Month: July 2019

National Conservatism

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Here is Peter Thiel’s keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference, if you haven’t seen it yet. His accusations about Google’s disloyalty are front and center. I’m not sure what to think about that particular part. There’s no doubt that Google has a socially liberal, internationalist bent that favors cooperation with China at the expense of domestic interests. On the other hand, if we’re singling out companies and industries that have pursued profits that undermined American values, there are plenty to go around.

Most of his other points are spot on. As a nation we chose bits over atoms, and it did not turn out well for a large segment of America. He has some scathing comments about the American dream and higher education that are hard to argue with, while approaching a nihilism that we don’t normally associate with conservatism.

The conference was organized by Yoram Hazony, political philosopher and author of the excellent book The Virtue of Nationalism, that I highly recommend.

Fear of Freedom?

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Stuart Schneiderman links to an article by a therapist who has a lot of experience working with millennials…

On any given day, a handful of millennials will come into my office and express their most pressing concerns: “I’m worried I’ll never make enough money to retire.” “I feel like a failure.” “I don’t know if I’m setting up my adult life the right way.”

But the complaint they bring up the most? “I have too many choices and I can’t decide what to do. What if I make the wrong choice?”

Now, I think that ‘generational’ explanations of social phenomena should be taken with multiple carloads of salt:  individual differences are IMO much more significant than generational differences.  And the people this therapist has been working with are not just millennials, but San Francisco area millennials.  Still, this pushback against having too many choices is unpleasantly reminiscent of the young German who was quoted as saying, shortly before the outbreak of World War II: “We Germans are so happy.  We are free of freedom.”

To the extent that this phenomenon is real and is general, I would suspect several factors of being implicated. Specifically:

***The focus on “self-esteem building”, which seems to have the effect of producing people whose self-esteem is brittle and cannot withstand failure or contradiction.

***The trend toward child-raising in organized group settings…usually for-profit organized group settings…which may tend to create more orientation toward group conformity and less individuality than the more traditional “artisanal” at-home child raising.

***Increasing years of schooling, which can delay growing up.  Peter Drucker observed that when you’re in school, it’s all about you, unlike the working world where it’s all about doing things that are of value to others.  (FWIW, Drucker also said he observed striking levels of immaturity in many medical students because of this factor.)

Anecdotal evidence only, but I have observed that people with many years of education–specifically, people with graduate degrees–are often reluctant to try new approaches to things.  Whether it’s an MBA or a Masters in Computer Science, they often want to stick close to the paradigms they were given in the classroom.  It would be interesting for someone to systematically study the relationship between education and mental rigidity.

***Finally, there is general social change and disorganization.  Stuart writes:  “Back in the day, when society was organized and where people understood their duties and obligations, these decisions were far less difficult and far less onerous”…the decisions were less onerous, but of course many people felt constrained–and often were constrained–in ways they did not want to be.

Someone writing in an aviation magazine observed that “if you do anything with your airplane that is not consistent with the Pilot’s Operating Handbook, then you are a test pilot.”  In a society, the equivalent of the POH is the aggregate of laws, customs, and implicit expectations that guide behavior.  There is no doubt that any society’s POH needs constant updating, and sometime major changes–but when major changes do occur, they will be disorienting to many people, and it seems that a nontrivial number of them will react by wishing for more constraints.

Some people thrive as test pilots–either of aircraft or in a societal setting–but many do not, including many people who would be perfectly adequate or even excellent pilots in a more-defined setting.

One of the major problems we have in America today is that so many of the people who have taken it upon themselves to totally rewrite the societal POH are people who are lacking in practical experience, historical knowledge, and ‘skin in the game.’  To continue the aviation analogy, it is as if a POH was rewritten by people who had no background in aeronautical engineering, no experience or minimal experience in flying aircraft, and (in many cases) absolutely no intent of either flying or flying in those aircraft being operated in conformity with their documents.

What proportion of the people in a society can lose belief in the value of individual freedom before they destroy that freedom for everyone, including those who do value it, and how close are we to that point?

 

 

Perception and…

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Culture?  Language?  Genetics?

Alison Gopnik, writing in the WSJ, discusses an interesting experiment on problem solving in very young children which was run by two researchers at UC San Diego, following on to research in which Gopnik was herself involved.  Children of various ages were shown a machine that lights up when you put a block of a certain color or shape on it.  “Even toddlers can easily figure out that a green block makes the machine go while a blue block doesn’t.”

The researchers wondered:  what if the test was of the relationship between objects..say, two square blocks of the same color made the machine light up, but not two blocks of different colors?

For American children, 18-month-old children had no trouble figuring out that the relationship between the objects was the key thing.  But older American children, 3-year-olds, did worse at the relationship test than did their younger counterparts.  For Chinese children, however, the fall-off in relationship-assessing performance between 18 months and 3 years old did not happen.

Here’s a reasonably decent summary of the paper’s main points, and here’s the paper itself.

Why the fall-off for American kids?  (A temporary fall-off, it seems…the researchers say that the American kids recover their relationship-assessing skills between the ages of  4-6 years.)  One hypothesis is language….possibly the “noun spurt” that is said to characterize early-English learning has something to do with it.  Or perhaps there are broader cultural factors:  “In particular, there are well-documented differ- ences in holistic and analytic processing (and relatedly, collectivist and individualist cognitive styles) across cultures, which may simi- larly result in an emphasis on relationships between entities or on characteristics of individual entities. More broadly, environmental variation across these learning contexts (e.g., socioeconomic status, number of siblings, and pedagogical and child- rearing practices) may differentially affect general cognitive skills that are known to influence relational reasoning, like executive function.”  (quoted from the paper)

Or, perhaps, could there be a genetic explanation?…Would children of Chinese ancestry, raised in the US in English-speaking homes, show more often the Chinese  pattern or the American pattern in these experiments?  While a genetic explanation seems unlikely to me, I would think it should at least be considered.

