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WARNING: RANT AHEAD! 

NYT Columnist David Brooks (via Metamodern):

A Case of Mental Courage

….Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts.

She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.

In the mental sphere, this meant conquering mental laziness with arduous and sometimes numbingly boring lessons. It meant conquering frivolity by sitting through earnest sermons and speeches. It meant conquering self- approval by staring straight at what was painful.

This emphasis on mental character lasted for a time, but it has abated. There’s less talk of sin and frailty these days. Capitalism has also undermined this ethos. In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.

In this atmosphere, we’re all less conscious of our severe mental shortcomings and less inclined to be skeptical of our own opinions. Occasionally you surf around the Web and find someone who takes mental limitations seriously. For example, Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once gave a speech called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He and others list our natural weaknesses: We have confirmation bias; we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible. We are herd thinkers and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group.

But, in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse

True, and kudos to David Brooks for calling attention to the deficit in metacognition. However, I suspect that there is more to this phenomena than decadence, ADHD and a handy internet connection. There’s a problem with our epistemology. To be specific, a common epistemological standard is fading from American life, giving license to demagogues and emboldening fools.

There are many possible causes. The decline of critical thinking, logic, history and science in the curricular standards of American public schools; the disappearance of liberal education and the excesses of postmodernism, deconstructionism, constructivism and crit theory in our universities; the dumbing down of the MSM into 7 second sound bite infotainment and partisan agitprop; political correctness and its fetishes of race and gender victimization and witch-hunting; the growing legitimization of magical thinking inherent in religious fundamentalism and secular equivalents in irrationality like “deep ecology” or crackpot conspiracy theories. All of these and more have combined to erode standards of public discourse to an ever lower common denominator.

John Adams once argued before a Massachusetts jury that “facts are stubborn things”. Today it is unlikely that such an appeal would work. Not only do many people believe that they are entitled to their own set of “facts” but that they can, if they wish, dispense with facts entirely, yet self-righteously insist that their deliberate ignorance should be given the same weight as an informed argument because they “have a right to their opinion” without anyone daring to ask them why they are so morally and intellectually retarded.

Where once intellectual embarrassment prevented outright lies or inane arguments from being made in respectable forums, the popular deference to the dignity of cranks puts tin-foil hatters and their OCD political convictions about Bush orchestrating 9/11 or Obama being a secret Muslim in the center of public debate instead being confined to off-center mimeographed pamphlets passed out at airports by glassy-eyed true-believers. We feel compelled as a society to politely entertain drivel that should never have been heard past a kitchen table with a three quarters empty bottle of whiskey on it.

The country needs to regain a common intellectual ground that eschews nonsense for what it is.

Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World by Adrienne Redd

I “met” Dr. Adrienne Redd some years ago through the kind offices of Critt Jarvis, which resulted in a wide-ranging and intermittent email discussion, sometimes joined by John Robb and others, of “virtual states”, “virtual nations”, “micropowers” and evolving concepts of sovereignty and statehood in international relations. It was an intellectually stimulating conversation.

Today, Dr. Redd is Nimble Books’ newest author, and she has just sent me a review copy of Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers, the culmination of approximately seven years of research and writing.  Redd investigates nothing less than the “fate of the state” and I am looking forward to reading her argument in detail.

To be reviewed here soon….

Remember this ?

Now try this:

Simple, focused and profound trumps ridiculously complex systems designed from technocratic hubris. Even if everything here worked according to plan in these charts, the intrinsic “friction” is a colossal waste of resources.

ADDENDUM:

In the interest of evenhandedness – and because it doesn’t matter in terms of the point of my post – here’s a Democratic take on the House Democratic plan for health care provided by Curtis Gale Weeks in the comments section. While this was not the same as the final Obamacare bill, there’s some congruence. If anyone has a link to a Democratic-produced chart of the final bill, I’ll post that:

Small “r” republican virtue, to be precise.

A wise man once told me that a weakness of our Constitutional system was that the Framers implicitly presumed that people of a truly dangerous character, from bullies to bandits to political menaces to the community, would primarily be dealt with in age-old fashion by outraged neighbors whose rights had been trespassed and persons abused one time too many. They did not prepare for a time when communities would be prohibited from doing so by a government that also, as a whole, had slipped the leash. Indeed, having read Locke, Montesquieu, Cicero, Polybius, Aristotle and Plato, they expected that such a state of affairs was “corruption” of the sort that plagued the Old World and might happen here in time. A sign of cultural decadence and political decay. They gave Americans, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “A republic, if you can keep it”. It remains so only with our vigilance.

It is happening now.

We have forgotten – or rather, deliberately been taught and encouraged to forget – the meaning of citizenship.

We have let things slip.

Joseph Fouche superbly captures this implicit element, the consequences of the loss of fear of  informal but very real community sanction, in his most recent post:

People Like Us Give Mobs a Bad Name

….A classic American mob could exhibit any or all of these strategies. It could be a saint inciting a mob to attack others who deviated from a shared narrative. It could be a knave in saint’s clothing inciting an attack on personal rivals. It could be a moralist inciting a mob against the local knaves. The one constant is that an American mob was an expression of communal self-government by moralists seeking to punish what they saw as deviant, even if its manifestation was frequently unpleasant. It was a sign the local people were engaged.

