A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career. As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change. That’s not the end of it. What follows is a train wreck of logic. Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”. And “change” is synonymous with “reform”. And “reform” is “good”. That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it. When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning? Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.
To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries. Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”. A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.
The terms are also labels. What fits under the label can change over time. A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day). However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers. Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.
If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”? It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing. A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history. For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present. An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope. It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.
Some serious implications soon follow. For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory? Academics, of course. They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment. It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty. Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us. Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets. Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.
The administrative state.
The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth. It was called central planning.
“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions. Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”. Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism. The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.
So, what do we have? We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws. Does the Old Testament sound familiar? Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do. By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform. Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment. Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.
The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism. I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature. The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us. A social miasma will descend on life.
Steve Forbes in “Forbes” (April 30, 2019) reviewed Rich Karlgaard’s book, “Late Bloomers”. In the book, Karlgaard makes the point that there is no hard timetable for human flourishing. When we act as if there is one, we disfigure our kids and their future. We go further in creating a cult of youth and shuffling the old out to pasture. In the end, I can’t help but think that we are fashioning our young into future clients of the therapy and counseling industry, and increasingly dragging in the government as financier. Taxpayers, watch out, for the taxman cometh.
Evidence of the mauling is all around. Parents will stretch themselves into bankruptcy court to move into a “nicer” neighborhood for the so-called “good” schools. The schools aren’t better; the student body is just better dressed with better cars in the parking lot.
And the kids are more likely to do the homework. But what’s in the homework? It’s the same deficient curriculum for the most part.
Guess what? This is all about cosmetic resume-building. Make sure to get the AP on your high school transcripts; go to the right summer camp; crowd your kid into as many organized sports as possible; do a charity for the way it’ll look to the college admissions officer. When does the kid have the breathing space to simply be a kid?
The college entrance cheating scandals are a sign of the trend. Do all of the above, and if that doesn’t work, or if the kid hasn’t done it, cheat. We’re creating a world of facile and sterile expectations.
But where does wisdom fit into the grand plan? It doesn’t. In a world of only looking good, wisdom has no place. Wisdom doesn’t arise from a mad race to fill a resume. Life, family, and faith have a much greater bearing on personal resilience and true happiness. And for some, maybe most, that takes awhile.
A Stanford prof is quoted as saying that the incoming freshman are increasingly “brittle”. Indeed.
Students in Los Angeles protest the November 2016 election result.
Anita Hill testifies at the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas. 1991.
Please read Mollie Hemingway’s piece in The Federalist, “Joe Biden on Anita Hill in 1998: ‘She Was Lying’”. At the time in 1991, there was good reason for 58% of polled Americans believing Clarence Thomas and 24% Anita Hill. All this is forgotten in the recent resuscitation of Anita Hill as the patron saint of #MeToo. The history of the time paints a radically different picture, and exposes Joe Biden to the charge of craven political groveling. Ironically, the lightweights of deep thought on The View brought it to light.
Joe Biden with the ladies on The View, Friday, 4/26/19.
Hemingway compares Biden’s comments on The View with Sen. Arlen Specter’s account from his 2000 memoir.
Sen. Arlen Specter on the Judiciary Committee from 2007.
Specter (deceased in 2012) and Biden were on the Senate Judiciary Committee considering the 1991 Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court. Specter quotes the Biden of 1998 contradicting the Biden of 2019. The 1998 Biden confessed to Specter, “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying”. The 2019 Biden confessed to leftie high priestess Joy Behar, “I believed her from the beginning”.
So, we have A and not-A, matter and anti-matter, and I still don’t know how to bring the two together without exploding.
Anita Hill receives counsel from Charles Ogeltree while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October, 1991. (Greg Gibson/AP)
Hill’s liberal beatification doesn’t come out of this unsoiled either. Her answers before the committee on cross-examination were, to put it mildly, disturbing, even to those anxious to “Bork” Thomas. She tried to deny prior complimentary comments of Thomas that were corroborated by multiple witnesses. She denied that she knew one witness who said that Hill’s charges “were the result of Ms. Hill’s disappointment and frustration that Mr. Thomas did not show any sexual interest in her”. Later she was forced to admit that she knew the witness after others were willing to come forward with confirmation.
The contradictions don’t stop with denials of knowing people. Her statements before the committee were far more colorful and dramatic than those given to the FBI, something she had trouble explaining.
