I’m drawn to Ronald Reagan’s famous witticism, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” Refashioned to our current political climate, it could very well be “America didn’t leave the blue dots, the blue dots left America” (mentioned in an earlier post). By blue dots I mean those densely packed, urbanized blue specks scattered across the electoral maps of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
What makes them distinct from the sea of red? It’s a relatively recent but deeply embedded and culturally partisan mentality, to the point of being an ambient governing doctrine, among the critical cultural and political influencers in the dots. The creed is part temperament in the form of arrogance in an assumed monopoly on facts and science, and part constipated intellectual imagination – a kind of myopia – in the form of a congenital rejection of earlier and widely accepted propositions. The blue dots have their foot on the pedal with their creed in tow leaving the rest of America behind.
Today’s National Geographic magazine reflects the soul of blue America. If you want a barometer on the state of play in our blue clusters, the magazine won’t disappoint.
Susan Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, is taking the magazine full blue.
Take the May and June issues of this year (2018). The May issue featured an in-depth portrait of Picasso as genius. For June, the title might as well be “The Plastic Apocalypse” of Goldberg’s introduction. Both profoundly reveal planks of today’s progressive (aka “of the left”) catechism, the prevalent philosophy of life in the blue dots.
Budding Chefs of Genius
A key part of the left’s dogma is the unshaken belief that circumstance is all. The historical setting, social environment, and economic backdrop are accepted as the forces of consequence for defining a person. Today’s lefty and urban writers wreak of the idea. Claudia Kalb, the author of “Intense, Provocative, Disturbing, Captivating, Genius Picasso” in the May issue, is an evangelist of this secular gospel.
The piece is a Godless sermon that unleashes two basic assumptions. First, since circumstance is all and circumstances change, so all standards must adapt to keep up. Einstein’s scientific relativity is expanded into the relativity of all things, and, by so doing, elevating to metaphysical importance all things circumstantial in a person’s experience . Out the window go overarching norms … as well as the basis for simple judgment.
Well, maybe not fully. While lefties talk a good game, they can’t live it. Nobody can. The word “disturbing” in Kalb’s title hints at the faint pulse of morality – those nasty overarching norms – that makes it possible for her to elicit uneasiness at certain aspects of Picasso’s life (like his womanizing). Thus, a Newtonian universe of fixed laws (morality) is jumbled together with Einstein’s general theory (relativity in the form of circumstance is all). Oh well, coherence may not be a hallmark of the outlook.
Freed of the straitjacket of an enveloping order to the human universe, the second horse in the lefty stable bursts out of the gate, assumption #2: the compulsion for reform. All we have to do in their estimation is examine our setting with the methodical precision of a gene-splicing lab tech, understand the workings of the discovered social elements, and manipulate them into a better person and world. Voilà, social engineering is born with its resulting wreckage.
It’s not that a person’s surroundings aren’t important. It’s what the lefties do with the info. Traditionalists profess the need for certain requirements for human flourishing, regardless of era or setting, then match the facts on the ground with these necessities . They recognize the existence of a permanent natural order for humanity like the one in the physical universe. Today’s progressives have a sense of order but their model is evolution, not Newton. For them, history presents a new stage that makes much of the older wisdom as obsolete as the woolly mammoth. Once they are convinced that they have a grip on the social evolutionary process and its direction, they scurry around as relentless busybodies to make the better world … in their estimation.
Watch President Obama – that bluest of all presidents – enunciate the folderol in a speech in support of Hillary’s candidacy on November 3, 2016. (Click on the caption. *Thanks to NBC News.)
The talk of “bending the arc of history” is straight out of the lefty playbook. The rhetoric appealed to Martin Luther King because of his inherent optimism. It is singularly cherished, though, by today’s leftists. Leftists claim to know the path of history and the means to speed it along and tweak it toward nirvana. They see themselves as social engineers with a scientist’s touch. People who think otherwise are treated as dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid.
The confidence in their possession of the scientists’ touch breeds an arrogance to brand those who disagree as “deplorables” (Hillary’s famous 2016 characterization), or as Barack Obama put it in 2008: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”. (1) There you have it. Opponents are ignorant rubes when compared to the purported clinical brilliance of progressives.
They claim sole ownership of rationality and science. In publications such as the May 2018 issue of National Geographic we see the reflex to connect whatever is written to something resembling a laboratory experiment no matter the precariousness of the relationship.
