tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37550105260291468642024-03-19T00:31:54.362-04:00Notes from an intuitive programmerMark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.comBlogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-65742708466562110972023-03-20T16:50:00.057-04:002023-03-21T19:51:37.721-04:00Coates' "The Case for Reparations"<p>The following are extracts and comments on "The Case for Reparations", Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2014:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">II. "A Difference of Kind, Not Degree"</p>
<p>"In 2012, the Manhattan Institute...noted that...African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country.</p>
<p>"[T]he [neighborhood] concentration of poverty has been paired with a [neighborhood] concentration of melanin....</p>
<p>"One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers [regarding concentrations] partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and...good behavior....The thread is...wrong. The...racism to which black people have...been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the...numbers, we see the...inheritance."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Racism, in the sense of discrimination, has been illegal in many activities since the mid-1960s;</p></li>
<li><p>A person can be respectable, even though disrespected by some others; and</p></li>
<li><p>This simply assumes, without arguing for the idea, that racism is the entire cause of today's:</p></li>
<ul>
<li><p>Black segregation; and</p></li>
<li><p>Black poverty.</p></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, I don't think we know:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That racism, in the sense of disrespect, is significantly present today;</p></li>
<li><p>If African Americans are the most segregated ethnic group in the country, that this is entirely because of racism today;</p></li>
<li><p>If neighborhood poverty is statistically correlated with melanin, that this is entirely because of racism today;</p></li>
<li><p>That the numbers for today's segregation and black poverty are entirely an inheritance of and caused by past racism; or</p></li>
<li><p>That the mentioned thread of thinking (about cultural pathologies and respectability today) is completely wrong.</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">III. "We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony"</p>
<p>"Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, 'Never again.' But still we are haunted. [W]e have run up a [debt. T]he balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Past racism lessened the inherited estate wealth of black Americans today;</p></li>
<li><p>Rather than half-stepping, we utterly abolished legal racism against blacks;</p></li>
<li><p>Past racism did not despoil black America completely;</p></li>
<li><p>This simply assumes, without arguing for the idea, that abuse in the past creates a debt; and</p></li>
<li><p>This is an argument by analogy; thus, it is fallacious.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, regarding racism, I don't think we know:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That in the sense of discrimination, it is operating today with significant effect;</p></li>
<li><p>That the past effects of its existence entirely determine anything today;</p></li>
<li><p>That non-black Americans are haunted today;</p></li>
<li><p>That America has run up a debt in the past; or</p></li>
<li><p>That America has a debt balance today.</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[T]he conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you'd expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America's crosshairs[.]"</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>America's "crosshairs"—in the sense of racial discrimination in many activities (and worse)—have been illegal since the mid-1960s;</p></li>
<li><p>Black America is not in America's crosshairs (in that sense) today;</p></li>
<li><p>This is a straw-man argument (and thus fallacious); and</p></li>
<li><p>This is an argument by analogy; thus, it is fallacious.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, I don't think we know that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America today are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Inexplicable; or</p></li>
<li><p>All that we can expect today of a community that, in earlier centuries, lived in America's crosshairs (in that sense).</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects....We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don't look."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>White supremacy is not present in any significant number today;</p></li>
<li><p>The lynching era was entirely in the past;</p></li>
<li><p>Dominance in general is the same as leadership;</p></li>
<li><p>White (statistical) dominance is not the same as white supremacy;</p></li>
<li><p>This simply assumes, without arguing for the idea, that abuse in the past creates a debt; and</p></li>
<li><p>This contains two arguments by analogy; thus, it is fallacious.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, I don't think we know:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That the effects in the past from the existence of white supremacy entirely determine anything today;</p></li>
<li><p>That the lynching era entirely determines anything today;</p></li>
<li><p>That any aspect of white statistical dominance today is entirely harmful; or</p></li>
<li><p>That it is morally correct to consider past white supremacy (or even white statistical dominance) to be a debt (delinquent or not).</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">IV. "The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From"</p>
<p>"Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country's exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. 'Whoever says Industrial Revolution,' wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, 'says cotton.' "</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The process of producing export cotton partially involved non-slave labor;</p></li>
<li><p>The inventions during the Industrial Revolution, including the cotton gin, were as important as labor;</p></li>
<li><p>It happens that Hobsbawm is a famous, influential Marxist; and</p></li>
<li><p>What is being presented here is the discredited labor theory of value.</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">VIII. "Negro Poverty is not White Poverty"</p>
<p>"From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Adhering to middle-class norms is good for black people, because it is good for everyone;</p></li>
<li><p>Ethel Weatherspoon's and other black people's adhering to middle-class norms is not the entire cause of their being abused by real-estate speculators;</p></li>
<li><p>Families are not immune from being affected by other families living in the same area; and</p></li>
<li><p>This depiction of an opposing argument as referring to all that ails black people, as well as individual fathers, is a straw-man argument (and thus fallacious).</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it."</p>
<p>395 years spans from 1619 to 2014 (the year of the article).</p>
<p>I think we know that America was not built entirely:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>By black people; or</p></li>
<li><p>On the preferential treatment of white people.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>And I think we know that this number is too high, because:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>America (arguably) began with the Constitution in 1789; and</p></li>
<li><p>Preferential treatment by race, in many activities, has been illegal since the mid-1960s.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>And I don't think we know that any significant preferential treatment of white people still occurs today.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"The Voting Rights Act has been gutted [by] the Supreme Court."</p>
<p>I think we know that the Act's provision for U.S. Justice Department pre-approval of changes to State voting laws, temporarily and previously allowed by the Supreme Court, is unnecessary today.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the 'achievement gap' will do nothing to close the 'injury gap,' in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Racial discrimination in hiring today is illegal;</p></li>
<li><p>White supremacy is not present in any significant number today;</p></li>
<li><p>America's development was not entirely due to white supremacy;</p></li>
<li><p>This simply assumes, without arguing for the idea, that if a racial achievement gap exists today, then past injury is the entire cause of it; and</p></li>
<li><p>This is an argument by analogy; thus, it is fallacious.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, I don't think we know:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That a racial injury gap exists today;</p></li>
<li><p>That American blacks are an oppressed group today;</p></li>
<li><p>That America committed a sin of national plunder;</p></li>
<li><p>That America is committing a sin of national lying today;</p></li>
<li><p>That all Americans consider America to be a dual society today;</p></li>
<li><p>That America actually is a dual society today;</p></li>
<li><p>That black job applicants without criminal records experience similar hiring rates as white applicants with criminal records; or</p></li>
<li><p>That black college graduates experience higher unemployment rates than white college graduates.</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">IX. Toward A New Country</p>
<p>"The laments about 'black pathology,' the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America's relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>America did not completely destroy the black family in the past;</p></li>
<li><p>America's existence was never predicated on the abuse of black people; and</p></li>
<li><p>This is an argument by analogy; thus, it is fallacious.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, I don't think we know that the mentioned criticism (of black family structures today) is entirely wrong.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country's shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm....</p>
<p>"Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture COLORED ONLY signs, but we should picture pirate flags....</p>
<p>" 'Negro poverty is not white poverty,' President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.</p>
<p>"Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice."</p>
<p>I think we know that the nature of the black individual, the black family, and the black community today are not entirely determined by:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Past abuse;</p></li>
<li><p>Present prejudice; or</p></li>
<li><p>Poverty today.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, regarding America's past history of treating black people as slaves, I don't think we know:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That it is the entire cause of:</p></li>
<ul>
<li><p>The racial wealth gap; or</p></li>
<li><p>The condition (in any sense) of blacks today; or</p></li>
</ul>
<li><p>That it is morally correct for Americans to feel shame about it today; or</p></li>
<li><p>That such a feeling of shame would be brought to a close by reparations.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Regarding today's racial wealth gap, I don't think we know:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That past federal government housing policies are the entire cause of it; or</p></li>
<li><p>That reparations would close it.</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting [about] slavery...is patriotism à la carte."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Patriotism includes being grateful for and celebrating the precious aspects of one's country;</p></li>
<li><p>For blacks, America was the source not only of their abuse but also of their liberation;</p></li>
<li><p>America is improvable; and</p></li>
<li><p>This is an argument by analogy; thus, it is fallacious.</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[A]s surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same....</p>
<p>"The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America's heritage, history, and standing in the world....</p>
<p>"We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.</p>
<p>"And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely....Reparations beckons us to reject...hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.</p>
<p>"Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution....What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.</p>
<p>"What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of...waving a Confederate flag."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>White supremacy is not a force fundamental to America today;</p></li>
<li><p>American prosperity was not entirely ill-gotten; and</p></li>
<li><p>Part of black history actually flatters American democracy.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, I don't think we know:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That it is difficult to imagine America without white supremacy;</p></li>
<li><p>That we need to imagine a new country;</p></li>
<li><p>That the racial wealth gap today is entirely because American prosperity was selectively distributed in the past;</p></li>
<li><p>That the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society;</p></li>
<li><p>That bridging the racial wealth gap today requires the cooperation of every aspect of society;</p></li>
<li><p>That Americans in general deny the facts of our racial history;</p></li>
<li><p>That America is still inheriting its past racial abuse even today;</p></li>
<li><p>That America today has hubris about race;</p></li>
<li><p>That the Americans who wave Confederate flags are all doing so, solely to signal support for white supremacy;</p></li>
<li><p>That it is morally correct, regarding Black history, for today's Americans to feel chastened or contrite;</p></li>
<li><p>That a national reckoning on race would lead to spiritual renewal;</p></li>
<li><p>That the American psyche needs to be healed;</p></li>
<li><p>That America needs to banish white guilt;</p></li>
<li><p>That reparations for black people would banish white guilt;</p></li>
<li><p>That reparations is the price Americans must pay to see ourselves squarely;</p></li>
<li><p>That the mocking of reparations is always fear masquerading as laughter;</p></li>
<li><p>That reparations won't tend to divide us;</p></li>
<li><p>That it is morally correct to make recompense now for past injustices to black people, other than individually by lawsuit; or</p></li>
<li><p>That the idea of reparations threatens America's:</p></li>
<ul>
<li><p>Heritage;</p></li>
<li><p>History; or</p></li>
<li><p>Standing in the world.</p></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Reparations would mean the end of yelling 'patriotism'[.] Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Our self-image as the great democratizer is already reconciled with the facts of our history; and</p></li>
<li><p>These ideas seem somewhat Marxist.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, I don't think we know that reparations would mean:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The end of American patriotism; or</p></li>
<li><p>A revolution of the American consciousness.</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">X. "There Will Be No 'Reparations' From Germany"</p>
<p>"An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future....</p>
<p>"In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.</p>
<p>" 'High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,' Rugh and Massey write, 'and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities' minority neighborhoods.'...</p>
<p>"In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself....</p>
<p>"In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods."</p>
<p>I think we know that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Black people are not being abused today;</p></li>
<li><p>When America looks away from its past abuse of black people it still remembers it;</p></li>
<li><p>In home-mortgage lending, racial discrimination is illegal; and</p></li>
<li><p>The Justice Department filed settlements for these cases in 2012.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand, I don't think we know:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>That black people will be abused in the future;</p></li>
<li><p>If highly-segregated black neighborhoods were natural markets for subprime lending, that this was caused entirely by racism;</p></li>
<li><p>If black buyers were more likely than white buyers to be steered toward subprime home loans, that this was caused entirely by racism; or</p></li>
<li><p>Of the Baltimore properties which were granted Wells Fargo loans between 2005 and 2008:</p></li>
<ul>
<li><p>If half were vacant in 2009, that this was caused entirely by racism; or</p></li>
<li><p>If 71 percent of those vacant in 2009 were in predominantly black neighborhoods, that this was caused entirely by racism.</p></li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2023 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-17768154559275337172022-09-09T12:39:00.000-04:002022-09-09T12:39:16.773-04:00Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam,</em> Douglas Murray, 2017-Jun:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Introduction</p>
<p>"In <em>Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday),</em> first published in 1942, Stefan Zweig wrote...'I felt that Europe, in its state of derangement, had passed its own death sentence—our sacred home of Europe, both the cradle and the Parthenon of Western civilisation.'...</p>
<p>"Western Europeans have lost what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously called the 'tragic sense of life'. They have forgotten what Zweig and his generation so painfully learnt: that everything you love, even the greatest and most cultured civilisations in history, can be swept away by people who are unworthy of them. [O]ne of the few ways to avoid this tragic sense of life is to push it away through a belief in the tide of human progress....</p>
<p>"More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past. [T]here is also the problem in Europe of an existential tiredness[,] and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin. [T]he replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people[,] we seemed to think, was as good as a rest.</p>
<p>"[W]e know that we Europeans cannot become whatever we like. We cannot become Indian or Chinese[.] If being 'European' is not about race—as we hope it is not—then it is even more imperative that it is about 'values'. This is what makes the question 'What are European values?' so important....</p>
<p>"While unsure of ourselves at home we made final efforts at extending our values abroad. Yet...we seemed to make things worse and ended up in the wrong. [W]e...lost faith in our ability to advance...human rights...abroad. At some stage it began to seem possible that what had been called 'the last utopia'—the first universal system that divorced the rights of man from the say of gods or tyrants—might comprise a final failed European aspiration." – pp. 1–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 10: The tyranny of guilt</p>
<p>"[In] 2016 one Kuwaiti official, Fahad al-Shalami, explained in an interview on France 24 why Gulf countries like his were refusing asylum even to Syrian refugees: 'Kuwait and the Gulf countries are expensive, and are not suitable for refugees,' he explained. 'They are suitable for workers. The transportation is expensive. The cost of living in Kuwait is high, whereas the cost of living in Lebanon or Turkey is perhaps cheaper. Therefore it is much easier to pay the refugees [(]to stay there[)]. At the end of the day, you cannot accept other people, who come from a different atmosphere, from a different place. These are people who suffer from psychological problems, from trauma.' You cannot just place them in the Gulf societies, he explained....</p>
<p>"What is strange is that the default attitude of Europe is to agree that the Gulf States and other societies are fragile, whereas Europe is endlessly malleable." – pp. 158–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 11: The pretence of repatriation</p>
<p>"[O]n the evening of Friday 13 November[,] 2015[,] Paris was rocked by three hours of coordinated terrorist attacks....</p>
<p>"Yet two days after the Paris attacks...European Commission President...Jean-Claude Juncker insisted at a press conference in Antalya, Turkey, 'There are no grounds to revise Europe's policies on the matter of refugees.' He went on to explain that the Paris attackers were 'criminals', not 'refugees or asylum-seekers', adding, 'I would invite those in Europe who try to change the migration agenda we adopted. I would like to remind them to be serious about this and not to give in to these basic reactions which I do not like.' " – pp. 185–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 12: Learning to live with it</p>
<p>"[I]n the United Kingdom...in 2013 (under a Conservative majority government)...efforts to arrest illegal migrant workers were met with fierce and forceful opposition on the streets by left-wing campaigners." – pp. 201–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 13: Tiredness</p>
<p>The dreams we dream</p>
<p>"It may be, as [t]he English atheist theologian Don Cupitt wrote in 2008[,] that 'the modern Western secular world is <em>itself</em> a Christian creation'....The post-war culture of human rights that insists upon itself and is talked of by its devotees as though it were a faith does itself appear to be an attempt to implement a secular version of the Christian conscience....</p>
<p>"Existential tiredness is not a problem only because it produces a listless type of life. It is a problem because it can allow almost anything to follow in its wake....</p>
<p>"The effect...when the people who know the answers, whether artists, philosophers or clergy, keep being shown to be wrong is far from energising....</p>
<p>"The fascist dream...never carried the intellectual class as communism did, but...though it crashed sooner[,] the devastation it left was as great." – pp. 213–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Icarus Fallen</p>
<p>"In <em>Le Souci Contemporain</em> (1996), translated into English as <em>Icarus Fallen</em>[,] the French philosopher Chantal Delsol...suggested that the condition of modern European man was the condition that Icarus would have been in[,] had he survived the fall. We Europeans had kept trying to reach the sun, flew too close[,] and hurtled back down to earth. [B]ut we somehow survived[.] All around us we have the wreckage—metaphorical and real—of all our dreams, our religions, our political ideologies and a thousand other aspirations, all of which in their turn have proved false. And though we have no more illusions or ambitions left, yet we are still here. So what do we do?" – p. 221</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 16: The feeling that the story has run out</p>
<p>"It is as well to admit when your enemies [see weakness. W]e remain among the only cultures on earth [that are] so open to self-criticism and the recording of our own iniquities[.] But on one single thing it is possible that our critics are onto something....</p>
<p>"The problem...runs something like this: that life in modern liberal democracies is to some extent thin or shallow[. L]iberal democracy uniquely gives [us] the opportunity...to pursue our own conception of happiness[. M]ost people find deep meaning[; b]ut there are questions that remain, which have always been central to each of us[:]</p>
<p>" 'What am I doing here? What is my life for? Does it have any purpose beyond itself?'</p>
<p>"[The German legal scholar] Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde...in the 1960s...posed [a] dilemma[:] 'Does the free, secularised state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee?'...One answer—which dominated in Europe for the final years of the last century—was to deny this history, to insist that what we have is normal and to forget the tragic facts of civilisation as well as life. Intelligent and cultured people appeared to see it as their duty not to shore up and protect the culture in which they had grown up, but rather to deny it, assail it, or otherwise bring it low....</p>
<p>"The way in which science, the dominant voice of our time[,] speaks to us and of us is itself revealing. At the opening of his 1986 work <em>The Blind Watchmaker</em> Richard Dawkins wrote...that...science has...solved [the] mystery [of] our own existence[. But] most of us still do not feel solved. We do not live our lives and experience our existence as solved beings. On the contrary we still experience ourselves, as our ancestors did, as torn and contradictory beings, vulnerable to aspects of ourselves and our world that we cannot understand.</p>
<p>"[F]ew people rejoice in being referred to as mere animals. [W]e...know that we are more than animals and that to live merely as animals would be to degrade this thing we are. Whether we are right or wrong in this, it is something we intuit. [W]e [also] know that we are more than mere consumers....We rebel...because we know that we are not only these things. We know we are something else, even if we do not know what that else is.</p>
<p>"[F]or real believers the question will always be, 'Why do you not just believe?'...Meantime the non-religious in our culture are deeply fearful of any debate or discussion that they think will make some concession to the religious, thereby allowing faith-based discussion to flood back into the public space." – pp. 258–67</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 17: The end</p>
<p>"In September 2016...I had an opportunity to speak with a Member of...the Bundestag...Parliament. [T]he realisation struck[,] that...even the most pro-Merkel, pro-migrant...MPs...have their snapping point...He was willing to plead the plight of all migrants[—]also condemn all the borders[—]and simultaneously be willing to pretend that the flow had slowed of its own volition. This was the way in which his conscience and his survival instinct had found room for an agreement. By pretending that the migrants simply weren't coming whilst supporting a policy that had stopped them from coming, it was possible to remain a humanitarian and remain in power." – pp. 285–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 18: What might have been</p>
<p>"[S]hould Europe be a place to which anybody in the world can move and call themselves at home? Should it be a haven for absolutely anybody in the world fleeing war? Is it the job of Europeans to provide a better standard of living in our continent to anybody in the world who wants it?...</p>
<p>"Chancellor Merkel, her contemporaries and her predecessors...could have consulted Aristotle[.] They were trying to weigh up the balance not between good and evil but between competing virtues: on this occasion 'justice' and 'mercy'. When such virtues appear to be in contravention, Aristotle suggests, it is because one of them is being misunderstood....The absent party in all this, for whom justice was never considered, were the peoples of Europe. They were people to whom things were done, whose own appeals—even when they could be voiced—were not listened to.</p>
<p>"In the great migration movements the decisions of Merkel and her predecessors had overridden all their rights to justice....</p>
<p>"Edmund Burke...in the eighteenth century made the central conservative insight that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but [are instead] a deep pact between the dead, the living and those yet to be born.</p>
<p>"[In] the post-war period...Europe had already failed the easiest part of the immigration conundrum...out of personal comfort, lazy thinking and political ineptitude. [I]t also failed the harder test, which was the migration conundrum that Chancellor Merkel confronted in her live televised discussion with the solitary Lebanese teenager[,] but then buckled under when it came to the untold millions [(strangely, because] most people...abhor the crowds but pity the individual). She had misunderstood the virtues. Merkel could have been merciful to those in need whilst not being unjust to the peoples of Europe....</p>
<p>"The first way [to do this] would have been to go right back to the basics of the problem: principally the question of who Europe is for. Those who believe it is for the world have never explained...why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair. Nor have they ever suggested that the migration movement has any end other than the turning of Europe into a place belonging to the world, with other countries remaining the home of the people of those countries. They have also only succeeded to the extent [that] they have[,] by lying to the public and concealing their aims. Had the leaders of Western Europe told their publics in the 1950s or at any point since that the aim of migration was to fundamentally alter the concept of Europe and make it a home for the world, then the people of Europe would most likely have risen up and overthrown those governments.</p>
<p>"[A] policy upon which European leaders could have embarked from the beginning was to ensure that asylum claims were processed outside Europe....</p>
<p>"Australian officials have said in private since the beginning of the current European crisis that this is the way in which Europe will have to deal with its crisis at some point anyway....</p>
<p>"Another solution would be a concerted Europe-wide effort to organise the deportation of all those found to have no asylum claim. This is easier said than done: millions of people who are currently in Europe have no legal right to be here. Some might welcome assistance to return home, having found themselves working for gangs or otherwise finding life in Europe less appealing than they had expected. Still, this would be a monumental task to undertake....Governments['] publics—including legitimate asylum seekers—need...to hear the language of exclusion....</p>
<p>"In order to bring an end to the ongoing migration problem and turn around the challenge that already exists, it would also be necessary for Europe's political leaders to acknowledge where they have gone wrong in the past....They might concede that...diversity...in large numbers...would irrevocably end society as we know it. They might then stress that they do not actually want to fundamentally change our societies. This would be a painful concession for the political class[.]</p>
<p>"[T]hose who have actually killed Muslims in Britain have been overwhelmingly other Muslims murdering them for doctrinal reasons....</p>
<p>"Of...greater concern to the majority is the observation that many of those who come to Europe...seem happy about transforming European societies....But most Europeans do not appreciate this common glee over radical changes to their society[.]</p>
<p>"Pope Benedict implored Europeans to behave 'as though God exists'[.]</p>
<p>"At the root of such appeals is an awareness that Europeans are unlikely to simply find or come up with another culture or a better culture....</p>
<p>"If the culture that shaped Western Europe has no part in its future, then there are other cultures and traditions that will surely step in to take its place. To re-inject our own culture with some sense of a deeper purpose need not be a proselytising mission, but simply an aspiration of which we should be aware. Of course, it is always possible that the tide of faith that began its long, withdrawing roar of retreat in the nineteenth century will come back in again." – pp. 294–307</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 19: What will be</p>
<p>"There has been little meaningful acknowledgement among the political class that what it has done during the decades of mass immigration is in any way regrettable. There is no evidence that they would wish to reverse that policy. And there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that they could not do so even if they wished to....</p>
<p>"And so in time, during the present century, in the major cities first and then across whole countries, our societies will finally become those 'nations of immigrants' that we pretended...we always were....</p>
<p>"For the time being most politicians will continue to find the short-term benefits of taking the 'compassionate', 'generous' and 'open' course of action to be personally preferable[.]</p>
<p>"So they will continue to ensure that Europe is the only place in the world that belongs to the world....Western Europe will at best resemble a large-scale version of the United Nations. Many people will welcome this[.]</p>
<p>"The less well off will have to accept that they do not live in a place that is their home but in one that is a home for the world. And whilst incomers will be encouraged to pursue their traditions and lifestyles, Europeans whose families have been here for generations will most likely continue to be told that theirs is an oppressive, outdated tradition[.]</p>
<p>"European society today is ever less recognisable, and what chances it had to sustain the whole were lost when it chose to wage a war on its own design. The pieces...that were added were not carefully selected and did not fit the old shapes....</p>
<p>"Nonetheless, the political leadership of Europe will go around and around the same failed and contradictory ideas and repeat the same [fundamental] mistake....</p>
<p>"During the migration crisis it was not only 'open borders' activists who believed that bringing the whole world on board was a sensible policy. It was members of the Greek government and of governing parties across Europe. Some believed it as ideology. Others simply could find no reasonable moral way to deny entry to the world's inhabitants....</p>
<p>"Promised throughout their lifetimes that the changes were temporary, that the changes were not real, or that the changes did not signify anything, Europeans discovered that in the lifespan of people now alive they would become minorities in their own countries....When the Vienna Institute of Demography confirmed that by the middle of this century a majority of Austrians under the age of 15 would be Muslims, the Austrian people were—like everybody else in Europe—simply expected to ignore or wish away their own cultural end point. The dark...Bertolt...Brechtian joke [which] he wrote in his 1953 poem 'The Solution'...appeared after all to be true: the political elites had found their publics wanting and had solved the problem by dissolving the people and appointing another people in their place.</p>
<p>"What is more, it had all been done on the laughable presumption that while all cultures are equal, European cultures are less equal than others. And that a person who favoured the culture of Germany over that of Eritrea had, in the most gracious interpretation, an out-of-date or ill-informed opinion, and in the more common view was simply an out-and-out racist....</p>
<p>"For if there was any chance at all of this working it would be that the new Europeans from Africa or anywhere else in the world would swiftly learn to be as European as any Europeans in the past....Only in 2016 did it become clear that...the name 'Mohammed'...in all its variants had indeed become the most popular boy's name in England and Wales. At which point the official line changed to 'And so what?' It was implied that...Britain will remain British even when most of the men are called Mohammed, in the same way that Austria will remain Austria even when most of the men are called Mohammed.</p>
<p>"[N]early all the evidence appears to be pointing the opposite way. [S]imply consider the minorities within the minorities. Who...are the Muslims in Europe who are most under threat. Are they the radicals?...There is no evidence to suggest th[is]. Even groups whose graduates go on to behead Europeans are taken on their own estimation inside Europe to be 'human rights' groups[.] This is why by 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for Isis than for the British armed forces.</p>
<p>"The people who are at risk and the people who are most criticised both from within Muslim communities in Europe and among the wider population are in fact the people who fell hardest for the integration promises of liberal Europe....And in Britain it is not those who preach the murder of apostates to packed mosques up and down the country who draw British Muslim ire and who consequently have to be careful about their security. Instead, it is a progressive British Muslim of Pakistani heritage like Maajid Nawaz, an activist and columnist, whose only mistake was in believing Britain when it presented itself as a society that still wanted legal equality and one law for all....In every Western European country it is the Muslims who have come here or been born here and stood up for our own ideals—including our ideals of free speech—who have been castigated by their co-religionists and carefully dropped by what was once 'polite' European society....</p>
<p>"In 2014 a leaked report from Britain's Ministry of Defence revealed that military planners believed that 'an increasingly multicultural Britain' and 'increasingly diverse nation' meant that British military intervention in foreign countries was becoming impossible....</p>
<p>"Just one consequence of having 'diversity' and 'difference' rather than 'colour blindness' and proper integration as a goal is that Europe in the twenty-first century is obsessed with race.</p>
<p>"[I]f you have many people from various parts of the whole world living in close proximity[,] it is probable that various of the world's problems will descend on those communities at some time. And the world will always have problems. In the meantime it is not certain that the European publics will forever...resist the issue of race. If every other group and movement in society is able to identify race and talk explicitly about it, why not the Europeans? In the same way that it is not inevitable that Europeans will forever be persuaded of our historical and hereditary iniquity, so it is possible that we might eventually say that racial politics cannot be for everyone else but not for us....</p>
<p>"Even now the onus still remains on Europeans to solve the world's problems by bringing in people from many parts of the world. Only we, when we say 'enough', are castigated and then troubled by such castigation[.] Iran['s] Hezbollah among other militias ha[s] been fighting for Iranian interests in Syria since 2011[. Yet i]n September 2015 Iran's President Rouhani had the gall to lecture the Hungarian ambassador to Iran over Hungary's alleged 'shortcomings' in the refugee crisis....</p>
<p>"Although recent history shows that politicians certainly can go on ignoring majority public opinion for decades, it is not inevitable that such a situation will continue indefinitely....</p>
<p>"Can governments continue to dodge the consequences of their own actions and inactions? Perhaps in some countries they will. Others may cynically switch track in a second. During this crisis I spoke with one French politician of the centre right [regarding] his...party's immigration policies[.] Asked how he would deal with a particular set of challenges to do with people who were already nationals, he replied with remarkable nonchalance that it would 'probably be necessary to change some bits of the constitution'....</p>
<p>"Perhaps in one European country in the near future a party of the kind previously described as 'far right' will come to power. Perhaps a party even further to the right will then come to power at some point later. One thing is certain, which is that if the politics are to turn bad it will be because...the rhetoric [and then] the ideas turned increasingly bad....In the wake of Cologne[, s]treet movements began to talk of all arrivals into Europe as 'rapefugees'. In Paris I met an elected official who referred to all migrants as 'refu-jihadists'. [S]uch deterioration in the language seems inevitable after a period of dishonesty from the other direction....</p>
<p>"Europeans are left in the position of not believing sufficiently in their own story and being distrustful of their past whilst knowing that there are other stories moving in[,] that they do not want. Everywhere a feeling is growing of all options being closed off. All routes out seem to have been tried before and appear impossible to venture into again. Perhaps the only country in Europe that could lead the continent out of such stagnation would be Germany....</p>
<p>"In the meantime elected officials and bureaucrats continue to do everything they can to make the situation as bad as possible as fast as possible. In October 2015 there was a public meeting in the small city of Kassel in the state of Hesse. Eight hundred immigrants were due to arrive in the following days[.] As a video recording of the meeting shows, citizens were calm, polite but concerned. Then at a certain point their district president, one Walter Lübcke, calmly informs them that anybody who does not agree with the policy is 'free to leave Germany'. You can see and hear on the tape the intake of breath, amazed laughter, hoots and finally shouts of anger. Whole new populations are being brought into their country and they are being told that if they don't like this they are always free to leave? Do no politicians in Europe realise what could happen if they continue to treat the European people like this?</p>
<p>"Apparently not. Nor do all of the arrivals. In October 2016 <em>Der Freitag</em> and <em>Huffington Post Deutschland</em> both published an article by an 18-year-old Syrian migrant called Aras Bacho. In the piece he complained that the migrants in Germany were 'fed up' with the 'angry' German people who 'insult and agitate' and are 'unemployed racists'. Among other imprecations he continued, 'We refugees...do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. Germany does not fit you, why do you live here?...Look for a new home.'</p>
<p>"On New Year's Eve 2016[,] there were...sex attacks in...Innsbruck and Augsburg. Police in Cologne were heavily criticised by MPs from the SPD and Green parties...for allegedly 'racially profiling' those seeking access to the city's main square in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the previous year's atrocities. [Just o]ne year after Germany had awoken to part of its new reality, the censors had returned and resumed control. On the same night in France just under 1,000 cars were set alight—a 17% rise on the same night one year before. The French Interior Ministry described the night as having gone off 'without any major incident.'</p>
<p>"Day by day the continent of Europe is not only changing but is losing any possibility of a soft landing in response to such change. An entire political class have failed to appreciate that many of us who live in Europe love the Europe that was ours. We do not want our politicians, through weakness, self-hatred, malice, tiredness or abandonment to change our home into an utterly different place....If they do so change it then many of us will regret this quietly. Others will regret it less quietly. [F]or Europeans[, p]risoners of the past[,] there seem finally to be no decent answers to the future. Which is how the fatal blow will finally land." – pp. 308–20</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-33784989934144880542022-09-06T16:57:00.004-04:002022-09-13T00:30:29.651-04:00Frank Furedi's What's Happened To The University?<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>What's Happened To The University? A sociological exploration of its infantilisation,</em> Frank Furedi, 2016-Oct:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Introduction</p>
<p>Socialisation through validation</p>
<p>"[A]s early as 1979[,] the American sociologist Alvin Gouldner...drew attention to the difficulties...parents faced in...carrying out...the task of socialising their children, stating that 'parental, particularly paternal, authority is increasingly vulnerable[,] and is thus less able to insist that children respect societal or political authority outside [of] the home.' He claimed that teachers in higher education were increasingly involved in socialising their students into its [own] values....</p>
<p>"For some time now it has been evident that parents and schools have been struggling with the transmission of values and rules of behaviour to young people. In part, this problem was caused by the lack [of] confidence of older generations in the values into which [they were] socialised by their parents. More broadly, Western society has become estranged from the values that it once held dear, and has found it difficult to provide its adult members with a compelling narrative for socialisation....</p>
<p>"Lack of clarity about the transmission of values has led to a search for alternatives.</p>
<p>"[T]here has been a perceptible shift from instilling values[, over] to the provision of validation. The project of affirming children and raising their self-esteem has been actively promoted by parents as well as [by] schools. This emphasis on validation has run in tandem with the custom of a risk-averse regime of childrearing. The (unintended) consequence of this has been...to extend the phase of dependence of young people on adult society. The extension of the phase of dependence is reinforced by the considerable difficulties that society has in providing young people with a persuasive account of what it means to be an adult." – pp. 5–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The return of <em>in loco parentis</em></p>
<p>"[M]ental fragility, and [a] disposition to emotional pain, often become...integral to the ways in which some students make sense of their identity. It is how they have been socialised to perceive themselves....</p>
<p>"Advocates of the etiquette of paternalism...see themselves as...'aware', 'respectful'[,] and emotionally and morally attuned individuals. They perceive themselves as 'enlightened' in contrast to their opponents...who, they claim, are steeped in outdated, prejudiced traditional values. Yet if there is an age-old[,] traditional value, it is that of paternalism." – p. 9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The deification of safety</p>
<p>"Unlike its censorious ancestors, [t]he trigger-warning crusade...is not particularly interested in the content of the literary text: its entire focus is about the potential effect that a book may have on an individual. This speaks to a narcissistic culture, in which the affirmation of 'my feelings' is seen as [a] sufficient reason to reorganise course content. The subordination of literary content to the arbitrary emotional reactions of students is likely to have a chilling impact on the quality of campus life....</p>
<p>"In contrast to the fragile child in need of trigger warnings, the English revolutionary poet Milton posited the ideal of the fit reader. He believed that readers 'possessed a fundamental capacity to judge, endowing them with importance and dignity'." – p. 12</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Entitlement for validation</p>
<p>"In wider society and in higher education, the demand for recognition serves as the central motif for the politicisation of identity. That is why demands for trigger warnings or safe spaces to protect students from emotional damage are frequently coupled with calls to recognise and affirm the cultural identity of those asking for them. [T]he call for trigger warnings is as much a demand for the validation of a student's identity as [it is a demand] for a health warning....</p>
<p>"Students who demand to be validated are not simply asking it for their individual selves but [rather] for the culture or the lifestyle with which they identify. The individual psychological need for an identity is sublimated through culture and lifestyle." – pp. 12–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The drivers of the paternalistic etiquette in higher education</p>
<p>"Libertarian paternalism is...wedded to the belief that people cannot be relied on to make important decisions concerning their future. [C]ontinually[, c]ommentators argue that...individuals lack the capacity for autonomous action. Often, people are portrayed as unwitting victims of the media, powerless to resist its subliminal messages—so they are kindly offered therapeutic censorship....</p>
<p>"The inference conveyed by this negative assessment of people's mental capacities is that because citizens cannot exercise independent judgment, they require someone else to do it for them....Because it assumes that people lack the moral resources to know what [is] in their best interest, paternalism infantilises its targets....</p>
<p>Paternalistic attitudes that are current throughout society have subjected universities to their influence.</p>
<p>"[T]he present-day mood of illiberalism is not underpinned by a self-conscious political project. The current issues raised on campuses tend to be not political but prepolitical, and they often...refer to conditions that are psychological. There is an important shift from the domain of ideas to that of emotions when people state...'I am offended' instead of 'I disagree'." – pp. 14–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 1: The weaponisation of emotions</p>
<p>"[T]herapy culture has come to exercise [a] powerful authority...over higher education[.]" – p. 17</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 2: The harms of the academy</p>
<p>"The current zeitgeist[, a] culture of fear[,] has as its premise the belief that humanity faces dangers that are hitherto unparalleled." – p. 36</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 3: Culture war</p>
<p>"In the 1960s and early 1970s, activists tended to identify themselves through...the social causes they fought for....But today, political affiliations have receded to the background and cultural, religious, sexual, gender or lifestyle-related identities have come [to] the fore." – p. 53</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 4: Safe space: a quarantine against judgment</p>
<p>A crusade against critical thinking</p>
<p>"[T]he educationalist Robert Boostrom...has pointed out that from 'Plato through Rousseau to Dewey', the education of students has led to the painful experience of 'giving up a former condition in favour of a new way of seeing things'. He asks, 'being interrogated by Socrates would evoke many feelings, but would a feeling of safety be among them?'</p>
<p>"[W]hat is probably the greatest shortcoming of the educational practice...of safe[-]space policy [is] that it runs directly against the grain of critical thinking." – p. 78</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 5: Verbal purification: the diseasing of free speech</p>
<p>Loss of cultural valuation for free speech</p>
<p>"The task of protecting the individual from psychological pain is perceived as logically prior to upholding the right to free speech....</p>
<p>"It is now an article of faith on campuses that speakers who espouse allegedly racist, misogynist or homophobic views should not be allowed to speak....</p>
<p>"Those who are concerned about state intervention into public debate are looked upon as having an old-fashioned and irrelevant obsession. One critic notes that 'free speech advocacy is steeped in the historical context' and that, therefore, the First Amendment is 'a direct expression' of the historical 'fear of state power'. His implicit conclusion is that it is therefore no big deal and writes with apparent puzzlement that for 'First Amendment absolutists, state power is inherently suspect.'...</p>
<p>"As [the] free speech advocate Steven Gey...points out, what 'most offends critical race theorists' is the</p>
<ul style="list-style-type: none;">
<li>presumption that the intellectual 'consumers' in the market place are free actors, capable of intelligently and fairly considering competing political ideas, policy proposals and value systems before forming conclusions of their own about the direction in which the country and its government should move.</li>
</ul>
<p>"In this model, mental enslavement trumps the capacity for autonomy. The inference conveyed by this assessment of people's mental capacities is that because citizens cannot exercise independent judgment, they require someone else to do it for them." – pp. 102–104</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 6: Microaggression: the disciplining of manners and thought</p>
<p>"Those accused of committing an act of microaggression are not simply condemned for their words but also for the hidden meaning and intent that might lurk beneath their remarks. The concept of microaggression provides a narrative that helps [to] interpret the ontological insecurity faced by an individual as the outcome of other people's acts of bias and injustice....</p>
<p>"The term 'microaggression' is associated with the publications of counselling psychologist Derald Wing Sue....</p>
<p>"People accused of this misdemeanour...are indicted for their unconscious thoughts." – p. 107</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 7: The quest for a new etiquette</p>
<p>Bypassing moral sensibilities</p>
<p>"Like the promoters of verbal purification, advocates of the theory of microaggression are engaged in constant moralising but [again] in a form that lacks a foundation in a system of morality....</p>
<p>"Through the use of idioms of vagueness, the commanding rhetoric of higher education avoids engaging explicitly with the principles of right and wrong and the system of values that underpin morality. Instead of cultivating its own positive antitraditionalist morality, it opts for the strategy of moralising—which is the self-righteous condemnation of inappropriate thoughts and behaviour.</p>
<p>"[T]he sociologist Alvin Gouldner['s] study, <em>The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class</em> (1979), offers a compelling sociological explanation for the ascendancy of an antimoral and antitraditional language and ideology in American universities. Writing in the late 1970s, Gouldner pointed to the role of what he called the new class of intellectual and knowledge workers in promoting the antitraditionalist turn in society, and especially inside the university. The exercise of the monopoly that this group had over education and expertise unleashed forces that worked towards the deauthorisation of traditional and cultural authority. Gouldner contends that this development was [further] facilitated by the decline of paternal authority within the family. The twin forces of women's emancipation and the expansion of education in the context of growing prosperity weakened paternal authority, which in turn damaged the capacity of the prevailing system of socialisation to communicate the legacy and the values of the past....</p>
<p>"Parental authority in general, and paternal authority in particular, found it difficult to impose and reproduce 'its social values and political ideologies in their children'....Gouldner...argued that schools and, chiefly, universities, [instead] assumed a central role in the socialisation of young people, claiming the right to educate young people in line with their enlightened opinions and, even in schools, sensing no <em>'obligation,</em> to reproduce parental values in their children'....</p>
<p>"As a result of this development, 'public educational systems' bec[a]me a 'major <em>cosmopolitanizing</em> influence on [their] students, with a corresponding distancing from <em>localistic</em> interests and values'." – pp. 128–31</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The contestation of values</p>
<p>"On university campuses and beyond, the suspicion directed at [both] normative values and the language of morality is paralleled by the attempt to moralise problems that are connected to cultural identity, lifestyles and the prepolitical sphere of private life....</p>
<p>"Through the moralisation of new issues, supporters of cultural politics attempt to give meaning to human experience." – p. 133</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Turning consent on its head</p>
<p>"Oregon State University announced in the spring of 2016 that it plans to introduce a new training programme for its new intake of undergraduates[.] The course outline indicates that students will 'learn how...to advance the values of the OSU community'. Th[is] is represented through the neutral and technical language of a 'learning outcome'....</p>
<p>"Training students to advance the preexisting 'values of the OS[U] community' raises the question of how much opportunity is available for undergraduates to develop, explore and advance their own individual values. And what happens to students who may wish to advance values that contradict or conflict with those promoted by the Social Justice Learning Module? The course outline conveys the imperious assumption that the values...it teaches are beyond...question. Therefore, they must be learned and, even more importantly, must be lived by every member of the university. As in an old-school theological institution, not believing in the Truth is not an option. Moral policing is now conducted through the technocratic language of training. The trainer in the skills of the new etiquette serves as the functional equivalent of the old-school theologian." – pp. 142–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 8: Trigger warnings: the performance of awareness</p>
<p>Rapid accommodation</p>
<p>"The academic community is more concerned about the use of trigger warnings than it is about most of the other paternalistic practices that have been imposed on universities in recent decades." – p. 151</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Sensitivity on demand</p>
<p>"Once the teaching of an academic topic becomes subordinate to a criterion that is external to it—such as the value of sensitivity—it risks losing touch with the integrity of its subject matter." – p. 159</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The dangers of reading</p>
<p>"Ultimately, trigger warnings degrade the spirit of artistic endeavour." – p. 160</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Intellectual paternalism</p>
<p>"[A]cademic teaching presumes that the people sitting in the lecture hall or in a seminar are not children, but young adults....By the time young people enter the university, their personal reactions have to be subordinated to the need to master intellectually demanding issues—regardless of the uncomfortable challenges they pose....</p>
<p>"The use of trigger warnings is particularly unhelpful for establishing a climate that fosters the habit of free inquiry and risk taking....Trigger alerts...provide an opt-out clause for students struggling to decide between making easy and difficult choices. One of the least discussed, but most damaging, consequences of the regime of intellectual paternalism is its effect on the way that students discuss and debate amongst themselves. Students frequently acknowledge that they find it difficult to discuss sensitive issues because they fear putting a foot wrong and offending their peers....In the current climate of intolerance towards 'insensitivity', there is little cultural valuation of a student who wishes to express a view that is controversial or unpopular.</p>
<p>"The advocacy of trigger warnings personalises academic learning[.] The privileging of the personal emotional response[s] of students creates a serious obstacle to the conduct of the free exchange of opinion through intellectual debate....A genuine clash of views ought not to be personal in an academic setting, and a serious academic institution teaches its members how not to be offended by uncomfortable ideas. The conduct of a robust debate is not always consistent with the idealisation of sensitivity." – pp. 162–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 9: Why academic freedom must not be rationed: an argument against the freedom–security trade-off</p>
<p>Academic freedom—the threat from within</p>
<p>"[T]he cultural climate of universities has changed from one that is welcoming of ambiguity and the risks associated with the quest for knowledge[,] to one that is preoccupied with the certainty offered by process and rules....If academics can be told what words they should use in their course material on [values] learning outcomes, then why kick up a fuss when guidelines on microaggression and speech lay down the law on what words to avoid?...</p>
<p>"The University of Derby's 'Code of Practice for Use of Language'...warns that the 'university recognises that individuals are responsible...but expects line managers to help staff carry out the terms of this policy'." – p. 175</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Academic freedom devalued through the sanctification of other values</p>
<p>"[W]ithout the right to offend, academic freedom becomes emptied of its experimental and truth-seeking content....</p>
<p>"There are powerful cultural forces at work that encourage the perception that the policing of academic freedom is not what it really is—the coercive regulation of everyday communication and the repression and stigmatisation of certain ideas. From this perspective, the regulation of academic life is not perceived as a form of authoritarian intrusion but as a sensible and sensitive measure designed to protect the vulnerable from pain.</p>
<p>"[U]niversity administrators have promoted the value of civility as an antidote to uncivil—that is, robust—free speech. In September 2014, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks emailed members of the University of California at Berkeley[.]</p>
<p>"Dirks's email warned that 'when issues are inherently divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings, the commitment to free speech and expression can lead to division and divisiveness that undermines a community's foundation.'...As he explained:</p>
<ul style="list-style-type: none;">
<li>Specifically, we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas. In this sense, free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin—the coin of open, democratic society....</li>
</ul>
<p>"Dirks's avowal of free speech is rendered meaningless by the conditions he places on its exercise.</p>
<p>"Fortunately, the Council of the University of California Faculty Associations took issue with the meaning of Dirks's call for civility, declaring that the right to free speech is not 'contingent on the notion that anyone else needs to listen, agree, speak back, or "feel safe" '.</p>
<p>"[T]he balancing of these two values tends to be at the expense of academic freedom." – pp. 177–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Academic freedom becomes a second-order value</p>
<p>"In 'A message from the leadership at Penn State', [the u]niversity [a]dministration communicated its version of the qualified defence of academic freedom:</p>
<ul style="list-style-type: none;">
<li>Debate and disagreement are critical constructs in the role of universities in testing ideas and promoting progress on complex issues. But, the leaders of your University at every level, from the administration, faculty, staff and students, are unanimous in deploring the erosion of civility associated with our discourse.</li>
</ul>
<p>"[T]he manner in which this argument is framed indicates a preference for civility over free speech, concluding with the words:</p>
<ul style="list-style-type: none;">
<li>Respect is a core value at Penn State University. We ask you to consciously choose civility and to support those whose words and actions serve to promote respectful disagreement and thereby strengthen our community.</li>
</ul>
<p>"[T]he statement...is conspicuously silent on where free speech and academic freedom stand...in the hierarchy of values.</p>
<p>"Despite the formal adherence of institutions of higher education to the ideal of academic freedom, this principle has in practice become a second-order value. In formal statements on the subject, academic freedom appears to be valued [only] instrumentally[,] as essential for intellectual and scientific advance. Its begrudging acceptance as useful for the development [of] scholarship coexists with ambivalence towards its idealisation as a foundational principle.</p>
<p>"[A]cademic blogger...Robin Marie...is scathing of liberal academics who are not prepared to acknowledge that they, too, regard their values as more important than academic freedom.</p>
<p>"Marie points out that so-called liberal academics frequently discriminate against their conservative colleagues. Drawing attention to the double standard that prevails in higher education regarding the employment of conservative academics, Marie writes:</p>
<ul style="list-style-type: none;">
<li>Academic institutions, moreover, are spaces that are morally policed—it is not a coincidence, nor due solely to the weak evidential basis of their positions, that only a minority of professors in the liberal arts are conservative. Declining to hire someone, publish their paper, or chat them up at a conference are exercises in exclusion and shame which those in academia, nearly as much as any other community, participate in.</li>
</ul>
<p>"Marie's allusion to the practice of marginalising conservative academics in the social sciences and the arts—a practice of which he approves—serves the purpose of reinforcing his argument that academic freedom is not allocated impartially and is a liberal shibboleth. For this advocate of social justice, academic freedom deserves to be treated with pragmatism and cynicism.</p>
<p>"[A]lthough [c]ritics of the 'liberal shibboleth' of academic freedom...are happy to deny its application to their opponents, they fervently uphold their own right to academic freedom....</p>
<p>"Until recent times, critics of academic freedom tended to argue that, although they regarded it as a very fine principle, they felt...there were clear limits to its application. [But i]n the current era, critics of academic freedom are openly scathing about the values it embodies....</p>
<p>"It is not surprising that many student activists lack a strong attachment to what they regard as a value that is less important than that of respect, safety, security or social justice....</p>
<p>"Through their socialisation[,] students entering the university already possess a low level of tolerance towards verbal slights and uncomfortable challenges. Once they become undergraduates, their sensitivities and risk-averse attitudes are validated and enhanced through the paternalistic etiquette to which they are exposed. Thankfully, many students are either untouched by this ethos or have a healthy reaction against the risk-averse paternalism that would treat them as children. However[,] they are rarely offered a genuinely tolerant and liberal counternarrative which would help them to challenge these trends. They are seldom exposed to positive accounts of academic freedom and free speech." – pp. 178–82</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The trade-off between freedom and security/equity/recognition</p>
<p>"Often, individuals who attack the academic freedom of their foes still claim the rights it encompasses for themselves. [P]roponents of 'academic justice'...merely...call for...academic freedom['s] subordination to their own values....</p>
<p>"The most coherent opponents of the ideal of academic freedom are often illiberal academics and administrators who are wedded to the belief that this principle simply reinforces the marginalisation of the powerless. They claim that academic freedom is monopolised by those who possess [the] privilege and power to flourish, at the expense of those who require special protection....</p>
<p>"Numerous academics have pointed to the threat that a range of new antiterrorism laws, such as the American Patriot Act, pose for civil liberties. However, when a similar trade-off is proposed in relation to limiting tolerance towards offensive speech in order to protect the emotional state of members of the university community, such criticisms are conspicuous by their silence....</p>