Then she was asked about a USA Today article that described an arrangement proffered to her by a Senate Democratic staffer for her to make a deposition against Thomas and it would be discreetly divulged to Thomas resulting, presumably, in him asking to withdraw his nomination, all done with anonymity for Hill. It’s a repeat of the 1987 play against Reagan’s nomination of Judge Ginsburg. She denied any knowledge of the offer and became evasive. This is what prompted Biden in 1998 to confess to Specter that she was lying.
Robert Bork at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on September 18, 1987. (CNP/Getty Images)
Remember, the Thomas nomination came just 4 years after the Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg fights. The Democrats were beginning the slide into the political tar pits for Supreme Court nominations. What worked against Ginsburg was redeployed against Thomas and later against Kavanaugh.
Sen. Joe Biden confers with Sen. Edward Kennedy. Kennedy would lead the fight to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork.
Anita Hill isn’t a saint. The 1998 Joe Biden was correct in catching the putrid smell of her testimony. The 2019 Joe Biden shows another side of the man. He’s a craven politician. If he has to be a SJW (social justice warrior), he can do that.
Joe Biden ain’t “lunch-pail Joe” since the real lunch-pail Joes are the “basket of deplorables” to today’s “woke” Democratic Party. Call him shape-shifter Joe.
Kudos to Mollie Hemingway for removing the vail obscuring both the real Joe Biden and the real Anita Hill.
Lesson: Fashionable ideas frequently fall into the category of “too good to be true”.
Compare Amy Harder’s Axiospiece from yesterday, “The key to unlocking wind and solar: Making it last”, and Michael Shellenberger’s Forbesarticle from 2018, “We Don’t Need Solar And Wind To Save The Climate — And It’s A Good Thing, Too”. The former is a puff piece about another alleged “breakthrough” for solar and wind energy. The latter is a healthy splash of cold water on the whole ploy. In today’s media, almost anything chic among the beautiful people, popular with the rulers in deep blue states, championed in thousands of public service ads, and exalted in high school science fairs, should be taken with a ton of salt.
Here’s a few takeaways from the analysis:
* Solar and wind, especially solar, have always been on the cusp of the next will-o’-the-wisp big breakthrough since the 19th century. Shellenberger recounts the history; Harder unwittingly provides another example.
* Solar and wind are expensive. They sound like a great idea since the sun shines and the wind blows without our help. Check out the electricity rates of countries who have bought into solar and wind.
* The environmental damage of wind and solar is immense. They use up and mar vast tracts of the landscape, disrupt and threaten the natural flora and fauna, and the production of their devices begets toxic wastes and land scarring.
* Nuclear is an obvious alternative but gets no mention in the rush to the solar-and-wind utopia. It’s better, more efficient, more cost effective, produces no CO2, and recycles much of its waste. What’s there not to like … if we can look away from the scowls of the beautiful people?
The China Syndrome (1979), directed by James Bridges. Shown from left: James Hampton, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas.
The real world can’t be boiled down to Sierra Club talking points. I wish that our media would stop repeating them and our kids weren’t taught the baloney.
A Berkeley economist has got the “woke” doofuses running the California madhouse – aka state capitol – in a tizzy over the state’s high gas prices. The number cruncher gave them an excuse for a pogrom [mass violence against a minority] against the oil industry in the state, shape-shifting blame from themselves to the buccaneers of capitalism. Now that’s quite a trick.
Gasoline prices have jumped nearly 60 cents in the past month in Southern California. The average price of $4.30 for a gallon of self-serve regular in Los Angeles County Thursday is the highest in California. The statewide average is $4.20 a gallon. (ED JOYCE/KPCC)
Below is a map of current gas prices by county. Notice the flaming red of California.
Let me count the ways that the screwballs – not Exxon/Mobil – have shafted the California motorist, starting with cap-and-trade. Back in 2015, people knew that the thing would hike fuel prices 11-13 cents per gallon by its lonesome. The dream was to dent global warming; the reality is to dent residents’ pocketbooks. (see here)
Let’s not forget that the state wacks each gallon of gas with a 41.7 cents/gal. levy – soon to rise to 43.7 cents. Couple that with the 18.4 cents federal tax and a commuter starts right out of the gate with each squeeze of the pump handle over 61 cents in the hole, second highest in the nation.