Most likely, to me, seems the language explanation.  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has also been dubbed ‘linguistic relativity’, holds that the language we speak has a major impact on how we perceive the world…it fell into some disrepute after WWII because of its appropriation by the Nazis to make claims of cultural superiority and also because of some apparent errors in Whorf’s reporting, concerning for example the Inuit words for ‘snow’…it does make sense, however, that language has a significant impact on what thoughts can be most easily expressed and hence on what thoughts are most likely to be conceived.

In the Matter of Epstein

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You know, it has gotten to the point where one honestly can’t be cynical enough. I thought I was pretty hard-bitten and un-shockable after two decades in the military, and a long snorkel through the vagaries of history (in a purely amateur capacity, meaning for a deep love of the topic rather than the commonly accepted imputation of being hap-hazard and imprecise) but the efforts of the Establishment Media Complex to tie Jeffrey “Humbert Humbert” Epstein to the Donald (AKA the God-Emperor) are … risible. It’s as of they are all channeling Veruca Salt, stamping their little feet, turning tantrum-red in the face, insisting that Orange-Man-Bad just has to be implicated, just because he once said something neutral-to-complimentary about a man who apparently occupied the same (elevated) social circles. Well, never mind that The Donald subsequently got Epstein thrown out of a golf club and banned from Mar-a-Largo for his tendency to perv on underage girls therein, and additionally was generous in cooperating with lawyers acting on behalf of the aforesaid perved-upon teenagers … Orange Man Bad, just because.
The tilt of this kind of coverage is so transparent; among those of us who have been paying attention to the Establishment Media Complex it seems like just another one of those torpedoes aimed at Trump circling around and holing those who have launched it well below the credibility waterline. And l’affaire Epstein is also reminiscent of the Harvey Weinstein imbroglio, wherein a lot of comfortably positioned Hollywood personalities were reminded forcibly that most ordinary Americans view a powerful boss demanding sexual services from underlings with considerable horror. In the case of Hollywood, though, I’d be willing to bet most of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual conquests engaged willingly with the man, and moreover, got what they wanted (juicy roles, fame and fortune) from the deal. But still – the spectacle of those personalities subsequently having the gall to hector the rest of us on an assortment of moral issues … splinter, logs, removal of same from eyes, anyone? Likely it’s been the same with Epstein, only in the political frame, rather than the strictly entertainment one. It’s already established that former president Bill Clinton was a more-than-frequent flier on Mr. Epstein’s personal private jet. The revelation that Mr. Epstein had many … many… many friends in political high places? Well, THAT should be interesting… Discuss as you will, and have insight into this.

PS – the reference to Humbert Humbert reminds me irresistibly of the verses in this small tome:

“Humbert gloats: His nymphet
Is “ineffable” (and yet
Effable as she can get):
Twelve year-old Lolita, kept
By this horny nympholept
Clear across the country schlepped… (middle verses omitted in the interests of space)
…By succumbing in his cell
Waiting trial. It’s just as well:
He has earned his private hell
Not for him apotheosis
In whose frog-eyed diagnosis
Life is just a pederoisis

The Totalitarian Mindset is Strong on the Left

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Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot:

“I woke up this morning thinking it was going to be another great day. I’ve been celebrating with friends, family and the community since I turned 90. I’ve told you about the gracious gift of $117 million that was collected and given in my honor to four charities that mean a lot to me. All that happiness blew up because I said in a newspaper interview that I have supported and will continue to support Donald Trump.

Boom!

Negative stories… vicious threats, without cause, to boycott the company that has enabled my foundation to give billions to support autism, medical research, education, heart and neurological issues like stroke, and to help our veterans. The company that I retired from in 2002 and have not had a business relationship with in almost 20 years. A company that has employed more than a half-million people. The people who work there are affiliated with both political parties or no party at all. They are of all religions and all colors and backgrounds. Why would people want to hurt them?

All because I give my voice and some of my money to our President. Am I in China? Argentina? Russia? That’s what it feels like to me.

It saddens me that our country has come to this, where I, as a private citizen, cannot express my feelings. It angers me and it saddens me, but it sure as hell is not going to stop me. If you thought it would, you’ve got the wrong guy.

In the next ten years, God willing, I will accomplish more to save this world than my critics will do even if they had forty lifetimes.”

Few people have Bernie Marcus-level resources, and also relatively few, I’m afraid, have the emotional strength necessary to stand up against a mob, even a mob whose attacks are (usually) strictly verbal.  Most, I fear, will simply go along.

And no one should be under the illusion that the Gleichschaltung will “only” require you to personally refrain from expressing unapproved thoughts: it will also require you to denounce and shun your friends and colleagues who have dared to express such thoughts.  See Lynchings and Witch-Trials, Technology-Enhanced:

A few weeks ago, shortly after I left my magazine gig, I had breakfast with a well-known Toronto man of letters. He told me his week had been rough, in part because it had been discovered that he was still connected on social media with a colleague who’d fallen into disfavour with Stupid Twitter-Land. “You know that we all can see that you are still friends with him,” read one of the emails my friend had received. “So. What are you going to do about that?”

“So I folded,” he told me with a sad, defeated air. “I know I’m supposed to stick to my principles. That’s what we tell ourselves. Free association and all that. It’s part of the romance of our profession. But I can’t afford to actually do that. These people control who gets jobs. I’m broke. So now I just go numb and say whatever they need me to say.”

Are there any among the current set of Democratic presidential candidates who see this kind of thing as a problem and who would provide even the most modest form of push-back against it?