Samuel Adams was the Lenin of the American Revolution. He conceived a hatred for the British Empire and a desire for American independence well before anyone else did. Adams skillfully used mobs alongside legal pretense to incrementally spread his agenda. Others followed his example. In the Worcester Revolution of 1774, the local population shut down the normal operations of royal government in west and central Massachusetts and drove royal officials out of those regions (the book to read is Ray Raphael’s The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord). The British crown lost control of inland Massachusetts before Lexington and Concord were even fought.

However, eleven years later, when many of the same local residents attempted to do the same thing in protest of the policies of a now independent Massachusetts, the state government put down their rebellion with Samuel Adams’s strong support. The difference? An apocryphal remark attributed to Adams captures some of the truth behind his attitude: “the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death”. Mobs protesting the actions of an unrepresentative government like the British Parliament, Adams argued, were valid. Mobs protesting the actions of a representative government like Massachusetts’s state government, on the other hand, were treasonous. This doctrine, supported by other Revolutionary leaders, especially the cabal behind the Order of the Cincinnati, was eventually enshrined as the higher law of the land in the slow motion coup d’etat that overthrew the Articles of Confederation and replaced it with the more authoritarian United States Constitution in 1787-1788.

While mobs continued to combine, they were gradually neutered by the conscious agenda of American elites who sought to replace informal norms enforced by communal censure with formal norms applied under the professional supervision of “wiser heads”. This was a collusion between saints and knaves against moralists. Saints got purer standards that were not reliant on the whims of moralists who got stirred up in unpredictable ways that might violate the saints’ prevailing narrative while knaves got credentials that allowed them to entrench their positions and agendas under the cover of serving a higher good. The same sense of community morality and punishment that gave nineteenth century self-government its vigor and occasional excess was weakened as moralists were tuned out by saints embedded in holy isolation and knaves concerned only with advancing personal priorities. Moralists saw the knaves getting away with free riding off of them and began to opt out, leaving room for more knaves to free ride. For a little formal pretense, the returns on rent seeking were enormous.

The ideal went from a citizenry engaged in self-government to a system designed to advance the best and brightest. Meritocracy sounds good in theory and has some positives in reality. However, a perfect meritocracy is a perfect tyranny. All of the leaders are on once side and all the followers are on the other. This tendency toward the separation of the best from the rest may only be checked by the tendency of those on the ascendant to favor their own children, whatever their merit, over strangers that are more meritorious. This will force some aspiring meritocrats to side with the followers and bring about a rotation of elites. But the transition may take a while and its best to start before you have a meritocratic problem….

Read the whole post here.

Today’s circumstances, with the elite determinedly crafting rules for the mass but not for their class, have an ominous portent for the future of America as a democratic republic, but violence is not yet required.

Political engagement is.

Older readers may recall the once famous but now largely forgotten Cold War figure of Milovan Djilas. While other dissidents from Communism like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers acheived a more epic historical stature, Djilas was the first high Communist official, the adviser and likely successor to Yugoslavian dictator Tito, to turn against Communism as a system. More importantly, Djilas wrote New Class in 1957, a damning analysis that accurately castigated the hierarchy of Communist Party and government officials an exploitive and tyrannical ruling class that in the Soviet context was later termed “Nomenklatura“. For this act, Djilas would suffer in Tito’s prisons, but he outlived both Tito and Communism and his Party enemies were never able to shake off the truth of his bitter critique.

Claremont scholar and Boston U. international relations professor Angelo Codevilla has published in The American Spectator a very lengthy, often brilliant, sometimes meandering, essay that is part analysis, part cri de coeur, but primarily the most devastating attack on America’s emerging, bipartisan, technocratic Oligarchy that I have ever read:

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

….Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

That passage captures the zeitgeist. Read Dr. Codevilla’s article in in its’ entirety here.

I am not in harmony with everything Codevilla has written. Neither is Dr. James Joyner. Codevilla’s personal, very socially conservative, cultural preferences are not mine and, like Joyner, I would quibble with some of his descriptions as immoderate. In general, this essay would have benefited from either having been edited down to be more concise or expanded into a book to leverage greater evidentiary support of diverging political worldviews, which is out there. What is hard to deny though, is that Codevilla is pointing a finger at a visceral problem of a self-aware ruling class in the process of ossifying and separating itself culturally and legally away from and over the ruled – an alien thing in American history. Something the ancient Greeks as well as the Founding Fathers would recognize as an “oligarchy“, a threat to democratic self-government and constitutional liberties.

Unlike Milovan Djilas, Angelo Codevilla will not face prison or lose his job for his criticism. Our oligarchy is in its newborn infancy, but it is hungry for power, venal in its corruption, covetous of security, impatient of democratic accountability and intolerant of dissent. Beware of legislative moves, cloaked in high-sounding phrases, to regulate speech, circumscribe criticism of public officials, grant police powers to private corporations like BP, tax farm the many to benefit the few, and generally exclude the public from important policy decisions by making citizen participation in governmental process more complex, opaque, indirect, financially burdensome and personally risky.

If any proposed government action would seem likely to legitimize an activity that would be unethical or illegal if an ordinary person did it, that is a time to make your voice heard against going down the slippery slope.