How the United States Has Changed, Ctd

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment" - "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

[They're] capable of anything. - Very Hard Choices, Spider Robinson

We might die to preserve our nation's principles but most of us won't kill our country to win an argument. - James C. Moore

A country once guided by exalted principles is now tainted by cruel ones. - Dahlia Lithwick

Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done. - David Frum

From Spider Robinson's SF novel Very Hard Choices:

[Spider, born in the US, who now lives in Canada]: I live in a civilized country instead of America. p. 8

The United States of America has the most magnificent of ideals any nation ever failed to live to live up to. p. 125

In this, one of his later novels, Spider Robinson uncharacteristically inserts a discussion of recent developments in American life, viewed from the standpoint of ethics and decency:

"If this account is ... accurate ... then all three of you are unusually ethical people," p. 180 spoken by a character who until then had seemed to be a master criminal. "Ethics of that order [are rare.]" p. 182 “Who's the most ethical human being in the firm? . . . I think they are . . . one hundred percent honest and utterly fearless.” p. 183 “The Constitution and Bill of Rights are among the most enlightened political documents the human race has produced so far, and its people are, so help me, some of the kindest who have yet walked the earth. . . . So far nobody's ever been as ashamed of their own racism as we are.” p. 187 “. . . people of good will and good sense seem helpless to do anything about it.” p. 188 A few pages later he says the U.S. "didn't dismantle its own Constitution and Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention and its own image of itself without help. ... All my life, if there was anything everyone in America knew for sure, without even thinking about it, it was that John Wayne would never beat up a little guy. ... The America he knew is gone." p. 189

The kind of people I'm talking about [...are] just very rich. ... They're not impressed by political power, popularity, or viciousness. They use people like those as chess-pieces--pawns. They've got handles on them all. They themselves are off the radar. They don't think of themselves as Americans. They don't even think in terms of nations or ideologies or the improvement of mankind; they are fundamentally indifferent to all suffering and death except insofar as it affects their game. ... The tools they have now are finally good enough to completely subvert democracy. ... Vandals ... absolutely selfish, utterly contemptuous of all morality and ethics. pp. 189-190

[They're] capable of anything. p. 191

All they were doing was treating each other with courtesy and common sense. ... What made me mad was, people used to treat each other that way in America when I was a boy. p. 197

. . . the hijacking and corruption of the United States. p. 200

Knowledge and reason and kindness and personal liberty really are worth all the dreadful effort they cost. p. 205

In "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed, we recounted Daniel Ellsberg's reflection on his part in the Pentagon Papers exposure of concealed information. The justice system of that time took a lenient, freedom-of-speech approach to what he had done. A public-spirited citizen described today's changed situation:

John Cusack at The Guardian isn't sure Eric Holder will protect journalists. Cusack (yes, the actor from Say Anything) argues that David Miranda's recent detainment in the U.K. "was an assault on press freedom that should make every reporter shudder no matter their opinion on the NSA." He asks, will the U.S. act similarly when NSA journalists try to enter the States? He wonders if Americans should now "conclude that the U.S. is willing to create a generation of exiled watchdogs, who are trying to hold their government accountable from afar." Glenn Greenwald recommended the piece, as did Jason Leopold, an Al Jazeera reporter who covers civil liberties.

James C. Moore described an underlying degradation of decency in those who govern:

We had a process. Congress proposed, and the president disposed with his signature. A law then went on the books. Courts might be asked to test its constitutionality, but by surviving legal challenges, a measure became the settled law of the land, which was the case with Obamacare. The American legislative system was, in spite of the disturbing influence of big money, actually quite elegant. But now it is broken.

We have entered into an era of gunpoint government.

Americans have discovered that a tiny, radical minority can immobilize their entire country and hold it as still as a robbery victim staring at the barrel of a pointed gun. And regardless of how this might anger the majority, they must live with the fact that it can happen again. ...

Political accommodation for the common good is not even a consideration. Shutting the country down is the only objective, with no purpose beyond political destruction and personal ambition. ...

[Cruz's] ideological strain thrives on the notion that government should do little more than protect the borders, pave the roads and then get the hell out of our way. ...

We might die to preserve our nation's principles but most of us won't kill our country to win an argument. ...

He was willing to jeopardize the lives and incomes of millions of Americans, along with global economies. ...

Our deliberative government was not designed to be hijacked by a few dissidents. But fanatics have found a way to pry open the cockpit door and demand course corrections that put everyone on board at risk.

Aphorisms and observations which may apply:

Those who violate the bounds of propriety counting on the reluctance of more decent people to stoop to their level to protect them.

A willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

David Frum - Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

James Fallows: Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms -- on the assumption that you'll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.

