An aging Kantian turns “amoralist”

Late-life conversions contain an element of sadness.  A long personal history is disavowed; personal achievements before conversion appear tainted or false; in the enthusiasm of the new perspective, an individual obliterates his old self.  For the young, radical change can be charming.  Among gray-heads, alas, it smacks of desperation.

So I was saddened to read a two-part “manifesto” by Joel Marks in Philosophy Now, breathlessly proclaiming his transformation into an “amoralist.”  The problem:  for the last 10 years, Marks has authored the “Moral Moments” column in the journal.  He’s clearly conflicted about the future of the column – much of the manifesto concerns the question whether an amoralist can dispense moral advice.

I peruse Philosophy Now on occasion, and must confess I usually found Marks’ pieces uninteresting because of their method and content.  The method was an unreal rationalism, of a type rarely found outside the sheltering walls of academic philosophy departments.  Possibly in consequence, the content avoided most problems central to morality and focused on a few liberal causes:  vegetarianism, animal rights, and gay marriage, for example.

Marks isn’t a young man:  he’s a professor emeritus, and his photo irrevocably ranks him with the gray-beards of the world.  All this time, he’s been a Kantian and a moralist.  Late in life, he has experienced a change of heart.  “In fact,” he exults, “I have given up morality altogether!”

His explanation has a strange, old-fashioned sound to it – one might call it Sartre resartus.  Marks is an atheist, and he has just now concluded that “without God, there is no morality.”  Moral actions, he writes, obey moral commands, and such commands can only be legitimate when issued by a Commander:  hence, no God – no Commander – no commands.

But what of reason?  Marks was never a believer; blaming a disappearing God for his conversion strikes me as disingenuous.  His faith was in rationalism, in a universally valid metaphysics:  in a “theory of morality” to which one must appeal by the use of logical argument.  The theory to which his heart had assented was Kantian.  That faith now lies shattered, and in the shipwreck all belief in the viability of moral theories has been lost as well.

I find it strange that Marks, having denied God and abjured Kant, nowhere in his manifesto questions the rationalist method that has delivered to him a heap of broken images.

I find it strange, too, that Marks doesn’t question his store of opinions in light of his radically changed perspective.  He was a zealot about animal rights as a Kantian – he’s going to stay a zealot as an amoralist.  He can do this, he explains, because he has become a “desirist.”  Whereas he once defended animal rights on principle, now he’s just indulging a private passion.

This will not do.

From Socrates onward, moral philosophers have placed great store on criticism yet drawn a subjective line beyond which criticism isn’t welcomed.  Thus Plato’s dialogues are unintelligible unless one knows the moral conventions of Plato’s day, and the works of Kant would be inscrutable to anyone unacquainted with Christianity.  All rationalist philosophers criticize selectively:  there’s much about their cultures they wish to keep.

Similarly, Marks calls himself a “moral fool” for having clung to his moral theory, yet appears desperate to justify the judgments derived from it.  Why on earth should an “amoralist” object to vivisection?  Because that’s how he feels about the question, Marks argues.  His desires revolt against vivisection.  But weren’t those desires trained under the foolish Kantian dispensation?  Had he been born a person devoid of moral principles, would he care now about vivisection?  And if the answer is “no,” how can anyone committed to logic continue to care?

Marks’ desires are Kantian, in the same way that Kant’s were Lutheran.  Philosophers know they must find a stopping-place for criticism, or else slide into nihilism.  This isn’t wisdom on their part:  it’s a failure to summon the courage of their convictions.  Rationalism and criticism fail spectacularly as guides to right action, but rather than confront this disaster head-on, philosophers pick and choose their stopping-places, usually at the point where their desired conditions come under attack.

Marks is enamored of metaphysics:  it’s what he means by “morality.”  Yet his is a strange cosmic edifice that can be torn down to the last brick without changing any of the routines inside.  His is a feeble set of abstract principles which can be abandoned without much effect on practical life.  If this is the sum of his transformation, he’s done nothing to get excited about.

