Yesterday's "Parting Glass" introduce me to RTE - Raidió Teilifís Éireann, or Radio Television Ireland, which seems like their version of NPR. Here's another from them:
On Gaslighting
It’s probably unhelpful to frame this, as he does, as the backstory on vaccine hesitancy. It surely does play into that, but that is a small part of what he shows to be a much bigger story: Brexit, 2016’s election, “Russiagate,” Mueller, two impeachment’s, claims of mass racism...
Why doesn’t anyone have any trust anymore?
A Submarine Analogy
Wretchard on, among other things, lockdowns by analogy to movies about submarine hunting.
Arguments by analogy always break; the point is to decide if the breaking point of the analogy is before or after the useful lesson. This one seems like a stretch, traversing both the distance between infectious disease and warfare on the one hand, and the fiction/true-life distinction on the other. Wretchard is one of the smartest people out there, though, so I'm going to give him leeway to make his argument.
West's Founding V: Consent of the Governed
Moving along to chapter six of the first part, West reminds us that the Founding idea was that government was created by the consent of the governed, and is sustained only by the continuing consent of the governed. There are at least three kinds of consent:
1) The initial formation of the social contract;
2) Period elections of representatives, which provide the citizenry with the chance to alter the government's membership according to their will;
3) The right to withdraw consent, i.e., the right of revolution should the government fail to abide by the contract of (1) or the fair elections of (2). (Today we will only treat (1) and (2).) In the absence of a declared withdrawal of consent, consent is supposed to be sufficient.
In his discussion of (2), West approaches one of the criticisms leveled against the Declaration: that it is not a democratic document per se, but would allow for any form of government that would secure natural rights. West argues that this view is wrong, as the Declaration's complaints against the king include specific complaints that he refused to honor their democratically elected legislatures. He ignored their decrees, and he taxed without their consent, and this anti-democratic character of his rule is part and parcel of the violation of natural rights.
Why should this be so? When people move out of the state of nature by creating a government, they might consent to many potential forms. Locke -- West does not mention -- cites the story of Jeptha from the Book of Judges to give an early account of how this might work. (This is in Locke's First Treatise on Government, which almost no one reads; everyone reads the Second). As long as everyone consents to the bargain, and the new authority secures their rights, isn't the bargain fair?
West thinks that the Founders did not think so. He says that the idea of representation is so central to their concept of what just government looks like that it constitutes an entire second criterion to what the Founders thought just governance was about.
This is not a view I've held myself, but I can see where he is going with it. I have tended to say, "The sole legitimate function of government, according to the Declaration of Independence, is to secure the natural rights of the people." West's argument is that a just government actually has to do two things, according to the Declaration: it has to secure natural rights effectively and not subvert them, but it also has to ensure the people are able to fairly elect representatives who will provide the ongoing consent that the nation requires.
If so, this is definitely an outgrowth of the British tradition of which the Founders were part. The kings of England and the United Kingdom slowly lost their ability to rule without the consent of Parliament, especially in matters of taxation. The presence of representatives fairly elected, without whose consent the king could not act, is a feature the British kings unsuccessfully resisted. It is plausible that to a British national of the eighteenth century this concept of being due representation was as fundamental as the concept of natural rights. Without representatives, there is no guarantee that initial consent will continue; if stripped of honest representation, the people have every right to withdraw from the contract.
Note that this representation is legislative in character. The executive need not be elected; he might even be a king, or he might be elected indirectly as in our Constitutional order. The legislature is where our right to representation firmly resides, as it was the legislature that was supposed to be the first and most powerful branch. The First Amendment begins "Congress shall make no law..." because if Congress cannot make the law, the executive cannot enforce the law, and the courts cannot try cases regarding that law.
Our whole system has slipped out of gear on that issue. Since the New Deal's establishment of a vast Federal bureaucracy, the production of laws has become more a matter of executive rule-making than formal legislation. Courts have set themselves up to create interpretations of laws that are in effect new laws, thus legislating from the bench. The actual legislatures have far less power than designed, and the demon of being subject to legislation without representation has escaped.
Who Burned the Bonnehomme Richard?
The Navy has charged a sailor, but won’t release his name or apparent motive.
