Matthew Yglesias on “Critical Race Theory and Actual Education”

 Matthew Yglesias, of slowboring dot com, quotes a bad educational idea associated with the antiliberal left.

“Valuing “written communication over other forms,” [Glenn Singleton] told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.””

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1. Implying that something would be wrong with “blackness” would be racist. Singleton’s suggestion that “whiteness” is bad reveals a common double standard of those with his political outlook.

2. Opposing “written communication” is anti-intellectual.

3. The reason skyscrapers don’t fall down; and the wings didn’t break off your airliner during turbulence, is that those who designed them engaged in “linear thinking.” (Anyway, science is much more than linear thinking: It’s Discovery and Demonstration. Newton’s apple: Discovery. Newton’s phenomenal conceptual analysis, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: Demonstration via linear thinking.) I was pissed off when the hippies whined about linear thinking, and am flat out offended that Singleton carries their stupidity into the 21st century.

A hallmark of those who, unlike Singleton, are not delusional, is that they get “cause and effect.”

/******/

Yglesias concludes: “If we stigmatize tests because they tell us bad news about racial gaps in academic achievement and then flood the zone with questionable initiatives whose efficacy we refuse to even try to measure, bad things are going to happen to the country.”

On growing up in a parsonage and coming to think that all the theologies seem to be stuck in the Bronze Age

Before modern democratic societies, rulership was the model of a head of state, and this influenced the concept of God:

“Truth stands independently of social opinion.” - Robert Pirsig

The person who realizes this will march to the sound of a different drummer.

In Matthew 19, Mark 10, and also in Luke, the rich young ruler appears, wanting to join Jesus’ movement: “And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do … ?” The young ruler says he has kept the commandments: “All these I have kept from my youth up.”

“Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.”

This should be understood in context. This is not against wealth as such. But for the “very rich” man, more than keeping the commandments, more than assuring agreement with “the community,” was needed. He had to give up what mattered so much that it got in the way.

And he couldn’t. The man got personally tailored advice from Jesus of Nazareth himself, and rejected it, because he valued something else more.

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Rulership was considered legitimate in the time of Jesus of Nazareth, but not in ours:

I’m a PK. Church twice on Sunday and once in the middle of the week. Wonderful KJV quotes pop up as I go about life.

Bill Gates lives in my area. Pursuing his interest in software development, he became a multimillionaire in his twenties. ”I have essentially infinite money,” he marveled.

In the first three, “synoptic,” gospels there is a man Protestants call the rich young ruler, a person of lands and estates and many servants. The rich young ruler shows up when he comes to barefoot Jesus of Nazareth and says he wants to join the movement.

But it struck me, Bill Gates, the equivalent in our society, would not be called a rich young ruler.

We don’t do that.

The mayor is not our ruler, the county executive is not our ruler, the governor is not our ruler, the president is not our ruler.

When the flying saucer lands, the creature inside doesn’t say, Take me to your ruler. It says, Take me to your leader.

Something became apparent that I’ve never seen written down: Rulership is illegitimate in our society. In a democracy, no one is subject to the will of another. We are governed, not ruled.

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The founder of Christianity used “father” to refer to God in the way the scriptures he read did not, except in the Psalms:

Quoting from memory, “If an earthly father’s child asks for bread, will he give him a stone? How much more will your Heavenly Father reward you?”

I once asked a religious person why so many worshippers are attracted to the idea of a Jealous God, a God of Wrath. They answered that God is so great he gets to do whatever he wants to do.

But Jesus, above, implied that divine greatness required greater kindness. I, Preacher’s Kid that I am, hold that the Father God of Jesus, above, is kind, generous, loving, and good.

After all, a father is a parent, just as many of us are parents. We know that normally parents don’t want their children to worship them; so God, being ego-secure, does not want to be worshipped (although what he stands for should be worshipped). We know that when parents rule their children or impose their will on them they are using them; much less will God’s greatness, or his love, allow him to do this.

But, you say, Jealous God and God of Wrath are scriptural. So are the passages in early Leviticus which say how to treat women when they are unclean, or which say the Israelites may enslave Philistines but not each other. “Rightly dividing the word of truth” (Second Timothy 2:15) tells us that the scriptures were a work in progress: “Whatsoever things are true … honest … just … if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” (Philippians 4:6-9)

The truest passages of scripture are those which celebrate lovingkindness. Which constitute the preamble to democratic society.

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These out of date theologies lead worshippers astray:

At a national faith gathering, the last leader of this nation, following a prayer for love, kindness, and turning the other cheek, said he didn’t particularly go along with that. That was acceptable to many millions of people of faith who, under the Bronze Age theologies of rulership, do not remotely follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

We live in a democracy which, as I understand it, grew out of Jesus of Nazareth’s teaching of love, cooperation, and altruism. The world cries out for the theologies to come into the age of Jesus’ Peaceable Kingdom.