Although he now calls himself an amoralist, Marks is one step shy of becoming a vulgar moralist.  He has given up on moral theories.  Good:  morality isn’t about theories but about actions.  He has given up on metaphysics.  Good:  morality, being practical, is engendered by history and community, not by abstract cosmic frameworks.

But he clings to rationalism, possibly because it’s part of this professional training.  This is the bridge Marks must cross if he really wishes to come to terms with his own conclusions.  He has rejected metaphysics, but will not grapple with what he calls, with apparent distaste, the “sociological kind” of morality.

His great revelation is that a metaphysics of morality doesn’t exist.  True.  Morality isn’t reasoned:  it’s given.  Who is the Giver?  Even if one believes in God, he can only work through his creation.  The community – which extends back to the dead and forward to those not yet born – legislates right action to the individual.  This becomes sociology, mere object of study, only to a professor or a morally inert soul.

The community is also the Commander, and its commands are absolute yet local, not cosmic, in nature.  The individual, confronted by situation X, will be enjoined to behavior Y.  Such commands can be aggregated into a commandment or a ruling principle only in the style of the pirate’s code – as guidelines rather than rules.  From “Thou shalt not kill” onward, local exceptions will always abound.

Does this leave us in the grip of orthodoxy and convention?  Depends on what we mean by those words.  Convention issues from community:  it’s what morality feels like to those who aren’t academic philosophers.  But convention need not entail hypocrisy, smugness, or intolerance.

Despite what Marks asserts, every moral ideal is an impossible thing.  Perfect courage or honesty, for example, are impossible states of being.  The conventional moral life is therefore a striving for perfection, an inching toward the light, which affords every opportunity for honesty and humility.  It has the advantage over metaphysics that one can look to flesh-and-blood examples for inspiration, rather than to syllogisms in books.

I can only wish Marks well in his pilgrim’s progress from metaphysics to reality.  I hope he can cross the bridge to a farther shore:  understanding morality as the impact of history and tradition on human nature, worked out in a specific environment by a specific community.  Although his manifesto fairly hums with uncertainty and doubt, the answers are right in front of him.

Only after has figured it out will he be able to resume his column and offer moral advice with a clear conscience.

North Korea kills, NYT chill

The actions of the shadowy rulers of North Korea are rarely transparent, but the general outlines of Monday’s violence in Yeongpyeong island are clear enough.  North Korean artillery lobbed over 200 shells into the island, which hosts a military base and a population of fishermen and their families.  Two South Korean marines died in the attack.  Many homes burned to the ground, and the charred bodies of two civilian victims were discovered Tuesday.  Eighteen people suffered injuries.

The South Koreans, who had been conducting a military exercise on the island, returned fire.  There’s no indication of any casualties by the North.

For all its antic reputation, the North Korean regime is quite adept at murder and blackmail.  It represses, imprisons, and starves its own population into submission.  In March, it torpedoed a South Korean warship, killing 46 sailors on board.  Earlier this month, it revealed to an American scientist a sophisticated and hitherto unsuspected capability for enriching uranium – threatening nuclear Gotterdammerung to an appalled world.

There’s a history here.  Yeongpyeong is the latest in a long list of atrocities perpetrated by the North Koreans for reasons best known to themselves.

Unless one looks at the world through the eyes of the New York Times.

The NYT’s tendentious “coverage” of the incident, committed by Mark McDonald, stands out as an atrocity of the journalistic kind.  In his initial report, McDonald seems perplexed about who fired first – although a literal reading might indicate it was the South Koreans.

The North blamed the South for starting the exchange; the South acknowledged firing test shots in the area but denied that any had fallen in the North’s territory.

One side says this, the other that, who’s to tell what happened?  Only the South, suspiciously, is forced to “acknowledge” anything.

The same approach is used when referencing the torpedoing of the South Korean warship.  The North’s responsibility for the attack has been established by a panel of independent experts, and accepted by most of the world.  But this is how the Solomonic McDonald comes to judgment:  “Seoul blamed a North Korean torpedo attack; the North has denied any role.”  How can an honest reporter decide?

