#60: Why the Constitution Can't Stop the Dog's Eating

My good friend A.G., prosperous attorney and man about town during the day, is also the caped superhero, Scourge of Left, by night. As soon as the sun sets each day, he quickly finds a Tim Horton’s men’s room and swaps his Armani knock-off for his Conservative superhero costume modeled on Washington’s outfit in the famous full length portrait. Assuring himself that his powdered wig is on straight, he ventures out to do battle with the evil forces of the Left, embodied (yes, embodied) in the lissom bodies of errant young lawyettes who have strayed into socialist fields by listening to the siren songs of socialist Svengalis. We owe him much for his tireless efforts on the behalf of Western civilization!

Ok, enough of that.

It was fascinating to me, A.G., that in your comment on my last post, you drew attention to the U.S. Constitution. The reason is that that post had commenced life as a reflection on the Federalist Papers, a reflection which addressed the very point you make!

Yes, as we both agree, there exists no natural monitor or governor on popular greed or governmental appeasement of that greed. I see this as a terminal problem, but you believe that the U.S. Constitution provides an artificial governor on that appeasement.

My first response to your point is that if there does exist such a monitor, the evidence suggests that it is utterly ineffective, since Obama has jacked up the U.S. national debt to over 10 trillion dollars in feeding the entitlement appetite.

But on a more historical note, I believe that you do have a point. Conservatives who are interested in using the Founding Fathers for political conversions do not usually mention that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were as suspicious of masses as they were of monarchs, and they argued that the Constitution was as designed to defend us against a dictatorship of the mob as it was of a would-be monarch. Of course, the Conservatives inveigh against the East Coast snooty-poos and the Leftoids inveigh against the “right wing extrmists,” but the Founding Fathers were actually worried about both, as well as about leaving the important matters of state to individual citizens.

Which is why the U.S. is a republic and not a direct democracy.

The famous “checks and balances” were supposed to be a bulwark not only against one part of government becoming tyrannical, but also against “the people” becoming tyrannical. And it worked, for a time. What changed?

I think a number of things changed within the electorate that made an end-run around the artificial checks and balances possible.

The electorate of post revolution times consisted of farmers, small merchants, and artisans. All of these were independent minded people quite suspicious of government. That they were also shrewd is evidenced by the way the Federalist Papers appeal to them. The articles are all carefully argued, carefully reasoned efforts to rationally persuade the electorate that their own interests are best served by a unification of the states under a single constitution. This bunch of people would have snorted and spit if someone tried to sell them the snake-oil of “social justice,” and that was because they made their livings with their hands and backs and were not likely to give their money away lightly for a song and a story.

By way of contrast, the U.S. electorate today includes 47% who are parasites, who pay no taxes. If we add to that the percentage of people who work for government and the non-governmental union members, we begin to realize that even if the productive portion of the country still has the values of independence that controlled government vote-buying, that portion is massively outvoted by the remainder that is glued to the government teat.

What this means is that the Constitution can no longer be relied on to control populist appeasement spending.

The rot began with Wilson, was hugely increased under Roosevelt, and the final nail was put in the coffin by L.B.J..

The Founding Fathers never anticipated the electorate we face today, and even as we speak, the Democrat majority is in the process of increasing this dependent underclass by another ten million in a single shot by granting amnesty to the illegals.

The motto of the Democrat party is this: if the poor, illiterate, and stupid don’t exist, we have to either create them or import them or both. They create them by crashing the economy and they import them with a skewed immigration policy that focuses on increasing welfare recipients. Any improvement in the national standard of living is a political problem for the Democrat Party, not a cause of rejoicing.

#59: Damn, This Dog Just Won't Stop Eating!

Let’s talk about “Populism.”

Populism must be distinguished from Socialism, though the two are closely related. Socialism is nothing other than populism with a pseudo-scientific mask. Both are efforts to harness the power of simple greed and envy. But people, particularly people of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are uncomfortable with their own greed and envy, and so the clever politicians invented a narrative in which their greed and envy resurfaced in the guise of fairness and justice. This narrative capitalized (no irony intended) on the powerful Enlightenment trend of science and pseudo-science from the 18^th c on, this narrative was the Socialism of Marx and Engels. What Marx decided was “let’s give Populism a popular 18^th c Materialist cloak and a trendy scientific ‘look’. Yeah! That’s the ticket, we’ll turn Populism into a ‘science’ which ‘proves’ that greed and envy are really fairness and justice!”