Ten Years After: A USENET Conversation Between Liberal and Libertarian Viewpoints

From http://adissentersnotes.blogspot.com/2012/07/conscience-and-language-orwell.html, "See Waring’s great blog post on libertarianism: delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/libertarian-ponies-what-still-may-be-the-best-weblog-post-ever.html"

"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>                            Friday, the 3rd of October, 2003

Mike wrote below:
>You don't understand Aristotle either. The idea is not that
>anybody has absolute knowledge of anything. The idea is that
>knowledge is possible, and therefore absolute knowledge is
>in the theoretical game.

You did not say absolute knowledge is possible. If it isn't, why
should it be in the theoretical game?

You have a greater difficulty than this, however. In order for there
to be a final truth, the fine detail of the universe would probably
have to be by definition finite. Even if finite (is that a provable
proposition?) it would also have to be within the grasp of human
understanding. It is for reasons such as this that I proposed, in
Liberalism Reviewed Part 1, "a suggested liberal definition of truth
as 'that conclusion from the currently available information which,
when acted on, tends to produce the expected result.'" Truth, or as
you say, knowledge, is a function of the current state of our best
observations and reasoning.

Your position, by contrast, is a concealed form of Platonism. "The
highest vocation of the soul in Platonism is to 'perceive the eternal
order of things'--to which the soul must passively adapt or conform."
(Richard Wolin, _The Terms of Cultural Criticism_ p. 37)

As Lee Smolin says in a chapter heading of _Three Roads to Quantum
Gravity_, reality consists of processes, not things. Knowledge--
truth--is a process. As such, your "absolute knowledge" is a
reification which should not be in the theoretical game. And as I have
suggested in previous articles, intellectual propositions of this sort
have unanticipated political consequences. Wolin: "As a species of
first philosophy, ontology posits an immutable order of being. Far
from there being anything intrinsically 'emancipatory' about this
ideal, it is a conception fully compatible with the most authoritarian
and rigid forms of political life." Wolin continues:

  With the transition from an "ontology" to "epistemology"
  inaugurated by Descartes, "reason" and "truth" need no longer
  be accepted on the basis of a spurious, supramundane claim to
  ontological primacy--for example, the claim that the "good"
  would be somehow a priori lodged in the "order of Being"; a
  claim to which human agents must simply submit. Instead, all
  truth claims and claims to right must be legitimated through
  the mediating agency of individual insight. The seventeenth-
  century shift from ontology to epistemology, therefore,
  displays profound affinities with the foundational values of
  political modernity: freedom, autonomy, and self-legislation.
   (p. 38)

Truth is not "out there" in the sense in which you argue. Truth is an
interaction between us and a non-subjective, extra-human "out there"
which constrains the range of legitimate propositions which we may
formulate about it but which does not, as such, determine those
propositions.

And that is the end-point of "absolute knowledge is in the theoretical
game": a determinism which is in remarkable contrast to your
libertarian wishes.

A second note: This clearly is not absolutism (I'm arguing against it)
but it is also not (moral) relativism, as you charge below. "Morality
is, roughly, what human beings owe to one another," Avishai Margalit
observed recently in the New York Review of Books. I've claimed
previously in the Liberalism Reviewed series that ethical positions
are roughly as described by Aristotle: something arrived at by the
analysis of cases.

Our ethics are a function of our growing understanding of the
right--of learning how not to do wrong to each other. This occurs by
our noting the consequences of our behavior and manners--our
consideration and restraint--towards each other.

What you wrote below contains a profound misunderstanding:
  The thing Nietzsche introduces is autonomy--the idea that there
  is no "moral code" and all there really are are possible "moral
  codes" which the victors make up at their convenience to pat
  themselves on the back for being "good", and [then] to kick the
  losers in the dirt for being "evil."

First, autonomy is independence, not imposition (nor sovereignty, a
word you overuse). "As I would not be a slave," Lincoln said, "so I
would not be a master." Therefore: As I would exercise autonomy, so I
would not constrain the autonomy of others (which would show that I do
not believe in autonomy).

Second, Nietzsche, and moral relativists generally, take an
intellectually trivial position. They do not consider the possibility
that ethical propositions may have functional value. Very strong
arguments can be formulated, for example, that murder is
dysfunctional: disruptive, destructive of human capital,
destabilizing, producing a climate of fear and inaction (or conversely
an internecine feud), etc. The relativists' argumentative inadequacy
in this regard signifies that moral relativism is not worthy of
critical inspection.

Mike wrote below:
>I do not wish to pretend to some agnostocism about whether,
>in some societies, it might be morally good to go and
>commit murder of those around one.