Later in the report, McDonald rambles on at length about how “analysts” believe the artillery attack was really a desperate North Korean plea for food aid, which has been “strangled” by US sanctions.  One “analyst” gets more space than any other voice in the report:

“It’s a sign of North Korea’s increasing frustration,” Mr. Choi said.

“Washington has turned a deaf ear to Pyongyang and North Korea is saying, ‘Look here. We’re still alive. We can cause trouble. You can’t ignore us.’ ” [. . .]

“They’re in a desperate situation, and they want food immediately, not next year,” he said.

Here at last we are told who is to blame:  we are.  The North Koreans, led by their “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il, feel frustrated, ignored, and finally driven to desperate acts by America’s indifference and strangling power.

McDonald’s report on the following day is even more egregious.  Once again he appears to wash his hands in the matter of blame:  “The Koreas blame each other for instigating the artillery barrages on Tuesday afternoon,” is his coy starting proposition.  But it soon becomes clear, from listening to McDonald’s “analysts,” that in fact the South bears the brunt of responsibility for being attacked.

“What has been missing in all the analysis is that we’re not listening to what North Korea says,” said Michael Breen, the author of a book about the two Koreas and a biography of Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader. “Because of the blustering language the North Koreans always use, you tend to dismiss it.

“But if the North was holding live-fire exercises five miles offshore from South Korea, it wouldn’t just be business as usual. These waters, they consider theirs. What’s the point, anyway, of doing these live-fire drills so close to North Korea?”

The point of the live-fire drills, of course, might be to defend the island against just such an attack as took place – but this isn’t the kind of logic “analysts” indulge in.  Anyway, a South Korean Defense Ministry official “acknowledged Tuesday night that the South had fired artillery close to North Korea,” and all that acknowledging probably adds up to a guilty verdict.

McDonald fairly sputters over news that, in a gesture of support, the US will be sending an aircraft carrier group to South Korea.  Yet another “analyst” gets trotted out to do the NYT’s vicarious opinionating:

Mr. Breen called it “foolishness.”

“The whole idea is just to give them the bird,” he said.

North Korea scholars in Seoul said the arrival of the aircraft carrier, as a potent symbol of gunboat diplomacy, would likely bolster the hardliners inside the North Korean regime.

“These guys want aircraft carriers,” Mr. Delury said. “This is exactly the response they want.”

Beyond boilerplate statements by the US military, no contrary voice is heard anywhere in the report.

Nor is consideration given to the difference in character of the two governments, North and South.  One is a brutal and aggressive despotism, the other a democracy lately inclined to appeasement:  no matter.  The only discussion of character McDonald engages in is a vigorous defense of Kim Jong Il’s.

“He’s not a foolish man at all,” Mr. Breen said. “He’s not crazy, not at all. He’s not nuts. That’s a very shallow analysis.

“If he was here on a conference call with us, he’d say, “Look, if there’s a war, my country will be finished within a week. I know that. I’m not trying to start a war, I just don’t like enemy states holding live-fire exercises within stone-throwing distance of my coast.”

So there we have it.  The US is foolish for giving North Korea the middle finger.  Kim Jong Il, however, is not foolish – he’s a reasonable guy, concerned about those live-fire drills.  Killing four people and destroying a fishing village is just his personal communications style, the Dear Leader equivalent of a conference call.

A Manichean vision seems to inspire the NYT approach:  self-loathing and self-abuse on one side, generosity if not admiration for moral monsters on the other.  Those who recall the work of Walter Duranty while “covering” Stalin’s purges will understand that the vision long ago conquered the soul of the newspaper, and like a cognitive affliction controls the facts its staff can process and regurgitate.

Print all the news which fit the mold.

Naked before the bureaucrats

Some years ago, after a particularly vigorous frisking in Heathrow Airport, London, I turned to the security agent and said:  “I think we have to get married now.”  He was not amused.

