"Don't make me come back there"

Thirteen years ago,  Jonathan Rauch wrote about his creed of "soft communitarianism," an alternative to both the most anarchic forms of libertarianism and the bureaucratic formalism that is strangling our country:

In standard liberal theory, coercion and force involve violence or the threat of violence: "Your money or your life."  Because, in modern democracies, the state possesses a monopoly on legitimized violence, a coercive policy will be, by definition, a state policy.  Nothing that private people or institutions do by way of criticism or exclusion is coercive. 

To [radical gay activist Michael] Warner and others of his school, that view of coercion is laughably narrow and naive.  Norms use the clubs of stigma and shame to punish deviants, nonconformists, and radicals. . . .  In his world, all social norms are more or less coercive, which means that all of them are oppressive when applied to consenting adults' sexual or social lives. . . . 

I am not a soft communitarian because I think shame and stigma are sweet and lovely things.  They are not.  A weakness of the soft-communitarian position is its unwillingness to admit the truth in much of what Warner says.  In some respects, norms are oppressive and shaming is coercive.  Having admitted this, however, one can go on to see what Warner, and other anti-communitarians, do not:  that soft communitarianism is less oppressive, usually much less so, than the real-world alternatives.  Shame and hypocrisy are not ideal ways to deal with philanderers and small-time mashers, but they are better than Paula Jones' litigators and Kenneth Starr's prosecutors.  Shame is valuable not because it is pleasant or fair or good but because it is the least onerous of all means of social regulation, and because social regulation is inevitable.   The implication of Warner's view is that the only just society is one without any sexual norms regulating the conduct of consenting adults.  But, of course, a normless society is as inconceivable, literally, as a beliefless individual.  What would a culture without shame or guilt or "hierarchies of respectability" look like?  How is a shameless society even imaginable, given the unbudgeable fact that humans, like dogs and chimpanzees, look to each other for guidance and approval and clues on how to behave? 

THE fact is, there are going to be norms; the question is always, What sort of norms?

Rauch favors a rejection of mindless, intrusive zero-tolerance legalism that he variously calls the Hidden Law, genteel hypocrisy, tacit decency codes, and a determination to avert the public eye from anything that's not scaring the horses.  What this approach lacks in logical consistency it makes up for in humane effect:

Without Hidden Law, life in society becomes like the home life of a 15-year-old boy whose parents never stop shouting, "Billy! What are you doing in there?"

Rauch poses interesting questions on soft communitarianism and gay marriage:

Warner is shrewd enough to see that the standard defense of gay marriage by gay activists is wrong.  This defense holds out marriage as just one more lifestyle option.  It is available to heterosexuals, so it should be available to homosexuals as well, and that's all there is to it.  But this is wrong.  Marriage, as Warner aptly puts it, is "a social system of both permission and restriction."  Spouses and society alike view matrimony as something special and exalted; it is not merely allowed, it is encouraged.  Far beyond merely creating legal arrangements, it is freighted with the social expectations and implicit requirements of hidden law.  It is a bargain not just between two people but between the couple and society:  The spouses agree to care for one another so that society does not need to, and society agrees in exchange to view their commitment to each other as inviolable and sovereign and, indeed, sacred. 

Traditionalist conservatives understand that marriage confers special status under hidden law, which is why they so fiercely oppose extending it to homosexuals.  I understand that marriage confers special status, which is why I favor extending it to homosexuals.  And Warner, piping up from the radical left, also understands marriage's special status, which is why he opposes gay marriage.  When marriage is available to gay people, he understands, gay people will be expected to marry, and married homosexuals will conduct themselves with the same (let's face it) smugness that characterizes married heterosexuals.  "The effect," Warner says, "would be to reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage."  Homosexuals who do not marry will be regarded as less respectable or less successful than those who do.

Parallel universes

Megan Kelly demolishes HHS Sec'y Sibelius.  Warning:  your President feels aggrieved that you might get information from this source.



Watching Hagan slip and slide is fun, but the really good stuff is towards the end.  And Kelly's guest is absolutely right:  everyone watching only the news outlets the President would prefer we watched will agree totally with Sebelius's version of events, not to mention with Harry Reid's.

Chivalry on Steel

Maybe you can do it without the horse.

Rolling

It's a good idea to question what you see on the Internet. Maybe.

Elephants as Natural Slaves

This post is mostly for Cassandra's enjoyment, because she'll like the article, but I'll take a moment to answer the question the authors ask in the tagline:

"We now have solid evidence that elephants are some of the most intelligent, social and empathic animals around—so how can we justify keeping them in captivity?"