“I love it!” he said to Engels, “Ain’t bullshit great when you serve it on a plate?” (loosely translated from the German)

That was the brilliant first step. The brilliant next step came from Lenin, who said to himself, “the pseudo science thing is good, but it can’t hurt to make it a secular religion, too! Yeah! That’s the ticket, we don’ need no God to make a good religion!” Stalin, of course, took that thought and ran with it.

The point is that if we focus on Socialism, we are not looking at the root phenomenon. Socialism is not the name of a societal impulse, it is the name of a marketing strategy, a sales story or narrative.

Populism has been around for quite a long time, it’s an answer to the question that has vexed rulers for as far back as rulers have existed. I suppose the question came into existence just around the time that people left behind that mythical condition that Hobbes called “the state of nature” that preceded any society at all. The question is: How do you control all those people?

Most of the time the answer was simply threat and killing. Those who respond to threat, you keep and enslave, those who don’t, you kill. But, eventually it dawned on rulers that there was another consideration, namely that of national productivity. The problem with the primitive repression method was twofold, 1) it was always risky for the rulers, and 2) that the wealth required to maintain a state did not seem to be generated under primitive repression. There’s always an overhead to running a state, even a slave state. You have to pay your army, and pay it well, and you have to feed the slaves, so as to produce the wealth with which you pay your army. The rulers in such a state are only safe as long as they can keep their army satisfied. This problem is exemplified in the state of North Korea today, and it is trying to solve it by blackmailing the outside world with nuclear weaponry. Primitive repression, as it turned out, was not a very good system, not even for the rulers.

The Romans had a better idea: Populism at home, primitive repression in the empire. The rulers of Rome were safer than their primitive repression antecedents. Of course, there were ongoing assassinations, but these were often prompted more by the insanity of the rulers than by the nature of the system. The empire could be sucked dry of its wealth for the maintenance of the army, but, more important, that wealth made it possible for the rulers to buy the passivity of their citizens. The Romans, bless them, invented (drum roll!) … ENTITLEMENTS!

The Romans gave their citizens “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses). Of course, that was still a far cry from free health care, free education, welfare, working for the government, etc. etc. etc., but it was one of Rome’s most lasting inventions (right up there with roads and aqueducts!).

But people are naturally greedy and ungrateful. What have you done for me lately? they ask. And they’re fickle. Once the Pandora’s Box of entitlements was opened, the only way of acquiring power was by trumping an opponent’s offers. That’s how we went from panem et circenses to free enrolment at the Sorbonne and welfare in the Bronx.

Once we left primitive repression behind and the people’s voice (the vox populi) got a say in who got to milk the national cow, the mechanism for acquiring power automatically became Populism or the distribution of new entitlements.

Now, one could argue, as many have done, that this is a great system because the power acquisition mechanism for the greedy would-be rulers mechanically assures the distribution of national wealth to the citizenry. And there is truth to this, since the unwashed masses (I’m not speaking specifically of the French here), the hoi polloi, have done much better under this system than any preceding one. However, the system suffers from an intrinsic and fatal flaw. The system forces the rulers to offer benefits that the national wealth cannot pay for. To put the system’s internal problem as succinctly as possible: the modern democratic system lacks a natural internal governor on entitlement spending.

What I mean is this: the impulse to acquire political power is psychologically natural; the greed and envy of the electorate is psychologically natural; but there exists no psychologically natural impulse to curtail the desire for power or greed and envy.

I’ve been told, don’t know if it’s true, that dogs have no internal monitor on their eating, that, unless stopped by their owner, they will eat until they die. The problem of the democratic state is that it is like a dog in this respect.

Thus, the financial problem for the rulers is always the same: how do we pay for the panem et circenses? There have always been only two possible sources of money: outside the nation and inside the nation. These days, nations are finding that their options have dramatically shrunk.

Originally, they took the path of least resistance, they solved the problem by looting enslaved colonies. But the cost-benefit equation increasingly turned against this strategy until the imperialist nations found that their colonies were actually costing more to control than they were yielding in wealth. The imperialists left their colonies, most often in expensive, protracted, stupid, and bloody conflicts. They still had to pay the costs of ever increasing panem et circenses. So, they turned to the inside, to taxation.