That was an age of innocence.  Today, TSA is lustily engaging in full-body scannings and genital gropings of nuns at US airports.  But there has been pushback:  barefoot and beltless, the American public has had enough of the autocrats of the security queue, and is in a state of open revolt.

This man has become a culture hero by defying the airport goons while his iPhone camera was on.  His cry of defiance has gone viral:  “Don’t touch my junk.”  The normally decorous Charles Krauthammer quotes him and piles on:  “Don’t touch my junk, you airport security goon – my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I’m a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?”

Janet Napolitano, head of the vast mindless horde known as Homeland Security, is not amused.  What’s wrong with being groped in the groin by a goon in a uniform?  It’s part of our “layered defense” and “layered approach,” she says.

Of course, we know Janet Napolitano can see right through those layers – and God help us if she craves a feel . . .

Since a lot of digital ink has been spilled on the subject, let me just make a couple of points – without once using the words “junk” or “johnson” – then withdraw into a discreet silence.

The political class now in charge of Washington has the ambition to control our lives, but lacks the wisdom and the courage to command the ways.  Instead it issues vague generic instructions to a brain-dead bureaucracy like TSA, which proceeds to take nude x-rays of the citizenry and feel up its private parts.

For the individual, it’s a violation.  For a liberal democracy, it’s an abomination – the surrender of sovereign power to government employees.  But for a bureaucracy, it’s business as usual:  show up, follow standard procedures, peep, grope, collect paycheck.  Complaints?  Threaten a lawsuit.  Call it a layered approach.

The outrage isn’t a question of the public listening to its inner puritan.  The clammy hands of TSA give physical reality to the more abstract urges of the Obama administration, and the anger at the airports is the same that was registered at the polls in the mid-term elections.

The people in power, disguised as good shepherds, like to echo the words of  the prophet Isaiah, “All we like sheep have gone astray.”  But we are not sheep, and they are not shepherds; and it is our government’s reach which has gone far astray.

Death of news, Ted Koppel edition

Ted Koppel reached the zenith of his career as part of an effort to exploit the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.  Four days after Islamist thugs took over the US embassy in Tehran, Koppel set up shop in a 15-minute national ABC News broadcast which followed the local news.  It began with ominous music and the dread-inspiring words, intoned by Koppel, “AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE.  DAY 342…”

The crisis lasted so long, Koppel stayed on for 20 years or so.  The hostage crisis, it bin bery bery good to him.

Now he has returned to steal one of this blog’s signature lines.  Ostensibly, the subject is the media fuss surrounding the political donations of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, about which I have absolutely nothing to say.  In reality, Koppel wants to brood on the death of news.

To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the “public interest, convenience and necessity,” as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses. The three major broadcast networks pointed to their news divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence that they were fulfilling the FCC’s mandate. News was, in a manner of speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.

On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.

Allow me to translate:  the atmosphere breathed by the titans of broadcast news was composed in equal parts of government compulsion and public indifference.

Koppel omits a third element:  information monopoly.  He was, after all, an odd-looking, bizarre-sounding man with no discernible expertise in Iran, hostage-taking, or foreign affairs.  ABC News just threw his face and voice at the crisis and sneered at the American public, “What are you going to do instead, read the blogs?”

His conceit is that he told us what we didn’t want to hear, whereas hacks like Olbermann just rant to the converted.  But again:  what were his qualifications to tell us anything?  What did we not hear, because of what he chose to talk about?  Where was he before the Iranian crisis exploded?

As long ago as 1922, Walter Lippmann knew that news only dealt with eruptive  events rather than their context or causes.  “Journalism” has always been in business to exploit, not  explain.  Keith Olbermann isn’t deep enough to have invented the shallow narrative.

In the petrified forest of Koppel’s mind, however, it is always 1979, and Keith Olbermann is a Ted Koppel who has sold his integrity for a bigger audience and the profits it brings.  The reality is that nobody watches MSNBC – Olbermann, the biggest draw, barely gets a million viewers in a country of 300 million.  On its worst nights, Koppel’s show did better.