West's Founding IV
The next section includes a lot of inside baseball, where West is working out disputes with other scholars (especially but not only Harvey Mansfield). There are three 'clarifications' West wants to lay out before he proceeds with positive arguments from the Founders on natural rights.
1) "Self Evident Truths." West makes the plausible claim that what is meant in the Declaration by "self-evident" is really "we all agree about this." The claims about human equality are not, in fact, self-evident. In fact, the evidence of your eyes will tend to argue against the notion that we are all equal. We have games like the ongoing Olympics to sort out questions about inequalities even among the very most unequally talented. People are smarter, stronger, wiser, and also weaker, slower, more foolish. It's the most obvious thing in the world.
This is a topic I've written quite a bit about, and my sense is that 'equality' among humans is generally only possible given a third party. Let's say that I'm a father, to illustrate, who has three sons. These sons are not equal: one is the oldest and another is the youngest, one is the strongest and another is the weakest, etc. But they are all equals in that they are all equally blessed, by me, in bestowing upon them an equality of inheritance. In that sense they are in fact exactly equal.
It happens that this is the kind of equality the Declaration posits, i.e., 'they are endowed by their Creator' with equal natural rights. But this isn't "self-evident" -- I had to give an argument for it.
West points out that scholars have sometimes treated the arguments for natural rights given by the Founders as dispensable because of this claim that the natural rights are "self-evident." They aren't, in fact, except perhaps in the sense he means. You do have to prove that they exist.
2) "Why should nature be a standard for right?" This is a crucial question. I'm not sure from reading West's account if he understands the depth of the opposition. Hume raised an objection to the whole idea that 'ought' can be derived from 'is.' Why should it be true, as Aristotle says, that an eye 'should' see because it ordinarily can see? Why isn't a blind eye just as good, in its own way, or perhaps even better in that it can enable different approaches to understanding and grappling with reality?
West gives this about two pages, which isn't enough. It's one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy. My own answer, summarized, is that you can only ever get an ought from an is. If it is possible to get an ought at all -- another fundamental and difficult question -- it has to be from the things that exist. Whether you get them from natural organs and functions ('an eye should see because that's what eyes evolved to do') or reason as Kant does (reason exists, after all), from virtue (what makes a virtue is that it excels, i.e., it has practically valid results), all these things reason from what is. There is no access to a discussion of 'ought' outside of reality; and thus, reasoning from nature, i.e. what is, is not only a reasonable thing to do it is the only thing to do.
But that is also too brief, much too brief. West quotes Hamilton: "The sacred rights of mankind are... written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal powers. (81) Would that it were so!
3) "The God of Nature." West rejects the idea that Deism was very important among the Founders, imputing to them a more ordinary form of Christianity. However, he does allow them the Enlightenment conceit that human access to reason is sufficient to deduce laws in (and of, which is not quite the same thing) Nature.
Here he claims to be interested in refuting those scholars who want to say that the Founding is hopelessly religious, rather than rational, and rooted in divine revelation. His (again very brief) discussion of natural religion is weak and limited to my ear, but I am accustomed to the Medievals who were very interested in this question and pursued it with great discipline. The point is that if you want to know about God, you can know him through his works; and nature, writ large, is one of his works. There are significant limits to this approach, which Aquinas and Avicenna explore in ways that West does not.
He is not that interested in the question, however, which may explain his brevity and inattention. He is interested in clearing the Founders of having relied upon revelation in the ordinary sense of 'God told me.' That's fair; they mean that they deduced ideas about God's will from God's work, not from the whisperings of angelic messengers audible only to themselves. (Muhammed is thereby supposed to have learned the divine law about what to do if a mouse fell into the butter you had churned this morning: to whit, God says to cut out the contaminated part and keep the rest.)
I'm leaving out all the internecine feuds with the other scholars. These are the key ideas from this section.
Licklog Gap
I know a high meadow still used that way. They’ve got a handsome crop of calves coming up. This view is from a little over five thousand feet, where it was seventy degrees and sunny today. Songbirds were singing, a veritable paradise even in August.
Bringing Back the Great Depression
Descendants of the FDR administration are uniting to try to get the Biden crew to adopt the same disastrous policies.
I knew one of these people decades ago; she was a professor at Armstrong (now part of Georgia Southern). Even then she’d built her career as a historian around apologist efforts for her grandfather’s work in Roosevelt’s cabinet.
