The Ultimate Minority

 

Worker or capitalist, both are slaves to making things for others. Only the artist is free. Such progressive or conservative terminology is like calling an exchange of harsh words “verbal rape.”
We need terms for the physical violence entailed in actual slavery and in actual rape, and should not cheapen them by applying them to our middle-class vexations in NW6 or Marin County.--McCloskey

***

School attendance, possibly through mechanisms of status competition and bullying, seems to raise the rate of youth suicide

***

In two years’ time, the French capital will ban non-essential through-traffic from its city center. The plan, which is expected to eliminate around half of the daily car journeys through Paris’ core, has been a long-term objective for the city, part of its overall drive to slash the number of cars on the roads.

***

The Ultimate Minority 

We have now moved from a democracy, where the majority has a responsibility to protect the rights of the minority, to where the majority must take the minority so seriously that, in most cases, they must defer to them. The Flat Earth Society gets interviewed. People who believe the U.S. faked the moon landing speak wryly on nighttime television shows. A child who wants to change his gender gets a contract instead of therapy.

The individual, the ultimate minority, is now the cynosure of the West. Everything he does has its own inherent value and validity. The Bell Curve is now irrelevant because we accept no norms. The Adam Smith community of productive, self-interested, and industrious individuals have had, insinuated into their midst, the inept, the disinterested, and the deranged--all of whom, in our brave new world, have their own value and story, too. Only the Nationalist seems to have allegiance less to an idea and more to some sinister, unseen group.

Recall the tremor that went through the academic community when the Unabomber was caught, the conflict, and ambiguous reflections. The guy was a bright, serious student and his social concerns overlapped those of many sensible, concerned observers of the new technological world. But you don't get a "Good Content-Bad Conduct Gentleman's C" in living. You can't get your murderous, vicious acts offset by a childhood Eagle Scout badge. No society can function on "compartmentalism;" Mussolini did make the trains run on time. But that is not enough. There is a bigger picture here. Ted Bundy was charming. World War II was loud. Goebbels had a PhD and a good first novel.

It's really quite simple: "By their fruits you will know them." Murder, chaos, mendacity, destruction. These are not faults in a greater, purer whole: These are the whole.

Sunday/WEIRD

Pain in life is inevitable but suffering is not. Pain is what the world does to you, suffering is what you do to yourself.--Allegedly from the Buddha

We had a really good dinner last night at Fish Nor Fowl with the McGraws. Good, fun night with interesting talk and good food. Wine, too. Really nice time.
Mom is hostessing a big dinner tonight with the roughnecks from WVa and an entrepreneurial group from Luxembourg. A lot going on.

According to an AP-NORC poll from late October, just 28 percent of Americans prefer switching back and forth between standard time and daylight saving time over a system where the clock stayed the same year-round. Another 40 percent favored using standard time all year and 31 percent preferred daylight saving time all year.


A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that “Among workers in the bottom three wage deciles, every $1 increase in hourly wages reduces the likelihood of receiving means-tested public assistance by 3.1 percentage points.”


 The political left loves to refer disdainfully to people who have “faith in the free market.” Mountains of empirical evidence from countries around the world on the superior performances of free markets are thus dismissed as mere faith. Meanwhile, the repeated failures of government-run economies are attributed to personal mistakes by Stalin, Mao or others — thereby preserving the left’s faith in political control of economic decisions, if only the right people were in charge. --Sowell

"Kingmaking is a sacred business, it's transforming a man or a woman into something other than a man or a woman," says a spokesman for the Japanese royal family. 

On Thursday evening, Japan's Emperor Naruhito dressed in pure white robes and was ushered into a dark wooden hall for his last major enthronement rite: spending the night with a goddess. Centered on Amaterasu Omikami, the sun goddess from whom conservatives believe the emperor has descended, the "Daijosai" is the most overtly religious ceremony of the emperor's accession rituals after his father Akihito's abdication. Scholars and the government say it consists of a feast, rather than, as has been persistently rumored, conjugal relations with the goddess.
Politics: The willing suspension of disbelief.

