George Lakoff is sending his readers to their Thanksgiving dinners with instructions on "How to Respond To A Conservative". Dunno what I think, either of his specific arguments (tho several make sense) or of handing out propaganda advice for people's own private family dinner tables. ("Use wedge issues, cases where your opponent will violate some belief he holds no matter what he says....")
Whudda you think?
--
Completely different subject: if anyone has the Orwell essay that mentions reciting the poem "Felix Randal" to himself while on sentry duty, could you please send it or post the cite? Thx much.
Posted by Martha Bridegam at November 23, 2004 02:14 PMI for one thing it's shocking that a liberal would hand out propaganda to anyone. He doesn't even show any signs of feeling guilty. Everyone knows only conservatives are allowed to do that.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at November 23, 2004 04:18 PM"Every time someone started screaming about “gay marriage” I’d ask if they want the federal government to tell them who they could marry. I’d go on to explain when challenged that once government has crossed the huge barrier into telling one group of people who they could not marry, it is only a small step to telling other groups, and a smaller yet step to telling people who they had to marry."
I don't really see that countering a daft slippery slope argument with another daft slippery slope argument is going to raise the general level of public discourse. Men are not about to start marrying cats and dogs; and neither are they going to be told which women they have to wed.
Posted by: Alan Allport at November 23, 2004 07:59 PMLast Thursday, my wife sent me a snippet from a NYT article on academia, mentioning
One particularly offensive quote:
A Democrat on the Berkeley faculty, George P. akoff, who teaches linguistics and is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," said that liberals choose academic fields that fit their world views. "Unlike conservatives," he aid, "they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about."
Later that day, I read a serious suggestion that Democrats 4. Hire George Lakoff and start a framing the issues now because Karl Rove is working hard to continue creating Bush “Fantasy World” on John Perry Barlow's blog (comment #74).
Sigh.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 23, 2004 08:22 PMHoguey Carmichael wrote:
'I for one thing it's shocking that a liberal would hand out propaganda to anyone. He doesn't even show any signs of feeling guilty. Everyone knows only conservatives are allowed to do that'
You are kidding ain't you? Can never tell on this blog.
Posted by: ROBBIE at November 24, 2004 03:33 AMIt's funny: the situation in England is a complete opposite. It's the Left and Guardian readers who rant at you by the water cooler if you dare to question the shibbos. The BBC is Fox news *the other way round*. Large and small C thinking is airbrushed from the media and is regarded as laughable. Alistair Campbell says in Saturday's Times'everyone is basically happy'. And the streets are as mean as a junk yard dog and people ain't happy. 'Member dat, you all. Careful what you wish for. (Very slowly) I believe in the Welfare State. (You American liberals have to be told that because anyone who disagrees with you is regarded as a Bush-ite.)
Posted by: ROBBIE at November 24, 2004 03:45 AMIt's funny: the situation in England is a complete opposite. It's the Left and Guardian readers who rant at you by the water cooler if you dare to question the shibbos.
The situation here seems to be a bit more complex than what you find in the metropolitan UK. Most political content on AM radio is like a right-wing version of the Guardian opinion page, running all day long across multiple channels. FM news tends to be slightly right of the BBC. Our newspapers seem to be too watered down to have much political content at all, but various news commentary magazines are excellent, and across the spectrum. I've got no idea about TV.
You never know what you'll find around the water cooler. I generally try to keep my yap shut, and only have piped up when I couldn't restrain myself from going into red-faced-angry-rant mode
You American liberals
Not every poster here is liberal. Or American for that matter.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 24, 2004 08:02 AMOkay, I've read the article, and once you get past his nutty-sounding metaphor about strict vs. nurturing parents, the article had a few reasonable suggestions:
Show respect to the conservatives you are responding to. No one will listen to you if you don’t accord them respect. Listen to them. You may disagree strongly with everything that is being said, but you should know what is being said. Be sincere. Avoid cheap shots. What if they don’t show you respect? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Turn the other cheek and show respect anyway. That takes character and dignity. Show character and dignity.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 24, 2004 10:02 AMI don't really see that countering a daft slippery slope argument with another daft slippery slope argument is going to raise the general level of public discourse.
That caught my eye too, but clearly this article is only secondarily about raising levels. It's about winning arguments. Using an opponent's tactics against them is perfectly good advice in that sense.
One particularly offensive quote:
That's an interesting one. I think I read the same article, which was about the idea that Democrats outnumber Republicans by a large margin in most schools. It also mentioned that the departments with the greatest discrepancies tended to be anthropology and the least economics.
Maybe this is the sort of thing that leftists aren't allowed to think anymore, but it seems worth entertaining the idea, however briefly, that this fact backs up Lakoff's point, although he phrased it very, very poorly.
Is it not true that multiculturalism is one of the major tenets of the academic left? Is it all that surprising, then, that leftists would be drawn to anthro? On the other hand, the right tends to be more business oriented and buys much more into market ideologies. Would anyone be all that upset if most econ departments employed Republicans? Would anthro departments be improved by trying to find some Bush Republicans who think that studying other cultures is their life's work?
There is an assumption going around these days that the left and the right are somehow basically the same, differing in degree but not in kind. In fact, this is probably the fundamental assumption behind the "political diversity" position. Why? Because only if one's politics is treated the same way as a genetic condition or a lifestyle choice, i.e., like something accidental and irrelevant to one's suitability for a job, can a claim for diversity be made. It's also on this assumption that one can convincingly claim that any discrepancy must be due to a hiring bias. But if it's true that certain ideologies predispose one to different jobs, then the whole thing is more complicated.
From what I've seen so far, Lakoff is doing good work, for what it is. I'll even cut him some slack for a needlessly insulting statement like the one above. There is some truth to it.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at November 24, 2004 10:29 AMThere is an assumption going around these days that the left and the right are somehow basically the same, differing in degree but not in kind.
Depends on context. If you take the long view, then nearly everybody active in Western politics today is some kind of liberal of the 19th Century variety; old-style conservatism of the kind that Burke and de Maistre would have recognized is unknown in the United States. (It's sometimes suggested, not altogether facetiously, that H.L. Mencken was the only 'genuinely' conservative figure in 20th Century America).
