixation on natural resources blinds one to the worth of human resources: We live in and are designed to exploit (which is another word for “use”) the natural world. The Socialist vision constrains human inventiveness and imagination.
Why would the worker on the assembly line come forward with a better idea? Why, if his compensation was always the same, would he even fantasize about it, which is the beginning of all progress?
Socialism is the end of all invention; it is the happy face of slavery. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
—J. S. Mill
14
R100
The controversy of capitalism versus state enterprise has been argued, tested, and fought out in many ways in many countries, but surely the airship venture in England stands as the most curious determination in this matter.
—Nevil Shute, Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer
Nevil Shute was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century.
He wrote the novels On the Beach, A Town like Alice, No Highway in the Sky, and so on. Many of his books (the above included) were made into very successful films.
By day he was an aircraft designer.
His novels, like those of Dreiser and Trollope, were romantic paeans to those processes the lay populace might presume mundane. Dreiser wrote The Trilogy of Desire, some thousands of pages, on the subject of street railway franchises; Trollope wrote the Palliser series about the romance of Parliament dealing with Irish Home Rule, and decimal coinage. Shute, in the main, wrote about aviation.
Aviation was his day job. He was a very successful designer of aircraft. His company, Airspeed Ltd., designed some of the first commercial air transports in the world. He designed the trainer which was used by the RAF until World War II; Airspeed eventually merged with de Havilland. He was the real thing.
In 1925, Vickers Ltd., for which Shute then worked as chief stress engineer, was commissioned, by the British government, to design a rigid airship (that is, a zeppelin) practicable for transocean and transglobal passenger travel.
But the British government decided to hedge its bets; it awarded the contract to two groups, Shute’s (Vickers), and a governmental group under the auspices of the Air Ministry.
The groups worked independently, but were free to exchange information with each other. Shute’s group (makers of the airship R100) learned that the government’s group (airship R101) was consistently making choices that were heavier, more complex, and, to the eyes of the free-market Vickers group, unnecessary or, indeed, unsafe.
The certainty of the governmental group drove the Vickers group back to their drawing boards, to retest their results, which they again found technically correct. No, the government ship, R101, was, they determined, too heavy, too complex, and unsafe. The various redundancies and compromises resulting from its design as the work of a government committee had rendered it unairworthy. Shute’s group shared its concerns with the government and were told to “go away.”
The R100 made the first east-to-west commercial airship crossing of the Atlantic, with Shute on board. The R101 set off to Karachi, India, carrying Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air, and Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, who were both proponents of the government’s plan. It crashed and burned in France, after three hundred miles of travel, and the British airship program was scrapped.
How often must this experiment be tried?
Israel’s economy wanes under socialism, and burgeons under the free market; West Germany throve, while East Germany, the slave state, lived in starvation until the fall of Communism; Cubans in Miami grow rich, and the prison they risked their lives to flee continues as an eighteenth-century feudal fiefdom. California taxes its flagship movie industry out of the state, and Toronto, Ireland, and the Czech Republic reap the benefits; the United States taxes the auto industry to Japan, the textile industry to China, and so on, and then wonders at the fall of the dollar.
I don’t know anything about the auto industry, but I am a member of another big business which has killed itself.
Anyone working in show business for any time—actually working, that is, writing, acting, designing, lighting, crafting—has said to himself, when the middle managers come on the set: “Why are those fools elected to do that job?”
The affronted, on continued interaction, comes to see that the problem is not with the supposed abilities or personality of the individual bureaucrat; the problem is the existence of the job itself, which is not only unnecessary to but destructive of actual industry.
In the growth of any successful organization, a now-entrenched bureaucracy may work to change its object from production of a product to protection of its (useless) jobs.
It is inevitable that the bureaucrat, awarded his job as a perquisite of superiors who wish to display their power and provide themselves insulation, will work, not primarily, but exclusively to obtain and exercise those same perquisites in his own behalf.
Thus, at the end, Chrysler and GMC were making cars no one wanted for a price that did not repay their manufacture. The car business had been run, both by labor and management, as a sideline of their bureaucracies, each exploiting its own rights (which is to say its position and potential for further exploitation). Who was left designing and producing cars people wanted to buy and drive?
At this point the hag-ridden industry was “rescued” by the only organization in the world less equipped to ensure productivity: the Federal Government.
What does this “rescue” mean? That the décor and the staffing of the boardroom will change. That the tenor of boardroom life will become more austere is inevitable (see the workers’ uniforms adopted by Stalin, Mao, Ho, and so on), but otherwise it will be Business As Usual, which is to say waste (now on an even greater scale), disregard for the consumer, and increased distance from those personally involved with the success of the product offered.
In a rational, which is to say a free-market world, this situation would self-correct: the public would cease to buy a product which no one cared to make attractive, efficient, or affordable, and the business would change or go broke.
The only businesses excepted from this rational progression are those supported by government, and, of course the Government itself, where waste is the end product.
What are we purchasing with our taxes?
What is Big Government but the Executive’s cocaine dream, an activity devoted solely to jockeying for position, in which he may find license for malversation, and may take the company treasury and direct it toward those people who will support his continued incumbency—it is within the law. Its street name is “earmarks,” but it is theft. Of your money and mine.
The problem is, as with the movie business, not with the identity of placeholders, but with the jobs themselves.
The San Fernando Valley is littered with office campuses housing the executives who supposedly “make” the movies. Many of these buildings occupy space which was, formerly, the lot on which actual movies were once made.
Mismanagement (by labor, capital, and our benevolent government) has driven the actual movie business out of California, and, to the largest extent, out of the country.
What would happen to the movie business if these office campuses and their inhabitants were all to disappear tomorrow?
Nothing.
It is not just that a movie studio could be run by one person with a cell phone, in the back of a limo—that is how they are run. The accreted bureaucracy serves the Executive as a Royal Court,37 but, like the Big Government it strives to emulate, it makes nothing but waste. It just exists and grows and grows.
Government is the ultimate bureaucracy, from which has been abstracted not only responsibility for the product, but the product itself.
