Politics & Culture

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch — and Ideology for Dinner

No Comments

On my drive into the Caffeinated Press office this morning, I flipped around the FM dial, searching for nothing in particular. I settled, grudgingly, on the local Michigan Public Radio channel, wherein NPR’s Weekend Edition was already in full swing.

Apart from some brief news about Sen. Bernie Sanders and his trek to South Carolina, the segment I heard featured the host speaking to an academic about the allegations of a rape culture at St. Paul’s, the elite boarding school that has prepared many of America’s top political and financial leaders.

The part of the interview that caused an involuntary, Spock-like eyebrow raise came when the guest asserted something to the effect that all of the stakeholders at St. Paul’s must band together for a “discussion” about ways to stop male upperclassmen from treating “girls like currency” in their competition to “score.”

Golly.

So let’s stipulate two things from the outset. First, that St. Paul’s — a 150-year-old institution that only recently allowed the admission of females — consists of teen-aged students from the upper-upper-crust of American society. And second, that if the stories about the schools are true, the school’s culture permits or even celebrates young males targeting even younger females for sex, yet there’s been only one allegation of rape. And that allegation is disputed.

Two points follow.

The first, and the more minor, point is that there appears to be a curious disconnect between the broad, left-leaning culture that mocks sexual abstinence training — see, for example, John Oliver’s take on sex ed in the U.S. — and the reaction to what happens when teenagers actually do what the sex educators encourage. Because the salient point at St. Paul’s is that even if older male students seek sex with younger female students, there’s been but one allegation of coercion in an environment where the occurrences of such liaisons is probably very high. In other words: The sex-ed folks say: “Do it, safely, and with consent,” and except for a single reported occurrence to the contrary, the kids seem to have followed their education. So what, exactly, is the problem that requires “discussion?”

Perhaps I’m cynical. But we should not be surprised when the left-leaning consensus is that we should train middle-schoolers to enjoy the fun of sex responsibly, that when those middle-schoolers pass the puberty mark, they’ll behave as they’ve been taught. If one student raped another student at St. Paul’s, then prosecute that occurrence. But to probe a deeper cultural problem? It’s not clear what such a problem could be, given that the students of St. Paul’s by and large seem to stick to the syllabus.

The bigger point, I think, is that the desire for a “discussion” about “treating girls like currency” in a male-on-male competition to “score” speaks to something quite unrelated to the current sexual mores of the students at St. Paul’s. Granted that in today’s ideological climate, any allegation of rape will find a chorus of professionals claiming a deep-seated cultural problem — hey, sociologists gotta pay the bills, too, even if every problem they see is a nail and the only tool they own is a hammer. Put that knee-jerk reaction aside long enough to reflect on just how curious it is that people assume that with the right degree of consciousness raising, we can consistently rise above hormones and instinct to be a New Soviet Man better person.

Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for lunch. What he meant was that the collection of habits and pre-rational behaviors that directly affect how people interrelate will always undercut an agreed-upon strategy that doesn’t square with that culture. For example, Microsoft’s strategy of unifying its software under one common codebase was, for a long time, hampered by an organizational culture that tied employee compensation to different internal business units sabotaging the success of other business units to improve their own relative metrics. When that sort of adversarial culture thrives, you have roughly zero chance of achieving a strategy that conflicts with it.

Let’s introduce the Gillikin Corollary: Culture eats ideology for dinner. In other words,  the highfalutin maxims of both the Far Left and the Far Right so often fail in the real world, because the real world is a messier place with a culture much more firmly rooted in the principles of evolutionary biology. The Gillikin Corollary is why both liberals and conservatives are mistaken in their pronouncements on sex ed: The conservatives are wrong because an abstinence-only training program (or worse, a “let’s pretend parents will teach their kids about sex” get-out-of-jail-free card) conflicts with teenage hormones. The liberals are wrong because on balance human males are sexually aggressive and human females are sexually receptive, so training everyone to be a metrosexual contractarian is doomed to failure. We’ve been wired over thousands of generations of pre-history that sexual dominance meant reproductive success and that human social frameworks were optimized for relatively small tribal groups. (See, e.g., the writings of E.O. Wilson.)

To quote Barack Obama: “Now, let me be clear.” I condone neither rape nor cultural norms that subtly compel people to engage in sexual behaviors they might have avoided but for engagement with that culture. If the student accused of rape at St. Paul’s is found guilty of rape, he should be punished.

Yet I cannot help but shake my head in amazement as the folks at NPR look at the story out of St. Paul’s and bemoan the fact that young males at an elite school engage in allegedly predatory sexual practices. Do all the left-wing sociologists and anthropologists out there really think that what they need is the right mandatory consciousness-raising program and that with it, a quarter-million years of evolution will therefore dissipate into a warm and loving enlightment completely untethered to hormones and pre-rational instinct? That a half-day seminar about “no means no” will perfectly empower testosterone-driven, highly competitive teenage males to default to asking, “May I unbutton your shirt now? May I kiss you? If your BAC is above 0.05, can we wait until we both can provide informed consent? Are you OK if we always use condoms until marriage?”

Riiiight.