California seems to be always red on these matters. This map sets the combined gas tax burden in the state at almost 66 cents per gallon as of 2015:
It doesn’t stop there. California demands boutique fuels: unique fuel blends just for the not-so-golden state. In fuel-speak, it’s called CARBOB and according to experts, “CARBOB is even more expensive, and is the main reason why California gasoline prices are typically higher than anywhere else in the country.” (see here)
The result is a stunted and mangled market within the narrow confines of one state. Those kind of markets don’t work very well. You can’t impose some of the highest gas taxes, pursue the fantasy of counteracting China and India with California’s adherence to a cap-and-trade straitjacket, and play footsie with fuel blends and not get jacked at the pump. Get real.
It’s simple economics, or – better yet – it’s simple math. I guess it goes to the difference between knowing economics and math and actually believing in them. Apparently, some people think that they can suspend the rules with no ill-effects.
How about a mandatory blood test for those folks in the clown car called the California State Legislature?
Shriner clowns or the California State Legislature in a parade?
Senator Kamala Harris in Houston on Saturday, March 23, where she unveiled early portions of her first policy rollout, a federal investment in teacher pay. (Larry W Smith/EPA, via Shutterstock)
It’s a good thing that the Democrats have hung their hat on Abortion Unlimited. At least they’ll be consistent. If you want to abort an economy, vote Democratic. There is a difference between the two abortifacients, though. Aborting a baby is intentional. Aborting an economy is a minor matter to Democrats in the quest for power, instill economic vengeance, and funnel bennies at public expense to their political allies.
Take Kamala Harris’s latest bribe to the biggest gorilla of campaign deep pockets: the teacher unions. Sorry, it ain’t Big Oil or the NRA (#262 and #500 respectively in the rankings). The deepest of deep pockets belongs to Fahr, Inc. (read Tom Steyer) and NEA/AFT, teammates in bankrolling Democrats. To cement the incestuous relationship, she wants a nationwide 23% increase in teacher pay (according to a CNN analysis). What teacher wouldn’t be willing to punch her ticket to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? But forget about paying for it.
Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren wants to bribe millennials – the most “educated” (?) generation in history (meaning the possession of paper, mostly empty, credentials) – with free college and forgiveness of college debt. The whole bribe is to be financed by a wealth tax. Recall, the excise is an old and failed one. 12 European countries had it, and dumped the silliness due to capital flight. Little revenue and a stagnating economy resulted. In her zeal to out-bribe Harris, she could care less.
The rest of the Dem herd will either outbid or bellow “me too”, as in the Green New Deal Stalinism. Like the greenie idiocy, a few party kooks announce the insanities and the ambitious adults jump on board. Amazing! Their bribes and the government takeover of most of life will do nothing but import Stalin’s economy. A vote for a Dem is a vote for Gosplan.
The old Gosplan Building in Moscow; today, the home of the State Duma. It was from this building that the Bolshevik “best and brightest” attempted to manage the entire economic life of the country.
Attorney General Barr at press conference annoucing the release of the Mueller Report, April 18, 2019.
The Mueller Report is out. Does it really matter? No. Partisans with no “reasonable cause” will still invent cause to pursue their political opponent. They’ll grasp at any straw to continue the inquisition. Burden of proof be damned. The entire course of western civilization is to be turned upside down to get Trump. That’s it in a nutshell.
There’s a reason for those with the power to take your life or freedom to meet the decency of a burden of proof when they make claims against a person. Yet, political and media partisans hang their hat on minor and loosely related evidence and even the absence of evidence.
That’s right, the absence of evidence. The “We cannot reach conclusions” or “We cannot charge” is morphed into “cause” by political partisans to pursue the accused that can’t be accused. Read the last bit of that sentence again. This is ludicrous.
In other words, “innocent till proven guilty” means something … or is supposed to. If you can’t prove a charge, then the actions at the root of the accusation are treated as if they didn’t happen. It’s up to the authorities to prove their case, not the accused to prove they didn’t do it.
The citizen’s right to silence is related. The target of the charge doesn’t have to say anything. He or she can just sit there quiet as the people doing the accusing are expected to make the case. If they can’t, then nothing happened regarding the accused.
That’s our law, and keeps us from exercising Stalin’s show-trial style of justice. It’s how we avoid the last moments of Bukharin, Kamanev, and Zinoviev beginning with a long walk down a lonely basement corridor and ending with a bullet to the back of the head.