Posted by: Alan Allport at November 24, 2004 10:47 AMYes, this is why I try to use left/right rather than liberal/conservative. I slip up often enough, though.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at November 24, 2004 10:49 AMAlan H. with his criticisms of false-equivalence talk about left and right, emboldens me to ask whether "social justice" is a term frequently used by conservatives &, if so, what they tend to mean by it.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 24, 2004 07:12 PMI've certainly never heard "social justice" used by conservatives of my acquaintance, or in literature. I've always suspected that when used by liberals, it's a phrase like "fraternity" that isn't more specific than "good stuff".
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 24, 2004 08:38 PMLakoff is doing good work, for what it is. I'll even cut him some slack for a needlessly insulting statement like the one above. There is some truth to it.
I'd cut him more slack for it if he weren't touted as having this great insight into how to communicate to conservatives. Read last year's Berkley interview for another sample. It's got some really reasonable points, but is still mixed with loopy sounding analogies and a great deal of carping about the obvious. So Republicans have learned from the advertising industry -- this is something to make Democrats tremble in impotent rage?
I did like this, though:
So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones — those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant — and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.
Wonder what his projection of the "nurturant" model is?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 24, 2004 09:00 PMI've certainly never heard "social justice" used by conservatives of my acquaintance, or in literature. I've always suspected that when used by liberals, it's a phrase like "fraternity" that isn't more specific than "good stuff".
No, it's more specific. It stands for the notion that a society's obligation to achieve justice doesn't end with maintaining a reasonably fair court system or allowing substantial political freedoms -- that the label "injustice" applies as much to systemic poverty and prejudice as it would to the criminal conviction of opposition editors or of unlucky innocents. Social justice would therefore be advanced, for example, by taking steps toward offering education of equal quality to all children, or by raising the minimum wage. It would be harmed by legalizing employment discrimination or by transferring the national tax burden from billionaires to seamstresses.
The term "social justice" is at the heart of liberal political principles, which I understand to include faith that the present system is capable of change for the better without radical upheval, balanced by recognition that an unrestrained free-market society does not by itself achieve social justice. It's an approach that has learned from the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism of the American 1880s and 1890s, and in the unhappier countries that export cheap goods to the U.S. at present -- child labor, 16-hour workdays, unventilated tenements, unsafe machinery, etc. etc.
"Social justice" describes the measures a reasonably provident society takes, by (small-"d") democratic agreement, to cushion or reduce the worse behaviors of private businesses and individuals. "Social justice" is, in other words, the unifying label for those government functions that Grover Norquist wants to "drown in the bathtub."
Social justice, to the extent we've achieved any, is the difference between what we have got now and what the working people among our great-grandparents had in the 1890s. It is the other major difference between us and China or Burma or Russia.
...Does that help?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 28, 2004 10:32 PMYou talk is if you think the left has accomplished something!
I seem to recall reading somewhere...I think it was Joe Connason, claiming that basically all of the social advances (civil rights and all that) in the last hundred years or so were pushed through by the left and opposed by the right. I've always wished I could get a non-Leftist to respond to that for me because as unfair as it sounds I can't think of a lot of good counter-examples.
Actually, not really any. But I must have missed something.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at November 29, 2004 10:22 AMI've always wished I could get a non-Leftist to respond to that for me because as unfair as it sounds I can't think of a lot of good counter-examples.
One response might perhaps be that all of the social horrors of the last hundred years (forcible collectivation, eugenics, persecution of "class enemies", the Cultural Revolution, technological obscurantism re. cheap food and power, etc.) were also pushed through by the left and opposed by the right. To the limited extent that the left has consistently favored change while the right has opposed it, each has been right or wrong at times.
Certainly the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was a change favored by the left. But a very good case can be made that the White Supremacy movement of the 1880s-1920s was also a change favored by the left of the time.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 29, 2004 02:08 PMIt stands for the notion....
Thanks -- that's a very good definition.
Social justice would therefore be advanced, for example, by taking steps toward offering education of equal quality to all children.
Since I'm wearing my "token conservative" hat today, I think this is the point where I'm supposed to hint ominously that there are two ways to achieve "equal quality," you know...
Ehhh. Heart's just not in it. Oh, well.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 29, 2004 02:20 PMI like 'The Left and the Right has been wrong at times.' That's more like it. Here in the UK all those notions that Martha was mentioning have got lost in the post. In education social justice's actualite is 'dumbed down shit for all'; In law and order the left has ended up with thinking that a man who beats a pensioner senseless is 'a victim of society' as well (topsy turvy, student common room morals) as ; it has dreamed up 'Multiculturalism' a programme that ghetto-izes people whilst carries on the great middle class lefty idea of destroying nation states and cultures.
Well I still feel very Left in most ways--in the sense that injustice, social and any other way, is the great evil--but I question whether it
actually can work, given human nature and what not (A certain quote from the African Queen is usually, disingenuously offered as a refutation of all this) It seems always to lead
to the rise of a dull caste of lockstepped and privileged bureacrats and commissars confiscating vast sums of other people's dough for their own
high-handed agendas and the real, basic needs in a society: justice,
opportunity, law and order etc, just go to pot. At least, that's what's always happened thus far and this time round it is no different. In fact
it's quite an achievement really to have a government of de-bearded Marxists led by a middle class English poster boy, that's achieved nothing much in seven years but the creation of a colossal bureacratic state (anti-smoking
coordinators; gay rights advisors; multicultural officers; abortion co-ordinators etc read the spiritual home of that kind of wasteful bollocks:
the Guardian jobs page) and a war. Meanhwhile the essentials of the society that Attlee and co honourably thought out, go down the lav. It's nothing so much as like the ghastly Thatcher years, but with an enthusiam for a
Islington wanky left agenda.
At the same time, the commitment to education--in the true sense--was a demonstrable lie: it was education in the socialist sense of: we know what's good for you and here's the new curriculum, the new hymnal. The other great
drive of the Left, to liberalize law and order has condemned huge swathes of
the poor--the very people the Left is supposed to interested in helping--to a never ending culture of boorishness, brutality and fifty seven varieties of pathological behaviour ancillary to drug abuse.
ROBBIE, I wonder if you read the tale of two bicycles that was circulating around conservatish blogs a few months ago. I suspect you'd like it.