The conservative justices’ incessant drive to radically enhance the court’s power

 Simon Lazarus, Robert Litan: As the first term of the Mitch McConnell–engineered 6–3 right-wing Supreme Court supermajority drew to a close last week, most liberal observers expressed qualified relief. With some exceptions—in particular, the last day’s evisceration of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and simultaneous invalidation of California’s donor-disclosure mandate for charities operating in the state—the assessment was that the decisions were, overall, less “conservative” than had been anticipated. The Economist summarized the state of play by announcing (albeit before the last day’s bombshell decisions) that this is a 3–3–3 court now, with an emerging middle consensus centered around Chief Justice John Roberts. This take is oversimplified and much too rosy.

The problem is that these observers have focused on particular substantive issues at stake in the highest-profile cases: the Affordable Care Act was saved, 7–2; religious claims were held not to automatically or presumptively trump laws barring anti-LBGTQ discrimination, again, 7–2; the National Collegiate Athletic Association was subjected to surprisingly strict Sherman Act strictures against price-fixing, applicable to all other “industries,” this time unanimously. Indeed, such results were positive and should be welcomed. But there is an underlying agenda embedded in the fine print of some of the court’s hot-button cases, as well as, more often, in less noted decisions, that’s been overlooked.

What these critics have missed is the conservative justices’ incessant drive to radically enhance the court’s power—power in opposition to Congresses past, present, and future; as well as against the federal executive branch and state and local governments. This historic trend, steadily gaining momentum over the 16-year span of John Roberts’s tenure as chief justice, escalated sharply in several end-of-term decisions. In these, the court’s dominant bloc—which President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, Charles Fried, labeled “reactionaries,” not conservatives—asserted for this court power on a level and scale unprecedented in the nation’s history: power de jure as well as de facto.

“We All Live on Campus Now” when “liberal” journalists write of “Conservative Panic about Critical Race Theory”

The news is routinely treating critique of Critical Race Theory as partisan racist bias, oversimplifying free democratic discussion of doctrines which have major flaws. “Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law".” … “There is a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system.”(1)

Wikipedia contains substantive criticism of CRT as seen below. In addition, CRT fosters:

1. A society enviously suspicious of achievement, ability, and success, which it denounces as “privilege”
2. Criticism of “privilege” implicitly praises mediocrity
3. In a truly Orwellian phrase, insinuates that accomplished Asian Americans are tainted by “white adjacency”

Wikipedia - Academic criticism:

“Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry argue that critical race theory lacks supporting evidence, relies on an implausible belief that reality is socially constructed, rejects evidence in favor of storytelling, rejects truth and merit as expressions of political dominance, and rejects the rule of law.

Additionally, they posit that the anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications. In particular, they suggest that the success of Jews and Asians within what critical race theorists argue is a structurally unfair system may lend itself to allegations of cheating, advantage-taking, or other such claims. A series of responses to Farber and Sherry was published in the Harvard Law Review. These responses argue that there is a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system. In the Boston College Law Review, Jeffrey Pyle argues that critical race theory undermines confidence in the rule of law, saying that "critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law".”

Criticism by jurists:

“Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals argued in 1997 that critical race theory "turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative", and that "by repudiating reasoned argumentation, [critical race theorists] reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites." Former Judge Alex Kozinski, who served on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, criticized critical race theorists in 1997 for raising "insuperable barriers to mutual understanding" and thus eliminating opportunities for "meaningful dialogue".”

Other criticism:

“Political commentators including George Will see resonances between critical race theory's use of storytelling and insistence that race poses challenges to objective judgments in the U.S.” …

“We All Live on Campus Now” by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine

Conservative fear of CRT in Washington Post

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(1) This doctrine’s jaundiced view of “individuals who perform well inside that system” tends to produce a society enviously suspicious of achievement, ability, and success. Its implied commitment to mediocrity accuses its own mainstream of “white privilege,” and in a truly Orwellian phrase, insinuates that accomplished Asian Americans are tainted by “white adjacency.” “May unintentionally lead to … anti-Asian implications.”

On publicly funded NPR, writer says it’s not enough to oppose racism. One is required to be an “antiracist” activist

On NPR, Eric Deggans wrote: “Opinion: Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” - June 14, 2021

Opinion: publicly funded NPR should not be promoting antiliberal left ideology (or any ideology). Our founding documents wisely emphasized that in a free country busybodies like Deggans(1) don’t get to tell you what to do. All people are created equal, proclaims the Declaration, meaning that a politics of identity, in which some identities are better than others, does not comport with liberty; and one of the inalienable rights is “the pursuit of happiness,” meaning that no one can assign you a cause to support. If they could, you wouldn’t be a free citizen. You’d be living in a regimented society rather than a liberal society.