The culture of an elite school serving elite families revolves around succeeding in a socially competitive world. That’s the culture. And a strategy of sexual egalitarianism will never thrive as long as that culture — and its supporting cast of hormones and instinctive behaviors — continues to imperfectly align with it.

I suspect there are ways to more effectively frame sexual education for both males and females — but those methods must be rooted in the human condition as it is, not as we’d wish it to be.

So for me, the most fascinating part of the whole St. Paul’s story isn’t the “Senior Salute” or the rape allegation; rather, it’s the putatively earnest belief that something like the “Senior Salute” could have been avoided with the right combination of training, seminars and consciousness-raising events. It’s pretty obvious that left-wing nostrums about hyperinformed and explicit consent are just as untenable as right-wing nostrums about virginity until marriage — and they’re both off-base for exactly the same reason.

Culture eats ideology for dinner.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Epochs, Ideology and the Things That Matter

No Comments

A liberal looks at the country and, in his eagerness to immanentize the eschaton, rejects well-functioning tradition for want of some high-theoretic World State. A conservative looks at the country and, in his eagerness to restore long-abandoned traditions, rejects much scientific and cultural progress for want of Duck Dynasty. Yet a healthy body politic needs both visions; liberals and conservatives are merely opposite lobes of Uncle Sam’s lungs, diseased though each may be in its own special way. Lose one to cancer, you lose a lot.
Lose both, though, and you lose everything. The Zombie Apocalypse test is apropos: What really matters after catastrophe strikes? Think of an event like Hurricane Katrina, when public order in southern Louisiana was shaky for several weeks and ordinary survival became a genuine ordeal. In such a climate, does anyone really care about “trigger warnings” or carbon footprints or into which cathole the transgendered person gets to pee? Almost all of the current causes célèbres of the Left are what kids these days call #FirstWorldProblems. The issues that progressives adore are so irrelevant to life on the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy that it’s a wonder so many people invest so much time into advocating for so little substance.
Yet in that Katrina situation, the Right isn’t appreciably better. The preppers hide in their bunkers while the guys with guns take stuff from the guys with yoga mats. If public order is a long way off, you’re much more likely to end up with a descent into strongman-led tribalism, with a pecking order directly related to what you can contribute to the group in terms of rare skills or biceps size.
And therein lies the rub. Neither conservatives nor liberals currently articulate a comprehensive worldview that successfully encapsulates the value of ancient knowledge and antique skills, with a respect for the sundry joys of High Culture and a sophistication for harmonizing new insights with old wisdom. Today, we can afford to obsess about Facebook offering dozens of gender options. Tomorrow, when the Zombie Apocalypse comes, those same people who eagerly set their Facebook genders to “Cis Woman” or “Transmasculine” are unlikely to survive a week without dying of dehydration, injury or human-caused trauma. Today, we can afford to let conservatives be the voice of anti-elite sentiment. Tomorrow, when the Zombie Apocalypse comes, those same people who disdain higher education will be the first to chuck the last copy of War and Peace on the fire when the menfolk return with a fresh kill of some endangered species.
We might get lucky; we might get a world that looks like Falling Skies, with a healthy balance between warrior and academic leading the group. But we might end up with Lord of the Flies, instead. It scares me that I can’t tell which scenario is more probable.
We could, perhaps, console ourselves with the belief that the Zombie Apocalypse — a term of art, of course, for any great civilizational catastrophe — won’t occur. But such consolation is empty given the sprawling narrative of human history. The May edition of the estimable First Things included, as a feature article, “The Great War Revisited” by George Weigel.  It is a masterclass narrative in a magazine that, itself, sets the high bar of literary merit.
Weigel recounts the willful blindness of world leaders in 1914. No one could quite believe that the stability of the Westphalian system could collapse so quickly and so completely in so little time, so they acted as if it couldn’t.
Consider. On January 1, 1910, Tsar Nicholas II ruled an ancient, vast, autocratic Russian empire. Kaiser Wilhelm ruled a powerful, prosperous Germany freshly ambitious after Bismarck’s consolidations a generation before. Emperor Franz Joseph ruled the elegant if creaky Austria-Hungary — since 1848, no less. The Ottomans were in control, albeit tenuously, in Istanbul and had been for more than half a millennium. The Qing Dynasty ruled a decrepit China through a monarchy with roots two millennia old. America was quiet and disinterested in foreign affairs, with William Howard Taft presiding over a prosperous, growing but inward-looking country.
On January 1, 1925 — a mere 15 years later — the Romanovs were decomposing in a shallow grave while the Soviet Union crushed internal dissidents on Stalin’s orders. Germany was a shambles, the harsh Peace of Versailles spreading misery among Germans of every stripe and depriving governments before Hitler of any real, legitimate power … thus sowing the seeds of the next major war. Austria and Hungary were cleaved apart and the last Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed VI, had been deposed while Ataturk began his secularizing work (potentially sparking the tinder of later Islamofascism, to boot). The KMT was consolidating control in a democratic China while Japanese forces still stung by the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 had correctly gauged the exhaustion of the West and plotted accordingly. The United States, after Woodrow Wilson’s collectivist war policies and internationalist exhortations, was enjoying the Roaring Twenties under Calvin Coolidge. And families across the world were still coping with the devastation wrought by the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
All the things that looked so permanent in 1910 had been laid waste over five years of war and a decade of ill-managed peace. An entire generation had bled to death for naught on the fields of Europe, and others — India, Japan, China — took notice. The suicide of the West took some time, but each slice of the wrist was unmistakable —