<p>"The premise of the academic freedom and security trade-off is rarely spelled out in a self-conscious and explicit form, but its assumptions underpin many current controversies....</p>
<p>"Omar Barghouti[,] founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel[,] claim[s] that some values override those of academic freedom and therefore [the latter] can, in good conscience, be traded for some alleged benefits[.]</p>
<p>"[T]he British educationalist Joanne Williams suggest[s that] arguments like those advanced by Barghouti are similar to those put forward to justify exchanging freedom for the benefit of the vulnerable. Calls for free speech to be balanced against the right not to be offended, made uncomfortable or emotionally harmed, exemplify what can be best described as the securitisation of freedom.</p>
<p>"Arguments used for regulating academic freedom are founded on the assumption that a consistent and unwavering commitment to this principle can clash with, and undermine, the psychological well-being of members of the university. Similar arguments are widely used to restrict free speech....</p>
<p>"The Canadian legal scholar Lynn Smith expresses the relative character of this balancing act in the following terms:</p>
<ul style="list-style-type: none;">
<li>Should academic freedom take priority over subjective discomfort? Yes. Should promotion of equality take priority over unfettered expression of whatever may occur to an individual scholar, even when irrelevant to the subject matter, simply because it flows from his or her personal creativity? Yes.</li>
</ul>
<p>"Smith is happy for academic freedom to take precedence over a bit of discomfort, but insists that it must give way to the promotion of equality....</p>
<p>"Since the beginning of modern times, assertions about the necessity of trading off freedoms for an alleged benefit have been used by critics of liberty, and these benefits have turned out to be illusory. However, the belief that human dignity and a sense of self-worth requires protection from the pain inflicted by hurtful speech is possibly the most counterproductive example of the trade-off argument. People acquire dignity and esteem through dealing with the problems that confront them, rather than through relying on the goodwill of the paternalistic university administrator.</p>
<p>"Trading off freedom for some alleged psychic benefit...deprive[s] freedom—in any of its forms—of moral content....As the philosopher Ronald Dworkin...argues, 'in a culture of liberty' the public 'shares a sense, almost as a matter of secular religion, that certain freedoms are in principle exempt' from the 'ordinary process of balancing and regulation'.</p>
<p>"[T]he principle of academic freedom is based on the presumption that people can be trusted to take risks. An academic community and wider society that is confident about its capacity to engage with uncertainty is likely to trust in its citizens' ability to use their freedoms in a responsible manner.</p>
<p>"Justice Louis Brandeis [wrote]:</p>
<ul style="list-style-type: none;">
<li>Those who won our independence...knew that...it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate, that hate menaces stable governments; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies....Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech....</li>
</ul>
<p>"When a society discourages people from taking risks, risk-taking becomes equated with irresponsible behaviour and conformism is turned into a virtue. Such a society is likely to be uncomfortable with allowing freedom to serve as a foundational value. It is for that reason that academics['] freedom has become a negotiable commodity." – pp. 182–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Final thoughts</p>
<p>"The main casualties of intellectual paternalism are the students themselves. In an infantilised higher education environment they are encouraged to adopt the role of biologically mature school children. [T]hey are expected to assume the habits of risk-averse and passive individuals who need to be protected from harm. Yet the flourishing of higher education needs individuals who are ahead of their time and prepared to search for the truth, wherever it may lead and whomever it may offend.</p>
<p>"A serious higher education institution...teaches its members how not to take uncomfortable views personally[,] and [how] not to be offended by them....</p>
<p>"Universities have to reeducate themselves [so as to] presum[e] students to be young adults who possess a capacity for embracing opportunities and creating a new world. [W]e need to take students seriously[,] and expect them to be able to act as adults[,] capa[ble of] moral autonomy and independent learning." – pp. 185–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-14158784966033474652022-06-09T21:11:00.000-04:002022-06-09T21:25:57.975-04:00Cheryl K. Chumley's Socialists Don't Sleep<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Socialists Don't Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,</em> Cheryl K. Chumley, 2020-Sept:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Dedication</p>
<p>"To Jesus, the hope of humanity." – p. v</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 1: Forgetting Our Roots</p>
<p>Patrick Henry</p>
<p>"Patrick Henry[,] the well-respected lawyer from Hanover County[,] Virginia[, said] at his state's Second Convention[,] 'What is it that gentlemen wish?...Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' " – p. 3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Americans Give</p>
<p>"This country is great because [it] is good. This country is good because [of its] moral compass shaped by God, dictated by the Bible, [and] forged by Judeo-Christian ideals....</p>
<p>"If churches feed the poor, the poor don't need food stamps. If nonprofits help people with disabilities, the people with disabilities don't need government handouts.</p>
<p>"[T]his nation's...Founding Fathers and visionaries of American exceptionalism...knew...that the link between individual or personal morality and good governance was inextricable. [T]heir...caveat[:] the republic [will] last...only so long as its people [a]re moral and virtuous." – pp. 8–11</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Freedom Can Fall in a Flash</p>
<p>"If we forget what made America great in the first place, [i]t takes only a flash for freedom to fall. If conditions are right, it takes only a moment and the freedoms are gone.</p>
<p>"In early 2020[,] fears of coronavirus gripped the nation[.]</p>
<p>"In a...<em>Today Show</em> interview[,] Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases...said...a federal stay-at-home order was the best way to combat the virus. [H]e said[, 'W]e just have to do it.'</p>
<p>"Then again, that's a doctor's order—not the Constitution's. In America, it's supposed to be the rule of law based on a concept of individual rights[.]</p>
<p>"The climate that came from the 2020 government-imposed coronavirus crackdowns was one of fear, and that fear was then played by some of the leftists and globalists and anti-American forces and sources to instill even greater fear[,] and [to] exert even greater government control." – pp. 13–21</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 2: Letting Democrats Disguise Their Socialism</p>
<p>Economic Rights</p>
<p>"[Although] in the spiritual realm, in the eyes of God, all His children are certainly equal and worthy of lives of success[,] all are not owed these lives simply because they're born. There is a biblical concept of work. There is a Bible-based idea of reaping and sowing....</p>
<p>"Economic rights are not human rights, no matter what [Vermont Senator Bernie] Sanders says, no matter how politicians masquerading as do-gooders push it. Arguing this[,] leads down a rabbit hole of deep, dark despair, absent ambitions, goals, and hopes, where the talents of the individual are stripped[: with] the seeds of greatness ripped, and even the power to think with clarity torn asunder. It's a life of tasteless collectivism [and] robotic drudgery. It's a life where the dreams of a child are choked for the good of the aggregate. It's a life that looks at struggle as an enemy to obliterate, not a challenge to beat, and that therefore wipes away all opportunities and motivations for individuals to win. It's a life devoid of spirit, with minds conditioned to believe that's the way it ought to be." – pp. 25–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Socialist</em> with a Small <em>s</em></p>
<p>"Democrats...have...taken the country far down th[e] socialist-in-all-but-name road. They've done it by sly means[: by] pretending to be progressives, [and] pretending to be social justice warriors[.] They've done it by using a combination of...tactics[:] a never-ending drumroll of...tactics[:] a wearying, fatiguing[,] never-let-up all-court...press[. T]hey'll continue...for as long as they can get by with doing it.</p>
<p>"[T]here's been...not nearly enough...attention paid to...'socialism' with a small <em>s</em>—to the cultural changes that have brought on the entitlement mindsets and the national cravings for government to step in and solve all....It's only from 'socialism with a small <em>s'</em> that 'Socialism with a capital S' springs....</p>
<p>"There's the Constitution—and there's not. There's the God-given—and there's not. Th[e]se are...the standards by which all political, economic, social, and societal programs and proposals in America should be measured....</p>
<p>"As philosopher and writer Ayn Rand wrote in a letter in 1945: 'Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism.'</p>
<p>"[S]ocialism comes as a shadow—a seductive, creeping, shadowy figure promising nirvana[—]while deceiving [us] about the only end result that can come: [which is] government oppression.</p>
<p>"[From a] GenForward survey [in] 2018[:] 'A significant majority (61%) of Millennial Democrats express favorable views toward Socialism.'...</p>
<p>"Th[is] finding...underscore[s] the ramrodding of socialism into American society that's yet to come...as youth reach adulthood and assume positions of power and leadership[.]" – pp. 27–30</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Democrats, Party of the Socialists</p>
<p>"[A]ll of today's Democrats, Democratic Socialists, [and] progressives[,] will, unchallenged, bring about the utter collapse of America, the total demise of individual rights[:] the choking[,] communist fists of big government control.</p>
<p>" '[W]hat all definitions [of] socialism...have in common is either the elimination of the market or its strict containment,' said Frances Fox Piven, a former DSA [(] Democratic Socialists of America [)] board member, in an interview with <em>Vox.</em>" – pp. 31–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 5: Allowing Wolves in Sheep's Clothing to Teach Socialism as Biblical</p>
<p>Jesus Wasn't a Socialist</p>
<p>"[The] type of ideology espoused by...Hillary Clinton[—]that families can't raise children, but only government; that communities, not individuals, are the source of America's power—[has] become the stuff of spiritual warfare for the left.</p>
<p>"The Bible teaches the opposite: First comes the personal relationship with God, then comes the foundation of God's creation, the family. [F]rom a biblically strengthened, morally solid family comes the community [and] the culture[.]</p>
<p>"If god is a god of anything[-]goes, then so, too, can be the culture. So, too, can be the government. Take away biblical[ly]-based standards, morals, and expectations of behavior, and you take away rule of law and rights and wrongs. Take [these] away[,] and you take away the Constitution.</p>
<p>"What's left[?] All roads lead to ultimate government control." – pp. 81–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Pope Pius XI and Pope Francis</p>
<p>"In 1937...the Roman Catholic Church, in a papal letter from Pope Pius XI, called out communism[: 'T]he class struggle with its consequent violent hate and destruction takes on the aspects of a crusade for the progress of humanity.'...</p>
<p>"In religion[,] as in politics, the tendency [is] to call socialism something other than socialism.</p>
<p>"[T]he spirit of humanity [is] the drive to create. It's no coincidence socialists are often godless; creation itself comes from God." – pp. 85–90</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Christian Socialism</p>
<p>"The lure of socialism is that it promises what the Bible teaches will only come in the afterlife: a state of true love, true equality, true justice, true peace." – p. 93</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 6: Pretending as if Socialists Care About the Youth</p>
<p>Fear as a Tool for Change</p>
<p>"Socialists will pretend to care about the victims of...broken homes, all the while ignoring that it's their very policies and cultural designs that bring about the brokenness[.]</p>
<p>"Often, the end result is to harm the very people far leftists say they support[:] 'Trans Athletes Destroy the Meaning of Women'...wrote the <em>Federalist</em> in 2019. [W]omen's rights...used to be a foundational support for the socialist business[.]</p>
<p>"[A] flip of normalcy for the abnormal, a destruction of tradition, a scoffing of what's lawful[:] by...these...means[,] big government grabs a root and grows, turning a free society toward a socialist mentality[.]</p>
<p>"[This] inevitably creates a cycle of exploitation and destruction with a most[-]predictable outcome: the utter collapse of any semblance of a free society." – pp. 108–11</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 7: Failing to Grasp That Not All Do-Gooders Do Good</p>
<p>Gifts of Money Don't a Saint Make</p>
<p>"The coursing of dollars from the elite flow[s] widely from foundation to organization to UN mission to globalist cause. It's a seamless transference that makes for some of the world's most powerful socialist-minded elitists all traveling [in] the same massively bureaucratic circles, all funding the same sorts of bureaucratic causes—all [remain]ing [safely] under [the] media and watchdog radars by cloaking their socialist, collectivist designs in altruistic wrappings." – p. 126</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 9: Ceding the Constitution to Technology for Convenience's Sake</p>
<p>Universal Basic Income</p>
<p>"As China collects citizens' data that drives its technology development, so America must go forth with data dissemination and AI [(] artificial intelligence [)] development, too.</p>
<p>"We have no choice. We must win....</p>
<p>"The only way to slow[-]walk the constitutional demise is to...fight hard to keep countries with godless, secular despotism as their governing system from leading[,] on the world stage." – p. 169</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 10: Forgetting Our History</p>
<p>Lies and Twisting the Truth</p>
<p>"Socialists do not belong in political office in a country such as America, where rights come from God, not government.</p>
<p>"[T]he common[-]sense, layman American's understanding of socialism...goes simply like this: It's government force....</p>
<p>"Since socialists like to use words as tools to confuse and hide, then the only way to beat socialists with their constant redirects and attempts to redefine history and truth is to remind everyone: Hey[!—H]ere in America, it's all about the God-given." – pp. 175–80</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Yes, It Matters</p>
<p>"This is America, a nation where rights come from God, not government." – p. 181</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 11: Missing the Links, Buying the Lies</p>
<p>First Socialism, Then Communism</p>
<p>"[S]ocialism gets it[s] wings...by way of messages about equality, justice, fairness, and helping others." – p. 188</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Subtleties of "socialism" with a Small <em>s</em></p>
<p>"[From the] Fall 2019 [article,] 'Socialism' [in] <em>The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</em>[:] 'Socialists have condemned capitalism by alleging that it typically features exploitation, domination, alienation, and inefficiency....Socialists have deployed ideals and principles of equality, democracy, individual freedom, self-realization, and community or solidarity.'...</p>
<p>"Socialists...repeat...tired mantras based on [the] drumming up [of] envy, anger, and hate....</p>
<p>"Yanking the seeds of socialism before they root is imperative[. I]n this country, it's the Constitution and the notion of individual rights from God, not [from] government, that guide [us]." – pp. 190–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Media's Influence</p>
<p>"[In] 1901[, Russian revolutionary] Vladimir Lenin, in a[n] essay called 'Where to Begin,' wrote[:] 'A newspaper is what we most of all need; without it we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social-Democracy'[.]</p>
<p>"In 2015...on C-SPAN['s] <em>Washington Journal</em>[,] the DSA's national director, Maria Svart, was...asked, 'Socialism requires that you take from some and give to the others.' [Her] response[: 'T]hat's what's happening right now under capitalism [at] Walmart. Anybody that works...hard for a boss who pays them...little and takes a lot of money in, knows...that's taking from some to give to others.'...</p>
<p>"Socialism is force, no matter how gently the government presents it. Svart's lie is aimed at confusing and, ultimately, conflating freedom with bondage, so that one day, America's light will be extinguished. Lies, lies, lies. This is the energy that fuels the socialist machine. Fending off socialism depends...on discerning the lies, and [on] bringing to [the] forefront those who can effectively fight for the American dream. This is why Christians are...crucial to today's political battleground." – pp. 194–200</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 12: Scoffing Those Most Equipped to Save the Dream</p>
<p>Government-Mandated Face Masks</p>
<p>"From <em>Time</em> magazine: '[According to] Mitsutoshi Horii, a sociology professor at Japan's Shumei University[, t]he difference in [the] perception of the [face] mask comes down...to cultural norms about covering your face[:] "In social interactions in the West, you need to show your identity and make eye contact. Facial expression is very important." '</p>
<p>"[I]t's th[e] unthinking quality of the...coronavirus...face[-]mask craze...that's most concerning....It suggests a choking of reason and sound thinking [in order] to give [to] others feelings of security and comfort—no matter how false the premise upon which those warm...feelings are built....</p>
<p>"Do not shrug off the significance of this mask-wearing moment in American history....</p>
<p>"Saul Alinsky[,] in his 1971 <em>Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals,</em> wrote[: 'O]nce you organize people around something as commonly agreed[-]upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move....</p>
<p>"Once it's accepted in American culture that others come before self[—]not as a biblical command[,] but rather [as a] governmental and political duty—it's a short and natural step to socialist takeover, to [a] collectivist win, to communist smashing of the Constitution....The left—the committed, hard-core, communist-like left—doesn't want simple obedience, anyway.</p>
<p>"The[ir] end[-]game is worship. The end game is a population that swoons over government[:] the provider and protector of all that's good....Yes, they'll take the votes for now. But in the end, they want the transformation of this country to be so complete, that citizens' hearts and minds are captured in their propaganda cages[—]never...again [to] be freed. Never again to even want to be freed....If America is to be saved from socialism[,] and rescued from the globalist-minded bureaucrats who'd collect the world's citizens and arrange them within nice, tight corrals to be easily ruled[—]rather than [to] let them roam free[—i]t's the churchgoers and believers and followers of Christ who must take up [the] reins and fight." – pp. 205–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">It's Up to the Believers</p>
<p>"Why the Christians? Why the Bible-readers, why the biblically focused, why the Bible-centered individuals more than any other segment of society—more so than the scholars, the intellectuals[,] and [the] Make America Great Again types[,] of...sovereign[-]nation fame?...</p>
<p>"Judeo-Christians...know [that] all of earthly living is a struggle—that this life is only a blink in [their] preparatory time for the next, permanent, everlasting life....</p>
<p>"We need men and women...who...unashamedly push forward a godly vision of America[,] close to what was conceived in the Mayflower Compact, in the Declaration of Independence, in the Articles of Confederation, in the Constitution, [and] in the writings[,] opinions[,] and essays of [the] framers and [F]ounders[.] And that means insisting on a government of people who are rooted in those very documents, along with the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and the Judeo-Christian system of beliefs and values....</p>
<p>"Anything less and it's just fighting an endless number of battles, but never winning the war. [I]f the greatness of America came by way of a founding that was steeped deep in the philosophy and biblical beliefs of Judeo-Christianity[,] then...the solution to [the] socialism that's rotting our nation is...to circle back to what made us great in the first place....Then it's to boldly insist on a culture and a political world that recognizes and abides [by] these same ideals.</p>
<p>"[I]ndividuals who believe in a higher power don't need man-made laws to keep them in line. They are already constrained by the[ir] higher power. [B]ecause [t]hey are self-governed[,] they aren't willing to accept a government that wants to run their lives[.]</p>
<p>" 'Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,' Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying....</p>
<p>"Spiritual discernment relies on God for guidance. And it's more than wisdom; it's deeper than knowledge. It's the application of wisdom, yes—but without the fleshly, worldly snares that entrap...and deceive. It's a gift of the Holy Spirit, and it allows the receiver to see beyond the façade and [to] separate the good from the evil, as through the eyes of God....</p>
<p>"Discernment...concern[s] itself with...the godly—or ungodly—motives of [a] philanthropist. Discernment doesn't look at the medical degrees and education status of a bureaucratic spokesperson[.] Discernment doesn't...bend or break with the political or popular[-]culture winds, because discernment comes from above, through the Holy Spirit, like a blazing beacon toward truth. It clears a path[;] it cuts through clutter.</p>
<p>"It's...discernment that shows the lies and deceptions[,] and fills in the blanks of the spiritual battle. 'Beloved,' 1 John 4:1 states, 'do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God'[.]</p>
<p>"America needs [m]ore spiritually[-]discerning people[: m]ore spiritual discerners who can truly see the seeds of socialism before they root and spread. America needs more biblically[-]based spiritual discernment...work[ing] in politics and culture[:] the kind that takes a worldview of Judeo-Christianity first, [and the] Constitution second[.]</p>
<p>"[H]ope...rests with Judeo-Christians seizing the day...by seizing on discernment from above[,] and applying the revelations to the physical plane, in the here and now....</p>
<p>"Christians have a realistic, proper view of humankind as fallen—as sin-filled, as born into sin. And that causes a dependency on God, not government.</p>
<p>"Christians are trained on freedom[:] that Jesus frees [them] from bondage[.]</p>
<p>"Christians are taught...that God grants [them] free will—meaning, individuals are at liberty to choose their own paths[, and] freedom...is...a natural human trait [from] birth.</p>
<p>"Christians are cautioned against judging others—'Do not judge by appearances'[,] John 7:24 states[. T]olerance of others is part...of the faith[.] Acts of tolerance and love, taken together and in proper form, with discernment as the guide, are actually examples of freedom-in-Christ[.] They allow for differences of opinion, differences of speech, differences of dress, [and] differences in personalit[y.]</p>
<p>"Christianity is filled with standards of behavior[al] teachings that encourage followers to practice self-discipline, compassion, charity, humility[,] and...self-control, and to be honest[,] steadfast[,] industrious[,] purposeful[,] and poised[:] partakers of good—and true enemies of evil.</p>
<p>"Christianity recognizes the...specific gifts, talents, [and] spiritual endowments of each...of God's human...creations[. I]ndividualism...is a core facet of the Bible. Jesus wants individual relationships.</p>
<p>"Christianity accepts the idea of absolutes...and never wavers from the fundamental idea: Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. Not government.</p>
<p>"Christianity points the way to living for something higher, something intangible and spiritual, [and] not of this earth—which makes...acceptance and recognition of America as a spirit...so much...easier. And that makes the striving to live for something greater than oneself[—]and to honor the sacrifices of those who went before, those who gave [their] blood and sweat and tears so that today's Americans can live free—that makes that striving all the more natural.</p>
<p>"Philip Vander Elst wrote in <em>The Christian Roots of Freedom and Tolerance:</em> 'The historical case for linking the growth of freedom with the development of Judaism and Christianity begins with the observation that the world of classical pagan antiquity was almost entirely hostile to the idea of liberty. With the rare exception of some Stoic philosophers, it had no conception of human rights'[.]</p>
<p>"It's no wonder communist nations seek to drive out God. Collectivism and Christianity can't coexist[.]</p>
<p>"If America is to be free, America needs Christians to get louder. [I]t's...the turning from God, the secularization of the nation, the refusal to uphold biblical standards and morals and values—that opened the door to big, bigger, biggest, even socialist government to enter. It's only by [re-]turning to what worked in the first place that America can recapture and hold for the long term its cherished freedoms.</p>
<p>"That starts with the churches. That starts with national confession and repentance. That starts with the hearts and souls of the people. [I]nteresting[ly,] Alinsky [quotes] John Adams: ' "The [American] Revolution was effected before the war commenced[; t]he Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people." ' [And concludes,] 'A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny.'....'For God has not given us a spirit of fear,' 2 Timothy 1:7 states, 'but of power and of love and of a sound mind.'</p>
<p>"Socialists in America are...advancing. [T]hey're coming...for the soul of the country. Let us awaken, fall to [our] knees in confession, repentance, and prayer, don spiritual armor, and stop the advance." – pp. 209–18</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Epilogue</p>
<p>And the 8 O'Clock Club</p>
<p>"Social media cannot be trusted. Social media cannot be counted upon as a tool for Americans to spread liberty views. Soon enough, there could come a day when freedom[-]focused patriots have nowhere to turn, nowhere to gather[,] nowhere...to wage mass fights against the socialists, the globalists, the collectivists, [and] the communists[.]</p>
<p>"We had a taste of what th[eir] world would look like...when the streets [were] filled with Black Lives Matter protesters[,] Antifa rioters[,] and outright anarchist thugs...bent on destroying any semblance of law and order by defunding and abolishing [the] police...without respect for patriotism[,] freedom, [or] constitutional...and societal standards[,] in the summer of 2020...when looters and rage-filled radicals and Marxist-like militants took over sections of Seattle, Washington[,] where...lunatic[-]fringe insurrection leaders sent out lists of demands to local government that included...end[ing] youth incarceration [and] infusi[ng] 'social equality' into budget matters....We can't rely on government to be the solution—particularly when government...stands by and watches...or...politically preaches[.] We need...Christians and those of faith to grow bolder, louder, and more organized in their appeals on America's behalf.</p>
<p>"[To] summ[arize this book] in a single word[:] Repent. And that means the solution [too] can be summ[arized] in a single word: Jesus....That's truth. [A]ll Americans [must] unite, with a single forceful voice, in a manner that recognizes this truth[,] and that simultaneously sets God, not government, as the leader of this nation. Once we reestablish who's really in charge, the seeds of socialism will naturally wither and die. It's our only hope. Malachi 3." – pp. 219–20</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-30982350707029785072022-05-19T18:12:00.002-04:002022-05-19T21:24:36.870-04:00Andy Ngo's Unmasked<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy,</em> Andy Ngo, 2021-February:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 3: Portland[, Oregon]</p>
<p>Send [i]n the Feds</p>
<p>"For the...four weeks [after] the Fourth of July[,] antifa's plan of escalating attacks on federal property to provoke a federal response for the cameras produced the exact propaganda they wanted....At its peak there were probably more than one hundred journalists and livestreamers, most of whom were sympathetic to the rioters and protesters. [A]t the urging or demand of others, their cameras were trained solely on law enforcement to capture their every move. Those [journalists] who ran afoul of antifa's rules were forced out or assaulted and robbed....</p>
<p>"Every use of force by officers, whether it be [by] tear gas, smoke, pepper...balls, or arrests, was heavily scrutinized. Out-of-context video snippets were released on social media and published by news outlets, generating mass rage and universally negative press for law enforcement and the Trump administration. The officers were called 'Trump's [G]estapo,' 'storm troopers,' and 'thugs' by Democratic politicians and the media.</p>
<p>"[The journalist] Erin Smith...says antifa use a 'calibrated level of violence' to provoke reactions by law enforcement for propaganda purposes.</p>
<p>" 'Antifa seek to force law enforcement into a dilemma action, where there are simply no good responses from a public relations standpoint,' Smith told me. '[All] choices undermine the legitimacy of the state and its security forces.' " – pp. 63–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 4: Rose City Antifa</p>
<p>"Rose City Antifa (RCA) [is] the oldest antifa group in the United States. It takes its name from...'City of Roses,' a nickname for Portland[, Oregon].</p>
<p>"Antifa began accelerating their mass organizing in early 2017 as Donald Trump took office. [I]n June 2020, the public...received a rare glimpse into the workings of the group through a video release[d when] a journalist at Project Veritas who used the moniker 'Lion' was...conditionally approved to join RCA[.]</p>
<p>"Since 2016, we have been told...by biased media and antifa apologists that antifa is not an organization....While there is no single capital[-]A 'Antifa' organization with one leader, there are indeed localized cells and groups with formalized structures and memberships. Though officially leaderless, these are organizations by every definition.</p>
<p>"The RCA curriculum is modeled on a university course. Yet it includes training on how to use guns and do reconnaissance against enemies....</p>
<p>"RCA was founded in 2007 and is the first-known formalized antifa group in the United States using 'antifa' in its name. [T]hrough Lion's time in RCA, he learned that it was started by a Portland woman, Caroline Victorin (née Gauld). She has been in a long-term relationship with a Swedish national. Together, they worked to bring a tried-and-true European antifa model to the United States." – pp. 79–82</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 5: Origin Story</p>
<p>"The militant far-left movement[,] antifa[,] ha[s] existed for over half a century in Europe. It has had decades to develop a coherent ideology and both violent and nonviolent strategies[,] to undermine liberal democracy under the guise of fighting fascism." – p. 98</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Weimar Republic</p>
<p>"[After] World War I[,] Germany was punished with crippling reparation payments[.] Emperor Wilhelm II's...abdication of the throne further threw the new nation-state into confusion. Between 1919 and 1920, [it] faced uprisings from both the left and right. In January 1919, around 50,000 communists...led a failed armed rebellion in Berlin.</p>
<p>"By August that year, a constitution was...adopted in the city of Weimar. But Germany did not have a democratic history or tradition, and the Weimar government was deeply unpopular.</p>
<p>"[T]hroughout the 1920s, political paramilitaries became the norm as groups and parties prepped their members to try to seize power[.]</p>
<p>"The paramilitaries were used as security for political gatherings and to violently shut down the meetings of opposing groups. The [R]epublic was marred with wave after wave of tit-for-tat political violence. The paramilitaries, both left[-] and right[-]wing, are notorious for carrying out assassinations and committing brutal acts of violence. Efforts throughout the 1920s by the government to ban some of the paramilitaries failed. They simply regrouped and reorganized under new names.</p>
<p>"Nearly every political group or party had a paramilitary: the communists, the centrists, and, of course, the fascists. For good reason, the most remembered of German paramilitaries is the [Storm Detachment (Storm Troopers, or SA, German:] <em>Sturmabteilung[)],</em> the original paramilitary of the National Socialist German Worker's Party, also known as the Nazi Party. Called 'Brownshirts,' based on the color of their uniforms, these paramilitary men were Hitler's violent street thugs.</p>
<p>"[T]he history of far-left paramilitaries in the German interwar years has faded [from] memory. Like the Nazis, the Communist Party of Germany (German: <em>Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands,</em> or KPD) had its own paramilitaries. The party was Stalinist in orientation and was closely aligned with the Soviet Union. At the national conference of the German Communist Party in 1924, they formed a new paramilitary: the Red Front Fighters' League (German: <em>Roter Frontkämpfer-Bund).</em> The league's paramilitary members had their own uniforms, and the group adopted the clenched fist as its symbol. Leftist groups today from Black Lives Matter to antifa have adopted that communist symbol.</p>
<p>"Throughout the 1920s, the Red Front Fighters' League was extremely violent, engaging in clashes with the paramilitaries of liberal parties. [A]gain[,] the communist paramilitary was mostly preoccupied with fighting liberals and socialists rather than the Nazi paramilitary. [T]he German Communist Party and its various offshoots viewed social democrats and liberals as 'social fascists' no different from Nazis. In fact, Communist International, the...Lenin-founded group that promoted communism around the world, believed that social democracy would inevitably lead to fascism....</p>
<p>"Despite claiming to be Germany's 'only anti-fascist party,' the German Communist Party sometimes worked with the Nazis to undermine the governing Social Democrats." – pp. 99–101</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Antifascist Action</p>
<p>"In May 1932, the German Communist Party announced the formation of the <em>Antifaschistische Aktion</em> (Antifascist Action, commonly referred to as 'Antifa'), a new paramilitary communist group. This is the original 'Antifa' and the group that contemporary antifa around the world take inspiration from. The paramilitary was created to bring together a coalition of communists at the community level to oppose and fight political opponents.</p>
<p>"Though calling itself the Antifascist Action, those who served as decision makers on its executive boards consisted of members of the German Communist Party and other allied communist groups. Simply put, the Antifascist Action was a communist organization under a thinly veiled new name. It held rallies and developed its own propaganda. The two-flag logo used by today's antifa groups is based on the original red flags logo of the Antifascist Action. The two red flags symbolized the union of communism and socialism. Like the other communist paramilitaries before it, the Antifascist Action was involved in political street brawls. They also acted as security and self-defense for communists who lived together in select neighborhoods and apartment buildings.</p>
<p>"While the communists were occupied with fighting the social democrats and liberals, the appeal and power of the Nazi Party continued to grow. By July 1932, the Nazis became the largest party in [the] parliament[.] The campaign season was marred by exceptional levels of political violence between fascist, social democratic, and communist members....</p>
<p>"The German Communist and Social Democrat [p]arties were both banned, leaving the Nazis with no political opposition[.]" – pp. 101–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Antifa State[-]Building</p>
<p>"German communists['] preoccupation with fighting the social democrats and liberals, who they called 'social fascists,' weakened a united opposition to the Nazis and further undermined the legitimacy of liberal democracy in the [R]epublic....</p>
<p>"While the Antifascist Action and all opposing groups were banned after Hitler became head of state, the antifa communist ideology never went away. [I]t was...institutionalized in the official state ideology of what would become...East Germany....For over forty years, the extremely repressive conditions in East Germany exemplified what 'antifa' state-building actually looks like.</p>
<p>"Through the East German Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, citizens were monitored and spied on through a vast apparatus of informants who infiltrated all aspects of life and civil society. The secret police agency was originally modeled to be similar to the Soviet Union's secret police, the KGB. The Stasi's mandate by the state was to weed out political dissenters and to terrorize the masses into compliance, in addition to conducting espionage. Antifa groups today do something similar on a community level.</p>
<p>"Secret police form a pillar of communism....One could never know if their friend, family member, or spouse was an informant. In East Germany, the mass persecution and psychological warfare against its own citizens [being] suspected of political wrongthink were justified by the communist state in the name of fighting fascism. But to them, 'fascism' referred to the West and its governing system of liberal democracy." – pp. 102–4</p>
<p>"Like antifa ide[o]logues today who call for terrorist attacks against the state and its institutions, East Germany supported terrorism. Of note was the Stasi's logistical and financial support to [the] West German far-left terrorist group the Red Army Faction[,] also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, which was formed in 1968. Throughout the 1970s, they killed dozens of people in West Germany[.] The goal was to undermine the West German government, which they viewed as fascistic, as well as to oppose American 'imperialism.' In 1967[,] Baader-Meinhof Gang founder Gudrun En[s]slin declared[:] 'Violence is the only way to answer violence.'</p>
<p>"The rhetoric used by Baader-Meinhof Gang members is nearly indistinguishable from [the] language used by antifa extremists today....</p>
<p>"The misnomer of 'anti-fascism' holds steady today for contemporary antifa groups—they advocate...the overthrow of liberal democracies and the abolishment of capitalism. And the legacy of a pervasive surveillance culture provides one of the pillars for antifa activities." – pp. 104–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Europe</p>
<p>"Today, the largest, most organized and violent antifa groups remain in Germany[.]</p>
<p>"Despite now having a strong, stable, and prosperous liberal democracy (Germany has the leading GDP in the European Union), the culture of polarized politics remains....Germany's domestic intelligence agency...released data showing [that] left-wing extremists have become more violent in recent years." – p. 105</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Italy and Spain</p>
<p>"Argo Secondari, an anarchist, founded a militant anti-fascist organization in Rome in 1921 called the People's Daring Ones (Italian: <em>Arditi del Popolo).</em> The group included communists, socialists, anarchists, and anti-monarchists. They led fights against [Mussolini's] Blackshirts in various towns in the Italian countryside. These historical fights form part of the borrowed mythos used by contemporary antifa groups today. By fighting people on the streets of Portland[;] Berkeley[, California;] and elsewhere, they claim to be engaging in the same anti-fascist tradition....</p>
<p>"Antifa groups today also borrow mythos based on the history of Spanish anarchists and communists who opposed the nationalists...during the Spanish Civil War. Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, a member of the Communist Party of Spain (Spanish: <em>Partido Comunista de España),</em> popularized the slogan <em>'No pasarán,'</em> or 'They shall not pass,' in a speech in 1936. <em>No pasarán</em> is still used today at antifa rallies and in graffiti messages." – pp. 106–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Antifa in Europe Today</p>
<p>"Of particular note are parts of the Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain and Neukölln neighborhoods in Berlin[, Germany.] The 'blind-eye' approach [adopted] by local governments allowed...radical far-left squatters [to] occupy abandoned property and land[, leaving] communities to fester for decades, resulting in the development of their own parallel societies where the authority of the state and the rule of law are challenged. Antifa in CHAZ attempted to turn Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood into a variant of this.</p>
<p>"Every year on...May Day, the inhabitants and supporters of these antifa-friendly neighborhoods turn violent. In July 2016, thousands of masked militants attacked police in Friedrichshain to protest redevelopment efforts in the area. They...destroyed shops[.] It took about 1,800 officers to bring the rioting under control." – p. 107</p>
<p>"Both the extreme left and right seek to undermine liberal democracy and the rule of law, whether through the use of violence or other means. They have differing political visions and goals, but both would result in the destruction of the liberties we value.</p>
<p>"[T]he threat of the far right is understood by the American public and actively countered by government, academia, media, and civil society. No comparable resolve or mass organization exists to counter the far left. Why? One explanation is the cultural dominance of the left. The political homogeneity in popular culture, academe, and urban centers of influence (e.g., New York[;] Washington, DC[;] Los Angeles[;] etc.) has produced a populace with severe blind spots." – pp. 108–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 6: American Mutation</p>
<p>Critical Theory</p>
<p>"Antifa do not view their premeditated and preemptive acts of violence as 'violence.' It is part of the strategy of remaking words to have completely new meanings. But it also pulls from a left-wing philosophical tradition established by twentieth-century German philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse....</p>
<p>"Born in 1898, Marcuse was a committed leftist all his life. As a young adult, he...voted for the German Communist Party. In 1933, he joined the Institute for Social Research, a think tank at Frankfurt University. [The Institute] is more commonly known as the 'Frankfurt School.'...</p>
<p>"One of the Frankfurt School's lasting legacies is the development of critical theory—the Marxist-inspired theory that undergirds all the various 'studies' disciplines in academe today. In short, critical theorists develop ways to 'criticize' perceived structures and systems of oppression in order to bring about radical change. It offers a heuristic for understanding all human interaction through power dynamics between groups....Colloquially, critical theory is sometimes referred to as 'cultural Marxism'[:] an application of Marxist theory to groups of people based on identity rather than class.</p>
<p>"Many dogmas of critical theory have become so mainstream in American academe and society that people don't even know the origins of those truth claims. Have you heard it argued that there is no such thing as objective reality and truth? Social-justice ideologues use this dogma to 'deconstruct' science[:] biological sex, for example. That's from critical theory. What about 'words are violence'? Antifa militants cite this to justify their violent behavior against opposing views. This is also from critical theory.</p>
<p>"Marcuse became known as the 'father of the New Left'...particularly through establishing the now far-left foundational belief that tolerance means actively suppressing 'intolerant,' usually right-wing, ideas....</p>
<p>"For decades, American academe has been marinating in Marcuse's ideas, spreading it to students who then form the next generation of politicians, leaders, and activists.</p>
<p>"Even stalwart civil[-]liberty organizations like the ACLU, now filled with members educated in this worldview, have been retreating quietly from their principle of defending free speech. In a 2018 document sent to members titled 'ACLU Case Selection Guidelines: Conflicts between Competing Values or Priorities,' the organization responded to the onslaught of resignations and criticisms it received after defending the right of the alt-right to march in Charlottesville.</p>
<p>"In August 2017, the ACLU supported Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler in his lawsuit against the city when it forced him to relocate his permitted rally. However, the [new] 2018 guidelines in response to left-wing criticism stated that 'a decision by the ACLU to represent a white supremacist group may...directly further an agenda that is antithetical to our mission and values[,] and that may inflict harm on listeners.'</p>
<p>"The mainstream left's retreat from [the] liberal values of free speech has worked to the benefit of antifa in every way imaginable....</p>
<p>"In 2020, the recurring theme from the left in response to mass BLM and antifa violence in the streets is '[p]eople over property.' Indeed, an author named Vicky Osterweil...was championed by the mainstream press for her book <em>In Defense of Looting,</em> published in August 2020. NPR interviewed Osterweil, who argued that looting is moral.</p>
<p>" 'The very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country,' she said in the interview with reporter Natalie Escobar. 'Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness, and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be.' This is verbatim what antifa say when they are asked to justify why they try to burn down businesses and homes. What the journalists, pundits, and intelligentsia don't understand is that at antifa riots, there is really no line between property destruction and assault. One bleeds into the other as they all serve the same purpose of chaos and violence." – pp. 123–6</p>
<p>"[S]tudents and outside[-]antifa militant groups work...hand in hand to carry out violence, threats, disruption, or harassment against targets at institutions that are supposed to uphold free speech and open inquiry. This close relationship is a unique development of antifa in the North American context. [W]hat is happening in the United States and Canada...recently demonstrates a unique cross-pollination of several radical ideologies: Marxism, anarchism, and critical theory....</p>
<p>"Intersectionality flows through American antifa. The revolution they are fighting for will not be led by workers but rather [by] trans, black, and indigenous 'folx' of color....</p>
<p>"The rise of antifa coincides with the rise of BLM. [T]heir mutual hatred of the United States has brought them together to form a powerful, dangerous union." – p. 127</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 7: Black Lives Matter</p>
<p>"Black Lives Matter (BLM) cofounder Patrisse Cullors was interviewed in the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> [i]n August 2017[. S]he was asked if BLM would be open to a conversation with the president. She responded: 'We wouldn't as a movement take a seat at the table with Trump. [He] is literally the epitome of evil[:] all the evils of this country—be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia.'</p>
<p>"In her own words, one of the cofounders of BLM demonstrates how closely the organization's ideology aligns with antifa. Central to both is the goal of abolishing law enforcement, American jurisprudence, national borders, and free markets in the name of anti-racism and anti-fascism." – p. 129</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Foundation of Lies</p>
<p>" 'Hands up, don't shoot' was a myth perpetuated by...Michael...Brown's friend Dorian Johnson....</p>
<p>"It wasn't just Brown who benefited from false narratives[,] but also other deceased or injured figures posthumously adopted as martyr[s] in BLM[:] for example, Trayvon Martin...and Sandra Bland.</p>
<p>"The most devastating consequence of BLM is that it provided the outlet for radical Marxist views to enter [the] mainstream American media, politics, and society under the guise of 'racial justice.' " – p. 131</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Marxist Ideology</p>
<p>"BLM is usually presented as an anti-racist uprising and movement focused on countering anti-black police brutality and 'systemic racism.' This effective branding strategy in [its] name has masked BLM's true radical ideology....</p>
<p>"Indeed, on-record statements and writings...by the group's three founders, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, demonstrate their agenda[:] to mainstream hatred of law enforcement, capitalism, free speech, and the United States itself. If this sounds familiar, it is because these are also core ideological components of antifa[.]</p>
<p>"BLM is...a member of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a collective of radical left organizations that share the "BLM" agenda of overturning capitalism and destabilizing the United States.</p>
<p>"On its now-deleted page listing various demands, the M4BL had stated[:]</p>
<p>" 'Until we are able to overturn U.S. imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy, our brothers and sisters around the world will continue to live in chains.'</p>
<p>"[A]ccusations of American 'imperialism' harken explicitly to the Cold War–era propaganda of the Soviet Union, which viewed U.S. imperialism not necessarily as an expansion of territory but [as] the spreading of liberal politics, capitalism, and culture....</p>
<p>"In April 2019, [Patrisse] Cullors, who is an associate professor in the Social Justice and Community Organizing master's degree program at Prescott College in Arizona, penned an article for the <em>Harvard Law Review</em>[:]</p>
<p>" 'Our task is not only to abolish prisons, policing, and militarization, which are wielded in the name of "public safety" and "national security," ' she wrote, '[w]e must also demand reparations[.]' " – pp. 131–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Convergence</p>
<p>"James Lindsay, coauthor of <em>Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody,</em> pinpoints BLM as the vector that allowed social-justice activism on campuses to metastasize into a violent, virulent movement in the rest of American society.</p>
<p>" 'Black [L]ives [M]atter was enormously visible,' Lindsay says. 'It was everywhere, and presented as a matter of life and death.' Indeed, the urgency surrounding BLM pressured sympathetic liberals to tolerate and even excuse even the most illiberal excesses of the movement. From street protesters carrying signs and chanting slogans urging for police to be killed[,] to even instances of mass murder, BLM's legitimacy was protected by liberals....</p>
<p>"Through BLM, antifa ideologues saw an opportunity to be mainstreamed. Taking advantage of the urgency and panic, antifa were able to say that their militant actions were needed to address white supremacy and fascism.</p>
<p>"As the Republican Party base began to consolidate behind candidate Trump in 2016, BLM took to the streets to protest. It was during this time that an informal alliance developed between BLM and antifa. Trained in fighting and ready for battle, antifa militants acted as volunteer 'security' at BLM-style protests." – pp. 136–8</p>
<p>"[B]oth ideologies now cross-pollinate and influence one another to the point that they are linked[-]entities[,] with the same people showing up to each other's events.</p>
<p>"Their convergence has been immensely mutually beneficial. Antifa get mainstream legitimacy on the back of American racial divisions while BLM gets a volunteer militia at [the] helm." – p. 140</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 8: Violence</p>
<p>Behind the Violence</p>
<p>"In an August 2019 on-camera interview with Rose City Antifa, NBC reporter Dasha Burns directly asked a masked member about the group's violent street actions.</p>
<p>" 'We see fascism as an inherently violent ideology, so when we disrupt its organizing, we see that as self-defense,' the man answered.</p>
<p>"[He] never referred to their militant actions as 'violence.' He was careful to label them 'self-defense'—even when the reporter asked him about antifa assaulting people with weapons and projectiles. This line has been carefully toed by Rose City Antifa since scrutiny was brought to bear on their actions following high-profile riots in 2017....</p>
<p>"Rose City Antifa posted in a statement on its Facebook [page] in 2017[:] 'Anti-fascism is, by nature, a form of self-defense: the goal of fascism is to exterminate the vast majority of human beings.' " – p. 154</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 9: Deadly Violence</p>
<p>Connor Betts</p>
<p>"One man in Ohio who joined the chorus of antifa in calling Willem van Spronsen a 'martyr' was 24-year-old Connor Stephen Betts. He went on to carry out his own deadly shooting in a packed[,] commercial Dayton neighborhood on August 4, 2019. He killed nine people, including his sister, and injured twenty-seven others....</p>
<p>"Bett's shooting came within twenty-four hours of another mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that shocked the nation. Patrick Crusius killed twenty-three people, mostly Latinos, at a Walmart. Another twenty-three suffered injuries. The 21-year-old allegedly left behind a 2,300-word manifesto on [the I]nternet forum [website] 8chan[,] espousing racist and white nationalist beliefs. The entire punditry class picked apart Crusius's manifesto word by word to blame the shooting not merely on him but on President Trump, white people, and every American who supported border security.</p>
<p>"And before details were known about Betts's political beliefs, his mass shooting was also assumed to be related to white supremacy because he was white. For a few hours, we heard about both El Paso and Dayton and the crisis of white racism. But once it became known that Betts actually espoused militant antifa views, the Dayton shooting went down the memory hole....</p>
<p>"A year after the El Paso mass shooting, the hashtag #ElPasoStrong trended on social media. It was created to remember and honor the victims of the far-right shooting. Many media outlets published stories of how Latinos were affected. However, a day later, no #DaytonStrong campaign materialized. This wasn't any surprise to me. Some victims are valued more [highly] in the eyes of the American media than others." – pp. 177–81</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Michael Reinoehl</p>
<p>"On August 29, 2020, three months into the daily violent protests in Portland, a 48-year-old volunteer security person for BLM-antifa killed a Trump supporter in [the] downtown [area].</p>
<p>"Michael Forest Reinoehl shot Aaron 'Jay' Danielson, 39, using a pistol at near...point-blank range after lying in wait for him around a street corner....</p>
<p>"The last few months...before...Reinoehl['s] deadly shooting show he was a violent man with no regard for the well-being of others. Over and over, authorities failed to prosecute or jail him, even when they had several opportunities to [do so]. This is the travesty in the killing of Danielson. It could have been prevented....</p>
<p>"Five days...after the killing, Reinoehl...emerged in a VICE News interview with [the] sympathetic left-wing journalist Donovan Farley....Reinoehl admitted to the killing, saying: 'I had no choice. I mean[,] I had a choice. I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn't going to do that.'...</p>
<p>"Reinoehl also admitted to being a fugitive, saying he was not turning himself in because he th[ought] police [we]re collaborating with right-wingers. [T]he rejection of police is a central tenant of antifa ideology. They do not allow comrades to cooperate with law enforcement." – pp. 181–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 12: Information Warfare and Propaganda</p>
<p>"In my first year [of] covering the antifa beat, one of the things that shocked me[,] as much as [the] street violence[,] was the alternat[iv]e reality [the] local and national press presented on antifa.</p>
<p>"Video recordings...by independent media journalists...provide [an] uncensored look into antifa's extremism. Antifa know this and have made it a priority to keep out journalists[—]even releasing manuals on how to obstruct the work of unapproved press. [And] they've made key allies in the media[,] to counter negative coverage, amplify their propaganda messaging, and discredit their shared opponents.</p>
<p>"The American public has been inundated with nonstop propaganda that obfuscates and lies about antifa[:] simultaneously presenting them as anti-fascists fighting racism and [as] a figment of the right's imagination. How many people who have heard of antifa actually know [that] the movement is made up of organized networks of anarchist-communists who have the goal, training, and determination to overthrow the U.S. government?" – pp. 210–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Fake News</p>
<p>"[T]he default position is to view antifa as the 'good guys.'...</p>
<p>"I think it is pure ignorance that leads news personalities like MSNBC's Joy Reid or CNN's Chris Cuomo to repeat some variation that 'antifa' is 'just short for "anti-fascist." '</p>
<p>"[S]omething different[,] is the existence of whole networks of writers and so-called journalists who intentionally spread pro-antifa messaging....Most do it as ideological fellow[-]travelers on the far left, but some...are actually members of the militant[-]antifa movement." – pp. 211–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Unpersoning</p>
<p>"[A]fter my beating by antifa thugs in 2019[, a] number of journalists...began targeting me with such animosity and viciousness[,] that they were indistinguishable from antifa accounts. Journalists I [had] never interacted with[,] pursued me with an obsessiveness [that] I can only describe as a personal vendetta. Their goal has been not only to delegitimize me as a journalist[,] but [also] to make me a toxic figure that others would be afraid of associating with. They pursued that goal through writing lies and half-truths[,] and even inciting violence....</p>
<p>"The network of antifa-supporting journalists is powerful...because their smears are laundered [by] one another and amplified far beyond the original publication. The smears eventually become citations in a Wikipedia entry[,] or the first results in a Google search.</p>
<p>"Any [t]ime someone looks me up online, they will see the false smears first....</p>
<p>"Alex Zielinsky...has played an important role in normalizing antifa in Portland. [H]er coverage since she became the...<em>Portland Mercury</em>['s] news editor protects antifa, amplifies their talking points about 'fascists' in Portland, and joins in demonizing antifa's opponents. Sometimes this manifests in shockingly cruel ways." – pp. 212–5</p>
<p>"[A] cabal of messengers...work in media and have the ability to launder their narratives far and wide. The damage they've done in making the public ignorant and misinformed on antifa has been immense. But as left-wing writers in an industry run mostly by people on the left, their bias does not count against them." – p. 216</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Identifying Antifa Press</p>
<p>"I did not like Trump's 2019 comment describing the mainstream media as 'truly the enemy of the people,' but one can see the basis for that sentiment when looking at how transparently [it is, that] extreme...far-left...ideologues are presented as the arbiters of truth....</p>
<p>"As [this book] demonstrates, antifa can terrify, dox, harass, and intimidate[,] without any [overt] use of force. They've been particularly effective[,] because they have infected one of the most important institutions of a free society: the press. Ironically, [the] media is now often used to undermine public support for free speech[,] and [for] the nation's norms, culture, and history." – pp. 218–20</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter: Afterword</p>
<p>My Story</p>
<p>"[Formerly,] I [had been] concerned with the material distractions of most youth[:] unaware of the culture, freedoms, and liberties that made society around me prosperous....</p>
<p>"My [M]illennial peers are often ignorant [of] the fact that in much of the developing world, conflicts still end in tit-for-tat clan violence[,] because citizens cannot depend on the state for justice....</p>
<p>"How ironic that decades after Mai and Binh[,] my parents[,] fled revolutionary communism, their son would encounter a virulent strain of th[at] ideology in their adopted home in the United States.</p>
<p>"[V]iolent masked revolutionaries...view...me as a 'reactionary.' Antifa's choice of language in describing me [in] that way echo[es] how my parents were labeled 'counterrevolutionary' by the Vietnamese regime and punished accordingly." – pp. 231–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">A Message to Antifa</p>
<p>"I...see [a]ntifa['s] humanity and [I] don't wish them ill. I...feel sympathy for [people] pulled and brainwashed into antifa's twisted ideology. They are often exploited and used[,] by a movement that explicitly rejects the value of individuals in favor of the cause.</p>
<p>"While some...antifa...are...highly educated and in white-collar professions[,] those [who are] involved in the street violence are disproportiona[te]ly individuals dealing with housing insecurity, financial instability, and mental health issues like gender dysphoria....</p>
<p>"Fear and hatred drive left-wing people to antifa's extremist ideology—but there is more[: t]hey have grievances that need to be acknowledged. [Yet even s]ome of [those grievances are] indoctrinated through education and culture....Grievance ideologies resonate with [M]illennials and Gen Z[.] I can understand why those who lose faith in the American idea—[or] in liberal democracy—[can] turn to extremist ideologies for solutions. The corruption in [the] politicians and state institutions at times rattles my own confidence in the American rule of law and democracy.</p>
<p>"For those who are vulnerable, antifa is more than appealing. It promises community, protection, and purpose. It is organized like a zealous religious movement through the constant feeding of ideology and propaganda. They believe a communist-anarchist world[-]utopia is possible. There would be no borders, police, prisons, racism, or fascism. All [human] material needs would be met through community mutual[-]aid, not through working in an exploitative[,] capitalist system.</p>
<p>"But the world [that] antifa envisions is a literal 'utopia.'...No society can function as antifa envisions. Their small-scale experiments at creating separatist[,] anarcho-communist communes...have ended in disaster and death. Even when their anti-fascist ideology was instituted at the state level (e.g., in the former East Germany), the result was the creation of a sprawling spy apparatus that monitored the public[-] and private thoughts of citizens for wrongthink.</p>
<p>"Antifa will continue to grow after this book's publication[. T]he ideology is mainstreamed and [has been] given legitimacy[,] through Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Party. Still, I urge compassion for those who have been drawn into this violent[,] extremist ideology. The hatred antifa feel toward their society, country, and fellow citizens comes from pain and resentment of their own lives.</p>
<p>"One of the most disempowering mind[-]viruses infecting America and the West[, to] the benefit of antifa[,] is grievance ideology. Through its control in every cultural and educational institution, it primes people to become perpetual victims. It makes them see grievance in every interaction. It turns pain and ignorance into hatred. It turns people into [apparent] oppressors. [The e]ffort...by the Trump administration in September 2020 to address critical race theory via an executive order to ban federal contractors from teaching the poisonous ideology is a good first step. But how do we address it in K–12 education? Higher education? The rest of society? What it will take[,] is the bravery to say, 'Enough!' Grievance ideology only has power[,] insofar as it is seen as legitimate[: i]t is not." – pp. 234–6</p>
<p>"The victory of real justice over antifa's version of 'social justice' requires people to be held accountable for their crimes. The systematic demonizing and weakening of police departments and law enforcement[,] across the United States[, has] emboldened BLM-antifa to destroy and attack with near impunity. Law enforcement need to be given access to the training and tools [needed] for crowd control. Prosecutors must prosecute....</p>
<p>"Antifa's ideology[—]or any extremist belief system for that matter[—]cannot be banned[,] per the First Amendment. Antifa have the constitutional right to espouse their hatred, as do racists and other bigots. I'm skeptical that additional legislation can be helpful[,] when there are already laws that can be applied. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act may be relevant[.] Antifa, regardless of what they call themselves, are an organized criminal network of groups....Organizers exchange money and resources with one another. They provide radicalization[-]training and instructions on how to commit crimes....</p>
<p>"Why are district attorneys, who are elected politicians, determining who gets prosecuted? They have every incentive to bow to the whims of the mob in order to stay in office. There must be better independent oversight[,] to hold rogue prosecutors accountable.</p>
<p>"The BLM-antifa narrative that police are murdering black and brown people in epidemic proportions needs to be thoroughly debunked....This should be the job of the media, but it has been they who fan the flames of racial division[,] through one-sided wall-to-wall coverage. The unending distraction from real issues[,] that c[ould] otherwise be addressed through evidence-based policy making[,] has us chasing shadows." – pp. 236–7</p>
<p>"On November 14, 2020, thousands of people from across the United States traveled to Washington, DC, for the 'Million MAGA March.'...As the participants dispersed...they were met by marauding gangs of Black Lives Matter and antifa black bloc counter-protesters.</p>