But while the unwashed masses, a.k.a. the electorate, quite naturally psychologically loves having its greed and envy satisfied, it equally naturally psychologically hates the opposite of that, namely being taxed. And so the government, the rulers, did the clever and inevitable thing, they taxed the few in order to provide the panem et circenses of the many.

And here we arrive at the inevitable, the inexorable consequence of democracy: Populism, the attempt to control a large mass of people by harnessing the greed and envy of the majority against a productive minority.

But even the most extreme taxation on the productive minority has failed to yield the requisite amount of money, so they now they turn once again to the outside, only this time in the form of borrowing.

This dog just won’t stop eating! It’s gonna die.

Marx thought there was a “logic” to history, a natural, inevitable progression in which capitalism was just a stage on the way to the ultimate classless society. It may be that he was half-right, that there is natural mechanical progression in the affairs of men, but that he was wrong where it would end and how. History has seemed to take us from primitive repression states to increasingly democratic ones. But the democratic ones seem to suffer from an internal defect that will not lead them to the so-called workers’ paradise, the “classless society,” but rather to an inevitable collapse, from which will arise, most likely, societies once more of primitive repression.

#58: The BIG Oil Spill: Conspiracy or Coincidence?

I love a good conspiracy theory.

I would probably be a conspiracy believer if I weren’t so convinced of the incompetence of conspirators and the inevitability of unintended consequences. But, if I can’t get in on the fun by believing some conspiracies, I can, at the very least, participate by occasionally contributing one. Here’s one I haven’t seen anywhere yet.

Just a short time ago, an off-shore drilling rig exploded, killing some of the workers and creating an enormous and continuing oil spill off the southern U.S. coast.

A short time before the explosion, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. announced that he would be allowing the development of further off-shore drilling.

Now, the drilling announcement was met, on the one hand, with surprise and relief by millions of American who thought it no less than common sense to develop America’s own resources when it was being blackmailed and sucked dry by the Arabs; it was met predictably, on the other hand, with shock, dismay, and a sense of betrayal by what is generally considered Obama’s “base,” the ultra-left screaming wackos. How could he? they screamed, Why would he?

Well, the answer to both of those questions seems pretty obvious. There are mid-term elections coming down the pike, drawing rapidly ever nearer, and the democrat chances are looking pretty grim. Perhaps, said the Bamster to himself, I can bleed off a few of the “independents” by doing what Clinton did, namely “move towards the center.” All I need to do, he said to himself, is something that will allow them to think what they really want to think anyway, namely that I’m really just a “pragmatic” guy, not an extreme leftie ideologue, and giving out a few new drilling licenses will convince them that I’m really not in the pocket of the eco-nazis, that I’m also “independent,” just like them, and that I can be depended on to do the common sense thing. Yeah, he said to himself, that's the ticket!

Of course, the problem with his reasoning would have been immediately apparent to any one of the brains he keeps around him. It would have seemed to them that while such a move might gain some independents, it would equally likely lose some loyalists. At best, it would only have a very small net gain, at worst, a large net loss, most likely no net change at all. Unless… unless … unless …

Unless, one of them thought, we could add a little complication that could turn his move into a bonanza for the left generally, and for the eco-freaks particularly.

What if, they said to themselves, what if, if after a bit of time following the granting of the licenses, there were to be a major ecological disaster?

Well, how would that help us? asked Obama (not being the sharpest knife in the drawer).

Well, answered the brain, if there were an oil disaster, then you could immediately put a halt on all of those new licenses (which has just been done) and you would still have gained your new Independents while retaining your loyalists. The independents would say, He's an ok guy, he can't help stopping the new drilling, it'sot his fault. The leftoid crazies would say, He's an ok guy, he stopped the drilling, he was on our side all along.

But, even better than that, the brain went on, this disaster would make any future off-shore drilling application a sure-fire d.o.a.. And, in addition, he said, it would further depress the American economy (which always makes a population turn to bigger government).

From a leftoid’s point of view, he said, this could be the gift that keeps on giving.

So, the question one has to ask oneself is this: Did the Bamster or one of his brains have anything to do with the causing of this accident? Here are some reflections.