On this day in 1558, Queen Mary I, the monarch of England and Ireland since 1553, died and was succeeded by her 25-year-old half-sister, Elizabeth.



                                     WEIRD

In 2010, psychologists Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia pointed out something odd: Virtually all research psychology studied only the countries they dubbed WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Disguised in this clever acronym is a very real observation: This research uses a select and maybe not so representative group.

Given that only about 12 percent of humanity lives in such a place, the researchers wrote in their paper, “The Weirdest People in the World?,” “members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.”

The WEIRDs are more individualistic and independent, less conformist and obedient, more likely to favor “impersonal prosociality” — the idea that one set of moral rules should govern how you treat everyone, from the most distant stranger to your nearest kin. This seems normal to them, but in a global context, it is unusual, even rare.

Where did this come from? Christianity, says Henrich (now at Harvard University), in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.  Western Christianity. The number of years that one’s ancestors were exposed to the medieval Catholic Church correlates pretty nicely with things like social trust, creativity and willingness to do things like donate blood — and correlates negatively with traits such as nepotism.

There are a lot of meaningless correlations out there but the paper offers an interesting hypothesis to support their notion:  the Catholic Church’s extreme obsession with incest, which isn’t found in the Eastern Orthodox branch. The church kept banning marriages between more and more distant relations, up to sixth cousins, which smashed the tight kin-based networks common to agricultural cultures.

As a result, Europe had to reinvent its society around the individual rather than the family. This created options that had not been available in a world where “family values” ruled every aspect of individual life. And, of course, one of those possibilities is not being religious at all, which is where WEIRD societies seem to be heading.

Of course, Christianity is a lot more than anti-incest laws. It promises forgiveness, community beyond family, a transcendent purpose within the working world. And it is interesting to see, as the religion is leached out of the social assumptions and beliefs, how cohesion and behavior must be increasingly regulated. More, it raises the crucial question: How much can the isolated individual stand?

One Man....

America is the only country where you must be sensitive to the sensibilities of atheists.--J.D. Roark

Chris took the dog to an emergency room. The wait was as long as for people. He had a UTI.
Mom has had a great time with the Kanes.

Somebody described the "collusion" search as this generation's WMD.

A study shows that the majority of Americans polled are in favor of stricter gun control. That might change tomorrow--and that is one reason why the constitutional protection exists.

The U.S. is now an net exporter of energy.

Am I right? Did the woman of New Zealand really adopt a symbol of women's suppression to show solidarity with the people of their attacked mosque?

Bernard-Henri Levy describes his new book as a reminder of America's origin and values. A Frenchman feels he needs to do this. Like Tocqueville? He thinks that the Europeans should replace the American troops in Syria to protect the Kurds but doubts the populist movement will allow it. His book offers the thesis that there are "five kingdoms"--Turkey, Iran, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia/Sunni Terrorists--who are not afraid of war and who will fill any vacuum that the Americans allow to occur with their withdrawal from engagement with the world. 

There is a story that Russian troops have landed in Venezuela.

On this day in 1774, British Parliament passes the Boston Port Act, closing the port of Boston and demanding that the city’s residents pay for the nearly $1 million worth (in today’s money) of tea dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. The Boston Port Act was the first and easiest to enforce of four acts that together were known as the Coercive Acts. The other three were a new Quartering Act, the Administration of Justice Act and the Massachusetts Government Act.

                                                   One Man.....

In Pittsburgh, another policeman accused of an unreasonable shooting of a black suspect was found not guilty by a jury of his peers. Those who hoped for violent outrage were not disappointed. I was not there and know little of the testimony. (The victim was fleeing a drive-by shooting and was unarmed when he was fired on and killed by a pursuing policeman. He was shot in the back.) 

