Moderates United

A proposition which cannot be negated is to logic what a hypothesis which cannot be falsified is to science: a failure of the method.

A complaint we often see from the left is that “real wages” are not rising; that by exporting jobs to China and elsewhere we are causing people’s incomes here not to go up. The reality–well detailed by Henry Hazlitt in his indispensable “Economics in one lesson”–is that we ARE getting wealthier. What is happening is that at the same wage, you can BUY MORE. The average American household today has many things that were undreamt of 30 years ago. Microwaves used to be luxuries, and computers unheard of.

Now, at those same wages (if we even accept this analysis, which I am willing to do in principle since it doesn’t matter) we have MUCH more. We have more furniture, TV’s, stereos, iPods, cars, etc. We take these things for granted, but anyone over 40 remembers three TV stations, and one TV.

The way Capitalism works best is if you let people create. When one industry moves away, new ones are created. When leftist talk about wages, what they are mainly talking about are UNION wages, since they are the ones who help get them elected, and their complaint is that they are not making MORE money for the SAME amount of work. Why would such a thing be possible?

Leftists fear the loss of power of unions, since that is a big part of the money machine that funds them. This entire health insurance take-over cannot be understood without reference to the benefits it provides the UNIONS.

As Hazlitt says, you can always help one group at the expense of another, and always help everyone in the short run, at the expense of the long run. In this particular case, for every person helped by this bill 4 or more will be hurt; and whatever good it does in its first few years will be devastatingly counterbalanced by the debt it will cause, and by the massive disruptions in a system which until now has been the world’s best.

John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty” is an essential text in the Liberal tradition. In it, he defends the necessity of personal autonomy, and the value of individualism. One quote (which I stole from the internet, but which I believe to be in that work, although I cannot quickly find it) that I like is this:

“Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, courage, and mental vigor it has contained.”

One sees efforts by Leftists to paint conservatives as the enemies of originality. In my own town, we have a campaign to “Keep Louisville Weird”, by which they mean we should buy from locally owned, ideosyncratic businesses, rather than patronizing national chains which lack the eccentricity that local control and local relationships makes possible.

Flower children reveled in their “free spirited” rejection of conventional society, as do punk rockers, goths, and others today.

As what I consider to be a genuine Liberal, I find nothing distasteful in diversity. I like it. I like it when people do things differently, and express themselves in their own voices.

What I find distressing is what I perceive to the general LACK of originality of thought that characterizes most of these people. Their non-conformity is external only, and the actual content of their thought is distressingly uniform. They reject traditional moral forms, notions of patriotism, and generally Capitalism generally, conflating it–as they do–with Consumerism.

On this reading, Socialism is a romantic escape from the drudgery of pedestrian conformity. Yet, nothing can be more drearily conformist than a State which tolerates only one set of ideas, which is economically incompetent, and which punishes ideological deviations. Cuba is a nation which should be happy, but which lives in constant fear of running afoul of the secret police and army of informers that are everywhere.

In my piece on Sybaritic Leftism, I did admit that the Scandinavian nations offer an attractive set of ideas, but the problem with them is that in their pursuit of simple hedonism, they leave no room for the persistence of principled difference, and in practice one sees them giving in to whatever group screams the loudest.

The true eccentric is a man or woman of sturdy principles, who hews to them even in the face of adversity. If no one is opposing you, it can hardly be an act of courage to be different. Rather, that type of non-conformity is little better than stylistic narcissism.

Americans in general have less of a commitment to one another than we might if we were in a tribe, but we have most of that sense. Most of us are willing to give our lives for this nation, which is to say for one another.

We have developed a generous attitude towards the world and one another. We need to remember how rare this is in human history, that a major power would be so tolerant, and so reluctant to use for our own immediate benefit the immense power we wield.

This is the direct result of the Enlightenment inspired enterprise that animated our Founding Fathers, which rested firmly on Christian charity.

Broadly speaking, our political arena offers us two options: doing what we’ve always done, respecting the Constitution, and free markets, and privileging religious commitment and our heritage; and implementing Socialism.

Now, we have been programmed since birth to believe in Progress, but you can’t progress if you keep doing what you have always done. Progress, as a theme, involves change. Logically, this is a powerful tool, then, in the arsenal of the Socialists, since they are the only ones saying they want to do something different.

Yet, regression is also change, and it seems to me that Socialism is actually a reversion to the aristocratic feudalism of the Middle Ages, without the palliative effect of the Church. Prices were fixed then, “just” wages were paid then, and the Kings would make sure everyone was fed, if they could.