Why?  Because it partook of a monopoly.  Where have all the viewers gone?  To other information platforms, every one.  The news are dying not because of a loss of integrity by newsmakers, but because the public has other options, and won’t necessarily put up with an odd-looking, bizarre-sounding man of no discernible talents just because the networks say so.

The public can now talk back.  Information now flows in a wide-open marketplace.  Industrially produced formats – what we have come to call “news” – are too expensive and unprofitable, add nothing of value to the information consumer, and will soon become extinct.

Look, I admit to a sneaking fondness for Koppel and his late-night horror show.  By making us perfectly safe stay-at-home Americans feel like we were bound and gagged by Iranian crazies, they pushed the country to get rid of Jimmy Carter, and – no doubt to Koppel’s dismay – assisted in the rise of Ronald Reagan.

Unintended consequences aside, the only difference between Koppel and Olbermann is the context of the marketplace.

Zombie redistribution

Dan Ariely is a famous psychologist.  He survived horrible burns as young man to become a driving force behind the “behaviorist” school of economics, which maintains we are too irrational to understand our own interest among the choices presented by a complex society.

Dan Ariely is also a zombie.  He espouses a socialist faith which died once, and now staggers around the world in search of sustenance.  Red meat for zombie socialists is other people’s money:  they want to snatch at it, tear it away, feed on it through a zombie government, and all without the need of an explanation.

Ariely wants to “redistribute” our wealth.  He surveyed 5,000 Americans, and found that they underestimated the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in the US, which, he adds ominously, “is bigger than at any time since the 1920s – just before the Depression.”  When told of the real levels of American inequality, a “consensus” emerged among those surveyed.  They wanted “to live in a country that looks more like Sweden than the United States,” and were apparently (Ariely cites no survey numbers) willing to redistribute 50 percent of the country’s total wealth.

So.  We have a survey.  People expressed certain opinions.  The consequence should be a traumatic intrusion of state power into the economy.  Ariely owns that going for the 50 percent figure with one cut of the knife would “create chaos” – but really:  for such a clever man, this is a remarkably obtuse argument.

While socialism lived, it had a theory of human nature, and hence of morality and government.  Wealth was created by exploitation.  To survive, the poor bargained away their freedom to the rich, who used their labor to become richer.  The exploiter added nothing to the process beyond his criminal greed.  A just government had to become powerful enough to sweep away the class of exploiters, and allow workers to reap the rewards of their labor.

This might have been wrong – and in fact it was – but it was coherent.  It explained government bullying in terms of justice and decency.

Ariely makes no claims that wealthy Americans are by definition exploiters or criminals.  But if they are law-abiding citizens, on what constitutional basis can the government expropriate half their wealth?  What fundamental law will the warrant point to, when the police move in to take over people’s excessive houses, jewelry, and Microsoft stocks?

It’s all a question of looking more like Sweden, apparently.  On this purported desire, Ariely disingenuously pretends to speak on behalf of most Americans.  But putting aside the right to property and the vagaries of an opinion survey, Americans vote for their representatives every year, and have yet to elect anyone who sounds remotely Swedish.  President Obama probably came closest, and has just been rebuked for his trouble – in the same elections in which Washington State voters rejected a first-time income tax for those making $200,000 or more.

From an economic perspective, the consequence of setting an arbitrary ceiling on wealth is wholly predictable.  People will stop working when they reach the ceiling.  Many will move to ceiling-free and zombie-free locations.  This is a given.  How, then, can we explain such nonsense from a leading light of behaviorist economics?

If pre-1989 socialism was, in part, an intellectual proposition, zombie socialism is mere impulse.  Ariely viscerally wishes to impose an abstract vision of equality on Americans, and the desire is its own justification.  His political urges even contradict his psychological theories:  if we are all irrational in our decisions, isn’t a limited government preferable to a Leviathan making colossal mistakes?

No matter.  The pleasure principle is in charge.