<p>"They pushed and punched people to the ground. They hit them with sticks. Diners eating outside at hotel restaurants had projectiles and mortar explosives thrown at them. No one was spared. Those targeted included women, children, and the elderly....</p>
<p>"During the 2016 presidential campaign, people leaving Trump rallies in liberal cities, like San Jose and Chicago, were stalked, robbed, and beaten....</p>
<p>"I am grateful for this country and its Constitution....My family came from a society where there is no tradition of freedom of speech or the rule of law....</p>
<p>"Tragically, what I see is that it's becoming taboo to be patriotic or grateful to one's nation. Americans have been robbed and assaulted in public for merely holding symbols of the United States. As the George Floyd–inspired rioting broke out in Portland at the end of May 2020, I saw a mob of so-called racial justice activists beat a man peacefully carrying an American flag in [the] downtown [area.]</p>
<p>"Antifa, its far-left allies, and [its] useful idiots have convinced the public that patriotism is synonymous with racism and fascism. I reject that and call for all decent people to do the same. As much as this book is about antifa, it's also a letter of gratitude to the nation that welcomed my parents[:] penniless refugees from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, to become equal citizens.</p>
<p>"Antifa seek to destroy the American philosophy and the [actu]al state itself. They are finding some success. For those who are drawn to their siren calls of 'anti-racism'[,] 'anti-fascism'[,] and 'equity'[, just] look to where their ideas have been put into practice. [There, n]o one inherits a utopia[,] or [even] civilization." – pp. 237–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-84879149979713070392022-05-18T14:15:00.000-04:002022-05-18T14:35:11.573-04:00Dinesh D'Souza's United States of Socialism<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How To Stop It.,</em> Dinesh D'Souza, 2020-June:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Preface: The Specter of Socialism</p>
<p>"[A] whole political party...seems...drawn toward the socialist camp. This...is...strange[.]</p>
<p>"[M]any big ideas, and their corresponding ways of organizing society, have ended up on the ash heap of history....</p>
<p>"Feudalism couldn't compete with capitalism, so feudalism was defeated[—]without being discredited[.] Feudal societies...'worked' for many centuries[.]</p>
<p>"[However,] socialism...is an utterly discredited system of ideas[. T]he people who lived under it considered it [as] a form of slavery....</p>
<p>"Friedrich Hayek's critique of socialism is...titled <em>The Road to Serfdom.</em> George Orwell depicted the tyrannical dimension of socialism in...two immortal novels[.]</p>
<p>"Yet [s]erious people advocate...socialism[;] there is a sustained cultural push to apotheosize it; a major political party is pushing aggressively toward it. How is this possible?...</p>
<p>"Socialism has made everyday existence a living hell...everywhere it has been tried, all over the world. [W]ithin...less than half a century since the Bolshevik Revolution, some 60 percent of the world's people were living under governments that embraced some form of socialism....Joshua Muravchik writes, 'it was...arguably the most popular idea of any kind about how life should be lived or society organized.'...</p>
<p>"I count...25 experiments in socialism, all ending in unmitigated disaster.</p>
<p>"The worst forms of socialism proved not only totalitarian but also murderous to an unprecedented degree....Orwell's description of the future from <em>1984</em> seems appropriate to apply to socialism here: 'A boot stamping on a human face.'</p>
<p>"[S]ocialism wasn't merely a political failure; it was also an economic failure....</p>
<p>"Orwell...never shows <em>how</em> socialism creates this totalitarianism[.]</p>
<p>"In the real world, the political collapse of socialism was brought about by its economic failure....China...abandoned socialism due to its economic shortcomings." – pp. 1–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Two Test Cases</p>
<p>"South Korea now is more than 20 times richer than North Korea[.] Every year many thousands of North Koreans risk their lives seeking to escape to South Korea....</p>
<p>"I grew up under...democratic socialism[.]</p>
<p>"A whole generation of young Indians in the 1960s and 1970s saw no future for themselves and fled to work at sea...or to Dubai to do manual labor[.]</p>
<p>"[C]hange...came about through economic liberalization, otherwise known as free market capitalism. [H]ow did India decide to move in that direction? It was not inspired by the Indians reading [the professor of moral philosophy] Adam Smith. Rather, Indians looked across the Chinese border[.]</p>
<p>"Under Mao, the government nationalized factories and expropriated peasants' land.</p>
<p>"[I]n 1966, Mao launched his Cultural Revolution, an attempt to erase all remaining capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society....</p>
<p>"The change came in the late 1970s, when China, under Deng Xiaoping, abandoned the socialism of Mao for its own brand of capitalism. [T]hey married dictatorial political control to free market liberalization....</p>
<p>"Technological capitalism has realized Gandhi's dream by wiping millions of Indian tears....</p>
<p>"American socialists...disavow history[.] They insist that everyone else got it wrong[, and] that...all professed socialist regimes...were not 'real socialism.'...</p>
<p>"What keeps socialism alive for them? [A]nswer[:] the socialist dream! [E]vidently, the socialist dream is one that survives all empirical refutation....</p>
<p>"The socialists...don't care about data, because no amount of data can refute a dream. The socialist mantra is, 'We don't care if it hasn't worked[; w]e will figure out a way to make it work.' [The left-wing activist and journalist] Owen Jones expresses this futuristic hope: 'A socialist society...doesn't exist yet, but one day it must.'</p>
<p>"[T]he socialists...insist that they are the champions of a moral ideal. The only way to refute them is to refute their moral ideal[,] to pop their utopian balloon....So...I will expose the socialist utopia...as a racket.</p>
<p>"[C]ult leaders and TV evangelists...offer [to] their followers the temptation[s] of paradise[:] freedom from the normal drudgery and travails of life[. T]he televangelist promises...wonders in the next life; the socialist promises them in this one. [Y]ou are expected to give up...your ownership of yourself, including your...independence of mind.</p>
<p>"[This] enterprise is driven by lust for money and lust for power[.] In principle, no less than in practice, socialism is the ideology of thieves and tyrants. [T]he people who fall for th[is] temptation...are connivers attracted by the rip-off scheme. But they end up as suckers[.] This book is written...to show the...suckers a better way to get ahead[,] and to demonstrate how the rest of us can finally defeat...the thieves and tyrants[:] the socialists." – pp. 5–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Introduction: Identity Socialism</p>
<p>"American socialism deserves its own name[:] 'identity socialism.'</p>
<p>"[T]he most helpful definition...come[s] from [the] economist Joseph Schumpeter. In his classic work[,] <em>Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,</em> Schumpeter defined socialism as a system in which, 'as a matter of principle, the economic affairs of society belong to the public and not to the private sphere.'...</p>
<p>"If someone were to insist today that the government, [and] not the market, should nationalize computer companies and decide how many digital devices should be made next year, such a person would be considered...a lunatic[.]</p>
<p>"[S]ays Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of the socialist magazine <em>Jacobin,</em> 'socialism is an ideology of radical democracy.'...</p>
<p>"The constitution of the Democratic Socialists of America...states, 'We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production[, and on] economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.' [New York] Democratic congresswom[an] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez[, a] member[,] pithily terms it 'putting democracy and society first.'</p>
<p>"Here we have the central moral claim of American socialism: [a]t least in principle, nothing is yours[;] nothing is mine[;] everything is ours. [T]he democratic majority...ha[s] the final say....The majority also has the right to other forms of [social] control: for example, subsidizing some lifestyles over others[,] and restricting citizens from exercising 'hate speech.'</p>
<p>"[T]his...seems to be a direct repudiation of the American founding. It...overturns...the basic design of our constitutional system. If...adopted[,] it would be a second American Revolution....</p>
<p>"But...socialists view their program as continuous with the revolutionary principle of the founding. In other words, the founders established democracy, and socialism extends democracy to the sphere of economics and to society more generally.</p>
<p>"[T]o those who object that socialism...mean[s] you no longer have the right to keep what you earn, or do what you want, or even say what you think[,] the socialist answer is that, in restricting your freedom, socialism advances a different type of freedom: the freedom of a people to govern themselves through democratic self-rule." – pp. 11–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Truth in Labeling</p>
<p>"Democrat[ic] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi...likens her differences with Ocasio-Cortez to differences among members of the same family. 'Does your family always agree on everything?' she asked at a news conference when the issue of the 'squad'—the socialist wing[—]came up....</p>
<p>"When I listen to the Democratic debates, I am struck by the omnipresence of the collectivist pronoun[,] 'we'[.]</p>
<p>" 'We' in this context does not mean 'us'[.] If it did, then [they] might consider voluntary and private-sector solutions to...education....'We' for them means...the whole society, acting through the coercive instrument of the federal government....</p>
<p>"Are there any prominent Democrats who resist this collectivist terminology? There are not. Some may term themselves progressive and others socialist, but they are all on the same side....The progressives and the socialists are largely unified behind a Democratic Party agenda that can...accurately be termed socialist...in that it involves expanded...government control of various sectors of economic and social life....</p>
<p>"There is only one way to get the...Green New Deal...done: warn that if you don't go along, the world will come to an end.</p>
<p>"[A]dvocates of the Green New Deal unveiled a[n] array of proposals [including] raising unemployment benefits and providing everyone with[:] free daycare, free healthcare and a guaranteed family wage. 'We're almost out of time,' screeches [the energy and resources scientist] Nathan Hultman in a Brookings Institution paper....</p>
<p>"Ocasio-Cortez's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti[, in a] meeting [with] the environmental policy advisers of Governor Jay Inslee of...Washington[,] frankly admitted that from the beginning the Green New Deal was conceived with broader ends. 'Do you think of it as a climate thing?' he chuckled. 'Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.' [C]limate change is the ruse to get the public to go for full socialism." – pp. 15–20</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Money in the Wrong Hands</p>
<p>"[Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Elizabeth] Warren [of Massachusetts] seeks an Accountable Capitalism Act[.] The government would require companies to include the interests of workers, customers, communities and society as a whole before making major decisions.</p>
<p>"[In p]art[, this] is the entitlement mentality, [as] evident in Ocasio-Cortez's recent claim that 'You have a right to a job, a right to an education, a right to a dignified home, a right to a dignified retirement, and a right to healthcare.' [M]odern socialism travels behind the banner of such entitlements[. I]t's worth exploring...what obligations the[se] rights...impose on other people[,] who are compelled to deliver on these putative rights.</p>
<p>"[Democratic presidential candidate, New York City Mayor] Bill de Blasio recent[ly] pledged, 'We will seize the buildings[.]'...</p>
<p>"Earlier in 2016, de Blasio spelled [it] out[:] 'I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it [and] what the rent will be. [I]f I had my druthers, the city government would determine[, for] every single plot of land, how development should proceed.'...</p>
<p>"What we see, unmistakably, in these remarks by Ocasio-Cortez and de Blasio is a...pathological hostility to free market capitalism. This is the other side of the socialist coin—blissful talk about rights and entitlements and solemn paeans to the public good are inevitably accompanied by vicious assaults on capitalism....</p>
<p>"Schumpeter predicted that capitalism would sow the seeds of its own destruction[, because it both] undermines traditional institutions[,] and fosters values hostile and antithetical to capitalism....</p>
<p>"Here's how Ocasio-Cortez responded to the prospect of the widespread obsolescence of human jobs[:] 'We're paid by how little we're desperate enough to accept. And the rest is skimmed off and given to a billionaire.'...</p>
<p>"Most people, in [Ocasio-Cortez]'s vision, no longer need to work....Their 'work' is to shop around and buy things....</p>
<p>"Millions of Americans live like this now. Their only 'work' is consumption. They rely on others...to provide for them. [R]emarkabl[y], they are convinced that this is a good and right way for them to live....</p>
<p>"Capitalism might sow the seeds of its [own] undoing...by creating [a] mass abundance that eliminates the need for most people to work. They [could then] rely on socialist measures...to redistribute the nation's wealth and guarantee them a secure and comfortable life. [T]oday's technologists and entrepreneurs will have fostered the end of American capitalism[.]" – pp. 22–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Strangers in Our Own Land</p>
<p>"[T]he vision of...socialist...activists is not merely economic. They are...more...energized...by cultural issues. [T]hey...care about their moral self-image[;] and they also care about their race...and their sex organs....</p>
<p>"Asked...by...PragerU...to define her brand of socialism, a female student said it would [be] really hard to do because socialism had so many dimensions. For example, 'You're socializing with me right now. Socialism!'...A Gallup survey, release in May 2019, found that 6 percent of respondents defined socialism as 'being social[;] social media[;] talking to people.'</p>
<p>"A writer for <em>New York</em> magazine attended a socialist confab called Red Party, hosted by the left-wing publishing house Verso[.] Mindy Isser, a young activist, whined that 'socialist men don't date socialist women and it really bothers me.' Another activist warned that socialists need better slogans. 'The beauty of ABOLISH ICE,' he said, was its sheer simplicity. It mirrored right-wing slogans[:] 'BUILD THE WALL. LOCK HER UP. They're all perfect for shouting.'</p>
<p>"Jarrett Stepman, a writer for [The Heritage Foundation's news organization] <em>Daily Signal</em> who attended the Socialism 2019 conference, sponsored by <em>Jacobin</em> and [the] Democratic Socialists of America[,] expect[ed] to hear mostly about topics like minimum wage [and] student debt[.] Instead[,] he found...that 'transgenderism, gender nonconformity and abolishing traditional family structures were huge issues.'...</p>
<p>"Corrie Westing, a self-described 'queer socialist feminist activist'[,] insisted that the traditional family is an instrument of capitalist oppression[,] and [that] pregnancy is a tool of oppression to remove women from the workforce[.]</p>
<p>"[A]ll the leading [presidential-candidate] Democrats...support the Equality Act [which] would prohibit discrimination based on 'gender identity'[.]</p>
<p>"[Karl] Marx considered other forms of social division—white versus black, men versus women—to be sneaky techniques on the part of the capitalist class to divide and rule the working class.</p>
<p>"[Similarly, it] is now the avowed strategy of progressives and Democrats...to turn black and brown against white, female against male, [and] gay and lesbian and transgender people against 'heteronormativity.' In 2020, Democrats intend to use these multiple lines of division to create [a] majority coalition[.]</p>
<p>"This broader agenda for identity socialism includes getting rid of ICE and flooding the country with illegals....They support firing and ostracizing Americans for criticizing 'Islamic terrorism'[.] They revel in the digital censorship of views they regard as promoting 'hate.'...</p>
<p>"I believe...the goal here...is nothing less than to make traditional Americans feel like foreigners in their own country. The identity socialists seek [to] convert foreigners into natives...and natives into foreigners....They seek...a way to alienate us from our own society.</p>
<p>"This is why, for many progressives and socialists, an illegal American is now the model American. Part of their plan is to change the national DNA. [T]hey intend to import illegals[,] who bring—in a quite[-]literal sense—new DNA. They seek...to...make the country unrecognizable to those who created it[,] and to many of us who...call it our own....</p>
<p>"Project Veritas secretly recorded [Democratic presidential candidate, Senator] Bernie Sanders['] staffers[.] 'There's a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags, right?' said Kyle Jurek. Even uncooperative liberals should be forced to undergo...reeducation, Jurek said. Such extremes were required, he added, 'because we're going to have to teach you not to be a f[——]ck[——]ing Nazi.'...</p>
<p>"Becoming American is not an easy process for an outsider[.] You are in no-man's land, belonging neither here nor there. But eventually...I assimilated. Since then I have felt at home in America[.]</p>
<p>"But now these people want to destroy my American dream and make me an alien in my adopted country. I...am not going to stand for it." – pp. 25–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Socialist Temptation</p>
<p>"My refutation [of] identity socialism [includes] expos[ing its] temptation. [I]f socialism is such a bad idea, why do so many people go for it? [More than] the temptation to live off 'free stuff'[, i]t is the temptation to annihilate one's conscience by feeling justified in living off other people's work.</p>
<p>"[M]ost people would not dream of going into their neighbor's house...and helping themselves to his [things. T]he only way to involve honest people in a theft scheme is to convince them that their neighbors have been stealing from them....</p>
<p>"The second part of the socialist temptation involves...the socialists...themselves. This is a class of people that has no idea how to create wealth. Pretty much the only thing they know how to create is words. This does not mean...that they are untalented. They are actually very talented, just not at making iPhones or warehouse delivery systems or getting oil out of the ground. Resentful of those who can do th[o]se things, the socialists proclaim them 'selfish' and 'greedy' and imply that such vices are responsible for their notable prosperity and success.</p>
<p>"What the socialist class is good at...is creating envy and entitlement. Th[at] is their...talent. [T]hough they won't admit it, they are engaged in a desperate battle for social control. What they seek is a displacement of power in society[,] in which they, not entrepreneurs, direct the great apparatus of American industry[:] indeed[,] direct the lives of the people themselves.</p>
<p>"[T]he very labels that they apply to the entrepreneurs—namely greed and selfishness[—]more accurately apply to them[selves. T]hey insist that society is in need of a neutral, administrative class....</p>
<p>"The people aren't even persuaded. They have to be cajoled, propagandized and bullied....This is what they are doing now. And they do it ruthlessly, relentlessly[:] keeping their eye on the prize[.] They want to be Plato's guardians[:] the 'people of gold'[,] who rule by right over the lower orders[.]</p>
<p>"Their [pretended] virtue [is an] ignoble lie[.] In fact, they are motivated by the same ambition and desire for power and gain as anyone else. [T]hey are the least compassionate, most uncharitable group in society. This, then, is the temptation of the socialists: they are tempted to annihilate their consciences to conceal the ugly truth about themselves.</p>
<p>"One fact they cannot face is that the only difference between them and [the] capitalist entrepreneurs is that they seek unearned power[.] As I will show, entrepreneurs are genuinely accountable to their customers, who exercise direct democracy[;] they vote every day with their purchases for the products that entrepreneurs supply. The socialists wish to answer to nobody. They are driven, as Nietzsche pointed out[,] by a nasty, vengeful 'will to power.'...</p>
<p>"The socialists are...a corrupt gang. They conceal their crookedness behind a mask of virtue, and they appeal to crooked people by giving them reasons to steal from others....Once the socialist morality play is exposed as a theft scheme[,] they are done....</p>
<p>"So what about 'the end of work'?...Even in sowing the winds of 'creative destruction' (Schumpeter's term), which displaces old industries and old institutions, the free market can and will create new opportunities for humans to thrive." – pp. 29–32</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 1: The Invention of Invention</p>
<p>America and the Ideal of the Self-Made Man</p>
<p>" 'Destiny...is a thing to be achieved.'—[Populist] William Jennings Bryan</p>
<p>"[Communist theorist Friedrich] Engels stressed the distinctiveness of America[. H]e admitted 'the peculiar difficulties for a steady development of a workers party' in the United States....</p>
<p>"When I arrived...in 1978 as an exchange student from India, I was simply stunned by the opulence of ordinary American life.</p>
<p>"[M]y host family proposed to take me on a sightseeing trip.</p>
<p>"[But] I wanted to see the local supermarket where I could survey the endless varieties of cheese and ice cream[,] or a local farm where I could watch one guy on a tractor plow and fertilize hundreds of acres[.]</p>
<p>"Most Americans take the basic amenities of modern life for granted. [But] not so long ago[,] America was one of the poor, backward countries. It was still largely rural and agricultural at the time of its founding.</p>
<p>"Then, in relatively short order, America became the most productive and prosperous nation in the world.</p>
<p>"[W]ho made the goose that lays the golden eggs?...</p>
<p>"America became rich...by creating a mechanism for innovation and growth[.] In America, conservatism means conserving the principles of the American Revolution. This means that we are heirs to a revolutionary tradition[;] and rebellion, change and making our own destiny are...in our political DNA....</p>
<p>"The founding...created the framework for a new type of human being[:] 'the self-made man.' " – pp. 33–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">History from Below</p>
<p>"The roots of American prosperity and of American self-invention...are completely ignored in the curriculums and classrooms of American schools and in the media. [Instead,] the history [we] learn...is...from the progressive viewpoint....</p>
<p>"Howard Zinn [in his] classic work, <em>A People's History of the United States</em>...uses the victim's perspective to generate an anti-American narrative, one that is not confined to the academic sphere but has now spread...through[out] the culture.</p>
<p>"[It] is the voice...of identity socialism[,] the dominant narrative taught to young people today....</p>
<p>"Mexican migrants...don't spend their time thinking about me; why should I spend my time thinking about them?</p>
<p>"[N]o ethnic group—not even the groups that Zinn invokes—cares very much about any other ethnic group....We're moderately interested in how American prosperity became more widely distributed[,] but we're much more interested in how it came about in the first instance.</p>
<p>"Here progressive history lapses into silence. This is the great subject it leaves out. Progressive history tends to take America's wealth for granted[.] Typical of this approach is historian Charles Beard, whose famous work is called <em>An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States....</em></p>
<p>"Beard tries to show that the delegates to the constitutional convention voted as economic interest groups....Beard's theories...held sway for a generation without anyone actually checking his facts.</p>
<p>"Eventually historians like Forrest McDonald and Robert Brown...found that Beard had spun his data. Convention delegates did not, in fact, vote as interest groups. [M]erchants on [both] side[s] of the...tariffs...debate [worked] the same trades[.] Beard's quasi-Marxist theory of the founding as an institutional manifestation of class oppression doesn't hold up.</p>
<p>"[Of] robber barons[,] Jack Schwartz in <em>[T]he Daily Beast</em> [writes]: 'The Gilded Age produced an unbridled capitalism and a culture of excess that led to financial panics impoverishing millions at the hands of corporate profiteers professing the sanctity of property.'</p>
<p>"[A] recent article in <em>[T]he American Interest</em>...says, 'The Gilded Age economy was lopsided and dysfunctional, producing untenable extremes of vulgar opulence and abject poverty.' [Q]uestions abound: Lopsided how? Dysfunctional in what way?...Abject compared to what? Surely not to how those poor people lived before, or else they would not have moved from the rural areas to the cities....</p>
<p>"<em>Encyclopedia Britannica</em> characterizes the Gilded Age as one of 'gross materialism' dominated by 'greedy industrialists.' Not a word about what those greedy industrialists did....</p>
<p>"In <em>1984,</em> Orwell warns of the socialist project of cleansing history where 'the past is erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.' That has almost happened[.]" – pp. 36–40</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Genius and the Bum</p>
<p>"The founders...were not career politicians or mere 'men of letters.' They were scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and builders—in other words, practical men of varied talents.</p>
<p>"[T]he founders sought to perpetuate Renaissance men like themselves. This is the grain of truth in Beard's indictment. The founders weren't advancing their economic interest, but they were, in a broad sense, replicating their own human types....Benjamin Franklin['s] <em>Autobiography</em>...captures a distinctive American mold that I'll call 'capitalist man.'...</p>
<p>"Franklin is eloquent on self-fashioning and self-improvement.</p>
<p>"[T]he Sanders type is recognizable all over the world—I had a close relative in India...like [him]—while the Franklin type is uniquely and recognizably American....</p>
<p>"Sanders['] young life seems to have been devoted to agitating for two causes: socialism and sexual freedom. In his college years and in his twenties, he emphasized the latter....</p>
<p>"In 1971 Sanders showed up at a commune in Vermont called Myrtle Farm[. T]he commune expelled [him] for laziness[:] for failing to contribute to sustaining the commune....</p>
<p>"Sanders...seems at ease with...his self-serving sycophancy and his parasitism on the largesse of capitalism to pay his salary through taxpayer outlays." – pp. 40–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Passions and Interests</p>
<p>"Democratic socialists like Sanders are not fans of the American founding. That's because they recognize the founding as a free market revolution. [I]t was also antidemocratic. [T]he founding rejected democracy in its original meaning[,] adopt[ing instead] a specialized form of democracy[:] a 'constitutional republic' [which] erected numerous barriers to direct popular rule.</p>
<p>"The most influential socialist publication in America is <em>Jacobin.</em> Get it? These guys want to identify with the French Revolution, not the American, and they don't hesitate to identify with the most radical faction of that revolution—the one associated with the guillotine and the Terror. The socialist historian Eric Foner urges...Sanders...to look...to 'the rich tradition of American radicalism.'</p>
<p>"[But] sympathetic...Englishman...Thomas Paine...was a champion of free markets and property rights, and...abolitionist...Frederick Douglass...championed the 'self-made man'[.] Foner makes no identification with the American founders. As far as he's concerned, radicalism in America means moving to...transform and...overturn the principles of the founding.</p>
<p>"We find the same antipathy to the founding in socialist Astra Taylor's recent paean to socialism in <em>The New Republic.</em> [C]lassical liberalism[,] she says[,] is 'not strong enough to survive [against], let alone constrain[,] concentrated economic power.' Liberalism, in her view, has been vanquished by capitalism, specifically by 'unaccountable plutocrats who have rigged the rules of the game.' Some form of socialism that overturns the structure of this constitutional republic is the only remedy.</p>
<p>"In October 2019, <em>Harper's</em>...rais[ed] the question, 'Has America's founding document become the nation's undoing?'...For Rosa Brooks, relying on the Constitution today was akin to...'NASA us[ing] the world's oldest astronomical chart.' Mary Anne Franks averred, 'We have not, as a country, fully confronted the fraudulent nature of the Constitution and the founding itself.'...Louis Michael Seidman said[,] 'We need to forget about constitutionalism entirely.'</p>
<p>"[T]he framers charged...Congress...'to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors [an] exclusive Right[.]</p>
<p>"This...is the only time the word 'right' appears in the original Constitution[.]</p>
<p>"Franklin knew...Adam Smith...personally, having initially met him through their mutual friend, the philosopher David Hume. Smith's <em>The Wealth of Nations</em> was published in 1776[.]</p>
<p>"[Illinois politician and later President] Abraham Lincoln's 1859 ['L]ecture on [D]iscoveries and [I]nventions[' explains that] entrepreneurs...need a regime dedicated to the protection of patents, property rights and contracts. Historically wealth was mainly land, but Lincoln now identifies wealth with new ideas and new human production....</p>
<p>"Wealth in ancient times[, the economist] Albert Hirschman...contends [in his] important [1977] book[,] <em>The Passions and the Interests[: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph],</em> was obtained mainly by seizure. Conquest, theft and looting were the preferred mechanisms for acquisition....</p>
<p>"Hirschman identifies the powerful human impulse to raid and seize and conquer with the passions. For centuries, he says, humans turned to religious and moral exhortation to temper and regulate the passions, but with limited success....</p>
<p>"Passion is sudden, tempestuous, violent; interest is steady, calm, rational.</p>
<p>"[F]or Lincoln, as for Adam Smith, self-interest is not a bad thing. His concern is not to suppress it but to motivate it. More self-interest...means less passion and less seizure by unlawful force....</p>
<p>"These are the principles that shaped...both American revolutions[:] the Revolution of 1776[,] provoked by the Declaration of Independence[;] and the Revolution of 1789[,] the framing and adoption of the Constitution[. T]he first...provides valuable clues about what motivated the second." – pp. 44–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Hands in Our Pockets</p>
<p>"[T]he right to property was the first principle at issue in the...first American Revolution[.] 'Can there be any liberty,' wrote James Otis in 1763, 'where property is taken without consent?'</p>
<p>"Consider how John Dickinson...responded to the Stamp Act[:] '[T]he Parliament will levy upon us such sums of money as they choose to take, without any other limitation than their pleasure.' Strikingly, American resistance here is not over the amount of taxation, which was quite modest....</p>
<p>"The British...in the Declaratory Act of 1766...rejected the American insistence on 'no taxation without representation.' England retained full power to make law for the colonies 'in all cases whatsoever.'...All these measures were, in [Thomas] Jefferson's words, 'a series of oppressions' that 'plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.'</p>
<p>"This theme of asserting economic freedom from government confiscation continues to undergird the Constitution[.] 'The first object of government,' [James] Madison writes in the tenth book of <em>The Federalist,</em> is 'the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.' [I]t is the primary goal....</p>
<p>"Jefferson [wrote,] 'To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'</p>
<p>"For the founders, this principle was about more than assuring growth and prosperity. It was about the cultivation of human personality itself. [T]he psychologist William James [wrote,] 'A man's self is the sum total of all that he can call his[.] If they wax or prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.'</p>
<p>"The importance of this passage is its emphasis that economic rights are no less fundamental than civil rights and civil liberties. It makes no sense to say that I own my religious and political opinions and have a right to them but I don't own my labor and have [no] right to the fruits of it....</p>
<p>"So the founding is a socialist nightmare[,] because it affirms as the possession[s] of citizens what the socialists would like to take away through the agency of government. [T]he socialists must insist that th[e]se things don't really belong to you. You somehow stole or appropriated them. You seized for yourself what belongs to the commonweal of society. A majority of citizens, agitating through the democratic process, have every right to seize some or all of what belongs to you to cover the wants or demands or 'entitlements' of others.</p>
<p>"For socialists, this is what democracy means: the collective right to appropriate. What gives this right the force of justice, and of law, is that it is supposedly an expression of the 'will of the people.'[—]But the founders did not agree with this. [T]hey rejected the premise that the people have the right to gang up in a majority and seize the property and earnings of their fellow citizens whose only crime is to be in the political minority." – pp. 48–51</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Tyranny of the Majority</p>
<p>"For Madison, writing in the tenth book of <em>The Federalist,</em> democracy is mob rule. 'Democracies...have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.'...</p>
<p>"We're...accustomed to hearing progressives and democratic socialists sing the praises of majority rule[.]</p>
<p>"Let's say the majority makes rules that discriminate in its favor and against minorities. Should this be allowed?...</p>
<p>"Lincoln['s 1858 senatorial] Democratic rival[, 1860 presidential candidate, Illinois Senator] Stephen A. Douglas...advocated 'popular sovereignty' [regarding] allowing or forbidding slavery.</p>
<p>"For Lincoln, this was morally unacceptable....No majority, Lincoln insisted, has the right to steal the bread that is made by the sweat of other men....</p>
<p>" 'An elective despotism,' Jefferson wrote in <em>Notes on the State of Virginia,</em> 'was not the government we fought for.'...</p>
<p>"But how, Madison asked, can majority factions be curtailed?...</p>
<p>"The American founders held that unrestricted majority rule is the principle of modern tyranny, just as unrestricted one-man rule is the principle of ancient tyranny....</p>
<p>"Majorities are not inherently wiser than minorities....</p>
<p>"But how to prevent majority rule from being unjust? This was the fundamental problem that the founders, through the constitutional structure, sought to solve....</p>
<p>"First, they adopted a written Constitution[—]a departure from Great Britain[—]that...overrid[es] the will of the majority. The Constitution creates a framework for limited government[:] the authority of the federal government covers enumerated areas[.] Outside [of] that purview, the government has no authority.</p>
<p>"Second, the Bill of Rights....In his famous commentary on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story noted [that] a bill of rights [in effect] places strict limits on majority rule.</p>
<p>"[T]hird[,] judicial review. The Supreme Court has independent authority to enforce the Constitution and protect the rights of citizens against the will of the majority.</p>
<p>"Fourth, representative government. What this means is that the people do not rule directly; they rule by electing representatives who govern in their stead....</p>
<p>"Fifth, separation of powers. [P]ower is divided [among] an elected legislature[,] an elected executive...and an appointed judiciary[.]</p>
<p>"Sixth, federalism, which divides power between the national government and the states[.]</p>
<p>"Seventh, checks and balances. This [includes] mutual oversight.</p>
<p>"Finally, the Electoral College and the two branches of the legislature[. In both the college and the legislature,] the distribution of power is weighted to give [more] representation to small...states. [T]he House [of Representatives is checked by the] parity among [the] states [with]in...the Senate.</p>
<p>"[A]ll this...means that America was designed to foster a spirit of freedom and enterprise among its people, and to thwart majority rule from tyrannizing over that spirit. In sum, America is a free market society whose founding principles...provide a powerful bulwark against socialism[,] including democratic socialism." – pp. 51–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Self-Made Man</p>
<p>"[T]he founders...were not unfamiliar with the anomaly of race. [And t]hey understood that their wives and daughters were part of their <em>novus ordo seclorum</em> [(Latin: new series of ages)].</p>
<p>"[E]very group in the world organizes its society without giving primary consideration to the outsiders who might wish to emigrate to that society.</p>
<p>"[T]he operating principle is one of universality, not of difference. This is the aspect of the American founding [which] identity socialists hate....</p>
<p>"At first...Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave...viewed the American founding purely from the point of view of the slave....Douglass couldn't see what Lincoln saw: the founders could not...outlaw slavery at the outset...and still make a union....</p>
<p>"Lincoln[,] Douglass...charged, was the white man's president. Blacks were...the accidental beneficiaries of his actions. After all, Lincoln...campaigned merely to arrest the spread of slavery....</p>
<p>"Lincoln was white; why should he give priority to blacks? Douglass...considered it right and natural for him[self] to give priority to his own race. [After] he met Lincoln, Douglass...saw that Lincoln treated him not as a black man but simply as a man....He didn't need Lincoln to see difference; he only needed Lincoln to recognize their common humanity....</p>
<p>"Douglass...came to see that the founders too articulated universal norms and rights that included him even while not recognizing his blackness.</p>
<p>"[D]ays after the Civil War ended, Douglass raised the question, 'What must be done for the slaves?' His answer: 'Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us...If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall....If you will only untie his hands and give him a chance, I think he will live.'</p>
<p>"[T]he...speech...Douglass...delivered most often...was titled 'Self-Made Men.' America, Douglass argued, is the land of the self-made man[. I]t offers that prospect to the woman no less than to the man, to the black man no less than to the white man....</p>
<p>"Douglass noted that there are those who scorn the self-made man, crediting his achievement to privilege or luck[,] tak[ing] 'no cognizance of the very different uses to which different men put their circumstances and chances[.]" – pp. 55–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">In Praise of Robber Barons</p>
<p>"[S]ome of the men of enterprise who embody the spirit of the American founding...are the very 'robber barons' vilified in progressive and socialist historiography....</p>
<p>"The progressive narrative focuses on [the] various government subsidies that were extended to [the] pioneers in...America's industrial revolution[. F]or progressives, the...lesson is that without government aid, the railroads and other key modes of transportation would not have been built. [H]istory...in this version...illuminates that the path to government direction of industry—the path toward socialism—is the right one.</p>
<p>"The truth...is precisely the opposite. The great innovations examined here all occurred without government [help, and] were achieved in the face of obstacles erected by the government....</p>
<p>"When Cornelius Vanderbilt began running steamboats on the Hudson River, the traffic was controlled by Robert Fulton's vessels. Fulton's monopoly had been granted to him by New York State.</p>
<p>"[S]teamers got bigger and began to make transatlantic crossings[.] Edward K. Collins...convinced the U.S. government to give him subsidies to compete with...the British line Cunard[. But] Vanderbilt built better ships [and] conserved his costs[.]</p>
<p>"After the...Civil War[,] Vanderbilt moved his investments from steamships into railroads[.]</p>
<p>"Progressives like to tell the story of the multiple railroad companies that built their cross-country lines with the help of government charters and subsidies. The two best known are the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad. Both desperately sought to fill their coffers with government cash as they raced to complete their projects....Henry Villard's Northern Pacific attracted both investors and government subsidies [for] the Pacific Northwest....</p>
<p>"James J. Hill built a transcontinental line through the Northwest with no federal aid. Notwithstanding his government subsidies, Villard failed and went bankrupt[.]</p>
<p>"Villard, a political entrepreneur who came from New York, viewed the Northwest like a postcard; he built along the most scenic routes. It cost more, but so what? Villard was spending the government's money. Hill, a local man with more practical concerns, chose the shortest and most efficient routes. Hill was spending his own money.</p>
<p>"Villard viewed the great Pacific Northwest as good for passing through; Hill encouraged the development of farming communities alongside his railroad....Hill expected that if these farming communities prospered, his railroad would too.</p>
<p>"Unlike Villard and other railroad builders on government support, Hill was obsessed with efficiency....So Hill hired local adventurers to comb through western Montana to find...the Marias Pass that shortened the distance through the Rockies....</p>
<p>"The well-connected political entrepreneur Samuel Langley had pledged to build an airplane. He had the support of the Smithsonian, the most prominent scientific institution in America. He had hundreds of thousands of dollars in government subsidy. He received devotional press coverage as the man who would conquer the sky.</p>
<p>"[Yet] as historian David McCullough tells the story, two owners of a bicycle business, Wilbur and Orville Wright, used $1,000 in profits from their company to purchase building materials. They designed an airplane. They got their materials to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They paid their own way to get there. They built the makeshift airplane. [And t]hey flew it....</p>
<p>"Vanderbilt, Hill, the Wright brothers—these are the American pioneers. They were self-made men who also helped [to] make a new nation....Ignored[,] these entrepreneurs may be—vilified[,] even—in progressive historiography. Yet who can deny that they embody the inventive, enterprising and—I hope—indestructible spirit of America?" – pp. 59–62</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 2: The Dream and the Nightmare</p>
<p>How Socialism Came to America</p>
<p>"We are not the United States of Socialism[:] at least not yet. But the socialists are here, and their agenda is now part of the national discourse....</p>
<p>"The activist group Democratic Socialists of America has grown...to over 50,000 members....More significant[ly], much of the national media is sympathetic, and socialist ideas now dominate the Democratic Party and shape the nation's political agenda....</p>
<p>"In a recent speech delivered at George Washington University[,] Sanders...described his...socialist platform as 'the unfinished business of [President] Franklin Delano Roosevelt [(FDR)'s] New Deal.'</p>
<p>"Sanders' speech provoked some indignant pushback[.] According to...the progressive narrative that is taught in schools and promulgated in the media[,] FDR and the New Deal saved America from socialism. They also saved capitalism by creating a new, more humane form of capitalism that protected its victims[.] Calling FDR socialist, [said the] progressive economist Robert Reich, is to characterize him with a 'scare word.' The progressive historian Sean Wilentz blames such rhetoric on 'right-wing name-calling.'...</p>
<p>"Wilentz stressed that while socialism is defined by public or state ownership of finance, industry and agriculture[,] progressivism refers to what FDR sought[:] a government that provides 'security for all citizens in the essentials of life'[.]</p>
<p>"Al Smith, the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 1924[,] nominated FDR...in 1928 [but] opposed his reelection. Smith knew that many of FDR's New Deal programs, including Social Security, unemployment insurance and agricultural price supports, had come from the socialists....</p>
<p>"So who's right, Sanders or the progressives? Sanders! Even the progressives know this. Their protest...seems to be against [his] candor....The progressives know that [if] FDR...had prevailed completely[,] America would be much more of a socialist country....</p>
<p>"This chapter will substantiate [Sanders'] contention that progressivism was the conveyor belt that brought socialism into the American mainstream." – pp. 64–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Sister Ideologies</p>
<p>"As the German[-born] sociologist Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues in a [2006] book tellingly titled <em>Three New Deals[: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933–1939],</em> progressivism, [c]ommunism and [n]ational [s]ocialism (also called fascism) were all sister ideologies, variations on a single theme, motivated by the same impulses, seeking to move society in a similar direction—away from free market capitalism and toward a collectivist society with the state as the instrument of the common good.</p>
<p>"Consistent with this ideological kinship, FDR and American progressives admired socialist regimes: not just the 'international socialism' of the Soviet Union but also [n]ational [s]ocialism[,] in Italy and Germany.</p>
<p>"[W]hat motivates the progressives today who are pushing America in the direction of socialism? Here the standard conservative answer is: the dream!...They want, in the words of [the] philosopher Eric Voegelin, to 'immanentize the eschaton'[.]</p>
<p>"[T]he facts were so obvious, even at the time, that it makes no sense to hold that otherwise[-]intelligent people were simply deceived. If they were deceived, [then] they wanted to be deceived. And why? Again, the standard conservative response is that they have to believe in theoretical socialism because actual socialism never works[:] because it is 'against human nature.' [E]ach generation of socialists has to harken back to the dream[,] and promise a new type of socialism different from all the types that came before....</p>
<p>"Charles C.W. Cooke writes in <em>National Review</em> that 'real socialism can't exist' because 'selfishness is ineradicable' and 'man isn't perfectible.'...But [n]o actual socialist has ever attempted that.</p>
<p>"Anyone who thinks that socialists...are genuinely trying to eradicate selfishness or human imperfection is living on Mars....Nicolás Maduro[,] for instance, promises poor Venezuelans that he will make rich people vacate their land and homes; then he will distribute that wealth among the poor. [W]hat about the [Sanders] voters who want other people to pay for their college tuition and healthcare? Th[is] is hardly an eradication of selfishness[.]</p>
<p>"Soviet socialism...worked for those who were running it, and that's why it lasted for more than 70 years. Venezuelan socialism today 'works' for the Chavistas, who live high on the hog. [S]ocialism is consistent with human nature; it draws on its worst impulses, which cannot be publicly acknowledged.</p>
<p>"[T]he 'will of the people' is not something given; rather, it is made. In Schumpeter's words, 'The will of the people is the product and not the motive of the political process.' Progressives know this, and, as we will see, they devote tremendous resources and energy to forging a climate of public opinion favorable to their projects." – pp. 67–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Ones Left Behind</p>
<p>"As [the] historian Bernard Bailyn writes, it is well understood in political theory that 'the ultimate explanation of every political controversy' is the 'disposition of power.'</p>
<p>"[F]or...John Adams[,] the defining feature of...'dominion'[, which] means...control by some human beings of others[,] is...its constant tendency to break loose of legitimate boundaries.</p>
<p>"[P]rogressivism...is akin to socialism in that it developed in opposition to the principle of the American founding....</p>
<p>"Every revolution other than the American has proven to be a failure or a disaster. The French Revolution, for instance, began with the glorious affirmation of 'liberty, equality and fraternity' and ended with Robespierre's Reign of Terror....The Russian Revolution was an unmitigated disaster from the beginning[.]</p>
<p>"Which was the class of people left behind by the American Revolution?...They were the courtiers who served at court, the barristers who advised the throne, the men of letters who received patronage at the hands of [the] monarchs and [the] aristocrats....</p>
<p>"What they produced were mainly words. They prized wordsmithing, but hated doing other types of work, especially manual work....</p>
<p>"These people were once at the helm of power. They were the old regime's ruling class. In Europe, such people watched angrily, resentfully, as the new entrepreneurial class rose in power[.]</p>
<p>"Viewing themselves as smart—the smartest people in society—they feel entitled to be the ones who exercise power, who tell others what to do....</p>
<p>"How...do the 'people of words' rise up and displace the people who make and do things? [T]hey go into full thespian mode. They are good at this; it is the courtier stance, and for centuries it has been their natural métier.</p>
<p>"[T]he people of words insist that they are cut from a finer cloth. They are not like the wicked entrepreneurs. What the people...demand...is a professional class of planners and administrators like the people of words, selflessly devoted to social justice and the common good....Their goal is...to mobilize the resentment of the people against the innovators and wealth creators.</p>
<p>"[T]hey are actually the hungriest, most grasping seekers of power. The people are merely the vehicle for them to get it....What motivates progressiv[e]s and socialists in large part is their desire to exercise tyrannical power over others.</p>
<p>"[Y]et[,] I have to admit that power is not their sole motive. Ideology matters too.</p>
<p>"[T]hey seek both power and an ideological transformation of American society." – pp. 69–72</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Honeymoon in Moscow</p>
<p>"When a Soviet choir of 30 young girls performed in Burlington[, Vermont] for about 500 residents, Sanders took the stage and sar[don]ically riffed, 'This is the enemy!' " – p. 74</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">What de Blasio Saw—And Chose Not to See</p>
<p>"In 1988...de Blasio visited Nicaragua. According to a <em>New York Times</em> profile, he had become...an 'ardent supporter of the Nicaraguan revolutionaries.'</p>
<p>"[He] volunteered...at the Nicaragua Solidarity Network[. He] recently said[,] 'My work was based on trying to create a more fair and inclusive world'[. I]n 1990, he said...about the Sandinistas, 'They gave a new definition to democracy. They built a democracy that was striving to be [both] economic and political[.] It was very affecting for me.'</p>
<p>"[From] his volunteer work at a health clinic in Masaya...de Blasio says[,] 'I took away...how hands-on government has to be[,] how connected to the people[.]</p>
<p>"One would never know from de Blasio that Nicaragua was a socialist dictatorship whose goal, in the words of Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Shirley Christian, was 'to assure themselves the means to control nearly every aspect of Nicaraguan life'[. T]he Sandanistas operated out of the same socialist playbook as the Soviets and the Cubans.</p>
<p>"[T]he aspiring Democratic presidential candidate[, former New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg offered a rhapsodic account of the Chinese Communist Party, insisting in an interview...on <em>Firing Line [with Margaret Hoover]</em> that the ruling regime in Beijing was democratically accountable to the Chinese people....</p>
<p>"There is a deep historical pattern here, brilliantly chronicled in [the Hungarian-born political sociologist] Paul Hollander's <em>Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals In Search of the Good Society....</em></p>
<p>"The American left is not removed from these horrors—it is...implicated....</p>
<p>"Hollander...misses how FDR and Mussolini formed a mutual admiration society, reviewing each other's books and praising each other as ideological soul mates....</p>
<p>"FDR[, in] his own words[,] viewed fascism from the outset as a 'phenomenon somewhat parallel to the [c]ommunist experiment in Russia.'...Fascism [now] has become toxic and, in the manner depicted by Orwell in <em>1984,</em> FDR's early connection to it has been erased [in] progressive accounts....</p>
<p>"The eminent leftist scholar W.E.B. Du Bois...championed every socialist regime no matter how murderous[:] 'If...Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.'...</p>
<p>"Du Bois visited Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and praised German [n]ational [s]ocialism as an 'absolutely necessary' scheme that 'showed Germany the way out.'...</p>
<p>"Hollander...thinks the socialist regimes in Russia, China and Cuba bamboozled American progressives and socialists. I...think...they saw what they wanted to see....</p>
<p>"Their project was to protect and defend...system[s] that they understood to be analogous and akin to what they were attempting here. In defending those regimes then, they were defending themselves, just as in denying their previous attachments now, they are also...defending themselves. This is how crime families behave. It's called deniability." – pp. 75–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Unnecessary Automobile</p>
<p>"The leading figure of socialism was...Eugene Debs. The leading figure of progressivism was...Woodrow Wilson. The former was, to use Obama's phrase, a 'community organizer.' The latter was the president of Princeton [University and] governor of New Jersey[.]</p>
<p>"The Wilson administration prosecuted Debs under the Sedition Act[.] Debs went into obscurity while Wilson served two terms[.] Yet...Wilson incorporated a good deal of Debs' platform into his progressive agenda. [And] Wilson created a framework for implementing...much of what Debs agitated for.</p>
<p>"The important thing to know about Wilson...is that he opposed cars....He warned[,] 'Nothing has spread socialistic feeling more than the use of the automobile.'...They are a rich man's toy. [Thus t]hey create class resentment. Who really needs a car for personal transportation when we already have the horse and buggy?...</p>
<p>"Wilson...lacked vision. His argument against the car may be termed the 'argument from personal incredulity.' [(]I get this phrase from the [English zo]ologist Richard Dawkins[.) Viz.] 'What is the point of a car? Can I think of any good reason why anyone would want to own a car? Here, sitting in my office and twiddling my thumbs, I cannot. Clearly there is no good reason why anyone should want a car. Therefore, cars should not exist.'</p>
<p>"[T]his is actually a common progressive mode of argument. [For] example[,] 'Who knows what [f]racking...is doing to the environment? It could be causing earthquakes for all we know. Here, sitting in my office and twiddling my thumbs, I cannot personally think of a single good reason for fracking. [So, f]racking should not exist.'...</p>
<p>"Wilson saw the car only as it was, not as it could be....Wilson viewed himself [not as] upper[-]class[, but] more as a man of the people[:] not one of them, certainly, but an objective administrator of the people's genuine interests. He knew what they wanted[—]and, just as important[ly], what they ought to want. He was there to show them how, under his leadership, their lives could be better. This was true democracy[:] democracy under adult supervision. Here [we have] the familiar pose of the enlightened progressive intellectual.</p>
<p>"[C]ontrast Wilson with one of the objects of his contempt[:] Henry Ford....</p>
<p>"Ford's genius was to envision a society in which not only the rich but nearly everybody would own and drive cars. He could see consumer demand, which didn't exist then but would develop later, after people saw what Ford had made for them.</p>
<p>"[Said] Ford[,] 'Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them.' Before he started work on the automobile, Ford worked as an apprentice in a machine shop, then in the engine room of a shipbuilding firm, then at a power plant....</p>
<p>"Interchangeable parts enabled Ford to make a standardized product. He didn't care about customization[.] Ford got his idea for a moving assembly line from what he observed in the giant slaughterhouses of the Chicago stockyards. [H]e added a marketing innovation, the car dealership, where cars could not only be purchased but also...serviced.</p>
<p>"While cars were initially selling for around $3,000[,] Ford sold his first cars for under $1,000. He reinvested his profits to make a better, cheaper product....By 1916, Ford's Model T was selling for less than $400....</p>
<p>"The prototypical entrepreneur had a much greater impact than the prototypical progressive statist. [T]he car was perhaps the most democratizing force in history." – pp. 79–82</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Wise Minority in the Saddle</p>
<p>"[T]he socialist...agenda was the talk of the nation in the pivotal year of 1912, yet two of the three leading candidates[,] Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, called themselves progressives rather then socialists....</p>
<p>"Debs, who started the Socialist Party...in 1901, is the founder of American socialism....Sanders knows Debs well. He still hangs a portrait of Debs in his office[.]</p>
<p>"Debs...praised the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and declared that, here in America, 'we shall transfer the title deeds of the railroads, the telegraph lines, the mines, mills and great industries to the people in their collective capacity; we shall take possession of all these social utilities in the name of the people.' Notice who takes possession: not the people but Debs and his buddies. They do it 'in the name of the people.' This is the voice of socialist tyranny, masking itself from the outset in the language of democracy.</p>
<p>"[T]he people...rejected the idea of giving...power to Debs in their name....</p>
<p>"In his recent book <em>The Socialist Manifesto[: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality],</em> Bhaskar Sunkara concedes that apart from a brief surge in 1912 and 1931, card-carrying socialists have never been 'a serious force in national politics.' At least until now.</p>
<p>"[I]n 1912...Teddy Roosevelt quit the Republican Party to run as a progressive....</p>
<p>"Wilson was the other progressive running, but he ran on the Democratic ticket. His ideas mirrored those of Teddy Roosevelt.</p>
<p>"[M]odern propaganda emphasizes the 'shiny' achievements of the progressives while covering up their deeper agenda. To understand this deeper agenda, we must listen to what the progressives themselves said at the time. Wilson was the first president to attack the founding. In words every previous president would have considered heretical, Wilson said, 'We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.'</p>
<p>"[E]ven during the Civil War, when the divisions in American politics were the sharpest, both sides emphasized that they were the true exponents of [the] found[ers'] principles. Wilson...made no effort to camouflage that progressivism represented a sharp break with the founding. Wilson outlined his doctrine in a 1913 speech titled 'What is Progress?' The speech contrasted what Wilson termed the Newtonian principle of the founding with the Darwinian approach of progressive Democrats....</p>
<p>"Wilson concluded, 'Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics. It must develop.'...</p>
<p>"Wilson is making the case for society to be run by enlightened planners, not through some sort of spontaneous operation of natural laws[.] This for Wilson is what 'progressive' means. It means progress away from the founding, progress according to a Darwinian principle of adaptation. Wilson's actual analogy...makes no sense....</p>
<p>"Darwin was very insistent...that evolution operates without...supervisory planning or design. Order is spontaneously generated through adaptive behavior at the local level in varying competitive environments....</p>
<p>"Free markets can be considered a form of...cultural adaptation and evolution. [W]hat survives and works is what gets replicated, with[out] a central planning authority....</p>
<p>"Wilson exhibits the typical profile of the progressives. He despises the founding and the kind of people the founders cherished. He considers himself better than them, more enlightened. He seeks to reorganize society in a way that puts this better kind of person, a person like himself, in the...saddle[.]</p>
<p>"We can hear this same self-aggrandizement in most of the progressive literature of the early part of the twentieth century....Here's [the political economist] Edward Alsworth Ross[,] from his [1901] book aptly titled <em>Social Control[: A Survey of the Foundations of Order]</em>: 'The state is an organization that puts the wise minority in the saddle.' Ross has no illusions about the state being run by the majority. He envisions not the people but a 'wise minority' guiding the people[.]</p>
<p>" 'The state aims more steadily at a rational safeguarding of the collective welfare than any organ society has yet employed.' While in theory the state is supposed to be democratically run by the society, Ross candidly states that 'as a matter of fact the state, when it becomes paternal and develops on the administrative side, is able in a measure to guide the society it professes to obey.' It becomes...'an independent center of social power.'</p>
<p>"During the Wilson years, the progressives made some key changes to establish the power of the centralized state. [T]he graduated or 'progressive' income tax...required a constitutional amendment. [T]he progressives added corporate and inheritance taxes. Now the mechanism to fund the centralized state was in place.</p>
<p>"Progressives...created the Federal Reserve Board to regulate money, banking and credit, and the Federal Trade Commission to oversee industry. [T]hey were the beginning of the administrative state, a kind of 'fourth branch of government.'...</p>
<p>"Wilson...had his own version of identity politics[:] he introduced racial segregation to the federal government[.] He helped to revive the Ku Klux Klan. He supported eugenic measures that would later inspire the Nazis[.] 'During the Wilson years,' [the historian] Ira Katznelson writes, 'the composite of racism and progressive liberalism came to dominate the Democratic Party.'</p>
<p>"We'll see this pattern of using white nationalism to build an effective political coalition continue with the Democrats through the middle of the century. [This] is not a contradiction[—]merely a change of tactics. The party of identity politics in one direction remains the party of identity politics in the opposite direction.</p>
<p>"[T]he Socialist Party platform...in 1912...called for an eight-hour workday at a guaranteed wage. It called for public works programs for the unemployed. It advocated old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, a graduated...income tax, an inheritance tax, getting rid of the Electoral College and a convention to revise the Constitution....</p>
<p>"My point is...simply to show how closely...the agenda of the early socialists...tracks the agenda of the political left and the Democratic Party. [And] that's what progressives did: they steadily took on board the socialist program. They made it their own, they carried out some of it and...they brought all of it into the political mainstream.</p>
<p>"This is Wilson's true and lasting legacy: creeping socialism....It would take a man less cerebral but more cunning to largely enact this program lifted from the socialists[:] a [then-]young navy secretary [who] never swerved from Wilson's priorities. Elected in 1932, he found himself in the midst of a national emergency....He seized on the crisis to do what Wilson never had the savvy or the chance to do. He, not Wilson, is the man who 'remade America' by pushing it in the socialist direction." – pp. 82–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">A Second Bill of Rights</p>
<p>"What is socialism, in the sense now meaningful in American politics? In his George Washington University speech[,] Sanders said it is 'the right to quality healthcare, the right to as much education as one needs to succeed in our society, the right to a good job that pays a living wage, the right to affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment.'...</p>
<p>"In this perspective, the state is the friend of my rights. Government makes available to me things like education, healthcare, home ownership and retirement benefits. It does so by seizing the earnings and resources of a minority of the successful[.]</p>
<p>"[L]ate in his presidency on January 11, 1944[,] Franklin Delano Roosevelt...declared that it was time for America to adopt what he termed a Second Bill of Rights. Every American, he insisted, is entitled to a 'useful and remunerative job'; the opportunity to 'earn enough' to provide adequate food, clothing and recreation; to a 'decent home' for his family; to 'adequate medical care'; to a 'good education'; and finally to 'adequate protection' in old age and retirement....</p>
<p>"When it comes to outlining the socialist agenda...we can say that FDR got there first....No wonder that today's socialists like [Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez] aren't in a socialist party[.] FDR made the Democratic Party a natural fit for them.</p>
<p>"The legal scholar Cass Sunstein, in his [2004] book <em>The Second Bill of Rights[: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever],</em> terms FDR's speech 'the greatest of the twentieth century.'...FDR didn't merely spell out all these new rights, he offered a rationale that basically flips the founders' idea of rights on its head....</p>