Science writer Neil deGrasse Tyson relates, in a podcast, that when he was young another talented African American said the needs of their community were such that black people couldn't afford to have him devoting his skills to science rather than the battle against racism. I don’t remember what Tyson said, but the aim of a society free of racism is that a young black person can choose whatever vocation they wish.

V. S. Naipaul on “Our Universal Civilization”

Excerpt: “A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

/*** Update June 18, 2021 ***/

Tim Graham on NewsBusters: NPR's Ritual Shaming of Tom Hanks: “On July 13, NPR television critic Eric Deggans penned a piece for their website titled “Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Deggans proclaimed that he liked Hanks and his work … but as a subhead warned, “He's built a career playing righteous white men.”

Deggans wrote “I know the toughest thing for some white Americans — especially those who consider themselves advocates against racism — is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures.” He complained Hanks has “built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men ‘doing the right thing.’”

Somehow making movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Apollo 13” and “Forrest Gump” is aggressively defined as a malignant whiteness-elevating conspiracy: “Baby boomer filmmakers have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism.” Now Hanks needs to make amends and be an “anti-racist” and acknowledge Hollywood’s responsibility “now lies with helping dismantle and broaden the ideas they helped cement in the American mind.””

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(1) Deggans wrote: “For those of us who speak often on these issues, one of the toughest things to do is to go to a white person who is trying hard to be an ally and tell them they need to do more. And I'm sure there are plenty of Hanks fans out there of every stripe who will say I am expecting too much, being ungrateful toward a big star who said more than he had to.

And understand: I'm not saying Hanks, Howard or Spielberg are racist. I'm not even saying that Hanks should have made or supported a film specifically about the Tulsa Race Massacre long before now (though I am astonished that a guy who has been making film and TV projects rooted in American history for at least 25 years didn't find out about Tulsa until 2020.)

But over this summer, in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a white police officer, I spent a lot of time investigating the difference between being non-racist and being anti-racist. Anti-racism implies action – looking around your universe and taking specific steps to dismantle systemic racism.

So I am saying it is time for folks like Hanks to be anti-racist.

What he (and Hollywood) should do next

If he really wants to make a difference, Hanks and other stars need to talk specifically about how their work has contributed to these problems and how they will change. They need to make specific commitments to changing the conversation in story subjects, casting and execution. That is the truly hard work of building change.

Rather than talk about what "historically based fiction entertainment" must do, why not talk about what Tom Hanks, longtime scripted and documentary executive producer, will do? As a star who can get a movie made just by agreeing to appear in it, what will Tom Hanks, movie star, actually do?

People often say columns such as the one by Hanks are published to start a conversation. Well, here is my suggestion: Let's make part of that conversation how baby boomer filmmakers have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism.

And how their responsibility now lies with helping dismantle and broaden the ideas they helped cement in the American mind.”

This is what The 1619 Project denies and distorts

Akhil Reed Amar: “[The] constitutions that sprang to life in 1776 [had] certain overarching elements that are now so commonplace that we forget how truly revolutionary they were back then: writtenness, concision, replicability, rights declaration, democratic pedigree, republican structure, and amendability. Never before in history had this particular combination of features come together. After 1776, this cluster would sweep across the continent and, eventually, across much of the modern world.”

“The history of the world before 1776 was a history of “accident and force.” Most people in most places were ruled by brute power or by old customs that the populace had never formally consented to in any self-conscious moment of collective choice. Very few advanced societies in or before 1776 could be described as self-governing. The history of the world was a history of emperors, kings, princes, dukes, czars, sultans, mogul lords, tribal chieftains, and the like.”

The spirit of 1776 updated politics, despite the essentially Marxist spirit of The 1619 Project.

Tragically, Organized Religion has not been updated. It still reverts to sultan language Jesus transcended: God of Wrath, Jealous God, not compatible with Loving Father. In the KJV version of Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer ends, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.”(1) Not only did Jesus never say that, it contradicts his teaching that God is kind, generous, loving and good. If Jesus had seen the “Christian” religion continuing the language of “emperors, kings, princes, dukes, czars, sultans, mogul lords, tribal chieftains, and the like,” he would have been as angry as he was at the money changers in the Temple.(2)

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(1)The translators of the 1611 King James Bible assumed that a Greek manuscript they possessed was ancient and therefore adopted the phrase "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever" into the Lord's Prayer of Matthew's Gospel. - Wikipedia

(2) “It is written, 'My house shall be called the house of prayer,' but ye have made it a den of thieves.” - Matthew 21:13

Why the “progressive,” “woke” left accuses the author of the Harry Potter series of “transphobia”

Andrew Sullivan in Questioning the roots of wokeness: “Questioning whether a trans woman is entirely interchangeable with a woman—or bringing up biology to distinguish between men and women—is not a mode of inquiry. It is itself a form of “transphobia”, of fear and loathing of an entire group of people and a desire to exterminate them. It’s an assault.”