The price is paid not by the consumer (of what? there is no product) but by Government’s victims—those taxed—and many taxed literally out of existence—by the bureaucrat’s unchecked ability to rape the treasury in buying support for his position, his good ideas, or his reelection.
The difference between the Liberal and the Conservative lies, in the main, in the level of abstraction of thought. The Liberal assumes he differs from his opponent on the identity of the person holding the job, and on the content of that person’s proposals. The Conservative cannot persuade him to see the problem differently: that it is the job itself which must be eliminated. The difference is one not of doctrine, but of philosophy.
The worker on the assembly line, on the movie set, and you and I have the same reaction when the Bureaucrats come slumming by: “If the goddamn Suits would finish their tour, stop nodding wisely, and go away, perhaps I might be able to get the job done.”
I received, from an auction house, a notice of the auction of a Glenn Curtiss 1915 seaplane. It is, I think, one of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen. Its hull is mahogany in a series of gentle steps, allowing it to plane on the water. It is a pusher biplane—its engine mounted behind the pilot and pushing backward. Its wings and tail structure are aluminum. It seats two. It looks as if it were designed by Brancusi; indeed, it was designed by his equal.
The aircraft business, around this time, a mere decade after Kitty Hawk, was largely the domain of producers and designers not far removed (if removed at all) from the workshop garage.
Planes were made (as Nevil Shute observes in Slide Rule) largely from wood, with canvas-covered wings; and it cost little to retool. A fellow with a saw could design and build his own plane, buying or modifying a cheap gasoline engine to power it.38
This early aircraft business resembled that of the shade-tree mechanics who, in building hot rods, gave rise, then as now, to true advances in automobile design. See also the chopper shops of California, and their influence on the world of motorcycling.
A list of these shade-tree mechanics includes the Wrights, Cyrus McCormick, Henry Ford, Tesla, Tom Edison, Meg Whitman, Bill Gates, Burt Rutan, and Steve Jobs. How would they and American Industry have fared had Government gotten its hands upon them at the outset—if it had taxed away the capital necessary to provide a market for their wares; if it had taxed away the wealth, which, existing as gambling money, had taken a chance on these various visionaries? One need not wonder, but merely look around at the various businesses Government has aided. And now it has taken over health care.
15
THE INTELLIGENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Socialism and “Social Justice” are a sort of Sunday religion, professed one day a week for many good and bad reasons, but suspended during and due to the pressures of the workweek. One may bemoan the plight of the Palestinians, who have elected a government of terrorists and daily bomb their neighbor to the West, but we realize that any support past the sentimental is elective: we do not want to live there, nor to go there, and we blink at the knowledge that monies spent in their support may be diverted to the support of terror, and of organizations pledged not only to kill all the Jews, but to kill Americans and Westerners of all faiths.
Where does sympathy stop, and where may it not become sanctimony and hypocrisy?
Our American plane has been forced to land at some foreign airport, by the outbreak of World War III. It will not be allowed to depart. Two planes are leaving the airport; we must choose which we want to board. One plane is flying to Israel and one to Syria, and we must choose.
That’s where sympathy stops.
No one reading this book would get on the plane to Syria. Why? It is a despotism, opposed to the West, to women, to gays, to Jews, to free speech. It is a heinous Arab version of National Socialism, dedicated to the murder of every person in Israel. And yet one may gain status or a feeling of solidarity by embracing the “Arab cause.”39
But we embrace it only as an entertainment. In the free market, which is to say, when something is at stake, we will vote otherwise.
My interest in politics began when I noticed that I acted differently than I spoke, that I had seen “the government” commit sixty years of fairly unrelieved and catastrophic errors nationally and internationally, that I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery they produced; and yet, I thought “the government” was good. What case could I point to to support my feelings? The Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act. Then I would have to stop and think.
It was, of course, easier to worship my own capacity for “good thinking” than actually to think, which is to say to compare my actions with their results. But I tired of it. I tired of hearing Israel condemned by Americans, and hearing Americans condemned by Europeans.
I prefer the company of those who are proud of their country, and proud of their religion—the African Americans have it right, the American Liberal Jews are wrong; there is neither beauty, utility nor safety in identification with one’s oppressors.
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed.
Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone.
People have differing needs. The notion that an honest exchange of views will solve all problems is an article of faith; which, like many another, is suspended in our daily lives.
It is fine for the uninvolved to say of everything, “The truth must lie somewhere in between,” but who on the Left says so, for example, of Abortion? The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all. I do not see where there is a middle ground.
The divorcing husband would like to retain some money and visiting rights to his children, the betrayed wife would like him dead; anyone ever involved in a fight or a lawsuit knows that some conflicts cannot be settled peaceably. The Liberal attitude to our war with Radical Islam is a preference for that action which would end the conflict immediately, and without rancor. That action, unfortunately, is surrender.
American Liberals do not wish to surrender their particular country, but many wish Israel to surrender hers; they wish to have someone else (the Israelis) pick up the cost of their own psychological upset:40 if the Victim is Always Right, and if the Arabs, being darker and poorer, must be the Victim, then Israel must be wrong; further, this being so, the Arab démarches of “land for peace” must be a legitimate attempt to solve the problem, for the victim is always right. It matters not that every Israeli swap of land for peace has resulted in increased Arab attacks. To the Liberal there must be a peaceable solution, and the good-willed (though not the Israelis) see that that solution must be further negotiation, which is to say further concessions from Israel.
The essence of socialism is for Party A to get Party B to give something to Party C.
The Liberal West would like the citizens of Israel to take the only course which would bring about the end of the disturbing “cycle of violence” which they hear of in the Liberal press. That course is abandoning their homes and country, leaving, with their lives, if possible, but leaving in any case.
Is this desire anti-Semitism?
You bet your life it is.
16
THE VICTIM
Just as the Santa Claus myth is a reiteration in the vulgate of the Christ story, so the Love of the Victim is an attempt at a nondeist recreation of religious feeling. It may be found in its everyday, popular face, in the Woman-in-Jeopardy film.