<p>"FDR argued that [l]ife requires certain necessities[.] Now[—in] the key move—FDR insisted that 'necessitous men are not free men.' He said that to give citizens true freedom, the government must insure them against deprivation, against the loss of a job, against illness and against impoverished old age.</p>
<p>"What people need, in other words, is what FDR frankly and without irony called 'freedom from fear.'...And who can deliver th[is]? For FDR, there was only one answer to this question: the federal government....As Sunstein recognized, this is...an intellectual revolution.</p>
<p>"It is a revolution away from the entrepreneurial society the founders created and toward the socialist society that FDR envisioned but dared not name." – pp. 87–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Franklin Delano Ponzi</p>
<p>"FDR's goal [with] Social Security...from the outset was to use current contributions to pay out to currently retiring seniors....</p>
<p>"FDR [said,] 'With those...Social Security [payroll] taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.'...</p>
<p>"He...wanted to fool people into thinking that they had earned their Social Security benefits. They had paid into the system, and now they were just getting their own money back plus interest. Any attempt to get rid of Social Security would provoke the fury of people as if their personal bank accounts were being raided.</p>
<p>"[E]ven in the Depression era, FDR had to be...deceitful about what he was doing. He couldn't sell Social Security as a 'right'[.] And he had to use the whole deceptive vocabulary of 'contributions'[.]</p>
<p>"FDR's second destructive act was confiscatory taxation. FDR raised the top marginal rate of the federal income tax to more than 80 percent[.]</p>
<p>"FDR hired 40,000 artists and painters to produce music and theater, paintings and murals [and] local travel guides[.]</p>
<p>"Alexander Forbes, a Harvard classmate of FDR who went on to be a professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote FDR to say, 'Look at the sorry spectacle presented by long rows of beneficiaries of the boondoggle, leaning on their shovels by the hour, at futile projects, and contrast it with the great universities, museums and research laboratories[—]and then consider which is the major constructive force in building a stable civilization.'</p>
<p>"[W]ho knows better how to use the money, the people who have made it[,] or the government that treats it with the...indifference of...spending someone else's money? FDR's response was to brand Forbes [as] 'one of the worst anarchists in the United States.'...</p>
<p>"Finally, we turn to FDR's unscrupulous willingness to use the 'race card.' We are familiar today with the race card being played against whites, but like Wilson, FDR played it against blacks. He was a practitioner of white identity politics. This is important because when [the] Democrats today say they are fighting the racism of the past, they omit to mention that they are the ones who practiced that racism....</p>
<p>"Katznelson shows in his [2013] book <em>Fear Itself[: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time]</em> how FDR cut deals with racist Democrats to exclude blacks from [the] New Deal programs. The legislation creating Social Security was deliberately crafted to exclude domestic workers and farmworkers, the two occupations in which blacks were most heavily concentrated....FDR blocked anti-lynching legislation to appease this group.</p>
<p>"FDR also named Hugo Black to the Supreme Court, a man with deep and longtime ties to the Ku Klux Klan....</p>
<p>"Later Black wrote in a 1968 memo that he had informed FDR about his background. 'President Roosevelt told me there was no reason for my worrying about having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said some of his best friends and supporters were strong members of that organization.'</p>
<p>"[S]everal Senate Democrats recently filed a brief[,] warning the...Supreme Court...justices to 'heal' the Court or face restructuring.</p>
<p>"Stacking and packing the Court...is what FDR cared about. He knew Black was an ardent New Deal man and would vote his way—to suppress economic liberties. That Black was closely linked with a group that lynched blacks...was a matter of relative indifference to American progressivism's most hallowed president. Identity politics is a dirty business[.]" – pp. 90–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 3: Alien Nation</p>
<p>Why Socialists Abandoned the Working Class</p>
<p>"Socialism...has turned into a coordinated effort to make...ordinary citizens and workers...feel unwelcome and demonized in their own country. Socialism in America today has turned black against white, female against male, homosexual and transsexual against heterosexual[,] and illegals against legal immigrants and American citizens. The typical socialist today is not a union guy who wants higher wages; it[']s a transsexual ecofeminist who marches in Antifa and Black Lives Matter rallies and throws cement blocks at her political opponents....</p>
<p>"In the left and in the Democratic Party, it's all about identity politics now.</p>
<p>"Recently, the left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore...pointed out...on MSNBC...that Democrats from Bill Clinton to Obama won the presidency without the white vote....Moore's message was simple[: M]obilize against them! 'Let's get out the Democratic base of women, young people and people of color.'</p>
<p>"The implications of this go beyond party politics; they involve how the left views the country itself....</p>
<p>" 'If you are white, male, heterosexual, and religiously or socially conservative,' writes author and editor Rod Dreher[,] 'people like you are going to have to lose their jobs and influence.'</p>
<p>"[F]or identity socialists and for the left more generally, blacks and Latinos are in, whites are out. Women are in, men are out. Gays, bisexuals, pansexuals and transsexuals, together with other, more exotic types, are in; heterosexuals are out. Illegals are in, native-born citizens are out....The point, for the left, is...to estrange their opponents from their native land....</p>
<p>"Because whites were a clear majority, whiteness was the norm. [M]aleness was also seen as normative. [T]he same applied to heterosexuality[.] For the socialist left, it's vital to overturn this hierarchy...by creating an inverse hierarchy. Whiteness, maleness and heterosexuality are now viewed as pathological, as forms of oppression. [T]he left by design seeks to demonize white male heterosexuals and thus make a large body of Americans feel like aliens in their own country.</p>
<p>"[T]his great shift occurred [in] the 1960s[;] the progressive baton passed from FDR to Lyndon B[aines] Johnson. LBJ [also] used a three-letter abbreviation[, a]nd FDR's New Deal found its fuller realization in LBJ's Great Society.</p>
<p>"[B]oth men...manipulat[ed] white supremacy for political ends....LBJ's embrace of civil rights was cynically motivated to preserve the Democratic plantation and guarantee a reliable [black] dependency on the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>"[W]hile FDR's socialist schemes were passed in an era of depression, LBJ's schemes were passed in an era of affluence....</p>
<p>"Earlier, FDR had argued...that [t]he situation was desperate. So it was morally imperative to act!</p>
<p>"[The] economist John Kenneth Galbraith [in his 1958 book] <em>The Affluent Society</em>...argued for an expansion of federal programs on the grounds that America was now a rich country and could afford them. How scandalous to have need[,] in the midst of plenty. So once again it was morally imperative to act!" – pp. 95–100</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Marcuse's Marxist Conundrum</p>
<p>"A German philosopher partly of Jewish descent[,] Herbert Marcuse...studied under the philosopher Martin Heidegger[.]</p>
<p>"Marcuse egged on the activists of the 1960s to seize buildings and overthrow the hierarchy of the university, as a kind of first step to fomenting socialist revolution in America....Ronald Reagan...got Marcuse fired....</p>
<p>"In his famous work <em>What Is To Be Done?</em> [the Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir] Lenin insisted that the socialist revolution would not be done by the working class; it would have to be done for them.</p>
<p>"In other words, a professional class of activists and fighters would be required[.]</p>
<p>"[I]n the early 1920s, the Italian [c]ommunist Antonio Gramsci made his own revision of socialist theory by introducing the theme of culture....He insisted that the capitalists...ruled through 'bourgeois values' that permeated the cultural, educational and psychological realm of society....</p>
<p>"For Gramsci[, t]he ordinary worker had no intention of toppling his employers[.] Gramsci's solution was for socialist activists to figure out a way to break this hegemony and to establish a hegemony of their own. To do this they would have to take over the universities, the art world and the culture more generally....</p>
<p>"Lenin and Gramsci provided Marcuse with a starting point. He agreed...that the working class [was] a conservative, counterrevolutionary force. But his greatest early influence was...Heidegger[, including his] magnum opus, <em>Being and Time</em>[.]</p>
<p>" 'Being'...is bracketed by 'time.' Humans are perishable beings that for the time being exist.</p>
<p>"[F]or Heidegger[,] the big question...was...'How is it good to be?' Typically[,] we are barely even aware of...this question[.] We go through life...steered by a tide of...conformity....Authenticity, for Heidegger, means coming to terms with our mortality and living the only life we get[,] on our own terms. We cannot rely on God to show us the way; we are alone in the world, and have to find a way for ourselves....</p>
<p>"So who could...agitate for socialism in America?</p>
<p>"Marcuse looked around to identify which groups had a natural antipathy to capitalism. Marcuse knew he could count on the bohemian artists and intellectuals who had long hated industrial civilization, in part because they considered themselves superior to businessmen and shopkeepers. In Germany, this group distinguished 'culture'—by which they meant art—from 'civilization'—by which they meant industry[.]</p>
<p>"These self-styled 'outcasts' were natural recruits for what Marcuse termed the Great Refusal—the visceral repudiation of free market society. B[ut b]y themselves, the[re] were scarcely enough to hold a demonstration[.]" – pp. 100–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">A New Proletariat</p>
<p>"Marcuse...had to think of a way to take bohemian culture mainstream, to normalize the outcasts and to turn normal people into outcasts. He started with an unlikely group of proles: the young people of the 1960s....How could these slack...products of postwar prosperity[,] loafers completely divorced from real-world problems[,] focused on themselves, their drugs...and mind-numbing music, serve as the shock troops of revolution?</p>
<p>"Marcuse's insight was Heideggerian: by teaching them a new way to be 'authentic.' By 'raising their consciousness.' The students were already somewhat alienated from the larger society. They lived in these socialist communes called universities. They took for granted their amenities. Ungrateful slugs that they were, they despised rather than cherished their parents for the sacrifices made on their behalf. They sought 'something more,' a form of self-fulfillment that went beyond material fulfillment.</p>
<p>"Here, Marcuse recognized, was the very raw material out of which socialism is made in a rich, successful society....Marcuse was confident that an activist group of professors could raise the consciousness of a whole generation of students so that they could feel subjectively oppressed even if there were no objective forces oppressing them.</p>
<p>"[T]o Marcuse's incredible good fortune, the sixties was the decade of the Vietnam War. Students were facing the prospect of being drafted. Thus, they had selfish reasons to oppose the war. Yet this selfishness could be harnessed by teaching the students that they weren't draft-dodging cowards; rather, they were noble resisters who were part of a global struggle for social justice. In this way, bad conscience itself could be recruited on behalf of left-wing activism.</p>
<p>"Marcuse portrayed Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong as a kind of Third World proletariat, fighting to free itself from American hegemony....The new working class were the Vietnamese 'freedom fighters.' The evil capitalists were [the] American soldiers serving on behalf of the American government....</p>
<p>" 'Only the internal weakening of the superpower,' Marcuse wrote in <em>An Essay on Liberation,</em> 'can finally stop the financing and equipping of suppression in the backward countries.'...Together, the revolutionaries at home and abroad would collaborate in the Great Refusal. They would jointly end the war and redeem both Vietnam and America. And what would this redemption look like? In Marcuse's words, 'Collective ownership, collective control and planning of the means of production and distribution.'...</p>
<p>"Who else? Marcuse looked around America for more prospective proles[.] The first was the Black Power movement[. T]his group...would not have to be instructed in the art of grievance; blacks had grievances that dated back centuries.</p>
<p>" '[B]lacks' would become the working class, 'whites' the capitalist class.</p>
<p>"[W]ith effective consciousness raising[,] the feminists...too could be taught to see themselves as an oppressed proletariat. '[W]omen' would now be viewed as the working class and 'men' the capitalist class[.]</p>
<p>" 'The movement'[,] Marcuse wrote, 'aims...not...at equality within the job and value structure of the established society...but rather at...change in the structure itself.' Marcuse's target wasn't just the patriarchy; it was the monogamous family. In Gramscian terms, Marcuse viewed the heterosexual family itself as an expression of bourgeois culture, [thus] in his view the abolition of the family would help hasten the advent of socialism.</p>
<p>"[T]he logic of identity socialism can easily be extended to [g]ays and transgenders[, who] become the newest proletariat[:] heterosexuals—even black and female heterosexuals—become their oppressors....</p>
<p>"The true examplar of identity socialism is a black or brown male with a Third World background transitioning to be a woman, who is trying illegally to get into this country because...her...own country has allegedly been wiped off the map by climate change....</p>
<p>"Marcuse...recognize[d] the emerging environmental movement as an opportunity to restrict and regulate capitalism. The goal...was 'to drive ecology to the point where it is no longer containable within the capitalist framework'[.]</p>
<p>"Marcuse recognized that mobilizing all these groups...would take time and require a great deal of consciousness raising or reeducation. He saw the university as the ideal venue for carrying out this project, which is why he devoted his own life to teaching and training a generation of socialist and left-wing activists. Over time, Marcuse believed, the university could produce a new type of culture, and that culture would then metastasize into the larger society to infect the media, the movies[:] even the lifestyle of the titans of the capitalist class itself.</p>
<p>"Marcuse...foresaw an America in which bourgeois culture would be replaced by avant-garde culture. He foresaw a society in which billionaires would support socialist schemes that take away a part of their wealth in exchange for [the] social recognition conferred by cultural institutions dominated by the socialists....</p>
<p>"Marcuse's project...succeeded as the activist generation of the 1960s gradually took over the elite universities. Today, socialist indoctrination is the norm on the American campus[.]</p>
<p>"Marcuse is also the philosopher of Antifa. He argued, in a famous essay called 'Repressive Tolerance,' that tolerance is not a norm or right that should be extended to all people. [T]olerance is good, but not when it comes to people who [oppress others]. It is perfectly fine to be intolerant against them[—]to the point of disrupting them, shutting down their events and...preventing them from speaking.</p>
<p>"Marcuse...invented the argument that it is legitimate to be hateful against haters—meaning those who might disagree with the socialist agenda. For Marcuse, there were no limits to what could be done to discredit and ruin such people; he wa[rn]ed the left to defeat them 'by any means necessary.' Marcuse even approved of certain forms of domestic terrorism...on the grounds that the perpetrators were attempting to stop the greater violence that U.S. forces inflict on people in...other countries....</p>
<p>"When it comes to identity socialism, we are still living with Marcuse's legacy." – pp. 104–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">How the Planet Caught a Fever</p>
<p>"[As t]he most ambitious proposal to achieve socialist ends[, b]acked by a group called the Sunrise Movement[,] Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal in apocalyptic terms. The planet has a fever! Humans have only 12 years to avert climate catastrophe! We must do these things to avert extinction!...</p>
<p>"The Green New Deal is socialism[.]</p>
<p>"[A]dvocates of the Green New Deal respond to...sober calculations with tantrums and hysteria. We cannot, they say, afford not to do it! Our lives depend on it!</p>
<p>"[A] significant part of the Green New Deal...has little or nothing to do with the climate. This seems to be socialism hiding behind an environmentalist banner....</p>
<p>"Marx advanced his theory as 'scientific.'</p>
<p>"Green New Deal advocates insist that their program too is 'scientific'—backed, they say, by 97 percent of all climate scientists. Given this scientific consensus, critics are dismissed as climate 'deniers.'</p>
<p>"[A] recent survey by Susan Crockford, an expert on polar bears, puts the current...population [at] four times as many...as there were in 1960[:] now at a 50-year high." – pp. 109–13</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Remember Global Cooling?</p>
<p>"None of this has diminished the certainty of Ocasio-Cortez and other activists. [T]hey are best understood as part of an apocalyptic tradition that includes environmentalists, religious fundamentalists, cult leaders, population-control fanatics and other types of zealots.</p>
<p>"[T]he whole Green New Deal is a scam, a massive exercise in globaloney, a transparent excuse to replace capitalism with socialism. The rhetoric of the activists certainly supports this. 'The climate crisis,' Natasha Fernández-Silber writes in <em>Jacobin,</em> 'is quite simply a crisis of capitalism....We must either replace capitalism with a more sustainable economic system—or face barbarism and extinction.' Extinction or socialism: you get to choose!" – pp. 114–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Problem with Walls—They Work!</p>
<p>"[A] second issue that animates identity socialism [is] illegal immigration. [T]his issue is now a critical part of the left's project to assemble a coalition of alienated minority groups to create a prosocialist majority.</p>
<p>"[T]here must be a reason why today's left gives such primacy to this issue.</p>
<p>"[It] cannot be that Democrats are courting the illegal vote. [B]y and large illegals cannot vote....</p>
<p>"Democrats['] determination to prevent [President Donald] Trump's wall...is in direct proportion to their fear that it actually would work....</p>
<p>"There is no record of any student...sneaking into...Stanford University[,] taking courses...and graduating....The wall...is...the admissions office[.]</p>
<p>"Why don't the Democrats campaign to change the immigration laws?...</p>
<p>"They portray enforcement of those laws...as hateful, racist and Nazi-like betrayals of basic human decency. [T]hey work with activists in Central American countries to...overwhelm...the holding facilities[,] apparently seeking the chaos that makes effective administration of the immigration laws more difficult[,] so that more illegals get through." – pp. 116–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Asian Indian in a Sombrero</p>
<p>"In a recent book, <em>This Land Is Our Land[: An Immigrant's Manifesto],</em> the progressive writer Suketu Mehta attempts to justify the left's approach to illegals....</p>
<p>"Mehta...play[s the] clever game [of] conflating legals and illegals. This has become standard fare among left-wing politicians and also the media left.</p>
<p>"Illegals are not 'immigrants.' [They] are, in a very precise sense, 'aliens.' Even those whose motives are understandable...are still breaking the law. Trump is determined to enforce the law. [B]y erasing the distinction between legals and illegals[,] the left can insist...that 'Trump is against immigrants.'...</p>
<p>"Mehta gives no indication of how...the migrant caravans...actually operate. How do thousands of supposedly starving people move themselves and their families...hundreds if not thousands of miles? [As investigative journalist] Michelle Malkin and others have shown, they do it through an elaborate network of facilities generated by the American and international left. The left assembles the caravans and then sustains them through their trek to the United States border.</p>
<p>"Along the way, the caravans benefit from soup kitchens and first aid centers, [and] overnight shelters with baths and medical care facilities, including therapeutic counseling....Mehta decides it would be impolitic to mention that the caravans aren't spontaneous; they are orchestrated and sustained by political groups for political benefit....</p>
<p>"Mehta['s] central claim seems to be that illegals have a 'right' to migrate to rich countries like England and the United States [b]ecause, in his view, 'Migration today is a form of reparations.'</p>
<p>"[D]id England ruin India through colonial occupation?...Without British influence, would India be the technologically advanced country it is today?...</p>
<p>"Texas used to be a part of Mexico but broke off because of tyrannical laws imposed by a Mexican dictator. [It] opted to join the United States....Mexico lost the...Mexican War[,] and ceded the disputed land in a treaty [in 1848].</p>
<p>"Hispanic Texans f[ou]ght on the American side of that war[. T]he Mexicans who ended up on the American side of the line...found themselves immeasurably better off than their counterparts in Mexico....</p>
<p>"What does Mehta have to say about these questions? The poverty of his argument is that he doesn't even address them. He merely asserts[,] what he has the burden to prove. [H]e's playing to an audience [that] he knows very well[—and] he's a...sly Indian who knows how to assimilate to progressive culture.</p>
<p>"[H]e writes[,] 'America has hurt Latinos much more than it has hurt Indians. America owes them more, and so it should open its doors more to them.' Again, the Latinos who became Americans in 1848 were not hurt; they were helped....</p>
<p>"So what's the left's motive here? The short-term motive is simple: [to] use the illegals to portray Trump and the Republicans as racist or anti-Mexican and also anti-immigrant. The point is to alienate Trump and the GOP...from legal immigrants and Mexican Americans[.] The left also wants to swamp the country with illegals, seeking to make them dependent on the government, so that if they ever get amnesty and can vote, they will vote for the party that sneaked them through[,] and provided them with...sustenance." – pp. 119–23</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Terrorist Next Door</p>
<p>"[Congresswoman] Ilhan Omar's 100,000-strong Somali community in Minneapolis[, Minnesota] is the terrorist recruitment capital of the United States.</p>
<p>" '[P]unitive measures'[,] Omar wrote [to a] trial judge[,] 'inevitably create an environment in which extremism can flourish, aligning with the presupposition of terrorist recruitment. The best deterrent to fanaticism is a system of compassion.'...</p>
<p>"I translate this to mean that punishing terrorists causes terrorism, and the best way to fight terrorism is to seek to include potential terrorists in our communities[.]</p>
<p>"In 2018, Omar was asked about terrorism on Al Jazeera, and she addressed what she called the 'quote-unquote legitimate fears' Americans have[,] respond[ing], 'I would say our country should be more fearful of white men because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so if fear was the driving force to keep...Americans safe within this country...we should be profiling, monitoring and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.'</p>
<p>"Here is the standard socialist move[:] to turn the tables and insist that whites, not Muslims, pose the greatest terrorist threat; that legals, not illegals, are the problem; that there's nothing wrong with creating Somalia-in-America; that Americans, not Somalis, should make the adjustment to this; and that even terrorism represents nothing more than a cry of protest against America's refusal to include and provide for its foreign newcomers.</p>
<p>"Illegal immigration is not merely a mechanism for changing the political, religious and cultural composition of America, it is literally a mechanism for changing, in ways that...immigration laws have not authorized, the actual DNA of America. In this way the socialists hope to win the day, not by convincing a majority of existing Americans but by creating a majority using new Americans who will overpower and subdue the native population." – pp. 124–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Race and Gender Hoaxes</p>
<p>"[T]he third face of identity socialism [is] the race and sex agenda. Again, this is...part of an attempt to amass a ruling majority by incorporating a mélange of self-styled victim groups. Strangely, the actual agenda here is pretty thin[, except that t]he left...wants biological males to be able to use women's bathrooms and compete in women's athletic events. Most of the legislative action...has been on th[is] front. Somehow, transgenders are [on] the front lines of identity socialism....</p>
<p>"What's going on...is that race and sex have become more than mechanisms to secure group loyalty for the Democratic left. [T]hey have become tactics of intimidation. The socialist left uses these mechanisms to force people to grovel and submit to its worldview. They want to overturn your moral code and replace it with their moral code. The [English] economist John Maynard Keynes...called this 'immoralism'[.]</p>
<p>"Naturally, [in general,] the left expects resistance. So the whole race and gender thing is aimed at torpedoing that resistance. The basic idea is to portray whites, males and heterosexuals as evil oppressors, and nonwhites, females and gender benders of all kinds as the most normal, wonderful people in the world. And if you say otherwise, or oppose this view, the left will demonize you as racist, sexist, heterosexist and a 'hater.' Then they will try to destroy your career and your life.</p>
<p>"[I]t is now customary, if not obligatory, to tiptoe around blacks and other people of color, to express deference if not subservience to their demands and to put up with behavior that would be utterly intolerable if anyone else did it. We live in a society of black and brown privilege, yet all that we hear about is 'white privilege.'</p>
<p>"[R]acial hoaxes have...become commonplace, especially on the university campus. [Political scientist] Wilfred Reilly in his [recent] book <em>Hate Crime Hoax[: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War]</em> counts more than 400 racial hoaxes.</p>
<p>"[T]he hoaxer is...like a cop who feels sure that the suspect did it, but since he doesn't have the evidence, he...plant[s] it. The outcome, he's convinced, is just, because he 'knows' the suspect is guilty.</p>
<p>"[S]ince...Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh...has been on the Court, all...the various women who accused [him] have disappeared, and the media has lost all interest in following up on any of these cases, since they have ceased to be ideologically useful.</p>
<p>"For some feminists, all of this is aimed at more than just putting men on notice that they can be accused and ruined at any time. It is also about toppling the heterosexual norm itself. As one writer, Marcie Bianco, recently wrote on the NBC website, 'Heterosexuality is just not working.' [W]omen are coming to recognize that 'they don't need heterosexuality,' which is the 'bedrock of their global oppression.'</p>
<p>"The solution: some form of lesbianism!...Miley Cyrus' split with Liam Hemsworth [is] 'a blow to the patriarchy.' Bianco is not kidding[.]</p>
<p>"[T]he notion that women are...oppressed by men goes back to the 1970s, when Shulamith Firestone published <em>The Dialectic of Sex.</em> [T]he basic problem...was nature itself, which assigned to women the reproductive function. Therefore[,] in the same manner that Marx asked the worker proletariat to seize control of the means of production, women must seize control of the means of reproduction.</p>
<p>"This means[:] abortion. The fetus...is an 'uninvited guest.' But it also means breaking...the biological family by figuring out ways to have artificial reproduction...outside the womb. Th[at] way children would still be born, but mothers wouldn't...carry them; somehow both sexes would bear equal responsibility[.] Firestone['s] ideological thrust [was] clear." – pp. 126–30</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Man Who Mistook Himself for a Toad</p>
<p>"[T]he radical gay and transgender movements...pick...up...this same thread....I have the biological equipment to be a boy, but I think I am a girl....The traditional medical approach has always been that nature dictates biology, and when psychology refuses to come to terms with biology, there is an urgent need for therapeutic intervention.</p>
<p>"The transgender movement wants to reverse that approach. Psychology trumps biology....Of course I don't have the biological equipment of a toad. But I feel that I am a toad. Therefore, I spend my days acting like a toad, jumping around in ponds and marshes[.]</p>
<p>"What happens if I then insist that society treat me like a toad? This means allowing me to audition for toad roles in Disney movies....It means that toad jokes are entirely taboo; if I hear someone call me anything other than a toad, I become furious and accuse that person of being a hater and a neo-Nazi....</p>
<p>"If, as leftists routinely say, 'gender is a social construct,' why isn't species membership also a social construct? [I]t takes a human[,] social system of classification to distinguish one species from another....</p>
<p>"Recently[,] TV personality Mario Lopez said in an interview that he was 'kind of blown away' by the whole transgender thing. [P]arents should 'allow their kids to be kids but at the same time, you gotta be the adult in the situation.'</p>
<p>"[H]e was viciously attacked in the usual left-wing quarters[.] Lopez seems to have saved his job only by apologizing....</p>
<p>"The real story here is the reeducation of Mario Lopez. Reeducation is...an old socialist technique, applied here in a new way. To put it in Marcuse's terms, the left had every right to be intolerant of Lopez's intolerance and to beat him into abject submission.</p>
<p>"[T]he left want[s] Mario Lopez...to embrace their race and gender hoaxes and their Moulin Rouge society. This is...limited Stalinism, [with] an official position on [merely] every aspect of identity politics. The left's goal here is to stigmatize resistance as discrimination and to ruthlessly punish dissenters[,] so that everyone is suitably warned. Socialism is a scheme for the trampling of human hearts.</p>
<p>"Today we are living with an identity socialism that seeks not only an economic upheaval but also a cultural upheaval. Its goal is forced cultural conformity: 'Here's our make-believe world that we are going to make you believe is real.' They want to bludgeon us into accepting their imagined community in which good is evil and evil is good, in which...normal behavior and feelings are rendered pathological, in which aliens are the true Americans and native-born citizens feel like aliens[.]" – pp. 131–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 4: Venezuela, S[í]; Sweden, No</p>
<p>Socialism and the Scandinavian Illusion</p>
<p>"[I]s there a socialist system today that moves and inspires...American socialism?...</p>
<p>"That model, the progressive economist Paul Krugman insists, is...Scandinavia....</p>
<p>"The point of Krugman's rhetorical performance...is to distance the American left from Venezuela[.] The same point is made by Krugman's allies on the American left.</p>
<p>"[T]he socialist blogger Matt Bruenig...solemnly notes that Norway deposits its oil revenues into a capital fund that it specifically labels 'the people's money[,] divided equally...for generations to come.'...</p>
<p>"Ocasio-Cortez said in a <em>60 Minutes</em> interview that...what we see in [Scandinavia is] 'on your 10 millionth dollar[,] tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent.' This is...indicative of how American leftists...have no...interest in how things actually work in the Scandinavian countries." – pp. 135–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Thank God for Scandinavia</p>
<p>"Scandinavia...appears to show that socialism at least works somewhere. This is encouraging for American socialists who must...confront a dreary landscape of failed socialist regimes, past and present....</p>
<p>"I'm not denying the existence of Nordic [(Scandinavian)] socialism. Nor do I deny that this type of socialism works to a point. What I deny is that it can be imported here. Our type of society doesn't...have the conditions for it....Moreover[,] the American left doesn't want it[, and] would consider the result a nightmare. [Thus t]he left's entire invocation of Scandinavian socialism is a fraud....</p>
<p>"The key to understanding Scandinavian socialism is that it is 'unification socialism,' very different from the 'division socialism'...of the American left. Unification socialism is the socialism of the tribe[.] The whole point is to gather the society into a single unit....The burdens of survival, and the fruits of prosperity, must be broadly shared by the whole society.</p>
<p>"In the old Viking days[,] Scandinavian solidarity was the product of the demands of survival in [a] harsh climate....</p>
<p>"Today...Nordic culture has preserved that sense of tribal solidarity that enables those countries to distribute their wealth...widely in the confident belief that they are helping 'our people.' Gert Tinggaard Svendsen, a political scientist at Denmark's Aarhus University, says that 'the Nordic welfare state works due to trust. You have to trust that people work and pay taxes when they are able'[.]</p>
<p>"One can see right away how distant the Nordic psychology is from the American....It...violates the root assumption...of American socialists[:] that America is not a single tribe. Diversity, not unity, is our defining characteristic and strength. The left here separates society into various subgroups: rich and poor, black and white, immigrant and native. The whole structure is based on 'us' against 'them.' Socialism in America means forcing groups defined as 'oppressors' to submit and pay up to groups defined as 'victims.'</p>
<p>"Nothing could be more alien to the spirit of Scandinavian socialism. None of the Nordic countries vilifies their rich. None of them preaches the politics of ethnic division. None of them exalts immigrants over natives, or illegal aliens over citizens. On the contrary, they preach the politics of ethnic unity. They stress the uniformity of Nordic culture. There is no 'us' versus 'them'[;] there is only 'us.' The Nordics insist that immigrants adopt Nordic culture...and...lose their enthusiasm for immigration...when they don't.</p>
<p>"For these reasons, American leftists who have thought about the subject realize they don't want Nordic socialism. They realize it can't work in America, and quite separately from that, it holds no appeal for them." – pp. 138–41</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">People Like Us</p>
<p>"When I think of what makes Nordic socialism distinctive, I'm reminded of [urban geographer] Joel Kotkin's [1992] book <em>Tribes[: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy.</em> O]ne key [feature of] some of the world's most successful groups[,] Kotkin argues, is their 'strong sense of identity.'...</p>
<p>"When tribal unity is strong, it generates trust....</p>
<p>"In the Middle Ages, the Muslim writer Ibn Khaldun used precisely this concept of tribal solidarity—which he called <em>asabiyah</em>—to advance a novel theory of history. Tribes that develop strong <em>asabiyah,</em> according to Khaldun, become very good fighters, and they also sustain strong communities....</p>
<p>"This kind of tribal identification that Kotkin and Khaldun both praise is reminiscent of the socialism—even communism—that operates within the nuclear family....'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.' Of course[,] healthy [f]amilies strive...to prepare the dependent children to become independent....</p>
<p>"The earliest forms of socialism, going back to the early nineteenth century, can be understood as an extension of this family principle....These were voluntary communities based on a shared vision. They functioned largely through consensus, which means they sought the elimination of faction.</p>
<p>"[T]he early Christians functioned as a kind of socialist commune. 'No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own,' we read in the Book of Acts, 'but they shared everything they had' and 'there were no needy persons among them.' Here we see the roots of Scandinavian socialism; it builds on the unification impulse of the early socialists and manifests as a secular version of the huddled unity that characterized the early Christians.</p>
<p>"Marx is the founder of the division socialism that...continues to define the socialism of the American left. Marx ridiculed the early socialist communities[. T]hey offered no way to transform society as a whole.</p>
<p>"Marx argued that a powerful economic structure like capitalism doesn't give way without a fight. Powerful people like capitalists don't submit unless they are pressured or overthrown. Consequently, socialism can come only via the class struggle. There has to be a Manichean division in society between capitalists and workers, or between the bad guys and the good guys. The good guys [can] win [only] by overthrowing the bad guys....</p>
<p>"FDR...taunted, reviled and sought to humiliate the capitalist class....FDR identified his wealthy Republican opponents as plutocrats, describing them as 'the forces of selfishness and of lust for power....They are unanimous in their hatred of me'[.]</p>
<p>"FDR use[d] the rhetoric of class warfare, of social division, to expand his electoral majority[. H]e sa[id] the plutocratic class...are 'aliens to the spirit of American democracy.'...</p>
<p>"Identity socialism continues...the politics of social division....The identity socialists...mobilize a martial rhetoric to crusade against their great reviled totem: the white male native-born heterosexual.</p>
<p>"The symbol of this evil—the totem himself—is...Trump. [Democratic presidential candidate, former Texas congressman] Beto O'Rourke calls him a white nationalist....Warren says that 'he has given aid and comfort to white supremacists.' Biden insists that Trump 'has fanned the flames of white supremacy.' According to...Ocasio-Cortez, a 'core part' of Trump's coalition was racists together with 'all sorts of other people that could be susceptible to racist views.' Notice how the indictment has moved from Trump to [his] supporters.</p>
<p>"The week of Trump's election, the writer Toni Morrison argued that[,] 'the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force.' And who are the Americans who respond to the call of whiteness? 'They are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school'...and to 'shoot black children in the street.' Is there any basis for unity here, for drawing these people into a...community? Of course not. Morrison wants them stigmatized, routed [and] ruined....</p>
<p>"O'Rourke recently said that 'this country is founded on white supremacy[,] and every single institution and structure that we have in our country still reflects the legacy of...slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression.'...</p>
<p>"For <em>The New York Times,</em> it's not enough to trace America's racial sins to the founders, because that still leaves as innocent the Americans who lived before the founding....</p>
<p>"In his [2002] book <em>Racism[: A Short History],</em> the Marxist historian George Fredrickson writes that 'racism as an ideology of inherent black inferiority emerged...in reaction to the rise of [N]orthern abolitionism in the 1830s.' Moreover, 'Antiblack racism peaked in the period between the end of Reconstruction and the First World War.'</p>
<p>"Fredrickson's dates are important, because they coincide with the rise and humiliating defeat of the Democratic Party. Antiblack racism runs congruent to those developments. Indeed, prior to 1860, the Democratic Party was the party of the slave plantation, and it trafficked in racism as a justification of slavery. After the Civil War, Democrats promoted racism as a doctrine of biological inferiority. Leading Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth century and then, after Republicans shut it down, revived it in the early twentieth century....</p>
<p>"Today the left...doesn't want...young people...to know the role of the Democrats in protecting slavery and advancing racism[—h]ence the pivot back to 1619! Th[at] way[,] 'America' gets the blame for what the Democrats did.</p>
<p>"[W]e see here...a systematic effort on the part of the American left to use various categories of oppression...to divide society into good guys and bad guys. Then their good guys band together to create an electoral majority for the left's operating vehicle, the Democratic Party. Through this majority, they seek to overthrow the power of the bad guys. They...consider it right and just...to confiscate the earnings and possessions of the bad guys to support and enrich themselves.</p>
<p>"In a sense, this is the...Viking model[, except that] the looters and the looted...are now in the same society....FDR understood this, which is why he vilified opponents and made no attempt to persuade or appeal to them. Neither does the left today. The left understands that any solidarity that the raided express for the raiders cannot be natural or voluntary; it must be coerced.</p>
<p>"Consequently, division socialism takes on its intolerant aspect. This is the 'intolerance toward intolerance' that Marcuse advocated. In this Marcusian spirit, the left today makes strenuous attempts to intimidate and bludgeon those whose possessions are being taken[, so they will] quietly succumb to the takers. Those who protest are branded as bigots and haters who deserve to be silenced, fired, prosecuted or imprisoned if necessary[—]but in one way or another driven to the margins of society.</p>
<p>"The Scandinavians would be appalled and horrified; imagine a Swede or Norwegian doing this to a fellow Swede or Norwegian! No Scandinavian has ever identified American socialism as resembling Scandinavian socialism, even in embryo. The defining features of American socialism and the American left—identity politics, class and ethnic division, and social intimidation to enforce these categories—are simply absent in the Nordic countries." – pp. 141–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">White on White</p>
<p>"I'm not aware of a single American socialist who wants what the Scandinavians have....The reasons for this are not merely temperamental [but] go back to Madison's discussions in <em>The Federalist</em> about how large extended republics cannot work on the same model as a small homogeneous society.</p>
<p>"[In] ancient Athens or Crete[,] the...goal [was] a one-class society. Madison insisted that factions are inevitable in a large extended republic. They reflect competing values and interests, and they cannot be eliminated. So the founding architecture is designed to accommodate this brute fact[:] in Madison's terms, to steer the course of factional politics toward the common welfare of society.</p>
<p>"Deep down, the American left agrees with this [distinction]. That's why leading figures of the left never go to Scandinavia....Sanders, who has Scandinavian roots and seems to have visited every socialist landmark on the planet, has never been to Scandinavia....</p>
<p>"The white ethnic Norwegians form a dominant majority bloc. They set the tone for the whole country. [The] journalist Robert Kaiser...reported that...tiny...Finland...is 'ethnically and religiously homogeneous.' The Finns, he said, look alike and think alike. 'Groupthink seems to be fine with most Finns; conformity is the norm.' Politics is based on consensus, and the major political parties are...inches apart.</p>
<p>"In Scandinavian countries[, t]here are no 'oppressors' and 'oppressed.' There is no 'white privilege.'</p>
<p>"[T]he black and brown immigrants to Scandinavian countries are largely indigestible. They are visitors of a sort in Nordic society....</p>
<p>"Norwegians have no intention of dissolving their own tribe; consequently, they have been shutting the door on immigration[.]</p>
<p>"Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen...once boasted that his country had no border walls[.] Responding to public opinion[, he] now...stress[es] that his government's goal is not to have refugees stay permanently but to eventually return home[:] 'We should not make refugees immigrants.'</p>
<p>"Carl Melin, policy director at the Swedish research institute Futurion, says that Swedes built the welfare state for themselves, not for outsiders. He remarks that his country has been cutting back on immigration because of the realization that 'people are quite open to showing solidarity for people who are like themselves. They don't show solidarity for people who are different.'...Urban Petersson, a council member in the town of Filipstad...says[,] 'It's interesting to meet someone from another country for maybe half an hour'[.] But '[p]eople don't want to pay taxes...to support refugees who don't work.'</p>
<p>"These problems are not unique to the Nordic countries[;] they afflict all of Europe. In this country, it is possible for a Nigerian, a Korean or an Asian Indian to 'become American.' But it has proved far more difficult for a Turk to become a German, for a Pakistani to become an Englishman, for a Syrian to become a Swede. This is widely understood throughout Europe[.] The modern Swedish term for 'immigrant'...mean[s] a non-Nordic person in Sweden....</p>
<p>"Scandinavian countries...provide greater security but they also provide lesser social mobility, compared with the United States.</p>
<p>"[T]he American model has proven far more hospitable to nonwhite immigrants than the Nordic model, and leftists in this country realize that." – pp. 146–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Destination Caracas</p>
<p>"If Scandinavian socialism is not the model, then what is? We can answer this question by seeing where American socialists have been going on pilgrimage in the past couple of decades. The short answer is: Venezuela. Venezuela has long been a multiracial society, as America now is. Venezuela has precisely the kind of division socialism that the American left admires and practices....</p>
<p>"In a 2006 speech at the World Education Forum in Caracas, with Hugo Chavez himself in attendance[,] Bill Ayers[, t]he former domestic terrorist and cofounder of the Weather Underground...spoke about how 'education is the motor force of revolution' and how 'Venezuela is a beacon to the world' because it was 'poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation.'</p>
<p>"[T]he left has long considered Venezuela as its actual dream and inspiration. There is no comparable literature of leftist political pilgrimage to Norway or Sweden....Venezuela, not Scandinavia, is the left's model, and it is Venezuela that supplies the road map for where we seem to be headed if we choose the socialist path." – pp. 150–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Why Andrew Yang Feels So Generous</p>
<p>"This is how the Scandinavians designed their welfare state: everyone is expected to act responsibly, and everyone, including the poor and the middle class, is taxed heavily.</p>
<p>"The underlying image of the welfare state is not one of a 'safety net' but rather one of the 'nest,' in which all the birds work diligently to sustain a common habitat....</p>
<p>"The reason for the cheering...at a...Democratic...rally...is the audience's excitement over its realization that their bills and benefits will be footed by some other guy.</p>
<p>"This isn't social insurance; it's theft socialism. In this country, the socialists want to stick the bill on Wall Street, or the rich, or the vilified '1 percent.' The strategy is to target an affluent minority that will be shoved up against the wall and forced to pay for the education, healthcare and monthly expenses of Democratic voters. In this way, the Democrats seek to create a majority coalition of dependent voters who can put, and keep, the left in power.</p>
<p>"[F]ormer Democratic presidential candidate, entrepreneur Andrew Yang['s] program involves a government giveaway of $1,000 a month to every adult....As <em>Wired</em> magazine notes, the only way the nation could bankroll this sort of program would be to get rid of many if not most existing social programs. But there's the rub. No Democrat wants to do that. Not even Yang....</p>
<p>"No Scandinavian country has Universal Basic Income." – pp. 153–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Everyone Must Pay</p>
<p>"While taxes cover the majority of healthcare costs, the Finns, like all Scandinavian countries, do not target the rich or the 1 percent. They target the entire society. The whole society is responsible for providing not just healthcare but also education and paid leave and all the other services that form part of the social insurance package. This means high taxes across the board. In some respects, the Scandinavians impose higher proportionate taxation on the middle and lower classes than they do on the rich....</p>
<p>"In Scandinavia[,] nearly half the society is taxed at the top rate....</p>
<p>"Moreover, the Scandinavian countries...collect around 10 percent of their gross domestic product through VAT [(]value-added tax[)] levies.</p>
<p>"[So] Scandinavians tax all working citizens at a rate of around 50 percent, but when you figure in the VAT, the poor and middle classes pay...higher [effective] rates than the rich....</p>
<p>"We can...say...that...the Scandinavian countries...are capitalist in wealth creation and socialist in wealth distribution....</p>
<p>"Unlike the American left, the Scandinavian countries don't demonize either [the] corporations or the rich....</p>
<p>"Sweden veered sharply in the socialist direction in the 1970s [following a] suggestion of [the] economist Rudolf Meidner [that] private ownership of...companies...gradually be transferred to...labor unions....</p>
<p>"But the Swedes themselves killed the Meidner Plan[, as] socialist policies dragged the Swedish economy into a slowdown[.]</p>
<p>"So the irony is that while the American left [says they] want...to move toward Scandinavian socialism, the Scandinavians have been moving away from it. The Nordics have learned from their experience with socialism; American leftists seem determined to pick up the Nordic model from the 1970s, ignore the lessons of subsequent experience and make all the same mistakes. Many on the left here will find it surprising that Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands now rank higher than the United States on the Heritage Foundation's 'Index of Economic Freedom.'</p>
<p>"[S]ome Nordic socialists are looking wistfully to the possibility of an American model that they can emulate. Writing in <em>Jacobin,</em> two Scandinavian scholars say that when it comes to digesting refugees and immigrants[,] to creating a model for 'a comprehensive welfare state in a multiethnic country,' the Scandinavians hope to learn from America[.]</p>
<p>"To sum up, the Scandinavian model is social insurance for 'people like us,' while the American left subscribes to what may be termed 'theft socialism' for the benefit of various favored constituencies, including illegals." – pp. 159–63</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Hugo Chavez's Gangster Socialism</p>
<p>"[T]he left's model for socialism in this country is not Scandinavia but Venezuela[: m]y wife [Debbie]'s native country[—]now in ruins[.]</p>
<p>"Of course they won't admit it. They keep repeating the mantra that their goal in America isn't dictatorial socialism of the traditional stripe; it's democratic socialism. But Venezuela has, or at least had, democratic socialism. Hugo Chavez was democratically elected in 1998. There have been subsequent elections, sustaining first Chavez and then, after his death, his handpicked successor Nicolás Maduro, although virtually every ballot since 2000 has been contaminated with charges of election-rigging and voter fraud[.]</p>
<p>"Why would the American left seek to emulate Third World socialism? [Because] Venezuela was not always a Third World country. In the 1960s, it was the richest country in Latin America and the fourth-richest country in the world[.]</p>
<p>"Socialism made Venezuela into a Third World country.</p>
<p>"[A]t the same time—and this is part of the appeal—it created a wealthy ruling class of Chavistas who run the country like their own private domain. They rewrite the constitution. They have their own private army. They are a governing elite exempt from the misery and desperation of ordinary citizens. They have uninhibited access to what remains of Venezuela's oil wealth. [T]heir lifestyles are the envy of American leftists....</p>
<p>"Let's examine the ingredients of Venezuelan socialism and see if they sound familiar. First[:] identity politics. Venezuela is a multiethnic country. In this respect it resembles America, not Scandinavia....</p>
<p>"There were two main parties, Acción Democrática and Copei. The former was the secular party; the latter nominally the Christian party. The former leaned to the left; the latter to the right....</p>
<p>"Hugo Chavez was elected as a third-party candidate who eventually got the backing of Acción Democrática. He didn't campaign as a socialist—in fact, he denied that he was a socialist. Remarkably, Chavez founded the Socialist Party in Venezuela only in 2007, eight years after he became president. Initially he sounded more like Barack Obama; he portrayed himself as a thoughtful centrist who sought 'hope and change.' Yes, this was his actual slogan.</p>
<p>"But Chavez also introduced an explosive new element into Venezuelan politics: the politics of race and ethnicity. Chavez highlighted the fact that he was a <em>pardo,</em> a term used in the colonial era to designate someone of mixed racial heritage....Chavez noted that his grandmother was a Pume Indian. Chavez's term for whites was <em>mantuanos,</em> which tellingly covers not only whites but also colored people with European pretensions....</p>
<p>"Knowing that nearly 70 percent of Venezuela is mestizo or mixed-race, with 20 percent white and 10 percent black, Chavez sought to mobilize the native Indian, black and mestizo populations against the whites....Chavez used the anticolonial model: whites of European descent are the foreign oppressors, and blacks and browns are the victims....</p>
<p>"Chavez turned Venezuela into a racially polarized society to an extent that it never was[,] before. The socialists introduced a new cultural policy termed Misión Cultura aimed at vilifying whites and elevating previously marginalized groups to hallowed status. Chavez even pressured the referees in Venezuelan beauty pageants not to award prizes to so many light-skinned Venezuelans and to give preference to those who looked more like him....</p>
<p>"Chavez created a new Chavista class heavily populated with blacks and browns, although sprinkled with whites who are happy to serve as 'race traitors' in order to enjoy the benefit of being part of a ruling elite. In Venezuela, as in America, identity politics serves to topple old social and cultural hierarchies and to foster a multicultural left[,] that then controls and dominates the society.</p>
<p>"Then came [the second theme:] the attack on [the] entrepreneurs and the rich. Chavez demonized the productive class—notably the Europeans, Americans and Venezuelans who collaborated in the oil industry—and invoked their alleged greed and selfishness to justify a government takeover not only of the oil industry but [of] nearly all industries. The socialists stacked the banks with directors drawn from Chavez's allies and cronies. The regime set wages and prices for basic goods, restricting the ability of entrepreneurs to make a profit, driving many of them out of the country and...ruining their businesses, so productivity ground to a halt....</p>
<p>"Chavez then proceeded to get rid of the professional class of Venezuelans that ran...the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA)[.] He fired PDVSA's president, the respected Guaicaipuro Lameda, and 18,000 other employees, most of them managers and skilled technicians, replacing them all with political allies loyal to the socialist government. For Chavistas who found themselves with grand titles, occupying corner offices, it must have felt like winning the lottery! These apparatchiks, through that familiar socialist combination of corruption and ineptitude, ran the oil industry into the ground....</p>
<p>"Some of these incompetents...mouthed off about 'climate change' and how Venezuela needed to make a transition from fossil fuel to hydroelectric power....The Chavistas...actually sought to [accomplish this] replace[ment. T]ogether with a mismanaged [electrical] grid[, t]his...is the root of today's regular blackouts.</p>
<p>"[T]he new PDVSA crew was running an oil-drilling operation [that] they had no idea how to run....</p>
<p>"Then began the socialist confiscation of land and property in Venezuela....Chavez himself liked to parade through neighborhoods, seizing property[.] These confiscations were triumphantly featured on Chavez's reality TV show <em>Aló Presidente</em> (Hello President).</p>
<p>"To oppose the socialist government is futile [b]ecause of the third feature of Venezuelan socialism, which is the rigging of the system to make it beholden to the socialist regime. Chavez and his cronies rewrote the Venezuelan constitution, dismantling provisions for [the] separation of powers and essentially stripping the document of its protection of economic and civil liberties. They 'packed' the Venezuelan Supreme Court, increasing its size from 20 to 32, in order to ensure that it was dominated by Chavistas. Today there is no judicial independence, and the Venezuelan high court is a rubber stamp for the socialist regime.</p>
<p>"Sure, there is an elected National Assembly—now largely made up of dissenters who oppose the socialist government—but it is largely powerless, because all legislation must go through another body, the Constituent National Assembly, which is controlled by the Chavistas.</p>
<p>"[I]t's easy to see how the Venezuelan blueprint points the direction in which...the American left...would love to go." – pp. 163–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Desarma la Violencia</p>
<p>"A fourth feature of Venezuelan socialism is gun confiscation. Here too we see how Venezuela resembles America[.] In Venezuela[,] citizens once possessed guns as a matter of right. The socialists began a systematic propaganda campaign to demonize guns and gun owners. This campaign was termed 'Desarma la Violencia' (Disarm the Violence)....</p>
<p>"The political purpose is to disarm the citizens, so that they are vulnerable to the depredations of the socialist regime. We now turn to the fifth feature of Venezuelan socialism, which is the unleashing of armed militias—the so-called <em>colectivos</em>—against dissidents and protestors. If you blame the government for shortages or blackouts, the government will send a motorcycle gang of armed thugs to beat you and members of your family. In 2005 the <em>colectivos</em> took control of a region of Caracas and unleashed an orgy of terror on tens of thousands of citizens protesting against the socialist regime.</p>
<p>"These thugs are Venezuela's answer to Antifa. They are not part of the government. They are civilian thugs who work in cahoots with the socialist regime. Some of them are criminals who have been armed and released on the condition that they serve the regime and target its opponents. No surprise[,] Ayers[—who is] one of the founders of [Antifa-allied anti-fascist organization Refuse Fascism]—praises the <em>colectivos</em> as a necessary militarized force to defeat the enemies of Venezuelan socialism. 'Venezuela must be defended,' Ayers writes, in part because it 'is today's proving ground for socialist alternatives.'...</p>
<p>"Conformity. That's the sixth theme of Venezuelan socialism. The whole education system has been designed not for debate but for conformity. This isn't an allegation I am making: it's the law. The socialist government has mandated that all education in the country be conducted according to what it terms 'Bolivarian socialism.'...</p>
<p>"The Chavistas have made [the] classical liberal...Simón Bolívar, who liberated much of Latin America from the Spanish[,] into a socialist. If the textbooks say he was a socialist, then, from the students' point of view, he must have been a socialist. There is no one to say any different. And Venezuelan socialism has an anti-American thrust that vilifies everything that America stands for. No wonder Ayers and the Hollywood left are so enthusiastic. That's why they rave about socialist 'literacy programs'—they are 100 percent political propaganda.</p>
<p>"And that...is the direction in which the American left has been moving education in this country. Propaganda on climate change, on identity politics, on gender and race and inequality, now dominates elementary and secondary education, and the debate that once occurred on American campuses is now a rarity; Antifa blockades and the shouting down of speakers has now become the norm.</p>
<p>"[T]he seventh familiar theme of Venezuelan socialism...is getting rich off politics. [I]n Venezuela, as in America, it is quite possible for 'public servants' to become very rich.</p>
<p>"[The merely rich] are the bottom apples in the Chavista barrel; the top ones live at the scale of the richest people in the world, enjoying private airplanes, domestic staff, Hollywood soirees, and Michelin-starred restaurants.</p>
<p>"[T]he late Hugo Chavez's family owns 17 country estates, totaling more than 100,000 acres....</p>
<p>"For Venezuelans[, i]t's one thing to be in pain; it's another to watch the people proclaiming to be your champion stamping their boots in your face to keep you down while they live high on the hog. These people seem like heartless monsters, and of course they are[: j]ust like the heartless monsters in this country who sound like them and, deep down, long to be like them.</p>
<p>"When we consider the major themes of Venezuelan socialism, we can see right away that every one of them parallels the themes of the American left. American leftists are wannabe Maduros pretending to take their cues from [Scandinavia]. If we continue to move in the direction that the left is taking us, we are going to end up not where the Scandinavians are but where the Venezuelans are." – pp. 169–72</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 5: Just Deserts</p>
<p>The Moral Basis of Entrepreneurial Capitalism</p>
<p>"The best thing going for socialism in America is the moral anxiety over capitalism. This by itself is a puzzle. Capitalism has proven enormously successful in relieving suffering [and] raising people out of poverty[.]</p>
<p>"Yet—and to some this will seem incredible—the anxiety over technological capitalism is perhaps stronger in America now than at any time since the Great Depression....I can understand the rage of a sociologist or [a] political scientist who, despite making $100,000 a year, despises a capitalist economy that confers vastly greater rewards on [someone] who sells...term-life insurance. Envy is not a justification, but it often provides a good explanation.</p>
<p>"But today we see whole groups in society that seem to revile capitalism[,] even though they are its greatest beneficiaries. On my campus tours, I frequently encounter students who are living off the proceeds of the small businesses operated by their parents, yet, in evident disregard of this, they unhesitatingly call themselves socialists....</p>
<p>"At one time such strange behavior was confined to Jews....Irving Kristol [of] the American Enterprise Institute...pondered this seeming political 'irrationality' on the part of Jewish Democrats. But now...many rich people earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans....</p>
<p>"Capitalism has won the economic debate, but it has never won the moral debate. The critics of capitalism are currently winning because their moral indictment goes largely unanswered." – pp. 173–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Three Strikes Against Capitalism</p>
<p>"[A]t the South by Southwest conference in Austin, [Texas,] Ocasio-Cortez...express[ed] the anticapitalist sentiment[:] 'The most important thing is the concentration of capital, and it means that we seek and prioritize profit and the accumulation of money above all else and we seek it at any human and environmental cost....To me, that ideology is not sustainable and cannot be redeemed.'...</p>
<p>"I find three arguments that seek to expose what the progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz calls 'fundamental flaws in the capitalist system.'...</p>
<p>"First, the argument from inequality. This argument...focus[es] on the degree of it....</p>
<p>"Since the 1970s[,] inequalities have grown much starker [than i]n the three decades following World War II[.]</p>
<p>"It is not enough to attribute these huge chasms to 'capitalism,' since America was capitalist between the 1940s and 1970s. Clearly something within capitalism has changed[.]</p>
<p>"A second anxiety about capitalism is focused on an issue that we may term...'just deserts.' 'The twenty-first century economy,' writes [the journalist] Nathan Robinson in <em>Why You Should be a Socialist,</em> seems 'more feudalistic than meritocratic.' In short, people aren't getting their fair share!...</p>
<p>"This issue of fair share and just deserts is encapsulated in Obama's claim, going back to 2012, that 'if you've got a business—you didn't build that...If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. Somebody else made that happen.'...</p>
<p>"This argument is flawed on its face. The 'rest of us' didn't pay for the roads and the schools and the police protection; the entrepreneurs paid also. So why [are] entrepreneurs...obligat[ed] to reimburse society for things to which they have already contributed their fair share? Should entrepreneurs be penalized because they made better use of the[m,] while the rest of us used them for less productive purposes? This makes no sense.</p>
<p>"But the question being raised[—]are the rewards of a capitalist society proportionate to what people actually contribute?—remains valid. In a recent interview[,] Ocasio-Cortez said, 'No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.' Here's the argument from personal incredulity...again....</p>