The seven Harry Potter novels are one of the great examples of ethical literature in the early 21st century. When the leader of Harry’s world, the Minister of Magic, tries to recruit him to perform public relations for the Ministry of Magic, Harry’s moral instincts are quick and sure: “I don’t think that will work.” When Aberforth, the late Dumbledore’s brother, suggests using the Slytherin children as decoys and cannon fodder during Voldemort’s final assault, Harry firmly replies that it’s a bad idea “and your brother wouldn’t have done it.”

The present-day left’s dictatorship of virtue demonizes J. K. Rowling, the series’ author, for correctly noting that it is known science that “a trans woman is [not] entirely interchangeable with a woman.”

This century already has another great example of liberal ethical art: Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. A previous blog post here, "Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate", received an unusual quantity of hits, probably because it contained extensive quotes from the series. For example, the description of the shibboleths of one of our major political parties, from ten years ago, could have been written yesterday:

“Rabid ideological purity

Compromise as weakness

A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism

Denying science

Unmoved by facts

Undeterred by new information

A hostile fear of progress

A demonization of education

A need to control women’s bodies

Severe xenophobia

Tribal mentality

Intolerance of dissent

A pathological hatred of the US government

[Newsroom Anchorman Will McAvoy:] They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves Conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans. Though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are: The American Taliban.”

 — The series is a passionate warning to (hopefully) “a well-informed electorate.” "The Newsroom" nailed the reactionary nature of the tea party in its discussion of  "The American Taliban." Its discussion of "America is the Greatest Nation" placed the meme in its rightful context: Manifest Destiny; and The White Man's Burden. "The Newsroom" gave two actresses outstanding roles. MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) has an early scene in which she owned Will McAvoy. Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) is the smartest person in the organization. 

Nevertheless progressive critics went with male dominance. There are far more criticisms, of conduct by male Republicans that is harmful to the public good, than of mean social standards in which women may play a part; but the fact that Sorkin dares to criticize, for example, soap opera gossip, is treated as proof of sexism. Charlie Skinner dares to say, "I'm too old to be governed by fear of dumb people," thereby showing insufficient respect for The Community. "The Newsroom" promoted Frank Capra/Don Quixote idealism; naive, sentimental public-spiritedness; thinking (and writing) fearlessly; the vital importance of truth and good information to a democracy; respect for dignity, privacy, and autonomy; and indifference to orthodoxy. It criticized gossip columns and TV shows dedicated to gossip; the associated glee for the "takedown" of prominent or successful public figures; news-as-entertainment; and mean, petty, uncivilized social practices — all things intolerable to a progressive wokescenti rendered livid when it encounters anyone who is free and refuses “to be governed by fear of dumb people.”

To the ascendant and increasingly dictatorial antiliberal progressive left, nothing is more infuriating than free, liberal artists who aren’t afraid of them. They have rejected J. K. Rowling and Aaron Sorkin, two of our best, because they are great, free, independent liberal moral voices.

Original Sin and Zero Sum Game are crucial political and cultural issues which the “news,” in its current form, simply will not address

 Original Sin is not compatible with democracy (rejects Presumption of Innocence), nor is Zero Sum Game (denies there is a universal Public Good). Jesus of Nazareth rejected Original Sin in The Parable of the Prodigal Son;(1) but Christianity, under the enormous influence of St. Paul and St. Augustine, uses Original Sin as the foundation of The Atonement on The Cross, mandatory doctrine from which Christianity seemingly cannot extricate itself.

Zero Sum Game is the harmful notion that whenever someone gets something, someone else loses something. “Cast your bread upon the waters,” and the parable of the Good Samaritan, suggest that “Love thy neighbor as thyself” was more acceptable to the Christian spirit, and to the public-spiritedness of democracy, than looking out for number one.

“Original Sin and Zero Sum Game are crucial political and cultural issues which the “news,” in its current form, simply will not address.” Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom” contains hints concerning this situation:

Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate

Why did "The Newsroom" offend progressives?

/***   ***/

(1) The Prodigal Son commits error, not sin. The error does not define who he is, but is only a temporary situation. Unlike Original Sin, which implies that man’s capacity for wrongdoing is greater than his capacity to correct wrongdoing (only divine intervention — the sacrifice on the cross — can atone for human sinfulness), the parable reverses much of Christian theology in four brief words.

“He came to himself.”

Any decent literary critic would know that art should not be didactic.

 Any decent literary critic would know that art should not be didactic. “This frenzy for censure, moralizing, and a seemingly endless expansion of the definition of harm.”