  • The sinking of the Titanic (1912) — we began to doubt scientific progress
  • The Guns of August (1914) — we went to war because we couldn’t find a reason not to
  • The battles of Somme and Verdun and Passchendaele (1916-1917) — we killed millions knowing it was futile
  • European acquiescence to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia (1938) — we looked away from evil
  • The Yalta Conference (1945) — we let Stalin get his spoils without a fight, condemning millions
  • The Counterculture (ca. 1968) — we stopped being serious about shared culture
  • The War on Terror (ca. 2001) — we over-reacted to a minor threat, then under-reacted to major threats

Imagine being a normal person born on January 1, 1890. You saw the entire world change before you greeted your first grandchild. You were born into a world without widespread automobiles, powered flight or amenities like indoor plumbing or electricity; as a child, you likely heard stories from your parents of the Civil War, the taming of the American Frontier and the era of tall ships. You lived through the Great War and World War II and the Cold War. If you lived to the ripe old age of 80, you died after seeing a man walk on the surface of the moon.
Think about that.
History is replete with moments in time where everything changed within a generation and old truths and new ideas fought bitterly for supremacy. The Great War was such an inflection point. So was the political upheaval of 1848. So were the Napoleonic Wars a generation earlier and the French Revolution that lit their fuse. So was the Reformation, starting with the 95 Theses posted in 1517 and persisting through centuries of wars of religion in Europe. So was the discovery of the New World in 1492. So were the Crusades. So were the crowning of Charlemagne, the Mongol invasions, the collapse of Rome and Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.
So why do we persist in thinking that such an earth-shattering event can never again occur? Why must we be so un-serious about the future that we can relish small-potatoes political idiocy as the world smolders while waiting for the tinder for the next world-historical dislocation?
Today’s domestic politics isn’t up to the task. Neither the Right nor the Left can articulate a coherent vision for what the world ought to look like next week, let alone a century hence.
Some of today’s more enlightened pundits — I’m thinking especially of George F. Will and Peggy Noonan — correctly note that the race for 2016 is hamstrung by both the Republicans and the Democrats lacking a consistent and comprehensive message about what they want for America. Debates currently focus on irrelevant personalities (Bill Clinton, the Koch Brothers) or on issues that aren’t really significant in the grand scale of things (marijuana legalization, the minimum wage). We’re back to small-ball politics.
But while politics is about legislative agendas, ideology is about the big picture. And on that front, all the main ideological voices in America lack a conceptual coherence that applies with equal validity and rigor to life on a college campus as well as life in a post-apocalyptic village. Ideology requires a conception of the human condition that applies regardless of any individual human’s specific condition. It requires a nuanced teleology. Ideology shapes politics, so with ideologies in disarray, it’s no surprise the our politics follows suit.
Progressive ideology spends so much time on harmonizing complex identity relationships that the framework it’s built upon cannot endure in adverse material conditions — what works in faculty lounges at Berkeley won’t work in a rural farming community in Nebraska, and certainly won’t work in a long-term survival situation. It fails the test of universal relevance. Conservative ideology lacks coherence on the big questions of life and human relationships; half of engaged conservatives appear quite willing to live within Leave It to Beaver and eschew politics entirely while the other half can’t figure out if it’s for or against the NSA, for or against starting council meetings with an invocation to Jesus, for or against vaccines. The libertarians fail to concede that humans are social animals, and that eusociality imperfectly squares with contractarian principles, so they seem like the rump at a linguistics conference that really, really wants you to believe that Esperanto is a logically superior alternative if only people would abandon their native tongues and give it a chance.
(Sneaky thought: You know who actually nails the big picture effectively? Catholics and Jews, and non-radicalized Muslims.)
I want conservatives, in particular, to advance a coherent framework that tells me what kind of America we aspire to in the year 2114. Don’t recite policy — recite the principles that policy will be shaped by. That framework will give a compelling, universal why as well as a specific answer to the tough questions we prefer to elide:

  • If human life is precious, will we abolish the death penalty when we abolish abortion?
  • Which is better: A well-reared child attached to two same-sex parents, or a poorly reared child of two opposite-sex parents?
  • Under what circumstances will we invade a sovereign state? To acquire resources? To avert genocide? Never?
  • Can we force children to get mandatory vaccination against parental consent, for diseases that could devastate large populations?
  • Does human destiny reside in the United States, across the globe or among the stars?
  • What should be in the public square, versus entirely private, versus private but subject to government monitoring?
  • To what degree should individual risk be socialized?
  • What is the purpose of a well-lived life?
  • Is society stronger with a Judeo-Christian worldview, with a secular worldview or with a Greco-Roman ambivalence about religion?
  • To what degree should a person be required know how to change a tire, raise a garden or build a fire in the backcountry?
  • What is the point at which we agree that gulf between “have” and “have not” is too wide to tolerate?
  • How do we balance libertarian autonomy with the stabilizing power of society’s little platoons, without rendering either useless?
  • At what point does market inequality amount to de facto duress for the economically disadvantaged?
  • What is the proper response to a person who is biologically female but professes to be male in gender?
  • To what degree are people free to make choices that may not redound to their long-term advantage (smoking pot, eating too many cheeseburgers, avoiding dental exams, driving without a seatbelt, etc.)?