<p>"Capitalism, the social theorist Michael Walzer argued[,] is inherently unjust because it does not recognize the 'intrinsic value' of work [n]or the 'individual qualities' of the worker. [Besides, t]here is too much luck involved[;] talk of desert makes little sense.'</p>
<p>"[T]he philosopher John Rawls...in his classic work <em>A Theory of Justice</em> argued that all our good qualities—our intelligence, our creativity, even our proclivity for hard work—are basically assets that have been provided to us as a consequence of luck. If we think about it, we don't really deserve them....</p>
<p>"We are not, Rawls argues, entitled to the benefits of luck....</p>
<p>"Rawls contends that we should seek 'a conception of justice that nullifies the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstances.' Th[is] basic idea is now a core element of progressive doctrine[:] namely that, through state intervention, the fruits of all good fortune must be shared with society, specifically with the least advantaged....</p>
<p>"A third and final argument against capitalism is that it is based on the worst qualities in human nature[:] namely, greed and selfishness. [W]e may expect that a socialist society...would also have greed and selfishness, but the progressive indictment of capitalism holds that these low qualities are incidental to other systems and intrinsic to capitalism....</p>
<p>"Entrepreneurs are successful, according to [the Dutch historian] Rutger Bregman, writing in <em>The Guardian,</em> in proportion to how greedy and selfish they are. It has little to do with what they produce....Bankers, he writes, are a 'giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body.' They specialize in 'sucking others dry.'...</p>
<p>"The rich are 'more likely to be despicable characters,' [religious studies academics] Charles Mathewes and Evan Sandsmark write in <em>The Washington Post,</em> and what's more, their vast sums of money 'poison...those who are merely around them.'...Capitalism is responsible for the moral depredation of American society." – pp. 176–80</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">A Single Argument</p>
<p>"[I]n moral terms, who's entitled to what? The arguments about [in]equality and greed...are all reducible to the single argument about fair share and just deserts....</p>
<p>" 'Is justice equality?' Aristotle writes[—]and then he gives this enigmatic answer: 'Yes, it is, but not for all people, only for those who are equal.'...He means that justice is...a matter...of giving everyone what they are actually due. If someone deserves more, it is just to give him more; if someone deserves less, it is just to give him less.</p>
<p>"[I]magin[e] a mother who has two children[:] a six-year-old and an infant. She spends most of her parenting time on the infant. The six-year-old is indignant; he protests he's not getting equal time. The mother...recognizes that...her infant child needs more time.</p>
<p>"[T]he greed and selfishness critique doesn't stand on its own; it involves implicit judgments about fair share and just deserts. [T]he left-wing economist Amartya Sen...envisions three individuals...fighting over a flute....To whom, he pompously asks, should we give the flute?</p>
<p>"The giveaway term here is 'we.' This is the precise point at which we catch Sen in the act. Sen has made the hidden assumption that ownership of the flute has silently transferred from the person who made the flute to some societal 'we' that now determines who gets the flute....</p>
<p>"Is [the one who] made the flute...'selfish' for wanting to keep what she made? Is she 'greedy' for seeking to hold on to what belongs to her? Of course not....</p>
<p>"Who owns stuff in the first place? Who has a moral right to it? 'Justice,'...Rawls...writes, 'is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. [L]aws and institutions no matter how efficient...must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.'</p>
<p>"I agree with this, and therefore the central question...is whether capitalism truly distributes its rewards in proportion with what people actually deserve. If it does, it's just." – pp. 181–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Voting in the Marketplace</p>
<p>"Capitalism has been a controversial institution[,] virtually since its origin[.]</p>
<p>"Adam Smith...famously wrote in <em>The Wealth of Nations</em>[,] 'We address ourselves, not to [merchants'] humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.'</p>
<p>"[In] <em>The Theory of Moral Sentiments</em> [he writes,] 'To feel much for others and little for ourselves, to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.'...He was, by profession, a professor of moral philosophy....</p>
<p>"The Adam Smith 'problem' is that we have two apparently contradictory teachings from the same teacher. In his earlier work, Smith ascribes elevated human action to sympathy and unselfishness; in his later one, he ascribes productive human action to self-interest or, to use his term, 'self-love.' Did Smith change his mind?...</p>
<p>"The...progressive way...to...reconcile th[is] is to hold that Smith conceded the moral inadequacy of capitalism—its rootedness in selfishness and greed—while insisting...that this greed could be channeled, through the invisible hand of competition, to promote the material welfare of the community....</p>
<p>"<em>The Theory of Moral Sentiments</em> seems to hover in stern judgment over <em>The Wealth of Nations.</em> By his own moral compass, as outlined in the first book, Smith seems to concede [that t]he good man looks out for others, while the entrepreneur looks out for himself. And Smith does not even make an effort to show that the allocations of free markets—what Smith terms 'the system of natural liberty'—correspond with merit or just deserts....</p>
<p>"However efficient a capitalist system may be, if it fails to give people their due, it fails the basic test of justice. In Rawls' words, it must be reformed or abolished.</p>
<p>"The alternative...is some form of democratic socialism.</p>
<p>"[T]he moral force of socialism derives from its appeal to democracy.</p>
<p>"[T]he founders clearly recognized popular consent...as the moral basis of the free society. [D]emocratic socialism today rides on the wagon of majority rule and popular consent. Its moral core is that our economic system...must reflect the will of the people. That's what is meant by the term 'social justice.'...</p>
<p>"I embrace...this criterion of justice. [T]he burden of this chapter is...to refute the socialists on their own terms by showing that capitalism, far more than socialism, reflects the will of the people and expresses democratic consent....</p>
<p>"The consumer, like the citizen, is a voter....The consumer votes with his dollar bills, which are his hard-earned money, which represent the time and effort he has put in to get those dollar bills.</p>
<p>"[C]onsumers vote in a system of direct democracy....</p>
<p>"We don't need to extend democracy from the political to the economic sphere; we already have it. And the moral grounding of free markets, just like that of our constitutional system, is in the will of the people[.]</p>
<p>" 'If we are not competent to rule ourselves, then let us misrule ourselves.' Barack Obama Sr., the former president's father, said that in 1959 when he was a student in Hawaii. He was making the case against colonial rule in Kenya....</p>
<p>"Consumers have the right...to elevate the entrepreneurs who produce...the products they want[.]</p>
<p>"Capitalism...is rooted in...popular consent. Thus capitalism, like democracy, is a form of social justice." – pp. 182–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Who Gets the Surplus?</p>
<p>"The parking lot...work[er at a] fine resort hotel...view[s] himself as...a 'maker.' It's the [owners] who are the 'takers,' depriving their employees of their fair share.</p>
<p>"[He] wants to know, 'Where are my just deserts?' [T]his is a legitimate question. We cannot convince him—and countless others like him—by simply chanting, 'Free markets!' 'Capitalism!'...We have to show...that he is being paid commensurate with what he is producing. If we can, [then] we will have shown that the rewards of the free market system are not only efficient but also fair. If we cannot, some socialist-type redistribution becomes not only plausible but also irresistible....</p>
<p>"Marx's celebrated criticism of capitalism...is taught in schools and universities today....Marx regarded [it] as his most original contribution to economic thought. This is the critique on the basis of 'surplus value.' It is intended to show that the outward cooperation between entrepreneurs and workers is illusory, that at bottom there is a deep conflict between them, and [that] the result of the conflict is thievery and exploitation....</p>
<p>"Marx attacks capitalism in its normal functioning; this gives his critique a universal character....</p>
<p>"Marx says...that...businesses...price their products as high as the market will bear. [W]hen you subtract total cost from total revenue, you get a crucial number[, which] Marx calls 'surplus value.' We call it 'profit.'</p>
<p>"Now Marx asks a profound question: Who gets that? The profit, Marx argues, belongs entirely to the workers. Why? Because they are the ones who have produced the product....Marx insists that the capitalist has produced nothing. The capitalist has—like the name says—contributed the capital. [W]e know what capital counts for: it counts for interest. And paying the going rate of interest on capital is part of the cost of doing business. So a business that does this has already repaid its capitalists. They are not due anything above and beyond that.</p>
<p>"Yet although the workers are the ones who are getting the job done, Marx notes that it is the entrepreneur who swoops in and takes all the profits. The workers produce the 'surplus value' but the capitalists steal it. Here, for Marx, is the true meaning of exploitation and social injustice. Here are the roots of the class division. And here is the moral argument against capitalist exploitation and in favor of socialist redistribution. Here's where Obama and later[,] Warren got their diatribes about 'fair share.' It's not about realizing some vague goal of equality; it is simply giving workers their due, using the agency of government to return, one may say, the 'stolen goods' that have been taken from them....</p>
<p>"Marx insists that the capitalist contributes nothing but the capital, and the workers do all the work to make the business run profitably....But...why don't the workers dispense with the CEOs and start their own companies?</p>
<p>"No one is being forced to work at Walmart, so why don't the workers leave and create their own Walmart? Sure, they may lack the initial capital, but they can borrow that at a going rate of interest. This way, there is no one to exploit them and they can share all the profit among themselves. I find it interesting that workers never do this, and even more interesting that Marxists and socialists never even call on them to do it. Deep down, the Marxists seem to realize that they don't do it because they can't.</p>
<p>"But why not? Here we get to the heart of Marx's fallacy. Marx was a highly theoretical thinker[. H]e had no idea of how businesses actually operate or what entrepreneurs actually do....He was a lifelong leech, a...Sanders type, who had most of his expenses paid for by his partner[,] Engels, who inherited his father's textile companies. Incidently, Engels didn't run his family business either; he had people do that for him. Freed from the need to work, Engels was a man of leisure and a part-time intellectual.</p>
<p>"[O]ne reason American progressives are continually drawn to this duo is that they too have little understanding of what entrepreneurs do. Nor do they really care. They have no aspiration to become entrepreneurs. Rather, they prefer occupations like community activist or professor of romance languages[. T]hey aspire to be, like Marx, lifelong leeches, agitating against capitalism even as they subsist off its largesse....</p>
<p>"Schumpeter wrote a little-known [essay in 1928] called [']The Entrepreneur[', which] shows that the one thing Marx says that capitalists do, they in fact do not do. Schumpeter...show[s] that capitalists do at least four important things that Marx...ignored[,] calling his whole critique into question." – pp. 187–90</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Secret of Trump's Success</p>
<p>"The starting point of...Trump's career, he writes in his best-known[, 1987] book, <em>[Trump:] The Art of the Deal,</em> was his realization that 'I didn't want to be in the business my father was in.'</p>
<p>" 'I was out to build something monumental—something worth a big effort.'...</p>
<p>"One defining feature of an entrepreneur[,] Schumpeter...writes, is 'the dream and the desire to found a private kingdom.' In fact, the secret dream of the entrepreneur is to found a 'dynasty,' to project the dream beyond his own life. It is, Schumpeter admits, 'the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man.'</p>
<p>"The motivation of the entrepreneur...is 'the will to conquer, the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others, to succeed for the sake...of success itself....The financial result is a secondary consideration[,] mainly valued as an index of success and a symptom of victory.' It is...subordinate to 'the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one's energy and ingenuity.'...</p>
<p>"Early in his career, Trump set his sights on [a h]otel...built in 1919 [opposite] Grand Central Terminal...and named after 'Commodore' Cornelius Vanderbilt. [D]erelicts reclined in the hallways....</p>
<p>"Trump's interpretation[:] 'What I saw was a superb location.' Affluent prospects were passing through it every day....'I was sure it could be a hit. Convenience alone would assure that.'</p>
<p>"[I]t's a big new idea, and that's what counts to get things started. [That]'s the first thing entrepreneurs do: they come up with a big new idea for a venture. [T]hey envision a new product, a new landscape, a new way of doing things or a new way of living....</p>
<p>" 'Most people,' Schumpeter writes, 'do not see the new combinations. They do not exist for them. Most people tend to their usual daily business'[.]</p>
<p>"[T]he second element of entrepreneurship...involves organizing the business....'I...told...my father...I had a chance to make a deal for [a] huge midtown hotel....He refused to believe I was serious.' Trump had to figure out how to buy the Commodore, and how to run it, even though he lacked the funds...and...had no experience in operating an upscale Manhattan hotel....</p>
<p>"Schumpeter calls the entrepreneur...a 'man of action.' What he means is that [he] must take action notwithstanding the risk involved. So here we have a third distinguishing feature of the entrepreneur[:] his employees...receive a guaranteed paycheck...per their contracts, [but] the entrepreneur takes virtually all the risk. [I]f the venture fails, he does not get paid at all.</p>
<p>"[I]f the Commodore failed[,] Trump...would not only make no money, he was basically out of the real estate business in Manhattan....Trump confesses he hates risk. 'People think I'm a gambler. I've never gambled in my life....I believe in the power of negative thinking. I always go into the deal anticipating the worst.'...</p>
<p>"Unknown risks are risks you cannot insure against because you cannot compute the probabilities.</p>
<p>"[T]he economist Frank Knight...pointed out that unknown risks are the hallmark of a capitalist economy.</p>
<p>"Entrepreneurs must go ahead in the face of risks that cannot be known, let alone mitigated. Sometimes they must do so with very limited information, indeed with little more to go on than personal intuition. This, Schumpeter writes, involves the entrepreneur overcoming the greatest resistance his venture will ever encounter[:] not resistance from the outside but resistance from within the mind of the entrepreneur himself.</p>
<p>"[T]he new thing the entrepreneur wants to make does not exist yet; it is only the 'figment of his imagination.' " – pp. 191–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">A Genius for Spectacle</p>
<p>"Trump...unveiled his plan to remake the Commodore...'with...highly reflective glass.'...The critics groused that Trump was violating the architectural norm of the area[.]</p>
<p>"Trump had a different idea[: 'Y]ou [will] see the reflection of Grand Central Terminal, the Chrysler Building, and all the other landmarks'[.]</p>
<p>"[T]he fourth characteristic feature of entrepreneurs [is] the branding and marketing of the business....</p>
<p>"Trump reacted [to] a competing property...lower[ing] its prices[: 'W]ealthy people...want the best[.] By pricing its apartments lower than ours, Museum Tower...just announced that it was not as good as Trump Tower.'</p>
<p>"[A] media panel...once...chuckl[ed] over the fact that Trump claimed to have a $10 billion valuation for his businesses. [His] actual net worth was...in the $4 billion range—but the rest he attributed to the value of the Trump name. The pundits could barely contain their amusement and derision over Trump's apparently inflated self-evaluation.</p>
<p>"[But] business consortiums all over the world...pay the Trump Organization to brand the[ir] hotels as part of the signature 'Trump Hotel Collection.'...Trump created one of the country's most recognizable brands....</p>
<p>"Finally, Trump solved [his] problem[:] He partnered with the Hyatt hotel chain...to operate the Commodore[, and] split...the profits 50–50. [I]n Hyatt, he had found a partner...experienced in running hotels[, and] also willing to...reimburs[e] Trump a significant portion of the funds [originally] expended....</p>
<p>"In 1996 Hyatt...b[ought] out Trump's half-share...for $142 million....</p>
<p>" 'The entrepreneurs,' Schumpeter writes, 'are the workers' best customers.' This is a...clever way to look at it: the worker is a salesman who markets his labor to his employer, who is, in that sense, his customer. 'A continuous improvement of the workers' situation stems from them.'</p>
<p>"Contrary to Marx, the entrepreneur undertakes projects that the worker has no comprehension of and would not undertake himself, but that nevertheless result in paid employment commensurate with the value the worker provides to the employer. [T]he workers...could scarcely get started! That's why they didn't. It took Trump to do it. That's why Trump is the boss and they are the workers.</p>
<p>"I've given only a tiny window into Trump's entrepreneurial world, and we can see from it the inadequacy of the Marxist critique. Marx implies that capitalists only supply the capital, yet typically this is the one thing that capitalists do not supply. Most entrepreneurs get their capital from banks—as Trump did—or venture capital firms. What entrepreneurs do supply—the idea for the business, the organization of it, the marketing, the assumption of risk—are all critical elements completely ignored by Marx. He simply had no conception of what capitalists do. This ignorance renders the Marxist critique of who gets what under capitalism completely useless.</p>
<p>"Although Trump may be a walking refutation of Marxist nostrums[,] in the early 1990s[,] two of Trump's big properties...had just gone bankrupt....Trump remarked [in his 1997] book <em>[Trump:] The Art of the Comeback[,</em> on] seeing a homeless man[,] 'He's...worth $900 million more than me.'</p>
<p>"Reviewing this passage in the book, Dylan Matthews, a writer for the website Vox, reacts with revulsion to Trump's casual, almost whimsical, attitude here. 'You'd think this kind of story would result in some kind of self-reflecting,' Matthews writes. But in Trump's case, 'Nah.' Trump seems 'uninterested in his failures.' In progressive academic and journalistic precincts, self-reflection is what you do when things take a downward turn....</p>
<p>"To such minds, Trump's willingness to assume gargantuan debt and then forge unreflectively ahead seems downright surreal. The man must be demented! Total lack of introspection! Yet Trump weathered the storm and went on to massively successful new ventures, including some...quite remote from...real estate. He won some and he lost some, but he won more than he lost[.]</p>
<p>"I'd like to conclude this section by addressing the parking [worker]. If he wants to know why he isn't being paid more, the answer is that his work is not worth more....</p>
<p>"Someone...had the idea for that resort. He organized it. He marketed it and established a coveted brand. His brand attracted the clientele. He took all the risk. The parking [worker] did none of this. So [the owner], not the parking [worker], deserves the lion's share of the profit. Both of them—the boss and the menial laborer—are getting their just deserts....Perhaps, one day, [the parking worker] will run his own business and, once he has paid all his employees and managers, justly keep the balance for himself as profit." – pp. 195–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Who Gave the Orders</p>
<p>"Beatrix Potter...and her husband...Sidney Webb...were Fabian socialists who despised Beatrix's father, Richard Potter, a wealthy businessman....</p>
<p>"Potter...described working as her father's secretary[.] 'Everybody had to obey the orders issued by my father[. T]o him nobody gave...orders.'...The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises...shrewdly observes, 'This is a very shortsighted view. Orders were given to her father by the consumers[. S]he could not see these orders...because she was interested only in the orders given within her father's office[.]</p>
<p>"[T]here is another type of entrepreneur who creates products in response to no existing consumer demand....</p>
<p>"Putting himself in the place of his potential customers[,] Steve Jobs...realized that they didn't like the existing keyboard and stylus that dominated the BlackBerry, Motorola and Palm smartphones of the day. Why not have everything work off a touchscreen, using nature's own stylus—the finger—to nagivate the device? [W]ith no instruction manual[,] you can see how to use it!</p>
<p>"The supply-side entrepreneur is an economic revolutionary. He or she thrives...during a technological revolution. During normal periods, entrepreneurs and CEOs respond to consumer demand....Think of...the 1960s, the 'golden age' of relative equality that progressives rhapsodize about today.</p>
<p>"What did those guys actually do? They were...routine administrators; they merely ran their companies[:] some of them...into the ground[. T]hey received mediocre compensation for what they did...because they were mediocre at what they did. They produced modest consumer welfare, and they were modestly rewarded for it.</p>
<p>"Contrast their performance with that of the supply-side entrepreneurs in revolutionary periods, such as...today. These are a select group of entrepreneurs working alongside traditional entrepreneurs, but distinguished from them in that they pursue radical innovations. These innovations produce unprecedented consumer welfare. But they also widen inequality, because they channel huge profits to the supply-side entrepreneur.</p>
<p>"So this is the real reason why inequalities today are wider than they were in the postwar period....Progressives who say we are living through a new Gilded Age miss the point. The Gilded Age...gave us the telephone, the car and the airplane....</p>
<p>"Can anyone who has lived through th[e] great transformation[s in] the past couple of decades not see the massive improvements they have produced? Is there a progressive or socialist alive today who would give them up? Are there young people who can even imagine what life was like before them? It is the enthusiasm of customers in America, and worldwide, that has produced the inequality that progressives bewail today. The moral justification of th[e]se profits is that they represent the wishes—and welfare—of delighted consumers. This is democracy in action, whether the left admits it or not.</p>
<p>"[T]here were supply-side entrepreneurs in the postwar era. One of them was Ray Kroc[.]</p>
<p>"Kroc met with the McDonald brothers and told them that he admired the simplicity, efficiency and affordability of their meals....Kroc even spelled out his supply-side insight. America in the postwar era was becoming more mobile. That meant Americans would be spending a lot of time in their cars. [So] Kroc's idea was that people might come to appreciate 'fast food' that was predictable [and] affordable[.]</p>
<p>"Yet the McDonald brothers were not interested. [T]hey had no intention of working any harder or taking huge risks that might jeopardize the good thing they had going locally....Later, [e]ach of them got a...million-dollar check[.]</p>
<p>"[T]he McDonald brothers resented the mammoth success of McDonald's. Th[e] success, of course, was only obvious in hindsight. It was Kroc, not they, who spotted the opportunity to expand into something big. They had a chance to bet on that success, but opted against taking the gamble. [If t]he duo...were [still] around[,] I wouldn't be surprised to see them...complain...about Kroc's 'selfishness' and 'greed.' " – pp. 198–201</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Guilty Party</p>
<p>"I remember meeting Sony CEO Akio Morita at a <em>Forbes</em> conference in the 1990s....Did consumers ask him to make a little radio that could be attached to their heads?</p>
<p>"Of course not, he said. [Rather, seeing] boom boxes[, h]e began to think in a supply-side mode[:] 'Why do I have to listen[?] Why do they have to carry th[em]?'</p>
<p>"Morita asked his engineers [for] a small radio and cassette player that would sound like a high-quality car stereo[,] yet could be attached to a person's head. [P]eople could listen...without annoying others[,] and...ride bikes...while listening to music....</p>
<p>"The marketing department...was aghast. [E]arphones...were used mainly by deaf people....</p>
<p>"One of...Jeff Bezos'...book buyers [said] he was looking for an obscure gadget[.] Then it hit Bezos that Amazon could sell literally everything, as long as they could figure out how to ship it....</p>
<p>"Bezos proposed Amazon Prime. For an upfront payment of $79, customers would get two-day delivery on their orders....Amazon could now compete with the immediacy of brick-and-mortar storefronts.</p>
<p>"[T]he upfront $79 payment...would give Amazon the capital to create dozens...of regional distribution facilities. [P]roducts...could be stored at fulfillment centers in every part of the country and then be driven to customers at a...practicable...cost[.]</p>
<p>"If you listen to the progressives and the socialists, you'll hear a lot about 'appropriation' and how these guys enjoy a disproportionate share of 'the nation's wealth.' But it's not the 'nation's' wealth; it's their wealth. They got it by producing things that have enriched people's lives so much that they were thrilled to pay for them, and probably would have...pa[id] more. So the entrepreneurs didn't appropriate anything; they earned what they...acquired[,] through their entrepreneurial ventures. Contrary to Obama and Warren, they really did build that!</p>
<p>"And how did they do it? [O]ne...element...runs counter to all the anticapitalist propaganda....That element is...unselfishness, empathy, the ability to identify with the feelings and wants of others. More than any other profession—with the possible exception of the clergy—entrepreneurs, and especially supply-side entrepreneurs, restrain their own selfish impulses and put themselves in the place of their customers. They focus obsessively on the customers' wants and needs, and on how best to fulfill them. In some cases, as we have just seen, through some sort of empathetic leap, they anticipate consumer desires even before consumers themselves have them.</p>
<p>"[T]hese qualities of self-restraint and empathy constitute, in the words of Adam Smith, 'the perfection of human nature.' Thus, we can see a way to resolve the Adam Smith 'problem.' [O]perational empathy...is critical to entrepreneurial success. The entrepreneur's profits are nothing more than a measure of the degree to which they have effectively satisfied the wants and needs of others.</p>
<p>"Inequality, in sum, is here by democratic mandate. Who can still contend that this inequality is unjust? Entrepreneurs are not responsible for it[:] we are. We conferred these gargantuan rewards on them not irrationally or unwittingly but purposefully, through millions of transactions aimed at making our lives faster, easier, more fulfilling. We are fortunate, not cursed, to be living through an entrepreneurial revolution....</p>
<p>"At some point, [perhaps] this revolution will stabilize, and the inequality that came in its wake will flatten out. We don't need policies to make this happen; it will happen by itself. High tech and ecommerce superprofits will shrink back to normal profits. [S]o let's enjoy the benefits and stop whining about a just outcome that we ourselves have, through our actions as consumers, ordained and sustained." – pp. 202–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Trying Our Luck</p>
<p>"[W]here is the justice or 'merit' in being in the right place at the right time? [The p]hilosopher Robert Nozick...argues that...any socialist attempt to equalize outcomes will require constant state intervention to undo the effects of voluntary human action. [S]ocialism...undermines freedom because it refuses to let people exercise free choice in the way they deploy the fruits of their labor....</p>
<p>"Where is the justice in the rewards [that] Wilt Chamberlain...or...Stephen King...rake in? Their merit...is [in] the value that [they] created for the consumer. [V]alue is in the eye of the beholder. Buyers [and] voters...confer rewards based on their own standards of value[.]</p>
<p>"[I]f we define merit not objectively but subjectively—to refer to what consumers value and are willing to pay for—then capitalism is obviously a meritocratic system par excellence....</p>
<p>"We can envision a group of talented aspiring athletes—or authors, or actors—coming together to create an insurance pool. Taking into account the risks of their profession, they create a 'cooperative' whose members agree in advance to share income receipts roughly equally. [T]he one who makes it big...gets to keep half of his earnings, but must split the balance with the rest of the pool. This would reduce the risk for everyone.</p>
<p>"Yet no one does this. In fact, the very absence of such risk-sharing pools, in sports or publishing or Hollywood, clearly shows that those who venture into these professions are ready to assume the hazards that go with them. I know I am. We would rather assume individually the risk of failure, and in the event that we are successful, the success would be ours; it does not belong to others who 'also ran.' " – pp. 206–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Ovarian Lottery</p>
<p>"John Rawls contends that...people['s] talents...are..by themselves 'neither just nor unjust.' Rawls argues that 'these are...natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with those facts.'...</p>
<p>"The investment tycoon Warren Buffett, a disciple of Rawls, is on board with this. It is his acknowledged basis for backing the Democrats and continuing to urge higher taxes on the top income brackets....Buffett says successful people...got lucky in their selection of genes, and parents, and where they were raised.</p>
<p>"[T]he key Rawlsian point [is] that none of these people deserve credit for talents that they were either born with or were conferred by their surrounding environment. Since luck cannot be earned, Rawls and his disciples contend that the benefits of luck should in justice be widely shared....Rawls...favor[ed] the state taking over and reallocating the fruits of [people's] labor in a manner aimed at reducing inequality and 'sharing the wealth.'...</p>
<p>"Is it really true that all [of] the good things...that anyone produces...are the result of luck or natural lottery? Is it really true that we deserve no reward—or even credit—for them?</p>
<p>"If so, it follows that all [of] the bad things that people do, including all the crimes and horrors they commit, are also the result of luck or natural lottery....Why then do such people deserve punishment? Why do they even deserve criticism?</p>
<p>"Rawls' theory applies to the entire system of rewards and sentences, or even of praise and blame, not merely in the market but in every sphere of human action, from performance in school to the criminal justice system. It declares all of it, without exception, to be null and void. Does Rawls seriously propose that we 'go there'? He does not. Nowhere does Rawls even acknowledge, let alone consider, these far-reaching implications of what he is proposing.</p>
<p>"Moreover, Rawls assumes that the outcome of a natural lottery is both unjust and undemocratic[. But] lotteries are inherently just and democratic, for the simple reason that they give everyone an equal chance to succeed....Rawls assumes that [a] lottery winner has some sort of obligation to share. But why? Can anyone reasonably demand this of lottery winners? Can the other players justly gang up on him and seize his winnings? This would be outrageous.</p>
<p>"The economist Milton Friedman [gives] an example [in] his [1962] book <em>Capitalism and Freedom.</em> 'Suppose you [are with] three friends...and you happen to spy and retrieve a $20 bill'[.] Would the other three be justified in joining forces and compelling you to share the $20 equally with them?' This...reflects the tyrannical logic of democratic socialism....</p>
<p>"Entrepreneurs have a name for luck: they call it risk....There is no alternative but to submit to it. This is what it means to take [a] risk; it is to test your luck.</p>
<p>"In life, as in business, our luck may be whimsical, capricious, [or] even random in her dispensations. Even so, we have a right to try our luck, and then to enjoy its rewards or suffer its slings and arrows. Contrary to the Rawlsian mumbo jumbo, no one has the right to our rewards who did not assume the risks we did. This is the human predicament—nature's bargain[.]" – pp. 208–10</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Endless Pursuit</p>
<p>"[H]ave...we...reached in America a situation in which robots and other forms of technology can do all the work, leaving nothing left for entrepreneurs and workers to do[?] I think we can see, reflecting on what we have observed of how entrepreneurs operate, that this is not a realistic fear. Entrepreneurs never run out of ideas, for the simple reason that humans never run out of wants....</p>
<p>"Just as farming gave way to manufacturing and [then] services, services will eventually give way to something else.</p>
<p>"[W]e will always need entrepreneurs and workers because human beings never run out of things to dream, and make, and do. [O]ur aspirations keep growing. [T]his [is] the human condition....The pursuit of happiness that Jefferson spoke about is...endless[.] We had better learn to enjoy ourselves along the way.</p>
<p>"[Do] highly successful entrepreneurs need so much money[?] Why...should we leave tycoons with so much surplus when that money can be put to relatively good use by the state to provide food, education and healthcare to others?</p>
<p>"This is an argument based on practicality, not morality. [I]t is a fallacy to suppose that because they have no plausible use for it themselves...they should therefore be willing to relinquish it[,] or [that] the state should have the right to confiscate it.</p>
<p>"What...would we ourselves do if we somehow came into a gargantuan sum of money?...However the money is invested, it will most likely help create jobs, satisfy consumer wants and stimulate the economy....</p>
<p>"Ray Kroc['s] widow Joan Kroc...g[ave] $1.5 billion to the Salvation Army.</p>
<p>"[P]eople who have made their own money are likely to spend it more carefully and discerningly than a group of politicians and bureaucrats. [E]ntrepreneurs are more likely to promote social welfare through their own efforts than by turning over their assets to the federal government." – pp. 210–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Business of Politics</p>
<p>"[T]here are...greedy selfish leeches...who don't deserve their money and...have gotten it by contributing little or nothing to society[.] Such people...exist, and they can be found among the ranks of the progressives and socialists themselves[.]</p>
<p>"Whatever one thinks about affirmative action, no one can justify a white woman[,] Warren[,] masquerading as a Native American to capitalize on benefits reserved for historically disadvantaged minorities.</p>
<p>"[T]he Clintons...went from zero to $200 million since Bill...left the White House. [T]he Clintons...are part of a Democratic trend....</p>
<p>"Michelle...Obama...sells 25 different items of merchandise—mugs, shirts and candles—on the speaking circuit....</p>
<p>"For the Bidens[,] it's a family racket that includes his son Hunter and his two brothers, James and Frank. All of them have become millionaires by trading on Biden's political name and connections....</p>
<p>"Somewhat comically, the Democratic[-led] House sought to impeach President Trump for raising the subject of the Biden family's crooked dealings on a phone call with the Ukrainian head of state. The attempt was swiftly and appropriately thwarted by a Republican majority in the Senate.</p>
<p>"The Obamas, the Clintons and the Bidens...are all political entrepreneurs for whom politics is a business....They are in the mode of Hugo Chavez and other Third World kleptocrats who speak the language of social justice even as they rake in gargantuan piles of cash.</p>
<p>"How long are Americans going to be suckered by this sleazy crew? Leave aside the hypocrisy of these pompous frauds talking about 'public service' even as they cash in on their titles, leverage their offices and deliver political favors for personal recompense. What social value have Democrats like Warren, Obama, Clinton or Biden created in exchange for the wealth they have obtained? Virtually none. Essentially, they have used their political name[s] and office[s] to enrich themselves.</p>
<p>"They—not entrepreneurs—are the greedy, selfish bastards. They are the ones playing the system and skirting the law. This is the progressive, socialist[,] parasitic class, feeding off the wealth of society while reviling the free market system that produced that wealth. If anyone deserves to be horsewhipped, it's these progressive and socialist Democrats. As for entrepreneurs, we need more of them. If the socialists are helping to destroy the country, entrepreneurs are helping to make America great again." – pp. 213–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 6: The Art of War</p>
<p>Battle Plan to Defeat the Socialists</p>
<p>"[In] 1860[,] Lincoln...was the right man for an incomparably difficult task[:] in his own words[,] one...greater than th[at] faced by [the Commanding General of the Continental Army, George] Washington.</p>
<p>"[New York] Republican [Senator] William H. Seward[,] by giving his 'Irrepressible Conflict' speech [in 1858], had seemed to invite civil war. He was deemed to be...too uncompromising.</p>
<p>"Lincoln seemed...more moderate[.] Yet once the conflict escalated, Lincoln...refused to give in. Some Republicans pressed him to abandon the Republican platform that rejected any extension of slavery and accept the [Kentucky Senator John J.] Crittenden Compromise [of December 1860], which would have extended the [Missouri Compromise l]ine all the way to the Pacific....</p>
<p>" 'I will suffer death...before I will consent...to any concession...which looks like buying th[at] privilege...to which we have a constitutional right.' Thus...Lincoln refused the only compromise that could have prevented the Civil War. And when the war came, he toughened up even more. He did not stop until the bitter end. As [Godfrey Benson,] Lord Charnwood notes in his marvelous [1916] Lincoln biography, 'The Convention rejected a man who would certainly have compromised, and chose one who would give all that moderation demanded[,] and die before he yielded one further inch.'</p>
<p>"It was with this historical example in...mind that I recently stood...in the Oval Office[.] I was eager to see...President Trump...up close[:] to see if he was up to the hard and unfinished task that lay before him....</p>
<p>"He immediately recognized my daughter, Danielle[:] 'I saw your beautiful face[—]and you have such a great way of expressing yourself.'</p>
<p>"[W]e launched into...politics. 'It's craz[ed] out there,' Trump said. 'The other side is relentless. Crazy. Totally dishonest. No regard for the truth.'</p>
<p>" '[Y]our case was bullshit....Now they are trying to do the same thing to me that they did to you.' Trump paused. 'But I fight back. I have the means to fight back. Like you fought back. We have to[: t]hese people are just disgusting.'</p>
<p>"I said [that] the relative civility and decency of...the Reagan years...was...a thing of the past....My wife, Debbie...said, 'Mr. President, I see how you are attacked all over the place, nonstop, without any kind of restraint or respect for the office. Frankly, I don't know how you do it.' At th[at] point, [we] expected Trump to [answer:] 'I couldn't care less what they say.'</p>
<p>"But Trump didn't [do] that. 'Well,' he said, leaning forward, 'to tell you the truth, it gets to me after a while. I'm out there trying to get the job done[. A]nd no matter what I do, these people are after me.'...</p>
<p>"Our talk turned to impeachment....Trump said[,] 'I am really lucky to have the...call...transcript. [A]ll these Never Trumpers and all these dishonest people, they would come forward...and say I said things I never said'[.]</p>
<p>"I looked over at my wife, Debbie, and I noticed that she was close to tears. We thought Trump didn't care one whit about what people said about him. But now we saw a side of him that was hurt, uncomprehending, vulnerable....</p>
<p>"Even so, Trump remained the warrior....At one point he said, 'So many people on our side are weak.' I agreed[:] 'It gives the bad guys a sense of immunity[.] We have to do to them what they are doing to us, otherwise they will never stop.' He said, 'Republicans are just not mean.'...</p>
<p>"I told Trump, 'One of the most common things I hear from Republicans is[,] please...take away his Twitter. I'm thinking[:] And do what—give it to you? What would you do with it?'</p>
<p>"Trump said[,] 'These people don't realize...it's my only way...to reach the American people.'</p>
<p>" 'Without,' I said, 'the filter of the media.'...</p>
<p>"What struck all of us about the meeting was how congenial he was, and how candid....He looked us in the eye. Later, my daughter would say that he was so 'real'[. S]he said[,] 'I love his personality. It inspires me to stand strong in my beliefs, even when I am treated badly because of them.'</p>
<p>"I told Trump[,] 'You should start a news network. Not another Fox News [with] 5 million, [but a] network that reaches 50 million...people.'...</p>
<p>"Then...we stood [on] the White House lawn...watching this intrepid fighter for the restoration of his country's greatness, with a task ahead of him greater than that which faced Reagan[,] helicopter...into the air and disappear gradually into the clouds." – pp. 219–23</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Checking Them Out</p>
<p>"On February 11, 1861, [weeks before his March 4 inauguration,] Lincoln gave a brief farewell address to...friends and supporters in [his base of] Springfield, Illinois, and began a train journey to Washington, D.C., to assume the presidency. He didn't take the direct route...but traveled meanderingly through various cities and towns, covering nearly 2,000 miles and making nearly 80 stops along the way to engage with crowds of admiring locals who had come to see the new president-elect....</p>
<p>"Lincoln sought to discover for himself whether Americans—specifically Republicans—had the strength and stamina to endure the coming storm. What were they prepared to do, and to suffer, to save the country?</p>
<p>"Today we are...in a cold civil war. It's a cold war, but not like the one Reagan fought, because it is domestic rather than international. And it's a civil war because now, as in 1860, there is a deep dividing line that runs through the country, not a regional line but rather an ideological one. It separates Americans from each other in a manner unprecedented in my lifetime and cuts deeper than any other schism since Lincoln's time. Therefore Lincoln's question—how prepared are we for the severities of our time?—remains pertinent for us....</p>
<p>"One of the tactics...of the socialist left...we have...discussed [is that] the left routinely practices the politics of division[:] not only rich versus poor but also white versus black, male versus female, heterosexual versus homosexual [and] legal versus illegal. This politics of perpetual turmoil, of pitting Americans against each other, is a tactic aimed at assembling a democratic majority of aggrieved[,] so-called victims. While it takes new forms today, the division formula itself goes back to Marx and is intrinsic to socialism....</p>
<p>"But beyond this division, why do the socialists need tactics? For the simple reason that their ideas are a flop. [E]ven many women, gays and minorities are skeptical of their racket. [I]f the socialists debated their ideas in an open forum with their critics, they would be crushed....</p>
<p>"So, unable to assemble a majority and win over critics and dissenters through honest persuasion, the left seeks to achieve its goals through naked propaganda, shameless deception, various forms of intimidation, outright coercion and the politics of personal destruction. They are in 'wartime' mode[. T]he Democratic left has become gangsterized....</p>
<p>"The Democrats...have created a massively powerful array of forces....They...have three institutions that are closely allied with them: academia, Hollywood and the media. By Hollywood, I mean not just the movie industry but also Broadway, the music industry [and] virtually all the comedians. These three institutions, representing education, information and entertainment, have the largest megaphones in the culture. They work largely as unpaid propagandists for socialism and the Democratic left.</p>
<p>"[T]he left has also recruited a shadowy...group into its orbit. This is the group conventionally described as the 'Deep State.' These are the police agencies of government—the IRS, the Department of Justice, the FBI [and] the CIA—that are supposed to be neutral enforcement agencies but have been working in close concert with the Democratic left to...go after prominent Trump supporters...and...overturn the Trump presidency[.]</p>
<p>"In <em>1984,</em> Orwell spoke of Big Brother as composed of two elements: the 'outer party,' which in this case would refer to the Democrats and their allies in Hollywood and the media, and an 'inner party,' which would here describe the spook world inhabited by Deep State figures like Robert Mueller, James Comey and James Clapper. The Democrats name their enemies, the Deep State goes after them, the media is quietly alerted to do its public strafing, Hollywood is recruited into the propaganda machine—and this is the real collusion[:] the only collusion that poses a clear and present danger to our republican system of government.</p>
<p>"[T]hese...people...create the lie. And to what end? Their ultimate objective is far more insidious than just taking away our money; it is to turn us into worms, to establish tyrannical control over our ordinary lives. That is the point of the left's relentless determination[:] to trample on our hearts and force us to invert our moral instincts. That's why they want us to succumb to them in whatever they say, even if it's the opposite of what they said yesterday. They want us to concede that they are right in all things, even if they say that up is down and two plus two equals five. In this respect, the socialists are all the same: they represent the boot stamping on our faces!...</p>
<p>"It is essential that we understand...that...this threat...means we are living in a new reality. This is not Reagan's America anymore[;] nor is it the 'kinder, gentler' America to which George H.W. Bush aspired. What this means is that the conservative and Republican strategies derived from that period are now largely obsolete[.]</p>
<p>"We have been utterly incompetent in our Supreme Court nominating strategy, but if by some miracle we gain actual domination of the Court and manage to overturn <em>Roe v. Wade,</em> the left would unleash a massive convulsion that would make Trump Derangement Syndrome look mild by comparison. And my point is that we are not ready for it.</p>
<p>"[T]he waters for...Lincoln...were even more roiled than they are now. And we are in the position that Lincoln was in when he took that train journey[. T]hat old crook Andrew Jackson would have been startled to see the gangsterization of...the Democrats of the 1850s[,] occurr[ing] under the leadership of [the] new breed of thugs[.]</p>
<p>"Think of the craziness that Lincoln confronted then, and it will seem eerily familiar, even across the chasm of time. Determined to break up the country because of their outrage that Lincoln won a free and fair election, Democrats shrieked that Lincoln—not they!—posed a mortal danger to the democratic form of government.</p>
<p>"In prior years, Democratic street gangs, the nineteenth-century precursor to Antifa, sought to disrupt the public appearances of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and to beat up the speaker....</p>
<p>"Lincoln was a moderate man who found himself in an immoderate environment. And that's where we are also. We are the party of the nice guys, the party of the strai[t]laced people, facing opponents who recognize this about us and ruthlessly exploit it. [S]uddenly we realize that our normal, decent ways of resolving conflict...don't work anymore. Only fools—by which I mean Never Trumpers[—]don't see this.</p>
<p>"Lincoln saw it in 1860, and he became a different man. [H]e adopted policies no less savage than those of the Confederacy. And the Republicans won the war by becoming sterner, harder people than they were previously. We must learn from these examples...and become...the dread and ruin of the opposition. So how do we do this, and how do we remain good people even in a very bad situation? Stiffen your spine[.]" – pp. 223–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Stormy, Stormy!</p>
<p>"We cannot understand the tactics of the socialist left without penetrating its most powerful institution, the media, and that institution's staple product, fake news. The media is critical because it is the channel through which the American people get virtually all of their political information.</p>
<p>"[H]ow has the Democratic left set the agenda for most of Trump's first term? Why are they on the attack, and why do we feel up against the wall? Why are so many of our leaders—Paul Ryan, Jeff Sessions and the rest—so ineffective?</p>
<p>"[T]hey are intimidated by the power of the media....They recognize that [it] is the power to humiliate. They know that if the media puts them in its sights and opens unceasing fire on them for weeks, their reputation will be in ruins. Even their own side will run away from them! This explains how ordinarily sturdy people on the conservative side become invertebrates....</p>
<p>"How is it possible for such a disparate group of institutions to work in such close concert to generate, as they typically do, a single ideological narrative?</p>
<p>"[T]hey operate like birds in flying formation...by...each...instinctively picking up cues from the others and maintaining a consistency of flight pattern. The question, however, is how that flight pattern is determined. What makes news into news, as far as these people are concerned?...</p>
<p>"The real power of fake news is in deciding...what to cover[,] and [thus] what to overlook. Through this process of news creation, the media...literal[ly] invents political reality. If they don't cover something, it might as well not have happened, because it has no effect on the political process." – pp. 227–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Essence of Fake News</p>
<p>"After Obama became a presidential candidate...Chicago [resident] Larry Sinclair...held a press conference on June 18, 2008, at the National Press Club, where he described...cocaine [use] and...oral sex[, both with] Obama....He called on Obama to be...honest, to admit his drug use and come clean with the American people. Immediately following Larry's public statement, he was arrested by the D.C. police[.]</p>
<p>"[W]ho ordered [t]he arrest[?] According to Sinclair, none other than Delaware's attorney general, Beau Biden, the son of Joe Biden.</p>
<p>"[T]he typical conservative complaint [is] that [the] progressive media coverage reflects [a] 'double standard.' [B]ut [t]his...is naïve! Behind every double standard is a single standard waiting to be uncovered. The single standard is to do everything possible to discredit a key political opponent like Trump while doing whatever you can to cover up for a key political ally like Obama. 'Protect our side—the side that seeks to move America in the direction of socialism—and destroy the other side.'...</p>
<p>"Contrast the media hosannas when Obama successfully took out [the Saudi Arabia-born al-Qaeda founder Osama b]in Laden[,] with the begrudging, hostile coverage when Trump took out the Iranian terrorist [Qasem] Soleimani. Incredibly, Soleimani was portrayed as a noble victim[.] Again, this...is the media showing it sympathizes more with Islamic terrorists than it does with the current president of the United States....</p>
<p>"Fake news is all [that] we can expect from the progressive media and[,] for the most part[, it] is all we get....Now the pretense is gone; [t]he socialists in the media are all 'out of the closet.'</p>
<p>"This media[-]pimping for the socialist agenda is a serious problem that requires thought, resources and commitment on our part. [W]e have to create new outlets to reach our people[:] essentially an alternative universe of information, so [that] we are not dependent on what they say. This means[:] our own print media[,] our own networks [and] our own digital platforms. Essentially, we need to 'secede' from the media.</p>
<p>"[W]e have to work to reduce the power of fake news in our minds....What this means is that we don't jump out of our chair when we see the latest outrage on CNN or in <em>The Washington Post.</em> Rather, we're indifferent. Or even better, we chuckle." – pp. 231–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Deep State Thuggery</p>
<p>"To use Orwell's terms, if the media represents the strongest arm of the socialist left's 'outer party,' then the Deep State represents the strongest arm of its 'inner party.'...The Deep State routinely leaks to the media, and the media protects the Deep State[.]</p>
<p>"The media's pose is objectivity: we are reporting the news fairly, without prejudice, without an ideological agenda. The Deep State's pose is neutrality. We...are enforcing the laws in a neutral manner. We don't play favorites. Lady Justice is blind....</p>
<p>"I admitted [to] the prosecutorial team of the Southern District of New York...that I...exceed[ed] the campaign finance limit—[that] I gave $20,000 over the limit to a college friend of mine running for U.S. Senate in New York[.] I added that I expected to receive the same penalty as anyone else who did the same thing. [But the prosecutors] added...bank fraud [a]nd mail fraud...because[,] they said[,] you took your money out of your bank account[, and] you put your check in the mail....Wow!...</p>
<p>"My attorneys informed me that the U.S. government, at the insistence of the Obama administration, was using...the same laws that were passed to go after ISIS and the mafia....Remarkably[,] these laws were used to target me not because of what I did, but because I was an outspoken critic of the Obama administration....I was red-flagged in my FBI file as a prominent opponent of the president.</p>
<p>"[T]he Deep State operates...under the cover of legalism[. N]one of the cases cited by the prosecution was remotely similar to mine; they typically involved repeat offenses, vastly greater sums of money[,] and always a quid pro quo.</p>
<p>"[A] Clinton appointee[,] Judge Richard Berman...rejected my claims of selective prosecution and selective punishment[.]</p>
<p>"The Deep State deception was picked up...by Anderson Cooper on CNN. Berating m[y claim], Cooper [compared me to] Democratic donor Jeffrey Thompson. [But] Thompson got a penalty comparable to mine for a vastly greater offense.</p>
<p>"Thompson...funneled $3.3 million...to...28...Democratic candidates[,] with a view to gaining...government contracts for his...accounting firm...over many years....</p>
<p>"Thompson's lenient sentence is...typical. New York hotelier Sant Chatwal[—]an Indian American[—]us[ed] straw donors... to give more than $180,000...to...Democratic candidates. [He] wanted Hillary to back a U.S.-India nuclear deal[.]</p>
<p>" 'That's the only way,'...Chatwal...said in a secret recording[,] 'to buy them.' He was also convicted of witness tampering[.] Chatwal told them[,] 'Cash has no proof.'...Chatwal got [n]o prison time. [K]nowing what I do...about the Deep State, my response is, 'That's believable.'</p>
<p>"[I]n late May 2018[,] the president...pardon[ed] me[.] I was elated[.] I was...getting my American dream back; since my conviction, the left would gleefully call me 'felon.' [Now] I was...becoming...an 'ex-felon.'...</p>
<p>"For Anderson Cooper, Trump's pardon was...no...proof...that I was unfairly treated[.] I [replied that] it took a...very powerful man, the former president of the United States...to get me on the hook. Cooper seemed...annoyed at this riposte, and I chuckled at his trademark quizzical expression[.]" – pp. 236–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Seal in a Sea of Sharks</p>
<p>"[A]ccounts like mine may seem...surreal. That's because we've all been raised on a civics-book understanding of the American justice system. It's only when the full force of the U.S. government is trained against you...that you see how remote the civics-book America is from the gangsterized America of the left....</p>
<p>"My case was heard in 2013. [T]his nonsense has been going on for a while now, directed by the same thuggish Obama crew. But...it reached a zenith[.] Trump's election was, to quote <em>New York Times</em> columnist David Brooks, 'the shock of our lifetime.'...</p>
<p>"Let's sum up what...three cases—mine[; that of] Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of [the] election watchdog group[s] True the Vote [and] Texas-based King Street Patriots[; and that of] Trump staffer...George Papadopoulos[,] a Middle East policy analyst...based in London[—]tell us about the Deep State. In two of the cases, Engelbrecht's and mine, we were the target. The goal was to 'take us out.' Yet...the broader objective was to use us to send a message to others like us[:] 'Don't screw with the left, because we have the power to destroy your life.'...</p>
<p>"In Papadopoulos' case, he...was their setup witness. They sought to use this completely innocent guy to fabricate a case against Trump. We cannot be naïve about the Deep State: this is who they are, and this is how they operate. They are unscrupulous thugs—thugs with badges—which makes them far more dangerous than ordinary criminals. Unless they are held to account, they will keep doing what they can to subvert our justice system and our political system." – pp. 239–44</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">When Two Plus Two Makes Five</p>
<p>"What is the point of all this aggression?...Never[-]Trumper Jennifer Rubin...puts it with her usual crudeness: 'I think it's absolutely abhorrent that any institution of higher learning, any news organization, or any entertainment organization that has a news outlet would hire these people.'</p>
<p>"She means Trump supporters. She wants [them] not only to exit the government, [but] to be unemployable in the private sector. [S]he says[,] 'We have to collectively...burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them[,] because if there are any survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.'</p>
<p>"This is the voice of tyranny. It seeks to establish full control of the culture so that, using the instruments of government and the media, it can exercise tyrannical control over our lives. They don't just want to take our money; they want to turn us into sniveling devotees of their wickedness and corruption....</p>
<p>"They...want the NFL [a]nd the NBA[:] a bunch of guys who bounce and run with a ball! Yet they want them[,] too. They...pretty much have...the Boy Scouts[.] They want to intimidate corporations into toeing their ideological line, even in matters that seem innocent or trivial. They want to force the Christian baker, Jack Phillips, to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding....</p>
<p>"For...the activist left[,] it's important to force Phillips to give in and go against the dictates of his conscience. That's what they mean by 'nondiscrimination,' a...term that takes on a darker...meaning in this context. So they file a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission[.]</p>
<p>"Phillips sues[;] the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court. [And] Phillips wins! [O]ne might think...at this point...that...it's over[.] But no! A transgender attorney[,] Autumn Scardina, comes...into Phillips' bakery and demands he bake a cake to celebrate her transition from male to female. [O]nce again[,] on the same grounds[,] Phillips...refuses. So she sues him! Phillips must go through the wringer once again.</p>
<p>"It's a form of terrorization, a historical specialty of the socialists. Sure, they want to ruin Phillips. But their wider objective is to show everyone...across the country...that this is what happens to you when you go against them. There is no point in resisting them because they will never stop....</p>
<p>"Corporations today operate under the strict surveillance of the left's censorship brigade. They live by Orwell's menacing slogan, <span style="font-variant:small-caps"><small>big brother is watching you.</small></span> They recognize that Big Brother's enforcement is swift and ruthless, and very few have Jack Phillips' stomach for principled resistance. [As] an example[,] consider the fashion retailer Forever 21 [making] a reference to the [2018] movie <em>Black Panther.</em></p>
<p>"One critic tweeted, 'Hey @Forever21, in what universe did you think it was OK to feature a white model in Wakanda gear. As a former #21 brand specialist for the company, I'm highly offended.' Notice how the critic tags the company, in order to...draw the attention of other censorious leftists to the ideological deviation. He doesn't use the term 'deviation,' but he declares that he is 'offended,' which is code for, 'Here's a clear ideological violation.'...</p>
<p>"Forever 21 instantly...removed all images of the offending...white male...model from its website. The company tweeted, 'Forever 21 takes feedback on our products...seriously. We...apologize if the photo in question was offensive in any way.' This sort of groveling before the icons of the left has become standard practice in corporate America. Some happily do it, and the rest are made to do it on pain of being branded as bigots.</p>
<p>"[M]any conservatives have turned to digital platforms as an alternative to the narrowness of the mainstream media. Now they find themselves restricted, shadow[-]banned and booted off those platforms. The pretext is 'hate,' even though in most cases the 'hate' amounts to nothing more than vociferously resisting the hateful doctrines of the socialist left.</p>
<p>"We are, again, in Orwell territory....In [his] novels, the state is the primary villain. [He] does, however, depict private individuals as informants. Someone tells, and that's how the state knows to go after you. That's the case here too. A journalist at Buzzfeed [for example] notifies YouTube or Twitter, and that's how you get permanently banned and become a digital unperson....</p>
<p>"Hate week! The Ministry of Truth! The Thought Police! All of this—once the hallmark of faraway socialist regimes—is now familiar. It has become our world. I'm reminded of the great scene in <em>1984</em> where the protagonist Winston Smith is being interrogated by the agents of Big Brother.</p>
<p>"[T]hey tell him[:] We are not satisfied. Why? Because we know that in your mind you still believe that two plus two equals four. You are just <em>saying</em> five because you know that is what we want to hear. Our goal is not merely to gain your outward subjection[,] but the conformity of your inner mind. We want to control that too!</p>
<p>"This, then, is the ultimate objective of the socialist left in America: to brainwash us through propaganda and to terrify us into submission, so that we all become Winston, cowering and whimpering at first and ultimately giving in, not only on the outside but also on the inside, our ideals crushed, our dignity gone, finally embracing our abusers and captors by saying, in unison[:] 'I love Big Brother.' At this point, the left is content and our reeducation is complete." – pp. 244–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Mister Trump Goes to Washington</p>
<p>"It is against the magnitude and sheer evil of the socialist threat that we can, and must, understand Trump....He is...the political wartime general who is leading the charge for capitalism and against the socialists. His tactics are unorthodox—we've never had anyone like him[.]</p>
<p>"It is commonly asserted on the left that Trump is responsible for the viciousness of American politics and the hatred and division that are now a staple feature of that politics. But Trump didn't cause the division. It would be more accurate to say that it caused him....</p>
<p>"The Never Trump phenomenon is, in part, a pining for the good old Reagan days. Reagan presumed the goodwill of the other side....</p>
<p>"But Trump doesn't presume any such goodwill, because...he doesn't receive it. Moreover, Reagan focused on a few key priorities—combating the Soviet empire, cutting taxes—in the belief that you can only change the world in one or two ways, and he let the rest of it go, making jokes along the way....</p>
<p>"Trump, by contrast, fights on every front....Trump has one foot in the political fight and one in the culture war, and he seems to understand that the political fight takes place[,] in just one corner of a larger cultural battleground.</p>
<p>"Trump comes out of popular culture, and he has a very good feel for it....His language is colloquial[;] it is the kind of talk that people can understand and identify with[.]</p>
<p>"Trump recognizes the power of social media. He literally sets the agenda for the national discourse from his Twitter account[.] Trump uses [it] to drive his opponents crazy, to keep them perpetually off balance[.]</p>
<p>"He knows what he is doing. He's...possibly the best mud wrestler in the world today....</p>
<p>"He is obviously the most conservative president since Reagan[.]</p>
<p>"Like Reagan, Trump is an avid patriot. He loves his country. [T]hat's why he didn't run as a Democrat[,] I believe[.] In a eulogy for his political mentor, [Kentucky Senator] Henry Clay[,] Lincoln said, 'He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.' That's Trump! Lincoln added of Clay, 'He burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity[,] and glory of human liberty.' That's Trump again!...</p>
<p>"Trump's trade policy can...be understood as a modest form of economic redistribution....Consumers...have gotten the great windfall from the globalization, immigration and second communications revolution. It has been a revolution of better and cheaper products. But Trump knows that these same developments have severely hurt working-class people in manufacturing sectors, in the process wrecking whole communities! Even if it confounds strict libertarian principles, Trump...is right to insist...on some form of protection for th[em.]</p>