The last big spill was the Exxon Valdez (why do they always pronounce it “Valdeez” on the news?) way back in Mar of 1989. Is it just a coincidence that, after 21 years of off-shore drilling without incident all around the world, that there should be a major oil spill just shortly after the granting of new licenses by a president who is in the pocket of the eco-nazi movement? I, for one, find that a bit too much of a coincidence.

There seems to have been absolutely no investigation of exactly what caused the explosion. Isn’t that strange? Could it have been, for example, just one of those shoulder fired mini-missiles so common in the U.S. armory?

Admit it, it could have gone down exactly like this:

The pressure is getting to the Bamster, it looks like November is going to be democrat Armageddon. He needs to do something, he calls in, say, some like mindeds from the Pentagon, and they send out a couple of reliable agents. The agents get themselves all wet-suited, go out on a raft, take a bead on the rig, and Bob’s your uncle, the whole thing is done.

Too crazy for you? How about this?

I just heard on the news that there was an actual emergency plan specifically targeted on the exact kind of spill that just occurred. Mysteriously, it was not activated, even though the locals were aware of it and were just waiting for the orders to begin.

All of this, a coincidence? I think not, I’m afraid, I think not.

#57: Determinism & Neo-Determinism; Freedom-Handicaps; and Liberalism

I’m talking about the philosophical theory called “Determinism,” a doctrine that is as at home in the European Enlightenment as Socialism is. The notion usually shows up as one half of a problem, 0ne of the most popular and enduring philosophical chestnuts with which to entertain and puzzle undergraduates: the free-will/determinism conflict.

The Determinism in question is usually called “Causal Determinism” because it emerges from reflections on nature and the way it is governed by causal laws. Once people became aware of science as an accumulation of related laws, they also drew the conclusion that there exist no exceptions to law-governed behavior. The underlying faith of science is that all natural change is law governed, whether we happen at any point in time to know which laws are actually in play or not. A further implication of this faith, some have thought, is that human behavior, no less than that of the planets, is itself fully law-governed and therefore fully determined. It would seem that this line of reflection inexorably leads to the conclusion that there is no free will.

The reason lies in the strong, if cryptic, intuition that “being free” means “being able to have done otherwise.” Was I free when I chose my Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks? On this intuition, I was free only if it’s true that I could have done other than I did, by buying, let’s say, a Cafe Americano. But, argues the causal determinist, since each of us is a machine and thereby governed by immutable causal laws, we could no more refrain from the Caramel Macchiato than a ball rolling down a hill can arbitrarily choose to stop or a clock arbitrarily change the time it is showing.

I think that I’m not going too far in saying that, all things considered, Causal Determinism has not taken any damage in this 400 year conflict. It has a very strong case. At least a part of the reason for this is that the increasingly powerful secular-scientific lobby has successfully pushing the view that Causal Determinism implies some very specific moral, social, and political positions. Among these are the following two BIG ones:

1) The law should only be an instrument of protection and rehabilitation, not punishment or justice. The law should protect all of its citizens, law-breakers included, from each other. Law breakers are not to be punished, since punishment presumes that the criminal had choice, which enlightened people understand is not the case. Law breakers are broken or maladjusted machines, to be repaired or readjusted, not made to suffer.

2) Since people could not have done otherwise, they are never free, and, since never free, never responsible for what they do.

Now, the move from Causal Determinism to the moral, social, and political policies is, I think, completely unwarranted. The former can be true, which I think it is, and the latter still be bad policies. This is not a new idea, it was already argued very well near the end of the 17^th c by John Locke. The view is called “Compatibilism” because it holds that freedom and Causal Determinism are compatible.

A Compatibilist maintains that people can in fact be free. They are free, he says, whenever they could do other than they do, given that they want to do the other thing. Being free, he argues, is simply nothing standing in your way of doing what you want to do. He doesn’t care why you want what you want, just that nothing is stopping you from going after it. When that is the case, he says that you’re free. The causal determinist does care about why you want what you want, and he doesn’t care whether it’s true that nothing is stopping you from going after it. All he cares about is that your past and your body are determining what it is that you want.