Otis Houston: “Literature used to be … a place to question taboos, and seek naked insights into humanity. …

Critics, writers and publishers are today enforcing a new vision that treats books less as a vehicle for artistic expression … a series of moral pronouncements. … sin of writing about marginalized characters without belonging to the same identity group. …

[They say] Jeanine Cummins, a white American woman with some Puerto Rican background, had no business writing about a culture and identity group to which she didn’t belong. … sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant.”(5) …

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is chair of English at the University of Southern California, has pressed fellow authors to repurpose their writing into progressive advocacy.(6) The only respectable goal of contemporary literature, he suggested in a New York Times essay last December, is to bring change through “the kind of critical and political work that unsettles whiteness(1) and reveals the legacies of colonialism.” Poetry and fiction that fail to advance politics (specifically, his politics) descend from a legacy of whiteness, conquest and genocide, he said …

Publishers seek to protect themselves by employing “sensitivity readers,” who scour unpublished fiction for offensive themes, characterizations or language. … moral, rather than artistic, gatekeeping(3) …

Two thousand years before the advent of mass print publishing, Socrates was sentenced to drink poison for having polluted the minds of the YA community of Athens. From the mid-16th century until 1966, the Catholic Church maintained its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohibited books. Over the past century, the establishment used anti-obscenity laws to ban Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. …

New, though, is the trend of policing books for social goodness from within the left-leaning literary community …

This new literary moralism isn’t only scrutinizing contemporary writing for evidence of sin; it’s looking to the past as well. #DisruptTexts, a group dedicated to helping teachers “challenge the traditional canon,” talks of “problematic depictions” in Shakespeare(4), and complains of The Great Gatsby being defined by the white male gaze(2). …

It diminishes the prospects of the reader too, restricting the scope of books to narrow conceptions of power and privilege. …

Art forces us to see with complexity. In return, we must accept that no easy solution awaits. Profound writing is never just an answer. …

This frenzy for censure, moralizing, and a seemingly endless expansion of the definition of harm …”

/***   ***/

[Reduces aesthetic writing to mere expository prose, “talking politics.”]

/***   ***/

(1) Liberalism holds that it is just as wrong to say there is something wrong with being white as saying there is something wrong with being black. It violates the principle of equality.

(2) Liberalism holds that it is just as wrong to say there is something wrong with being male as saying there is something wrong with being female. It violates the principle of equality.

(3) The purpose of art is to be good art. (Is that so hard?)

(4) Chairman emeritus of the Cal Lit Department Frederick C. Crews spoke of moral critics “perpetually scandalized by the past.”

(5) Isn’t our mainstream religion’s heavy reliance on the Tanakh, the Book of the Israelites, disrespectfully called the Old Testament by gentiles, “cultural appropriation” by this logic?

(6) Liberalism, in our very own Declaration of Independence, holds that one of The Rights of Man is “the pursuit of happiness.” In this context, it means that writers get to write about whatever they want to write about.

[www . persuasion . community/p/beware-of-books]

Homage to a good cop

From Alaska connections (I’m an eighth grade graduate of a one-room school in the Alaskan bush; and graduate of a high school in one of those small Alaska “cities” not reachable by car):

“Nick” on Sergeant Walters: “He was there when I was there in the late 70s and early 80s.  Great guy.  Probably why I still have a drivers license.  No DUI's  Just where do you want to go and you can pick up your keys at the cop shop at 9 tomorrow morning.  Great Guy!!!”

Fundamental problems with the thinking of Karl Marx

“Ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.” - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

Animals, Harari argues, can only talk about things you can point to. “No animal,” goes an old saying, “can say, ‘My parents were poor but honest.’” Animals are natural materialists.

1. Marx’s Dialectical Materialism is founded on his Labor Theory of Value. Only the physical things made by the hands of workers have value, and only the laboring proletariat should get the money in our society. (As a businessman remarked, this ignores management, distribution and marketing.) The bourgeoisie and their fictional capitalist corporations are robbing workers of the value produced by their hands.

On the one hand Marx is reactionary, his objection to “capital” (Das Kapital) a reversion to medieval prohibitions on “usury.” On the other, Marx is engaging in the fundamentalist oversimplification of valorizing the “materialism” of limiting thought to those things you can point to.

A digression: In 2012 I bought an iPad 3. It couldn’t perform the videophone function of FaceTime. Before long, a free software update from Apple enhanced the usefulness of my purchase. According to Marx, the hundreds I paid for my iPad should have gone to the workers at Foxconn who made it. In reality, which has an antiMarxist bias, without the thousands of hours of design, the iPad would just have been a paperweight. Ditto for the additional thousands of hours for iOS, the software (FaceTime, etc.) which enables Personal Electronic Devices to actually do things. Add software development and design to “management, distribution, and marketing.”