We can hope that the Zombie Apocalypse never comes, despite history’s ample lessons. But while we maintain this foolish hope, will we think prudently about what kind of life ought to persist between our cyclical catastrophes, or will we duck our heads in the sand and continue pretend that today’s hot-button social issues really do have meaning?

Religion

The Nature of Faith

No Comments

Last Sunday, we had a closing four-hour retreat for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults at St. Robert of Newminster. The session was pleasant and the people at that parish are really quite delightful. The experience, at the time when Palm Sunday opens Holy Week, reinforced for me a concept I don’t take seriously enough — that is, the role of religiosity in the lives of ordinary people.
The social scientists tell us that formal religious profession is on the wane. Only one in five Americans visits a place of worship in any given week. Although three-quarters of us confess Christianity, demographers project that Christianity will be a minority faith tradition by 2030 given that one-third of people under age 30 claim no religious affiliation whatsoever.
Yet the religious impulse, as a human phenomenon, is quite different from religious practice. For the unchurched or the atheistic, their religious impulses tend to find expression in other pursuits — sexual licentiousness, radical environmentalism, unfocused spiritualism, unfettered egoism, etc.
Look at the pseudo-messianic undertones of the climate-change True Believers. Some of them suggest that people who disagree with their interpretation of climate models aren’t just mistaken — they’re morally defective and ought to be silenced — or even put in jail. Look, too, at the furor over the departure of newly appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. Some representative supporters of same-sex marriage have argued, loudly, that one man’s private donation six years ago is a public matter because he’s a public face of a company. Think what you will about climate change and same-sex marriage: The zeal to persecute non-believers is a religious impulse that goes beyond mere disagreement about facts, theories or policies.
The phenomenon is simple, really. Human nature is what it is, and that nature prompts us to seek to belong to a tribe. The evolutionary biology and developmental psychology of humankind is fairly well understood on the matter, thanks to pioneering work by researchers like Jared Diamond. Our tribes both fuel and channel our passions and inspire emotional bonds that transcend abstract, dispassionate reason.
Tribes are funny things. In simplest form, they’re society’s little platoons, the places where we discern meaning and level-set sociocultural expectations and find refuge in a like-minded community. In years past, tribes in the United States looked like ethnic bars, churches, fraternal clubs and neighborhood associations. Yet these mediating institutions, across the board, are failing. Gentrification is leading to the erosion ethnic identity for most white Americans; church attendance is on the wane; fraternal organizations are a shell of their former glory; neighborhood civic groups have been superseded by online communities.
So how do we find our tribe? How do we belong? We do it the same way we always have — we find people who “look like us” and share our worldview. Except now, we’re not finding communal solace in religion or civic virtue but rather in political and public-policy forums, and our potential fellow travelers don’t need to hail from our neighborhood but rather can come from anywhere there’s broadband access. Hence the polarization of the electorate: We’re sorting ideologically across party lines because we have fewer purely local social ties to bind us.
Religiosity, when channeled through institutions that have had millennia to develop, is mostly benign. Religiosity, divorced of anchor institutions and self-directed through political channels, is harder to manage. Harder to mediate. Without a diversity of those “little platoons” to provide a broad-based context, we fall into the solipsism of a single-issue messiah. Political activism sourced from a wholly self-contained belief system cannot be reasoned with; it can only be confronted or accommodated.
Hebrews 11:1 reminds us that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith compels us; even people who profess atheism nevertheless need faith in something. It’s hard-wired into us as humans. As the rich tapestry of competing loyalties — a diversity that helped to check the excesses of any single constituent part — fades for many of our fellow citizens into a single-issue monochromatic print, our faith loses its grounding.
Some may argue that religious conservatives are ignorant. Or superstitious. Some probably are. But their faith in something bigger than themselves offers their religiosity a more humble, more humane path. Those whose faith hails from their own privileged beliefs, answerable to no higher authority than their own egos, have a tougher struggle to maintain a similar humble, humane demeanor. And, in this poisoned climate, it shows.
As a Catholic, then, I must confess: I have not really appreciated the gift of faith until I finally understood people whose faith is little more than a megaphone for their own psyches.

Politics & Culture

Zero Political Shades of Gray

4 Comments

The meta-debate about same-sex marriage and the Supreme Court prompted a side conversation with a friend that highlighted my frustration with people whose opinions on any given subject constitute little more than a rationalization of the inverse argument offered by an ideological opponent.

Conservatives don’t care much for progressives. Progressives don’t care much for conservatives. Yet too many people from each camp content themselves to find an explanation — any explanation, no matter how flimsy — to justify their oppositional defiance to a caricature of the position of the other side.

Put differently: Not only do we lack 50 shades of political gray, we lack any shades of gray. Positions distill to paired binaries; you’re pro or con without any hope of a middle ground or an alternative position. Deviate from the black-and-white model, and you’re either a traitor to the cause or a wacko kook outside the mainstream.