Our government is so ossified in its bureaucracy now that it probably can’t learn any new tricks anyway. It won’t help to bring in people literally trying to restore failed policies that haven’t been new ideas for a century.
Never-, sometimes-, always-Trump?
Salena Zito thinks about Ohio:
Paul Sracic, a Youngstown State University political science professor, ... adds that it would be a big mistake to think that Ohio's sudden reddening was just about former President Donald Trump. “These voters clearly liked the former president, but they are not a cult," he says. "They were just waiting for someone like him to come along, and when he did, they were overjoyed. They’ll still turn out in droves to hear Trump because he still says the things they want to hear and in the way they want to hear them."
* * *
“Jacksonians were attracted to law and order Republicans such as Nixon, or the patriotic anti-communist, Ronald Reagan,” Sracic said. "But they usually considered themselves Democrats since they tended to be working class and associated the Republican Party with the wealthy. Trump converted the Republican Party into the Jacksonian Party; this change is likely permanent, and future Republican candidates will adopt this message.”
The wisdom of strangers
From a PowerLine comment: Programs are voluntary until people figure out they're rubbish, then they become mandatory.
Songs of Doom
Two country pieces, both of them odes to lost times as well as sorrowful worries that the world to come will not be one we will like.
Waylon Jennings played off the last one during a cameo he made on Married With Children. He said, “Men like us are dinosaurs. Real, live, dead dinosaurs.... The only thing wrong with being a dinosaur is there’s no future in it. But there is one hell of a past. Be like the mighty Tyrannosaur, and while you can, leave deep prints so everyone remembers we were here. Leave deep prints.”
No More Masks
I passed through Asheville today, expecting to find a total resurgence of the mask mania that characterized it last year. In fact very few people responded to the CDC by returning to their masks.
One young lady at a raucous bar explained: “I did the right thing, but I’m not going to let a bunch of Republicans screw up my summer.” I assume she meant ‘by not getting vaccinated,’ since Republicans hold no power at the Federal level and even at the state level only control a legislature whose power has been largely usurped by the governor and the courts.
The non-Karen voters
Instapundit reports both an encouraging outbreak of sanity among voters and an opportunity for Republicans to makes inroads into Democrat strongholds:
Overall, a majority of voters — 55 percent — agree that “despite good intentions, shutting down businesses and locking down society did more harm than good.” Only 38 percent disagree, with the rest unsure.
But the really interesting part is the racial breakdown: White Democrats reject the idea that lockdowns did more harm than good by a 30-plus-point margin. Nonwhite Democrats, on the other hand, are evenly divided.
The divide widens on the question of whether government officials will hold on to too much power in the future: 62 percent of voters say yes. Nearly two-thirds of white Democrats disagree. But note well: By a whopping 64-27 margin, black Democrats fear that officials will abuse their vast new powers.
West's Founding, III: Against Criticisms
West is aware of the need for someone writing today to defend the Founding against claims that it extended its allegedly universal claims only to white men, and only in defense of their power. He attempts this in Part I, Chapter 3.
First, he distinguishes between rights and power. "The language of the founding documents did not exclude either blacks or women from equal natural rights," he says, then quoting Congress' 1774 declaration, a 1776 address to foreigners fighting for the British that appealed to their notion of natural rights, Georgia's revolutionary 1776 constitution, and another 1777 affirmation by Congress. (62-3) If West is right about what was meant by equality -- that all are rightly born free of masters -- then the fact that political power was not distributed equally was not what the Founders intended by 'equality.' They had hoped (as per the last section) to enshrine political power among the especially virtuous, not all people equally. The rights of all to be free of slavery, though, were recognized as universal.
Of course that leaves the actual fact of slavery. West cites the 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (Pennsylvania), which states that there is a "duty" to "release them from thralldom" because though "the inhabitants of the several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion.... it is sufficient to know that all are the work of the Almighty hand." (63) He also cites in the same place the abolition law in Rhode Island, and the fact that the Revolution was in fact accompanied by an intense period of manumission: "By 1810, more than a hundred thousand slaves had been freed." (ibid.)