We need a third way. Clearly, adherence to religious sentiment is declining, due particularly to the advent of Science as the preeminent and dominant source of Truth. Yet, regardless of what Leftist attacks on religion may claim, the reality is that our nation has always relied on religion to provide the moral compass that enabled us to be actually tolerant of diversity, and to do the right thing, even when it was hard and involved sacrifice. Self evidently, religion played a large role in Abolitionism, and in the Civil Rights movement, among other areas of social evolution.

The third way, in my view is a Liberalism denuded of a NECESSARY religious component. This is the political role that I foresee for the concept of Goodness. I have nowhere defined in detail what exactly it is we MUST do. Everything is up for discussion. My only absolutes are that self pity must be rejected; that we must persist in our efforts to improve the world; and that we must make strenuous efforts to be wise, to foresee the effects of our ideas, and to understand that sometimes NOTHING need be done. There is no pain that cannot be transmuted into understanding, and there is no point in creating a world in which pain is banished.

Our only choice is in how we choose to suffer. This sounds maudlin, but in reality for those who accept it, suffering isn’t. If you want to feel alive, take a risk. If you want to become tranquil in mind and spirit, voluntarily undertake a difficult task, and give it everything you have.

Socialists are willing to suffer for their Socialism, are they not? Are full time revolutionaries not passionately commited to their cause? Do we not see romantic evocations of the trials and travails of Reds everywhere, for example in the movie Reds?

Socialism serves this role–that of providing meaning–for revolutionaries. The problem is that this sense of purpose is not transferable. When they succeed, they have nothing left. The people on whose behalf they presume to speak, do not attain–in whatever material repose is enabled by their economic incompetence–a feeling of being alive. On the contrary, unless they themselves become revolutionaries, they find it oppressive and empty, because it is. It is a fire that burns, and if it ever engulfs our planet, it will consume to the last drop every hope of transcendance we might have had. At least, that will be its goal.

In that uses the method of stoking resentment, of rejecting traditional moral norms, and cultural forms, and in that it demands dogmatic conformity to ideas generated far, far away, Socialism is the antithesis of Goodness as I have defined it.

It is evil, in my view, and no quantity of lies can erase this fact.

Most men, it seems to me, occasionally covet other women, no matter how loving their wives or girlfriends might be. We are presented–in movies, particularly–with bright shining images of beautiful, emotionally engaged women who seem to possess something that we lack. Or we are presented, in pornography, with sexually available women who will do anything we want.

Everywhere there is this bright shining lie–if I may borrow a term from a liar–that over the hill, happiness awaits. In contrast, what we have comes to seem dull and dreary. This is the myth that leads many middle-aged men into what can become the crisis of infidelity.

It seems to me, though, that all of these images subtract from the particularity of the women. They have needs, they have desires, they have bad days, they get grouchy. And at an increasingly early point in their lives, many women become cynics. Subjected to objectification from a very early age, it seems to me most women fall in love once in their teens, and a second time, if they are lucky, some time in their twenties. After that, they are spent. They have risked, and lost, to men who had been conditioned by a relentless media advocacy campaign to view sex as an object, not a type of emotionally involved relationship.

Clearly, the biological imperatives of men differ from those of women, but we both need love. This doesn’t change. And one of the principle arguments against the sexual revolution in the 60’s was that it would lower women to the standards of men, which seems to have happened.

So quite often what we have is objects interacting with objects. This is what you have when there is no genuine affection. This is the logic of oral sex, for men at least, in that you have a power relationship, and are freed from the need to look in anyone’s eyes with affection.

Women, it seems to me, come into their relationships with men in their teens with very glowing hopes. They feel love, and think that love is being given back to them, and so readily surrender their bodies. And most of the time, they are betrayed.

What is lacking in this whole process is creation. In order to love, you must exist as a person first. You must understand that you must be able to resist your own most primal impulses, so that you can connect on higher levels with other people. A lover is just a friend with whom you have consummated the deepest level–not of physical–but emotional intimacy. Women think they can get love with sex, but in general they don’t. They get used, then abandoned when they become “clingy”. This drives some women crazy. You see them in middle age, in constant pain, unable to understand why no one wants them, and becoming steadily less attractive as this frustration eats them. This is the “crazy bitch” that men can’t comprehend. What they are seeing is 20 years of emotional abandonment, and emotional silence, tempered only by the companionship of their female friends.