The divide in America isn't between rich and poor. It's between those who must live with the inescapable reality of crime on a daily basis, and those who don't. It's between those who would be scandalized if made the target of a violent crime, and those who have been victimized before and expect to be victimized again. It's between those who can buy new presents for their children to replace stolen ones, and those who can't.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 30, 2004 08:48 AMI can't let the claim pass that "the Left" is somehow responsible for eugenics. Margaret Sanger, yes, but it wasn't her idea. It emerged much earlier from the long European tradition of racial prejudices and ideas about "breeding," and reached pseudoscientific status through the likes of Lombroso and Bertillon, and as I hope I don't have to explain, it reached its worst in the hands of certain right-wing Germans and their sympathizers in the middle twentieth century.
What figures who considered themselves right-wing, or even merely conservative, made a special point of opposing eugenics?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 30, 2004 09:59 AMFrom this "bicycles" article:
Poverty can be resolved through individual effort; crime cannot. We know what prevents poverty. Acquire as much education as you can, get a full-time job and work hard at it, get and stay married, and avoid substance abuse -- take these steps, and you won't be poor. Each step is within the abilities of even a below-average person. But how can individuals resolve crime? No amount of hard work or personal initiative will stop a mugger from waving a knife in your face. A responsible lifestyle won't put your car radio back after some thug steals it. For the crimes that afflict the poor, our society has only one approved solution: stop being poor, so you can move somewhere safe. Some solution.
Look at this: the fellow doesn't even bother to question the fact that poverty is the cause of the coarser kinds of crime. Then he treats it as legitimate to say that everyone who works hard enough and behaves nicely enough can get out of poverty, leaving their presumptively less diligent neighbors behind. Then he treats it as illegitimate to say that the way to avoid the kind of crime that is a consequence of poverty is to move to a better neighborhood.
This is nonsense. The idea that individuals can lift themselves out of poverty is exactly, precisely, as rotten as the idea that moving to a better neighborhood is the answer to the consequences of poverty. They're two halves of the very same mentality.
Listen, as long as there aren't enough ways out of poverty, because our society doesn't care enough to provide them, only the very brightest, craftiest, and most tenacious people are going to get out. The fact that it's possible to get out of poverty is just precisely exactly as helpful as the fact that it's possible to move to a better neighborhood.
If the fellow grasps that providing good policing for a neighborhood is a helpful step, why can't he grasp that providing better schools or higher wages might be a good idea? Willful blindness? He'd better look in the mirror.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 30, 2004 10:10 AMWhat figures who considered themselves right-wing, or even merely conservative, made a special point of opposing eugenics?
Well, there's Chesterton, for one.
I posted about religious opponents of eugenics back in July. These were generally conservatives who were also opposed to other uses of Darwin as well -- what we'd call fundamentalists or conservative Catholics today. According to a different review, the religious spectrum also included advocates of eugenics, but these were on the left -- advocates of the "Social Gospel."
James Lindgren has pointed out that this conflation of evolution, eugenics, and social Darwinism sheds some interesting light on the Scopes Trial, as well.
I can't let the claim pass that "the Left" is somehow responsible for eugenics.
Honestly, I don't know enough about the eugenics debates outside of the religious world. It does seem to me that eugenics went part and parcel with Americanization, immigration clampdowns, anti-Catholic legislation, and a bevy of other problematic causes advocated by "Good Government" reformers at the turn of the century, who mostly seem to be leftists pursuing "progress."
Can you name an opponent of Eugenics before 1933 who you'd feel comfortable identifying as a member of "the left"?
It's always hard tracing these things, isn't it? "In 300 words or less, identify the connection between Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels and anti-semitic theology in 1930s Germany. You have five minutes, then I will say 'pencils down' and collect papers. Anyone still writing at that time will receive a failing grade"
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 30, 2004 11:43 AMHmm.. That Chesterton link wasn't quite what I'd intended -- GKC's actual essay is here.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 30, 2004 11:55 AMI think that's the heart of the argument, and it's an unusually clear display of the twist in the kind of "victims'-rights" rhetoric that calls for treating poor people with Victorian harshness "for their own good."
Hmmm. I doubt it -- don't forget that the author is writing for an audience that accepts as a given the phrase "we've spent untold trillions of dollars in the last forty years in order to vindicate the largely imaginary right of poor citizens to live on someone else's dime."
I'm aware of how the broken window theory can make poor, young or black people look like broken windows to law enforcers. But would you disupute the author's argument that "the greatest threat to civil liberties isn't the well-paid prosecutor with time to investigate and consider his cases; it's the overworked, underpaid prosecutor, desperate to secure convictions in order to manage his volume of cases?"
We all know that crime and poverty feed on each other. The author's not proposing that we deal with crime instead poverty, he's proposing that we deal with crime instead of dealing with neither.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 30, 2004 02:38 PMBen, thanks for those cites from Chesterton et al. -- I was probably unfair to those folks. (Maybe because by present U.S. standards Chesterton would likely be some kind of liberal? He was, after all, in favor of mercy...)
But I'm confused about your next comment: you write, "Hmmm, I doubt it," but I'm not sure which part of what I said is getting your doubt.
Seems to me like the passages you've just quoted are more of what I was criticizing.
At any rate, no, I wouldn't say "overworked, underpaid prosecutors" were the worst threat to civil liberties. I'd save that honor for the extremely overpaid folks who are so high up in the Justice Department or the academic ivory tower that they can bring themselves to sit around undermining the "quaint" Geneva Convention, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, etc. with cutely dishonest little sophistries. They just plain lack the life experience to care or understand what kind of suffering might be caused by their trivializing of great charters that good people have given their lives to defend. Your basic overworked grunt-level courtroom prosecutor is paid to think badly of defendants, yes, but he/she still lives in the part of the system where the rubber meets the road. The courtroom prosecutor knows almost as much as the public defender about things like prison rape, and may know more about domestic abuse, and also knows, for example, that welfare checks do pay people's rent and that living indoors is much more conducive to productive and orderly citizenship than living outdoors.
This Mr. Kern who knows about bicycles: he may have a friend who once lived in poverty (and he probably pats himself on the back for his own broad-mindedness in maintaining that friendship), but I doubt he knows squat about the plea-and-arraignment meatgrinder that operates every weekday morning in every county courthouse in the country. Most of the deputy DA's who do stand in court feeding that meatgrinder have a better sense of the devastation caused by social service cuts than your average armchair Gradgrind. He should listen to the social consciences of some actual prosecutors before he starts speaking for them, or for the people they try to protect, or for the people they prosecute.
About the "good government" movement -- I know it's now identified with politically liberal groups, but I don't think it has always been an aspect of "The Left" by any means.