Nor do I. As Travis Porco wrote here some years back, the wrongness of
murder is "certain for all practical purposes." This is not, as
Platonists will tell you, an absolute position. It is merely, as
Gordon Fitch once noted, the "good enough." My point is that practical
certainty is adequate for a human ethics, and that it avoids the
cognitive and intellectual traps consequent on any claim of
metaphysical certitude, to wit: You can't prove that; and therefore
you must retreat to nihilism.

Mike wrote below:
>The whole point of Natural Law is precisely that it is that part of moral law
>which does not depend upon Revelation. It's what intelligent men anywhere
>and everywhere have understood to be ethically right in the absence of
>divine guidance.

Bravo! Unfortunately I cannot take seriously the claim that this is
your actual position. On October 22 you wrote:

  You really are willing to call
  liberalism anything that has gotten divorced from the doctrine 
  of the inalienable Rights of Man? Even in the face of the fact
  that the Declaration of Independence---the founding document of
  political liberalism if there ever was one---declares the Rights
  are the whole beginning and end of government in the first
  place?

You forgot that the passage in reference begins "We hold these truths
. . ." Before "these truths" the authors of the Declaration placed the
active human intelligence which is continuously formulating truths. A
reasonable observer will deduce from the tone of your statements about
"the doctrine" that when you think of "Rights" you are thinking of "an
immutable order of being [...] to which human agents must simply
submit."

You claim that Natural Law and Rights are "what intelligent men
anywhere and everywhere have understood to be ethically right" as if
it was not open-ended. But that can't be right. From everything we
know of what they said and did the greatest minds prior to the modern
era--Plato, Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Paul--never clearly
formulated what seems morally obvious to us: the ethical status of
slavery.

Their position must have seemed to their contemporaries--if not to
they themselves--beyond discussion. So as to your charge: "You are
saying nothing is beyond argument" I repeat, That is exactly what I
mean. I do not fear argument or free thought or discussion. That is
how we got beyond the ancients on the question of slavery. Do we
know--indeed can we know--that our descendants will not better us in
some way which _we_ cannot now envision?

End-Stuff:

Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power
of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a
given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of
argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom,
based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
 - F. A. Hayek, "Why I Am Not A Conservative" [PDF]

www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/09/after-strange-gods/?pagination=false

 [Margalit cite above]

Liberal, Left

The ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission. - Warraq, Ali and others

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. - My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy

 "The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Ultimate success and happiness comes from leading a principled life, not in getting the upper hand. - Sally Forth, comics section of Seattle Times, Sunday, 2/18/2007

Affirmative action is "the just spoils of a righteous war." - Julian Bond

A collection of notes on the difference between liberalism and the outlook of the left, in no particular order:

• The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
• The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
• The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
• This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
• “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
• In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group.
• This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
• The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
• This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
• The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.

To be continued . . .


(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’

"You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment"

A pair of recent articles have suggested that the United States has become a harsher nation with less tolerance for dissent, whistle-blowing, constructive protest, or civil disobedience. Jathan Sadowski wrote, of Edward Snowden's exposé of massive NSA surveillance:

If Snowden were sure to receive a fair, just trial, he might not have chosen to embark on his journey around the world, from hideout to hideout, potentially sharing more valuable secrets with countries that America isn’t on the best of terms with. The way whistle-blowers are persecuted now, though, leaves little reason to believe Snowden would enjoy such treatment.
Yes, Snowden could walk with head held high into federal custody. But it’s not clear that this would do much of anything besides ensure that the rest of his life is hell.

Later in another magazine, Eric Levenson wrote:

Unlike Snowden, after leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971 [Daniel] Ellsberg did not flee the U.S. and faced trial for his leak, but "the country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago," Ellsberg writes in a column that The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald calls a "must-read." Ellsberg's trial was thrown out due to "the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal," including denied bail and post-arrest isolation for Bradley Manning that would be applied to Snowden, too.

The erosion of liberty, and the transformation of the open society intended by the Founders into a fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment, has proceeded by slow, steady increments in the last half century. The incarceration society,  the prosecutorial society, the society in which Bradley Manning is casually abused in an overlong wait for his day in court—a court whose impartiality and equity we have reason to doubt—these are the symptoms of the transformation of a free country into a regime which no longer appears to be any such thing.