<p>"In my view[,] Trump...should have fired Comey on day one. [T]here would have been no Mueller inquiry, and Trump would have controlled his Justice Department. But [he] didn't[.] As a consequence[,] while that idle figurehead...Sessions...watched in obtuse silence[,] wily Obama holdovers like Rod Rosenstein...figured out how to use Trump's own DOJ against him. [I]n effect[,] Trump...was deprived of one of his most important cabinet agencies[. A]ny effort by Trump to tell the DOJ what to do [was] construed by the Democrats as 'obstructing justice.' This...game...was...successfully played by the left for most of Trump's term....</p>
<p>"Now, through John Durham's investigation, Trump...has the chance to do to the left what it has been doing to him. We'll know he is succeeding when prominent figures on the left—from Clapper to Comey to [Eric] Holder to Obama—wake up to police sirens, hear helicopters ahead and stumble out of bed to see automatic weapons trained on them, and men with handcuffs approaching them through the front door.</p>
<p>"This is not only the best way, it's the only way to curb the excesses of the Deep State. Payback is the road back to a kinder, gentler politics, just as victory in the Civil War was the way to achieve a peaceful, post-slavery America....I for one can't wait. Schadenfreude, I gotta say, is noble when it springs out of the aspiration to restore justice....</p>
<p>"Never Trumpers and others on the left express their contempt for Trump's character[.]</p>
<p>"But put yourself in Trump's place. The man is flayed on just about every media platform at every second of every day. [T]he man's implacable self-assurance acts as his own personal wall. It creates for him a kind of insulation[.] Trump can ignore the shrieks of abuse and push confidently [and] resolutely ahead.</p>
<p>"[I]n a Republican Party that has nominated one Boy Scout after another[,] it's refreshing to have a fighter for a change....</p>
<p>"It's especially invigorating to see how effective Trump is in labeling his opponents. When he calls them names—'Crooked Hillary,' 'Crazy Bernie,' 'Sleepy Joe,' 'Mini Mike'—they stick. Notice that Trump's media opponents, who compose words for a living, have still not successfully pinned a damaging label on him....'Orange Man'...seems[s] to indicate more their own frustration[.]</p>
<p>"Trump simply does not accept the p[eri]meters of acceptable discourse that the left has carved out, p[eri]meters that every previous Republican—even Reagan—dared not trespass. [H]ere's Trump, at a 2018 campaign rally in Ohio[:] 'They're not the elite, you are the elite.' Here's Trump's point[:] Why should we admire angry, rootless people who live screwed-up lives?</p>
<p>"Trump goes on to say that his supporters in the audience...are professionals[;] they run businesses, they own their own homes, they have functional families. [T]hey are 'smarter' than the so-called elite, and they 'make bigger incomes.' Trump goes on to say, 'I'm better than everything they have, including this,' pointing to his head [or hair]. And I became president and they didn't...And it's driving them crazy.' Trump wants to drive them crazy[;] because watching the self-appointed elite in apoplectic mode is both satisfying and entertaining.</p>
<p>"Trump is the only Republican in the country who is...genuinely unafraid...of the media....Reagan was [like] a peacetime general[:] he wasn't trying to neutralize the media, he merely sought a way to get his own message across....While the media couldn't hurt Reagan, they sure hurt his successors, the two Bushes[:] neither of whom had Reagan's way of circumventing the media.</p>
<p>"Trump, by contrast, wants to hurt the progressive media, to expose them as frauds, to permanently reduce their credibility and influence. Even after Trump, CNN will still be fake news, and there's no way for <em>The New York Times</em> or <em>The Washington Post</em> to again become the hallowed institutions they once were. We're on to them now, and we can't unlearn what we know about their sleazy, dishonest operations. Future Republicans will benefit from the media carnage that Trump will leave in his wake.</p>
<p>"If Trump loses in 2020, the left will treat his term as a regrettable blip, a moment in history when Americans lost their minds and then returned to their senses. There will be a comprehensive effort to sweep away everything connected to Trump, to wipe away not only the Trump 'stain' but to discredit all of us who ever said anything positive about Trump. The left will try to ensure that Trumpsters are unemployable, unpublishable, reviled, ostracized—and all in the name of fighting 'intolerance.' If Trump goes, the MAGA concept goes with it.</p>
<p>"But if Trump wins, then MAGA will be a reality by 2024. Reagan had two terms, and America was a different country in 1988 than it was in 1980....Clinton was dragged by the Reagan tide for eight years. [It] ended only in 2008 with Obama's election. [T]wo terms for a man like Trump could change America for a quarter[-]century.</p>
<p>"We do at some point have to see beyond Trump. We won't always have him. We will have to get along without him. My hope is that he will bequeath us a Trumpified Republican Party, with old leaders who have learned from Trump or new leaders formed out of Trump's rib[.] We can't go back to the usual, familial GOP invertebrate style; if we do, the other side will once again reduce us to rubble, and the Trump phenomenon will have been a brief and shining interregnum.</p>
<p>"[W]e need a new generation of leaders who can assimilate the things that Trump does so effectively, fearlessly and gleefully. Trump has made it fun to beat the hell out of leftists and socialists, and even when Trump is gone, we must continue to enjoy the Trumpian experience of being a butt-kicking Republican, Christian, right-wing American capitalist." – pp. 248–55</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Onward!</p>
<p>"[To] spell...out what we must do[,] I must begin by complimenting the left. They set out a generation ago to transform America not just through politics but also through culture....They devoted themselves to teaching and organizing and activism.</p>
<p>"[T]hey created two Americas. This is the fact that we conservatives have so much trouble accepting. We continue to chant that this is one America [but] our fallback plan is to create our own space[,] and...pray that [they will] live and let live.</p>
<p>"[B]ut the left has no intention of leaving us alone. They want us to submit to them. They want our children. [W]e don't have the same 'all in' commitment to dominating the country that they do.</p>
<p>"So we must develop it. This is not an option. It is a requirement for our moral and personal survival. We have to change our ways in order to make them change their ways. If we don't fight back, they will turn America into <em>1984,</em> and we will have no place to run to. What this means is that we have to contest their domination of the media, and academia, and Hollywood. We need to recapture some of that cultural space. We need to build our own megaphones.</p>
<p>"We must go after them like they go after us. This means holding them accountable and not backing down. There is no 'let's move on' after they attempt a lethal strike. [S]urviving [those] is not #SoMuchWinning. We don't move on until we put the perpetrators into handcuffs. [W]e're winning when we take lethal political shots at them.</p>
<p>"They have unleashed their fury against us, just as they did a century and a half ago at Fort Sumter. Let's unleash our fury against them, as Lincoln did in response to Fort Sumter. The Republican Party...came together in full force once it took the full measure of the other side[.] Our situation[—]in a political sense—is quite similar....</p>
<p>"When we...take the field, we will recognize our full strength. [H]alf the time, we aren't even ready to fight. We are in conciliatory, even surrender, mode....Not anymore! We know who they are, and we know what we're willing to do to protect ourselves and save our country. We become 'one America' again by defeating them, just as they seek to become 'one America' by destroying us. Our future...depends almost entirely on us." – pp. 255–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-47069585387531104132022-04-15T16:04:00.005-04:002022-05-27T18:30:26.805-04:00Julius Lester's Lovesong: Becoming a Jew<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Lovesong: Becoming a Jew,</em> Julius Lester, 1988:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Part One</p>
<p>Chapter 1</p>
<p>"It is...any summer in the 1940s....</p>
<p>"Grandmomma's house stands alone[:] removed from its neighbors and back from the main road like the monarch of an impoverished kingdom. To the east is a large field[:] 'the orchard,' Momma calls it still...because when she was a girl[,] rows...of [fruit] trees flowered[.]</p>
<p>"In all, there are forty acres of fields and woods enclosed by a sturdy wire fence, whose gate no one ever enters[,] and we seldom go out.</p>
<p>"Beyond the fence, on the west, is a dirt road[.] It is wide enough for a mule wagon as far as Grandmomma's gate, then it narrows to a dusty footpath and winds into the innards of Pine Bluff[, Arkansas]'s black community. [I]n those days[,] change was what the white man at the store <em>might</em> give you when you bought something[.]</p>
<p>"I sit on the porch each day and watch children go back and forth to the little store on the main road. I am a child yearning to be with children, but these wear dirty and torn clothes. ([N]o child ever came to the gate to ask me who I was, where I was from[,] and did I want to play....I never went to the gate so that they could ask.)...</p>
<p>"We are different. Daddy is a Methodist minister and I was robed in a mantle of holiness even before the first diaper was pinned on my nakedness. I cannot do what other kids do—play marbles for keeps [or] listen to popular music[.] We represent Daddy and he represents God.</p>
<p>"My brother hates all of it. He is nine years older than me. [H]e does not come to Grandmomma's[.]</p>
<p>"Daddy tells me, 'God has special plans for you,' and I wonder what they are. I cannot imagine, but I will never know[,] if I do not nurture separateness as if it were my only child.</p>
<p>"We are different, too, because we do not depend on white people for our economic survival. Daddy does not work for white people and we do not have to talk to them or even see them, except when we go to town. We go to town as infrequently as we can.</p>
<p>"There is something else different about us[.] Grandmomma and Momma look like white women. Both have thick, wavy long hair and skin like moonlight.</p>
<p>"(Summer 1982. Daddy has been dead a year....I go to Nashville to help Momma...sell the house[.]</p>
<p>"([N]either Momma nor Grandmomma ever had much use for words....So I am surprised when...Momma...says, 'It was hard growing up looking white. I had a hard time in school. The other kids were always beating me up. And when we went to town, the white people acted like they hated us because we looked white but weren't.'...</p>
<p>"(Silence closes around her again like an enemy....It is the silence of Grandmomma's solitary house and of how solitary we were in that house, in that community and with each other. We were different[:] Grandmomma, Momma and me, holding ourselves back from the world and all in it—reserved, polite [and] formal—acknowledging salutations with the fingertips of white-gloved hands while longing for an embrace.)</p>
<p>"[T]he name on Grandmomma's...mailbox...painted crudely in black...is...A-L-T-S-C-H-U-L. Grandmomma's name is Smith....</p>
<p>"Momma...does[n']t like my questions and generally answers them with 'No,' even when they begin with 'Why?'...</p>
<p>"She chuckles. '[Y]our grandmother...was an Altschul before she married.'</p>
<p>"[S]he hasn't told me who Al[——] is, but if I ask again, she will only say that I ask too many questions." – pp. 5–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Daddy teaches ministers in summer school...in Little Rock[, Arkansas.]</p>
<p>"Anybody can tell that Daddy is a preacher. He always dresses in a suit and tie. They are as natural on him as his black skin....Even when he grins and laughs[,] the seriousness does not change. It is as if his grin and laughter are prayers, too....</p>
<p>"Daddy['s] anger taught me that though we were powerless to change segregation, we would not freely choose it. His anger was self-respect[.]</p>
<p>"Walking along a street in downtown Pine Bluff[,] I see a...round clock jutting from a store front. Curved over the top are the letters A-L-T-S-C-H-U-L. Curved at the bottom is the word <span style="font-variant:small-caps"><small>Jewelers....</small></span></p>
<p>"Driving back to Grandmomma's[,] Daddy...says, 'Your great-grandfather was a Jew. Altschul[—t]hat's a German-Jewish name. [Y]our great-grandmother...was a slave[—n]ot when they met[.] His name was Adolph.</p>
<p>" '[T]he story goes...that Adolph came over here from Germany...and...became a peddler. He went around through the countryside selling things off a horse and wagon. [N]ot too many years after slavery[,] him and your great-grandmother—her name was Maggie. Maggie Carson. A little bitty woman who looked like she was white. Well, [h]is brothers disowned him for marrying her....They didn't want to have nothing to do with him when he was alive....</p>
<p>" 'What was he like, Momma?' I ask eagerly.</p>
<p>" 'He was a very nice man,' she says in that proper way. '[W]hen my father died[,] I remember Grandfather came and got us and brought us out here where Momma lives now. And that's where we lived from then on.' " – pp. 9–12</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 2</p>
<p>"After Daddy's death[,] the parsonage...in Kansas City, Kansas[—t]he home of my childhood[—]is as if it never was.</p>
<p>"[I] lived there until I was nine[, in] a childhood as heavy and gray as the stones of the church[—]bare and lifeless[,] and...pruned...until [it] is not even a memory in my veins.</p>
<p>"I was at Grandmomma's for no more than a month each summer, but every detail of her house, the nuances of the heat of the day, the smell of dust and [the] sounds of bees in the heavy air, the textures of silences from waking through sleeping are integral to my daily journeys through memory....</p>
<p>"Only now do I understand that there was...no separation between life in...the parsonage...and the church next door[.] Daddy was not a pious man and our house was not burdened by...Bible readings. But he was deeply religious and the word [']God['] appeared in conversations...casually[.] My children ask me about my childhood, and I am embarrassed and annoyed when images and their attendant emotions slide from memory[.] I am being born only when I think of church and Sundays....</p>
<p>"(Momma...recalled to my wife with pride once that she never allowed me to get [my clothes] dirty.)</p>
<p>"[One] time[,] my brother was making noise during service. Daddy stopped preaching[,] took off his belt [and] beat [him], and...returned to the pulpit[.]</p>
<p>"In the 1940s a black minister was the recognized and accepted authority in the community—the enforcer of divine law, adjudicator of disputes, provider for the poor, [and] intermediary between the white and the black communities....</p>
<p>"The white community regarded the black minister as a tribal leader. I accepted it as normal that Daddy went to court and on his word alone the judge paroled young black men into his custody[.]</p>
<p>"The black minister embodied—in the way he dressed, talked and walked, the dreams and hopes and aspirations of a people[.] That was why I seldom saw Daddy without a suit and a tie on. He exuded dignity as if it were everyone's birthright[.]</p>
<p>"I remember...after church each Sunday...being given the pennies to count....I am the minister's son and I am admitted to the world of men and act like one. Every Sunday someone says, 'He's just like you, Reverend Lester!,' or 'You gon' be a preacher like your daddy!'</p>
<p>"In [a] sixty-fifth-anniversary booklet there is a picture[:] In the middle is Daddy....I have on a dark coat and am staring directly at the camera, intent and serious....I look closely at the photograph and notice both of Daddy's hands on my shoulders. There is no affection in those hands[:] but control, power, dominance[;] and I submit gratefully: This is my father, I am his.</p>
<p>"I do not enjoy...being God's representative among my peers, as Daddy was among us all. But...I do not hate it[,] unlike my brother[. T]o quarrel with how things are is to think you can box with God and win.</p>
<p>"Yet I do not like church, do not understand why the people shout and 'get happy'[.]</p>
<p>"Nor do I like to look at the cross affixed to the wall behind the pulpit....</p>
<p>"Jesus is less real to me than the giant in <em>Jack and the Beanstalk....</em></p>
<p>"One night...I...turn to the Book of Psalms. [I]ts wholehearted love and praise [make me] so happy that my body wants to jump up and down, dance, turn flips, spin around and around[,] until I collapse in laughter as lilting as sunlight on a wheat field.</p>
<p>"[A child] asks me what [it] means....I [become] angry and...slam...the Bible...on Daddy's desk[.]</p>
<p>"Suddenly my head is like a balloon and...I float...into a deeper blackness....</p>
<p>"I open my eyes. Daddy is looking down at me....</p>
<p>"When he finally speaks his voice is quiet, almost hollow, and more serious even than when he prays. 'Don't ever slam the Bible down again.'...</p>
<p>"In the silence a fear crawls over my flesh like a long-legged spider and I understand in the hollows and crevices and caves of my soul[—]God has chosen me for Himself.</p>
<p>"But I don't tell Daddy." – pp. 13–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 3</p>
<p>"I am eight or nine years old. I am playing Bach on the upright piano in the living room[,] a simplified arrangement[.] I forget that I am playing, and I slip through the lines to the other side of the music where I understand all that was, is and will be. When the music ends, however, I return to this side and cannot remember what I understood.</p>
<p>"I love Bach's music more than that of any composer, but my favorite composition is in a thick book Momma bought me....It is not lines or chords[.] It is happy and sad at the same time....The music winds itself around me and...take[s] me somewhere, but I am afraid and do not go. [T]he composition is <em>'Kol Nidre.'...</em></p>
<p>"Christmas Day, 1951. I am twelve years old. Momma hands me her present. It is...thick and heavy. A book!...</p>
<p>"She smiles. 'You might want to start by reading...<em>The Merchant of Venice.'...</em></p>
<p>"Shylock. How odd that in him I encounter myself in literature for the first time[,] because I did not grow up unaware of black...literature. The segregated schools of Kansas City, Kansas, were secret training camps for the black leaders of the next generation. [T]here were books by and about blacks on...Daddy['s] bookshelves, books [which] I read.</p>
<p>"Yet in Shylock I see myself[,] as I do not in...any...black figure. [T]hey are models of success and I need...someone wh[o] gives me permission...to defend my soul[. T]hrough Shylock I learn that blacks are not the only people in the world who must ponder in their flesh the meaning of meaningless suffering[.]" – pp. 20–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 4</p>
<p>Summer 1953</p>
<p>"We move to Nashville, Tennessee.</p>
<p>"Because of my summers at Grandmomma's I hate that land...where white men stare with eyes as tiny and unblinking as snakes', where stillness and silence lie...as if the land itself clutches secrets...because we would die[,] black and white, if we knew them....</p>
<p>"Daddy has been offered the position of Director of Negro Affairs for...the Methodist Church, and its headquarters are in Nashville....</p>
<p>"White women are the deepest terror. What a white woman says is truth even when it is a lie....</p>
<p>"(Since 1975 I have taught a course on...the Civil Rights Movement.</p>
<p>"([T]he only salvation was to learn to live outside the terror. Daddy taught me how.)...</p>
<p>" 'I know you don't want to move to the South'[,] Daddy...says gently. 'I'm not too keen on the idea myself'[.]" – pp. 23–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">September 1956</p>
<p>"I enter Fisk University[.]</p>
<p>"[A] heretical thought follows: 'What if there isn't a God at all?'...</p>
<p>"Daddy...says...everything I have comes from God[, and] asks if I understand[:] How can he be telling people about God [when] his son is arguing against God? [But] I can believe what I want[,] as long as I...don't embarrass him by saying publicly that I am an atheist. I marvel at Daddy's wisdom. My declaration of atheism has been like a knife in his heart, but he keeps his hands off my soul." – p. 26</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Autumn 1958</p>
<p>"It is a mouse-gray day, the kind only an English major finds romantic. [A] fellow English major...thrusts a book in my hand[.] The book is called <em>Exodus....</em></p>
<p>"What most deeply affects me in the novel...is the love story...about a people and God and a land." – pp. 29–30</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Spring 1960</p>
<p>"I sit on...Robert Hayden's...porch[.] He is a poet and teaches creative writing[.]</p>
<p>He said, 'You're a writer. Anybody can sit-in at a lunch counter. But not anybody can do what you can do, which is write. James Joyce's job was to write <em>Finnegans Wake,</em> not write political tracts or go on a demonstration.'...</p>
<p>"What I really need to know is: Why do I rage over and mourn for murdered European Jews as I never have for my own people? But I am...afraid he will not understand the question as I do not." – pp. 32–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">" 'I want to be a monk,' I say hesitantly.</p>
<p>" 'Monks don't do anything'[,] Momma...replies [with] her back to me[.]</p>
<p>"I learned[:] Holiness is as solemn and unfathomable as a mountain[,] and to be lived as if I am...eternal[.] Holiness is the living of the Oneness of Being. How else can I do that if I don't join the Catholic Church[,] and chant psalms of praise as a monk?</p>
<p>"Now I am told th[is] is doing nothing.</p>
<p>"[F]or...commencement...Momma gives me a book: <em>Disputed Questions,</em> by a Cistercian monk named Thomas Merton. (I still don't know why she gave me a book by a monk after telling me that monks don't do anything.)</p>
<p>"Merton[:]</p>
<p>" 'Contemplation...is the very fullness of a fully integrated life.</p>
<p>" '[W]hat we need are "contemplatives" outside the cloister and outside the rigidly fixed patterns of religious life[—]in the world of art, letters, education, and even politics. This means a solid integration of one's work, thought, religion, and family life and recreations in one vital harmonious unit'[.]" – pp. 34–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">July 1986</p>
<p>"Twenty years ago on this date I was in Atlanta, Georgia, working for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. It was the first summer of Black Power. Stokely Carmichael, SNCC's chairman, was crisscrossing the country carrying the message of Black Power, and in whatever city he spoke, riots blossomed[.]</p>
<p>"My soul did not believe in The Movement[.] What I remember of that time is my soul calling for me to tend it....</p>
<p>"My students at the University of Massachusetts do not hear my woe. They look at me as if they are in the presence of History[.] I see the rapture of nostalgia in their eyes, and shake my head. No one should have to live through a time when History strode across the land like a demented conqueror....</p>
<p>"From 1961 to 1964 I resisted the Siren call of History. I...eked out a living as a folk singer and guitar and banjo teacher. A part of me wanted to be in the South, though[,] where friends were organizing blacks to register to vote....</p>
<p>"History claimed me for Itself; I became a revolutionary.</p>
<p>"Or did I? When I...hear myself introduced as 'a social activist of the Sixties,' I am embarrassed. What did I do? I led singing at mass meetings in Mississippi, took photographs throughout the South, and served on SNCC's Central Committee....</p>
<p>"I remember leading singing at a mass meeting in Laurel, Mississippi, the summer of 1964 and being frightened and repelled by the intensity of emotion with which the people sang[.]</p>
<p>"I joined The Movement, but something essential within me remained unchanged, remained separate and apart, like Grandmomma's house, like those of us who sat on the porch of that house.</p>
<p>"I envied those who believed with their souls that registering people to vote, teaching in freedom schools[,] and challenging the power structure really mattered. They belonged to something greater than their solitary selves....</p>
<p>"Mind conspired with Body to make me believe I was a revolutionary. Soul knew otherwise....In the solitary darkness Soul was safe to come out and live with me. It asked me why I was playing revolutionary. I didn't know. Nor did I know what else to do. No one wanted to hear what I had to say—that death is awful[,] that none of us would be free...until we stopped seeking to create the world in our own images[.] But I was afraid to speak those truths because they seemed alien and irrelevant to almost everyone I knew....</p>
<p>"To my Mind revolution was more imperative than God. [In] the singing of freedom songs at mass meetings I could feel the pain and desperation in people's lives as their voices overwhelmed mine. I shed no tears for the pain as plentiful as cotton. I drank. All of us did. We were too young to carry the pain of all those lives[.]</p>
<p>"Most of us were not destroyed, and none of us became free....</p>
<p>"My Mind did not understand...why hatred was more compelling [to] white people...than love. Yet if I was left alone for more than five minutes my soul surged forward like a tidal wave to remind me that, as compelling and righteous as such emotions were[,] I belonged to the darkness of God.</p>
<p>"May 1966. Lowndes County, Alabama....In the distance, a man plows a field. In the tree above me, birds chirp. I am whole again, at peace and at One with God. [T]he poverty and the pain and the death all around me vanish as if they had never been.</p>
<p>"Th[is] is my most vivid memory of the Civil Rights Movement." – pp. 38–41</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 5</p>
<p>Summer 1968</p>
<p>"My first book is published. Since college I have fantasized that I would write highly praised fiction and be hailed as 'the black James Joyce.' Instead, my first book is a political essay[.]</p>
<p><em>"Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Momma!</em> is the first book explicating Black Power. It is written in...an angry, colloquial black English. Yet the anger is...the anger of love that mocks and pokes fun at whites. [It] is a very funny book.</p>
<p>"[A] mere book...is all <em>Look Out, Whitey!</em> is—a book delineating the political and cultural 'philosophy' of Black Power and the historical context from which it comes....</p>
<p>"Because I can express black anger does not mean I am angry, and it certainly doesn't mean I hate white people. Because I articulate the experiences of many blacks does not mean I am writing autobiographically....</p>
<p>"Not only am I not a 'militant,' I'm not even political, even if I am involved in a political movement....Writing politically is a function of Mind. Mind is not me. How can others not know that?</p>
<p>"But how can they know if I don't tell them?...</p>
<p>"There is the Julius Lester who is interviewed on television talk shows, and takes phone calls on his radio show; he speaks dispassionately about the necessity for blacks to acquire the power to control the institutions that govern their lives, and [that] whatever means used to acquire that power is justified.</p>
<p>"Am I lying? Not at all. I am simply speaking in that collective black voice.</p>
<p>"That Julius Lester is the creation of a History sweeping across the American landscape....That Julius Lester was a welfare worker in Harlem in 1962[,] where he did not know what to say to the fifteen-year-old girl pregnant with her third child[,] and Julius had nightmares and after four months quit his job...because his rage that any society would...offer [to] so many a perpetual living death threatened to destroy him. He read...and found a way to focus and organize that rage—revolution.</p>
<p>"Yet Julius is never sure how much of his revolutionary zeal is born from justified rage and how much is created by the fear of loneliness, by the need for a secure and uncomplicated identity to relieve him of the uncertainty and the unknown in which his Soul seems to delight....</p>
<p>"How can he argue with the nobility of sacrificing himself for the good of that mysterious entity called 'the people'? That is concrete. It tells him what he is living for and for what he would die. Revolution rescues its devotees from doubt and ambiguity if they relinquish all claims to a life separate from 'the people.' The collective aspirations and identity of blacks is all; the individual not only ceases to matter; the individual ceases to exist....</p>
<p>"What are black people doing to their souls by making power an end[,] in and of itself? Even the redefining of ourselves as 'black' places us closer to those people called white, because we...now claim race as identity. Black Power sounds like the roar of independence but it is the whimper of submission. To make our primary definition the color of our skin is...not...to...be free of...white people[.]</p>
<p>"Persona and Soul....Soul can be a luminous glowing behind Persona. My Persona and Soul are not in communication, are not even living in the same countr[y]. They can't be until I write and speak my Soul's doubts about Black Power and revolution....</p>
<p>"I sympathize with white college students who come to hear me; they...are pathetically grateful when I speak to them as human beings deserving respect. I ache for the black students who need me to be their whip, flaying white flesh for sins, real and imagined. I can't do it, and often after I speak I am surrounded by white students eager to talk with me while the disappointed black ones drift sullenly away." – pp. 42–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 6</p>
<p>Winter 1969 [(beginning December 1968)]</p>
<p>"Nineteen sixty-eight was a year that not only tried the soul but left it limp, exhausted, twitching spasmodically on a deserted beach, uncertain [whether] it had the strength to flop its way back into the water or even [whether] it wanted to. [I]n France, students took over Paris. In August, Mayor Daley of Chicago...permitted police to brutalize reporters and demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention, while Russian troops invaded Czechoslovakia....</p>
<p>"In black America the agonized and exhilarating cry of Black Power expunged King's dream of nonviolence[.] Th[os]e very words—Black Power—were a magical incantation conferring instant enlightenment, telling blacks once and for all that the black condition was not the result of genetic inferiority. (A lie we were never absolutely certain was a lie as we searched our souls in the wells of dank nights because we did not understand why we could not succeed to the degree <em>they</em> did[.] Maybe we did have a peculiar odor.)...Freedom rushed forth in cascades when we heard those words—Black Power!—and we [decided] that we were degraded because we lacked the power to be anything else....</p>
<p>"In New York City, blacks and Jews...went to war against each other. The hilltop to be captured was community control of schools." – pp. 46–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">March 1968</p>
<p>"I begin...at WBAI-FM, a listener-supported radio station in New York[.] In the fall [(of 1968)] I am offered a live show for two hours on Thursday evenings. I call it 'The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.' [I]n the humorless atmosphere of the late Sixties[, the] self-mockery [of t]he show's title...is taken seriously.</p>
<p>"As the only black at the station with a live show, I make the airwaves available to blacks who do not have the opportunity to be heard, or are heard only under adversarial questioning from white reporters....</p>
<p>"I am one of the staff people WBAI assigns that fall to cover the strike called by the United Federation of Teachers [(UFT)] over the issue of community control of schools.</p>
<p>"The Board of Education of the City of New York has created three experimental school districts in which boards comprising parents and local leaders are given control[.] One of th[o]se districts is Ocean Hill–Brownsville in Brooklyn, a black and Puerto Rican area.</p>
<p>"[F]rom September 9 to November 18, 1.1 million pupils in the city's nine hundred schools are without teachers.</p>
<p>"From the beginning the UFT has attacked community control with innuendos and slurs. Union president Albert Shanker is quoted [frequently] in <em>The New York Times</em>[.]</p>
<p>"The media does not challenge Shanker's racial code words—'extremist groups,' 'hoodlum element'—by demanding that he be specific and give names. His charge of anti-Semitism is reported as if it is substantiated fact.</p>
<p>"Two leaflets appear mysteriously in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. One...demands black control of black schools but makes no mention of Jews. The other is viciously anti-Semitic, calling Jews 'Middle East Murderers of Colored People'[.]</p>
<p>"The UFT duplicates the leaflets on one sheet of paper [and] distributes them...to union members and [to] the Jewish community[.]</p>
<p>"The New York Civil Liberties Union...investigates the leaflets and...concludes that [they] are another example of 'the UFT's strategy of lying and distorting in order to whip the city into a frenzy of fear of Ocean Hill–Brownsville.' New York's Jewish community is unfazed by facts....</p>
<p>"The UFT is defending an area of institutional life in New York City in which Jews hold real power, for two-thirds of the UFT membership is Jewish, as is Shanker; a majority of supervisors and administrators in black areas are Jewish; and a majority of the Board of Education is Jewish....</p>
<p>"I am unaware of instances of black anti-Semitism but I have heard stories from blacks about Jewish teachers calling black children 'n——' as they enter schools staffed [despite the] strik[e.]</p>
<p>"When I go to Junior High School 271 [in] Ocean Hill–Brownsville...I am surprised to learn that the majority of teachers there are Jews....</p>
<p>"I tape a history class taught by Leslie Campbell, a black man whom the press and the UFT have singled out as the most 'militant' black in the school district. Impressed by his...effectiveness as a history teacher, I invite him on my show.</p>
<p>"Thursday evening, December 26. [B]efore going on the air[,] Les...shows me several poems[.] </p>
<p>" 'I want you to read this one on the air,' I say to Les[.] 'I think it's important for people to know the kinds of feelings being aroused in at least one black child because of what's happening in Ocean Hill–Brownsville.'</p>
<p>"[From] a transcript[:]</p>
<p>" 'Campbell: I...brought with me some works by a young sister in Brooklyn who is fifteen years old...by the name of Thea Behran. She has written a poem about anti-Semitism[,] and she dedicates [it] to Albert Shanker[;] and the [title] is "Anti-Semitism":</p>
<p>" ' "Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head<br>
You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead.<br>
[Etc.]" '...</p>
<p>" 'Lester: I had you read that in the full knowledge...that probably one half of WBAI's subscribers will immediately cancel their subscriptions to the station, and do all sorts of other things because of the sentiments expressed in that particular poem; but nonetheless, I wanted you to read it because she expresses...how she feels.'</p>
<p>" 'Campbell: [S]ome of our listeners...are going to say that that is anti-Semitism...but I don't think that is the question.'...</p>
<p>" 'Listener: That was a very ugly poem. What was it about the poem that made you feel we should have heard it?'</p>
<p>" 'Lester: People should listen to what a young black woman is expressing. I hope that will properly cause people to do some self-examination and react as you have reacted. An ugly poem, yes, but not one half as ugly as what happened in school strikes[.] I would hope that you would not have the automatic reaction, but raise a few questions inside yourself. I had it read over the air because I felt what she said was valid for a lot of black people, and I think it's time people stop being afraid of it and stop being hysterical about it....</p>
<p>" 'Lester: All black people are saying is, if there is going to be communication between black people [and Jews], our point of view and our attitudes are going to be a major consideration. In the past they have not been because we have kept quiet, and now we are saying it's a two-way street, and you have to at least come one-half way on our terms.'...</p>
<p>"For the next two Thursday evenings I...engage[d] listeners...in a discussion of the underlying issue, namely, the need of blacks for political control over the institutions of their communities....</p>
<p>"January 16, 1969[. M]y answering service [tells me] to call Lee Dembart at the <em>New York Post.</em></p>
<p>"[His] story...follows:</p>
<p>" 'Julius Lester, the black author, radio commentator and host of the WBAI-FM show on which...an anti-Semitic...poem was read, said that while "the poem did not express my own personal emotion"[,] he thought [its] feelings should not be ignored....</p>
<p>" 'The United Federation of Teachers...has lodged a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission[.]</p>
<p>" ' "I recognized at the time that there would be some understandable reaction," Lester said, but added that he had neither "endorsed the poem" nor "made any anti-Semitic remarks" on the air....</p>
<p>" ' "The sad thing to me is that I feel the UFT is responsible for quite a bit of the feeling that exists among young blacks now in terms of Jews," Lester said. He said the teachers' union had adopted a position that anyone who opposed them was anti-Semitic.</p>
<p>" ' "Regardless of whether the feelings are true or not, they can't be ignored," he said. "They can't be looked at as 'This is wrong.' "</p>
<p>" 'Said Shanker last night:</p>
<p>" ' "Leslie Campbell's proud reading of his student's anti-Semitic poem is an indication of his teaching approach....This city is going to have to decide whether it wants its teachers to teach anti-Semitism or understanding and brotherhood."</p>
<p>" ' "He [Shanker] doesn't want Les Campbell teaching black children. So here's another weapon he's using," Lester said.</p>
<p>" 'Frank A. Millspaugh, WBAI's general manager...and program director Dale Minor presented a special half-hour program last Friday in which they "supported the station's right to air such things," Lester said.</p>
<p>" 'The author said he was gratified by some fifty letters he had received, both agreeing and disagreeing with the poem, all "in the main very serious.</p>
<p>" ' "If I had to do it all over again, I'd do the same thing," he said. "These things are not going to go away by screaming about them." '</p>
<p>"That morning's <em>New York Times</em> carries a front-page headline about the poem and the UFT complaint. The <em>Times</em>...does not then or ever contact me for comment[.]</p>
<p>"Later that morning...on the radio...the lead...news... item...is that I have been fired from the station....Frank Millspaugh [says,] 'I don't know how that got on the air, but we're going to stop it.'...</p>
<p>"The airing of the poem coincides with the organizing of the Jewish Defense League[,] who campaign to get me fired from the station. On...a leaflet...is a picture of me[. A] headline read[s]: 'This is the Outrageous Anti-Semitic Poem which was read by Leslie Campbell on the Julius Lester Program, Dec. 26 over Station WBAI.'...At the bottom in bold letters: 'Cancel Out Julius or he may cancel out you!' [A]t the bottom right is a circle in which are the words 'Cancel Julius Lester.'...</p>
<p>"Most distressing is that Jewish newspapers across the country carry stories about the airing of the poem, but no editor or reporter from a Jewish paper ever seeks my side of the story....</p>
<p>"Naïvely, I['d] thought that airing the poem would facilitate contact between Jews and blacks. Jews needed to know how damaging Shanker's remarks had been; they needed to know the depth of black anger over the UFT's opposition to community control and how they were being exploited by the false accusation of black anti-Semitism....As crude...as the poem was[, i]t was pain expressed as anger at Jews, many of whom found identity by borrowing suffering...while remaining...blind to the suffering of black people around them and actively opposing the political means blacks used to alleviate a portion of that suffering.</p>
<p>"Yet my strongest supporters during these weeks are also Jews....</p>
<p>"Ironically, I do not receive one expression of support from blacks, not even a phone call from a single black friend. I begin wondering why I am so eager to risk my life and reputation in the service of black people when they do not seem to care....Most important are the Jewish listeners who call and write to say that they know I am not an anti-Semite.</p>
<p>"Between January 23 and the following Thursday[,] in the quiet and aloneness I hear an anger within me, an anger that my suffering as a black person is not understood as I feel the suffering of Jews is. I am angry, too, that Jews, the people I thought most able to understand black suffering, do not understand, do not care, even, to try to understand. Once I see my anger staring at me, I cannot deny that part of my motivation in airing the poem had been to hurt Jews as they had hurt me. If such unspoken anger becomes a comfortable habit, there is no way I can prevent myself from sliding into anti-Semitism as if it were a cool lake at the bottom of a grassy slope.</p>
<p>"Then I remember my great-grandfather. I have not thought of him since childhood. I wonder what he is thinking of me[.]</p>
<p>"That evening of January 30, when the Jewish Defense League is to picket me, I walk to the station [and] can hear them shouting and screaming....Jewish counter-demonstrators were there in support of the station and me, and the shouting is between them and the JDL demonstrators....</p>
<p>"The JDL demonstrators surge against the police barricades, screaming and yelling[.] Policemen move toward the demonstrators and begin pushing them back with nightsticks....Seventy-five policemen are needed to maintain order.</p>
<p>"What I said on the air that evening follows[:]</p>
<p>" 'When the teachers' strike began last fall, I thought that the issue involved was community control of schools and that the racism which was exemplified by[,] and in[,] the teachers' strike was a part of that....</p>
<p>" 'Everybody in New York City has more than enough outlets for whatever they might want to say[.] Black people do not. So I'm here two hours a week, trying to serve as a forum for the black community....</p>
<p>" 'A black man in the communications media is generally there as a representative of the Establishment, not as a member of the black community. [H]ere's a black person on the air talking to black people, not trying to mollify white people. Thus, there was pressure on me to disavow...what [certain blacks] said[.] I have no choice but to look upon myself as a black, who as an individual has certain skills that he is trying to make available to blacks. </p>
<p>" '[I]t is...a major mistake...to equate black anti-Semitism, a phrase I will use for the sake of convenience only, with the anti-Semitism which exists in Germany and Eastern Europe. If black people had the capability of organizing and carrying out a pogrom against the Jews, then there would be quite a bit to fear....I doubt very seriously if blacks even have the desire. But Jews have not bothered to try to see that black anti-Semitism is different. It is different because the power relationships which exist in this country are different. In Germany, the Jews were the minority surrounded by a majority which carried out heinous crimes against them. In America, it is we who are the Jews. It is we who are surrounded by a hostile majority. It is we who are constantly under attack....And the greatest irony of all is that it is the Jews who are in the position of being Germans.</p>
<p>" 'In the city of New York a situation exists in which black people, being powerless, are seeking to gain a degree of power over their lives and over the institutions which affect their lives. It so happens that in many of those institutions, the people who hold the power are Jews. In the attempt to gain power, if there is resistance by Jews, then, of course, blacks are going to respond. [W]hen blacks consistently attacked the political position of the UFT, their response was to accuse blacks of being anti-Semitic and to point to their liberal record on race relations and the fact that Shanker marched in Selma. Indeed, Jews tend to be a little self-righteous about their liberal record, always jumping to point out that they have been in the forefront of the fight for racial equality. Yes, they have played a prominent role and blacks always thought it was because they believed in certain principles. When they remind us continually of this role, then we realize that they were pitying us and wanted our gratitude[.]</p>
<p>" 'Maybe that's where the problem comes now. Jews consider themselves liberals. Blacks consider them paternalistic. Blacks do not accept the Jews' definition of either the problem or the claim that Jews have been in the forefront. And what can only be called Jewish contempt for blacks reaches its epitome when Jews continually go to the graveyard and dig up Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, 'who died for you.'...When you're powerless, you reach a point where you realize that you're all alone. You have no one but each other. Those who said that they were your friends were never your friends, because they unilaterally defined the relationship. Nonetheless, you had a certain sympathy from them, and having that sympathy, you expected that it would remain. But we have learned that sympathy exists only when it is a question of morals. When it was a moral issue, a question of integration in the South, for example, blacks had nonblack friends. But...America does not run on morals....America acts on the basis of power. Power, and power alone. [B]lack people [have] reached the point of correctly analyzing that it was not a question of morals, but a question of power[.]</p>
<p>" '[A] colonized people, which blacks are, cannot make fine distinctions as to who holds...power....Jews are no exception because they hold only a measure of that power. It is power, and the Establishment maintains its powers partially through Jews. When a powerless people, a colonized people, begin to fight for power, then the first thing they will do is to lash out verbally at the most immediate enemy. In this particular instance, that hurt, the articulation, the demand that the colonizer listen, is accomplished in a violent manner, like the language of the poem....</p>
<p>" 'To the question of whether or not I am anti-Semitic, I won't answer, because it's not a relevant question to me. The relevant question is changing the structure of this country because that's the only way black people will achieve the necessary power. [We are] seeking...to escape the definition of this controversy which others have put on it. Because what we have seen has been a moral response to a political problem.</p>
<p>" 'We've reached a point where the stage is set now. I think that black people have destroyed the previous relationship which they had with the Jewish community, in which we were the victims of a kind of paternalism, which is only a benevolent racism. It is oppressive, no matter how gentle its touch. That old relationship has been destroyed and the stage is set now for a real relationship where <em>our</em> feelings, <em>our</em> view of America and how to operate have to be given serious consideration....</p>
<p>" 'If there's going to be any resolution of the problem...then it means that Jews and Anglo-Saxons are going to have to examine themselves. They are going to have to relinquish the security which comes from the definition which the society has given them. They're going to have to question themselves and they're going to have to open up, to be, at the least, receptive to what blacks are trying to say....</p>
<p>" 'James Baldwin...says in...<em>The Fire Next Time,</em> which came out in 1962[:]</p>
<p>" ' "Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point. But I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be accepted by white people, still less to be loved by them"[.]</p>
<p>" 'Black anti-Semitism is not the problem; it has never been the problem. Jews have never suffered at the hands of black people. Individuals, yes[.] But en masse, no. The issue is not black anti-Semitism. The issue is what it has always been: racism. And the physical oppression of black people by a racist system. But that system needs instruments and those instruments have been white people, including Jews. If this fact cannot be faced, then there is little else to be said. It is this which black people understand. I guess it just comes down to questions of who's going to be on what side. If there are Jews and other white people out there who understand, never was there a more opportune time for them to let their voices be heard.'...</p>
<p>"On March 26, 1969, the Federal Communications Commission rules on the UFT complaint against the station, and says that WBAI 'fulfilled its obligation imposed by the fairness doctrine'[.] It...quotes extensively from...the remarks I made on the air [on] January 30[.]</p>
<p>"[N]either <em>The New York Times</em> nor any radio or television station reported what I said on the air that [evening; and] I am anathema to Jews across the country." – pp. 47–65</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 7</p>
<p>Spring 1969</p>
<p>"For Christmas 1968, my wife gives me...a human skull....</p>
<p>"My marriage of seven years bleeds from wounds that...neither my wife nor I know how [to] suture[.] The end is in sight and we wait passively for it to arrive.</p>
<p>"That political movement in which I have been involved full-time since 1966 is disintegrating into factions and acrimony. Such disintegration is...a sign of The Movement's success. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, The Movement effectively put itself out of business....Why do we not celebrate the victories that make our slave ancestors weep for joy from their graves?</p>
<p>"[W]hite Americans...still believe that by being white they partake of innate and God-endowed superiority.</p>
<p>"[B]lacks are jumping to the other side, and in redefining ourselves as blacks, we impose racial definitions on the rest of humanity. Murder is committed when we define others as anything except a variation of ourselves[,] and we of them. And the greater victim of that murder is the murderer.</p>
<p>"It is we who are the executioners of ourselves, and our paeans to blackness are like the rouge morticians rub into the cheeks of the dead. Blackness is a cosmetic, obscuring the reality of human existence." – pp. 67–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 8</p>
<p>Autumn 1970</p>
<p>"My wife and I have separated....Why did the silence of tenderness become the foreboding stillness of unspoken hurt and anger? Who have I become that the...love I offered...now feels like dust [which] I am eager to wash from my hands?...</p>
<p>"Me is a voice on the radio trying to get out of the net of blackness in which I have become entangled....Me is a lonely child disguised as a man, frightened by suicidal depressions.</p>
<p>"[B]eneath the[se] I sense something as compressed and unchanging as a stone, something with the power to direct all the Me's to their proper places...where they will be relieved to speak their lines at the proper times[.]</p>
<p>"Merton. I return to him in...<em>Contemplation in a World of Action[:]</em></p>
<p>" 'What is meant by identity?...We are talking about one's own authentic and personal beliefs and convictions, based on [the] experience of oneself as a person'[.]</p>
<p>"How am I supposed to recognize the truth of my life?...I do not even know where or how to begin." – pp. 71–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Autumn 1971</p>
<p>"Since the anti-Semitic poem controversy, I have been changing the...radio show....I add rock...as well as...classical pieces. It is a subtle attempt to express more of my personality[. My] listeners are uncomfortable with the mix of the familiar and the new....I have lost my audience.</p>
<p>"I leave the radio station. I can no longer be the person my listeners need me to be. (Nine months later WBAI asks me to do a show from seven to nine on Monday and Tuesday mornings....For the first time I allow myself to be me in public. To my surprise, people like me.)...</p>
<p>"I stare at my name on the spines of the nine books I have published and wonder who Julius Lester is and what all those words are that he has written....If I am not in those books, where am I?</p>
<p>"I do not know and am ashamed that I don't. I have written books that, while not false, are not wholly true. I have lived the life others needed me to live. By doing so I have sold my birthright and I never knew what it was." – pp. 73–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Summer 1973</p>
<p><em>"July 5, Waynesboro, Virginia.</em>...The worst legacy of having grown up in the South is not knowing how to trust reality; I do not have the capacity even to know reality....</p>
<p><em>"August 3, Lawrence, Kansas.</em> [R]eligious professionals...can't talk without quoting...others with whom I am not familiar. I wonder if they lack their own words because they have not experienced God. Tell me about <em>you,</em> I want to yell at them....</p>
<p>"I listen to their emotions and perceive that they are people without hope, and thus are in despair. They feel abandoned by God. This is not surprising because their religion is a politicized Christianity. They think Christians are supposed to save the world.</p>
<p>"What gives them the right to think [that] they should save the world?...</p>
<p>"I...tell them that there is no hope, and as long as you think there is, you are saying that life is valid only to the degree that one's impact on the world is for the good. The meaning of life is not found in the effect we have on...what we think to be the world. We are called to live our lives and be instruments of God. We are merely human[.] As long as Christianity thinks it should...change the world, it will be nothing more than a caucus in the Democratic or Republican parties....Christianity has become a wing of Caesar's Bureau of Propaganda.</p>
<p>"In all the times I've spoken publicly, this is the first I've felt wholly myself, hiding nothing. [W]ords came that I do not recall ever saying even to myself. They came from somewhere within me that had never known words, and for the first time I was not ashamed to be one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness. There is only one reason to be alive and that is GOD ALONE....</p>
<p><em>"August 4–6, Kansas City, Kansas.</em>...I told my parents I was coming and they told friends, who arranged a public gathering, and in a moment of weakness, I consented to it....</p>
<p>"Whatever someone says about me is not true, and I refuse to be pinned by anyone's words, even my own.</p>
<p><em>"August 13–16, Abbey of Gethsemani.</em>...On my last day[,] a feeling of utter sweetness begins to permeate me[.] I...lie in the grass. It is as if I am rocking gently back and forth in the bottom of the sky....</p>
<p>"I hug myself in delirious joy....</p>
<p>"The monastery is pure Being, and that is the world, too[.] I cannot know myself as long as I confuse me with who the world defines as me." – pp. 74–86</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Part Two</p>
<p>Chapter 9</p>
<p>Autumn 1975: Amherst, Massachusetts</p>
<p>"For six months now I haven't given myself to the pictures rising from the grave of night, the nocturnal messages from unknown parts of my soul which the ancients knew as visitations from the gods....</p>
<p>"I am afraid my life is an unclean thing.</p>
<p>"Is that what God wants me to know? If so, then why doesn't He tell me how to cleanse this life He has given me? I...learn only that I am not the person I could be and I do not know what to do.</p>
<p>"Each morning [I] try...to gather the night pictures before they are scattered by the broom of day's light[.]</p>
<p>"Five years after his mother and I divorced [m]y son...has come to live with me....<em>She asked me to come from Amherst for a conference with her and our son's second-grade teacher.</p>
<p>"Malcolm's having problems in school.</em></p>
<p>"What do you mean?...</p>
<p><em>"All he likes is sports, doing something where he can run into someone and knock them down.</em></p>
<p>"He's testing himself against others. It's a way of learning who he is, what he can do....</p>
<p><em>"But he's so violent, which is possibly repressed anger at your having left.</p>
<p>"[And, h]e might hurt me!</em></p>
<p>"You're a grown woman!</p>
<p><em>"I wonder if she knows it is not physical strength she fears but the power of the masculine. My son's burden is to grow up when feminism roams the streets with all the intelligence of a lynch mob. His teacher at the private, multiracial, nonsexist, 'progressive' school to which I am paying three thousand nondeductible dollars a year does not love the ecstasy of leaping toward where clouds are born to glove a high line drive, the mesmerizing magic of the spinning spiral of a football arcing through an autumn afternoon as dazzling as a stained-glass window, the pride of ripped pants and grass-stained shirts, or the gleeful power in a tiny clenched fist.</p>
<p>"There is nothing wrong with him, but there will be if he isn't respected and loved for who he is. And who he is, is male. [M]aleness must be a source of joy and delight for him.</p>
<p>"He has my permission to defend himself in any way he can against feminist tyranny. If he doesn't, he'll find himself hanging from a nonsexist lamppost, crows pecking at his penis.</p>
<p>"[H]is mother...asks, 'How would you feel about him coming to live with you?['] I respond with...vehemence[:] 'I want him!'...</em></p>
<p>"I am entering middle age without having left childhood. How can that be?" – pp. 89–91</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"How did that pasty liquid which spurted from my penis create this miracle of bone and flesh[?] I am ashamed at how casually his life was conceived....But Nature is intent only on its own renewal and doesn't notice or care about me." – pp. 91–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Daddy and I used to do jigsaw puzzles....</p>
<p>"My son taught me a new way to do this. I match pieces by color. He sees shapes....</p>
<p>"I want to see my son [as] the man forming in the boy's soul....</p>
<p>"My son...demands that I live as a whole person[.]</p>
<p>"I was twenty before I lived among whites. His mother is white and he has never lived among blacks....</p>
<p>"I am arguing with him as [with] a drunk in a bar....I say, coldly, 'Babe Ruth was a white man, and probably didn't like black people.'</p>
<p>"I am immediately ashamed....</p>
<p>"I remember interviewing Muhammad Ali in the fall of 1968. [M]aybe it was because I was black that he felt compelled to recruit me for the Nation of Islam.</p>
<p>"[F]ather[s] need...who [they] are as a man[,] to be understood and continued[.]</p>
<p>"[T]he essence of me...cannot be separated from Sundays in church listening to Daddy preach[,] as only black ministers can[;] from sitting on Grandmomma's porch at night[,] listening to her and Momma and Uncle Rudolph[.]</p>
<p>"[T]here is nothing racial in his being called Milk Chocolate[,] my son...insists.</p>
<p>"[F]or the first time[,] our lives have met in the suffering place, which is the only place I can be known." – pp. 92–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I assumed...children...would appear out of the fog one day...and listen avidly while I discoursed[.]</p>
<p>"Sometimes I think children cry out from the trunk of my penis to be born, and it angers me when I hear women say it is their right to do as they wish with their bodies. How came it to be <em>theirs?</em> That body was put into their keeping, but it is not their property....</p>
<p>"Once seed and egg unite, a man and a woman no longer have rights. [W]hen abortion is reduced to a political right, my daughter and my son grow up without humility before the mystery of Life." – pp. 96–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"My son's clothes amaze me...for they are smaller versions of my clothes. They are not children's clothes, but child-sized men's clothes....</p>
<p>"I am left...with the burden and terror of my life. [W]hat we accomplish is not as important as who we are." – pp. 97–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 10</p>
<p>Spring 1976</p>
<p>"Spring...is winter's child and summer's parent, and I try to find my place[.]</p>
<p>"The definition by which I have known myself since I was eighteen died this winter[.]</p>
<p>"[F]or five months not only have I been unable to write, I don't know why I should, or how I ever did.</p>
<p>"Now my son lives with me....</p>
<p>"In less than a year I have learned that you become a parent the day you stand before a human being barely four feet high, who weighs forty pounds, and realize that he has...power and control over your life....</p>
<p>"I no longer do anything when I want....I must be prepared to answer questions[.]</p>
<p>"I never learned to care for myself; now I must think about and for him. [N]othing makes you more aware of your total inadequacy....</p>
<p>"I want...to provide a...compassionate answer for his life, but I have nothing to offer except that I am a writer.</p>
<p>"Now, I am unable to write." – pp. 100–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I am of that generation of Southern blacks whose parents made the journey from the sweat of cotton fields and vegetable patches to the ease of city living[.]</p>
<p>"I see...Daddy...go out the back door after supper, still dressed in a suit, his gray straw hat on his head, a seat cushion in his hand. He takes the hoe from the garage and walks behind it to the square patch of ground[.]</p>
<p>"[H]is garden...was what remained of his life before, and each spring he renewed the covenant with his father and his father's father, whose lives were bounded by fields and haunted by train whistles calling them[.] Daddy had ridden the train his father and grandfather and great-grandfather could only look at while leaning on their hoes. Now my life is acted out in worlds my father cannot imagine. When we see each other, he glows with pride as he tells me of meeting people and being asked, 'Are you any kin to Julius Lester, the writer?'...I feel a yearning[,] a hunger...for the common ground that father and son are.</p>
<p>"Every evening as I wash the dirt of the garden from my hands, I experience that ground[.]" – pp. 102–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 11</p>
<p>Summer 1976</p>
<p>"[In] the years with...my son['s] mother...I lived as if all a marriage needed to be fragrant and many-petaled was my having said, 'I do.' I was young and did not know that other people are real, too....</p>
<p>"Sometimes I wonder if I do not need to atone for the sins of an entire generation. [T]here is an evil arrogance in attempting to remake the world in your own image. That is what we tried to do, we who called ourselves revolutionaries....</p>
<p>"There is no greater terror than doing what you think God wants of you." – p. 104</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"It is not surprising that...whites who live...toward the mountains [of] Arizona...north [of] Phoenix...are among the most conservative in the country....Nature is not a mother's breast, nourishing anyone who places the nipple in his mouth....</p>
<p>"The politics of fear is powerful here because the land is harsh and unyielding to those who do not love their [own] finitude....</p>
<p>"Dusk. There is a howling in the distance. It is a coyote. It is the sound my soul makes at dawn." – pp. 104–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Tuzigoot National Monument[;] Montezuma Castle National Monument</em></p>
<p>"Tuzigoot is the ruin of a ninety-room pueblo in the Verde Valley....</p>
<p>"Eight hundred years ago[,] someone...here...knew only what he needed to know: how to irrigate the fields, grind the corn, build a house with small stones, and praise his gods....</p>
<p>"Montezuma Castle...was carved from the face of limestone cliffs....</p>
<p>"That Indians created such an edifice without modern machinery amazes white people....We are the oddities of humanity, wholly dependent on machines and technology, [while] damning those who aren't[,] as underdeveloped.</p>
<p>"[T]he...ceiling...is...so low[:] these rooms were only for sleeping....The National Park Service booklet speculates that...high...on the cliff, the people were immune to attack from enemies[—h]ow American. [I]t is only here that one does not intrude on the land. Here...I sit[,] as dusk descends as relentlessly as a hawk[,] and know that my rightful place in the world is a low dark room in the face of a cliff." – pp. 105–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Hopiland</em></p>
<p>"From...three mesas...the Hopi[s] saw the Spanish coming and fought them, century after century, never incurring defeat....</p>
<p>"The Hopis are known for two things to outsiders: draft resistance during World War II...and the Snake Dance[.]</p>
<p>"[In] an interview[, a] Christian...snake handler...said [t]he only time he was bitten was the Sunday morning he <em>thought</em> about handling a snake. After that[,] he waited until the urge to handle was so strong that it was <em>the only way</em> to give witness to his joy in knowing God....</p>
<p>"The snake...represents...that energy and power which is life itself. The Snake Dance reconciles earth and sky, passion and reason, cathedral and kiva[;] and the monk becomes a lover." – pp. 107–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Taos</em></p>
<p>"[A] drunken Indian...ask[s] for a ride to the pueblo....Those who live in the continuous miracle are few. Most of us are drunkards looking for a ride home[.]" – p. 109</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Taos Pueblo</em></p>
<p>"The Taos Indians say [that] this is the spiritual center of the world. The Hopis claim the same for their land. I believe them both....</p>
<p>"A young Indian...gives me...the Black Solidarity handshake, and...proceeds to tell me that he and I are brothers and must come together to fight the white man. Even here[,] I am defined by my skin color." – p. 109</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>San Cristobal, New Mexico</em></p>
<p>" 'D.H. Lawrence Ranch'</p>
<p>"I...pay homage to this man who tried to find the way to live—with integrity—in right relationship to the demands of the blood[:] that part of us which is instinctual. Until I learn to live with [this] I will not be...truly religious." – pp. 109–10</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 12</p>
<p>Winter 1977 [(beginning December 1976)]</p>
<p>"[I]n the 1940s, [e]ducation in...all-black schools was a process of being trained—intellectually and emotionally—to survive and persevere. We were not allowed to think that the white world could defeat us....If we didn't succeed in becoming doctors, lawyers, teachers, ministers or writers[,] we were to...pass...on[,] to the next generation[,] the dream and the toughness to endure when dreams do not come true....</p>