As for those who kept slaves in spite of the Revolution, West has several citations from them in which they acknowledge the injustice of it. (65) Jefferson, he suggests, regarded it as both an intolerable injustice and yet a necessity because there was no practical way to release slaves without tempting a mass murder similar to the one that occurred in Haiti. (41) The fact that a hundred thousand slaves were indeed released without a mass slaughter is evidence against Jefferson's position, but the fact of Haiti's 1791 revolution and massacre gives evidence that Jefferson was not completely out to sea on this possibility. Jefferson knew and admitted that he knew that what he was doing was a violation of natural law and therefore a monumental injustice. The Founding was tainted by bad practices, but it was not unable to see the injustices being committed among its members.
Furthering this discussion, West cites pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun in a few places where Calhoun is condemning the Founders for being too devoted to this whole equality notion. Rather than the Founding principles being easily transferrable to the Confederacy, as is sometimes suggested, the Confederacy and its predecessors needed to reject the Founding explicitly. (64, 75)
On women and Native Americans, West has different arguments but claims that both were considered equals in the "natural law" sense he is framing as fundamental. Women are equals in that sense, he writes, but considered themselves to have a different role in society than the exercise of political power (a complimentarian view still defended by some communities, e.g., the Amish and some Orthodox Jews). He quotes Abigail Adams, certainly no shrinking violet, on this score, and a number of her contemporaries. (66-7)
Native Americans were not considered racially different at the time of the Founding, West says, only culturally so. He cites in support Patrick Griffin, who "argues that white settlers 'did not vie Indians as an alien race and did not refer to Indians by their physical features." (71) This may have some weight, because in the Colonial and Revolutionary period intermarriage was quite commonplace on the frontier. It is clear that a racism that embraced Native Americans arose later, of course, just as it is clear that the 1915 era KKK disliked Jews as well as Blacks even though Jews seem to have been regarded as equals in Antebellum Savannah (where they fought in duels against Christian gentlemen, the fullest proof that they were regarded as equals who must be answered even at risk of one's life).
What the Founders looked down upon about the Native Americans was their way of life, which they regarded as "savage." We know this because they say so, for example in the Declaration of Independence. In fairness, West says, just as the Declaration says the Native Americans did "often fight by means of indiscriminate and merciless killing of all ages, sexes, and conditions," and the British really did use them as irregulars on the frontier. (71) That did not remove their equality under natural law, but it did mean that they were criticized as barbarous and dangerous.
Maybe that's true. Certainly the record of interactions there involves a mixture of ruthless war and negotiated peace (the latter of which infamously often ends up being betrayed and treaties broken). There is intermarriage, there is cohabitation, there are frequently people of mixed heritage who seemed to be accepted without prejudice in the early era. I don't know that it's right, but it isn't completely out of order with what I know of the time and place.
West buys some trouble for himself in trying to rope in a discussion about relative intelligence for different peoples, citing Charles Murray et al. His claim is that the Founders would not have accepted that a difference in relative intelligence justified a reduction in rights, or an inequality in the natural law sense he has been defending. He might have been wiser to have avoided bringing what is really a historical debate about what the Founders thought into a contentious present day debate about whether race is in any sense 'real.'
That said, West has good citations in support of this position to Jefferson ("whatever may be the degree of talent [of blacks] it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others") Benjamin Franklin (who remarked after a visit to a school for black children, "Their apprehension seems as quick, their memory as strong, and their docility in every respect equal to that of white children"), and Alexander Hamilton ("their natural faculties are probably as good as ours... The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience"). (69)
Likewise, he has Declaration signatory Benjamin Rush condemning the principle that intelligence ought to give power over others. "But supposing our author had proved the Africans to be inferior...: will his cause derive any strength from it? Would it avail a man to plead in a court of justice that he defrauded his neighbor, because he was inferior to him in genius or knowledge?" (70) That implies that Rush was not convinced of the proof, but also that he thought the proof was irrelevant to the question of rights.
West is trying to put a lot in this short section, which has to carry the weight of defending the Founding against a set of vicious attacks as well as a large number of misunderstandings (if West is right) by major historians and scholars. It is clear that he has found and marshalled at least a lawyerly defense, which should give us reasonable doubt about the condemnations to which the Founders are often subject. Whether it proves his case requires longer reflection and further study.
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