At the same time the liberal democratic principle that the party out of power is, ethically, the loyal opposition ("a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests"), has been obliterated by movement conservatism's unbelievable betrayal of what the Founders stood for. In The Guardian, Michael Cohen writes that the GOP has become the heartless party of cutting food aid to the poor, abortion bans and denying people health coverage:

Never before in American history have we seen a political party so completely dominated and controlled by its extremist wing; and never before have we seen a political party that brings together the attributes of nihilism, heartlessness, radicalism and naked partisanship quite like the modern GOP. ...
In the narrow pursuit of political gain, Republicans have adopted an agenda that is quite simply, inhumane and cruel. Even if one is charitable and defends it on the ground of adherence to an ideological agenda of smaller, less intrusive government (except in the case of lady parts) it can't be defended. If one's ideological predisposition means denying food assistance to people who are laid off from their job or forcing a woman to carry a dead fetus to term or preventing individuals from getting health care coverage, then you have a monstrous ideology.

In the past such "crises of the Republic" been met with a fervent, often religiously based revival movement by the people. The last such was perhaps Martin Luther King's civil rights crusade—don't forget, he was a Baptist minister who spoke in a southern preacher's stirring sonorous crescendo—but is any such voice on the horizon? Would it be heard in the present absorption with the relentless trivia of social media?

Write for the Public Good

Advice from a pair of writers:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. - Thomas Merton, "Letter To A Young Activist"

The great Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Tayler, a writer of nonfiction, recently meditated on the question of how one becomes a writer. He settled on a much more onerous approach:
The question for me was not, then, how does one read to write, but how does one read to live? I conceived early on the conviction that one should lead one’s life as if one were the protagonist of an epic novel, with the outcome predetermined and chapter after chapter of edifying, traumatic and exhilarating events to be suffered through. Since the end is known in advance, one must try to experience as much as possible in the brief time allotted.
The protagonist of “The Death of Ivan Il’ich” died moaning, in agony, overcome with the realization that he had wasted his days on earth following social conventions. He lacked l’esprit frondeur, and he paid for it. Conventions now are hardly less pervasive than they were in Tolstoy’s day; we’re pressured to start a career, build our résumé, earn a certain amount of money, and so forth. But remember: None of us gets out of here alive. So don’t fear risks. Rebel. Be bold, try hard, and embrace adversity; let both success and failure provide you with unique material for your writing, let them give you a life different enough to be worth writing about.

Akhmatova, in a translation by Martin Cruz Smith:

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together, and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.

For other examples of principled writing, see Fritz Stern and Timothy Ferris in The Liberal Founding.

My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

The ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission. - Warraq, Ali and others

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker.

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. - Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy

An acquaintance of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote the following rough draft in imitation of Randall Kennedy's "My Race Problem—And Ours." With the former's permission:

"The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Ultimate success and happiness comes from leading a principled life, not in getting the upper hand. - Sally Forth, comics section of Seattle Times, Sunday, 2/18/2007

Affirmative action is "the just spoils of a righteous war." - Julian Bond

There is one thing someone who surveys the current political scene can be confident of, that people believe, or say they believe, that "liberal" and "left" mean much the same thing. As a liberal, I find this to be a problem. The left as it is now constituted does not have the values which characterized the old left: rationality and individualism, civility, toleration, privacy, impartiality, objectivity, generosity, public-spiritedness, optimism, humanitarianism, and equality. When I ask what I should think with respect to the social and political issues of the day, neither the left (nor the right) seems to offer guidance that is intellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory.

How, for example, should I think about white people? (I happen to be white.) The left seems to find that the cases of man's inhumanity to man fall disproportionately on Caucasians. Should I view white people as uniquely bad, and perhaps deserving of punishment wherever I find them? Should I see white people as guilty because of the history of slavery? Some conduct reflecting these sentiments has entered into everyday life. Many depart from what may be their usual candor and frankness when the reference is racial or ethnic minority groups or members. Many whites, Shelby Steele observes, have confessed to him "that on some occasion they have not said something they truly believed for fear of being marked a racist." An unwritten rule that "We must say only good things about these people" seems to be in effect. In remembrance of a regrettable past, the joshing and jostling and hurly-burly which characterizes our conduct with equals is forgone. An unnatural politeness, even solicitude takes over with respect to members of certain groups.

One answer is suggested by the example of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader said several things which guide me in my response to the injustices of the past. He said, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." He did not draw a distinction between one group of humans and another. "God is not merely interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men," King said. "He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race." From such a perspective the problem with theories of group guilt is that it divides King's "human race" into two separate, unequal categories, one part burdened by accusation and shame, the other indignant, resentful, and inclined to feel justified in seeking retribution.