Well, we can justify it precisely because of their limited access to reason. In the Politics, Aristotle suggests that some men are slaves by nature. Specifically, those who "are as different [from other men] as the soul from the body or man from beast—and they are in this state if their work is the use of the body, and if this is the best that can come from them—are slaves by nature. For them it is better to be ruled in accordance with this sort of rule, if such is the case for the other things mentioned."

What he means by "for them it is better" is that the slaves themselves will enjoy better results if their affairs are managed for them, i.e., if they are not left to their own devices. This should be an improvement that they themselves could recognize, rather than one that comes from outside of them (i.e., not "I think you would be better off if you lived as I want," but rather, "I realize that, though I'd prefer to do heroin every day, and would choose it if I were left free, it really would be better if I weren't free to make that choice").

Because they have enough reason to see the good, but not to choose it, there is a kind of objective justice to organizing their lives for them. This is true even if they don't choose this state, because it's the ability to choose to do what they can see would be better that is at work. Thus, if a judge should involuntarily commit an addict, the addict may be angry about it, and certainly wouldn't have chosen commitment for himself. But he should be able to see the justice of it, to recognize that in an objective way he will be better off for it.

So it is possible to justify the captivity of elephants in the same way. Note, though, that the force of Aristotle's assertion that there is a kind of just and natural slavery is to bracket it as the only acceptable kind. It turns out to be a harsh criticism of every kind of actual slavery being practiced in his own day.

We might apply a similar critique to our favorite zoo.

Republic VIII

An excerpt, for Tom but also for Cassandra, from Plato's great work on politics. But for one line, it sounds like something she has been saying to me for years. How many of these markers do you see around you?

“Come then, tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises. That it is an outgrowth of democracy is fairly plain[.] ... Liberty.... is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?”

“How?” he said.

“Why, when a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the liberty unstintedly, it chastises them and accuses them of being accursed oligarchs.... [T]hose who obey the rulers... it reviles as willing slaves and men of naught.... Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all lengths?”

“Of course.”

“And this anarchical temper,” said I, “my friend, must penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals.”

“Just what do we mean by that?” he said.

“Why,” I said, “the father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner likewise.” ...

“The teacher in such case fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young... for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative.”

“By all means,” he said. “And the climax of popular liberty, my friend,” I said, “is attained in such a city when the purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the owners who paid for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relation of men to women and women to men.” ...

“And do you note that the sum total of all these items when footed up is that they render the souls of the citizens so sensitive that they chafe at the slightest suggestion of servitude and will not endure it? For you are aware that they finally pay no heed even to the laws written or unwritten, so that forsooth they may have no master anywhere over them.” “I know it very well,” said he.

“This, then, my friend,” said I, “is the fine and vigorous root from which tyranny grows, in my opinion.”

Peer review

It ain't what it used to be.  Even the laziest and shallowest reviewer should have known there was something wrong with a paper entitled "TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce," whose abstract states that the authors "concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact."

Jokes (Not For Dummies)

The authors of this piece assert that you won't get these jokes. I assume they know their audience. As for you ladies and gentlemen, I believe you will collectively get all of them, and individually nearly all.

Stoicism for Dummies

This brief article omits everything except a few pieces of pragmatic advice, but at least that makes it useful. Separately, that it is right about the pragmatics might inspire someone to read more deeply into the underlying thought and history.

Contradictions in Liberalism

This is an outstanding essay, very much worth reading in full. None of you who spends time here will likely regret giving it your attention, as it touches on so many of our regular topics of conversation.

The "Liberalism" under attack is Liberalism proper: the whole thing, all the way back to Locke and Hobbes. Once I too thought of myself as a Classical Liberal: and small wonder if I was one, for so I was taught to be. It is the whole world of what we are taught about politics. The only alternatives you will get even in college are later ones, supposedly defeated: fascism and Marxism. You can think what you want, as long as you begin from liberal grounds and recognize only alternatives liberalism itself has provoked.

The article defends the proposition -- quite right, I believe, though it will be challenging to some -- that Classical Liberalism and the current 'liberalism' are not inversions of each other as they are often said to be. The newer one is a natural consequence of the older one. Both must be rejected.

This is because both depend on an inheritance that is not being replenished, the author argues, and have created a world that cannot be sustained. What, then, is to be done?

(H/t: D29)

A Bright Spot on a Dark Sea

Ukraine has a revolution.

The protests have been driven by a faction that wants to push away from the domination of Russia, and pursue ties with the EU. They are culturally European, so much so that their symbols in the streets have been shields painted with Crusader crosses. Apparently inspired by these examples, other protesters went so far as to erect a trebuchet so as to provide artillery support to their lines.