It’s an attempt to validate a tendentious viewpoint with a patina of science, as if disagreement with them connotes dumbness. Woven into Kalb’s story of Picasso’s genius is a tangent into neurology.
But more telling as a window into Kalb’s progressive soul is her comment about the factors leading to Picasso’s genius:
“All the elements are there: a family that cultivated his creative passion, intellectual curiosity and grit, clusters of peers who inspired him, and the good fortune to be born at a time when ideas in science, literature, and music energized his work and the advent of mass media catapulted him to fame.” (2)
All but one of the determinants is either social or historical. The perspective invites efforts to duplicate the ostensible formula to manufacture more geniuses as one would follow the Betty Crocker cookbook.
Or will it, leaving aside the dangers of raising a generation of puerile know-it-alls? Who knows, but it most certainly will lead to an endless rejiggering of the public schools and the family to do it. Prepare for boundless parental how-to therapies and school reform consultancies. Helicoptering urban and suburban parents will have new and experimental reasons to micromanage their kids’ lives. The likely consequence is never-ending upheaval in the family and the schools without any glide path to improvement.
It’s the arrogance of people without much scientific acumen but possessed with media connections and some writing ability. Their writings bleed with the arrogance of a teenager’s first exposure to the rudiments of AP Physics. They know enough to profess opinions but not enough to draw back from them. They lack the deeper understanding that comes with years of study and experience with disappointments and dead ends. It’s the first blush of innocence, not wisdom.
Arrogance and myopia are related. Arrogance blinds a person to other possibilities — like, you could be wrong. He or she wallows in a mental rut, lacking the means to question prior assumptions. In fact, the person’s imagination can’t go very far since many hunches about reality go unrecognized.
The Tirade Against Plastic
Such is true in the June issue’s jeremiad against plastic. Arrogance and myopia go hand-in-hand.
More telling than Goldberg’s editorial stance against plastic is the location for the scene at the top of her page (above). It depicts a huge mound of plastic bottles in … Bangladesh. Do we have a global plastic problem or a disposal problem in poor countries? Goldberg would have us leap over that question and go right to a global ban, or some approximation of it. So, a litter problem in South Asia means an American motorist can’t buy an affordable and accessible bottle of water at a convenience store on a hot summer day? Forgetting your canteen when you jump in the car may mean a meandering hunt for a water fountain in a strange town.
Indubitably, activists would recognize the complication and address it with the tried-and-true “surcharge”, CRV, etc., to be layered on top of all the others of prior crusades. They’ll justify it as a down payment on their favorite rhetorical gambit, “social cost”. The term is flexible enough to encompass any penalty for behavior that doesn’t hew to their wishes. Myopic do-goodism has a built-in inflation factor.
People being people, they will adapt to this new normal as the recent CRV assessments and plastic bag and straw bans have shown. To feel better about it, though, any number of academics can be recruited to add a gloss of “science” to what is, in essence, an ideological expedition. Right away, starting on p. 15, we get exposed to “Greed vs. the Common Good” by Dylan Selterman.
The piece is, at root, an attempt to condone an expanding array of governmental measures to control individuals. This is how Selterman does it. First, he accepts as a given Garret Hardin’s famous pet theory, the “tragedy of the commons”. The tragedy, according to Hardin, lies in the natural incentive to overuse and abuse things held in common, such as air, land, and most other resources. The reasoning is that you don’t own it; you don’t care; you wish to grab as much of it for yourself as possible; and consequences be damned. Selterman concocts a game to convince the youngins in his University of Maryland psychology classes of the divinity of the concept.
Though, is it true? As in many misleading beliefs, a faint inkling of truth can be buried deep within. Yes, things owned by nobody, least of all the user, can quickly look the worst for wear. Ask any parent handing the car keys to the teenage son. Unpleasant side effects normally accrue to things lacking a personal and direct investment on the part of the user. Expect the car to look different when you get up in the morning.
The last time I checked, parents can still impose controls on the minors under their roof. Now we get to the rub of it all: Selterman/Hardin/Goldberg turn our basic conception of government on its head. To avoid the “tragedy”, their logic places government in the parental role as the citizens are relegated to wayward children in need of a leash. Forget about the “government of the people, by the people” parts of Lincoln’s famous line, or Jefferson’s admonition “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”. (3) Instead, these mavens call for an unaccountable EPA commissariat from the international level down to one’s humble abode. Ineluctably, popular sovereignty is mangled into one man/one vote/one time as power increasingly accrues to an army of apparatchiks.