Creation, here, is adding energy to the system. It is deciding to give first, then receive later. Women do this easily when young, and very poorly after getting stung repeatedly. Men, in our society, do this very poorly.

I do not think I am misstating the facts when I say that there was a time in the not too distant past when men would court women. When they would offer up effort to win them, and offer unconditional loyalty, having done so. When they would serenade them, figuratively or literally. When poetry evoked deep sentiment, and when women were considered special, and their tenderness and sensitivity valued.

So often, now, women are seen simply as sexual objects, and on this view there is no major difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality. One orifice, by and large, is as good as another. The emotional quality is the same: that of two animals in heat, bound only by desire, and who for that reason only stay together until that particular passion is spent.

And when emotions do enter into it, when people “fall in love”, what is happening is that one person is asking another to “complete” them, as in Jerry McGuire. If you don’t know who you are, and find someone who can tell you, that is the person you love. But this, too, is compulsive. If you need that other person, in order that you can exist as a person, then you can never see them as they are. You never complete them.

Many women will settle for being needed, but this is far short of love, and will lead to chronic levels of emotional malnourishment. This has been the lot of countless women over the ages.

By and large, though, what I see on our cultural scene as it exists today is everyone searching for someone to complete them, and never quite finding it. They search and search. Momentarily they may find someone, but wind up rejecting them as not enough.

People want someone to tell them who they are. No one is creating. There is leveling process where no one is creating anything. Practically, this gets expressed as women want money, men want good sex with attractive women. Marriage becomes a de facto business proposition, particularly after the “starter marriage” in their twenties.

Yet, there is nowhere to run when no one is adding anything. Everybody is looking for soemething and not finding it. Dissatisfaction is everywhere.

You can’t find yourself if you don’t exist, and you won’t exist until you create yourself, by determining what you stand for, and what you are willing to suffer for; what your unique brand of Goodness will be.

Expressed poltically, this is the problem of socialism: it reallocates wealth, it doesn’t create it. This is the point Ayn Rand wanted to make. Everything, in the end, depends on people who put out more energy than they consume, who take nothing and make something.

The outcome of a lack of individuation is a lack of love, which leads to alienation, which leads to frustration, which leads to anger and violence. Any loveless sex for a women is a type of cruelty. Men need love as much as women, perhaps more. Everyone is losing.

These musings are not yet as tight as I would like them to be, but will have to do for now. More on this later. When I understand something, I can be concise. I’m not there yet.

Fashion is really a type of art. It’s a way of interacting with your environment in a creative and engaged way. Obviously, most people don’t create their own clothes, but there are so many options to choose from, you have the ability to assemble something that is uniquely you and yours.

The use of your personal space in this way is an external reflection of inner realities. To echo a similar point Theodore Dalrymple made in one of his essays, the extent of your congruence with social conventions is reflected in how you present yourself.

Everyone wants to be an individual, but no one wants to be alone, and when you see people flouting social conventions–as in the ironic use of military clothing by rumpled hippies–you generally see them doing it in groups.

Read through the lyrics to these two songs, then return to look at my analysis:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnnycash/aboynamedsue.html

http://www.rhapsody.com/everclear/rolling-stone-original/father-of-mine/lyrics.html

The two cases are roughly the same. In both you have young boys who grow up without a father, who have to struggle to survive, and who bear psychological scars.

In the first, you hear of a drifter who goes from town to town, often getting in fights, never settling down. He doesn’t whine about it, but clearly he is psychologically damaged.

In the second, you get the confession: “I will never be safe/ I will never be sane/ I will always be weird inside/ I will always be lame.”

Now, my own temperamental inclination, as should be obvious, is to side with Johnny Cash. Shit happens: deal with it. But as you ponder it, you realize he really isn’t dealing with it. He is running and hiding from his “shame”. He is acting out constantly in an aggressive way.

In our pre-Confessional culture–prior to our mass conversion to the idea that talking about psychological problems somehow helps us “process” them–people like Cash’s Sue were common. They were drunks, and losers. Some got religion, or found a good woman, and made their peace with their world; others never did. This world has always been filled with much suffering.

Freudianism, with the notion of the Unconcious, tells us that who we are now, is the product of who we were, then. The logic of this is that if we are suffering now, we should blame the past. Freud may today have no claims that pass even rudimentary scrutiny scientifically, but the basic notion of the retained experience, the permanent moulding of self at some time before our maturation, is everywhere.

Thus, when the claim is made “I will never be sane”, the singer is simultaneously attacking his father for his cruelty by claiming irreparable damage, and surrendering his creative capacity for regeneration and growth.