Almost every political question being tossed about in the mainstream press — entitlement reform, gun control, abortion, same-sex marriage, defense spending — distills into a straw man. Policy issues with several distinct facets are ground into a single surface that reflects back a mere bumper-sticker slogan.

Consider just two questions: Same-sex marriage and gun control. On SSM, you’re either for “marriage equality” or for “traditional marriage.” Very little serious attention is paid to the best, ideologically hybrid solutions, like splitting religious and civil marriage or treating marriage like a personal contract like any other. On gun control, you’re either in favor or against tougher laws; not many have bothered to adjust their solution set in light of a copious stream of data that suggests that some regulations are useful and others aren’t.

America’s problems have solutions. Social discord has an exit strategy. But as long as we insist on treating every policy question like a zero-sum game with only one valid answer per ideology, we all lose.

Politics & Culture

The Fortnight in Politics: Right to Work, Fiscal Cliff, Sandy Hook, Susan Rice Withdraws, Amash Gets Spanked

No Comments

It’s been a month, hasn’t it? The astonishingly mild 60-degree winter in West Michigan serves as a counterpoint to the depressingly extreme politics beyond the Grand Rapids area. Several news ledes warrant a quick review.

Right-to-Work in Michigan

Big Labor picked a fight of their own choosing. Michigan’s One Tough Nerd, Gov. Rick Snyder, decided to fight back, after trying for most of his term to keep labor issues off the table entirely.

Michigan, as a labor-heavy state and birthplace of industrial unionization in the U.S., has long enjoyed a peaceful if uneasy truce in state politics over labor issues. Mutually Assured Destruction, of a sorts. This truce was broken last year, when Bob King — elected in mid-2010 as president of the United Auto Workers — saw the “tea” leaves in Wisconsin and tried to prevent a similar showdown in the Wolverine State.

Backed primarily by the UAW, Michigan unions pushed hard for Proposal 2, a 2012 ballot initiative that would have enshrined a full-throated right to collective bargaining within the state constitution. The proposal failed, equally hard; it went down 57/42 in a state that gave Barack Obama and Debbie Stabenow healthy re-elect margins. King recently suggested that he felt the fight was necessary to protect organized labor. Fair or foul, King knew that if he proceeded with Prop 2, that the Legislature would follow with an RTW initiative. Thus, Prop 2 having been resoundingly defeated, the Legislature acted, and Snyder signed the bills. Despite the drama of union thugs raining down upon the Capital, the entire ordeal unfolded quickly and without too much messiness. And to think — RTW could have been avoided had the UAW kept its powder dry. That’s gotta sting.

The Big Labor argument boils down to this: Since everyone who works in a given union shop enjoys the benefits that accrue to the collective bargaining agreement, allowing non-dues-paying employees to enjoy those benefits amounts to unfair free-riding. (The nature of the free-riding mechanism is always merely asserted, never explained.)  The counter-argument is equally simple: Employees should not be forced to pay to join an organization that doesn’t reflect their values. The whole RTW issue would play out differently politically if the unions weren’t basically the chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party.

The irony of it all is that when it comes to abortion — when a human life is at stake — Dems plead for “choice” but when it comes to working conditions, they suggest that “choice” is an evil. Funny, isn’t it? And by funny I mean idiotic.

The Fiscal Cliff

As of this writing, semi-secret discussions between President Obama and Speaker Boehner continue. There are some indications that the GOP would be willing to accept higher rates on millionaires in return for significant spending concessions and meaningful entitlement reform. The White House doesn’t seem all that eager for a deal, on the assumption that if it waits long enough, Republicans will eventually cave.

I have no clue how this will end up. I do know that irrespective of any specific policy or spending proposal currently on the table, the United States remains on a fiscal trajectory that, in the long run, will prove ruinous. We simply cannot continue to spend like drunken sailors — the IOUs will one day come due, and when that happens, the adjustment pain will increase for every fiscal year we delay serious action.

Obama’s single-minded insistence on higher taxes for the “wealthy” is somewhat difficult to fathom. Surely POTUS is aware that even at 100 percent tax rates on all incomes above $1 million, the Treasury would only net about $616 billion — which, according to John Stossel writing in Forbes, amounts to a paltry one-third of the deficit. And that assumes that the wealthy wouldn’t change their behavior to mitigate their tax liability or change their behavior to reduce their financial risk, and that the lock-up of that money wouldn’t engender a significant economic contraction that lessens the size of the tax base.

The real problem is spending. As I’ve said before, when your entire political-economic platform consists of playing Santa Claus to the nation, it’s hard to accept when the bill comes due that your magic credit card has been maxed out. The Dems genuinely have no alternative strategy for addressing high spending and over-generous entitlement programs. Until they do, the plan of “tax the rich” and “leave Medicare alone” will do little but increase the price future generations will have to pay.

I hope the House GOP caucus sticks together and demands substantial structural reform. I’ll forgive tax hikes if it means we can finally get the spending beast under control with real — not paper, not baseline — reductions in discretionary and entitlement spending.

Sandy Hook Shooting

Last week’s shooting is a tragedy of the first rank. As of this writing, it seems that a young man with a history of mental illness stole some guns from his mother, killed her, forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary and started firing. Dozens died.

The media’s instinct is to “not politicize” the tragedy, which is code for tut-tutting anyone who dares suggest that gun control ought not be on the agenda.