Gun bans and heavy regulation are well-intentioned, but as effective as repairing a watch with a sledge hammer. Another case in point: Kenya’s wildlife has experienced a catastrophic decline despite national gun bans and extensive regulation (see here). A minuscule ownership rate of 1.5 guns per 100 people hasn’t stopped the poisoning and poaching of some of Africa’s signature wild animals into near extinction, as mentioned in a “60 Minutes” story of 2009 and in National Geographic Magazine (Aug. 2018).
Poisoned young male lion in Kenya. (National Geographic Magazine)Kenyan elephant killed by poison arrows.
People get guns, illicitly or otherwise. And if people can’t get their hands on one due to the expense or regulation, they turn to poison. It’s cheap and effective. The only problem is that the neurotoxins move down the food chain to scavengers like lions, leopards, elephants, birds, and people. At least a bullet is limited to the target.
A Kenyan vulture who died after eating poisoned carrion.
What’s the moral of the story? People who are motivated to kill won’t be dissuaded by a gun law. They’ll still kill, but mostly with other means that are cheaper and with broader ill-effects. So, we attempt to solve one problem by creating bigger ones.
People can be very dangerous without guns. Timothy McVeigh didn’t need an assault rifle to kill 168 and injure hundreds more in the Alfred P. Murrah Bldg. in Oklahoma City. Weaponizing fertilizer in a garage was all that was necessary. Tomorrow is the sad anniversary.
Alfred P. Murrah Bldg., Oklahoma City, after McVeigh’s bomb.
9/11 proved that box cutters and hijacked airliners can be homicidally effective.
Stripping the population of guns won’t settle your problems. It won’t even come close. One solution to assist our overburdened police officers would be to deputize the law-abiding with open-carry and accessible ccw laws. Just a thought.
If it’s the safety of your kids in school that worries you, harden them. Sadly, we live in a time when our society is getting ragged. Civil society’s little platoons of civilization are in decline. Many of those very same kids, if they survive the abortion gauntlet, are born into an increasing array of chaotic home environments. Now that doesn’t bode well, with or without more gun laws.
I was listening to Pandora’s “Cool Crooners” station this morning. A thought occurred: What makes Frank Sinatra, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, and Tony Bennett, among others, stand head and shoulders above your uncle Fred who just so happens to have a good voice as he works at being a very good CPA? Is their success an accident? Certainly, many factors account for their fame, but in the hustle and bustle of life they congealed into excellence. They had a special talent.
Joseph Schumpeter, Austrian economist
What’s this got to do with economics? A lot. The economist Joseph Schumpeter made it abundantly clear. The economy rides on the backs of a few very talented risk takers, whether it be Henry Ford or Jeff Bezos. The accomplished few weren’t just a collection of lucky mediocrities. At the core, this is a remarkably different story than the one peddled by the Democrats.
To justify their love of the state – the key plank of Progressivism – the Dems have convinced themselves of the bottom-up falsehood. In a nutshell, their favorite suggestion for the economic riddle is to confiscate from the rich, deposit the takings in the government, and then have public employees scatter a portion of the proceeds to the hoi polloi. Leaving aside the absorption of a sizable slice of the booty by a hungry bureaucracy and the political chicanery that is endemic to government, the gimmick remains pure, unadulterated economic nonsense.
It’s as if the Dems will create jobs by punishing job-creators. That’s right, they believe that they can confiscate from the people making thousands of jobs and expect the poorer rungs to more than take up the slack with their limited and desperate consumer spending. The rich guy and gal (or the 38 other genders) can’t help creating jobs, even if they fritter away their gains on yachts, private jets, and California coastal real estate. Talk to the guys and gals building the mansions, making the yachts and fancy jets, or the hirelings who maintain or captain them. How many jobs can we expect from a Section 8 housing recipient?
Section 8 housing recipient
Let’s face it, the donkey party isn’t about economic sense. They’re all about class identity – as well as the other identities on their long scroll – and class victimhood. They’ve got too much Marx rolling around in their heads. In the end, the scheme won’t pencil out. These materialist levelers forget that the economic pie isn’t a static thing. Yes, some peoples’ slice grows bigger than others, but in reality, all slices expand. That’s the beauty of a growing pie. The pie is dynamic, not static.
The Lefty alternative is like what happens when the Chinese bound the feet of young girls. Everything gets mangled. Specifically, it’s a mad scramble to take as much for yourself from the only treasure chest in the room. The government becomes the weapon to wield against your rivals. In the end, you’ll find the chest empty, and more than that. It just got smaller.