I'm sure there were nuances and legal points. I'm sure, while there are many such events with similar appearances, those events have their own distinguishing particulars. But all these events have a unifying element they share with the infamous Simpson trial: They are all jury trials. And, in our modern world with its eagerness to expand individualism and populism at the expense of representative forms--e.g. Brexit and uprooting the Electoral College--is there any better example of democracy in action than a jury trial?

Sunday Sermon 10/2/11

One characteristic of the modern world is the development of group thinking. Historically there was little more than national identity, if anything. Joan of Arc, travelling to meet the king for the first time, could not speak easily to neighbors in towns twenty miles away because their french was so different. Indeed, Manchester says that war was a unifying factor in nations not because it created a common enemy but because it organized a national language.

With better unification, identities formed and sometimes ethnicity trumped nationality. (See Balkans, see Black America.) But these reasonable identities could not prepare us for the new identities that were discovered/invented/smoked up in the last two hundred years. We, as a species, became thralls to economics, power and sexual urges among many others. Captivated by the surmising of bright and creative men we became slaves to the plausible.

And some of these ideas were quite captivating. Some made sense. But all of these generalities were as unproven and unprovable as string theory. Nonetheless we were ready to kill and die for them.

This modern tendency is in great conflict with two groups, religion and the English (really Scot) Enlightenment. Both emphasize the nature of man as an individual rather than a part of some group movement or evolution. Before any discussion occurs between the two philosophies of groups and individuals, that impossible bridge must be built.

And before any thought of man's relationship with man can be entertained, that personal and individual relationship between him and his soul must be encountered.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

The European Parliament has commissioned a study of light powered vehicles: 2 wheel mopeds to motorbikes, three wheel and quad. These vehicles, called "L Vehicles", make up 3% of transport mileage with considerably higher proportion of pollution, 2% distance mileage and 16% of traffic deaths.

It is likely the Parliament will come to a rational, thought-out decision here.

While they are at it, perhaps they could comment on the wisdom of individuals making their own choices for spouses.

Striking a Note But Not a Chord

The release of the movie "Atlas Shrugged" might be a cynical pitch for a current political sweet spot but nonetheless again raises the interesting and unanswered question in the current political debate: What are the mutual responsibilities between the producer and the general public? In the story, John Galt, an industrialist, organizes a "producer strike", a strike by the only special group in history that has never struck. Ayn Rand, the author, is an individualist and believes the sanctity of the individual and his achievements, refined down and purified. His efforts and achievements are his only reward and his alone; derivative benefits for the nonproducers are their good fortune but nothing more. Politicians, businessmen who collude with politicians and the passive but assuming public are the real evil in the world because they take, modify and regulate what they do not and can not create for their own benefit. And their reward is grudging: As is said to the successful industrialist Hank Rearden in the novel, "You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements."

This is a harsh philosophy and Rand is nothing if not consistent. She makes no excuses and lived this belief in her personal life. (She was an atheist, thought openly that theists were fools, hated national aggression and once told a woman she was going to seduce her husband--before she did.) While there are some intense devotees to the Rand philosophy--and the books sell well--it seems the philosophy strikes a note in peoples' minds but not a chord; the notion is too isolated and too spare in a society that seems so convoluted and intertwined. But it does strike a note.

Obama's attack on "the rich" in this country is a case in point. Why is this obvious--albeit heavy-handed--populist and demagogic appeal to envy not more successful? How can it be so debated? One reason is likely those studies that show that Americans, alone as a group in the world, do not resent gaps between themselves and others because they believe in the possibility that, with work and sacrifice, they--or their children--might well become those "others." Another reason might be cynicism. The capitalist' motives are more clear to the average guy, the politician's are not. And the producer has a history in this country of success. Indeed a big problem in America might be how to manage the success of capitalism, not its failures.

Indeed, the present problems in America are not the failures of capitalism, they are the failures of government.