In a liberal society every person gets a fresh start. It was one of the goals of the civil rights revolution that blacks should no longer be asked to know their place, but should have as much opportunity for the full realization of their abilities as everyone else. Theories of racial guilt in practice means that some do not get a fresh start, free and clear, but will go through their lives being limited or targeted in visible or invisible ways because of the deeds of other people in another century. The problem of inequality which the civil rights revolution addressed is not solved by relocating the inequality from the formerly oppressed to the former oppressors, it is solved by resolutely opposing even the hint of inequality* in any form. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," King reminded us. "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

But what of the continuing problem of racism? Perhaps the descendants of the people who did these things will be less likely to act in prejudiced or unjust ways if their self-esteem and confidence is reined in by a sense of guilt for the past. I answer that "we should not cultivate guilt in order to leverage policy." [James Piereson] We will not be serving our fellow citizens well if we insist on teaching them what is factually incorrect, even if we imagine that it would be better for them if we did so. [Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa, p. 196] Guilt is powerful. Its legitimacy derives from the care we take to establish it. For this reason liberal societies established the principle that a citizen is innocent until proved guilty, sought to maintain an independent judiciary, and honored due process and rules of evidence.

Instrumental guilt, guilt propounded in order to compel a course of action we deem desirable without a legitimate grounding in culpability, violates the fundamental rule of liberal societies that no one should be subject to the will of another. If I were to be found guilty of robbing a store, following a trial in which the rules of due process were observed, I could still count myself a free human being. My guilt, and any appropriate punishment resulting, would be a foreseeable consequence of my own actions freely taken. My deeper freedom—freedom from the arbitrary acts of another—would be unimpaired. White guilt, as Professor Steele also observed, is another animal; not a belief in one's guilt, but a vulnerability to being stigmatized as guilty because of one's skin color alone. It represents not a victory of anti-racism but a rebirth of racism in another form. It revives the ancient paradigm, so repugnant to a free people, of domination and submission.

Another problem with theories of group guilt is that they impair the sense that in the end the society we live in is the result of what we all do and think. Senator Barack Obama recently observed that the achievements of the civil rights revolution are dimmed somewhat by a lessening of the sense of our common interests and goals. The liberal ideas which emerged around the time of the American Revolution included the conviction that cooperation and altruism create a better society and a better life than any of the alternatives. The sense that we are all in this together runs through King's thought as it runs through Obama's, as when he reminded us that injustice to one endangers all. Over and over again King asked the mainstream society to live up to its own stated principles. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" His work reflected the sustained theme that within each of us, regardless of our differences, is the possibility of a better person. Theories of group guilt go in the opposite direction to this positive theme. Where King sought to unite us, these theories seek to divide us. Where King sought to uplift us, theories of group guilt invite suspicion and distrust by some of those he addressed.

"The poor you have always with you" is a timeless problem of every society. When we phrase this problem as the contemporary left seems to, postulating a "dominant culture" and its relationship to those who are left out or disadvantaged, we are making a specific assumption about humankind and our life together. When instead we phrase the problem of poverty and injustice as Martin Luther King did, in terms of great principles which uplift and unite us, we are in the presence of a completely different vision of humanity. One worldview perceives the problem as primarily one of identifying enemies who have taken what is not rightfully theirs. It conceptualizes the problem of the poor and outcast, the have-nots, as the result of intentional wrongdoing by the haves; and it imagines the solution in terms of punishment and redistribution. By contrast the vision which animated the civil rights movement was that when we the people work together to further the public good, we all benefit.

The vision of political democracy has always been that the people themselves can constitute the government, because they have common interests which they can identify and work toward together. The democratic outlook may or may not be correct, but a politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. It is difficult to see how a better life for all can be achieved by a process which is primarily negative, such as identifying enemies to be deprecated and degraded. I have watched as the left has moved from attitudes resembling Martin Luther King's—attitudes of mutual respect and cooperation—to attitudes of opposition traceable to places in Central Europe which had never really known political freedom or democracy.

Sometimes, when I find myself in gatherings of the left, it seems that all I hear is a litany of negatives: "European, bad; white, bad; male, bad; corporations, bad; capitalism, bad—yet without any alternative suggested or a hint of what a world shaped as they think it should be would look like. This seeming vision of a world of enemies stands in sharp contrast to the principle of public-spiritedness. "The Americans, on the other hand," remarked Alexis de Tocqueville in his analysis of the democratic disposition, "are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state."

White people, the current left seems to say, committed foolish and terrible mistakes. They, and their European Civilization, despoiled the planet, polluted the skies, corrupted the earth with monstrous smoking factories, imposed the barbarism of colonialism on the third world, and enslaved a dark race. To prevent this from happening again, we must struggle against the people who committed such monstrous crimes, we must make them pay for what they did, and we must not aid and abet them by accepting or tolerating any aspect of them or their ways.

But King rejected the easy path of sweeping generalization and simple condemnation. When he received the Nobel Prize for Peace, Martin King said, "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history." As Randall Kennedy wrote, "a brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice — constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless."