Time and again, we see mass shootings and then in the aftermath, it becomes clear that various taxpayer-funded social-services entities adjudged the danger but failed to act. Instead of directing one’s ire toward gun owners, perhaps we should start to hold the various psychologists and social workers to account, whose negligence allowed a dangerous mentally-ill person to roam free. I’m not entirely serious about this, but it does seem odd that we’re quicker to blame an inanimate object than the specific counselors and therapists who fell down on the job.

The gun-control argument is interesting, in one sense. Proponents suggest that there were no guns, then even a perpetrator suffering from mental illness would end up wrecking less carnage. Perhaps that’s true, but I’m skeptical. First, there are just too many guns in the U.S.; you couldn’t confiscate them all, even if such were permitted by the courts and Congress. Second, a person bent on committing violent crimes might use a gun if he can find one, but if he can’t, he might resort to something else. There’s a reason why bombings are popular in countries with tough gun laws — just ask the Irish. Bad people will find a way to do bad things. Instead of trying to whack at the hydra’s head of weapons choices, perhaps we should re-think our approach to treating mental illness. Particularly when the patient’s suicidal or homicidal ideations are obvious.

Susan Rice Withdraws

Sparing her boss the drama of a confirmation fight, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice has asked that her name be withdrawn from consideration to serve as America’s next Secretary of State. Press reports suggest that Sen. John Kerry may well end up being the nominee.

Rice angered Republicans when she went on a whirlwind Sunday-TV interview circuit, weeks before the election, and repeated blatantly false talking points about the attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya — an act of premeditated terrorism that left Ambassador Stevens and several other Americans dead. The White House still hasn’t gotten its story straight about what it knew and when it knew it, regarding the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo.

Rice disqualified herself through her intransigence about those interviews. Her withdrawal marks the first good sense she’s demonstrated in this debacle. 

Justin Amash Learns the Price of Radical Individualism

The Second Coming of Ron Paul has been on a roll. After spending a first term in Congress as the black sheep of the Republican Caucus —

(The Weekly Standard) When I asked fellow freshman Republican Renee Ellmers of North Carolina about Amash, she laughed nervously. “He doesn’t play nice with others,” said Ellmers, a Tea Party conservative popular with the House leadership. … For the Republican establishment, Amash may be more an amusing spectacle than a serious threat. After the first ask, the GOP leadership doesn’t bother whipping Amash on votes. Committee chairs have learned he’s not likely to budge and usually don’t try to negotiate with him. No congressman is an island, but Amash comes close.

Michael Warren’s story in The Weekly Standard is worth reading in full. It tells the tale of a first-term Congressman who’s drinking up the hard-core Libertarian limelight and casting ideologically pure votes in that vein with no regard for party discipline or constituent instruction. And then he has the balls to say he was purged because he was too conservative? I throw the B.S. card on that one.

Amash won because in 2010, the grown-up vote split between two experienced, seasoned primary candidates. Amash got the Paulite wing, and the youth vote.

After 2010, the redistricting changed the district to include a much deeper swath to the south. If the Democrats get their act together, a seat that’s been a mainstay of men like Gerald Ford, Paul Henry and Vern Ehlers could very well flip blue.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Of Bread, Circuses and Ovaries

No Comments

The 99 percent. The 47 percent. Sandra Fluke. Cardinal Dolan versus Secretary Sebelius. Single women giving 68 percent of their vote to Barack Obama. Each of these talking points waltzes around a thorny problem for American governance: The challenge of entitlement reform in a culture with far too many fallen soldiers in its “little platoons.”

The GOP consultant class, diving into the post-election crosstabs, are trying to make rain for themselves by noting “unexpected” electoral trends, like the rate of single women going for the Democrats. Although I certainly applaud their zeal to keep themselves employed, their potential future employers ought to ask, How did you clowns not see coming a trend as old as the Roman Empire and as evergreen as Tocqueville?

It’s a commonplace for economists to claim that people are fundamentally rational. In the aggregate, people tend to make prudent short- and long-term choices that redound to their own advantage. That’s why economics works fairly well as a predictive theory.

Concurrently, sociologists have lamented since the Moynihan Report the fracturing of the American family. The two-parent family, with a working father and a homemaking mother and a typical family size above the population-replenishment rate, is transitioning. Single parenthood, divorce, the sociocultural legitimization of same-sex attraction — these pressures have modified the political and economic calculus that the average citizen must factor. Cultural conservatives have done much to decry these shifts but precious little to change them apart from sitting on the sidelines offering boos and hisses.

Thus, the question: If it’s culturally and economically viable for a single female to thrive on her own terms — as promiscuous or as chaste as she wishes; married or unmarried; barren or fecund; straight or gay; obligated to her family or not — then what’s her Plan B when family and network support aren’t up to the task?

I’m not talking about the morning-after pill. Human society has always emphasized intergenerational support as a mechanism for protecting against illness, injury or old age. Within kin networks, in your youth you relied on your parents and grandparents, and in your old age you relied on your children. Extended family helped, too, and in many places affinity groups — churches, benevolent associations, labor unions — pitched in to cover gaps. Once upon a time we called these institutions “civil society.”