Here the audience experiences vicarious worry and fear for the lot of the defenseless woman (or child), pursued by implacable Evil.
But with these slice-and-dice gothic and horror films, as with the Plight of the Palestinians, the interchange, in order to please, must be inconclusive. The weak, though they may momentarily triumph at the conclusion of any one film, must be available in their intrinsic state of powerlessness for the next go-round.
The woman’s victory over the ax murderer is not a portent of her change from victim to nonvictim, but merely a chance, momentary suspension of that state.
For, in our love of Women-in-Jeopardy films, and in the Left’s love of the Palestinians, there is something of the sadomasochistic. (If one truly deplored the fact of an alleged injustice, one might actually do something about it, but the West sees the Middle East conflict as entertainment; and part of our polymorphous enjoyment of the ending is that though the woman prevails, we know that she is exploitable again next film.)41
We confuse news with reality, and so do the news organizations. They are selling entertainment, and, like any good entertainer, will stress the facts likely to please the audience, and structure the rather confusing and nonconclusive nature of day-to-day existence as a drama.
Six houses were destroyed in the Israeli Army’s incursion into the Arab town of Jenin. It was described by the Western news as “The Rape of Jenin,” and a photo showing a supposedly wounded Palestinian child cradled in his mother’s arms went around the world.
Of less currency was the photo taken from an only slightly wider angle showing the mother and child completely surrounded by photographers, arrayed around the now obviously staged shot.42 But that second shot, though a better depiction of the actual state of events, had less entertainment value as part of an enjoyable spectacle of misery; to call attention to this would be as irritating to the consumers of “outrage” as would a film buff in the next seat at a horror movie explaining, shot by shot, how the effects were produced and that the woman screaming on the screen was actually an actress in no danger at all.
To do so would have lessened the viewer’s enjoyment of the Rape of Jenin.
For one of two things must be true, in the West’s abandonment of Israel: either it is known, at some level, that the Palestinian claims are insoluble, exaggerated, unjust, or skewed; or that the audience, in truth, does not actually care. For if they cared, they would do something, and as they do nothing, one must assume that action would put an end to their enjoyable position as viewer.
Michelle Obama famously declared that America is a “mean, mean country,” of which she was never proud until it nominated her husband for President. But this “mean, mean country” sent soldiers from the North to eradicate slavery (an action, I believe, unique in the history of the world), in a war fought at shocking cost, which would confer upon those who willingly risked their lives no benefit other than their participation in a cause they knew to be right. More than 360,000 Union soldiers died freeing the slaves. This is an actual abiding and permanent legacy of slavery. They died to extinguish evil.
Many in the West enjoy not the suffering, but the contemplation of the suffering of the Palestinians.
For a film one buys a ticket. What is the ticket one buys to enjoy this other spectacle? Its price is the indictment of the State of Israel, in contravention of history, of facts, reason, international law, and affinities, national, cultural, and traditional.
Just as at the movies we would resent the fellow in the next seat explaining the effects, so actual information about the Middle East conflict is considered an intrusion and a distraction from the spectacle. One has made one’s choice (bought one’s tickets) and would like to be left in peace to enjoy the show.
In films the villain is identifiable because he wears the black hat; in the Middle East spectacle he wears a yarmulke.
In 1895 Theodor Herzl was sent by his paper Neue Freie Presse to cover the trial of Dreyfus. Herzl’s cultural awakening came in seeing Dreyfus stripped of his badges of rank while the crowd screamed not “death to the traitor,” but “death to the Jews.”
It was a better story that way in 1895, and it is a better story that way today. But it is just a story.
The question, “Excuse me, what has Israel ever wanted except peace within its borders?” is greeted, largely, in the West, by the response: “Shut up, I’m watching the news.”
The bifurcation of Humanity (as opposed to acts) into two identifiable camps, Evil and Good, is, essentially, a childish act; the notion that one may gain merit from this division, and that this merit makes one the superior of the unenlightened, is the act of an adolescent.
Should such reductionism result in any actual social change, the adolescent intellectual is immediately supplanted by the Man of Action (the Tyrant), as observed by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.
For just as the con man capitalizes upon the reluctance of the mark to ascribe evil motives to a chance acquaintance, the Jacobin, his motives limited to pursuit of power, easily supplants, and, traditionally kills, the fool dreamer who thought he was creating a paradise.
17
PURITANS
He did not, like a Puritan, torment himself and others with scruples about everything that was pleasant.
—Macaulay, The History of England, 1848
Have we turned into a nation of maiden aunts?
Must one, upon risk of exclusion from polite society, decry all life as waste, and all differences of political opinion as heresy? Must the opening salvo of any conversation, interminably, be “Did you see what he/they did today?”
For, at least, one could say of Hitler and his assassins, that they enjoyed their anti-Semitism. But the Left proceeds, from day to day, in a sort of sad, wistful fury at all the things of life not recognized in its cosmogony.
To them, in an inversion of the truly, historically, Liberal philosophy, everything not permitted is forbidden.
But the Talmud cautions that when a man dies, he will be called to account for all the unenjoyed, permitted pleasures of this life, which, after all, were given to him as a gift.
And we have become a nation of noodges.
I have seen visitors at an art exhibition clear their paper plates of the residue of bad cheese, and put the plates in their purse, so as to avoid the waste of paper. Is this fun? Is it productive? Or is it just, rather, the physicalization of that same do-goodishness the apotheosis of which is the bumper sticker?
Do bumper stickers save whales, and free Tibet? By what magical process?
Dennis Prager said that the beautiful one-word haiku, the bumper sticker “Coexist,” that cunning exhortation both verbal and pictorial, its letters made of the Islamic crescent, the Cross, the six-point star, et cetera, that this work of art appears in the country on earth and in history uniquely dedicated to and achieving freedom of religion. He remarked, further, that were one to affix this bumper sticker to his car in Iran the car would be keyed and its occupants beheaded.
Macaulay suggests that the Puritans were expelled from England not because of their religion, but because everyone had sickened of their kvetching.
