Political Philosophy

The Bailout and Human Nature

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Eyes and ears are poor witnesses when the soul is barbarous.      Heraclitus  

Posted mid-Sunday, as bail-out talks continue.    

Pinker complains in The Blank Slate  of the increasing emphasis in the 20th century on  nurture.   This may well have increased  our sympathies for others, but has led us to undervalue human nature and therefore not consider moral hazards that tempt it.    Our experiences are so variable and their impact so ambiguous, we may be quick to assert  effect where none  existed – or emphasize it when  convenient.       Indirectly, we came  to  devalue  that third and most personally consequential component – human agency.     We say, “Officer Krupke, I’m down on my knees” and  grin, but  we  aren’t always  ironic.   Our experience and history, however,  should make  us more optimistic and  also wary:   men can be good (and remarkably so) and men are fallible.   (Sinners some might say, while the Deists find us  prone to errata.)    A culture’s use is in restraining  us from being our worst and encouraging our best; the more those restraints and rewards are internalized  the smoother, more productive, and happier  our lives. Our goal is not too  many laws but good ones, not  many restraints but necessary ones.  

The general consensus is that  increased subprime lending encouraged by Congress led CEOs to make bad loans.   We are selfish, our vision narrowed to our time and our profit:   the home buyers may have been naïve but also wanted a free lunch; the CEOs wanted to please Congress the source of their jobs, power & money; Congress wanted to buy votes, increase campaign contributions, and purchase  their own houses cheaply.    Those least likely to feel the consequences of their follies are in Congress.

Which is a long way around to the point:   What the hell were Dodd and Frank doing writing a version of the bailout?   Why do they think they should?   Why does anyone else listen to them?   Isn’t having a dog in that fight exactly the reason for recusals?   Is there no moment when we say your history has undermined your authority?      

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A Pause for Wretchard

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Richard Fernandez discusses Dostoevsky and abortion, noting that

Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through Ivan in his Brothers Karamazov, wrote that the only questions which really mattered were the eternal ones. They are what return in various guises generation after generation not because we can never resolve them, but because we resolve ourselves in them.

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Post-Individuation Community; Bennett; Macfarlane

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This century will reconcile individuality with community. We will find the vision and the means to achieve kinds of community that becomes possible only after complete liberation of the individual from any but self-imposed obligation. Post-individuation communities will be dynamic networks of voyagers bound to one another by sovereign commitment to shared images of good. This will happen most rapidly and beneficially if the ground from which it springs is understood.

James Bennett offers an important contribution to such understanding in an article published in The National Interest, Winter 2004/05, drawing attention to the work of Alan Macfarlane. Bennett writes:

… Over the past thirty years an intellectual revolution has been taking place in historical sociology …
 
[Alan] Macfarlane and his associates have demonstrated very convincingly that English society back to Anglo-Saxon days has been characterized by individual rather than familial landholding; by voluntary contract relationships rather than by inherited status; and by nuclear rather than extended families. Individuals were free of parental authority from age 21 on, and daughters could not be denied their choice of husband (unlike on the Continent). The English nobility, regularly churned by elevation of commoners and marriage of younger sons to non-titled families, tended to mix freely with the rest of society, rather than being a separate caste, again as on the Continent. Rather than the English Reformation being the event that caused this change, it seems to have been (for the majority of the population) the event that brought formal theology and church government more in line with the pre-existing customs of the country. So the English “peasant” the Hollywood is fond of depicting turns out to be the figment of a 19th-century Marxist’s imagination.
 
Macfarlane’s body of work represents a momentous intellectual revolution. The implications of this revolution have not yet been fully realized, or even generally understood. It suggests that modernity and its consequences came particularly easy for the already-individualistic English.

[ef glyph 180] The Making and Riddle of the Modern World & other contents of Alan Macfarlane’s website, including  ebooks  on Yukichi Fukuzawa, F.W. Maitland, Baron de Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Thomas Malthus  — provided as a gift from Alan Macfarlane. Thanks Alan!

Alan Macfarlane’s website

Explaining Elitism to Leftists

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I’ve been thinking about this subject for sometime now. When recent events prompted me to write I spun out over a thousand words on the subject. (I’m rushed, please forgive any typos.) That’s a bit long for a blog post so I’ve split it into a short version here and then the long version in the “Read the Rest…”.

Short version: Leftists believe that elitism arises from wealth and only from wealth. Non-leftists believe that elitism arises from the belief in an intellectually and morally superior of a minority. Elitists demonstrate their elitism by their lack of respect for the decision-making ability  of others.  

They confuse compassion for their “lessors”  with  respect for the  decision-making  ability of those same people.  Leftists view themselves as superhuman with the same relationship between themselves and the rest of the population as the relationship between adults and children. Since they have no respect for the  decision-making  ability or ordinary people, they seek to elect fellow extraordinary  people, i.e.,  supermen,  to political office.

Leftists hate Palin and non-leftists like her for the same reason: She represents a wide swath of Americans. She’s not a superman. Leftists can’t believe anyone would seriously elect an ordinary moron to the highest office in the land, instead of a superman. The same goes for McCain. Despite his wealth, people believe he would make the same decisions as an ordinary American.

The election comes down to whether people think of themselves as electing a superior person, someone who will make different and better decisions than ordinary Americans, or whether they think of electing someone who would make the same decisions that an ordinary American would make.  

[Update:(2008.9.18.13:51): Sometimes, it falls right into your lap. Read this before reading the long version]

Long version…

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The Left Embraces Its Extremists

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Commenter  greggriffith, commenting on this Hot Air Post [h/t Instapundit] makes a very good point:

What’s happening now in the Democratic party is that the  ideological  liberals (Dean, MoveOn, Kos, et al) have succeeded in wresting control from the  institutional  liberals (Hillary, Lieberman, et al). Where the Republicans have largely been successful at shearing off and marginalizing the influence in their own party of people like David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and less conservative but equally nutty types like Ross Perot, the Democrats have not. They have gone from Mondale, to Dukakis, to Clinton, to Gore, to Kerry, to Obama – a nearly unbroken linear progression from garden-variety liberal to wackadoo liberal.

I think this is a very good point. As I wrote before, the  truly  disturbing  thing about the Obama-Ayers relationship is that nobody in the leftist community of Chicago seemed to find Ayers an unacceptable person. Ayers did not stand out as a whack job that people of good standing on the Left could refuse to deal with.  

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