Yet, must the “tragedy” logic lead to despotism? No. Rather than resort to commissars, the despoliation can be avoided with more private ownership, not less. The enclosure movement in England of the 17th century, spurred by acts of Parliament, did more to ignite the second agricultural revolution than any other single event. Land became fenced with personal title of ownership. It became more productive and resulted in the beautiful rural English countryside of today. No tragedy there.
Furthermore, the title of Selterman’s article is a false dichotomy by positing a hostility between “greed” and the “common good”. The war between the two isn’t the done deal that Selterman would have us believe. Adam Smith became the famous Adam Smith due to his articulate exposition of the beneficial intersection of “greed” and “common good”. As Smith laid it out, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. The insight explains the difference between an American supermarket and the streets and stores of today’s Caracas, Venezuela.
The problem with the obsession over the “common good” is the unavoidable question about whose “common good”. Maduro and company of Venezuela have an answer. Theirs!
Positioning an unaccountable United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – with our unaccountable EPA hitched – into the role of arbiters of human activity would be to supplant popular sovereignty with a board of Maduros. The new potentates can’t possess enough knowledge for decision-making without massive and negative unintended consequences. We’ve been down this road many times before in the USSR, the countries behind the Iron Curtain, Mao’s China, Maduro’s Venezuela – indeed anywhere the “common good” was the excuse to translate good intentions into sweeping state controls.
The real tragedy would be to recapitulate the dreadful history of the USSR’s experience with its cadre of overseers. America’s blue dots are replaying the scenario. High taxes and powerful buttinsky bureaus proliferate in places run by de Blasio clones. Bans on everything from super-sized drinks to happy meals to all things plastic are blue-dot chic, now actively seeking a home in DC’s halls of power. Not content with localized efforts, the activists seek the whip hand of a centralized state, the one most removed from people’s daily lives. The crusade is revving up with Susan Goldberg’s National Geographic magazine at the tip of the spear.
Back to the June cover story. Biography is telling. Well, who is Laura Parker, the author of June’s “Plastic” cover story? She’s a journalist and self-employed writer with past and current homes in Seattle, Detroit, Washington DC, and maybe New York City. Her education consists of a BA in Communications – the degree of choice for today’s journos – from the University of Washington, and appears quite proud of her Neiman Fellowship at Harvard.
She conspicuously displays one of the fetishes among our urban “elect” (to borrow John Calvin’s famous term for the “saved”): environmentalism. From her LinkedIn page she writes, “As a staff writer at National Geographic, I cover climate change and water–including the decline of underground aquifers to sea-level rise and the huge mess that plastic trash is making of the world’s seas” – a concise confession of faith in the citified dogma if there ever was one.
The worldly church of environmentalism brooks little confidence in capitalism while fondling a conviction for social engineering. It’s the quintessential doctrine for reimposing a form of feudalism with its new aristocracy: politicized technocrats and degreed ideologues. The models are Robespierre and Lenin, not the disinterested “experts” of the early progressives’ dreams.
Marx tried to turn history into a science inexorably leading to his preferred social order. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the rest of the Jacobin crowd of 1793 imposed their version of rationality as “pure reason”. Lenin, the community organizer par excellence, took Marx’s rhetorical pugilism and cooked up the political means to impose it. The Jacobin brain trust and their Committee of Public Safety marched off in 13 months 16,594 souls to the guillotine and other creative methods of execution. The real history – not the “science” of Marx’s fevered imagination – is a sorrowful tale of the rule of centralized pedants.
Our blue dots are awash in the philosophical underpinnings of self-righteous pedantry. Pregnant with implications is the fact that the French Revolution was a Paris affair with its mob in the vanguard. Similarly, Lenin’s claque extended control from Petrograd and Moscow with the help of urban radicals, his so-called “vanguard elite”. A slog through the multi-part series on the Russian Revolution by both Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Richard Pipes, with Simon Schama’s Citizens (French Revolution) thrown in for good measure, would prove enlightening.
The cities are famous for their innovations in the arts and technology, but also in new forms of inhumanity.