Now we will see how far the Russians are prepared to go to support their client. In the past, they have been willing to go very far indeed. I can only wish the best to those resisting Russian domination in what seems to be an honest cause.

Meanwhile in Venezuela...

...it sounds like Ragnarok came early.

Don't Forget: Ragnarok Starts Tomorrow

The countdown clock at the JORVIK Viking Center is under 20 hours at this writing. Hope you're prepared -- just in case.

Turnpike Troubadours

Good red dirt country, and they put on a great show, if you can catch them.

Here's three of theirs I like, though I haven't found any I didn't like yet. (Yeah, the first two are from the same album, so the video starts w/ the same cover.)

Update: Two of my favorite country bands got together without telling me ... I'm hurt. (And YouTube won't let me embed it for some reason.)

Checking In On Queensland

Remember when we were talking about the new Aussie laws against bikers? Groups declared to be "gangs" by government fiat could no longer hire plumbers, because any plumber who worked with them would have his license pulled. Queensland has started making noises about pushing that concept on lawyers, too. After all, lawyers have licenses that can be pulled, and too many lawyers have been willing to side against the government by defending people charged under these laws:

Not content with upsetting the blue-collar workforce, Queensland premier Campbell Newman labelled members of the legal fraternity involved in defending bikies as:

…part of the machine, part of the criminal gang machine.

Turns out these lawyers are real bad apples.

Mr Newman shocked the legal community last week when he labelled lawyers who represented bikies as “hired guns”.

“They take money from people who sell drugs to our teenagers and young people. Yes, everybody’s got a right to be defended under the law, but you’ve got to see that for what it is,” he said.

“They are part of the criminal gang machine and they will see, say and do anything to defend their clients and try and get them off, or indeed progress their sort of case, their dishonest case.”

What about the plumbers, though? Can the plumbers hire lawyers without being 'part of the criminal gang machine'?

And, by the way, if you could prove these were criminal gangs, why wouldn't you just do that without going after their lawyers and plumbers?

Friday Night AMV

Police. State.

Cyborgs. Robots. Computer surveillance. Computer hacking. Secret government security organization infighting. Amazing amounts of weaponry. Health Ministry Commandoes.

Failure

McArdle on how important it is to be able to learn to fail. Learning how to fail well is one of the secrets to success. I've failed at very many things, over the years. If you're not failing, you're not really pushing yourself. You're not growing. You're not learning important lessons about how to bounce back when -- as is inevitable -- you do hit a wall you can't get over. She's quite right about all this.

No one will listen, of course, because the stakes are too high. It isn't just colleges that think this way, because these markers of perfection aren't really about accomplishment but about obedience to the expectations of your superiors. The Unfailing are reliable, not for the kind of entrepreneurs that McArdle is thinking of when she talks about the Dot-Coms, but for the big bureaucracies that dominate the centers of power in DC and New York.

Get on with one of those, and you're set for life. It won't matter that you've never learned to think for yourself, but only to parrot carefully what you've been told by your superiors is the right answer. That's just what they want you to do. Unfailingly.

An End To An Era

Did I miss the point at which Pravda bought out the Washington Post?

With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans.

Well, I mean, last year's projections do look a bit like austerity, if you're stone blind.

Obviously that kind of thing can't continue. I had some notion that the correction might run the other way, though.

Why Not The First?

What's so special about the First Amendment, anyway? The Tenth is treated as a dead letter. Why shouldn't the First be?

[U]nder the Obama administration, the Federal Communications Commission is planning to send government contractors into the nation's newsrooms to determine whether journalists are producing articles, television reports, Internet content, and commentary that meets the public's "critical information needs." Those "needs" will be defined by the administration, and news outlets that do not comply with the government's standards could face an uncertain future. It's hard to imagine a project more at odds with the First Amendment.

The initiative, known around the agency as "the CIN Study" (pronounced "sin"), is a bit of a mystery even to insiders. "This has never been put to an FCC vote, it was just announced," says Ajit Pai, one of the FCC's five commissioners (and one of its two Republicans).

That's funny, "sin." Everybody remember how that Alinsky book was formally dedicated to Lucifer? Ha, ha, ha. What a great joke.

Participation in the Critical Information Needs study is voluntary—in theory. Unlike the opinion surveys that Americans see on a daily basis and either answer or not, as they wish, the FCC's queries may be hard for the broadcasters to ignore. They would be out of business without an FCC license, which must be renewed every eight years.

Juggling with robots

This guy is having a blast.