In the urban U.S. Northeast, for example, my understanding is that the "good government" efforts of the 1940s were often led by old-line patricians -- possibly even Republicans of the old style, tho I'm not sure -- trying to beat back the gains of Democratic Party immigrant machine/patronage politics with measures like civil service examinations and public-bid requirements. In Eastern Massachusetts, which I know the most about, that meant the Yankees versus the Irish and Italians. ("Yankees" here meaning, not Northerners in general, but actual and spiritual descendants of the area's earlier settlers. In the Boston area this division involves some transplantation of the ancient English-Irish rivalry.)
Today, the old "good government" versus "machine" division is expressed in Northeastern cities (and also in San Francisco, not sure where else) through factional divisions within the Democratic Party. Members of the old machine tradition tend to be more socially conservative but more helpful to both trade union members and small business.
For example, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the '80s, the City Council members were all Democrats but one, but on many political issues they were pretty evenly divided. The more machine-ish Democrats were less rigid about defending rent control, more sympathetic to homeowners and small-scale landlords, and less interested in having Central American "sister cities." One of the faction's senior members, the late great Al Vellucci, could (and did) philosophize for hours in public about the sins of "the goo-goos." But of all the City Council members, Al Vellucci was the one who pushed hardest to get the city's two big rich tax-exempt landowners, Harvard and MIT, to make payments to the city in lieu of taxes. And I certainly can't picture him cutting public benefits to poor people. He maintained friendships with a lot of poor people in northeastern Cambridge. After all, he needed their votes.
As of the '80s only one Cambridge City Council member, a large-scale landlord, was anything like a Republican.
Meanwhile members of the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), a "good government" political club that I gather was typical of many founded in the '40s, tended to be more educated, more socially liberal, more insistent on things like civil service correctness, and more sympathetic to the very poor. Some of the CCA folks were fairly labeled "limousine liberals" (IIRC Al Vellucci did call them that, among other things), but if members of the old patrician Yankee tradition had made common cause with "the left" that didn't necessarily mean their political history was especially liberal.
Now, I was covering Boston-area politics ten years after the busing riots, so I only heard dim echoes of that period, but it's my impression that in Boston the old Democratic machine folks would have tended to oppose school integration while the "good government" types tended to favor it. Fortunately, in Cambridge the integration process was said to have gone especially quietly and well, so that the question hadn't come up as forcefully there.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 30, 2004 07:06 PMOnce when I lived in Seattle and worked at a fast food restaurant, I was walking with one of my co-workers to work and sitting on the corner was one of the most polite and generally pleasant panhandlers I've ever met. He was just sitting there asking for change. So after we've passed him, Duane starts going on about how fucking lazy the guy is, how he probably makes more money than we do in a day (which was certainly possible), how unfair it all is, how hard he, Duane, works, etc.
My reaction was, "Good for him." For one reason or another, I was not willing to opt for the carefree, cushy existence of living on the streets and depending on strangers' kindness for my dinner and sleeping quarters every night, so as bad as working at fast food for minimum wage was (and that was really, really bad), I couldn't envy him. And if I had envied him I'd probably have gone and done it myself. I would have had no scruples about that.
What was really pissing Duane off was the unfairness of his own situation: the poor treatment, the inadequate pay for shitty work and long hours, the idiot bosses with a slavemaster's mentality. But the beggar was one of the few people Duane was still higher than on the pecking order and I suppose he felt more at ease getting angry at him. He was, in a sense, a more appropriate target for Duane's general sense of frustration.
It's nice to live in a nice part of town and have a car and get some respect. It's nice when you can afford one of those satellite dishes and put the kids in a school where the liklihood of them getting shot at is almost nil. Most sane people would like that, or something like it.
Then why don't they just reach up and take it, like Mr. Bicycle thinks they should? There are three possibilities. One, they are just corrupt individuals without the morals and the discipline to work hard. Some people are like this, but just because they are a little fucked up and don't take responsibility for themselves, they don't deserve to die in the street or of easily preventable illnesses because they have no way of getting reasonable health care. For instance.
On the other hand, it may be that being poor is actually really fun. You don't have to work, the government pays the lease on your cadillac, you get to watch Jerry Springer all day, you don't have to deal with babysitters. Who could resist that? Surely only the select, those with an iron determination to slave away at a desk job purely for its own sake (and the moral superiority that comes with it) could resist such luxury. This might sound absurd, but I hear something along these lines from people, even intelligent people. The bicycle guy even has a line in his article about petty crime being the fun and easy way out for his vaunted friend.
Or, it may be that many recognize their own interest and do not especially like Jerry Springer, but nevertheless find it difficult to make money. The reasons for this are in most cases a combination of internal and external factors. But the most important one, I think, for most people, is where they are born. Someone with a professor and a doctor for parents, though certainly they may work hard and apply themselves, simply will never understand the barriers in the way of those who want to move up in the world.
Sure, there's a guy in New York who can lift a Volkswagen with his teeth, but I don't see people suggesting that everyone can do that. And no matter how many tales of Volkswagen lifting you find, it's not going to prove that anyone who can't lift a Volkswagen is lazy. People who insist in the face of all evidence and reason that poor people deserve what they've got and that poverty is caused by moral flaws is dellusional, simple as that.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at November 30, 2004 07:16 PMI doubt he knows squat about the plea-and-arraignment meatgrinder that operates every weekday morning in every county courthouse in the country.
So I take it that you disagree with his call for better funded justice systems in poor areas?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 30, 2004 09:04 PMI was probably unfair to those folks.
Come to think of it, perhaps the scientific/pseudoscientific dogmatic politics surrounding eugenics, social Darwinism, contraception and such might explain some of Orwell's antipathy for contraception. He seemed to have associated contraception advocates with kookiness -- perhaps becase that issue was associated with kookiness in the time?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 30, 2004 09:09 PMAbout the "good government" movement -- I know it's now identified with politically liberal groups, but I don't think it has always been an aspect of "The Left" by any means.
What you describe sounds precisely like the direct heirs of the good goverenment movements of the turn of the century, from opposition to Democratic machines to having WASPy members. Whether they are "left" or not is the tricky bit -- how well can you identify the modern right or left with any movement that predates WWI? It's easy enough in hindsight to identify the good guys and bad guys on a political question, and it's always tempting to assert continuity between your side and the white hats.