The zealotry for environmentalism – the only thing that functions as a vibrant religion in metropolitan America – cries for some definition. It has many postulates. First among equals is man’s bastard status in relation to nature. Nature is often mindlessly inferred as a unitary being by the movement’s clergy (Pope Gore?). The concept has all kinds of room for Planned Parenthood, unbridled abortion, euthanasia as both mercy and merciless killing, PETA, and any greenie scheme to control and remake us in appeasement to the mother goddess. The word “balance” seems out of place in the paradigm. It’s meant to.
The normal, run-of-the-mill utilization of nature – you know, like mining, lumbering, building homes and factories – becomes much more difficult as people struggle through the state organs run by a new godless clergy with the enlightened gnosis. Since only the new secular priesthood are entrusted with the mysterious truths, the hoi polloi must be supervised. The emphasis – and emphasis makes the big difference between popular sovereignty and Pol Pot – is “control” and not the greatest possible freedom in accord with decency. Thus the love of bans like the current political fad of blackballing plastic.
Parker’s article in National Geographic is an example of their disfigurement of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. There’s a leap, but it’s a jump from plastic in the oceans to plastic elimination. She mentions the source of much of the problem – Asia – but she appears to be in a hurry to get to her favorite solution: eradication of the stuff. She’s got the impatience of Lenin.
Laura, let’s slow down. If the source of the problem is in Asia, then the solution is in Asia. But before we get to the talk of solution, as the saying goes, context is everything. Asia’s context in many places is one of grinding poverty from which much of it is just beginning to emerge as free market capitalism makes its halting, contorted, and meandering march around the world. Public sanitation is a persistent problem. One basic choice for the masses in such places is between potable water in a plastic bottle from a Nestlé factory or cholera in the village well. It’s a mistake that a friend experienced in the Philippines when he avoided the tap water but not the ice cubes in his hotel room’s freezer. Montezuma was avenged.
Under these circumstances, clean water is more reliably and inexpensively distributed in plastic bottles than anything else known to man or woman, or the other 38 or so genders imagined by our urban betters. Until an expensive sanitary grid is in place for taps, the 16-ounce bottled water of Nestlé , Unilever, and assorted knock-offs are the only practical option for a Bangkok worker on the go.
And what does the worker do with the bottle when finished? Of course, he throws it out the window. It’s what we used to do before the crying Indian public service ads of the 60’s and 70’s. It’s what poor people in poor countries still do without blinking. It’s a matter of values. Outside the super-rich enclaves in most places around the world, filth is common; litter is common.
A poor resident of Guatemala City isn’t so concerned about Santa Barbara urban aesthetics as he or she struggles to survive on a dollar a day. Talk to a rich-country anyone who’s spent many years outside the Anglosphere and Europe. You become inured to the litter, and when you return home, a formerly considered filthy area suddenly looks like the home of a germaphobe (a person with a compulsion to clean excessively).
If there’s a need for consciousness raising, it’s at the level of the denizen of the third world and not a people who look upon littering as a sin akin to assault and battery. But when our hypersensitivities meet with third world reality, we frequently end up as Green Peace activists.
Something the first world activists won’t recognize is the real source of their anxiety. It’s something that they can’t handle nor recognize. These scions of our suburban/urban sophisticates can’t come to grips with the realization that the mass of the world’s population don’t share their neatness values. What muddles their thinking and makes it easy to avoid the obvious conclusion is the airy notion that all cultures are equal. The idea disarms our privileged activists. It might be considered the second doctrine of environmentalism, and every other lefty cause for that matter. So, plastic must be banned everywhere and not just for the people who produced the dilemma.
The approach is a blind alley when practiced in other fields. A teacher can’t establish classroom discipline by constantly admonishing the whole class. The problem is concentrated on a few individuals. It’s easier to make a general indictment than engage in the unpleasantness of one-on-one encounters with the few malefactors. As a consequence, the innocents begin to dislike the teacher as much as the hellions. From there, it’s downhill. Such is the lefty approach to the problem of plastic litter. In the end, we avoid coming to grips with the principal cause: South Asia has a litter problem!
And more than that, it has a sanitation problem. And more than that, it has a government problem. And more than that, it has a wrenching poverty problem. And more than that, it has a corruption problem. And more than that, it has an infrastructure problem. And more than that …. Such countries aren’t going to look like the manicured landscapes of Bel Air.
But anyway off we go on the merry crusade to eliminate plastic from the face of the earth. The circus may be fun, replete with bucket-list trips to exotic locales and foundation-funded conferences in affluent resorts to meet with the like-minded. But is the scare well founded? Is plastic really a bonafide boogeyman? The answer requires more of Parker than a chronicle of littered beaches and breakdowns of plastic bags into nano-particles.