If equality, in the form of the principle that no one is worse than anyone else because of their race, enabled Martin to end a century of Jim Crow prejudice, it cannot be a progressive principle to demonize white people or the civilization which originated the proposition that all men are created equal. There are no shortcuts: no group has a monopoly on virtue or evil.

The century of the American Revolution—the Eighteenth Century—was a heady time for liberalism. Voltaire, centuries early, wrote the appropriate response to the fanatics of September 11: "If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities." Across the Atlantic, the fledgling American republic's declaration of human equality enabled Martin King to create a revolution simply by asking their descendants to live up to their own stated principles. As Abraham Lincoln had realized a century earlier, Americans believe in uplift, and it is not a mistake to appeal to the better angels of their nature.

I can find no such high-mindedness in what the left has become.

(*) Correction. Originally read: "it is solved by resolutely opposing even the hint of equality in any form."(Revised by editor 11/18/13)

The sweet enjoyment of partaking good laws under a free government

I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers. - The conclusion of George Washington's Farewell Address

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias wrote, of The Fast and the Furious franchise,

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .

Yglesias describes this deficit of social capital:

The problem, of course, is that this sort of particularistic outlook is very dysfunctional on a social level.
As David Madland has written, the low-trust ethics it embodies are, in fact, typical of societies featuring a high and growing level of income inequality: 

One study of U.S. states measured the percentage of state residents who think “most people can be trusted”... It found that “a 10 percentage-point increase in trust increases the growth rate of GDP by 0.5 percentage points” over five years. 
Trust reduces transaction costs because less time and resources are spent verifying and policing. And trusting people see the world as full of opportunities. With higher levels of trust, people are more likely to innovate, seek out trade and new technologies, and generally take economically sound risks.

This, says Yglesias, is "a world where the system increasingly seems to be rigged." He speaks of the type of hero who "ultimately ends up violating his obligations to law and order to discharge a personal debt"—that is, someone for whom Washington's mutual cares of fellow-citizens—the public good—have become an unreal abstraction:

[This] outlook is increasingly appealing in an increasingly unequal America. But it's ultimately destructive of the social institutions needed to generate prosperity. And yet at a time when elites long ago stopped caring whether the gains of economic growth would be widely shared, and in recent years seem to have turned their backs on the unemployed altogether, then these are the heroes we'll turn to.

In Arguments for Liberalism, this blog noted that Former President Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, drew our attention to the fact that: 

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.

An increasingly callous, unjust and venal society seems, so far, oblivious to the decline which it is bringing upon itself. The Liberal Founding put it somewhat differently:

The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society.

The Social Darwinism of Movement Conservatism

Movement conservatism's covert furthering of class, masquerading as tax and entitlement policy is, in Lincoln's terms, an attempt to "overthrow" the principles of the Founders. (See below.)

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias wrote:

The budget House Republicans have written cuts $0 in Medicare spending over the next ten years. It cuts $0 dollars in Social Security spending ever. It increases national defense spending. It sharply cuts cuts rates on high-income families. And it balances the budget. So who loses out? Poor people. It is true that starting in Year 11, the House GOP budget begins to cut Medicare spending. But it does so in a way that does very little to protect the interests of low-income retirees. And the cuts to Medicare are not used to avoid cuts in programs for the poor. In fact, the cuts to Medicare are not even used to avoid tax hikes on the poor. The style of tax reform favored by the House GOP ensures that along with spending on programs for the poor being cut, working class families will pay more in taxes.
Just to sum up—the actually existing GOP agenda overwhelmingly suggests that not only do Republicans think that government spending is bad, but also that government spending on the poor is an especially pernicious form of spending. They appear to believe that taxes are bad, but that taxes on the poor are an especially benign form of taxes.

Merriam Webster defines Social Darwinism as:

a sociological theory that sociocultural advance is the product of intergroup conflict and competition and the socially elite classes (as those possessing wealth and power) possess biological superiority in the struggle for existence

Russell Kirk included in his Ten Conservative Principles:

For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

To give further wealth to the wealthy on the backs of the poor, while undermining what remains of the humanitarian safety net meant to succor those afflicted by poverty or illness, in the name of the "health" of a civilization founded on the proposition that all are created equal, is a heartless betrayal of what George Washington called "the public good." In his Farewell Address he spoke of the error which

gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens ... facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation. (Emphasis added.)