The atomization of the family and the turn toward more robust and unhindered individualism turned this model on its head. For many, many people — and most especially, single females — Plan B isn’t family or a social network, but the promise of baseline support from the government.

Yes, many Republicans mouth their outrage at this turn of events. Yet whether the sound bite is Romney’s 47 percent remark or Rush Limbaugh’s idea of a “nation of takers,” the reality is that a sizeable proportion of the population has no other reliable catastrophic fallback. No savings, no spouse, too small of a family. Only Big Government is positioned to fill the gap, and without that backstop, a person’s just one step away from the abyss with no safety net at the bottom.

And you know what? This trust in providential government is rational. Trusting the government to care for you, when you have no one else who will, provides psychological comfort. It’s also economically rational. Thus, voters will support politicians who protect their Plan B.

The conservative talking-points on Big Government ring hollow with folks who trust Uncle Sam to catch them if they fall. Part of this disconnect might be simple cognitive dissonance: People support “caring government” for others as a sign of enlightened social compassion without acknowledging that their support is partially selfish. Sometimes — look, for example, at the Occupy nonsense — a trust in government is a convenient outlet for envy.

In any case, a message of “smaller government” that “gets out of your life” appeals to people who follow the older life plan of larger families, connected local networks and wealth-building thrift. If you don’t have that infrastructure behind you, all you’re hearing is “we’re taking away your safety net, you leeches.” Appeals to fiscal restraint become too academic, too coldly calculating to resonate — especially when the “other side” argues that that the cost savings will simply revert to the wealthy.

The Republicans have a real rhetorical deficit on this point. I worry, though, that the Democrats have an even worse problem: Eventually, someone’s going to have to pay the bill. When you offer bread and circuses on the public dime, the public is going to demand that you get the dimes from somewhere. When the sources dry up, so also does the public benefit. When that happens ….

Democrats have been disingenuous about entitlement reform. It’s as if they believe they can find ways to fund a generous welfare state indefinitely, contrary to the experience of social democracies across Europe. Raising taxes on the wealthy won’t cut it, and they know it, but just like the Republican refuse to concede that that they’ve lost the culture war, the Democrats refuse to concede … math.

We’re therefore facing the odd problem of two major political parties cum ideologies that could be positioned to take up a reform mantle within their scope of interest, but instead pick incoherent fights with straw men.Republicans should probably lay off the moralizing about the shift away from the Eisenhower-style family. Democrats should probably stop lying about entitlement spending.

Either way, the next few decades will prove fascinating. The premise of American government rests on intermediary institutions and federalism to check the popular excesses that appear at the federal level. The more we take knock down those barriers, the more likely it is that our worst impulses will be unimpeded by our best instincts.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Civility in Modern Discourse: A Brief Reflection

1 Comment

In the foreword to her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman offers what at first blush feels like an out-of-place observation: Evils like domestic violence or child sexual assault persist because people are too polite to confront it. Thus, witnesses’ eyes avert and people adopt a not-my-business demeanor to rationalize their lack of courage to stand up for the helpless.

In a book about complex post-traumatic stress disorder, an introduction about evil — and how civility enables evil — represents a curious rhetorical strategy. Yet it fits. Stories abound about how no one intervened to help a battered wife or molested kid, but after the news became public friends and neighbors said there was something they coudn’t quite pin down that felt amiss.

Yeah. That something was their own moral cowardice, conveniently obscured under the color of civility.

Civility as a civic virtue has taken something of an odd turn in the last half-century. Whereas once it represented the mutual respect of citizens and the observance of polite manners, now it’s morphing into something less coherent. Consider:

  1. The new civility says we shouldn’t judge others, for anything, at any time. If you disapprove of the behavior of another, you’re socially obligated to keep your own counsel, even when you believe that the other person’s behavior is wrong or harmful. Civility and nonjudgmentalism are becoming increasingly synonymous.
  2. Civility applies only to people within the in-crowd. Social demonstration that you’re not in the in-crowd means you’re no longer worthy of civil treatment. This strategy of moral isolationism is particularly effective on the Left; if you don’t support certain policy goals like “marriage equality” or “environmental protection” then you’re not just wrong, you’re outside the scope of respectability and may therefore be treated cruelly, dismissively or unfairly as punishment for holding a contrary opinion. In a sense, civility is the social mark of tribalism: You extend it to fellow travelers and withhold it from the tribe’s enemies.
  3. Civility has become something of a scare word for political moderates, who seem to think “civility” requires everyone to accept half a loaf for comity’s sake. A good No Labels kind of moderate would look at an NRA member and a Brady Campaign member and decide that virtue meant banning only half the country’s guns. Perhaps those with an odd-numbered serial number. Whether the half-a-loaf strategy is even coherent never seems to matter; what matters is that the Civil Moderate gets to feel smug for playing a modern-day King Solomon.

The ties that bind us in community have been fraying for a long time. The idea that neighbors have a responsibility for each other, or that everyone deserves to be treated decently even when you disagree, seem to be derogating in favor of a civility-as-nonjudgmentalism that undermines the power of public expectation to maintain public morals.

Once upon a time, if a man backhanded his wife in public, everyone would know and he’d either have to reform or be ostracized. Now, people simply avert their gaze when they witness domestic violence — or at the least, decide it’s solely a police matter.