I confess I don't know enough about the political history of the first few decades of the 20th century. I feel like the anti-immigrant reformers were part of the left, but that may only be because of the parallels in the more easily traced religious world, and the presence of G.B. Shaw. Got any different evidence?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at November 30, 2004 09:31 PMOK, a few comments at least:
I don't really see either the machine patronage guys or the "reform" guys of old urban politics as wearing white hats. They were each nasty in some ways & merciful in others. There's a good article in the December Harper's on machine politics in Brooklyn, actually, & I had it in mind when writing some of the above.
I'm in favor of better-funded "justice systems" in poor areas so long as that includes well-funded, well-staffed public defenders' offices and the same kinds of nice treatment and diversion programs that white middle-class teenage druggies get sent to. And so long as the criminal justice system isn't made to do a lot of social work it wasn't designed for. So long as the police don't become a substitute for the government as a whole.
What pisses me off is that our federal government has been cutting its most useful programs steadily since 1980 (yes, I do include the Clinton "welfare reform" in that), in large part for ideological reasons, and then the ideologues who drove the destruction of a nearly-half-decent welfare state turn around and say the welfare state isn't working, we need more cops and prisons instead.
Well, gee, Officer Krupke, if they hadn't been starving the welfare state into incompetence for twenty years maybe it could help folks a little better....
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 30, 2004 11:43 PMAin't anyone gonna mention *moral* poverty?
Yes Wal Mart and McDonald's suffer from that too. But the real problem the Left has is that they seem to have got, like some 16 year old on cannabis, themselves into a terrible pickle about Right and Wrong. Does financial poverty cause and therefore excuse bad behaviour? Judging from the long old epistles here it does.
In England, where there is little full-on poverty, you have a growing class of well-dressed, amoral, brutal people; these are the full flowering of 40 years of the Left's sophistry and meddling in education and morality. Giving all these wankers money and saying 'sorry, it's everyone else's fault not your's or your parents' just makes them worse. Martha and Alan H could SO DO with a few years in a shitty area of England and without the American system to point the finger at, it could be VERY sobering for them and give them a new outlook on human behaviour.
Most middle class lefties believe the things they do as a kind of reaction to their upbringing, which is why so many of them end up getting turned on in various ways by people and siatuations from lower down the social scale. Most people from the middle class pass through this in teens and early twenties- a rooted, reactive antipathy that gradually fades as they confront Real Life. Some however, cushioned by Academia or other forms of Public Money, never come out of it and spend the rest of their days justifying wrong doers, dismantling the culture that gave them the education to dissent on behalf of the wrong doers in the first place and creating all manner of sophistries to dance on the grave of western bourgoise life: restructuring and policing language and permissable debate; obstinate promotion of disorder by the minimizing of criminial activity as 'society's crime'; obstinate promotion of multiculturalism even in the face of its manifest distastrous effects on social cohesion; obstinate promotion of any minority cause that could engender a lever for cultural change; minimizing anti-social behaviour; promoting ignorance as a kind of non-elitest equality. We have all that in England and OODLES of public money thrown at it and guess what, it quite often makes bad people worse.
Anyone who lives in the Real World will know that people don't want to live in shit-hole areas; some settle for it, others don't. In the end we all know, in our different walks of life, that if we want something, we're going to have to go and work at it. A redistribution of wealth system is fine by me as long as the people in charge have a sense of proportion; trouble is, they don't here. The 'majority' don't want some high-handed ideologue confiscating their money for some bizarre agenda that that has been extrapolated from too-rigorous potty training in childhood or being sent to bed early or whatever.
Sorry, Robbie, but the jerks ye always have with ye. You can't prove people are any nicer in societies where life at the bottom is materially worse. Wot -- do you have so much faith in the welfare state that you're upset with it for not improving people's characters as well as housing and feeding them? Or do you have enough faith in the morally improving effects of privation that you'd like to try making people suffer instead? Sorry, but I'm afraid in this life the choice is between having a population consisting of nice people and jerks all of whom are housed and fed -- or having a population consisting of nice people and jerks some of whom are slowly dying of exposure in your own neighborhood. Believe me it is not pretty to see the latter. Come over here if you want to see it.
Talking of morality, though, there's quite a bit to be said against the arrogant declaration, by folks who are personally living indoors, that other persons deserve to starve, freeze, etc. because they lack insufficient good character.
So, tell me, then, which kind of poverty death do you think should be the penalty for traits of character that annoy Robbie -- hypothermia? untreated chronic infection? bacterial illness from eating out of trash cans?
Now, it's true that the most immediate cause of many homeless deaths is some kind of drug -- but what effect on susceptibility to addiction do you think it has to put someone in a state of poverty producing actual physical debilitation? A few years ago I joined an all-night protest for the rights of the poor, with a group consisting mainly of local clergy, on the City Hall steps in cold rain. By midnight it had become a running joke how many of those priests and pastors and rabbis had given up quitting smoking. Because a cigarette is a comfort you want when you're stuck outside in the cold. Do you think living in those circumstances for months on end doesn't increase the temptation to stronger drugs?
So rail against drugs if you want, and in that I'll join you. But leave what's left of your welfare state out of it. As the song says, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 1, 2004 10:18 AMCome to think of it, perhaps the scientific/pseudoscientific dogmatic politics surrounding eugenics, social Darwinism, contraception and such might explain some of Orwell's antipathy for contraception. He seemed to have associated contraception advocates with kookiness -- perhaps becase that issue was associated with kookiness in the time?
Hmm. I don't know if it represented kookiness to him so much as the Brave New World kind of attempt to live a modern, clean, hedonistic, fully ordered and controlled life without discomfort, danger or inconvenience. It of course weakened his argument that he wasn't personally the one risking the discomforts and dangers of pregnancy, but he was certainly aware that having a very young baby does create some disorder in a household and does require self-denial on the part of both parents. I think he saw the intentional refusal to have children as selfish, in part likely because he would so much have liked to father a child himself.
It's true btw that of all the current public nagging campaigns, the creepiest is probably the smiling exhortation to Spay Or Neuter Your Pet. It's a rational enough goal of course, but if it has to be advocated it ought to be as a painful necessity, not a happy little errand like getting flu shots used to be. I just don't like the echoes of cheerful advocacy for sterilization, even if it isn't involving people.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 1, 2004 10:31 AMDoes financial poverty cause and therefore excuse bad behaviour? Judging from the long old epistles here it does.
I don't feel like rereading everything right now, but I don't recall saying anything remotely like this. In fact my bike was just stolen and I've been having fantasies of revenge all week.