Public good. Literally, the good of the people. Not the good of the "civilization" at the expense of the sick and the poor in the name of better "orders and classes." Lincoln said that the United States had advanced beyond the Old World order of "classification, caste, and legitimacy," and the first Justice Harlan, in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, declared, "Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." Yet if Yglesias is correct in his analysis, we now have the Republican Party surreptitiously advancing a wealthy class; and if the Merriam Webster definition above is correct, this favoritism toward the rich reveals a social Darwinist theory of sociocultural advance which is fundamentally incompatible with "all men are created equal."

Let's look at the rest of what Lincoln said about "legitimacy." Lincoln is referring to the sentence from the Declaration which begins "We hold" and asserts, among other things, that all are created equal:

But soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. ... The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities" another bluntly calls them "self evident lies" and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to "superior races." These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect--the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard ... of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves. (Emphasis added.)

Movement conservatism's covert furthering of class, masquerading as tax and entitlement policy is, in Lincoln's terms, an attempt to "overthrow" the principles of the Founders, "supplanting the principles of free government."

Katharsis

Robert Silverberg's novella "Breckenridge and the Continuum" is the story of a conventional middle-aged man who sets off for exotic places and finds himself among companion wanderers on an aged planet:

The city was extraordinary . . . an ultimate urban glory, a supernal Babylon, a consummate Persepolis, the soul's own hymn in brick and stone.

Breckenridge tells garbled myths:

Then Breckenridge said, "I suppose I could tell you the story of Oedipus King of Thieves tonight." The late-afternoon sky was awful: gray, mottled, fierce. It resonated with a strange electricity. Breckenridge had never grown used to that sky. Day after day, as they crossed the desert, it transfixed him with the pain of incomprehensible loss. ...
The aurora flashed with redoubled frenzy, a coded beacon, crying out, SPACE AND TIME, SPACE AND TIME, SPACE AND TIME. ....

Messages come to those Breckenridge left:

The third cable said: GUESS WHAT STOP I'M REALLY IN TIMBUKTU STOP HAVE RENTED JEEP STOP I SET OUT INTO SAHARA TOMORROW STOP AM VERY HAPPY STOP YES STOP VERY HAPPY STOP VERY VERY HAPPY STOP STOP STOP It was the last message he sent. The night it arrived in New York there was a spectacular celestial display, an aurora that brought thousands of people out into Central Park. There was rain in the southeastern Sahara four days later, the first recorded precipitation there in eight years and seven months. An earthquake was reported in southern Sicily, but it did little damage. Things were much quieter after that for everybody.

The Moral Order in Popular Writing

You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. - Peter S. Beagle, The Folk of the Air

[The manumitted slave] Thorby . . . answered, “If you are Captain Fjalar Krausa, I have a message for you, noble sir.” . . .
“To Captain Fjalar Krausa, master of Starship Sisu from Baslim the Cripple. Greetings, old friend! Greetings to your family, clan, and sib, and my humblest respects to your revered mother. I am speaking to you through the mouth of my adopted son. He does not understand Suomic; I address you privately. When you receive this message, I am already dead. My son is the only thing of value of which I die possessed; I entrust him to your care. I ask that you succor and admonish him as if you were I. When opportunity presents, I ask that you deliver him to the commander of any vessel of the Hegemonic Guard, saying that he is a distressed citizen of the Hegemony and entitled as such to their help in locating his family. If they will bestir themselves, they can establish his identity and restore him to his people. All the rest I leave to your good judgment. I have enjoined him to obey you and I believe that he will; he is a good lad, within the limits of his age and experience, and I entrust him to you with a serene heart. My life has been long and rich; I am content. Farewell.” - Citizen of the Galaxy, Simon and Schuster trade paperback edition, pp 63 ff [by the early Robert A. Heinlein]

Later, in the same work, crew-members of a ship of the Hegemony:

"Not me," Stancke said firmly.
"You. When you're a C.O. and comes time to do something unpleasant, there you'll be, trying to get your tummy in and your chest out, with your chubby little face set in hero lines." p. 181

And:

Colonel Baslim ... one of the toughest, sanest, most humane men ever to wear our uniform. p. 189
Did [Thorby] really have blood relatives somewhere?
"I suppose so," he answered slowly. "I don't know."
"Mmm . . ." Brisby wondered what it was like to have no frame to your picture. pp. 190-1

This spot-on send-up of academic jargon that "darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge":

[Thorby's grandfather, a professor:]
"I heard you use that term 'sold' once before. You must realize that it is not correct. After all, the serfdom practiced in the Sargony is not chattel slavery. It derives from the ancient Hindu gild [sic] or 'caste' system--a stabilized social order with mutual obligations up and down. You must not call it 'slavery.'" p. 236
"I don't know any other word to translate the Sargonese term."
"I could think of several, though I don't know Sargonese . . . it's not a useful term in scholarship. But, my dear Thor, you aren't a student of human histories and culture. Grant me a little authority in my own field." p. 236

my first affair with that older woman
she was ten years older
and mortally hurt by the past
and the present;
she treated me badly ...
 
yet we had our moments; and
our little soap opera ended
with her in a coma
in the hospital,
and I sat at her bed
for hours
talking to her,
and then she opened her eyes
and saw me:
"I knew it would be you,"

she said. - Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

From Robert B. Parker's Spenser series of detective novels:

  [Spenser:] "Have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner?"