<p>"I am...suspicious, angry and afraid that...my son['s] white mother and relatives are undermining him with their cuddly gifts[,] render[ing] him weak and defenseless [for] when it is his time to traverse the valley of the shadow of death....He will need strength to believe in himself when he has no reason to. I demand perfection of him now[,] so he will demand perfection of himself later[,] because white people do not care if he lives or dies, do not care even that he is.</p>
<p>"I know that I am too harsh with him, too strict[.] But I did not know what it is to have a childhood. I lay awake nights...wondering if I would be strong enough and bright enough not only to endure but to make my forebears proud and the way a little easier for my descendants.</p>
<p>"I am merely one in the generations of black intellectuals and professionals who were required to sacrifice their childhoods, personal dreams[,] and desires because our task was to prepare the way....</p>
<p>"I have wondered often who I would be if I were not black. But I cannot imagine what it is to live without my life dangling in space, stretched and broken by the noose of race....</p>
<p>"I went to Tanglewood one Saturday last summer....I saw a young black kid hurrying by[.] I hated him for having opportunities I did not. I suffer in the shadows of the unrealized and unfulfilled parts of my soul, parts which will be forever stillborn. I could have been a classical musician[. T]here is still a part of me that wishes he could have studied harpsichord with Wanda Landowska[.]</p>
<p>"It will never be, and grief and rage bubble inside me like molten iron. Even now, at age thirty-seven, I ask myself, What do you want? and do not understand the question. It's a white folks' question, the rage and grief respond contemptuously.</p>
<p>"That is not so, I respond weakly. If I do not know what I want, how can I live? To have done what history considered necessary has not been sufficient.</p>
<p>"What do you want? I ask myself again, and, enraged, I shout back: I want not to live with the spirits of my slave ancestors needing me to sing the song they couldn't sing....</p>
<p>"When rage subsides I realize that I have stated what I <em>don't</em> want....</p>
<p>"What do I want?</p>
<p>"I honestly don't know." – pp. 111–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"My son is at school and I cry. Every morning when I hear the school bus pull away, I lie across my bed and the tears come. I cry for the childhood I could not have. I cry because...I will never know who I could have been....I cry because I hurt so damned much." – p. 113</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I am planning the garden.</p>
<p>"[T]he seasons do not come in orderly succession. They are intertwined[.]</p>
<p>"I missed spring last year because I was looking for it." – p. 113</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 13</p>
<p>Spring 1978</p>
<p>"My time of depression is over. I do not know...when...it ended[.]</p>
<p>"Something has changed within me. [T]he tears of others are my own now. S. is a beautiful blond girl who was in my 'Contemporary Afro-American Novel' course last spring. [I]f she had applied her above-average intelligence as diligently to my class as she so obviously did to <em>Vogue,</em> she could have replaced me as teacher. She always sat in the front row, her perfect legs crossed to reveal the beginning of a thigh, the top buttons of her blouse undone to show the lacy border of her bra. I wanted to give her an 'A' for the sheer pleasure her presence brought me and the enrichment of my fantasy life.</p>
<p>"She came into my office at the beginning of this school year[.] Minutes passed....</p>
<p>"Finally she said, 'I had an abortion this summer....</p>
<p>" 'I knew that I couldn't have the baby. I'm still a baby myself. But nobody told me that...I would feel like I'd killed my own baby!'</p>
<p>"She sobbed. I closed the door of my office and held her for a long time.</p>
<p>"I could not have done that before....</p>
<p>"I want to live as if I am a song of praise composed by God[.]" – pp. 114–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"My daughter [Jody] and her mother have moved to Amherst. [T]he differences between her mother and me are most evident in how we raise our children. My daughter is accustomed to a kind of freedom that is alien to me....</p>
<p>"She argued with me about her 'rights.' [S]he is growing up at a time when the concept of rights has been perverted until it is synonymous with desires. Even a cursory reading of the Bill of Rights makes it clear that rights are guaranteed to the individual as protection from the power of government and that is all. People talk as if rights were handed down by God at Sinai and sanction anything their hearts desire. I knew better than to say to my daughter that abortion per se is not a woman's right[.] She would not have understood[.] </p>
<p>"[S]ometimes...I am the agent for the suffering of others.</p>
<p>"To suffer and inflict suffering are as much a part of God as love." – pp. 115–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Last year I met a woman who knows that the night pictures are the soul's mirror, and who wants to live holiness in family. [W]e have married....</p>
<p>"I know how to live [in that way,] how to imbue our children with reverence for their lives[:] By the way we live the ordinary. Yet I watch...news...during supper[,] which angers my wife. [W]hen she and the children ask me to quit...smok[ing,] I tell them angrily to mind their own business.</p>
<p>"I betray holiness while wanting so much to be holy, to make my marriage holy, to make my new family holy.</p>
<p>"[S]omething is missing and I don't know what it is. It should be easy to make the ordinary sacred. For some reason it isn't." – p. 117</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Every Sunday morning the university radio station plays Jewish music for two hours. I don't know why but I listen every week....</p>
<p>"I listen and that loneliness lying within me like a black hole threatening to suck the entire universe into its nothingness is destroyed and stars shine with a white heat and I become infinity.</p>
<p>"Every week when I listen to the show 'Zamir,' I pretend that I am a Jew and the Hebrew words are my language[.]" – p. 117</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 14</p>
<p>Spring 1979</p>
<p>"Tillie Olsen...once...remarked, 'We should be allowed one child to make all our mistakes on. Then, that child would disappear and we would have our first one.'...</p>
<p>"I have been more authoritarian than I needed to be; I have not loved with the clarity their souls deserved." – p. 118</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[During] my sabbatical[,] I happened to pick up Raul Hilberg's <em>The Destruction of the European Jews</em> from [my] pile of unread books[.]</p>
<p>"I wanted to understand the historical conditions which led to the Holocaust so I could recognize them if they ever appeared in this country[.] Of course[, i]f America were going to destroy blacks, the scenario would be so different that I, like the Jews of Europe, could not recognize what was before my eyes....</p>
<p>"Each evening[,] I read[.]</p>
<p>"On January 27, 1939, Jewish children were born across Europe as I was born in St. Louis, Missouri....</p>
<p>"To be innocent is to deceive myself about what it means to be human." – pp. 119–20</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I am five or six years old[.]</p>
<p>"The war was...little children at church on Father's Day[,] pinned [with] white flowers[.] Their fathers had died in the war and on that Sunday we were afraid of them....</p>
<p>"Why am I alive?</p>
<p>"Why are the [Jewish Holocaust] children...dead?" – pp. 121–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 15</p>
<p>Summer 1979</p>
<p>"[U.N.] ambassador...Andrew Young...has resigned, and Jesse Jackson...and other black leaders have accused Jews of pressuring President Carter into forcing Young to [do so.]</p>
<p>"Young met secretly with the Palestine Liberation Organization's representative to the [United Nations]. Official U.S. policy is...that there be no contacts between the U.S. and the P.L.O....Young...admitted that...a meeting had taken place[. B]oth President Carter and the Israeli government urged Young not to resign. Young said he chose to resign so he could speak freely on foreign policy and not because Jews demanded his resignation.</p>
<p>"Why, then, are blacks blaming Jews? Why are blacks responding as if an injustice has been done [to] the entire race? [I]nsisting on innocence...is what blacks indulge in[,] with these attacks on Jews.</p>
<p>"Since the Sixties a profound transformation has occurred in the souls of black folks and I fear we have become unworthy of our foreparents. I am beginning to realize that I am part of the last generation of blacks to grow up with a morality which demands that we recognize and acknowledge the humanity of white people, especially because they made the denial of ours a creed by which they lived. 'You have to be better than them,' teacher after teacher in those segregated schools told us. 'We got to save them po' people from theyselves,' the old ones would say. What I understood was that I protected my soul only to the extent that I did not give my soul over to hating those who had earned my hatred.</p>
<p>"It was a paradox. I was educated to live with an unbearable tension between the real and the ideal, recognizing the real but acting, always, in relationship to the ideal. By believing in the humanity of whites, we of the generations before the Sixties avoided becoming victims or executioners, to use Camus's formulation.</p>
<p>"With the coming of Black Power, blacks chose to resolve the tension by becoming victims[;] that is, they allowed their souls to be identified and synonymous with their political condition. They chose blackness, which did not permit whites to be other than white. The humanity of whites was denied by blacks as the humanity of blacks had been denied by whites....</p>
<p>"By resolving the tension through canonizing themselves as victims, blacks relinquished the courage to suffer. They began singing songs of sorrow to one another[.] Now they languish in the sentimental and self-righteous security of being victims. But a victim is merely an executioner too cowardly to sharpen his or her sword.</p>
<p>"[B]lacks are thinking with damaged emotion[al system]s. They no longer perceive their [own] pain. If one does not know he hurts, he cannot cry[, a]nd...there is no salvation....</p>
<p>"I don't want...to be the center of controversy again, but sentences form in my mind against my will....</p>
<p>"I cannot expunge the thought of...absolution[.] I would not have th[is] need...if I were not guilty....</p>
<p>"Reluctantly, I call David Schneiderman, editor of the <em>Voice.</em></p>
<p>"[T]he sentences rush into life with...eagerness[.] Quickly the article is done.</p>
<p>"[D]isturb[ingly,] I have written as if I am a Jew[:]</p>
<p>" ' "The Uses of Suffering"</p>
<p>" '[H]ow self-righteous and arrogant Black leaders sounded: "Jews must show more sensitivity and be prepared for more consultation before taking positions contrary to the best interests of the Black community."...</p>
<p>" 'I understand that such a statement comes from years of anger at active Jewish opposition to affirmative action, and how deeply Blacks were hurt by this opposition to what was in our "best interests"[.]</p>
<p>" 'Arrogance is...a common fault of oppressed people when they believe [that] their own status as victims gives them the advantage[.] Morality [instead] is painfully earned by constant awareness of one's own limitations, mistakes, and fragile humanity. Morality comes by constantly adjuring yourself and not others to "show more sensitivity."</p>
<p>" 'It is the absence of sensitivity to point the finger at Israel's relations with South Africa[.] How dare Black leadership thrust itself into foreign affairs on the issue of Palestinian rights[!] The lack of Black sensitivity on matters of deep and abiding concern to Jews has wounded Jews as much as Jewish opposition to affirmative action has wounded us....</p>
<p>" 'Black leadership not only wraps itself in a cloak of moral excellence; it goes further and chooses sides in the Mideast conflict. [A]s Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker expressed it, "The Palestinians are the n[——]s of the Middle East." [W]ho in the course of Western civilization has ever cared when Jews were killed?...</p>
<p>" 'Not being different, Black leadership takes its stand for "human rights and self-determination for Palestinians."...How can Black leadership even think about self-determination for people who attack children? To do so[,] implicitly condones the murder of children.</p>
<p>" '[H]ave we forgotten the four children murdered in that Birmingham church in 1963? And surely we've forgotten that at the memorial services and rallies after the bombing, it was Jews, more so than other Americans, who stood beside us and shared our pain. Black leadership insults...Jews...when it says that Jewish support for the Black struggle was given when it was "in their [the Jews'] best interest to do so."...</p>
<p>" 'That Jews have not supported affirmative action does nothing to negate this....I cannot understand why Black leadership lacks the simple humanity to express gratitude for past support[.] Black leadership has acted as if Jews were responsible for Andy Young's resignation. [W]henever something goes wrong, it is easy to blame the Jews.</p>
<p>" 'By doing so, Black leadership has shown itself to be morally barren. By its support of the Palestinians, it exemplifies a callousness of spirit to the meaning of the Holocaust, because when six million Jews are killed while the world is indifferent, the right of Israel to exist is unassailable. [W]hat I hear in the self-righteousness of Black leaders...is[,] we don't give a damn.</p>
<p>" 'The irony is that this new expression of anti-Semitism was spearheaded by the organization founded by Martin Luther King, Jr.—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Dr. King has been dead only 11 years, but when I listen to his SCLC successors, it is hard to believe that Dr. King ever lived.</p>
<p>" '[T]hough I suffer by virtue of my race, I cannot indulge that suffering. Neither can I use suffering to crown myself with a tiara of moral superiority. I must learn to carry that suffering as if it were a long-stemmed rose I offer to humanity. I do that by living with my suffering so intimately as to never forget that, having suffered evil, I must be careful not to do something that will, as Dr. King put it, "intensify the existence of evil in the universe." Because I have suffered as a Black person I do not succumb to the thrill of making others suffer. I look at my own suffering and say[:] let this inhuman suffering end here.</p>
<p>" '[T]he positions espoused recently by Black leaders...show that Blacks, too, can be Germans.'</p>
<p>" * * *</p>
<p>" 'It's very personal,'...my wife...says....</p>
<p>"Much of my writing has a tone of calm detachment, reflecting the fact that, regardless of how angry my words have been[,] my anger lacked personal conviction. I wrote as an observer, not a believer. This time[,] something [has] opened within me[.]</p>
<p>"She reaches for my hand and holds it tightly." – pp. 125–31</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[I]t will appear in the September 10 issue. The deed is done....</p>
<p>"I tremble uncontrollably....</p>
<p>"My body gives an involuntary shudder....What do [I] fear?...</p>
<p>"All my life I have tried to be who Daddy, Momma and the blacks of Kansas City and Nashville needed me to be—a servant of...my people. Now I...attack...them, and a multitude of black voices ask, 'Why[?] Our enemies will take great pride in your words and use them against us. We hope you're proud of yourself.'...</p>
<p>"I have lived these past nine months amidst...Auschwitz and Treblinka[.] The spirits of murdered Jewish children shoot marbles with me in the dirt of a parsonage yard. [So] I had to write as I did[.]</p>
<p>"Proud of myself? I say to the voices finally....Yes, I am." – pp. 131–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">September 12, 1979</p>
<p>"Our child [was] born as summer withdraws with clear skies and cool winds.</p>
<p>"We name him David. It is my favorite name....It is important to me...that this child have a Jewish name....</p>
<p>"I am thinking of developing a course [to compare] Jewish and black histories[.] Jews believe they have much in common with blacks. Many blacks are insulted by the idea. Probably both are right.</p>
<p>" * * *</p>
<p>"I come in early [to] the third floor of New Africa House...to...stare out the window at the mountains....</p>
<p>"I pass the open door of A.B.'s office.</p>
<p>"[H]e screams[,] 'I'm sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust! You don't know Jews like I do!...I'd see them go from school to Hebrew school. I'd see them make the highest scores on tests!" – p. 133</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Did people like me merely because they thought I confirmed their picture of reality? If that is so, I was mistaken in thinking they were ever friends....</p>
<p>"David Hillel, an Israeli friend who teaches soil science at the university...invites me to be his guest at <em>Kol Nidre</em> services with the Jewish Community of Amherst. [S]omething in me needs to go, needs to be with[—]needs to be with other Jews.</p>
<p>" * * *</p>
<p>"The synagogue of the Jewish Community of Amherst used to be a Congregational church[.]</p>
<p>"I've been to services here once when Daniel...invited us to the bat mitzvah of their daughter[,] a close friend of my daughter....</p>
<p>"I liked the rabbi. A soft-spoken man with a white beard, he talked gently, lovingly[,] about what bat mitzvah meant[:] to accept the covenant of being a Jew." – pp. 134–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 16</p>
<p>Autumn 1979</p>
<p>"I refuse to understand a morality that is selectively indignant.</p>
<p>"[B]eing known as the 'black defender of Jews' would be the same as having been thought a 'black anti-Semite.' I am neither." – pp. 137–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Haim Gunner...teaches in the Environmental Sciences Department at the university and is one of the leaders of the Jewish Community of Amherst....</p>
<p>"He...invite[s] me to [his] house for lunch to talk about [my] course next semester on blacks and Jews. [T]he doorbell rings. Haim returns with...the rabbi who conducted the bat mitzvah. He is introduced to me as Yechiael Lander, the Hillel rabbi at Smith College and Amherst College, and...rabbi of the Jewish Community of Amherst.</p>
<p>"[H]e says[,] 'Thank you for...your article[.] I know that I'll be able to fill your class with students from Smith and Amherst alone.' " – pp. 138–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Paul Puryear, the chairman of the Afro-Am Department, calls me into his office....A blunt, outspoken man, he, too, is a Southerner bred in the creed that morality was the standard applied to one's own behavior first[.]</p>
<p>"[H]e says[,] 'They called a special...departmental faculty meeting[. T]he subject...was your new course...on blacks and Jews....</p>
<p>" 'So...I said, "Ain't you fools ever heard of academic freedom?" I told 'em that if you wanted to teach the course, there wasn't a thing they could do about it[.]</p>
<p>" 'They said you wouldn't teach it from the quote[,] correct political point of view[,] unquote.' " – pp. 139–40</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I imagine telling...Daddy that...Jesus was a Jew[,] who never addressed his aphorisms...to non-Jews. Jesus belongs to Jewish history, although in a minor and aberrant role. I imagine saying such things to Daddy and the entire universe crumbles[.]</p>
<p>"Judaism...is a way of living in the world through small actions[:] mak[ing] holy the ordinary, find[ing] the mystical in the mundane." – p. 142</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Winter 1980 [(beginning December 1979)]</p>
<p>"I've never had many black students in my classes[.] A black student told me once it was because my wife is white....</p>
<p>"Would I want to...convert...if I were not so isolated from blacks now?...I...feel lonely and abandoned by my people. [I]f Jews did not accept me, I would be devastated. I can only become a Jew when I know [that] that is what God wants of me[,] even if no Jew in the world accepts me....</p>
<p>"I must accept that this loneliness is how God wants me to live." – pp. 144–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 17</p>
<p>Summer 1980</p>
<p>"Daddy['s] handshake is firm as he gives me his traditional greeting: 'Well, what you saying about yourself?'</p>
<p>"[T]his man['s] warmth and laughter and clumsy tenderness taught me love....</p>
<p>"Father's Day. It is the only time I will sit at one end of the table and stare at my father at the other[,] and along the sides, my children and his grandchildren. I will not see him alive again." – pp. 146–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Spring 1981</p>
<p>"[From] an essay I wrote for <em>Katallagete[:]</em></p>
<p>" 'It was my task to mediate...my sins....</p>
<p>" 'To lift my stone. To live with the suffering that comes to me...as a consequence of...being born black.</p>
<p>" '[Or, just] because I was born.</p>
<p>" 'How do you lift a stone that weeps?</p>
<p>" 'You reach down and pick it up.'</p>
<p>"Daddy does not understand and, I realize now, has never understood. He has tried to accept but he cannot. How could he have spent most of his eighty-three years traveling and preaching[,] yet neither of his sons goes to church[?]</p>
<p>"But I hear him say[,] 'I knew that you were attracted to the Catholic Church. I would be happy if you went to somebody's church.'...</p>
<p>"How can he not know how insanely religious I am? How can he not know?</p>
<p>"He doesn't and I will never be able to convince him. But I do not need to and I hear a smile in my voice as I say, 'I'm sorry you don't know, Daddy[.] You didn't fail!' " – pp. 148–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">July 31, 1981</p>
<p>"Momma is direct[:] 'He's dead.'</p>
<p>"[M]emories[,] unbidden, rush forward like a lover[.]</p>
<p>[(A Joycean paragraph of prose follows.)]" – pp. 150–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 18</p>
<p>Autumn 1981</p>
<p>"[M]y wife['s and] the children['s] faces are familiar, but who are they? My father is dead and I do not understand why.</p>
<p>"I know he was old. I do not understand why he had to die.</p>
<p>"[A]s I watched his casket being slid into the vault at the mausoleum the next afternoon[,] and heard my brother cry out and watched my father's youngest...brother collapse, I knew, for an instant, that I would never see him again.</p>
<p>"In the next instant, I thought[:] My father, dead? Ridiculous!" – pp. 152–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I sit on the couch in the family room and the tears come....I...write in my journal[:]</p>
<p>" '[S]o sorry. He was such an alive person....</p>
<p>" 'For so long[,] I didn't feel much. I was afraid to feel, because I was afraid the feelings of loss and abandonment would kill me....</p>
<p>" 'He just isn't alive[—]because if he's dead, then what's to become of me?...What am I supposed to do?...Who am I supposed to be now?...</p>
<p>"My daddy loved me so much and now all that love is gone....All that love has been withdrawn[.] When the sun goes out, the solar system is destroyed....</p>
<p>"So much of who I am is because of him. So many of my strengths are because of who he was and what he taught me and who he raised me to be. And so much of what I have done with my life was for him, too—thinking about him, wanting my life to compensate him for...disappointments in my brother....What am I supposed to do with my life now that it can't be an offering to him[?]</p>
<p>"[H]e gave me the encouragement to be an individual; he gave me warmth and let his pride in me show[,] forming so many of the essentials of my character.</p>
<p>"I am so much like him. I talk like him. I look like him. I speak publicly, as he did. I use humor like he did. My interest in folklore comes from him telling jokes and stories. My interest in history comes from him talking about the past. My feelings as a Southerner and my connection to slavery come through him. My religiosity comes from him. My faith comes through him. I have his quick temper and sternness[.]</p>
<p>"I [am] lonely without you there[,] like some pillar on which I stood and out of which I grew. You were my roots—personal, religious, racial....</p>
<p>"Sometimes I had the feeling that there was nothing you wanted to say but that you just wanted to look at me. It was enough for you that I was there[,] and it was enough for me that you were there.</p>
<p>"[I]t was the mere presence of you that could make a difference. It was your presence, and the knowing [of] where you'd come from[,] and what you'd made of your life....</p>
<p>"I'll miss the act of making an offering to you[.]</p>
<p>"To take who the father is and carry it into the future[:] I don't know...any other way to live....</p>
<p>"We understood a lot of things about each other...without agreeing on most and that's pretty amazing....</p>
<p>"I don't see how I can accept that our relationship is dead[.]</p>
<p>"I've wanted to ask you how it was for you when your father died." – pp. 154–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Part Three</p>
<p>Chapter 19</p>
<p>December 18, 1981</p>
<p>"I am no longer a son but do not know what else there is to be. With sadness, the thought comes—I can be me." – p. 159</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Night....Suddenly, I see myself dancing in the middle of a brick-laid street....</p>
<p>"I want to shout[:] I am a Jew! I am a Jew dancing the joy of God!" – p. 160</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Two weeks pass. Joy is no longer an emotion[;] it is who I am....</p>
<p>"I tell my wife[,] 'I think I'm going to convert to Judaism.'</p>
<p>" 'I'm not surprised,' she says....</p>
<p>"[So] I am a Jew. I wonder if I have been always[.] I will not be converting to Judaism. I am becoming...who I always have been....I'm...sorry it has taken me forty-two years to accept [i]t." – pp. 160–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Two more weeks go by. I must be sure that this is...what I need to do. But why do I doubt? The joy is there each morning when I awake." – p. 161</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Julius Lester, former black militant, former anti-Semite, becomes a Jew?...</p>
<p>"My wife had not been surprised. Rabbi Lander is not surprised. Was I the last to know?" – pp. 161–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 20</p>
<p>Winter 1982 [(beginning December 1981)]</p>
<p>"Parents are supposed to be like the face of a mountain—solid, unchanging and always there. What is it like for them to have a father who is more like a bird, and you never know in which tree he is going to be roosting[?]" – p. 165</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[U]nless I make peace with the concept of chosenness, my conversion will be stillborn. I'm afraid to discuss it with Rabbi Lander, afraid he will say I can't be a Jew.</p>
<p>"Rabbi Lander explains that chosenness [means] Jews are responsible for living in the world...with ethical values, with a sense of morality and divine purpose....</p>
<p>"There isn't anyone on earth who wouldn't claim that.</p>
<p>"How do you belong to the Chosen People without thinking yourself better than everybody else?" – p. 166</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[N]ow...I understand...the saying of an Israeli poet: 'It is not that Israel has kept the Sabbath; the Sabbath has kept Israel.'</p>
<p>"When it is time for Shabbat to begin...I go upstairs and put on a suit. Sometimes when we are all dressed, my wife and I sit and have a drink, staring with happiness[.]" – pp. 167–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"The Jewish Community of Amherst does not have Saturday services.</p>
<p>"[O]n Saturday...afternoons[,] I'm not so sure I wouldn't be able to convince God to pull up a chair and watch Patrick Ewing slam-dunk!" – pp. 169–170</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"The revelation of God as One enters history through the Jews. [T]his tiny group of people...dared to be different, dared [to] insist...there is only one God[.] This is extraordinary[.]</p>
<p>"Judaism does not <em>believe</em> in reason; it uses it as a tool of worship[,] but reason itself is without intrinsic value. Value is found in suffusing the daily with holiness[.]</p>
<p>"The unseen soul is as real as what is seen....To guard and embody that experience[,] with attentiveness to the nuances and intricacies of holiness[,] is the Jews' task.</p>
<p>"[N]ow that I am entering the covenant, I experience it as a blessing[.]" – pp. 170–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 21</p>
<p>Passover 1982</p>
<p>"I...wonder if a Gentile can understand Judaism and Jewishness. The thought is as repugnant to me as when blacks tell whites they cannot know what it is to be black. It is a statement that negates...art and...the realm of the imaginative....</p>
<p>"My wife fears that I am becoming unfamiliar to her....</p>
<p>"Does...my wife...look into my eyes now, expecting to see a reflection of herself, to see my love giving her back to herself[,] and instead see[ing] something called a Gentile?</p>
<p>"[S]ometimes that is so. On Shabbat, I...say: 'O God, You have chosen us and set us apart from all the peoples'[. S]he...hears those words, is humiliated, even, by them. But if I need those words [in order] to be me, she is willing to extract more love[,] from deep within the pain [that] my becoming a Jew is causing her. [M]y becoming a Jew is separating us[,] more than her whiteness and my blackness ever could have....</p>
<p>"To be like everyone else is to cease to be a Jew....</p>
<p>"It is not possible for Gentiles to experience this separateness as other than a rejection of them....</p>
<p>"My wife is right; I am changing when I can think that she is a spectator to my life." – pp. 172–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Shavuot 1982</p>
<p>"Certainly there are many laws in...Torah; they are the means by which...one is led...deeper into Torah....</p>
<p>"Orthodox Jews believe that at Sinai God gave Jews not only the...Hebrew Bible...but all the commentaries[.]</p>
<p>"[R]eading Torah is not merely saying the words[.] I imagine myself into the text....</p>
<p>"It is Shavuot and...I walk through the tall, white double doors of the Jewish Community of Amherst[. W]hen I go into a synagogue my new identity is not strong enough to...see...myself with my [own] eyes.</p>
<p>"[A]s I listen to the music, th[e] voice within that mocks me...is replaced by a wondrous love." – pp. 174–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Summer 1982</p>
<p>"I...hear shouting and look to see a group of students marching down the street[:] 'Israel out of Lebanon!'...</p>
<p>"How can a...student...so...easily feel that he knows who is right[?]</p>
<p>"I recognize them as belonging to Amherst's radical left fringe. I look at the face of my former student and his eyes gleam with a dangerous righteousness, as if God had come down that morning and tied the cloak of truth around his shoulders. It is the same look I see in photographs of some Palestinians and some Israelis. It is undoubtedly the same look that burned my face during the Sixties....</p>
<p>"I do not want to see Jews treating Arabs as blacks were treated in the South. I do not want to see how racist many Jews can be. I fear that if I go to Israel I will have to write a Hebrew version of <em>Look Out, Whitey!</em>...</p>
<p>"Jews no longer expect non-Jews to approve of them...and certainly not love them as members of the human family. Jewish survival depends upon the willingness and ability of Jews to act in their own defense....That is why Israeli planes are bombing Beirut.</p>
<p>"I can defend what Israel is doing. That does not mean I like it[.] I want Israel to be 'a light unto the nations.' I want Israel to be better than other nations, to set a new standard for politics and international relations. It is not going to do that." – pp. 176–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 22</p>
<p>Summer 1982</p>
<p>"Daddy lives in my soul; Momma lives in my personality. [E]ven to...my wife...I do not speak from that place of silence in me as distant and hard as the farthest star.</p>
<p>"Momma and I share, also, a suspicion of emotion. [W]e do not know how to show the emotion expected of us....</p>
<p>"Mother is matter-of-fact and blunt. She hurts other people's feelings and if it is pointed out to her, she says, 'What I said was true. If his feelings were hurt, that's not my fault.' I can be matter-of-fact and blunt, too....Even Daddy was afraid of her.</p>
<p>"In the spring of 1978...Daddy called me and said she had lost the will to live[.] I flew down[.]</p>
<p>" 'Well, are you going to live or die?' I greeted her.</p>
<p>"She laughed. 'I'm still thinking about it.'</p>
<p>" '[Y]ou're about to worry Daddy to death.'</p>
<p>"I...found Daddy...and said, 'She's going to live.' " – pp. 178–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In a corner near the furnace is the round picture tube from the first TV set we owned—1948.</p>
<p>"[E]motion caused him to save tiny bars of soap, each one still in its wrapper....</p>
<p>"What do I do with...the proclamation from the governor and legislature of the state of Tennessee honoring him on his retirement[?]</p>
<p>"I do not want to impose on any of my children the...burden of burying me, object by object, memory by memory....</p>
<p>"I must not deprive my children of this bitter intimacy of knowing me in ways they could not[,] when I was flesh....</p>
<p>"I want to put my arms around...Malcolm...and say, 'In my boxes are memories of you like golden threads spun by fairies in the deepest night and left on my pillow'[. Y]ou will yearn for your child to receive these offerings...because by offering...your memories, you are offering the child another birth, one through a canal of memory you will not know you have[,] until you hold in your hand a golden thread gleaming like dandelions[,] and you will despair if your child sees only dirt and grime and age on a teddy bear that kept you safe from night's dragons[.]</p>
<p>"I open a box....It is...letter[s that] Momma...wrote Daddy before they were married....Do I want to know? Or do I want them always to shine in the nave of my soul? To read and to know will be the final task in ceasing to be my father's son." – pp. 179–82</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I am going to the morning <em>minyan</em> at the Chasidic <em>shul</em> on West End Avenue...in Nashville, Tennessee[.]</p>
<p>"I am going because I am afraid. I am afraid more and more, so afraid that I fear to name the fear....</p>
<p>"This fear is existential, because I do not understand myself. I do not understand how I have lived, and how I have arrived at this place of so radically changing not only how I live but how I conceive of myself. The only answer I can offer is that I am following my soul, but what does that mean? What the hell is the soul, anyway? How do I know when I am hearing it and not some neurosis or complex? Is the language of the soul that swelling exaltation of tears and laughter?...Is it a silence as deep and eternal and incomprehensible as death?...</p>
<p>"I went to the mausoleum to see Daddy. I told him that I am becoming a Jew and I didn't want him to be hurt. I wasn't repudiating him but affirming all [that] he gave me—the faith, the passion, the courage. I told him...I wanted him to be happy that God had led me to a place of joy and peace. I told him how much I missed him, but that if he had not died[,] I did not know if I would have been able to become a Jew because only now, now that I am no longer his son, can I be me[;] and then I cried because my life needed his death.</p>
<p>"Services have begun....I slip quietly into a seat in the back...and begin reading....In the far corner two men are talking loudly about last night's game on 'Monday Night Baseball.'...</p>
<p>"Someone catches my eye[,] and nods his head in greeting. I return the nod....I am half-involved in the conversation about the baseball game[:] which is becoming an argument over whether the manager should have taken out the starting pitcher in the seventh inning.</p>
<p>"[Eventually], people close their prayerbooks, shake hands with each other, and start talking and laughing....I slip quietly out the...door.</p>
<p>"I have no idea what I just experienced because it bore no resemblance to anything I've ever known as religion. Reform services are similar in style to Protestant worship.</p>
<p>"[And yet], there might be some mornings when God is more interested in hearing about a baseball game." – pp. 183–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"It has been...thirty years since I[']ve been to Pine Bluff....</p>
<p>"Where Grandmomma's house [once] stood is thick woods....</p>
<p>"Malcolm and I...walk across a clearing [and] past a pile of discarded furniture...and unidentifiable debris. I am saddened that the forty acres of land my great-grandfather purchased has become the neighborhood garbage dump....</p>
<p>"I feel foolish for not having thought that the cemetery would be on the other side of the dump....</p>
<p>"I point to a grave. 'That's your great-great-grandmother[,] Maggie Carson. She was a slave.' The birth date on the tombstone reads 1846....One [of] her children...is missing[:] Florence. She moved to Indiana and passed for white. Momma told me...she came back once, in the middle of the night, to see Maggie[,] and was gone before sunrise....</p>
<p>"There is so much I want to tell my son about those who lie here[,] because I fear that when I die, there will be no one to remember....</p>
<p>"I want...to...tell...my son...about Grandmomma raising four children alone on these forty acres. I want to tell...how...that thin woman...looked so much like a white woman[,] and that whatever that did to her was passed to her oldest daughter and then to me and now it is his[.] I want...my son [to] look into her piercing eyes, so he can see the absence of sentimentality in that face[,] and maybe then he will understand why there are moments I answer his questions with a stare and it is her stare and it is a stare that says, 'We survived the fire and the flood'[.]</p>
<p>"Aunt Rena lived at the eastern edge of the property next to the railroad tracks....She was as white-looking as Grandmomma[,] and her husband, Fate McGowan...looked white, too. 'Your aunt Rena hated it when I married your mother,' Daddy told me once[.] ' "That n—— is too black," she told your mother. She didn't know she would end up stark raving mad, without a dime to her name'[.]</p>
<p>"A path led through the field from Grandmomma's to Aunt Rena's. I must have been fifteen...the last time I walked that path with Momma...up to the house[.] We...stopped in horror[.]</p>
<p>"I did not see Momma cry when Daddy died [later] but she cried that day[,] and I knew she cried not only for what was[,] but for what had been and would never be again[.] I wanted to feel something more than repulsion and disgust and fear of that mad and ugly and dirty and old white woman who was my great-aunt.</p>
<p>"[T]hat is the sadness of memory. But as long as...Malcolm...remembers to remember[,] he will know that the lives of his children did not begin with their births, or even his." – pp. 185–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Momma...answer[ed my question,] 'After Grandfather died, Momma used to light a candle once a year'[.]</p>
<p>"It was a <em>Yahrzeit</em> candle, I am sure. Grandmomma remembered....Did Adolph ask her to do that for him as he lay dying? [W]hat was the link between him and her that he knew she was the one? Grandmomma remembered. And Momma remembered Grandmomma's remembering[.]</p>
<p>"If I can ever find the date of Great-grandfather's death, I will remember that of which I have no memory." – p. 189</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 23</p>
<p>Autumn 1982: Rosh HaShana</p>
<p>"The...traditional Jewish term for the ten days from Rosh HaShana to Yom Kippur is Days of Awe....I have not experienced any awe....I am...discouraged. The more...I study, the more difficult becoming Jewish is....</p>
<p>"I sat in synagogue[.] If people didn't know anyone else was there, they knew I was, with my black self. How can I become a part of the Jewish people when I don't look like other Jews?...I...came home.</p>
<p>"I sit on the couch now[:] silent, angry, disappointed in myself[. —]I can't be a Jew. What made me think I could? I wish I knew another convert, a black one[.]</p>
<p>"But if I do not become a Jew, who am I?</p>
<p>"I cannot go back to who I was, and I do not know who I am becoming." – p. 191</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Yom Kippur</p>
<p>"Instead of sitting at the rear of the synagogue I sit at the front[.] I do not see all the people[.]</p>
<p>"The cantor is an Israeli, Gadi Elon. [T]his time I...give myself over to the sound, allowing it to beat at me, to flay at my self-consciousness, my sense of foreignness until they are like granules of pulverized stone and I am emptied of who I was....</p>
<p>"Part of the service [is] Yizkor[,] the service of remembering the dead....I thought of...Daddy...and was glad...to be with others and remember." – p. 192 </p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">January 3, 1983</p>
<p>"Tonight I publicly proclaim that I have chosen to become part of the Jewish people.</p>
<p>"Last week...Rabbi Lander...was...disappointed that I decided not to be circumcised....I knew that if he insisted on circumcision I would not continue with the conversion process. I have done as much as I can[.] I will keep my foreskin.</p>
<p>"Near the end of the service, Rabbi Lander calls me to the <em>bimah</em>[.]</p>
<p>"A chill goes through me and I think of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother[,] and it is not in my imagination but in my body that I feel them joined once more. I feel also a deep peace[:] for at long last[,] my great-grandfather is at peace.</p>
<p>"So am I." – pp. 194–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Part Four</p>
<p>Chapter 24</p>
<p>September 1983</p>
<p>"It is the day after Yom Kippur[.]</p>
<p>"The Days of Awe do not begin with Rosh HaShana...but in Elul, the month preceding. That is when you begin preparing yourself to stand before God to be judged[.] During Elul you ask forgiveness from those you have sinned against[.]</p>
<p>"I was not strong enough to...silence...my pride[,] so I didn't ask my wife to forgive me for all the times I threw silence at her like stones as sharp as knives. [R]ecently...a friend...said, 'You must be hell to live with. [Y]ou seem like fire under ice.'...</p>
<p>"How do I explain how I must live[:] to tend and nurture the images and words that continually rise within like fish coming from the depths of a river whose darkness only they have penetrated?...</p>
<p>"Elul teaches that to be human is to be destructive as well as creative....</p>
<p>"I only know how to glorify myself for my goodness and indulge in self-flagellation for my evil. Both are sentimental responses, and my goodness brutalizes others with the same force as my evil." – pp. 199–201</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Winter 1984 [(beginning December 1983)]</p>
<p>"I am in love...with being a Jew. But this passion is not...blindness[.]" – p. 202</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[C]entral to Judaism [is] separating the sacred from the profane in every way, on every level[:] being a people apart in order to be holy, to belong only to God....</p>
<p>"I am used to thinking of holiness as powerful[;] but it isn't, which is why Judaism is so much work, why it is so concrete, why it demands so much. Holiness cannot be taken for granted. It must be fought for and won each day." – pp. 204–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Though I was converted by a Reform rabbi, I never assumed I would be a Reform Jew....I am very traditional, conservative even....</p>
<p>"I prefer Conservative services. Through the use of Hebrew the link with Jews throughout history is reaffirmed....If I lived in a Jewish community, I would want to be Orthodox, but I could never accept...women [being] prohibited from...participating fully in the service....</p>
<p>"As long as I remain uncircumcised, I am a Reform Jew. Even though I've studied the rabbinic commentaries on the meaning of the covenant of circumcision, I do not understand why it is so important....</p>
<p>"If somebody would promise me that circumcision would not affect my enjoyment of sex adversely, I would do it. But the medical books I read talk about the sensitivity of the foreskin and what it adds to sexual pleasure. Some maintain that circumcision diminishes not only sexual pleasure but sexual desire.</p>
<p>"Well, if I have to choose between being a circumcised Jew and sexual desire, forget it!</p>
<p>"[W]hen I began[,] my one rule was not to do something simply because it was Jewish. I do only that which makes sense to my heart. For that reason I have not observed the holiday of Succoth, the Festival of Booths....</p>
<p>"Chanukah was incomprehensible when I read about it, but my heart had no objection[. That] final night...we turned out the lights and the entire room was ablaze at the time of year when there is the greatest darkness!</p>
<p>"Judaism is a doing which can be grasped only by the heart.</p>
<p>"Maybe it's that way with circumcision[.]" – pp. 205–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I...offer[ed] to write an essay about my journey to Judaism.</p>
<p>"Copies of <em>New Traditions</em> arrived today. It is a good magazine. I like the layout and typeface.</p>
<p>"I write instinctually....I'm not a literary person[.] I write, but I'm not a writer. Writing is the means by which I seek to render myself holy.</p>
<p>"That is the only way I can understand why someone as intensely private as I am reveals so much of my life in print. It is not my life I write about so much as it is the lives of everyone." – pp. 206–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Spring 1984</p>
<p>"When Jesse Jackson announced his candidacy for the presidency[,] I knew his Achilles' heel was his attitude toward Jews, and I waited for him to nick himself with his poisonous arrow[.]</p>
<p>"He referred to Jews as 'Hymies' in what he thought was an off-the-record conversation with a black reporter for <em>The Washington Post....</em></p>
<p>"This is one issue I will not go public on....</p>
<p>"I suppose I am no longer black[,] if blackness is synonymous with black nationalism warmed over once too often. If blackness is synonymous with unthinking...blind loyalty to the race, regardless of what any of its members do, then I am not black.</p>
<p>"James Baldwin is teaching on campus this academic year. [W]e have talked and argued...many nights about our definitions of ourselves as writers, about blacks, about Israel[.] He has sat at our Shabbat table and read the words from Psalms that are part of our Sabbath evening ritual....The personal bond between me and Jimmy is quite deep because we know the penalties writing extracts, how its demands diminish our human capacities[:] even as what we write seeks to expand the capacity for being human in us....</p>
<p>"Last Tuesday Jimmy devoted his lecture to the Jesse Jackson affair....</p>
<p>"Jimmy's view was that Mondale and Hart say things like that about blacks but the media won't report it. His sense of history is supposed to be better than that....Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, had to resign for telling an anti-black joke in a setting similar to the one in which Jackson made his 'Hymie' reference. Jimmy insisted on blaming the messenger, however.</p>
<p>"He then went on to hold Jews responsible....Maybe because we were so ungracious as to say that we were insulted by being referred to as 'Hymies.'...</p>
<p>"It was reading <em>Notes of a Native Son</em> [in] my sophomore year at Fisk that told me that I, too, could be a writer, because Jimmy wrote with a lyricism and love closer to me than the anger of Richard Wright....</p>
<p>"At the conclusion of his lecture, he called for questions[.] His words had given black students permission to stand up and mouth every anti-Semitic cliché they knew[,] castigating Jewish landlords and Jews in general. Jimmy listened and said nothing. [A]n Afro-Am faculty member stood up to say that Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement should not be denigrated...as [mere] paternalism....</p>
<p>"I found myself surrounded by Jewish students[,] most of whom had tears in their eyes....</p>
<p>"In my section of the [same] class on Thursday, [t]he Jewish students were hurt and angry...and the black students were silent....I told them [that] I thought...Baldwin was wrong in his analysis of the Jackson affair because his outrage was misdirected. Why weren't he and other blacks angry at Jesse?</p>
<p>"I did not expect...people in the Afro-Am Department...to include a hostility in their silence[,] which frightens me....The look of cold defiance in...one department member['s] face was chilling.</p>
<p>"I wish they would...be done with me." – pp. 208–11</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I had lunch with Jimmy to talk about his Jackson lecture. He was...distressed to hear how I and the Jewish students felt about his remarks....</p>
<p>" 'In your lecture you didn't speak as someone who understands Jewish suffering and Jewish fears.'</p>
<p>"He admitted I was right and said that next Tuesday he will apologize to the Jewish students." – p. 211</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"The semester has ended[—h]e never apologized to [them.]" – p. 211</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 25</p>
<p>Summer 1984</p>
<p>"One afternoon eight years ago...my son...looked at me and said, 'Dad, do you know why I like to play hockey?' [—] 'Because I like to hit people,' he answered solemnly. At that moment I knew...my task was simple—to love him as he was.</p>
<p>"Each evening I listen to the sounds of him lifting weights in the basement. He is male in ways...foreign to me[.] Girls cheer and call his name when he knocks an opposing player on the ice....</p>
<p>"He walks through the family room wearing only a pair of shorts and I see what the male body is supposed to look like....His body is so beautiful he should be posing for a sculpture to be placed in the Parthenon. He is taller than me now and I do not mind raising my eyes to look into his face. [J]ust as my father had to raise his eyes to look into mine and those of my brother, it is only proper that I look up....</p>
<p>"This time next year he will be preparing to leave for an as-yet-unknown college. Already[,] home is just the place where his bed is located. I do not know where he goes or what he does....</p>
<p>"It is not enough to simply love another; I must learn to love as that other needs to be loved. If I do not, my love is merely an emotional generalization, suitable for all and mattering to none." – pp. 212–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"After Abraham was circumcised[,] three...angels...came along....</p>
<p>"This was my first operation and I was terrified....An hour later I awoke in the recovery room[.]</p>
<p>"No rational thought process led to the decision to be circumcised. More and more I felt incomplete as a Jew....</p>
<p>"On the first day of Passover we read the section from Joshua where he orders all the men circumcised immediately after crossing the Jordan and entering the Promised Land[.] The place where the circumcisions occur is called Gibeath-ha-aralot[h], hill of the foreskins....</p>
<p>"I hear my penis plotting to get back at me. It is planning on not becoming erect for the rest of my life." – pp. 214–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I received a letter from...Rabbi Allen Maller of Culver City, California....Enclosed were some extracts from his book, <em>God, Sex, and Kabbalah:</em></p>
<p>" '[N]ot all non-Jews who convert to Judaism are the reincarnated souls of Jews who had been separated from Judaism in former lives....</p>
<p>" 'The religious tradition of their birth never seems to fit them well....They begin searching here and there, restlessly. [T]hey are drawn to a particular...group of Jews, and by this means gradually become part of the Jewish people. Much to their surprise, frequently such people discover...that one of their great-grandparents had been a Jew.' " – pp. 216–7</p>
<p style="margin-top: -0.4%"><small><small>"IT WORKS!<br>
"IT WORKS BETTER THAN EVER!!!"</small></small> – p. 218</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 26</p>
<p>"I hold [an] envelope in my hands and stare at the name...in the upper-left-hand corner[:] 'Samuel Altschul'[.]</p>
<p>"The final document [i]nside...is a copy of a newspaper clipping....Under a heading that reads 'Death Record' are the following words[:]</p>
<p>" 'Mr. Adolph Altschul...died at his country home...after a lingering illness....The remains will be interred in the Jewish cemetery this afternoon, the funeral taking place from the residence at 2 o'clock.'...</p>
<p>"Did Great-grandmother go to the cemetery, or did she stand on that porch and watch as the hearse moved slowly up Sheridan Pike?</p>
<p>"Once again I find myself hating the silence of my family. I would like to think [that] all [of] that silence compelled me to be a writer. That is not so, because words are another dimension of silence for me.</p>
<p>"I read the letter. Samuel Altschul is a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Arkansas[.]</p>
<p>" 'The Altschul family,' he writes, 'originally came from Ober Lustadt[,] a small village [in the western German province of] Rheinland-Pfalz[.]'</p>
<p>"Adolph's grandmother was Barbara Altschul[.] One day in 1816 Barbara appeared at the town hall in Ober [L]ustadt to register the birth of a son, Samuel....The name of Samuel's father was not recorded[.] Barbara was already married...for three years, to a Joseph Levy....</p>
<p>"In 1823 Barbara had another son, Jacob[;] and once again, no father's name is listed.</p>
<p>"[H]er firstborn[,] my great-great[-]grandfather, Samuel Altschul, had four children[. In order:] Joseph[;] Adolph (1841–1901); Jeanette[;] and Morris[.] Joseph and Adolph were in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy....Joseph was the Confederate Army bandleader and Adolph played in the band....</p>
<p>"I read further and...learn that there was never an Altschul Jewelers in Pine Bluff. The Altschuls owned a wholesale tobacco company[, which] did sell jewelry....</p>
<p>"I notice that the name 'Julia' appears and reappears. I was named Julius for my mother, Julia. I did not know that Julia was the name of a cousin of Adolph's father....Adolph named one of his daughters Julia[.] I, not knowing the name had been passed from generation to generation, [gave] David the middle name of Julius, making him the fifth generation[.]</p>
<p>"[O]f all the Hebrew names I could have chosen, I chose Yaacov, Jacob. Only now do I learn that it was the name of my great-great-great-great-grandfather.</p>
<p>"[From] the end of the letter:</p>
<p>" 'We found it interesting that you converted to Judaism while our family has gone in the other direction.</p>
<p>" '[T]he Altschuls are Kohens (Kohanim), which means that they are direct descendants of Aaron. Several older members of the family have told us this fact, and many of the tombstones...have the Kohanim symbol.' " – pp. 220–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">June 1985</p>
<p>"What is Malcolm feeling tonight?...I finished high school a year early[,] and had completed my freshman year at Fisk when my high school class graduated. I...had almost graduated from college before I thought to go by the high school and get my diploma.</p>
<p>"Is he alternately elated, relieved, apprehensive and sad? It is the sadness I cannot imagine....Malcolm enjoyed high school, especially this past year....</p>
<p>"I remembered I took him to Wollman Rink in Central Park for the first time...and...led him to the ice....He ignored me, pushed himself up, and clinging to the boards, he began making his way around the rink. It was my first experience of letting him go.</p>
<p>"[In] lacrosse[, h]e was...considered the best in the school's history. I teased him, sometimes, about choosing sports that black people know nothing about. [W]henever he has asked me, 'What do you think I should do?,' my response has always been, 'If you do what you love, you'll be all right.'...</p>
<p>"He...found himself being recruited by college football and lacrosse coaches....</p>
<p>"When we visited the college that was his first choice, I was not prepared when he said, 'How would you feel if we went to the meeting for potential English majors[? I] held my breath for the next hour[:] anything I said would be wrong....</p>
<p>"I don't know why fathers want and even need at least one of their children to follow in their footsteps. Are we so unsure of how we have lived that we cannot know...that we have lived well[,] unless one of our children continues what we began?...As a man, do I need to feel that from my soul the souls of my children are born[?]</p>
<p>"When Jody was ten I gave her a guitar, hoping but not daring to expect that, through that instrument, she would take me into her soul and find her own. To my amazement she did. [W]hen I listen to her, I am at peace. [W]hen she holds the guitar in her arms[,] and plays it better than I ever did, I know that I gave her something...important[.]</p>
<p>"[W]hen we know that you choose to use us...fathers...as...bridges[,] across which you walk to reach your souls[,] then we know that we have been equal participants in what will be, we hope, your unceasing act of creating yourself....</p>
<p>"Once or twice a year I allowed myself to say [to]...Malcolm[,] 'You write well,' daring to say no more....He says he wants to be a sports journalist. I wish I wrote as well as some of the men who write for <em>Sports Illustrated</em>. Some of the best writing in America appears in that magazine....</p>
<p>"After reading one of my books, my father looked at me and said, 'Well, I guess you became a preacher after all. You just did it a little differently.'</p>
<p>"I smiled as tears rushed to my eyes. 'Daddy, I'm so glad you know that.'...</p>
<p>"What was it like to be my son?...Sometimes it was a fear of being eclipsed....He had chosen athletics over academics because, he said, 'I want an area that's mine, that you've had nothing to do with.'...Jody sa[id] to me once[,] 'You've done almost everything, Dad. You haven't left anything for us.'</p>
<p>"How do the children of high-achieving parents find their own identities? [T]hey are robbed of identity when they are seen as 'Julius Lester's son,' 'Julius Lester's daughter.'</p>
<p>"I have tried to protect their separateness[.] But when Malcolm says, 'Why didn't you tell me you had an article in such-and-such?' publication, there is hurt in his voice, as if he thinks I want to exclude him....</p>
<p>"I do not want my children sacrificed on the altar of black people's needs or mine.</p>
<p>"I fear that one day they will tell me I was wrong, that it was their [own] task to fight for their separateness[.]</p>
<p>"Michael McIntosh, senior class president...and one of Malcolm's...hockey...linemates, is introducing me[:] 'I'll say only the most important...thing[.] He is Malcolm Lester's father.'</p>
<p>"[T]he mystery is...that we are each unknown and unknowable to the other[.]" – pp. 225–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 27</p>
<p>October 7, 1985</p>
<p>"It is Simchat Torah, the night we...complete the reading of the five books of Moses and begin again immediately[,] and...sing and dance our joy in Torah.</p>
<p>"I stand outside the Pennsylvania Station–Madison Square Garden complex in New York City....</p>
<p>"The sun has not gone down so I still have time to get to a synagogue, any synagogue....</p>
<p>"A few days ago Marty Peretz, editor of <em>The New Republic,</em> called. 'I'd like you to cover [a] rally'[.]</p>
<p>"[In] the summer of 1960[,] someone played for me a 45 rpm record called 'White Man's Heaven Is Black Man's Hell.' It was a song with a calypso beat sung seductively and persuasively by a man named Louis X....What a relief it would be to condemn all white people as unredeemable. I would be free of having to live with...uncertainty and ambiguity[.]</p>
<p>"After the death of Elijah Muhammad, the [leader] of the Nation of Islam, the Nation rejected Elijah's racial philosophy, changed its name and aligned itself with more traditional Islamic thinking and practice. Louis X, or maybe he was Louis Farrakhan by then, [resurrected and] assumed control of the Nation.</p>
<p>"Farrakhan delighted in shocking people, and nothing was more so than his description of Hitler as 'wickedly great.'...</p>
<p>"I knew that I would have to do it because I was curious about what I would write. Would I respond to him as a Jew or would I be seduced by his charisma, his rhetoric? Would his expressions of anger and hatred be so comforting to the hurt and bleeding parts in me that I would applaud his sharp...anti-white and anti-Semitic...rebukes[?] I could not be sure that I wouldn't[. H]ow humiliating[!]</p>
<p>"Walking among the crowds are black men in suits [wearing] billed caps on their heads with the initials FOI, Fruit of Islam....Their eyes are hard with dangerous pride. Farrakhan has given them...simple solutions for every problem. I look at the women of the Nation[.] They carry themselves with a regal arrogance as if...they are the owners of the future....</p>
<p>"I live in a beautiful New England town[.] I read about social problems...but they do not sit at my doorstep as they would if I lived in an urban community. As I walk...among the crowds[,] I look at their faces and see poverty. I look at their clothes and hands and see menial work....My hands are soft and my eyes gentle. My walk is slow and languid, as if the world is not a dangerous and threatening place[.] I feel tension, fear and desperation in their bodies, even in the women in white and the Fruit of Islam. Clothes are merely a polyester shield against reality, and tomorrow[,] despair will settle down once again like fog[.]</p>
<p>"Sitting next to me is a white writer from <em>New York</em> magazine. [On] stage[,] a tall black man in a long, flowing white robe is talking with someone.</p>
<p>"Whoever he is, he is quite elegant and looks like a member of some royal African family. [Suddenly,] out of my mouth comes 'My God!' It is Stokely Carmichael.</p>
<p>"[I say,] 'Stokely needs an audience to know he's alive[,] and obviously he has no scruples about how he finds one.'</p>
<p>"[H]e spoke to my Civil Rights Movement class more than ten years ago[. T]he year was close enough to the days of The Movement that its dying glow still infused our relationship with some warmth. [C]lose relationship with Stokely depended on ideological agreement. [A]s he became more nationalistic, he could not accept that I was married to a white woman, and...I would not leave my wife merely because she was white. [F]riends told me: 'Stokely has some real problems with you because of your wife.'...Stokely...had been to our apartment in New York, had...sat at our dinner table, laughing and joking. But when the personal becomes political, persons cease to exist....</p>
<p>"All the memories of the laughter and danger Stokely and I shared are not compelling enough for me to regard him as other than my enemy....</p>
<p>"He calls himself Kwame Touré [(Ture)] now and heads something called the All African People's Revolutionary Party....Only when Stokely begins attacking Israel, Zionism and Judaism does it seem that he finds what [anyone] came to hear. 'Africa gave Judaism to the world,' he shouts [to] applau[se.] 'Moses was an Egyptian! Moses was an African!' The audience is on its feet, cheering.</p>
<p>"Looking at Stokely I realize that he is really a Las Vegas entertainer whose name used to be on the marquee as a headliner.</p>
<p>"[A] representative of the Palestinian Congress of America is introduced. He proceeds to equate Zionism with cancer, and 'the supports of Zionism are cancerous.' The implication is obvious: Cancer kills unless it is killed. [T]he audience greets each anti-Semitic thrust by rising to its feet, cheering, arms outstretched at forty-five-degree angles, fists clenched. I feel that I have been set down in the midst of one of the Nuremberg rallies.</p>
<p>"[Then] Farrakhan walks onto the red-carpeted stage, flanked by six women in white hats and white suits with red tassels at the shoulders. More than twenty thousand people rise, cheering and applauding[.] Farrakhan steps to the edge of the stage, his arms outstretched as if he is posing as the Lamb of God.</p>
<p>"[He says,] 'Somebody has to come to separate God from Satan[,] oppressor and oppressed, so they can see each other and then go to war to see who is going to rule—God or Satan.' And he is that someone....</p>
<p>" 'Who are those who support me? The righteous! You have been deprived of justice, and if God sends a deliverer, will the oppressor love him?'...</p>
<p>" 'I am resurrecting the minds of black people from the dead, and they attack [me,] Farrakhan.'...</p>
<p>"I see black reporters and photographers putting down their pens and cameras to laugh and applaud.</p>
<p>" 'I am your last chance, Jews! The scriptures charge your people with killing the prophets of God.' Farrakhan goes on to contend that God has not made Jews pay for such alleged deeds. However, if something happens to him, then God will make the Jews pay for all the prophets killed from biblical times to the present. '[W]hen God puts you in the oven, "never again" don't mean a thing.'...</p>
<p>"I leave because I am too frightened....I expect to see someone point at me and yell, 'He's a Jew!' and to find myself running from an angry crowd....</p>
<p>"It is one experience to read the words of...anti-Semitism in books; it is entirely another to hear them spoken with intensity, urgency and conviction, to hear them affirmed with cheers, the stamping of feet, laughter, applause and arms thrust toward heaven. I am afraid and enraged....</p>
<p>"As a black I am ashamed. I do not understand what is happening to blacks that so many could revel in vicarious bloodletting. Despair, poverty, deprivation and the relentless heat of racism do not justify hatred. Those blacks inside Madison Square Garden act as if they are the first generation of blacks to make its way through the valley of the shadow of death. They are not. They are the first, however, to wear suffering as if it were the divine right of kings. They are the first to use suffering as if it gives them divine exemption from moral and ethical responsibility to the rest of humanity." – pp. 230–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 28</p>
<p>Winter 1986 [(beginning December 1985)]</p>
<p>"I look at her sitting at the table, studying Hebrew. I admire this woman whom I am blessed to also call my wife....I try to imagine my life without her presence and I cannot....</p>
<p>"If it had been she who had plunged the marriage into the fires of Judaism, would I have sat at the Sabbath table week after week with love and respect for her and a way of being I had not chosen?...</p>
<p>"I would like to think yes, but I cannot be sure....</p>
<p>"I am afraid to give my joy a place in my body, afraid that joy of such magnitude will terrify her, will block the entranceway of her own joy....</p>
<p>"Would it have been wrong for her to become a Jew because she loves me?...I assumed that...offer[ing] her the opportunity to...become Jews together...would violate my separateness and hers....</p>
<p>"Unbidden, the image comes to me of that house sitting far back from the road and of me, Momma and Grandmomma sitting on the porch in the evenings. Separateness was survival, I understand now.</p>