2. So, based on the fallacy of The Labor Theory of Value, what is the place of everybody else — the bourgeoisie, the middle class — in the Workers’ Paradise Marx envisioned?

There isn’t any. Marxism is eliminationist. Marx’s abstract theory, in real life, implies Ethnic Cleansing. In any case where someone not a laborer has the good things of life, it’s unjustified “privilege.”(1)

Moreover, political democracy is about all the people. Civil rights is about all the people.

Marxism’s unrelenting bias against everyone except the One Favored Class — its class warfare aspect — means that Marxism is essentially discriminatory in its very nature.

It is no accident that no Marxist regime has ever been democratic; or that Marxist regimes, with respect to civil rights, have consistently been autocratic. The late Soviet Union; North Korea; Maoist China, the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik).

Marx’s thought was in its very nature arbitrary and bigoted. In the founding of societies its emergent property was autocracy.

/***   ***/

(1) In my experience, no one will listen to criticism of “Check your privilege,” even though “privilege” arguments are concealed Marxism.

Epistle to the Christians

 First, a little background. When I was four my father began college on a pre-sem track. Seven years later he was ordained a Protestant minister and began his life career as a pastor. My comments on Christianity are from the status of a PK (Preacher’s Kid).

I’m a secular student and follower of Yeshua. Because he lived in the Hellenistic Near East of the first century, the world knows Yeshua by the koine Greek form of his name, Jesus. The Hellenistic town Sepphoris was less than an hour’s walk from Jesus’ boyhood home, Nazareth. Jesus grew up and lived out his life in the concept-rich environment of the Roman Empire. (I’ve already used a number of Graeco-Roman terms - comment, status, concept, Christianity.) His crucifixion was formally authorized by a colonial Roman overseer.

Jesus belonged to a third-world African culture and spoke a third-world language related to Arabic, but the entirety of the scriptural writings about him were in one of the languages of his European overlords, the koine Greek of the first century. For example, the word Christ was no more a word in Jesus’ language than Caudillo is in ours.

Jesus’ culture was no more likely to wonder if a person who had a mother and father, and siblings, was divine than ours is. His monotheistic religion, Judaism, had a built-in antipathy to adding another god, however that might be done. The Europeans did impute divinity - it was claimed that Emperor Caesar Augustus was divine, for example.

So Jesus’ alternative name, Christ, and the “Christian” doctrine of his divinity, came from the European overlords of Palestine who wrote his story and wrought Christian theology, creating an organized religion as Judaism, Islam, etc., have their organized religions.

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My epistle to the Christians objects to organized Christianity, on the grounds that it is intellectually unsupportable; is reactionary in a world of democracy and civil rights; and is unChristian in major beliefs, particularly rejecting Yeshua’s teaching that God is kind, generous, loving, and good in favor of a jealous God, a God of wrath who is angry, punitive, and vindictive.

1. Christians’ intellectual problems begin with the oxymoron “literal interpretation,” failing to understand that their scripture is one of the longest, most complex texts in existence. Such a text can’t have a single literal transparent meaning. Jesus himself reinterpreted the fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy,” saying “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

One viable approach to the scriptures is that it is the felicitous outcome of a Semitic tribe, related to the Phoenicians who invented our alphabet, deciding to become the people of the book. They wrote down the best of their thought. Then, for centuries, public intellectuals they called prophets looked at where their predecessors had been - and raised the consciousness of their culture. “Write the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that it may be read readily”, wrote Habakkuk. “The vision will come - Wait for it, it will not be late.”

2. There is no democracy, no leaders chosen by the people and responsible to them, in the Tanakh, the Israelite scriptures Christians call the Old Testament. Much of it presents God in the autocratic terms of the kings, shahs, rajahs and emperors of the time, demanding fear, unquestioning obedience, and fawning worship of sinful human beings. Sometimes sin is presented as a violation of the rights of God.

Christian theology presents humans’ capacity for sin as exceeding humans’ capacity to make amends. That theology portrays us as inheriting the original sin of Adam, and as such, born guilty.(1) Under this outlook, salvation is an unreturnable favor, coming from God, and putting humankind permanently in the one-down position relative to him.

This is unhealthy; and the founder of “Christianity” disagreed with it in the parable of the prodigal son. Raised on the estate of his wealthy father, this son obtains his inheritance in cash, goes to a city, and blows it all on an extravagant lifestyle, becoming a beggar. Then, Jesus said, “He came to himself.” He returns to his father’s estate, hoping that there he will be better than a beggar, and to his surprise, his father welcomes him with open arms and prepares a feast.