Now, the lyricist has obviously done something with his life–he is no doubt wealthy, as someone who created at least one major hit–and has commited himself to not doing the same thing to his kid. These are positive, and bely the fundamental helplessness he is invoking.

But he is still offering us an idea that is fundamentally pessimistic. Are we in fact pressed into molds at an early age, and forever after helpless in their face? Are the combinations of genetics and early experience fully and completely determinative of our future experience?

Johnny Cash’s Sue is insufficiently self reflective to make claims like that. He doesn’t think about it. And it does seem to me that as we evolve as sovereign individuals, we do so as whole qualitative Gestalts. Quite often, you can do things that are “impossible”, if you don’t know they are impossible. And it seems to me that someone who simply wants a better life will be more likely to get it than someone who has already determined in advance that the battle is already lost.

So, in the end, I have to come down somewhere in the middle. Clearly, whining is not generative. As a general rule, it makes you more depressed, and lessens your capacity for transcendance.

The optimal therapeutic approach would be one where you reject self pity, but also realize you have to process hurt. People are often blind and cruel, but that is for now simply the reality, and you can’t unwrite the past by accurately pointing to real wrongs done to you.

Our task in life is creation. This is what I believe, and any and all beliefs that subtract from your capacity for creation are for that reason to be avoided. Experience is primary. Explanation is secondary. This is the order. My operative optimism consists in the belief that if we truly understand how to live, everything can be clear and bright, pleasing and satisfying. We should never settle for anything that falls short of that.

It seems to me that art is the expression of the sacred myth. It is understandable that it became a cult in and of itself in the late 19th century among people who had otherwise rejected all faith and creed. The best art simultaneously ennobles us and binds us, one to another.

Regrettably, it also expresses who we are, and who we are becoming. On that score, modern art–as a rejection of form, meaning and beauty–represents the increasing formlessness and incoherence of our culture.

Yet, we remain a system in motion. We are still free. Our task, I think, is to evolve from the eternal verities which the ancients and medieval painters sought to convey, to a constant effort to reconcile stability with motion, through balance.

Thinking about art. I want it to be constructive without being didactic. The fractal pictures are a good example, showing beauty in disorder. Didacticism is a sort of linear, imposed order, that I oppose. The best art, it seems to me, induces in the viewer (listener) latent sympathies with what is good in life. It helps us find pleasure and companionship in difficulty, and helps us manage our tendencies to lapse into self pity, and move towards a creative, fulfilling engagement with life. I can’t say what exact forms this might take.

I do like the idea of layered pictures, with very rich information in them, more than we can process. Currently, I think much art ALSO has more information than we can process, but what is being signalled on the channels which elude our conscious awareness is gloom, pessimism, and latent sympathy for evil. Is the proverbial blank canvas not a rejection of all values, and of creative engagement, regardless of what excuse may be offered for it? Is it not a rejection of society, and effort?

I have thought often about architecture. Broad stroke, I think it would be useful to have interactive homes, which react to changing conditions. We tend to stagnate, and moving homes would work to counteract that. That is the implicit myth in the Harry Potter novels, at Hogwarts. The stairs move, and the pictures are alive. In their world, nothing remains static, and life is never understood as being even potentially without risk. We need that, and Rowlings very insightful use of these principles–which she may or may not have even expressed consciously to herself–is why so many people have taken such pleasure in her creation. Actually, she offers a good example of the sort of art I like.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to develop homes that react to the weather. You could, for example, have very complex glass pathways in a wall that carried water when it was raining. You could invent patterns; you could add flywheels; you could make the tubes move as the volume of water changes.

In the ceiling you could have an area filled with smoke that moved with the wind, or flywheels inside that turned the speed of the wind. The smoke could change color as the temperature changed.

You could have rotating homes, or homes that tilted a bit this way and that.

You could put in optical pathways for the sun, so that you could direct light wherever you wanted, or run it through filters that changed depending on the time of day. You could pipe in moonlight, and have a moving mirror that followed it all night long.

A paint could be developed that changed color regularly. You could have roofs that altered their shape.

All of these, of course, would be expensive, and many would recoil in horror at movement in the one place they can rest. Yet, can any of us REALLY rest, finally, on this Earth? Is the task not much more to be up and exploring every day, and would it really be so traumatic to have a dwelling that supported our efforts not to get stuck somewhere?

The best meal I ever had was at the Oak Room, in Louisville. At the end of a fine dinner, they brought us out 6 fine chocolates, each one not only delicious, but prepared as a unique work of art. All of them were visually appealing, in different ways.