On politics, Ariely is a deeply unserious writer.  There is a lot of that going around, and not just on the money-eating zombie side of the street.

Let me end this post with a warning by Peggy Noonan, directed at the newly elected Republicans at the opposite end of the spectrum from Ariely, who are about to enter Washington in triumph.

We’re in an age where politicians assert, insist and leave. It’s all quick, blunt and dumb. But to win and hold the center you have to make your case, you have to show you’re philosophically serious, you have to show your logic, and connect it to a philosophy. You don’t sit around saying, “I like centrists so I compromise,” you say, “Here’s what we believe, here’s how we think and why.”

Just so.

Systems of freedom, systems of control

Janet Daley chronicles the death agonies of “democratic socialism,” 20 years after its totalitarian sibling expired.

So a generation after the collapse of totalitarian socialism, its democratic form is finally crumbling as well. And, oddly enough, the latter may take longer than the former to unravel. The one virtue of totalitarian governments is that they can be swept away in a single blow, either through violent overthrow or – as in the case of Soviet communism – by their populations simply walking out from under them. But social democracy has the supposed legitimacy of the consent of an electorate which has exercised a free political choice.

This is a second death, which makes the present state of socialism, in Europe and elsewhere, not so much democratic as zombie-like.  Originally socialism was an ideal of  social justice and brotherhood.  The current version is about the satisfaction of appetites:  mindless bodies tumbling about in dark streets, looking for fresh meat.

Zombie socialism has gone terminal because it lacks justification, other than the pleasure principle.  Looking over the world, I find this to be true of the regimes which today challenge and condemn liberal democracy.  Politically they might be strong or weak, but intellectually they are hollow.  They are defined by negation and, to paraphrase John Adams, can’t explain themselves to themselves.

Unlike the Marxist-Leninists, the fascists, the Nazis – all of whom could spin endless reams of bogus political theory – the despots of the moment are reduced to weak hypocrisies or awkward silence on the subject of their own systems of government.  The glorification of the state, once the key to transforming human nature, now emanates quite nakedly from a Nietzschean will to power.

Take the case of China, a country usually portrayed as the rising superpower.  What’s the Chinese model?  In essence, a political mafia – the undead carcass of the Chinese Communist Party – lords it over the most untrammeled capitalism on earth. Why does this mafia have the right to rule?  It used to be, because they were the vanguard of the proletariat.  Are they now the vanguard of the plutocrats?

The mind reels.  This isn’t a system:  it’s history.  It’s thugs in power for one reason clinging to power for whatever reason.

Or take Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his “Bolivarian revolution.”  What does that label mean?  Other than a sincere anti-Americanism, nothing much.  In a sense, Chavez is a throwback Latin American caudillo, basing his power not on any system but on strength of personality.  He believes he’s doing his country a favor by shutting down the opposition and talking endlessly on TV.  But unlike the classic model of the personalistic dictator, Chavez has been unable or unwilling to dismantle Venezuela’s  democracy – and has been weakened by its continued existence.

Chavez has pauperized an oil-rich nation.  Even if his Bolivarian spoutings amounted to a true model, few would be interested in testing its consequences.

Islamist radicals oppose a caliphate to liberal democracy.  But politically “Islam” is a fiction lacking a path to reality.  The old caliphates – Arab and Ottoman – were political empires conquered and held together by the sword.  We are back in a history which is particular and can’t be borrowed or loaned.

The same applies to the political arrangements of the companions of Muhammad, a shining ideal, equivalent to “pure communism,” for Islamist terrorists like Osama bin Laden.  Here the appeal to history is a pretext for nihilism and revolution:  for a war of destruction against the pervasive Western flavor of the present.  Only a handful of Muslims – and of course no infidels – wish to live under such a dispensation.

As for the Iranian model, I have written elsewhere that it is more Platonic than Islamic.  In Iran, a corrupt religious clique sheathed itself in democratic-sounding institutions – and, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, may well have been fatally wounded by even this slight brush with democracy.