My daughter comes home from her high school music class and reports that the teacher has announced that the mnemonic for the lines in the treble clef will no longer be “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” which would be sexist, but “Every Good Baby Does Fine.”
Bruno Bettelheim, a holocaust survivor, wrote that the genius of the Nazi salute was that it prescribed the constant repetition of an action. It did not ask for belief, it inculcated belief, as one, perhaps opposed to the Nazis, but forced to give the salute some hundreds of times a day, eventually tired of the unuttered proviso “but I don’t believe it.” He tired of feeling like a hypocrite, and came to take out the anger this feeling produced not on his oppressors, but on those who did not salute wholeheartedly—who, that is, preserved a measure of autonomy.
The puritan has become, of late, the totalitarian, where every last thing, thought, and utterance in the Liberal Day must be an assertion of some Liberal Value; One-Worldness, Compassion, Conservation, Equality, the dread of giving offense, and guilt.
What is the actual human mechanism devoted to the dread of giving offense? It is called culture. It, in its entirety, consists of rules worked out through human interactions sufficiently successful to have been relegated to unconscious habit.
When all human interactions are brought to conscious consideration, the result is anxiety and fear. Consider any first meeting or ceremony where the forms are unknown: a dinner party, for example, of such formality that one was unsure which fork to use, and how and when to address one’s tablemates; a meeting with a head of state, or a celebrity. Human beings, in such circumstances, may be brought to a literal state of immobility through fear of violating a norm and of behaving in a, thus, shameful fashion.
This is the state of the contemporary Liberal world—the fear of giving offense has been self-inculcated in a group which must, now, consider literally every word and action, for potential violation of the New Norms. To further compound the dilemma, the norms themselves are inchoate: consider a high school teacher coming upon two students kissing in the hallway, in violation of school rules. Suppose the two students are gay. Can you imagine a teacher who would not at the very least hesitate in or mitigate her caution or censure in fear of offending the students? Consider the Black Power agitation and vandalism of the sixties, and the school administrators who allowed it on campus—not out of fear for their person, but out of fear that to defend the actual university culture of civility would be to give offense. It is not the absence of government, but the rejection of culture which leads to anarchy.
18
THE NOBLE SAVAGE
There is a curious disconnection between the Left’s worship of the tribal and its religious belief in the power of Government. It may be that its mythology runs like this: The Noble Savage acts in a manner more in tune with Nature. He is uncorrupted, save by the advent of the Whites, who took his land (Israel, the American West, the British Empire). Prior to their coming, he dwelt in peace, tilling the soil according to immemorial principles, and ruled chiefly by his love of the plants and seasons and their influence upon all things. If he had a religion it was that of God as Nature. And we, Westerners, killed and kill him, through greed for his possessions (natural resources).
But the so-believing, the adorers of Third World music, native crafts, and the disheveled dress of their notional American Native Tribe (the poor, the homeless), these, nonetheless, continue to enshrine Big Government as the only tool capable of returning Man from Hell to Eden.
The same Democracy, then, which, in its nonelected quality (civilization) inexorably populated the world, ever widening the polity, and obliterating the Tribe and its supposed blessings, is held by the Left to be that tool capable of reversing the process and restoring us to the Tribe, its campfire, its wise elders, its superabundance of untouched wilderness and game. We’re going to vote on it, and when we have enough votes, we’re going to return to the campfire. There will be no more pollution, for we will vote to stop our polluting ways; there will be no more war, as all sovereign States will be subsumed into a large tribe of the mutually understanding (cf. the United Nations), there will be no more Poverty, because the Earth Holds Enough for All, and lacks only that Wise Leadership which will see to its Just Distribution (a dictator). And all that stands between this utopia and our present state of stupid error are the Conservatives, who believe only in Greed.
How did the Conservatives Get That Way? No one on the Left knows. The generous response was that they must have been dropped on their head as babies, lacking which excuse the Conservative point of view is (to the Left) incomprehensible indwelling Evil.43
For to the Left, Government is the water in which they swim, the underlying belief of their lives: Government is not merely one of the ways in which humanity may be convened to order its various affairs (the others being Religion and the Free Market), but the only way. Liberalism is that religion which has, for the Left, replaced Religion, for which the prime purpose of Government is to expand Equality, which may also be stated thus: to expand its own powers.
For if Government is not only good, but the only source of good, why should it not be elaborated and empowered to address any and all issues?
This is the vision of FDR, who elaborated a bad economic downturn into the worst depression in history. In an attempt to Do Good for All, he dismantled the free market, and, so, the economy44 and saddled our country not only with “social programs,” but with the deeper, unconscious legacy of belief in Social Programs, irrespective of their effectiveness. Roosevelt’s great domestic bequest was this syllogism: If anything called a Social Program fails, expand it.
This is the meaning of Social Justice. It means actions by the State in the name of Justice, which is to say under complete protection and immunity from review. Its end is dictatorship. This progression, from Social Justice to Judicial Activism and control of means of production and distribution, can be seen in the history of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the USSR, North Korea, China, Cuba, wherever the Socialists took power and brought terror; and yet the Left, longing for the campfire, votes for collectivism, for bigger and more powerful and more “feeling” Government. Why?
It is not that the Superstate will return one to the campfire, but that the fantasy of the Superstate seems more elegant than the simple arithmetic of the Free Market.
The Free Market is not a fantasy. We see its efficiency when the power goes out, when we are stranded in an airport, when we throng to the new exciting business down the block—the desire to exchange goods and services in order to increase individual happiness also increases group and societal happiness. The curtailment of that freedom leads to shortages, famine, and oppression. But its operation, and the demonstrability of its superiority to top-down control, cannot be embraced without forgoing the fantasy of the Return to Nature and the Campfire.
Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, called the view of the Free Market the Tragic View: that man is limited; that government is limited in its power to, justly, do more than take care of the infrastructure and adjudicate between conflicting claims according to a mutually agreed upon set of laws; that any may and many do misuse both the goodwill of their fellows and the laws themselves to gain immoral advantage; that elected officials are only human, and must be responsible first for their own election, with all that entails; that once elected they will look first to their reelection, which is to say to their own self-interest; that with residual time and energy and wisdom, they may address the social problems before them, but that even in so doing they are, being human, limited in wisdom and foresight. Laws, therefore, cannot be perfect, and all laws will of necessity discommode, anger, or in fact injure someone—that is what a law does. It takes two human behaviors, or wishes—two human approaches to the same problem—and chooses one.
Government is limited, as human foresight, wisdom, energy, time, and knowledge are limited. The Left holds as a path to Eden a large unfettered Government, a World Government, in fact. That any democracy is made of warring factions, each plumping for its own vision, does not escape the Left, but that any opposing faction may be a legitimate attempt to bring about the greater good, is, to them, a simple untruth. The Left insists on unity and indicts the Republicans, not one of whom in either house voted for the health care bill. How could they have increased this supposed good, “unity”—by ratifying a plan they found monstrous and destructive? The Left longs for the one-party state or dictatorship—this is of course not unity but slavery.
Does Man, then, desire slavery? This is the question Moses asked the Jews—the tragic answer being, time and again, “yes.” Can this desire be resisted? It can and it must. That’s why this country was founded.
Intelligent people may look at the excess of big corporations and be appalled by the lack of connection between the will of the shareholders and the operations of the business. They may be shocked by the out of control executive compensation. Why, they may ask, do the shareholders not take the control which is theirs? But these questioners, on the Left, will not ask the same question of that largest and most bloated of all corporations, the American Government. And well they might.
For our chief executive has just used his prerogatives to empty the treasury, and take on what may prove to be a level of debt lethal to the corporation he was hired to run.
What’s the difference?
There is no difference. We all know that though we may be unfit to manufacture a car, or plan a pharmaceutical campaign, we each feel capable of demanding an explanation of those in charge of businesses in which we have invested. But the Left does not feel this of our Government.
Why is the government different, in this regard? It is not magic, it cannot be other than an amalgamation of human beings just like you and me, some good, some bad, some smart, some not, and all liable to corruption or confusion by prerogative and power.
19
ADVENTURE SLUMMING
For Abbie Hoffman, as for the Mailer and Sartre, Castro’s appeal had much to do with the macho image, the condottiere on the white horse—or tank: “Fidel sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year’s Day . . . girls throw flowers at the tank and rush to tug playfully at his black beard. He laughs joyously and pinches a few rumps. . . . The tank stops in the city square. Fidel lets the gun drop to the ground, slaps his thigh and stands erect. He is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall and straight the crowd is immediately transformed.”
—Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to
the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1981
Let us squint for a moment, to see if we may blur the particulars and perceive a familiar outline in an unfamiliar act. A young wealthy woman puts on vaguely military garb and travels to a far-off, less-developed land to participate in adventure. She meets there the more primitive indigenous people, admires their hunting abilities, and, in fact, poses with one of their large guns, famous for having bagged many trophies.
Q. What is she doing? A. Going on Safari.
Essentially, yes. The woman, however, would be appalled had the big gun been used to kill an elephant. But it has not. It has been used to kill American fliers.
Jane Fonda’s Adventure Tourism is, then, incorrectly, identified not as a safari but as “Ending the War.”
This was a no-cost, exhilarating adventure, all the more attractive because it took place in the purlieus of danger, but contained no danger; and it could be described as “humanitarianism,” which is an edifying title, rather than “slumming,” which is perhaps less so.
Ms. Fonda did not choose to take her wish for adventure into the veldt, where, after all, the beasts might strike back, but to Hanoi in 1969. At the height of the Vietnam War—to pose with the enemy, secure in the knowledge that her (largely inherited) position would protect her from prosecution for what was, arguably, an act of treason.
In her reliance upon this protection she was, of course, availing herself of that same privilege and culture whose destruction she was endorsing in posing by the gun.
Her pilgrimage, as Mr. Hollander points out, was not unique. Intellectuals through the twentieth century have traveled to see the Potemkin Villages of Stalin’s “Workers Miracle,” the happy children of China, and the grinning, sun-drenched Campesinos of the Island Paradise. They have believed what they were shown.45
From the Webbs, and Bertrand Russell, to Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and various movie stars of our day, these happy dupes reward themselves for feeling superior to their own country, from which country they were free to travel, and to which they were free to return, while the smiling folk they visited were locked in slave states.
See also the brave actors who endeavored to boycott, and so close, the 2009 Toronto Film Festival because it offended by showing films from Israel.
This “visiting” and political pilgrimage differs from safari in that one does not here toy with danger. It more closely resembles the Victorian practice of “going among the poor.”
It used to be called “passing out tracts.”
Actors, thriving on publicity, have historically claimed for themselves the right to champion “causes,” the term of art being “Their” disease. This hucksterism may, in fact, have done somebody good, and more probably, did harm to nothing save the actor’s understanding of his place in the world. But it is the nature and profession of the actor to see himself as the Hero. Without this capacity and inclination, the actor cannot act. His professional indulgence in fantasy is a boon to the community, its elaboration into do-gooderism is, perhaps, inevitable.
We writers, similarly, are professional fantasists. But, rather than imagining ourselves as heroes, we live through delineating the struggle between Good and Bad. We are, essentially, Zoroastrians—for, if we can’t adequately differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys, how will we know when to end the story?
Writers have traditionally been the dupes of totalitarian propaganda, as the visions we have been shown and the tales we have been told sound, to us, like the products of our own imagination.
And actors, as above, are easily manipulated, similarly, by the unconscious appeal of a universe resembling their own (in which they are the hero).
No wonder, then, that these two subgroups of my particular racket, show business, have been trotting the globe for a hundred years, petted by and championing the causes of Tyrants.
No wonder that the Hollywood enclaves of today coalesce around Good Causes, and that these Good Causes seem to be reducible to “saving the world.”
But I will note that the brave groups protecting the rights of the Palestinians to destroy the Jews, the rights of Iraqis and Cubans to live under dictatorship, and protesting the American military’s mission to protect their lives, that these disaffected are taken, in my business, in the main, from the ranks of actors and writers, and interestingly, contain only a very small number of directors.