Now you end up like North Korea. What rich person – you know, the guy or gal who made all those jobs possible in the first place – will wait around for Bernie Sanders, et al, to confiscate their gains? The Sanders crowd will only be able to do it once. The next year, the successful are gone –- along with the jobs.
The UK called it the “brain drain” of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Many talented Brits escaped their country’s King Kong taxman by fleeing to the US. The Beatles even made a song about it (George Harrison’s “Taxman”). Nancy Pelosi and company want to replicate the Labor Party’s economic reign of terror.
For Trump’s America, the proof is in the pudding. CBO numbers on the post-Republican tax cut economy are out. The tax cuts are a financial winner; unemployment is at historic lows (for all of the Democrats’ favorite identities); GDP is growing faster than Paul Krugman’s reputation is declining; wages are rising; and corporate profits are bountiful enough to demand more workers – i.e., more jobs and higher pay – and pay more lucrative dividends. Either way, it all adds up to an economic renaissance.
It’s the same playbook of the 1946/1948 Republican Congresses, JFK, and Reagan. The only response of the Democrats is the caterwauling about the filthy rich, with their emphasis on “filthy”. They deserve to be relegated to the place that used to be reserved for the psychotics, but, today, congregate in the tent cities of the Dems’ strongholds in the LA-to-Seattle corridor.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) pegged. Yes he did, without ever laying eyes on the spirited millennial.
Solzhenitsyn in his 3-volume novel on Russia in the runup to the Bolshevik Revolution (August 1914, November 1916, and March 1917) sought to explain how Russia could turn into the 74-year nightmare called the Soviet Union. In so doing, he spends much time on the fashionable currents of thought among college students in the few years before the Revolution. His account is fascinating for its parallel with our own youth’s growing affection for socialism and a host of chic causes. In both generations, the enthusiasm for their infatuations is matched by an unwarranted confidence in their judgment.
Some might rightly use the word “arrogant” in describing the mental disposition of more than a few of our most hearty firebrands, then and now. Humility would require something other than an absolute faith in their youthful “answers” to life’s real or imaginary problems. Sounds like AOC. Combine the cock-suredness with a prescription that centers around the empowerment of the state and we have all the makings for disaster.
First, let’s take a look at an MSNBC townhall with AOC from April 1, 2019. Watch the whole thing to have a feel for the march of unexamined assumptions and faulty reasoning.
Now, compare the above with the book. In a scene from August 1914 (pp. 334-348), two university students on a Moscow holiday before they were to report to artillery school run into an elderly college acquaintance and professor on the street. The three agree to go to a pub for beer, food, and conversation. The back-and-forth is enlightening.
The two university students in the story are Sanya and Kotya and the elder sage is Varsonofiev. Here’s Varsonofiev making one of the young minds realize their affection for the state.
Varsonofiev: “But if you are a Hegelian you must take a positive view of the state.”
Kotya: “Well, I … I suppose I do.”
Kotya was unaware of this basic assumption in his thinking till the old guy brought it to his attention. He would have to embrace the state as savior for his reasoning to make any sense.
Does AOC show any evidence of a similar “Oh, I see” moment? Nowhere in her unchallenged comments on MSNBC does she say anything like, “We must give government more power”. Instead, it’s left unstated and abstract. Her favorite word is “mobilize” – a verb – as in mobilize everyone to the cause (her climate-change cure). Who’s doing the mobilizing? It won’t be AOC and her merry band of climate-change barkers who’ll convince the nation’s entire populace to voluntarily jump on board the train to the carbon-free utopia. If she’s relying on that, the growing number of dissenters will exercise an early-term abortion on the scheme. Clearly, she’s not telling the audience that an omni-competent state will have to be created to manage the people’s lives in the minutest detail. And, of course, AOC and kindred spirits will do the managing. It’s sooooo unstated.
What’s the historical experience of activists who created such all-powerful governments? The 20th century showed that the supposed failures of the marketplace were pale next to the ensuing government failures. Such a thought will never grace the mind of the youthful zealot. That would require the humility of recognizing the possibility of being wrong. Don’t expect it from AOC.
Another aspect of these conversations – whether in a Solzhenitsyn novel or AOC interview – is the prevalence of the procrustean fallacy. To be “procrustean” (adj.) is to enforce “uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality”. For instance, activists frequently use “people” as if the people are an undifferentiated mass. The same would be true with the litany of ethnic, gender, and racial groups: all African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and evangelical white Christians think this or that. AOC does it with “all scientists”, along with the rest of the demography in tow. It’s how she tries to make her opinions incontestable.