Of the Kim dynasty’s “Juche” model in North Korea, and the Castro brothers’ Caribbean communism, the less said the better.  These are family businesses, not political systems – and both families are slouching toward senility and bankruptcy.

One by one, the great systems of control have lost legitimacy, until only a single true system remains, bestriding the world:  and it’s a system of freedom.  Liberal democracy rests on the sovereignty of the individual and the constraint of state power.  These were once parochial concerns, evolved in the history of Western Europe and America, but they have seized the imagination of much of the human race, and they have taken root in Latin America, Asia, Africa.

From an accident of history, liberal democracy has become the global path to personal happiness and material plenty.  For this reason, its only real challenger since the death of the Soviet Union has been democratic – zombie-style – socialism, which rejected the free market, contested the meaning of democracy, and promised a morally superior path to happiness and plenty.

Beijing and Caracas uttered angry defensive sounds:  but a flood of righteous smugness burst forth from Brussels and Paris, Madrid and Rome.  Posturing masked a pervasive hedonism.  Zombie socialists looked in the mirror, and passionately loved what they saw.

This was never a system, but it was about control.  The zombie state infantilized its citizens by denying them any meaningful life decisions.  It educated them at length, cut their hours at work, and allowed them to retire young.  In a democratic setting, this required a lot of money.  So long as citizens remained semi-adults, they continued to produce and reproduce, but with the inevitable regression to infantile behavior they have done less and less of either.

The paradox of zombie socialism is that triumph meant bankruptcy.  It can’t compel people to work on pain of death, as did Stalin, and it can’t embrace the markets without losing its aristocratic sneer of superiority.

Hence the second death.  According to Daley, the peoples and governments of Europe have woken up from their dream of eternal childhood, taken out their steely knives, and now seek to slay the insatiable monster:

On this side of the Atlantic, there is now a broad understanding that the social democratic project itself is unsustainable: that it has grown wildly beyond the principles of its inception and that the consequences of this are not only unaffordable, but positively damaging to national life and character.

As Europe retreats from social democracy, the midterm elections put an end to the Obama administration’s plans to Europeanize the US.

Daley thinks the end of zombie socialism will be “quite appallingly traumatic.”  The moral sovereignty of the individual will have to be resurrected somehow; the social contract will be edited beyond recognition.

“How can the mechanisms that entangle government in virtually every aspect of our personal and communal affairs be disengaged?” she wonders.  “And how can populations which have, perhaps against their better judgment, become dependent on the state, be enabled to take back what should be their rightful liberties and responsibilities?”

Maybe so.  Growing up is hard to do.  Accepting that money isn’t a social construct but must be earned in the sweat of one’s immaculately coiffed brow must be even harder.  But the world has gotten over more beautiful fantasies than that of aging populations playing at schoolchildren – it will get over this second death, and look back, I suspect, appalled that it didn’t happen sooner.

Marco Rubio’s exceptional America

The midterm elections are over, and advocates of limited government appear to be on the march.  Their opponents have lost all hope of permanent power, and – understandably enough – are reacting with anger and frustration.  Much of it is aimed at their countrymen.

Peter Beinart, parsing the acceptance speech of newly elected senator Marco Rubio, is appalled to discover in it the “lunatic notion of American exceptionalism.”  Rubio called America “the single greatest nation in all human history” because “almost every other place in the world. . . what you were going to be when you grow up was determined for you.”

In such love of country, most of us will hear a familiar note:  that of the grateful son of immigrants who sacrificed their present for his future.  This is a common American story.

Beinart, for his part, angrily derides the belief that America is an exceptional land when it comes to opportunity:

Almost every other place in the world? From China to India to Brazil, hundreds of millions of people are rising economically in ways their parents could scarcely have imagined, in part because their governments are investing in infrastructure in the way the United States did in the late nineteenth century. The American dream of upward mobility is alive and well, just not in America.

We are not particularly exceptional, Beinart is saying – and we are becoming less so every day, because of the electoral triumphs of a crazed “anti-government ideology.”