I think that Locke is in the right on this, but Hume, some 75 years later, elaborates and clarifies his point. We never ask whether a ball rolling down a hill is free or not. And, more specifically, we never complain that a ball lacks freedom because it is incapable of suspending or violating the laws of motion. That is, where an inanimate object is concerned, we don’t think that the object’s leaving the control of the laws of nature would constitute “freedom” for it.

The reason is that balls rolling down hills don’t have goals or objectives. The ball is not, as Aristotle thought, “trying to get to it’s home” (his explanation of gravity). We do, however, speak of “setting an animal free” and of animals being in “captivity.” Perhaps this is no more than anthropomorphization, perhaps not, but it indicates that we apply the notion of freedom only where we believe there exist wants, desires, goals, or objectives. “Freedom,” thus is a very limited notion, applying only to one’s ability to satisfy one’s wants or achieve one’s goals. As Hume puts it, freedom is either this or it is nothing (meaningless). It is true that our wants and goals are the causal results of our personal histories, our genetic endowments, and our others physical inheritances, but to say that we are “free” is nothing other than to say that nothing stands in the way of our satisfying those wants and achieving those goals.

But Locke and Hume don’t have to be right on this question, since I’m quite willing to grant Causal Determinism to the Enlightenment’s Liberal descendants for the moment because what puzzles me is not their being Causal Determinists or even their extending this theory to moral, social, and political doctrines, but rather their apparent inconsistency.

Conservatives are constantly disturbed and offended by what they perceive to be “double-standards” being applied by liberals. What is a “double-standard”? It is applying one set of expectations for, say, moral behavior or rationality to one population, while applying another lesser one to another. Here are some obvious examples:

1) The rich and the poor. Characteristically, rich criminals are excoriated with the entire vocabulary of blame, while the poor are exempted from any responsibility.

2) The white and the black (or Hispanic or gay; strangely, Asians do not seem to benefit from this application of the double-standard as the former).

3) The male and the female.

4) Israel and the so-called “Palestinians.”

5) And, lately, we have noticed the same phenomenon occurring with respect to the Tea Party and the vocal Left.

Not least, it is very apparent in 6) the different treatment being accorded to Bush and Obama.

One half of this double standard is perfectly understandable in terms of the Enlightenment legacy of Causal Determinism. People who are the causal products of their histories are not responsible for what they do. Blaming these people would simply be unfair. One could see these positions already explicitly stated in Julien de la Mettrie’s The Man Machine, as well in as in his other writings. Nothing new, nothing unexpected.

But the other side of the double standard is really difficult for these descendants of la Mettrie to defend. Are not the rich, the white, the male, the Israelis, the members of the Tea Party, and, of course, Bush, not equally products of their histories?

The existence of this difference in treatment is so dramatic that it would seem that even the most ideologically brain-damaged Liberal would find herself suffering some cognitive dissonance, but this does not seem to be happening. How can this be? I have a modest answer here.

I think it is because Liberals are not traditional Causal Determinists at all, they are what we might call Neo-Determinists. But, you say, if this is true, why have they not come out and published their new doctrine, the philosophy of Neo-Determinism? The reason, I think, is that while this new doctrine does have some significant political advantages, it also has serious disadvantages that would become quite obvious once the doctrine was brought to the surface. More on this below.

Now, I do believe that Liberals hold, along with everyone else, that responsibility varies directly with degree of freedom; but I think that Liberals also harbor an unspoken commitment to the view that personal freedom and responsibility together actually vary with membership in certain select populations. This barely visible theory, if it can even be called that, is that freedom (and responsibility) varies directly with 1) money, 2) race, 3) sex, 4) education, 5) intelligence, and 6) political affiliation. This means that people with more money are more responsible for what they do, white people more than “people of color”, the better educated more than the less, the smarter more than the stupid, and Conservatives more than Liberals. The precise size of the responsibility discount being applied for each category will vary with the Liberal involved, and these degrees are never very precisely identified, but they are definitely there. And lest you think that “being more responsible” is a “good” thing, for the Liberal mind it is not, it only means “being more hateable and blamable.”

Liberals must keep this doctrine unspoken since it has very unflattering implications for themselves and their supporters. While, on the one hand, the protected groups have the benefit of being able to misbehave with impunity (they cannot help what they do), they only gain this benefit at the cost of being identified as handicapped by either their poverty, their race, their sex, etc, etc, etc. Hence, the cost of being a “protected” group is being, in effect, Freedom-Handicapped.