Varsonofiev catches Kotya in the same falsehood. Here they are talking about the “people”.
Kotya: “What we need is a strict scientific definition of the people.”
Varsonofiev reminds him of the foolishness of attempting to know “the people” as a uniform whole: “Yes, we all like to look scientific, but nobody has ever defined what, precisely, is meant by the ‘the people’. In any case ‘the people’ don’t just comprise the peasant mass. For one thing, you can’t exclude the intelligentsia.”
Kotya responds by compounding the error: “The intelligentsia also has to be defined.”
Varsonofiev counters: “Nobody seems capable of that either. We would never think of the clergy, for instance, as part of the intelligentsia, would we?”
Trying to make Kotya understand the problematic nature of his thinking is doubly difficult when his answers are so obviously true … to him! Ditto AOC. Her responses to her self-defined prediction of environmental doom are festooned with “We’ve got to do ….” Our young congressional zealot gets away with it when MSNBC lines up on the stage (see the above video) fellow travelers in the climate-change apocalypse movement and create the false impression that all questions are settled and now all that’s left is building the omni-competent state … on the q.t. of course.
The scene wasn’t an exchange of views but more like the mutual reinforcement of the like-minded. The program had all the atmospherics of an evangelist’s tent-meeting revival.
More to the point on the arrogance of the young, in an exchange on the proper form of social organization, the old master set the record straight for our young interlocutors on our ability to make the best form of government.
Kotya: “So you don’t think that the rule of the people is the best form of government?”
Varsonofiev: “No, I do not.”
Kotya: “What form of government do you propose then?”
Varsonofiev: “Propose? I wouldn’t presume to do that. Who is so rash as to believe that he can invent ideal institutions? Only those who suppose that nothing valuable existed until the present generation came along, who imagined that whatever matters is only just beginning, that the truth is known only to our idols and ourselves, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is a fool or a scoundrel.”
I’ll get to the direct reference of youthful arrogance in a moment. It’s coming. But here Sozhenitsyn goes after another favorite gambit of people like AOC. It’s the “right side of history” thing. AOC is symptomatic of a kind of person who sees that their views are especially ordained since history, in their adolescent reasoning, leads to the present moment and their opinions. They are therefore justified in dismissing and silencing opposing views. Now that’s arrogance!
Varsonofiev continues: “Still, we mustn’t blame our Russian youngsters in particular, it’s a universal law: arrogance is the main symptom of immaturity. The immature are arrogant, the fully mature become humble.”
Pow! The eight-ball is sunk in the corner pocket. In AOC’s mind, the answers are so simple, and she won’t hesitate to bull rush her solutions down the throats of any who disagree. She has all the arrogance of the immature.
The presence of AOC on the national stage gives us a chance to peel back the scab on the festering wound that is the intellectual bankruptcy generated by our failed schools. AOC throws out terms from a textbook as if their presence in a textbook is all one needs to know of their veracity. She uses “market failure”, “externalities”, and “social cost” as if their use is ipso facto proof of any claim that utilizes them. Her understanding is that of a textbook and not the workings of a critical mind. She throws out the terms to impress her audience. It’s another form of arrogance recognizable to Solzhenitsyn.
A truly thoughtful mind would be more skeptical. Completely absent from her thought process was a limiting principle, the simple idea that there are other concerns to limit their application. If “market failure” condemns free markets, then its replacement, government, also elicits “government failure”. If “externalities” (effects on those not a party to an action) condemns capitalism, then what of government’s “externalities” of illegitimacy and crime stemming from the Great Society programs? If “social costs” (the costs that befall society as a whole) condemns free markets, do such negatives accrue to government actions, and are the alleged social costs a sufficient excuse to ignore the benefits of the action in question? For AOC, she appears to be ignorant.
Maybe Varsonofiev’s maxim should be altered. Instead of limiting the adage to the factors of maturity and arrogance, we need to add ignorance. Thus, immaturity leads to arrogance because it is based on ignorance.
The making of the omni-competent state democratic can’t paper over the hot mess. There are certain things that shouldn’t be a matter of democracy. Democracy can’t make the immoral moral. Democracy oughtn’t willy-nilly confiscate my property or invade my freedom of conscience. Democracy isn’t a license to trample on my God-given rights. Indeed, they come from God (or Nature according to Locke and Jefferson) and not the state.
If all this is true, we’ve just laid the foundation for free markets. Are you listening AOC?