Interesting rant, though. Does anyone know how crime statistics compare between, say, New York and London? Or good sources of statistics on this sort of thing in general?
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 1, 2004 11:32 AMHeh, whenever someone doesn't agree with something it becomes a 'rant'.
Martha, you're only doing what you always do: using the fate of people on skid row on the west coast of America as a catch-all argument against any criticism of the Left. It ain't good enough mate. I'm sorry but if I'm ranting, you are being a disingenuous prig. Of course I believe people shouldn't die in the street. To play that card in response to my points is silly.
You say that the jerks will always be with us which is indubitably true but you fail to realise my point and that is that the Left's agenda is swelling the ranks of jerkdom. That agenda has gone far beyond your earnest homspun idea of feeding and clothing the world into a wide ranging meddling across society. My point--and I don't think I've transgressed too much of Politics and the English Language in saying it--is that that meddling agenda is doing more harm than good and the reason for it is that it is formulated and executed by well meaning fatheads who know little of human life.
As I always have to repeat, I believe in the welfare state and have, on and off, been the recipient of it. I condemn nobody to sleeping on the streets; I think that is wrong. You are using emotive swipes to avoid the other points I have raised; you always do.
In England, there is a large welfare state; I have no problem with that. I HAVE a problem with the Left's notions of what is socially acceptable. Crime, as I say, is regarded as a sort of upshot of the material society; single mothers are encouraged--employed actually--by the State to have babies- have a baby and we'll make it easy for you to get a house. Unlike you, I know half dozen women under 20 who have done this for those reasons- the well-meaning fathead Left encouraging something quite wrong in my veiw. Naturally the fathers generally piss off and leave the family--the modern culture of rap music, braggadocio, arrogance and irresponsibilty (all antonyms of bourgiouse constructs maaan)--especially among the white working class and its afro caribbean counterpart--which is incidentally given a de facto thumbs up by the Left because of its cult of 'society's fault' 'non-judgemental' 'non-punish' 'legalize drugs' thinking.
The Guardian-reading Left here is also very fond of the idea that heavy handed policing is responsible for most problems regarding disorder. The riots of 20 or more years ago were a reaction because people who wished to carry drugs and weapons were exarsperated by constantly being molested by policeman. So they went on the rampage--looting and destroying their neighbours' property--and got what they wanted: the abandonment of 'stop and search', 'softly, softly' policing (this was the first 'in' for the British Left's project of emasculating the Police Force into the impotent, politically correct and hog tied with paper work Police Service of today). As a result, violent crime, murder and drug use has steadily risen. The various children shot dead in England in 'dissing' incidents in the last year would have been avoided if the stop and search laws had not been abandoned. Ditto the constant knife attacks.
What would the Left advocate doing with the men--and two girls--who kicked a gay man to death on the South Bank some weeks ago? Rehabilitation? In my view, once you've gone over that line you can go hang, literally.
Then there's the Left with education: we all know the various obsessions and agendas well enough don't we? More social engineering and the dangerous 'egalitarian' road of educating people badly and telling them its good.
I was beneficiary of a Left wing education system so I know.
The British Left has some bizarre ideas about the cohesion into the host culture of migrants: they don't believe in it. Rather they believe in using the host cultures resources to ensure that migrants and migrant culture *don't* become assimiliated; rather, they would prefer that the host culture (England in this case) that was so attractive to the migrants in the first place, be dismantled: multiculturalism and academic, post-imperial axe-grinding paid for by Everyone Else.
The British Left has some enterprising ideas on hard drug abuse: give the addicts the drugs and finance the rest of their lives as well. Essentially make drug addicts state employees.
The morality is f*!cked and the message it sends out to people less privileged than the Islington Left is a wrong one in my view.
Again, I believe in fair and decent society; but I know longer believe the official Left's strategy about how to get it. If you don't protect society and civilization, then you won't have the kind of society that can support the homeless and the ill; indeed with the Left's current ideas about morality, people won't even understand that we *should* help the homeless and the ill. The fathead Left with its trendy post-60s usurping of 'morality' and so on is condemning more of the poor to brutal, ignorant and socially non-mobile lives and then saying 'oh come along, isn't that much better than 'trying to better yourself?' don't you know how *bourgiouse* that sounds?!'
Seems like time to reprise Alan H.'s nice quote from Bertrand Russell, here ironizing on the recipe for "genius":
It is essential to appeal to prejudices and passions of which men have begun to feel ashamed and to do this in the name of some new ineffable ethic. It is well to decry the slow and pettifogging minds which require evidence in order to reach conclusions. Above all, whatever is most ancient should be dished up as the very latest thing.The social pathologies Robbie is talking about are as old as urban society itself. The habit of blaming them on too-generous treatment of immigrants and the poor is equally ancient. And moldy. Cf. Henry VIII or Ferdinand and Isabella.
As for bringing the U.S. case into it -- well, my own much loved and mourned country has unfortunately become a test case for the application of not much carrot and mostly stick to poor people within a rich society. What I've been discussing is a fact in large parts of American cities -- it grew beyond "skid rows" long ago, in the Reagan years. As for the destructive effects of aggressive "stop and frisk" policies, see, for example, the New York State AG's report on "stop and frisk" practices in 1990s NYC.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 2, 2004 10:23 AMYour usual response. I don't really see the relevance of the Russell quote- I see why you *want* it to be. Nice vague, non-specific 'was it ever thus' response. Vague stuff about historical brigandry completly missing the point that the civilisation that dreamed up the welfare state and so on, is under threat. You seem, like a lot of lawyers, to have a dangerously eccentric idea of what is right and what is wrong. Such lawyers now run England, to disastrous effect.
Stop and search is a good thing- it will obviously save lives and protect the innocent from the wrong doer; only a fool would worry about the supposed social rancour it causes.Turn your argument round: in your view any price at all is worth paying for what you think is Right. I note no specific arguments against my criticisms of the Left's strategy and tactics. Yes, america is a harsh society and I don't condone it. You seem always to want to portray any critique of the Left's strategy and tactics as an attack on the Welfare State- that's disingenuous and, as ever, condescending.