Why? A director cannot deal in fantasy. His job is to take the delineation of a fantasy (a script) and transform it into film-in-the-can. He has a certain amount of time and money with which to do so, and no amount of fantasy will stop the sun going down on a day on which he has not completed his assigned filming.
More importantly, a director (I speak as one who has directed ten features, and quite a bit of television), is exposed to something of which the actors and writers may not have taken notice: the genius of America, and the American system of Free Enterprise.
The director sees, on the set, one or two hundred people of all walks of life, races, incomes, political persuasions and religions, and ages, men and women, involved, indeed dedicated to doing their jobs as well as possible (indeed the ethos of the film set could, without overstatement, be described as “doing it better that it’s ever been done”), in aid of the mutual endeavor (the film). Each brings not only his or her particular expertise and craft, but an understanding of and dedication to the culture of filmmaking: work hard, pitch in, never complain, admire and reward accomplishment.
Travel posters of the postwar era proclaimed “See America First.” I would recommend this as an anodyne to the Adventure Tourist’s Weltschmerz: look around you.
20
CABINET SPIRITUALISM AND THE CAR CZAR
I am very willing to recognize the good in many men of these two classes, but a politician or a civil servant is still to me an arrogant fool’til he is proved otherwise.
—Nevil Shute, Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer, 1954
A czar is an absolute ruler. The wish to appoint a bureaucrat and name him Czar is an example of magical thinking, for, if government is inefficient, how may it be improved by making it omnipotent?
But perhaps Government is unsatisfactory because it is made of bureaucrats. This “czar,” then, will be but another. He will have to deal not only with the bureaucracy he inherits, but with that which he creates—the attempts to amalgamate the two, resulting in an organization inevitably worse than either.
The new group dedicated to the streamlining of Government will be paced by a corresponding group of incumbents ensuring that this takes place within the existing rules (which is to say that its jobs are not threatened), and the net results will be an unavoidable increase in the infighting which is the main occupation of all bureaucrats, and a concomitant increase in the power of the State. The inefficiency of Government cannot be addressed through an elaboration of Government.
The delusion that it can calls to mind the Cabinet Spiritualists of the late nineteenth century. These assured the public that they possessed supernatural powers. Locked in a cabinet and bound, they could, for example, cause musical instruments to play, cause writing to appear upon slates, cause objects to fall from the sky, and so on.
But these feats, they explained, could only be performed under those special circumstances necessary for the intercession of the Spirits. The Spirit World demanded privacy. So, the cabinet in which the acts were performed must be closed. To still the doubts of the unbelievers, however, the Spiritualists would be bound, and the cabinet investigated by an impartial committee of the audience.
Here we have a charming example of codependent thinking on the part of the audience, who, in this figure, represent our Electorate. Their will to believe is in direct conflict with their understanding. They may enjoy the demonstration only if it is believable, but they know it to be a hoax—what are they to do?
The spiritualist and the politician are essentially magicians, one offering diversion, the other security, in exchange for a suspension of common sense.
For, if the spiritualist could actually cause the instruments to play without his intervention, let him do it in the light—he cannot.
Neither can the politician suspend the natural processes of bureaucracy by expanding them. He can at best, and only under special circumstances, perform the illusion of doing so—these special circumstances being that period prior to his inauguration, or a time of emergency sufficient to distract the populace or otherwise stay any outside power of verification.46
How, for example, may a new agency, named Homeland Security, offer improvement over that security previously provided by various diverse government agencies, each of which itself originated as an amalgamation of its predecessors in the name of efficiency?
This tendency toward elaboration is, of course, the way of the world. In the mobile society of our Democracy each new stage of elaboration is inaugurated by the selfsame vision: that what is needed is a centralized power, and a revision of laws to allow this efficiency. This is called a return to common sense.
But how may it be common sense for the auto industry to be run by one with no experience of it? This might be envisioned only through the intervention of some magical power—the process taking place in the dark, or in some closed cabinet. This is the essence of the wish for a czar: “Do it, but don’t tell me about it, I’m sure it will be fine.” It is the wish to be dominated by a strong beneficent power—the wish, in essence, for enslavement. See the various programs headed over the years by “czars,”—the Poverty, Car, Energy, Drug, et cetera—all exercises in magical thinking. What have they accomplished? Nothing.
How can a country grow rich through “redistributing” the wealth, by driving production overseas through taxation, by a refusal to exploit natural resources? This could be imagined only by those willing to suspend their understanding of the laws of cause and effect—the audience at a magic show.
Curiously, as magicians know, the more intelligent the viewer, the more easily he may be fooled. For the less imaginative and less theoretical know that a rabbit may not be produced from any hat which did not previously contain a rabbit; that wealth can accrue neither to an individual nor to a society not committed to the production of wealth, and that no organization may be made more efficient by adding to its bulk.
This delusion of an expanded government’s increased efficiency is, in Liberal thought, buttressed by a belief in such a government’s increased fairness—that more laws and more extralegal or administrative procedures will somehow bring about more and “better” justice than that provided by the Constitution. As some groups, we know, were discriminated against in the past, justice may now best be served by discrimination against other groups. This is suggested as a commonsense mechanical device. Psychologically, however, it is magical thinking: awarding to the State non-Constitutional powers, correctly deemed notorious when exercised by the individual.
How may justice be served by awarding to any special group a preference? Such awards may be welcome to the recipients, and their contemplation enjoyable to those of the good-willed who are not adversely affected by the redistribution, but they cannot be just.
Contemporary Liberal sentiment endorses the abrogation or elaboration of law to ensure that no one suffers, but the first and most important task of law in a democracy is not to right individual wrongs, but to ensure that no one suffers because of the State. And the simple, tragic truth is that this may be accomplished not by a Czar or a committee, or by reorganization, or by accession to office of the Benevolent or Wise, but only by limiting the State’s power.