Thus, Neo-Determinism brings with it the embarrassing implication of Freedom-Handicappedness. But the important point to be noticed here is that Freedom-Handicappedness is a price that Liberals are happy to pay for the privilege of being able to hate and excoriate other populations. If the liberals just remained traditional Causal Determinists, then freedom would become simply impossible for everyone equally. But, on the doctrine of Neo-Determinism, freedom becomes apparently once again possible and available, though it happens to be the case that a large portion of humanity does not have access to it.

That most liberals actually do hold to Neo-Determinism is, I think, indirectly confirmed by the remarkable contempt they display towards even their own side. Of course they show contempt for their own: their own are un-free puppets to be manipulated. This follows from their doctrine.

So much for Liberals. As far as traditional Causal Determinism is concerned, here are a few more remarks.

De la Mettrie hit the nail right on the head with his image of the “man-machine,” for it is this image that underlies traditional CD. It is because man is no more than a machine that he is not free, is fully determined in everything he does and thinks. Some philosophers of the time took the most obvious course by simply denying the CD premise, that man is “no more” than a machine. They granted that a significant part of every person is “material” and thus subject to the laws of nature, but, then proceeded to insist, each person also contains a mind or soul or spirit that is exempt from those laws. Our freedom, they insist, lies precisely in our being a “mental” as well as “material” being.

This is, however, a very risky move to make just for the sake of free will. There might, of course, be other reasons for making it as well, but buying free will at the expense of incurring all the risks and problems associated with a commitment to “mind” seems imprudent.

For one thing, in order for “mind” to actually be capable of supplying freedom, it must be assumed to be exempt from the control of causal laws. But what this means is that more exists than just the natural world. Applying Hamlet’s line, according to the “mind” supporter, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We can easily imagine Immanuel Kant making this claim, since he believes that he has been able to leave room for the possibilities of God’s existence, human freedom, and the immortality of the soul. But Kant doesn’t think that Horatio (or any of us) can ever know that these possibilities are or are not realized. The “mind” supporter does think that he knows that mind is real and is the source of human freedom. The mind supporter thus buys human freedom at the cost of expanding the universe into one that is both natural and non-natural, law governed and non-law governed. This is a hell of a price to pay for a freedom we might well be able to get pretty much for free. And it is for this reason that Compatibilism seems such a bargain: human freedom made possible without the overhead expense of maintaining a soul! What a deal!

#56: American Jews: Lookin’ For Love in all The Wrong Places

Hatikvah is Israel’s national anthem, but since the ethos of the Israelis and American Jews is so different, it might be appropriate to find a separate one for the latter. My own candidate for a new Jewish-American anthem is Lookin’ For Love in All the Wrong Places (sung by Johnny Lee in Urban Cowboy).

A lot of people, most of them reflective Jews, have been puzzled by the twentieth century Jewish infatuation with the Left. The excellent periodical Commentary, for example, ran an entire symposium on the theme Why Are Jews Liberal? and there were as many answers, all of them plausible, as there were contributors. We don’t want to get trapped into the “single-cause” assumption, so I suspect that the truth is that all of those proffered explanations are involved in the phenomenon to varying degrees and among different sub-populations. There is, though, one pervasive factor that seemed to have been missed in that symposium, which is what leads me to dip my own oar in the water on this question.

The Jews have lived with the consciousness of being hated and despised wherever they have gone for more than two thousand years. And this hatred crystallized into very specific libels and stereotypes of evil. In particular, Jews were hated for being greedy and money grubbing, for being insular and clannish, and, in general, for being just plain bad. You’ve got to admit, tough or not, this is bound to get you down eventually. Sooner or later, you’re bound to develop neurotic reactions to this treatment. Some of them seem pretty obvious.

The most obvious one, it seems to me, is that Jews would become neurotically preoccupied with persuading people that they were not at all bad, that they were, in fact, good.