I have dreamed of a world where we all live in little houses, in the middle of large expanses of grass and trees. What matters most about the houses is not their size, but their quality, how interesting and innovate they are.

If we are to contain our relentless thirst for more, more, more, the way to do it is in Quality. We must remember beauty, and in my view copying the ordered chaos of nature is the best way to do it.

The Taoist speak of the Uncarved Block. As I understand the issue, what this term in Chinese actually means is an uncut forest. If you look at a forest, it is not ordered, but it is harmonious. That is the metaphor I like.

Socialism is lines of trees in neat rows, labeled and confined. That, of course, I don’t like. A blank canvas serves this cause well, since it agitates for individual creative nullity, and passive submersion in a vast heap of undifferentiated things, to be moved and ordered like so much clay, by those who control us.

It would be interesting to compare and contrast the arguments the Fascists used against Democracy with those used by Communists, and compare both with the arguments being advanced today by the environmentalists. I think what one would find, laying one piece of rhetoric next to another, is that the claim is being made “we–or I–know better. Since the people are stupid, their sovereignty over their own lives should be sacrificed and ceded to their betters, against their will, if necessary, since they don’t understand their own interest.”

Ultimately, you have only two directions: voluntary compliance with laws you believe in, and forced compliance with laws you oppose. In the first case, very little government is needed. In the second, a great deal of government. In Cuba, for example, as many as one in three people may be informers. No one really knows. That’s the point.

And historically, what the Communists have really done is return us to Monarchy, Feudalism, and Mercantilism (whose core doctrine is that one man’s gain is necessarily another man’s loss), with none of the tempering virtues of those doctrines, such as noblesse oblige, faith in an eternal future in a better land, and honor.

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Look at use of word Reform. One could compare Healthcare Reform with Land Reform as used by the Soviet and Chinese Communists, which meant ceding all private land to that State, resulting in mass famine in both cases. Likewise, with so-called healthcare reform, we can expect the virtual famines of rationing down the road.

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The professor who taught the Teaching Company course on Chinese history really did a poor job of the Communist period. One particular theme I found very revealing.

Bit of background: like Lenin, Mao promised all the peasants “Land reform”. What they understood by this is that the land of the large land owners would be taken from them, and dispersed to them, the less well-off farmers. Where they had say 2 acres, they would now have 10 acres, and all they had to do was support Mao. Being short-sighted, they did.

In the short term, this is what happened. The land was taken from the “bourgeoisie”, and a great many of them were murdered after staged “trials”, where the “people” were expected to show no mercy, and express loud indignation at the supposed crimes of the rich for being rich.

Mao, though, was a liar, of course. All Communists are liars. They want absolute tyranny, and no matter what they say, they never stop until they get it. In this case, 10-15 years or so down the road, they took the land from the peasants, and placed it under the control of the State, which took everything they grew, then gave some of it back to them. Understandably, many of them were very upset. In the Soviet Union, many refused to grow food, and in retaliation Stalin condemned millions to starvation, by taking everything they did grow, and prohibiting all importation of food.

In the Chinese case, simple incompetence caused a similar result, with tens of millions dying of preventable hunger, after being “saved” by Communism. It is somewhat complex, so I won’t get into the details here.

(It is my sincere hope I can at some point induce in a previously commited Communist nausea at the extent of the horror they have sponsored).

In any event, relative moderate (read: incomplete psychopath) Deng Xiopeng forced Mao out as head of the Party (the ruling aristocracy), and implemented liberalization. One of the features of this was limited de facto land ownership.

On this point, our illustrious professor comments that whereas they had previously had to give up all of their food, now they had to surrender a certain amount, but were able to keep anything the raised over that amount. He viewed this as an improvement.

What is noteworthy about this, is that THIS IS FEUDALISM. You have the peasant and the Lord of the area. The peasant pays his taxes to the Lord, and keeps what is left. Tens of millions died to return to a system which was worse than what they had before the revolution.

It’s interesting that as a professional he couldn’t make that connection. All that has happened, when Communists take over, is you have deducted ideas of virtue and honor from what is otherwise a medieval system. Communists eradicated the “mandate of heaven”, which had been a key feature of Chinese political theory for nearly 3 millenia. That doctrine stated, in effect, the same thing our Declaration of Independence did, that when governments become abusive, the people have the right to overthrow them.

The Chinese Communists–like all Communists–have kept what was bad, and implemented it in such a way that all moral critiques have been disabled.