Just for the fun of it, and because when the going gets tough, the language here gets rather evasive and emotive:
'It is essential to appeal to prejudices and passions of which men have begun to feel ashamed'
I've never felt ashamed of the idea that someone who is, as we say in South London, bang out of order, getting his just desserts. Nobody else I know, except a couple of fools who inhale too hard on the Guardian, ever did either. Unlike you I'm not that patriotic but realise the nonsense of something like multiculturalism; I assure you that, outside of Berekely and San Fran, that does not make me what you want me to appear to be, a nascent nazi.
'and to do this in the name of some new ineffable ethic'
You seem to think I want to give migrants a hard time; you are so obstinate about this and ignore what I say--that the Left's attitude, beyond welfare support into the diktats of multiculturalism, actually inhibits that person's assimilation and success in that society--that you make me quite angry and yourself look a little foolish.
'. It is well to decry the slow and pettifogging minds which require evidence in order to reach conclusions'
Well I don't adopt stances on the basis of anything other than slow, accumulated experience. The same can't be said of academics and believers in government papers and university thesii and Guardian editorials.
'. Above all, whatever is most ancient should be dished up as the very latest thing'
You are of course aware that the arguments you use on me, vis a vis historical brigandry and Why It Is Foolish To Think That Crime Should Be Punished, could well be turned on you. Was it ever thus is a blithe swipe that works both ways.
Posted by: ROBBIE at December 3, 2004 02:43 AMMaybe because by present U.S. standards Chesterton would likely be some kind of liberal?
Not by any conceivable definition. Nice swipe with the "mercy" comment, though.
You still haven't found me a pre-30's opponent of Eugenics that can be definitely described as "Left".
Seems to me like the passages you've just quoted are more of what I was criticizing.
They are (assuming you're talking about "live on other people's dime"), but they're commonplaces within libertarian and conservative thought in the US. You're welcome to disagree with that perspective, of course (not being a libertarian or conservative), but touting that perspective wasn't the point of the article at all. Rather, it was (as I read it) an argument for more funding for certain programs within poor neighborhoods.
Look, if there's a voice within the Klan that advocates moderation, I may not agree with the perspective or context, but I should at least recognize that it's a step in the right direction, whatever its inadequacies, right?
Or, it may be that many ....nevertheless find it difficult to make money. The reasons for this are in most cases a combination of internal and external factors.
The author's pointing out (albeit from within his own TCS world) that crime is one of these external factors that needs to be addressed. You and Martha are adding high-quality schools and a handful of other programs also address these external factors, and asserting that they're more important. I'm not going to argue with that.
What about the internal factors? What is the social justice perspective on success and failure that really is due to industry and thrift?
Let's take a concrete example that doesn't involve classes like "the poor" and has only one variable:
My friend and I both graduated from the same university with marketable degrees and married professional women. As couples, we've probably had nearly identical incomes, as well as similar profiles of employment and unemployment. However, he's always lived well above his means (sometimes flirting with personal bankruptcy), while I've lived well below. If we continue our lifestyles, retirement age may find me fairly comfortable, while he'd still likely have saved nothing.
Would it be reasonable for society to transfer some of my savings to pay for his retirement? How about restricting my benefits (drawn from the common pool our income taxes went into) via a means test that grants him full benefits? If not
I'm genuinely curious -- I've seen the conservative and libertarian answer to this situation before (and suspect I'll hear a lot more about them over the next four years), but rarely see a "social justice" engagement with the moral problem that goes beyond flatly denying that such situations ever arise. Links would be welcome.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 3, 2004 12:57 PMI'm genuinely curious -- I've seen the conservative and libertarian answer to this situation before (and suspect I'll hear a lot more about them over the next four years), but rarely see a "social justice" engagement with the moral problem that goes beyond flatly denying that such situations ever arise. Links would be welcome.
I'm not all that comfortable playing spokesman here, and can't think of any links off the top of my head. Perhaps Martha can offer something.
The short, personal answer is that I think your friend should, if he needs it, get the same sort of assistance anyone else gets in order to keep him off the street, fed and reasonably healthy, regardless of how profligate he's been. I think it's worth it to society as a whole to do this, and benefitting society is what taxes are supposed to be for.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at December 3, 2004 02:13 PMThe fathead Left with its trendy post-60s usurping of 'morality' and so on is condemning more of the poor to brutal, ignorant and socially non-mobile lives and then saying 'oh come along, isn't that much better than 'trying to better yourself?'
ROBBIE, I think that much of reason your argument seems to fall flat here is cultural -- namely that such a Left doesn't seem to exert any power in the US anymore. I don't know if it ever did, either -- it just seems so much like what you'd expect Rush Limbaugh to use as the monster under the bed in kids stories, and is about as believable.
I'm willing to buy that the UK does have some sort of busybody laziness-rewarding, crime-promoting, western-civilization-denigrating leftist government, but only in the same sense that it also has men whose faces are below their shoulders and sheep that grow on trees.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 3, 2004 03:18 PMYou still haven't found me a pre-30's opponent of Eugenics that can be definitely described as "Left".
Well, here I don't know enough history of debates over the specific word "eugenics" or the specific abomination of scientifically breeding human beings, but certainly the "left" position has always been the antiracist one, and it has always been the left that has championed the notion that people from disfavored ethnic, religious, or cultural groups deserve as much chance to succeed as anyone else. It has always been the right that has claimed innate superiority for persons of "good stock," meaning descent from privileged families or categories. The most specific thing I know about this, I guess, is the stuff in the Guardian article I cited above, about Bertillon, the father of biometrics, testifying against Dreyfus as a "handwriting expert".
If you're willing to broaden "anti-eugenics" to "antiracist," then, you can include the Dreyfusards, the Underground Railroad organizers, U.S. urban reformers like Jane Addams, organizers of immigrant labor unions, etc., etc.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 4, 2004 12:42 PMAbout Ben's question re: supporting the profligate -- well, I can only give my own answer to it, but my answer may be shared by others:
See, I was raised to see patience, forgiveness, generosity, and egalitarianism as important virtues. Naturally, being human, I don't really follow these imperatives but I do believe in them. Of course I lose patience with people who get themselves into avoidable trouble and then call me and ask to be rescued yet again. Of course I do. And I have less patience as time goes on. But when I decide it's time to refuse to help further, I know I'm committing a sin. The part of me that says "enough!" puts it more or less this way: "Sorry, I refuse to be a saint here. I'm going to make a selfish objection to someone who's taking advantage."