Frankly, this upends Christian doctrine. There is no sin, but rather correctable error. The son, representing fallible humankind, does correct the error by his own action, able to recognize his mistake, and change the course of his life. In doctrine, there would be “salvation” — sin, rescue by a Power to whom one would be in debt, and at best forgiveness. Interestingly here the father, representing God, is focused on the joyful future with his returned son, not the past, thus does not need to forgive. No sin; no salvation; no lingering taint implying ongoing subservience.

3. Doctrine is “unChristian”: Rejects the founder of Christianity’s” teaching that God is kind, generous, loving, and good, and other important teachings.

I once asked a Christian teacher why God is often portrayed as dominating, demanding, punishing those who disobey him in fearsome ways. They said, “God is so great that he gets to do whatever he wants to do.” Again, Jesus of Nazareth disagreed, saying, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, … know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

God’s greatness, it is implied, requires him to be better than we are.

It seems to me that organized Christianity has never bothered to explore the implication of their term, God the father who is even better than earthly fathers. In this context, language should change: “Lord” is inappropriate, and “every knee should bow,” and even “worship,” if applied to the creator rather than the creation. On the other hand “Jesus wept,” which according to theology would betoken an incidence of a Weeping God, is well worth pondering. At my grandson’s christening a priest cited a Concerned God passage from Ezekiel, which I paraphrase from memory: You say that I am unfair. But I am not pleased by the death of him that dieth. Wherefore turn ye from the way of death to the way of life, that ye may live life alive.

I understand, from the example of the prodigal son, that Jesus had progressed beyond the doctrine of original sin, but the Greek Paul and the Roman St. Augustine bore false witness to his teaching on this matter.

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Other matters — I found the Jesus Seminar persuasive on a number of matters: Jesus did not predict his death and resurrection; he did not utter the “I am” statements in the Gospel of John; Jesus’ family and disciples knew him to be a perfectly ordinary human being.

In Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe - The one-time theologian Thomas Cahill writes: “Though the idea that Christ died to repay his Father for human sin is still a favorite theory of many (especially evangelical) Christians, it is a doctrine that no one can make logical sense of, … it necessitates a sort of voraciously pagan Father God steeped in cruelty and, in the case of Jesus’s horrific death, his son’s blood.” p. 199

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(1) In Romans 5:12 the Greek St. Paul wrote, according to the Geneva Study Bible: “Wherefore, as by one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: From Adam, in whom all have sinned, both guiltiness and death (which is the punishment of the guiltiness) came upon all.”

Liberalism, underlying theme of modern civilization, misunderstood and widely under attack at the moment

The previous post described the American Founding as a liberal event. A working hypothesis: Democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor, are liberal. While the left and the right are ideologies, belief systems, the catechisms of vested interest political parties, liberalism is an information system, dedicated to getting things done. Ideology is the deformation of thought and language in the service of power; liberalism is the methodology of the good life: its keyword is efficacy, not power.

The ancient foundations of liberalism are the Roman concept of universal justice, the Greek concept of an independent nature, and Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings of cooperation, altruism, care for the neighbor, and passion for optimum outcomes. The spirit of liberalism slowly grew throughout the Middle Ages; its emergent first step the Renaissance; and got a second wind with the scientific revolution, producing the Enlightenment and its world-changing manifestos, the Declaration and Constitution.

Corollaries: The irony that one of the political parties emerging from the enlightenment liberalism of the Founding uses “liberal” as a derogatory epithet. The irony that the media describe the antiliberal left as extreme liberalism. The irony that the academic humanities do not reflect the liberalism of scholarly endeavor, but embrace anti intellectual ideological dogma, such as the unconstitutional content-based censorship of “no-platforming.”

The proposed Great Synthesis, Democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor, are liberal, leads us to consider whether what applies to one, such as scholarly endeavor, may apply to others. Examine Immanuel Kant’s observation that the one indispensable intellectual property is “a good will,” since all the other intellectual attributes may be subverted to unintellectual ends. Where there is not a good will: A small-d democrat who is not public-spirited; a justice who uses the courts to thwart government by consent of the governed by furthering voting restrictions; a scientist who, instead of honoring feedback from reality, tries to fudge the data; an academic who, instead of fighting to create a space for passionate discussion among informed people who disagree, dictates that only that which is true shall be given a platform in the university.

Liberalism is not partisan, not political; it is the practical, neutral, methodology of the good life, the bedrock of modern civilization. The current mischaracterization and widespread attack could undermine that civilization in ways few of us would want.

The difference between liberalism and left-progressivism, updated

 

Part I:

Since “liberal” and “left” are often treated as synonymous, Historian Fritz Stern’s discussion may be useful:

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich and became an American historian.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to Ronald Reagan's derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . 