Thus does the new civility undermine the old community.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Reflections on the “After Liberalism” Essays in “First Things”

1 Comment

Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.

Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”

Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.

Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.

In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!

Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?

Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.

The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?

As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Reflections on the "After Liberalism" Essays in "First Things"

1 Comment

Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.
Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”
Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.
Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.
In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!
Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?
Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.
The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?
As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.

Personal

The Experts Speak: Style for a 30-Something

No Comments

Last weekend I enjoyed a lovely 15-minute coffee-shop conversation with a pair of GVSU students. The girls had been giggling about a patron who had just left; he was a fairly short and pudgy male, probably in his late 40s, with thinning hair. The girls thought his attire was grossly age-inappropriate — he was dressed head-to-toe in too-tight Aeropostale clothes, including a teal polo with the big “A” logo on it and a bit of chest hair flashing over the top. He also wore tight, ripped light jeans, flip-flops and a clamshell necklace. And you can’t forget the gold hoops in each ear. A veritable walking stereotype.

As I recall, I made some pithy comment to one of them about their observations that started our shared conversation. Short version: They thought that “older people” (defined, as best as I could tell, as folks over 30) shouldn’t try to dress like college students. I was more agnostic about it.

On their major point, I am sympathetic. On one hand, it’s not my business to tell people how to dress. If a 90-year-old wants to rock out a faux hawk with his Volcom T-shirt, leather bracelets and tartan Vans, more power to him. Just like the 19-year-old with the tweed jacket and bow tie is free to dress as he likes.

But people are people, and our clothes help tell the story about who we are. They’re an immediate visual indicator of our tastes and socioeconomic status. They identify any sociocultural tribe to which we voluntarily associate. So, although one’s apparel isn’t anyone else’s business — clothes do send a message. There’s a degree of prudence in playing the game.

As it happens, the conversation last week coincided with the the arrival of a few magazines, including Men’s Health and Details, that shared their own perspective on what men ought to wear in the summer 2012 season. Me being me, I then spent the better part of a week thinking through the somewhat insecure question of what message my own clothes send, and what a 30-something guy should or shouldn’t wear. I even scoured some style magazines and websites (well, briefly — I was interested in the subject, not obsessed by it).

Observations from the self-appointed guardians of male style:

  1. Despite the comments about “men in their 30s,” the real age bracket is more like 27-to-37, although a person’s weight and visual signs of aging (grey hair, wrinkles) affect the sorting. A 35-year-old who worshipped the sun during his college years may well fall into the over-40 bucket if he looks like a wrinkled prune, whereas a 35-year-old athlete with great teeth and good hair can still pull off the 20-something look without difficulty.
  2. Men who are clearly adults and no longer in their extended adolescence should wear clothes that fit. Well-tailored clothes send a message of competence. Too-tight or too-loose equals too sloppy. As do hoodies.
  3. Avoid no-name “uniform” clothes, even if you’re married with children. The Gap jeans and T-shirt (or polo), or the khakis and button-down, that are worn often enough to constitute an informal uniform are a sign of surrender. Vary it up.
  4. Brands matter more. Certain labels are associated with — indeed, are iconic of — youth. Think Abercrombie or Hollister, then avoid them. Some stores, like The Buckle, cross age brackets (especially if you’re a Nickelback fan), but the older you get the more ridiculous you look when you peacock. Trendy clothing for the urban chic look for the 30-somethings — the kind that gets you a pass to the front of the line at an upper-tier Vegas nightclub — usually cannot be acquired at an average suburban shopping mall, although if you’re into the vintage scene a local consignment store may prove useful. Guys with the physique to pull off a closely tailored look may find Express or its equivalents an good choice.
  5. Accessories count. An expensive watch, a well-designed belt or a couple of pairs of high-quality shoes matter and can set off an otherwise routine wardrobe selection. As do jewelry choices: The clamshell should permanently retire, as should the 60-gauge spacers, but a couple of subdued bracelets or a ring or two are fine.
  6. If you wear hats, substitute the ratty, backwards-turned baseball cap for something like a newsboy or a thin-brimmed fedora.
  7. Hair styles convey station. If your hair says, “I could only get a job in an indie records store” and you’re in your 30s, you’re telegraphing a future of lifetime earnings in the lower quintile. Not an attractive prospect for potential mates. And if you’re thinning on top, for heaven’s sake, lose the ponytail. No one likes looking at Gallagher.
  8. Tattoo with caution. When skin sags, so does the ink.
  9. Always dress a half-step more crisply than everyone else, regardless of the situation.
  10. Watch color palettes. If (like me) you’re brown-haired and hazel-eyed, you will look better with earth tones like browns and greens and oranges. This rule governs accessories, too — I’d look better with golds than silvers, which is unfortunate since I think black/grey/blue/silver makes the prettiest color combo. Find a way to flash color, like a pocket square or a tie or bold socks or something.

The core message that today’s style sentries share makes a lot of sense: As you age, your clothes serve as at-a-glance proxies about your socioeconomic status and cultural affiliations. Dress how you like, but the guidance seems to favor fine things — watches, shoes — and well-tailored clothes set off by bold colors.

Decent advice … that I usually manage to ignore.