There's a religious element to this, at least for me: our duty is to help our fellow beings regardless of whether we think they "deserve" help. It isn't for us to judge who deserves what. Everyone has a right to live; helping anyone to avoid suffering is a good deed; proper good deeds are done in secret, without the crowing that, for example, I'm doing now in order to explain myself -- and certainly without the self-important pageantry of "I find you Deserving and therefore I award you this benefit."
The imperfect reality is that most of us tend to feel more like helping people who seem deserving and grateful. The imperfect reality is that sooner or later most of us put ourselves first and help others only as we feel able.
But the idea that anyone would see virtue in withholding help from the "undeserving" -- that anyone would see virtue in selfishness, in denying benefits, in handing out privation as a punishment for improvidence -- well, that sounds like one of Screwtape's sneaky inducements to the mortal sins of greed and pride.
I think that's a big reason why a lot of liberals and leftists find conservative and libertarian social philosophies so repugnant: we, too, get fed up with fuckups -- but when we get around to saying "pull yourself together; don't expect me to carry you," we have this guilty knowledge that it's a moral weakness to lose patience. To treat this weak capitulation to selfishness as a positive virtue -- to even self-righteously claim religious backing for refusing help to people in need -- well, it's just topsy-turvy, frightening, "evil be thou my good," Cain praised for refusing to be his brother's keeper. It's as morally repugnant to us (or me, anyway) as Satanism is to a Pentecostalist.
There, does that help?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 4, 2004 01:25 PMBen wrote:
'I'm willing to buy that the UK does have some sort of busybody laziness-rewarding, crime-promoting, western-civilization-denigrating leftist government,'
You left out its rooted commitment to the curtailing of personal liberty and developing a Police State: new laws to control private opinion etc, abolition of jury trial, and holding suspects without charge indefinitely because of scare stories of terrorism.
but only in the same sense that it also has men whose faces are below their shoulders and sheep that grow on trees.'
Then you are uninformed. Here's a titbit that sums up the current leftist daft behaviour: Geoff Hoon, our stupid Minister of Defence delivered a speech to the SAS last week and began it with this: 'Gentlemen, you need to become more gender inclusive.'
He was not applauded at the end, and the top kiddy C.O gets up and says 'well Mr Hoon, if that's all you have to say, I think we're done here.'
re martha's comments:
I see what you're saying but you present it in a reductionist way with a little of the Dubya 'you're either with us or against us' mentality. There are pettifogging details surrounding the topics you cover and how best to deal with them. The fact that I don't believe in the strategy or tactics of the Left, never mind about their societical vision, which goes well beyond feeding and clothing the unfortunate and into all sorts of agendas and obsessions doesn't mean I think people should be sleeping in the streets. And I hate supermarkets and corporations too: mind you, less people get cancer now, so they say, because of a wide range of food supplied cheaply by supermarkets. I dunno...
Posted by: ROBBIE at December 6, 2004 08:32 AMThere, does that help?
Well, I do appreciate the effort, but I'm afraid that it's probably just pushed me about half an inch further rightward. Of course I don't disagree with any of your points about helping the poor, nor about the "seventy times seven" approach. It's just that you don't seem to draw any moral distinction at all between me helping my friend and you forcing me to do so.
You mention the religious aspect, which I think is very relevant. At least within the Christian tradition, there's a strong distinction between the moral commandments placed on an individual subject/believer and those placed on a ruler. In a democratic society, we're forced to assume both roles when making decisions -- in most cases one set of rules apply governing our own private conduct, while other cases (like voting or legislating) another set apply.
Applying the set of moral rules directed towards an individual to one's political decisions is precisely what the religious right gets criticized for. How is the application of "give all your wealth to the poor" to tax/benefit legislation less misapplied than the various efforts to apply "avoid fornication" to sodomy laws?
I'm not saying that there's no moral justification for redistributive programs -- not at all! I'm just saying that you seem to have ducked providing it, by talking about what we each ought to do, instead of what we all should legislate and enforce on each other.
Oh well. We won't solve the world's problems tonight.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 7, 2004 06:13 AMThen you are uninformed.
It's not just that I'm uninformed, it's that I've simply got no visceral experience. I believe your story like the couple of England scare stories I read each month on the horrors of an England that's outlawed guns and self-defense -- say 'what a shame that those foreigners have gotten themselves into such a mess,' and then turn the page. It's not that I don't think preaching "gender inclusiveness" to the SAS is nuts -- it's just not anything I can get a handle on for my own situation.
Look, I could go into a long rant about this obnoxious old coot at last year's rifle club picnic. The sheriff had come out to give our pre-BBQ speech, and afterwards this guy started badgering her with questions about why "the militias" weren't called out after 9/11. She managed to parry his questions a bit without actually saying "because there's no such thing, you loon." But it was a really unpleasant exchange, with some awkward looks shared by the rest of us, each half-hoping that everyone else agreed with us on the matter, but not wanting to find out.
Then I could say: They're all seditious nuts, just like your fox hunters!
That's my point -- no quantity of stories about a bunch of foreigners acting nutty is going to persuade somebody to change their opinion of domestic politics much..
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at December 7, 2004 07:23 AMIt's just that you don't seem to draw any moral distinction at all between me helping my friend and you forcing me to do so.
I said nothing at all about "forcing." You're inserting that into what I said. It's a matter of us, as a society, as a community, democratically deciding whom to help on an entitlement basis, as opposed to a few individuals with money unilaterally deciding to hand out charity to folks they personally feel like rewarding. Private charity is backhandedly a kind of coercion, especially if you think from the point of view of the people the Big Man refuses to help due to his personal moral disapproval. Supposing, for example, that the Big Man chose to hand out Thanksgiving turkeys only to poor households with Bush signs in their windows?
If you don't like the democratic decisions about whom to help, work politically to change them. If you want to complain that you as a voter don't feel you have enough say in the government social programs, that's a valid complaint. But it's not a complaint about the programs, it's a complaint about the quality of the democratic process. I don't happen to like the way our welfare system works -- actually I dislike it intimately, in agonizing technical detail, for its Victorian arrogance and stinginess and its postmodern obsession with data collection -- but that doesn't mean I want to get rid of it. I want us all to vote for changes that make the system actually treat people decently.
Seems like our basic difference -- maybe the chief liberal-conservative difference -- is between a categorical-imperative sense of responsibility for one's whole society, and a more personal sense of responsibility for one's own self, household and locality. There's this point, yes, where everyone gets tired and says, "Listen, I can't save the world, I can only try and live honorably in my own corner." But I don't think one's politics need to change as a result.