21
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Freud posits three main aspects of the mind: the Id, which is the unmitigated urge or nonnegotiable demand (“I want it”), the Ego, which attempts to integrate this demand with the Ego’s other conflicting needs (“I know I want unlimited sex, but I also want to stay out of prison”); and the Superego, which is taxed with finding a solution to this hopeless and enervating struggle.
Here is my example of the process.
One finds oneself, in the middle of the night, stopped at a deserted intersection by a red light. The Id says, “What the hell are you waiting for, drive on.”
“But wait,” says the Ego, “what if it is a trap? What if the police are hiding, right behind that road sign?”
“No,” says the Id, “their car would not quite fit, and we would see the tires, for the love of God.”
“But what if there is a hidden camera,” says the Ego. “Is it worth the risk? Why not wait the extra half-minute.”
“You fool,” says the Id, “there is no danger. You weak fool.” This is, of course, intolerable. A random moment at a stoplight occasions a battle for self-esteem and psychic integrity. Even the changing of the light will not still the conflict, for one stands insulted and accused, and the question of what should have been done remains unanswered and unanswerable.
However, comes now the Superego.
“No,” it says, “It is not that you are weak and foolish. You are, in fact, both worthy and good, and I will tell you why: you stopped at the light because you are a Good Citizen. And you realized that if everyone obeyed only those laws the transgression of which would result in immediate punishment, where would Society be? I congratulate and honor you for your choice.”
Everybody happy, well, I should say.
As we have seen, all under the sway of the Nazi regime had to greet each other with the Nazi salute. Many found this, as it was an avowal of subjugation, intolerable. The Id said, “I will not give the wretched salute.” The Ego replied, “What does it mean? You don’t actually have to believe in the Nazis; it’s just a simple gesture, and performing it will save your life.”
But this interchange, unfortunately, caused the individual to enter into a painful negotiation scores of times a day. To wit: “I do it, but I don’t believe in it. I am not a coward. I am merely making a rational and cost-effective accommodation. I am a worthy person, whatever the Id may say.”
How can one eliminate the pain of the continual repetition of a distressing and seemingly insoluble negotiation?
Here comes the Superego with a brilliant solution: let the gesture be consigned to the realm of the unconscious—it turns the continual nature of the repetition from a reiterated pain into a selling point. “Look here,” says the Superego, “there is just not enough time in the day to worry about it—we will let the dialogue lapse from consciousness, and replace it with unthinking habit.”
But this instance differs from that of the stoplight.
For here we have an unfortunate unresolved remainder. For though the conscious negotiation ceased, the salute survived.
What was the effect, Bettelheim asked, of the now unconscious habitual repetition of a gesture of subjugation? The individual became a Nazi. How could he not? Was he not now pledging, unthinkingly, his loyalty scores of times a day?
A friend reports that she saw a doyenne of the Left at a restaurant and asked her advice on some question of Liberal Doctrine. “Contact MoveOn.org,” the doyenne replied, “And do whatever they say.”
The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyphean burden. I speak as a reformed Liberal.
How may one support higher taxes and government intervention as an aid to the economy, when all evidence historical and current (cf. Greece), records the disastrous folly of such a course?
How can one support racial preferences and set-asides, when they run contrary to the evidence of the results of all race–or genetic-based programs in history—their existence an incipient invitation to murder?
How can one deny (as the Obama administration insists on doing) that the military threat to the West has a name, and that name is Islamic Fascism?
Et cetera.
These positions, ad infinitum, are incompatible with reason, and one can embrace them only with great assistance, which, unfortunately, for the Liberal, is forthcoming.
That assistance is the Superego, capable of adjudicating all things.
A proposition or a person emerges promising the impossible. (“The New Economy”), or crooning about the unquantifiable (“Change”), and the Liberal finds this soothing sound consonant with his self-image as a brilliant and compassionate individual.
This individual is in the exact position of the confidence man’s mark. In fact he is the confidence man’s mark.
Now, the main problem in structuring a con game is in answering the mark’s question, “Why me . . . ?”
In the Spanish Prisoner, played for over two thousand years, and seen today in its incarnation as the Nigerian Letter, the individual is appealed to as one of noted repute and standing in the community, as someone who can be trusted with the confidence man’s improbable claim.
The mark is flattered. He understands why he has been chosen. He has been chosen because of his excellence. How could one (the Confidence man) who was that perceptive, then, be other than honorable also? The question does not arise.
The flattered mark glossing over all inconsistencies, and improbabilities, and indeed, impossibilities, in the confidence man’s story, forks out his money.
The Liberal is flattered that he, in contradistinction to his benighted countrymates, has been chosen to advance the policies and doctrines of Liberalism. He, in endorsing them, is part of the Elite, one of those empowered to eradicate those historical evils entailed upon humanity because of the unfortunate delay of his advent. (“We are the people we have been waiting for,” Obama campaign, 2008.)
He is the champion of Good, chosen because someone (the Candidate) has finally recognized his excellence.
His problem resides in this: that the doctrines, policies, and programs presented for his endorsement are senseless and destructive, and can be so-proved by any slight referral of them to the impartial verdicts of history.
What will the Superego do?
It will ensure that the referral will never occur.
How will it do this? By ensuring that the referral would occur only at the cost of relinquishing membership in the herd.
The Superego cannot increase the benefit of compliance (as it did with the stoplight), but will increase the cost of noncompliance. Questioning = excommunication.
The Left, in addition to its embrace of the false (higher taxes means increased prosperity for all), and its acceptance of the moot as incontrovertible (Global Warming); must account for the incidental effect of the sum of these decisions. This effect is the destruction of our culture.
All strife to the Left is error, and poverty and all human ills eradicable by new programs. But these revolutionary revisions destroy the human ability to interact, which, in its entirety, is known as Culture.
Note that, under the Statist revisions of the Obama administration, racial tensions have devolved to acrimony unknown in this country for decades. Sexual relations are universally subject to constant revision, and limits on language and behavior, once imposed unconsciously, and learned in family, community, and school, are returned to the conscious mind, erasing spontaneity and ease, and replacing them with consternation and fear.