Putting aside the element of sour grapes, I think it’s fair to ask whether Beinart’s or Rubio’s description of America comes closer to reality.  Is ours an exceptional nation, or are made of the same mold with, say, China or Brazil?

When President Obama was asked the question, he responded evasively:  “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”  In other words, a sort of “Nope” – except as an indulgence of national vanity or in the trivial sense that we are each special in our own way.

There is, of course, no purely objective answer.  There’s no way to measure the moral distance between America and other nations by a number, as I would the temperature of my body or the speed of my car.  It’s a matter of faith, of belief.  The faith to which March Rubio testified with the miracle of his life was in our country’s extraordinary freedom from determination.

Most human lives – I recently noted in this blog – have been been determined in a way that is difficult for Americans to understand.  Across history, a grinding poverty has been the lot of the vast majority of people, whose existence, body and soul, was stunted by the desperate pursuit of survival.  Marx named this condition the kingdom of necessity.  One declared one’s independence from it at the cost of starvation and death.

But there were also cultural and political reasons for determination, summed up in what Karl Popper called the closed society:  the belief that the status quo had been ordained by God, and that any attempt to change one’s lot in life was not only subversive but morally monstrous.  So peasants forever remained peasants, and lords remained lords.

Only in the last three centuries has this changed in any degree.  It has taken the combined energies of the Enlightenment, modern science, and the industrial and technological revolutions to open up an undetermined space in the lives of ordinary people – and this only across a patchwork of places and times.

The American Revolution, and the constitutional order it bequeathed, contributed mightily to the birth of liberal democracy:  to the open society.  Rubio gave the Founders much credit for his “privileged” life.  His father was a bartender, his mother a maid, yet he has achieved high office.  Under the American dispensation, Rubio proclaims, peasants can become lords.  His own rise gives evidence to the country’s uniqueness.

I have traveled to many places in the world, and on balance I tend to agree with Rubio.  Nowhere else is the individual not only allowed but expected to re-make himself – from the category of “foreigner,” for example, into “one of us.”  Northern Virginia in my youth was a pretty homogeneous region, but my best friend had a German grandfather and a Welsh mother, and my second-best friend had a Cockney mom who sounded like a member of the “My Fair Lady” cast.

Today, my daughter’s friends are Iranian, Lebanese, Bolivian, Chinese, a veritable United Nations of immigrant citizenry.  These kids from the four corners of the globe aren’t accepted or tolerated by us:  they are us.

In America, you are what you become.  Rubio’s trajectory testifies to this mold-shattering  freedom, though not so vividly as Barack Obama’s, a man who rose from obscure, Gatsby-like origins to the highest office in the land.

What is exceptional about America is the depth and breadth of our personal freedom.  This has radiated to other countries, which is all to the good.  But the source is here:  and as our fortunes rise or fall, so does the spread of freedom.

As for the countries praised by Beinart – China, India, Brazil – I can only presume they were trotted out as rhetorical devices rather than examples of personal opportunity.  China is run by a corrupt Communist mafia, which controls who can attain wealth and who will stagnate in poverty.  If Beinart really believes Indians can transcend their personal origins, he should look up a single word:  outcaste.

Brazil I have visited a number of times.  It’s the most unequal country in the world – I once saw people living in what looked like doghouses, not far from the skyscrapers of Sao Paulo.  Color differences seem to determine one’s economic fate:  blacks are beach peddlers and construction workers, variegated skin tones prevail in middling jobs, and whites run everything.  In Brazil there’s racial tolerance but little freedom.

Americans, in their social and political freedom, are not in the same mold with the Chinese, Indians, and Brazilians.  Some day, maybe:  it’s an evolution devoutly to be wished.  But not today, and not soon.

A people which constantly re-makes itself isn’t likely to have much patience with those who use politics to regulate behavior.  Most Americans are Jeffersonians, and have limited government inscribed on their DNA.  In a world of Leviathan states, this too is exceptional – and it accounts for the results of last Tuesday’s elections, cause of Beinart’s complaint against his fellow citizens.