As it turned out, since their behaviour was neurotically determined, not determined by a rational assessment of the situation, their efforts at persuasion have always been doomed. Since they were not hated because of the characteristics they were alleged to have, getting rid of those characteristics did not serve to reverse the situation. People hadn’t hated Jews because they were bad; they hated them, and, because of that, believed them to be bad. More specifically, the fact that the hate came first, the rationale second, was given a theoretical foundation during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. While previously the Church and others allowed for a Jewish “redemption” through conversion, this ended with the doctrine of racial, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism. This was a crucial moment in history, since it set the stage narrative-wise for Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The Jews had to be exterminated because, according to the new doctrine, their evil was not remediable. Since one can change one’s religion, a person who is bad because of their religion can become good by simply changing it. But, as the Nazis maintained, if a person is bad because of what they are (metaphysically), they can never be made good. And the only remaining remedy is to exterminate them.

And since people continued hating them (or they believed that people were still hating them), they continued to work even harder at being publicly and conspicuously GOOD. My point is that Jewish liberalism must be, among other things, a psychological reaction to the situation of Jews in history.

Here are a few elaborations on this theme.

First, this strategy was not going to work with the dominant Protestant population. As Max Weber famously argued, the Protestants developed the acquisition of wealth as a theologically based God-given holy task necessary for the doing of good works. There was no way that these money-grubbing Protestants would not see the Jewish acquisitiveness and efforts at philanthropy as anything other than an attempt to ingratiate themselves (which, on my hypothesis, they largely were).

But not all Jews had philanthropy or good works available to them for proving that their hatred was undeserved. Certainly the Jews of pre-revolution tsarist Russia did not. Therefore, these Jews sought the only other option available, they sought to make common cause with the other sub-groups being mistreated, thinking to persuade at least them that Jews are not evil, but actually good.

But they were looking for love in all the wrong places.

The Russian upper classes despised them; but so did the Russian peasantry; and so, to their shock and horror, did the Russian revolutionary class. They tried the same thing later in Germany, with much the same result. The German socialists used the Jews when they were useful, and murdered them when they were not.

As in the case of all compulsions, the American Jews have never learned from their own history. They have continued to seek the love and approbation of their non-Jewish environment through philanthropy and good works. It hasn’t worked.

They desperately tried to make common cause with American blacks during the civil rights movement. They contributed their money, they contributed their brains, they contributed their influence, and sometimes they even contributed their lives. And, of course, predictably, anti-Semitism is nowhere more entrenched than among American blacks. The blacks used (and use) the Jews when they are useful, and reject them when they are not. Think Jesse Jackson and the Rev'rnd Wright.

But, in addition, a habit born of psychological compulsion does not cease to work when either the causes of the compulsion or even the compulsion itself ceases to exist. What was once a mere compulsion can acquire all the trappings of a moral-philosophical mantra, it can become an auto-biographical narrative, and this has certainly happened in the case of the American Jews.

Just as native Americans have become the environment-loving, spiritual, noble victims of European aggression and vice, and American blacks the poor victims of white racism, so the American Jews have become the modern warriors for right and good. Where self-identification is involved, the game du jour is Let's Pretend.

A further point that is consistent with this thesis is that American Jews have seen fit to reject the affection of possibly the ONLY population in history for whom the Jews have been flavour of the month: the American Evangelicals. This should be no surprise, from a psychological point of view.

The mechanism that underlies the Jewish search for love necessarily involves the conversion of hate into love. Freely offered love is worthless; only a love that has been dearly earned through suffering is satisfying. And so the American Jews keep snuffling around the American black population, and keep being harassed and assaulted, and, at the same time, turn up their noses at friendly overtures from the Evangelicals.

Groucho Marx captures the American Jewish neurosis perfectly in his clever quip:

Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.

I end this discussion with this.

The American Jews voted by a vast majority for Obama despite everything that was known about him that should have warned them, including what he explicitly stated. To them I say: How’s that been working for ya?

I doubt that Johnny Lee is Jewish, but any American Jew could sing:

I was lookin' for love

In all the wrong places

Lookin' for love in too many faces

Searchin' their eyes, lookin' for traces

Of what I'm dreamin' of

Hopin' to find a friend and a lover

I'll bless the day I discover

Another heart lookin' for love.

Voting for what is clearly and transparently against your own interests is only explainable in terms of mental pathology.

#55: Obama: Copernicus or Sitchin?

Way back when I was still teaching, I used to tell students that all enduring philosophical questions have the same form: a really powerful intuition that things are ONE way meets an equally powerful theoretical reason why it CAN’T be that way. For example, most people feel totally free in their decision-making, but, yet, the conclusion of an excellent argument (the causal determinist argument) holds that they are not. Most enduring paradoxes belong precisely to this pattern.