  [Susan:] "Certainly . . ."
  "Suze," I said. "You just don't have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner . . . You know how in medieval landscape painting the artists would often include an allegorical representation of death to remind us that it's always present and imminent?"
  She nodded.
  "That's like inviting Hawk to Thanksgiving dinner. He'd be the figure in the landscape, and that would compromise him. Hawk would not want you to invite him."
  "That doesn't make any sense," Susan said.
  "It would to Hawk." p. 126
  I said, "He and I are part of the same cold place." p. 127
  "One of the rules," she said. . . .
  "Doesn't matter," I said. "It's a way to live. Anything else is confusion." p. 134 [Robert B. Parker, Ceremony]

For my ivy league friends
you should have seen them back then: raggedy-ass, wild-eyed, raving
against the order
now
they have been ingested, digested, rested
they write reviews for the journals
they write well-worked, quiet, inoffensive poesy
they edit so many of the magazines that I have no idea where I should send this
poem
since they attack my work with alarming regularity
and
I can't read theirs

 - Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

Peter S. Beagle - The Folk of the Air:

  [John Erne, the combat master:] "I never met a real musician who wasn't a miser with himself. They'll never come all the way with you anywhere." p. 150 
  Farrell: "You're like me." ...
  "Am I? I don't have room for more than the one seriousness, if that's what you mean. ... People invite me to their history classes, and I give demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl." ...
  "This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don't know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you're like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real." p. 151
  Erne: "A dead art form," he said, "like lute music. As unnatural to the animal as opera or ballet, and yet nobody who puts on even cardboard armor can quite escape it--any more than you can escape the fact that your music believes in God and hell and the King. You and I are what they used to call witnesses, vouching with our lives for something we never saw. The bitch of it is, all we ever wanted to be was experts." p. 152
  Ben [alter ego is Egil Eyvindsson]: "[This university tolerates] Blacks and Chicanos out of fear--and expect[s] to be praised for it." p. 161
  Ben/Egil: "Things taste so different there, Joe; the light's all different, the constellations, the facial expressions ..."
  The cape dogs danced hotly against the bars, whining with grim urgency. They smelled to Farrell of blood and horse dung and chocolate, and he wondered whether they could sense Egil, if only as a wrongness, a constant disquieting shiver in their wild logic. p. 195
  The gyrfalcon kept her eyes closed for a moment, then opened them so explosively that Farrell stepped back from the dark, living emptiness of her gaze.
  Frederik said, "Look at her. she balances between habit and what we'd call madness, and for her there's no such thing as the future. I don't think there's really any present, either--there's just the endless past going around and around her, over and through her. When I hold her on the glove--"He indicated the leather jesses that leashed the falcon's ankles, "--she's more or less tied to my present, but the moment I let her go, she circles up into her real time. Her real time, where I never existed and where nothing's extinct." p. 204

you get so alone at times that it just makes sense
when I was a starving writer I used to read the major writers in the
major magazines (in the library, of course) and it made me feel very bad because--being a student of the word and the way, I realized
that they were faking it: I could sense each false emotion, each utter pretense. - Bukowski

The Folk of the Air: The goddess Sia: "I like it here," she said softly. "Of all worlds, this one was made for me, with its silliness and its cruelty, and its fine trees." ...
"And still you desire one another ... I know gods who have come into existence only because two of you wanted there to be a reason for what they were about to do that afternoon. Listen, I tell you that on the stars they can smell your desire--there are ears of a shape you have no word for listening to your dreams and lies, tears and gruntings. There is nothing like you anywhere among all the stones in the sky, do you realize that?" p. 272
Ben: "Egil was my sanity. The real crazies go to meetings, teach what they love to people who don't love anything, and stand around at receptions for years with other crazy people who never do give a shit about them. And they don't know what anything is, just what everybody thinks it's like. [...] Egil knew what poetry is, and what God is, and what death is. [...] I'll never have a good time like that again. Just tenure." p. 283
"Um. Egil didn't think much of our civilization, the little he saw of it. He thought it was probably all right, for people who really didn't care a lot about anything."

help wanted
I was a crazed young man and then found this book written
        by a
crazed older man and I felt better because he was
able to write it down. - Bukowski