Our beautiful American language is now subject to revision by those screaming loudest, and we have the enormity of s/he, the clunky continuous reiteration of his-or-her, and so on. This revision is presented by the Left as an aid of equality, but its result is an atmosphere not of happy compliance, but of anxiety, circumlocution, and a formalism destructive of the free exchange of ideas.
Our culture is being destroyed by the Left. What difference that the good-willed do so in the name of Equality? It is being destroyed.
The decision to allow a thirteen-story Islamic Center to be built in the vicinity of Ground Zero may be defensible under the rubric of law; but it is a cultural obscenity, allowable only if the State, the Left, or the individual asserts that every decision must be adjudicated according to the new understanding of the anointed.
The Government sues the State of Arizona for the enforcement of laws the passage of which are not only the right of the state under the Constitution, but the content of which is virtually identical with federal law.
The State of California sentences the farmers of its Central Valley to drought, and their farms to destruction, because a small fish called the delta smelt has been declared endangered.
That our culture is falling apart is apparent to any impartial observer. But what observer can be impartial? Conservatives are aghast; we are shocked at the actions of the Left, and we are astounded that they do not acknowledge these actions’ results.
It is not that they do not care. But that they cannot afford to notice, for comparing their actions to the results would bring about either their ejection from the group (should they voice their doubts) or, should they merely follow their perceptions to their logical conclusions, the psychic trauma incident upon a revision of their worldview.
The Superego, here, has made a terrible bargain.
It has offered membership in a group whose size and power allows the individual to submerge his doubts. And then to forget them. But the cost is the surrender of his reason.
He may live his entire life never talking to a Conservative, never reading a Conservative publication, or listening to any news at all save that of the Left. That four hundred Liberal journalists have been revealed as involved in a long cabal to distort that which they offer as news, in aid of Liberalism, makes no difference to the Liberal. It cannot; for he cannot risk his membership in the herd. And he must remain unaware of his bargain. Like the young lady in Rumpelstiltskin.
The Gnome in the story came to offer her release from the Evil King. The gnome, however, was no one other than the Evil King, and his demands, like those of the King, eventually became intolerable. Prior to that point, she was dedicated to self-delusion. Maybe, she thought, this savior will aid me. Maybe, the Liberal thinks, this new iteration of Government Programs will prove useful. Perhaps this previous new panacea has failed (as all its like have failed) because it was Underfunded.
The Liberal is caught. To reject the herd protection is to, inevitably, undergo the shame and humiliation of recognizing his prior, destructive folly.47
So the Liberal stands pat. He, who never talks to anyone outside of this group, accuses the Conservative of being brainwashed; he explains the abysmal performance of Obama by saying “look at the mess he inherited,” as if the President did not campaign (as do all politicians) on the platform of cleaning up the prior mess. (Those of the same party as the outgoing incumbent campaign on improving his accomplishments—which is to say the prior mess.)
The Liberal is subsumed in the herd. How, then, to explain, as he must, the unfortunate state of things? The herd supplies the answer: blame the Opposition.
Obama’s plans are questioned? Call his opponents Racist.
Palestinian Terrorists are dedicated to the destruction of our ally, Israel? Blame the Israelis for saddling us with a challenge to our delusion of Universal Brotherhood.
The Left, in suspending reason and accountability, is ravaging our beautiful culture.
But the necessity of Culture is a part of human interaction. Strand ten bus riders in a blizzard, and they will extemporize their own culture.
The drive to discard our evolved American culture, to replace it with the “reasoning” of idiot teenagers who have blessed, by their presence, the schools of the Ivy League, results, as it must, in a new culture. But in what does this culture consist?
The Nazis and the Communists railed against and discarded religion, and instantly, automatically, created their own religion, each with all the formal trappings and operations of—though with different content than—those religions they displaced.48
So the Left creates its own, new culture.
But this culture is confusing, amorphous, and constantly shifting. It not only resembles, it is the Party Line, avant la lettre. The confused Liberal must grope, each day, to find how to explain (to his own satisfaction, for he will never talk to a conservative) the inexplicable vagaries of his tribe.
How can he do so? “Call MoveOn.org, and just do whatever they say.”
In what does this new culture consist? In obedience.
22
MY FATHER, AL SHARPTON, AND THE DESIGNATED CRIMINAL
What is it that Liberal African Americans have not recognized about the Left? That there is no one home. The Left has abandoned the country, come out against capitalism, exploitation of resources, the free market, and work, and announced its refusal to defend our borders. All this as a matter of principle.
Al Sharpton and those calling (under whatever name) for reparations for ancient crimes are, in effect, suing for crumbs from those they, by that suit, designate as their (somehow) superiors. But they have no superiors. There is no one home. The slave owners, along with the robber barons, and “the interests,” have left the building.
Reverend Al Sharpton, in Chris Rock’s wonderful documentary Good Hair, takes on the overwhelming Asian ownership of hair salons in Black communities. He calls this ownership “exploitation.” But who is exploiting the Black community, the Asians who, perceiving a need, are catering to that need, or the Reverend Sharpton?
The Asians, like the Jews, immigrants one hundred years ago, saw both a market and a vacuum of power, and responded. They saw in effect that no one was there.
My father bluffed his way into Northwestern Law on the GI Bill, having (perhaps) finished two years of community college. He graduated first in his class. I asked him what his secret was, and he explained that he didn’t realize how little was required of him.
President Obama announces every day (and his presidency could, indeed, be reduced to this announcement and its results) that the West is finished: with capitalism, with Democracy, with self defense, and that anyone who wants it can have it. Will our opponents, those declared and those indeed stunned into wakefulness by our lassitude, be any less likely to respond to opportunity than the Asians in Harlem?
The same rules governing commercial real estate must govern geopolitics—how could it be otherwise, as each are only expressions of the universal nature of human interaction?
If the other fellow has damaged his property, if he has mismanaged it, and depressed or miscalculated its value, if he does not engage in its supervision and upkeep, it becomes a Bargain, and the bargain will be snapped up by the observant.
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