Now, in this collision between our strongest convictions and equally powerful contrary arguments we see a conflict that is rarely resolvable by reason. What actually happens is that the positions taken by people on these puzzles is almost always decided by their psychological dispositions. Thus, some people are more disposed to trust their instincts, others to trust arguments, while yet others are most comfortable suspending judgment altogether.

For example, Malebranche took the Cartesian doctrine of the beast-machine so seriously that, according to anecdote, he drop-kicked a little pregnant dog (of whom he was very fond) across the courtyard in the firm theory-determined belief that animals felt no pain (no more than did clocks). Even as there is no way of theoretically determining whether animals, like humans, feel pain or not, most people’s spontaneous inclinations are to believe that they do. But Malebranche was so much the philosopher that reason trumped inclination in his case.

On the other hand, while Hume was convinced that Berkeley’s skeptical arguments concerning the existence of an independently existing material world were irrefutable, he also thought that they couldn’t possibly overrule our dispositions to believe the contrary. He writes:

But that all his arguments, though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical, appears from this, that they admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism.

Moore took the same line in his famous The Refutation of Idealism, in which he made the point, albeit indirectly, that at the end of an argument with an undesirable conclusion, we always have a choice: we can accept the conclusion, or we can reject it on the grounds that its negation is incontestably true. If the proponent of the argument objects that we have not shown how the argument fails, we can respond since we know the conclusion to be false, we also know the argument to be flawed. Precisely how it is flawed is not our problem.

Lest it be thought that this is only an issue in abstruse philosophical controversies, please note that exactly the same issue arises in science. Carl Hempel pointed out (in a book whose title I no longer remember) that when a researcher encounters an unacceptable result (he just doesn’t like it), he can always (in theory) choose to reject the theory underlying some key part of his experimental apparatus. Of course, this can be extremely expensive in that it inevitably also brings into question everything else in science that relied on that theory. Yet, some times people are fully prepared to do just that. And that’s often when we get scientific revolutions.

When the researcher’s bet pans out, we’re clearly happy with him. When it does not, we think he was an idiot for challenging so much of the existing system of beliefs. We still get all giddy about Copernicus, but about Zecharia Sitchin, not so much. Sitchin has been arguing for some time now that we are the engineered products of highly advanced extraterrestrials who came to earth roughly 450,000 years ago. This theory has not done terribly well within the astro-physics community.

What all this indicates is that there is no simple, easy answer as to when or why to opt either for intuition (or the mass of evidence or the mass of acquired belief), on one hand, or for theory-derived conclusions.

The reason I bring up this theme is that I had not noticed before that this paradigm extends even beyond the pale of philosophy and science; it extends to politics as well.

In particular, I noticed this extension when reflecting on the apparent immunity of leftist ideologues to the lessons of 20^th c history.

If there is one thing that seems apparent beyond argument, it is that socialism simply does not improve the lives of the people who live under it. We know this most dramatically from the failure of the Soviet Union, from the fact that Cuba has been a welfare client since its revolution, and we also notice that China is leaving classical communism behind. At the same time we notice that India is booming as a free enterprise economy. All around the world, we see the socialist states creating horrible living environments for their people and capitalist states doing significantly better. And this is as true of Europe, with its social democracies, as well as out and out commie states.

Yet, the true believers, those who live under the aegis of a “great theory”, they proceed as if none of this had ever happened.

As in the cases I discussed earlier, these true believers must do something in order to hold on to their privileged theories. In effect, they must reject 20^th c history or its apparent lessons in some way.

One way, of course, is to deny that those things ever happened. This is a tough one, since the U.S.S.R. is visibly absent, if something can be visibly absent (Sartre thinks it can!).

Another thing is to admit that they happened, but it’s not because the system sucks, but because a) the system was never fairly applied, or b) it was applied, but it was undermined by the evil capitalists.

The true believers are making a BIG bet, just as Copernicus made a BIG bet and Zecharia Sitchin made a BIG bet.

Copernicus’ bet paid off. Sitchin’s has not.

Time will tell whether Obama’s goes the way of Copernicus’ or the way of Sitchin’s.

My money is on the Sitchin way.