A comparison of alternatives would prove useful before we pack for the Davos trip. Surrogates for the typical light-weight plastic bag (high density polyethylene, HDPE) come up short for their harmful environmental impact, or so says a 2011 study by the Environmental Agency of England. Alternatives to the light-weight plastic bag included bags composed of HDPE laced for decomposition, bio-degradable starch/polyester, paper, heavy-duty low-density polyethylene(“bags for life”), heavier duty polypropylene (“bags for life”), and cotton (“bags for life”).
Consider the “bags for life”. They must be reused between 4 to 131 times (cotton) before they equal the environmental benefits of the disposable kind. Counter-intuitive? Maybe, if your exposure to science is limited to “Bill, the Science Guy”. (4)
What about cross-contamination and the hazards of washing chemicals associated with “bags for life”? Cross-contamination involves the danger of spreading pathogens from an unwashed bag to the contents of your Safeway cart. From there, who knows where it spreads.
It has happened. Check out this story from 2010. An Oregon teenage soccer player fell ill with an awful norovirus that quickly spread to teammates. As NBC reported, “The girl had been very ill in the hotel bathroom, spreading an aerosol of norovirus that landed everywhere, including on the reusable grocery bag hanging in the room. When scientists checked the bag, it tested positive for the bug, even two weeks later.” The snacks in the reusable shopping bags feeding the kids then infected the team. (4)
How many people are going to wash the things after every visit to the supermarket? One study presents good grounds for skepticism. You should be too.
Rather than wipe out an entire industry, wouldn’t it be better to run the familiar public service ads, organize voluntary trash collections, and establish something kindred to solid waste management in the developing world? They would have to do it anyway as poor people in poor countries become richer to afford more stuff, much of it disposable, with or without plastic. The people in these countries now have the wherewithal to access potable water that also happens to portable … in plastic bottles. Whereas before, they wallowed in sewage and cholera. Next on the national development list is anti-litter campaigns and solid waste management. Speaking of evolution, that appears to be the normal progression if our experience is any guide.
Do we really need to resort to death squads on a mission to destroy the plastics industry? Take it away and we have a mess. Saran Wrap works wonders in protecting our foods from insects and airborne pathogens. It functions better than blood-soaked wrapping paper seeping onto a “bag for life”. In short order in tropical climates things start to stink. Plastic is cheap – thus making things affordable for the average person – and wonderful for human health. Plastic provides too many benefits to ignore. Now poor countries need to stop being poor in the means to dispose of all forms of rubbish, let alone plastic. Also, try some crying ads.
Inconvenience seems to be an important part of the blue-dot weltenschauung. Its urban purveyors won’t be happy until they run us out of our air conditioning, bungalows, cars, guns, and almost anything sold at a Walmart. All this while afflicting us with high taxes, high-priced everything, and the entanglements of nanny state regulations.
Hedonism, though, is ok, particularly of the sexual variety. It’s part-and-parcel of the disrepute in the blue-dot world for old standards and norms. It is ironic that nearly everything is subject to control and governmental manipulation except matters dealing with sex and gender. The irony might dissipate if one sees it as additional site preparation for the brave new world.
There is little self-reflection by these politicized technocrats and degreed ideologues in our urban centers. For them, it all makes so much sense as they wallow in their confined mutual admiration society. They may not even be aware of their biases. In that sense they are both myopic and arrogant as they brook no opposition. The Bible, conservative Christians, Christian bakers, gun owners, advocates of limiting marriage to couplings who can consummate it, etc., are to be steam-rolled in the paving of the road to nirvana – a blue-dot nirvana.
At its most basic level, the divide in our politics is a philosophical one with a geographic dimension.
RogerG
Footnotes and sources:
- “Obama angers Midwest voters with guns and religion remark”, Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, April 14, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/barackobama.uselections2008
- “Intense, Provocative, Disturbing, Captivating, Genius Picasso”, Claudia Kalb, National Geographic Magazine, May 2018, pp. 99-125. This quote can be found on p. 103.
- From Thomas Jefferson’s 1826 letter to Roger C. Weightman, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-roger-c-weightman/
- “The Crusade Against Plastic Bags”, Kenneth P. Green and Elizabeth DeMeo, Pacific Research Institute, Dec. 2012, https://www.pacificresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/PlasticBagF_low.pdf