[I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” 

It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best … a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” ... In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.” - This from Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known

Stern is saying that the Founding was a liberal event. Liberalism is the raison d’etre of the United States. It’s in our DNA. Enlightenment liberalism proclaimed the Rights of Man — immunities which no government can abrogate. Liberalism declared that all are created equal, which over time finally rendered slavery unthinkable, something no society prior to liberal modernity had done.

Part II:

How my own life history taught me that “liberal” and “left” are not alike:

I went to high school during the second Eisenhower administration, and to college during the first Kennedy administration. I thought of myself as liberal/left, and at that time the public understanding of these terms was not as divided as it is now.

By the time I reached middle age, I realized that the left was telling me that white was bad, male was bad, European was bad; and I began searching for a political philosophy that did not require me to hate myself.

I learned that liberalism, unlike the outlook of the left, does not care about identity. If, as the Declaration proclaimed, all are created equal, immutable characteristics that we are born with and can’t change don’t matter.

Can there be anything more unjust than considering a newborn baby guilty because of its race and gender?

There’s much more to be said about this, but if it is understood that any analysis which conflates “liberal” and “left” is necessarily intellectually incoherent, that’s a good start.

https://adissentersnotes.blogspot.com/2018/10/on-difference-between-liberalism-and.html

If the Founders had “eradicate[d] slavery at the nation’s founding” the new nation would would have been much smaller

Alan Jacobs: 

In Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1852, [Frederick] Douglass gave a speech called “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” and it is as fine an example of reckoning wisely with a troubling past as I have ever read. He begins by acknowledging that the Founders “were great men,” though he immediately goes on to say, “The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.” Yes: Douglass is compelled to view them in a critical light, because their failure to eradicate slavery at the nation’s founding led to his own enslavement, led to his being beaten and abused and denied every human right, forced him to live in bondage and in fear until he could at long last make his escape. Nevertheless, “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

What, for Douglass, made the Founders worthy of honor? Well, “they loved their country better than their own private interests,” which is good; though they were “peace men,” “they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage,” which is very good, and indeed true of Douglass himself; and “with them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not right,” which is excellent. Perhaps best of all, “with them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final’; not slavery and oppression.” Therefore, “you may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.”

In their day and generation. But what they achieved, though astonishing in its time, can no longer be deemed adequate. Indeed, it never could have been so deemed, because they did not live up to the principles they so powerfully celebrated. They announced a “final”—that is, an absolute, a nonnegotiable—commitment to justice, liberty, and humanity, but even those who did not own slaves themselves negotiated away the rights of Black people. And so Douglass must say these blunt words: “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

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I have quoted Lincoln’s observation that the Constitution could not have been ratified if it had an anti-slavery provision, because the states which became the Confederacy would have voted against it.

There was a second choice Lincoln did not mention in the passage cited. Divide the nation into the states which ratified an anti-slavery Constitution, and see the other former colonies proceed independently.

The southern colonies would eventually have ended slavery, and would not have felt that emancipation had been imposed on them against their will.

The United States would not have had a permanent backward, benighted, resentful, reactionary region as it has now; and probably would not have had the worst healthcare and highest prison population of modern industrialized nations.

It would also be smaller. Would the expansion of the Louisiana Purchase have taken place? The expansion to the Pacific, and taking large parts of Mexico such as the Southwest and California?

With a much diminished United States, what would have been the outcome of the two World Wars?

This is why I am a liberal and not a progressive

The following appeared on nbcnews dot com:

“Netflix's 'Trial of the Chicago 7' is very Aaron Sorkin. But at least it's not 'The Newsroom.'

By Ani Bundel, cultural critic

It has been generally accepted in progressive circles that the idealized neoliberalism of the late 1990s has aged poorly. Creator Aaron Sorkin’s excessively sentimental “West Wing” is the poster child for this sea change, aided by his failures since. … “The Newsroom” — which attempted to take the same liberal views and apply them to TV cable news — was worse.”

/*****/

Is this idealism?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.“

If so, I’ll take it over the cynical trashing of Sorkin’s moving dramas. Example: Best Takedowns

Yglesias comments on left critique of functional liberal principles

 Matthew Yglesias: “imo a movement that finds itself defining belief in the importance of clear writing, a sense of urgency, and a desire for perfection as forms of white supremacy is a movement that is asking to lose over and over and over again as its institutions fail to function effectively”

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1331011999074050049

About people coming to America and taking American jobs

Worker spending is a major pillar of economics. Everyone who comes into America and goes to work creates at least as many jobs as they take. With their pay they buy all the things of life, from groceries to cars to houses. This creates or expands industries which employ people. New jobs. This includes our own children (that’s where most of the “job takers” comes from).

Example: America at the founding had three million people. It now has one hundred times  as many, most born here. And one hundred times as many jobs.

So don’t worry about new people taking jobs. They create jobs.

You can count on it.