<p>"When Adolph and Maggie decided to live their love in that time and...place, they separated themselves from family and community to live unto themselves by a value system which no one agreed with or approved. And that separateness was handed down, generation to generation[.]</p>
<p>"My wife is becoming a Jew and I am freed." – pp. 237–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"David is six now[.] I have taught him the <em>alef-bet</em>[.] Sometimes when he is playing by himself, we hear him singing under his breath, and listening closely, we hear <em>'Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ehad.'...</em></p>
<p>"Nomi, one of his teachers and the daughter of Haim...Gunner...said[,] 'One day [when] Hebrew [was mentioned,] David...said, "My God speaks Hebrew"[.]'...</p>
<p>"David has a love for Judaism...which surprises and startles me. After my wife becomes officially Jewish, we will have him converted. H[e] regret[s] giving up Christmas. Last December was the first time there was not a Christmas tree in the house. How pure the house was for me without it....</p>
<p>"I resent...Christmas[.] I think I will wear a Star of David...every year. Maybe that will force Gentiles to limit their greetings to 'Hello.'</p>
<p>"[My wife's daughter] Elena [stated] that she was released from the monumental expectations Christmas creates as well as the anxieties of not having those expectations met....</p>
<p>"It used to be the custom for Jewish males to write out their own copies of the Torah. That is how I would like to spend my old age[:] slowly, reverently meditating on each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, each one a holy picture delineating my soul and the face of God. I want my last years to be lived in holy silence, opening my lips only to sing the prayers of worship....</p>
<p>"Last June I attended a three-day seminar on...the cantorate as a profession at the University of Hartford.</p>
<p>"[O]nly one [of t]wenty-five people...was older than me, a man who served as cantor in a small Connecticut town and had come because he felt the lack of formal cantorial training....</p>
<p>"The comment I hear most often is 'Didn't you have enough problems being black?' The remark startles me[. T]he person is really saying...he has problems being Jewish. I generally respond by saying, 'Being Jewish is a joy for me.'...</p>
<p>"Many Jews (and Gentiles) feel that if you're not born Jewish, then you aren't <em>really</em> a Jew. I am learning...that [o]nly secularly identified Jews cannot accept that I, too, am a Jew....</p>
<p>"Even though I had recorded two albums of original songs in the mid-Sixties, my voice was untrained and it no longer had the richness and purity of twenty years ago....</p>
<p>"I learned [of] men in the <em>shtetls</em> of Eastern Europe who prayed to God for the congregation. [T]he sacredness they brought to the prayers caused them to be chosen by their congregations to pray in song. That was who I wanted to be—a <em>baal t'filah,</em> a 'master of prayer.'</p>
<p>"At the end of the seminar, I knew [that] on Shabbat mornings...I needed to be in synagogue[:] needed to be with other Jews, singing prayers to God....So the following Saturday David and I drove the ten miles to the synagogue in Northampton....</p>
<p>"The synagogue had no cantor, but the rabbi, Edward Friedman, had a strong tenor voice and, most important, knew that his voice and the music were vehicles for prayer....</p>
<p>"A few months after I started attending B'nai Israel I told Rabbi Friedman that I wanted to have my conversion done Halachically, since I had not been circumcised [the first time.]</p>
<p>"The next week I met him and two other rabbis at the <em>mikveh</em> in Springfield. The <em>mohel</em> took a sharp instrument...and drew a drop of blood from my circumcised penis. I immersed myself in the ritual bath, said the appropriate blessings, and it was done." – pp. 238–42</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">May 10, 1986</p>
<p>"It is Shabbat[,] the second day of Rosh Chodesh, the New Moon.</p>
<p>"[E]arly in the spring...Rabbi Friedman said casually to me after services, 'When are we going to get that bass voice of yours up on the <em>bimah?'...</em></p>
<p>"I know...my voice...is deep and loud, which is why I tried to sing quietly. But...joy [had] banished timidity, especially during the repetition of the <em>amidah</em> when we sang <em>'Yismach Moshe'</em> and <em>'Sim Shalom.'</em></p>
<p>"In a few moments...Rabbi Friedman will say, 'Julius Lester will lead us in the <em>Hallel.'</em> I will rise, walk to the <em>bimah</em> and begin to sing Psalms 113 to 118, those special psalms of praise that are only sung on holidays and when Rosh Chodesh coincides with the Sabbath. At long last I will stand in a synagogue and sing Jewish liturgical music as a Jew....</p>
<p>"I close my eyes and begin to chant the opening blessing[.] The melody is my own and it is simultaneously joyous and mournful, because that is the essence of Chosenness.</p>
<p>"As I hear the voices from the congregation rising to meet mine, there is no separateness between me and them. We have become music[. H]eaven has now become earth...and the two are one[,] as God is One....</p>
<p>"All those years[,] I sang folk songs, spirituals, blues [and] work songs, and always knew that something was absent[:] that as much as I loved spirituals, I was not wholly present when I sang them. Now I know why. It is this music [which] my voice was meant to sing[,] of praise and love that releases my soul into my voice, and I have known that[,] ever since I was seven years old and sat at the piano playing <em>'Kol Nidre'</em> over and over....</p>
<p>"I know now who I am. I am a Jew and I am a lovesong to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a praisesong to the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.</p>
<p>"Th[is] is all the 613 <em>mitzvot</em> are, the <em>midrashim,</em> the Talmud, the Torah, <em>kashrut, tzdekah [(tzedakah)],</em> and everything else in Judaism. They are lovesongs to HaShem.</p>
<p>"And so am I." – pp. 242–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-41032829864589492622022-04-02T12:34:00.227-04:002022-04-07T13:28:55.466-04:00Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,</em> Michael Shellenberger, 2020:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Introduction</p>
<p>"A scientist and a professor...created Extinction Rebellion in spring 2018[.]</p>
<p>"[Its] main spokesperson made alarming claims[:] 'Billions of people are going to die....Life on Earth is dying....Governments aren't addressing it.'</p>
<p>"By 2019, Extinction Rebellion had attracted the support of leading celebrities, including actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry, pop stars Ellie Goulding and Thom Yorke, 2019 Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman, Live Aid producer Bob Geldof, and Spice Girl Mel B....</p>
<p>"In September 2019, a survey of thirty thousand people around the world found that 48 percent believed climate change would make humanity extinct.</p>
<p>"[B]y the fall of that same year[,] the organization shut down streets and public transit throughout London....</p>
<p>"Extinction Rebellion's Sarah Lunnon...appeared on <em>This Morning,</em> one of Britain's most popular [television] news shows....</p>
<p>"In a...video[,] we see [a]ngry commuters at [a] Tube station descend[ing] into violence.</p>
<p>"[Although they objected to the tactics,] the cohosts...odd[ly] appeared to agree with...Lunnon....</p>
<p>"I couldn't understand[.] If the television hosts agreed that climate change was an enormous crisis, one in which 'billions of people are going to die,' how could they possibly be upset about commuters being late for work?...</p>
<p>"Even if climate change were 'only' going to kill <em>millions</em> of people, rather than <em>billions,</em> then the only reasonable conclusion to draw from Extinction Rebellion's tactics is that they weren't radical enough.</p>
<p>"[So] what kind of a crisis is it, exactly?</p>
<p>"[Now, I']ve been an environmental activist for thirty years[.] I care deeply about my mission to not only protect the natural environment but also to achieve the goal of universal prosperity for all people.</p>
<p>"I also care about getting the facts and science right. I believe environmental scientists, journalists, and activists have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear [that] doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.</p>
<p>"Much of what people are being told about the environment, including...climate, is wrong, and we desperately need to get it right. I decided to write [this book] after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.</p>
<p>"[This book] makes the moral case for humanism, of both secular and religious variants, against the anti-humanism of apocalyptic environmentalism." – pp. ix–xiii</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 1: It's Not the End of the World</p>
<p>The End Is Nigh</p>
<p>"[T]he Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...is a United Nations body of 195 scientists and other members...responsible for assessing science related to climate change." – p. 1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Resilience Rising</p>
<p>"In its fourth assessment report [(2007),] IPCC projected that by 2100, the global economy would be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4 degrees Celsius) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) [by] just 4.5 percent." – p. 6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Billions Won't Die</p>
<p>"On BBC Two's <em>Newsnight,</em> in October 2019[,] journalist Emma Barnett asked Extinction Rebellion's sympathetic and empathic spokesperson, [former county council Green Party politician] Sarah Lunnon, how her organization could justify disrupting life in London the way it had.</p>
<p>"[S]aid Lunnon, '[I]t makes me really cross and angry that the lack of action over thirty years has meant that the only way I can get the climate on the agenda is to take actions such as this; if we don't act and protest in this way nobody takes any notice.' " – pp. 9–10</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In...November 2019, I interviewed Lunnon....</p>
<p>" 'It's not [me],' Lunnon told me....'The science is saying we're headed to 4 degrees warming and people like...Johan Rockström...are saying that such a temperature rise is incompatible with civilized life. Johan said he could not see how an Earth at 4 degrees (Celsius) warming could support a billion or even half-billion people.'</p>
<p>"Lunnon was referring to an article published in <em>The Guardian</em> in May 2019, which quoted Rockström[.]</p>
<p>"[W]hy should we rely on the speculations of [one or] two scientists [instead of] the IPCC? 'It's not about choosing science,' said Lunnon, 'it's about looking at the risk we're facing. And the IPCC report lays out the different trajectories from where we are and some of them are very, very bleak.'</p>
<p>"[So] I interviewed Rockström[.] He said [t]he <em>Guardian</em> reporter had misunderstood[.] What he had actually said...was[:] 'It's difficult to see how we could accommodate 8 billion people or even half of that'[.] Even so, Rockström was predicting four billion deaths.</p>
<p>"[H]e said[, 'W]e don't have evidence that we can provide freshwater or feed or shelter today's world population of eight billion in a four degree world. My expert judgment...is that it may even be doubtful if we can host...four billion.'</p>
<p>"But is there IPCC science showing that food production would actually decline? 'As far as I know[,] they don't say anything about [that],' he said.</p>
<p>"Has anyone done a study of food production at four degrees? I asked. 'That's a good question. I must admit I have not seen [such] a study,' said Rockström, who is an agronomist.</p>
<p>"[S]cientists have done that study, and two of them were Rockström's colleagues at the Potsdam Institute. It found that food production could increase even at four to five degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels. And...technical improvements...mattered more than climate change.</p>
<p>"The report also found, intriguingly, that climate change <em>policies</em> were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself[:] policies...that would make energy more expensive and result in more bioenergy use[,] which...would increase land scarcity and drive up food costs....IPCC comes to the same conclusion." – pp. 11–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">A Small Part of Big Conflicts</p>
<p>"In 2006, a...political science professor from the University of Colorado in Boulder organized a workshop for thirty-two of the world's leading experts to discuss whether human-caused climate change was making natural disasters...more costly. Th[at] professor [was] Roger Pielke, Jr....</p>
<p>"The group met in Hohenkammer, Germany[.]</p>
<p>"The experts agreed[,] in their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement[,] that...more people and property in harm's way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters." – p. 13</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario....</p>
<p>"What about the claim IPCC contributor Michael Oppenheimer made that...2-foot, 9-inch sea level rise would be 'an unmanageable problem?'</p>
<p>"[M]illions of small farmers, like the ones on Bangladesh's low-lying coasts, move to cities every year, I pointed out [to him]. Doesn't the word 'unmanageable' suggest a permanent societal breakdown?</p>
<p>" 'When you have people making decisions they are essentially compelled to make,' he said, 'that's what I'm referring to as 'an unmanageable situation.'...</p>
<p>"In other words, the problems from sea level rise that Oppenheimer calls 'unmanageable' are situations like the ones that already occur, from which societies recover, and to which they adapt." – pp. 15–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Development > Climate</p>
<p>"Near the entrance to Virunga National Park [in Congo, I met] Mamy Bernadette Semutaga. She went by Bernadette. She was twenty-five years old....</p>
<p>"Much of...Bernadette's life has been difficult....</p>
<p>"We should be concerned about the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations[.]</p>
<p>"[Bernadette] is also...vulnerable to the weather and natural disasters <em>today.</em> [A plethora of things threaten her] surviv[al.] Understandably, then, climate change is not on her list of things to worry about.</p>
<p>"As such, it's misleading for environmental activists to invoke people like Bernadette, and the risks she faces from climate change, without acknowledging that economic development is overwhelmingly what will determine...the future of her children and grandchildren, not how much the climate changes.</p>
<p>"What will determine whether or not Bernadette's home is flooded is whether...Congo builds a hydroelectric, irrigation, and rainwater system, not the specific change in precipitation patterns. What will determine whether Bernadette's home is secure or insecure is whether she has money to make it secure. And the only way she'll have money to make it secure is through economic growth and...higher income." – pp. 18–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Exaggeration Rebellion</p>
<p>"Economic development outweighs climate change in the rich world, too....</p>
<p>"The main reason [for g]reater fire damage in Australia...is that the government[,] as in California, refused to do controlled burns, for both environmental and human health reasons. As such, the fires would have occurred even had Australia's climate not warmed....</p>
<p>"Climate alarmism, animus among environmental journalists toward the current Australian government, and smoke that was unusually visible to densely populated areas, appear to be the reasons for exaggerated media coverage.</p>
<p>"[O]ther human activities have a greater impact on the frequency and severity of forest fires than the emission of greenhouse gases." – pp. 19–21</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In July 2019, one of Lauren Jeffrey's science teachers...in...a city of 230,000 people...fifty miles [from] London...made an offhand comment about how climate change could be apocalyptic. Jeffrey was seventeen[.]</p>
<p>" 'I did research on it and spent two months feeling quite anxious,' she told me. 'I would hear young people around me talk about it and they were convinced that the world was going to end and they were going to die.'</p>
<p>"Studies find that climate alarmism is contributing to rising anxiety and depression, particularly among children. In 2017, the American Psychological Association diagnosed rising eco-anxiety[.] In 2020, a large national survey found that one...of five British children was having nightmares about climate change....</p>
<p>" 'I found a lot of blogs and videos talking about how we're going extinct at various dates, 2030, 2035, from societal collapse,' said Jeffrey. 'That's when I started to get quite worried. I tried to forget it at first but it kept popping up in my mind.</p>
<p>" 'One of my friends was convinced there would be a collapse of society in 2030 and "near term human extinction" in 2050,' said Jeffrey. 'She concluded...we've got ten years left to live.'</p>
<p>"[O]ne...Extinction Rebellion activist climbed atop a desk in...a classroom to give a terrifying talk to children...ten years old....</p>
<p>"The BBC's Andrew Neil interviewed a visibly uncomfortable Extinction Rebellion spokesperson in her mid-thirties named Zion Lights. 'One of your founders, Roger Hallam, said in April, "Our children are going to die in the next ten to twenty years"[.] What's the scientific basis for these claims?'</p>
<p>" 'These claims have been disputed, admittedly,' Lights says....'But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.'</p>
<p>" 'But most scientists <em>don't</em> agree with this,' says Neil. 'I looked through [IPCC's recent reports] and see no reference to billions of people going to die[.]</p>
<p>" 'I've seen young girls on television, part of your demonstration...<em>crying</em> because they think they're going to die in five or six years' time, crying because they don't think they'll ever see adulthood,' says Neil. 'And yet there's no scientific basis for the claims...your organization is making.'</p>
<p>"[R]eplies Lights[,] 'They're learning about the consequences.'</p>
<p>"Happily, not all of Britain's schoolchildren trusted Extinction Rebellion to honestly and accurately explain the consequences. 'I did research and found there was a lot of misinformation...on the doomsayer side of things,'...Jeffrey told me.</p>
<p>"In October and November 2019, she posted seven videos to YouTube and joined Twitter to promote them. [S]aid Jeffrey in one of the videos[:] an open letter to Extinction Rebellion, '[Y]our persistent exaggeration of the facts has the potential to do more harm than good to the scientific credibility of your cause as well as to the psychological well-being of my generation.' " – pp. 21–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Apocalypse Never</p>
<p>"In November and December 2019, I published two long articles criticizing climate alarmism[.] I received many emails from scientists and activists alike, thanking me for clarifying the science.</p>
<p>"One of the main questions I received, including from a BBC reporter, was whether some alarmism was justified in order to achieve changes to policy....</p>
<p>"Governments 'have a ten-year window...to solve the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control,' [a] June...article quoted [an anonymous] senior U.N. environmental official[.]</p>
<p>"Did the Associated Press publish that apocalyptic warning from the United Nations in June 2019? No, June <em>1989</em>[!]</p>
<p>"In early 2019[,] Pielke reviewed the apocalyptic climate tract, <em>The Uninhabitable Earth,</em> for the <em>Financial Times.</em>...Pielke described a filtering mechanism that results in journalists, like the one who wrote the book, getting the science so wrong.</p>
<p>" 'The scientific community produces carefully caveated scenarios of the future, ranging from the unrealistically optimistic to the highly pessimistic,' Pielke wrote. By contrast, '[m]edia coverage tends to emphasize the most pessimistic scenarios and in the process somehow converts them from worst-case scenarios to our most likely futures.'</p>
<p>"The author of <em>The Uninhabitable Earth,</em> like other activist journalists, simply exaggerated the exaggerations. He 'assembled the best of this already selective science to paint a picture containing "enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic." '</p>
<p>"What about so-called tipping points, like the rapid, accelerating, and simultaneous loss of Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, the drying out...and die-back of the Amazon, and a change of...Atlantic Ocean circulation? The high level of uncertainty...and...complexity...make many tipping point scenarios unscientific. That's not to say that a catastrophic tipping point scenario is impossible, only that there is no scientific evidence that one would be more probable or catastrophic than other potentially catastrophic scenarios, including an asteroid impact, super-volcanoes, or an unusually deadly influenza virus....</p>
<p>" 'Richer countries are more resilient,' [MIT] climate scientist [Kerry] Emanuel said, 'so let's focus on making people richer and more resilient.'</p>
<p>"The risk of triggering tipping points increases at higher planetary temperatures, and thus our goal should be to reduce emissions and keep temperatures as low as possible without undermining economic development. Said Emanuel[,] 'We shouldn't be forced to choose between growth and lifting people out of poverty[,] and doing something for the climate.'...</p>
<p>"Most energy experts believe emissions in developing nations will peak and decline, just as they did in developed nations, once they achieve a similar level of prosperity.</p>
<p>"As a result, global temperatures today appear much more likely to peak...between two to three degrees [Celsius] over preindustrial levels, not [at] four, [so] the risks, including from tipping points, are significantly lower....</p>
<p>"Can we credit thirty years of climate alarmism for these reductions in emissions? [No, w]e can't. Total emissions from energy in Europe's largest countries[:] Germany, Britain, and France, peaked in the 1970s, thanks mostly to the switch from coal to natural gas and nuclear—technologies that [Bill] McKibben, [Greta] Thunberg, [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (']AOC[')], and many climate activists adamantly oppose." – pp. 24–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 2: Earth's Lungs Aren't Burning</p>
<p>'There's No Science Behind That'</p>
<p>"I...call[ed] Dan Nepstad, a lead author of a recent IPCC report on the Amazon[, to] ask...whether it was true that the Amazon was a major source of Earth's oxygen supply.</p>
<p>" 'It's bull——,' he told me. 'There's no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration'[.]</p>
<p>"[R]ainforests in the Amazon and elsewhere...can only be saved if the need for economic development is accepted, respected, and embraced. By opposing many forms of economic development in the Amazon[—]particularly the most productive forms[—]many environmental NGOs, European governments, and philanthropies have made the situation worse." – pp. 30–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Looking Down on the Poor</p>
<p>"In 2016, the Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen flew over the Amazon forest with the head of Greenpeace Brazil[,] Paulo Adario...as part of a National Geographic television series called <em>Years of Living Dangerously.</em></p>
<p>" '[C]attle is not even natural of the Amazon!' Bündchen says. 'It is not even supposed to be here!'</p>
<p>"[Replies] Adario[,] 'When you eat a burger you don't realize [it's] coming from rainforest destruction.' Bündchen starts to tear up. 'It's shocking[,] isn't it?' asks Adario.</p>
<p>"But[,] is it really so shocking? After all, agricultural expansion in Brazil is happening nearly identically to how it occurred in Europe hundreds of years ago....</p>
<p>"And yet developed nations, particularly European ones[—]which [themselves] grew wealthy thanks to deforestation and fossil fuels[—]are seeking to prevent Brazil and other tropical nations, including...Congo, from developing the same way....</p>
<p>"The good news is that, globally, forests are returning, and fires are declining. There was a whopping 25 percent <em>decrease</em> in the annual area burned globally from 1998 to 2015, thanks mainly to economic growth. That growth created jobs in cities for people, allowing them to move away from slash-and-burn farming. And economic growth allowed farmers to clear forests for agriculture using machines, instead of fire.</p>
<p>"Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark <em>combined</em> grew back in Europe between 1995 and 2015....</p>
<p>"Part of the reason the planet is greening stems from greater carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and greater planetary warming....From 1981 to 2016, four times more carbon was captured by plants due to carbon-boosted growth[,] than from biomass covering a larger surface of Earth." – pp. 31–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Romance and Reality</p>
<p>"I am sensitive to the insensitive behaviors of developed-world environmentalists because I lived with the small farmers Bündchen looked down upon, and life was exceedingly difficult....</p>
<p>"The people I worked with were too poor to have much livestock, though that was the next rung up the economic ladder. Slashing and burning was brutal work. The men drank large quantities of rum[,] while doing it....</p>
<p>"I can count on a single hand the number of young people who told me they wanted to remain on their family's farm and work their parents' land. The large majority of young people wanted to go to the city, get an education, and get a job. They wanted a better life than...low-yield peasant farming could provide. They wanted a life more like mine. And I knew, of course, that I didn't want to be a small farmer. Why did I ever think anyone else wanted to? The reality I lived, up close and in person, made it impossible for me to hold on to my romantic views.</p>
<p>"In August 2019, the news media's portrayal of the burning rainforest as...result[ing from] greedy corporations, nature-hating farmers, and corrupt politicians annoyed me. I had understood [this] for a quarter century[.]</p>
<p>"Anyone looking to understand why Brazil cuts down its rainforests to produce soy and meat for export must start with the reality that it is trying to lift the last one-quarter of its population out of a poverty comparable to that of Bernadette in...Congo, of which environmentalists in Europe and North America are oblivious or, worse, unconcerned." – pp. 33–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Fire and Food</p>
<p>"What we today view as a pleasing natural landscape—a grassy meadow surrounded by a forest and with a river running through it—is often a landscape created by humans to hunt game[,] seeking...drinking water. Using fire to create a meadow in which to slaughter animals is one of the most frequent[ly] mention[ed] uses of fire by hunter-gatherers around the world. The meadows of the North American eastern forests would have disappeared had they not been burned annually by Indians for five thousand years....</p>
<p>"In short, fire and deforestation for meat production are major parts of what made us humans....</p>
<p>"For twenty-first-century environmentalists, the word <em>wilderness</em> has positive connotations, but in the past it was a frightful 'place of wild beasts.'...</p>
<p>"Thus, for early European Christians, removing the forest was good, not bad. Early Christian fathers, including Saint Augustine, taught that it was humankind's role to finalize God's creation on Earth[.]</p>
<p>"It was only after humans started living in cities, and growing wealthier, that they started to worry about nature for nature's sake." – pp. 36–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Greenpeace Fragments the Forest</p>
<p>"Insensitivity to Brazil's need for economic development led environmental groups...to advocate policies that contributed to the fragmentation of the rainforest and [actually] the unnecessary expansion of cattle ranching and farming....</p>
<p>" 'The mastermind of the soy moratorium was...Adario of Greenpeace Brazil,' said Nepstad. Adario is the man who made Bündchen cry....'People dressed up like chickens and walked through a number of McDonald's restaurants in Europe. It was a big international media moment.'...</p>
<p>"In 2008, the World Bank published a report that...'said that small is beautiful[;] that modern, technologically sophisticated agriculture (and especially the use of GMOs) was bad,' wrote the World Bank's representative at the time to Brazil[;] that 'the path that should be followed was small and organic[,] and local agriculture.'</p>
<p>"The World Bank report enraged Brazil's agriculture minister, who called the Bank's representative and asked, 'How can the World Bank produce such an absurd report. Following the "wrong path"[,] Brazil has become an agricultural superpower, producing three times the output we produced thirty years ago, with 90 percent of this coming from productivity gains!'...</p>
<p>"The World Bank had already cut 90 percent of its development aid for Brazil's agricultural research efforts as punishment because Brazil sought to grow food in the same ways that wealthy nations do....</p>
<p>"Much of the motivation to [prevent] farming and ranching is ideological, Nepstad said. 'It's really antidevelopment[:] you know, anti-capitalism. There's a lot of hatred of agribusiness. Or at least hatred of agribusiness in Brazil. The same standard doesn't seem to apply to agribusiness in France and Germany.' " – pp. 38–40</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">'Take Your Dough and Reforest Germany'</p>
<p>"Greenpeace's agenda fit neatly into the agenda of European farmers to exclude low-cost Brazilian food from the European Union. The two European nations that were the most critical of deforestation and fires in the Amazon also happened to be the two countries whose farmers most resisted the Mercosur free trade agreement with Brazil: France and Ireland....</p>
<p>"Brazil's former socialist president grew just as angry at the hypocrisy and neo-imperialism of foreign governments[,] more than a decade earlier. 'The wealthy countries are very smart[:] approving protocols, holding big speeches on the need to avoid deforestation,' said President Luiz Inácio 'Lula' da Silva in 2007, 'but they already deforested everything.' " – pp. 41–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">After Amazon Alarmism</p>
<p>"Farmers should be allowed to intensify production in some areas, particularly the Cerrado, to reduce pressure and fragmentation in other areas, particularly the rainforest.</p>
<p>"Creating parks and protected areas goes hand-in-hand with agricultural intensification....</p>
<p>"The determination by activist journalists and [television] producers to paint deforestation in the Amazon as apocalyptic was inaccurate and unfair. Worse, it further polarized the situation in Brazil, making it harder to find pragmatic solutions between farmers and conservationists.</p>
<p>"As for the myth that the Amazon provides '20 percent of the world's oxygen,' it appears to have evolved out of a 1966 article by a Cornell University scientist. Four years later, a climatologist explained in the [respected] journal <em>Science</em> why there was nothing to be frightened of." – pp. 42–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 3: Enough with the Plastic Straws</p>
<p>Things Fall Apart</p>
<p>"In 2019[,] scientists...discovered that sunlight breaks down polystyrene in ocean water over a period as short as decades....</p>
<p>"But environmental groups have long considered polystyrene waste in the ocean to have a lifespan in the thousands of years, if not longer, because it can't be broken down by bacteria.</p>
<p>"[T]he scientists...discovered...that sunlight breaks...polystyrene into organic carbon and carbon dioxide. The organic carbon dissolves in seawater[.] At the end of the process, the plastic is gone." – pp. 51–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Elephant in the Room</p>
<p>"In 1863, in upstate New York, a young man named John Wesley Hyatt learned about [a] billiard ball maker's offer of a $10,000 reward to anyone who could create a suitable substitute to ivory, and he started experimenting in his backyard shed with various materials. Six years later, he had invented celluloid from the cellulose in cotton....</p>
<p>"Combs were one of the first...uses for celluloid. For thousands of years, humans had made combs of tortoiseshell [and] ivory[.]</p>
<p>"Celluloid had the advantage of being colored in ways to imitate the distinctive marbling of tortoiseshell combs. Hyatt...boast[ed] of the product's environmental benefits, claiming 'it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.' " – pp. 54–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Plastic Is Progress</p>
<p>"[B]ecause bioplastics come from crops[,] rather than the resin waste product from the oil and gas industry, they have large land use impacts[.]</p>
<p>"[S]witching from fossil plastics to bioplastics would require expanding farmland in the United States by 5 to 15 percent. To replace fossil plastic with corn-based bioplastic would require thirty to forty-five million acres of corn, which is equivalent to 40 percent of the entire U.S. corn harvest[.]" – p. 61</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Waste Not, Want Not</p>
<p>"The plastics parable teaches us that we save nature by <em>not</em> using it, and we avoid using it by switching to artificial substitutes. This model of nature-saving is the opposite of the one promoted by most environmentalists, who focus on either using natural resources more sustainably, or moving toward biofuels and bioplastics.</p>
<p>"We must overcome the instinct to see natural products as superior to artificial ones, if we are to save species like sea turtles and elephants.</p>
<p>"[A]rtificial substitutes are necessary but not sufficient to save wildlife like the hawksbill sea turtle and African elephants. We must also find a way to train ourselves to see the artificial product as superior to the natural one.</p>
<p>"[T]o some extent, this is already happening. In many developed nations, consumers condemn the consumption of natural products, like products made from ivory, fur, coral, and tortoiseshell.</p>
<p>"Humankind is thus well-prepared to understand an important, paradoxical truth: it is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what's natural." – pp. 61–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[T]here are few things more demoralizing than hiking or swimming to a place of great natural beauty only to discover plastic waste that has either been left behind by thoughtless people, or has migrated there through rivers and oceans.</p>
<p>"But for the people who are often struggling to survive in poor and developing nations, there are many things more demoralizing than uncollected waste....</p>
<p>"For poor nations, creating the infrastructure for modern energy, sewage, and floodwater management will be a higher priority than plastic waste, just as they were for the United States and China before them." – p. 64</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 4: The Sixth Extinction Is Canceled</p>
<p>Exaggerating Extinction</p>
<p>"In 2014, the Oscar-nominated documentary film <em>Virunga</em> depicted the possibility of oil-drilling in Virunga Park as a major threat to...mountain gorilla tourism.</p>
<p>"[But 't]he gorillas are on an escarpment[. O]il companies...aren't interested in those areas'[,] primatologist Alastair McNeilage, of Wildlife Conservation Society, told me....</p>
<p>"The real threat to the gorillas and other wildlife isn't economic growth and fossil fuels[,] but rather poverty and wood fuels." – p. 68</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Wood Kills</p>
<p>"People prefer charcoal for cooking because it is lighter, burns cleaner, and does not become infested, like wood, with insects. And charcoal is labor-saving: you can put a pot of beans onto a charcoal fire and go do something else." – p. 69</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Why Congo Needs Fossil Fuels</p>
<p>"[F]or people to stop using wood and charcoal as fuel, they will need access to liquefied petroleum gas, LPG, which is made from oil[;] and cheap electricity. Researchers in India proved that subsidizing rural villagers in the Himalayas with LPG reduced deforestation and allowed the forest ecosystem to recover.</p>
<p>"[Wildlife Conservation Society's Andrew] Plumptre...agrees. 'If they had hydro and oil, and if it can be done in a clean way, to generate electricity and gas to use instead of charcoal, that would be good for the environment.' " – pp. 81–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Power for Progress</p>
<p>"Experts agree that the easiest and cheapest way for Congo to produce abundant supplies of cheap electricity is by building the long-planned Grand Inga Dam on the Congo River. 'You have 100,000-megawatt potential through Inga,' [Michael] Kavanagh[, reporter in Congo] said. 'You can provide all of Africa with that power.'</p>
<p>"The Inga would be fifty times larger than the Hoover Dam, which serves eight million people in California, Arizona, and Nevada.</p>
<p>"But for cheap electricity and LPG to pay for themselves, and not depend on charitable donations from European governments and American philanthropists[,] Congo needs security, peace, and industrialization of the kind that has lifted so many nations out of poverty in the past." – p. 84</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 5: Sweatshops Save the Planet</p>
<p>Leaving the Farm</p>
<p>"In June 2015[,] I decided to go to Indonesia and see for myself what the situation was like for factory workers there....</p>
<p>"I [met] twenty-five-year-old...Suparti, who had come from a small village on the coast. Her...second...job was...at a chocolate factory....</p>
<p>"Suparti [had] worked alongside her parents...in the fields. [S]he [remembered,] 'We cooked with rice husks.' " – pp. 88–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Manufacturing Progress</p>
<p>"The declining number of workers required for food and energy production, thanks to the use of modern energy and machinery, increases productivity, grows the economy, and diversifies the workforce.</p>
<p>"[B]uying cheap clothing, and thus increasing agricultural productivity, is one of the most important things we can do to help people like Suparti in Indonesia and Bernadette in Congo, while also creating the conditions for the return and protection of natural environments, including rainforests." – pp. 90–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Great Escape</p>
<p>"Before 1800, notes Harvard University's Steven Pinker, most people were desperately poor. 'The average income was equivalent to that in the poorest countries in Africa today'[.] The Industrial Revolution constituted what Pinker calls the 'Great Escape' from poverty.</p>
<p>"The Great Escape continues today. From 1981 to 2015, the population of humans living in extreme poverty plummeted from 44 percent to 10 percent.</p>
<p>"[Humanity's] prosperity is made possible by using energy and machines[,] so fewer and fewer of us have to produce food, energy, and consumer products, and more and more of us can do work that requires greater use of our minds and...even offers meaning and purpose to our lives." – pp. 93–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Power of Wealth</p>
<p>" 'It is comparatively easy to turn a rice farmer into a garment factory worker,' notes Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik.</p>
<p>"During the last 200 years, poor nations found that they didn't need to end corruption or educate everyone to develop. As long as factories were allowed to operate freely, and the politicians didn't steal too much from their owners, manufacturing could drive economic development. And, over time, as nations became richer, many of them, including the U.S., became less corrupt.</p>
<p>" 'You could start with very poor initial conditions, get a few things right to stimulate the domestic production of a narrow range of labor-intensive manufactures—and voilà! You had a growth engine going,' Rodrik says." – p. 96</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In the early 2000s[,] economist...Arthur van Benthem was working for Shell Oil Company...to develop scenarios to predict future energy supply and demand....</p>
<p>"Shell [had] pioneered scenario planning [i]n the 1960s[.] To forecast market collapses, Shell's scenario planning depended on thinking in counterintuitive, contrarian ways[,] continually seeking new evidence, rather than relying on assumptions.</p>
<p>"[M]any energy analysts at the time...assumed that more energy-efficient...technology meant...poor nations could get rich using far less energy than rich economies....</p>
<p>"Van Benthem...told me, 'I found...that developing countries exhibit more energy-intensive growth at the same levels of GDP than developed countries did.'...</p>
<p>"Since 1800, lighting has become five thousand times cheaper. As a result, we use much more of it in our homes, at work, and outdoors. Cheap light-emitting diodes (LEDs) allow Suparti to consume much more lighting than our grandparents could when they were at similar income levels.</p>
<p>"[E]conomists demonstrated that cheaper lighting led to greater consumption in 1996 and again in 2006.</p>
<p>"How wealthy we are is...reflected in the amount of energy we consume....</p>
<p>"Almost all of the average Congolese person's energy consumption is in the form of burning wood and other biomass, where[as] just 24 percent of the average Indonesian's is[.]</p>
<p>"Globally, the history of human evolution and development is one of converting ever-larger amounts of energy into wealth and power in ways that allow human societies to grow more complex." – pp. 97–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Energy Density Matters</p>
<p>"[W]omen [who] cook with wood [don't] complain about...toxic smoke[. W]hat they complain about...is how much time it takes to chop [and] haul wood, start fires, and maintain them....</p>
<p>"Fossil fuels were...key to saving forests in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries....</p>
<p>"Centralizing energy production has been essential to leaving more of planet Earth for natural landscapes with wild animals....</p>
<p>"While the energy density of coal is twice as high as the energy density of wood, the <em>power</em> density of coal <em>mines</em> is up to twenty-five thousand times greater than forests....</p>
<p>"The more people and wealth an area has, the higher [its] power density....</p>
<p>"Horse-drawn carriages made New York City unlivable in the years before the introduction of the automobile. The streets...stank of urine and feces, which brought flies and disease. Petroleum-powered vehicles allowed for much higher power densities with much less pollution....</p>
<p>"A simple technical fix added to coal plants...after 1950 reduced dangerous particulate matter by 99 percent. High-temperature coal plants are nearly as clean as natural gas plants, save for their higher carbon emissions....</p>
<p>"People burn wood not coal, and coal not natural gas, when those fuels are all they can afford[.]</p>
<p>"As a result of cleaner-burning coal, the transition to natural gas, [and] cleaner vehicles, [along with] other technological changes, developed nations have seen major improvements in air quality....</p>
<p>"Humans today use more wood for fuel than at any other time in history, even as it constitutes a lower share of total energy. Ending the use of wood for fuel should thus be one of the highest priorities for [those] seeking...environmental progress." – pp. 99–102</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Manufacturing Ladder</p>
<p>"The real risk to forests comes not from the expansion of energy-intensive factories in poor nations, as Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion claim, but rather from the [reduction of] them....</p>
<p>" 'Most countries of Africa are...experiencing de-industrialization,' writes Rodrik[.]</p>
<p>"One exception is Ethiopia[.]</p>
<p>"Ethiopia had [first] to end and recover from a...seventeen-year civil war[.] 'The resources spent on investment—in basic infrastructure such as roads and hydroelectricity—appear to have been well spent,' says Rodrik....</p>
<p>"'To be successful, industrialization has to come from the very top,' Hinh Dinh, a former World Bank economist who advised the Ethiopian government...told me....'Ethiopia got good results because...the[n] prime minister [Meles Zenawi] went to China to get garment and shoe factories.'...</p>
<p>" 'In the U.S., manufacturing employment peaked at twenty million people in 1978,' said Dinh, 'and since then, it has shed its low-end industries to focus on higher, more specialized manufacturing. That's different from Nigeria de-industrializing at 7 or 8 percent (share of manufacturing in GDP) before its manufacturing reached the maturity stage.'...</p>
<p>" 'There is nothing wrong with growing through agriculture,' said Dinh. 'But historically, nations did not do it that way because the scope for innovations is fairly limited.'...</p>
<p>"I asked Dinh, what should...Congo...do? [H]e said[,] 'I advised[d] Nigeria...to open up to foreign direct investment and try to get as many jobs created as possible....</p>
<p>" 'First you make bicycles and that allows you to make motorcycles. From there you can go to automobiles. From automobiles you can start thinking about satellites.</p>
<p>" 'The goal in Ethiopia is to have as many jobs as possible, and have the education system turning out the factory workers that you need. That's why I push for light manufacturing. It's not just the skills but also the discipline instilled in people. Later on, when the country reaches the second stage, the education system should produce more skilled workers capable of producing medium tech products, and so on.' " – pp. 102–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Fast-Fashion for Africa</p>
<p>"Contrary to what I and others have long believed, the positive impacts of manufacturing outweigh the negative ones. We should thus feel pride, not guilt, when buying products made by people like Suparti. And environmentalists and the news media should stop suggesting that fast-fashion brands like H&M are behaving unethically for contracting with factories in poor nations....</p>
<p>" 'If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070, you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,' said...Emanuel. 'It doesn't sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it's by burning a lot of coal they make themselves wealthier...and have less children.'...</p>
<p>Late economic developers like...Congo have a much harder time competing in international markets than did early economic developers like the United States and Europe. That means early developers, today's rich nations, should do everything they can to help poor nations industrialize. Instead[—]as we will see[—]many of them are doing something closer to the opposite: seeking to make poverty sustainable[,] rather than to make poverty history." – pp. 105–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 6: Greed Saved the Whales, Not Greenpeace</p>
<p>Greenpeace and the Whales</p>
<p>"[B]y the mid-twentieth century, with the rise of massive industrial ships, humans nearly hunted whales to extinction.</p>
<p>"Scientists raised the alarm about declining whale stocks, and a small group of committed...activists set out to save them....</p>
<p>"Things came to a boil in the summer of 1975.</p>
<p>"[T]he activists boarded their...high-speed inflatable boat, and drove between a Soviet catcher vessel...and a pod of...whales....</p>
<p>"Walter Cronkite aired the Zodiac crew member's Super 8 footage...and millions of people would learn the name of the new organization: Greenpeace.</p>
<p>"After another seven years of media publicity, grassroots organizing, and political pressure, in 1982 environmental activists successfully inspired the world to impose a complete ban on commercial whaling." – pp. 107–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">'Grand Ball Given by the Whales'</p>
<p>"Th[at] story of a small band of committed nature lovers saving the environment appeals to us. It is the story we learn from [television] and movie documentaries, books, and news reports. It is an exciting drama with obvious heroes and villains. On one side there are greedy, cowardly people destroying nature for profit, and on the other side there are idealistic, brave youths. It is a story that has inspired millions to take action.</p>
<p>"The only problem with it as a guide for protecting the environment is that nearly everything about it is wrong." – p. 109</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In 1849[,] Samuel Kier...launched...'Kier's Petroleum, or Rock Oil'[.]</p>
<p>"A chemist recommended distilling it[,] and using it as lighting fluid. Kier's contribution to the emerging petroleum revolution was the creation of the first industrial-scale refinery in downtown Pittsburgh.</p>
<p>"A group of...investors...hired an...engineer with...expertise in salt drilling to poke around in Pennsylvania for petroleum. In 1859[,] Edward Drake...hit...oil near Titusville[.]</p>
<p>"The discovery of the Drake Well led to widespread production of petroleum-based kerosene, which rapidly took over the market for lighting fluids in the United States, thus saving whales, which were no longer needed for their oil. At its peak, whaling produced 600,000 barrels of whale oil annually. The petroleum industry achieved that level less than three years after Drake's oil strike. In a single day, one Pennsylvania well produced as much oil as it took a whaling voyage three or four years to obtain, a dramatic example of petroleum's high power density." – pp. 110–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">How Congo Saved the Whales</p>
<p>"In 1905, European chemists invented a way to turn liquid oil into solid fat for making soap. The process was called hydrogenation because it involved blowing hydrogen gas over nickel fi[l]ings into the oil. Then, in 1918, chemists discovered how to solidify whale oil while eliminating the smell and taste, allowing it to be used for the first time as margarine.</p>
<p>"But then, industrial chemists succeeded in making margarine almost entirely from palm oil, eliminating the need for whale oil. By 1940, palm oil, much of it coming from...Congo, had become cheaper than whale oil....Whale oil as a share of global trade in fats declined from 9.4 percent in the 1930s to 1.7 percent in 1958, resulting in declining whale oil prices in the late 1950s....</p>
<p>"Whaling peaked in 1962, a full thirteen years before Greenpeace's heavily publicized action[,] and declined dramatically during the next decade....</p>
<p>"It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whale...kill[s] in the twentieth century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982. The Commission's moratorium on whaling in the 1980s, according to...the most careful study, was a 'rubber stamp' on a 'situation that had already emerged....Regulation was not important in stabilizing populations.'</p>
<p>"The International Whaling Commission set whaling quotas, but they weren't low enough to prevent over-whaling....Concludes the leading historian of the period, 'The thirty years of work by the IWC have proven a fiasco.'</p>
<p>"Those nations that thundered the loudest against whaling after the Greenpeace action didn't themselves hunt whales. 'Strong anti-whaling positions became a...convenient way of portraying a green image as virtually no material costs were involved for nations without whaling interests.'</p>
<p>"Rising prosperity and wealth created the demand for...substitutes that saved the whales. People saved the whales by no longer needing them[,] because they had created more abundant, cheaper, and better alternatives.</p>
<p>"Today, the populations of blue whales, humpback whales, and bowheads...are all recovering[.] Not a single whale species is at risk of extinction. Nations harvest fewer than two thousand whales annually, an amount that is 97 percent less than the nearly seventy-five thousand whales killed in 1960.</p>
<p>"The moral of the story, for the economists who studied how vegetable oil saved the whales, was that, 'to some extent, economies can "outgrow" severe environmental exploitation.' " – pp. 112–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">A System Without a Schedule</p>
<p>"[H]istories emphasized the role of scarcity in raising prices and stimulating innovation....But...in the early 1970s[,] Italian...physicist...Cesare Marchetti...found that 'the market regularly moved away from [any given] primary energy source, long before it was exhausted[.]</p>
<p>"[I]t is often rising economic growth[,] and rising demand for a specific energy service, like lighting, transportation, heat, or industry, that allows fossil fuels to replace renewables, and oil and gas to replace coal.</p>
<p>"[And t]hat's what happened with whales. Other substitutes, principally hog fat and ethanol, emerged before the discovery of oil fields in Pennsylvania and the distillation of petroleum into kerosene. [But i]t was petroleum's abundance and superior power density that ultimately led to its triumph over [those] biofuels....</p>
<p>"Energy transitions...occurred in the way...Marchetti predicted, from more energy-dilute and carbon-dense fuels toward more energy-dense and hydrogen-dense ones....</p>
<p>"The chemistry is simple to understand. Coal...comprise[s] roughly one carbon atom for every hydrogen atom. Petroleum...comprise[s] one carbon atom for every two hydrogen atoms. And natural gas, or rather, its main component, methane, has...one carbon atom [for every] four hydrogen atoms[.]</p>
<p>"Marchetti was right that human societies tend to move from energy-dilute to energy-dense fuels[.]</p>
<p>"What determines the rate of these transitions is politics. And, as we will see, sometimes politics can [even] move societies away from energy-dense fuels...back toward more energy-dilute ones." – pp. 114–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Gasland Deception</p>
<p>"In spring 2010[,] documentary filmmaker...Josh Fox...released the trailer to his new film, <em>Gasland,</em> about the natural gas boom in the United States.</p>
<p>"[T]he film's depiction of...flammable water was deceptive....</p>
<p>"Irish documentary filmmaker...Phelim McAleer called out Fox...at a 2011 <em>Gasland</em> screening[:]</p>
<p>" 'McAleer[:] "You have said yourself people lit their water long before fracking started. Isn't that correct?"</p>
<p>" 'Fox: "Yes, but it's not relevant." ' " – pp. 116–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Fracking the Climate</p>
<p>"[O]n virtually every metric, natural gas is cleaner than coal. Natural gas emits 17 to 40 times less sulfur dioxide, a fraction of the nitrous oxide that coal emits, and almost no mercury. Natural gas is one-eighth as deadly as coal, counting both accidents and air pollution. And burning gas rather than coal for electricity requires 25 to 50 times less water.</p>
<p>"The technological revolution allowing for firms to extract far more natural gas from shale and the ocean floor is the main reason...U.S. carbon emissions from energy declined 13 percent between 2005 and 2018[.]</p>
<p>"Despite a nearly 40 percent increase in natural gas production since 1990, the EPA reported a 20 percent decrease in methane emissions in 2013, in part because of improved gaskets, monitoring, and maintenance....</p>
<p>"Fracking brings pipelines, rigs, and trucks, which can disrupt peaceful landscapes that people rightly care about....These problems...are nowhere as bad as coal mining, which has in many ways become worse throughout the decades, not better, culminating in mountaintop removal and the destruction of river ecosystems.</p>
<p>"What explains the lower environmental impact of natural gas fracking as compared to coal mining is power density. A natural gas field in the Netherlands is three times more power-dense than the world's most productive coal mines.</p>
<p>"[C]limate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert told <em>The Washington Post</em>[,] 'People should prove that we can actually get the CO-2 emissions down first, before worrying about whether we are doing enough to get methane emissions down.'</p>
<p>"[A]s Marchetti predicted[,] what mattered most was the creation of a more power-dense, abundant, and cheaper alternative. What Marchetti didn't foresee was how powerful[,] and important[,] opposition to the new technology, particularly from [the] upper classes of society, could be in the case of energy transitions." – pp. 118–20</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Fish Go Wild</p>
<p>"In late 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a genetically modified salmon, one that delivered major environmental benefits over existing farmed salmon....</p>
<p>"The AquAdvantage salmon, developed by AquaBounty Technologies in 1989, grows twice as fast and needs 20 percent less feed than Atlantic salmon. While eight pounds of feed is needed to harvest one pound of beef, only one pound of feed is required for one pound of AquAdvantage salmon.</p>
<p>"Unlike the majority of farmed salmon, which is produced in floating sea cages in coastal areas, AquAdvantage is produced in hatcheries and facilities in warehouses on land. It thus minimizes the impact of aquaculture on natural ocean environments and prevents harmful interactions with wild species, which can result in disease....</p>
<p>"By genetically altering the salmon, AquaBounty...eliminated the need for antibiotics[.]</p>
<p>"Fish farming is critical for saving wild fish and other marine species[.] Overfishing has resulted in many local extinctions[.]</p>
<p>"[F]ish farming, or aquaculture, is developing rapidly. Aquaculture output doubled between 2000 and 2014, and today it produces half of all fish for human consumption....</p>
<p>"A big environmental benefit from aquaculture comes from moving fish farms from oceans to land. Doing so reduces their impact on marine environments and allows for closed or near-closed systems where water is constantly being cleaned and recycled....</p>
<p>"And yet, the most outspoken critics of replacing wild fish consumption with farmed fish are environmental groups...which claimed AquAdvantage...might contaminate populations of wild salmon.</p>
<p>"[S]everal large supermarket chains...announced they would not carry the AquaBounty fish, even though spokespersons...admitted the stores offer other foods [also] produced with genetically modified ingredients or feed.</p>
<p>"Fish farming is not without its problems. Early fish farms, such as shrimp farms, were quite destructive....But...their negative environmental impact has significantly declined[,] through better siting of fish and shrimp farms and the cofarming of species such as scallops and mussels with seaweed and microalgae.</p>
<p>"[S]aid [a] scientist[, 'T]here's nothing in this...genetically engineered salmon...that would last more than a single generation [in] the ocean...because of its low fitness.'...</p>
<p>"But five years later, neither the environmental groups supposedly worried about the future of wild fish, nor Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Costco, Kroger, [or] Target, had changed their minds." – pp. 120–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Class War</p>
<p>" 'If you look at [Leonardo] da Vinci's drawings of storms and clouds, he understood the immense indifference of nature,' said...Marchetti['s] friend and coauthor, Jesse Ausubel[,] 'and a lot of the human enterprise.'</p>
<p>"I asked Ausubel why he thought Marchetti's model of energy transitions had been so off in terms of timing[.] 'You can look...at any phenomenon and find interruptions, hiatus[es], digressions, and diversions. That's what happened with energy.'</p>
<p>"Opposition to...new fuel usually comes from the wealthy....Coal smoke smelled bad against the sweet smell of wood-burning. The upper-class of Victorian England resisted the transition from wood to coal [for] as long as they could.</p>
<p>"It was educated elites who similarly waged the war on fracking. The key antagonists were <em>The New York Times</em>[,] McKibben, and well-financed environmental groups[.]</p>
<p>"Ausubel pointed to the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1976...who, with the support of major environmental groups, pushed for more coal instead of nuclear and natural gas." – pp. 122–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Happily, the war on fracking failed. When it came to fracking shale for natural gas, the United States interfered less than other countries and benefited enormously as a result. The United States allows property owners the mining and drilling rights to the Earth beneath them....</p>
<p>"Politics even interfered with saving the whales. While environmentalists often blame capitalism for environmental problems, it was communism that made whaling worse than it needed to be. After the fall of communism, historians found records that the Soviet Union was whaling at far higher numbers than they had admitted. It did so [despite being] no longer profitable[,] thanks to Soviet central planning. 'Ninety-eight percent of the blue whales killed globally after the ban in 1966 were killed by Soviet whalers,' wrote a historian, 'as were 92 percent of the 1,201 humpbacks killed commercially between 1967 and 1978.'...</p>
<p>"The moral of the story is that economic growth and...rising demand for food, lighting, and energy drive product and energy transitions, but politics can constrain them. Energy transitions depend on people wanting them." – pp. 124–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 7: Have Your Steak and Eat It, Too</p>
<p>Eating Animals</p>
<p>"When Jonathan Safran Foer was nine years old, he asked his babysitter why she [did]n't eat...chicken[.]</p>
<p>" 'I don't want to hurt anything,' she said.</p>
<p>" 'I put down my fork,' Foer wrote in his 2009 vegetarian memoir[,] <em>Eating Animals.</em>" – p. 126</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Meat-Free Nothingburger</p>
<p>"[W]ere IPCC's 'most extreme' scenario of global veganism to be realized[,] total carbon emissions would decline by just 10 percent....</p>
<p>"Plant-based diets, researchers find, are [also] cheaper than those that include meat. As a result, people often end up spending their money on things that use energy, like consumer products.</p>
<p>"[T]he thing that makes chicken production environmentally superior to beef production is the very thing [that] Foer most laments: the higher density of meat production allowed for by factory farming." – pp. 128–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Nature of Meat</p>
<p>"[T]he total amount of land humankind uses[,] to produce meat[,] <em>peaked</em> in the year 2000....</p>
<p>"Developed nations like the United States saw the amount of land they use for meat production peak in the 1960s. Developing nations, including India and Brazil, saw their use of land as pasture similarly peak and decline.</p>
<p>"Part of this is due to the shift from beef to chicken. A gram of protein from beef requires two times the energy input in the form of feed as a gram from pork, and eight times a gram from chicken.</p>
<p>"But mostly it is due to efficiency. Between 1925, when the United States started producing chicken indoors, and 2017, breeders cut feeding time by more than half while more than doubling the weight.</p>
<p>"Meat production roughly doubled in the United States since the early 1960s, and yet greenhouse gas emissions from livestock <em>declined</em> by 11 percent during the same period.</p>
<p>"Throughout <em>Eating Animals,</em> Foer argues that factory farms are far worse for the natural environment than free-range beef. He writes, '[I]f we consumers can limit our desire for pork and poultry to the capacity of the land[,] there are no knockdown ecological arguments against [free-range] farming.'...</p>
<p>"Consider that pasture beef requires <em>fourteen to nineteen times</em> more land per kilogram than industrial beef[.]</p>
<p>"Since grass-fed cows gain weight more slowly and live longer, they produce more manure and methane....</p>
<p>"Attempting to move from factory farming to organic, free-range farming would require vastly more land, and thus destroy the habitat needed by mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and other endangered species. Foer unwittingly advocates nineteenth-century farming methods that, if adopted, would require turning wildlife-rich protected areas like Virunga Park into gigantic cattle ranches.</p>
<p>"Farmers make this point to Foer in <em>Eating Animals.</em> 'It's cheaper to produce an egg in a massive laying barn with caged hens,' says one. 'It's more efficient[,] and that means it's more sustainable....Do you think family farms are going to sustain a world of ten billion?' " – pp. 129–31</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Meat = Life</p>
<p>"While writing for <em>Science</em> and <em>The New York Times Magazine</em> in the early 2000s[,] science journalist Gary Taubes...unearthed studies finding that a high-fat diet would lead to weight loss and improvements in heart disease risk factors compared to...low-fat, plant-rich diets[.]</p>
<p>"Yet, for decades, the scientific consensus remained that high-fat diets were dangerous. That consensus led many governments to promote a diet high in carbohydrates, low in animal protein, and very low in animal fats.</p>
<p>"[H]e explained[, 'M]etabolic syndrome—which is a cluster of abnormalities, including weight gain and high blood pressure, which affects around half of middle-aged men and women in the U.S.—is linked to the carb content of the diet, not to the fat content.' " – pp. 132–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Death for Life</p>
<p>"[A]nimal fats contain two to five times as much energy by mass as protein[,] and ten to forty times as much as fruits and vegetables. Those higher densities allowed early humans to gain more energy with less work than carbohydrates....</p>
<p>"During the decade I was [a] vegetarian, I grew tired most afternoons after eating a carb-heavy lunch[.]" – p. 134</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"For decades, psychologists have been interested in the relationship between vegetarianism and the emotion of disgust....</p>
<p>"An Italian team of psychologists recently found [that] vegetarians view meat as 'the representation of death as a contaminating essence.'...</p>
<p>"In 1989, when I arrived at college, animal rights activists were eager to share horrifying videos of factory farming conditions.</p>
<p>"[Such] videos[,] made and distributed by groups like [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (]PETA[)] before the Internet[,] led me...to stop eating meat in the late 1980s.</p>
<p>"And...videos like those...continue to motivate young people[.] 'I became a vegetarian in fifth grade,' my colleague Madison, who turned twenty-five in 2020, said....It was the main thing for me.'...</p>
<p>"In 1999, McDonald's[, perhaps in response,] hired...animal welfare expert Temple Grandin....</p>
<p>" 'Animals don't think in language,' she said. 'They think in pictures.'</p>
<p>"In <em>Eating Animals,</em> Foer argues...it's 'plainly wrong to eat factory-farmed pork[,] poultry or sea animals. [F]eedlot-raised beef...offends me less (and 100 percent pasture-raised beef...is probably the least troubling of all meats)'[.]</p>
<p>"Grandin...found that what cattle most wanted was cleanliness and predictability[:] 'Keeping the pens dry and keeping cattle clean'[.]</p>
<p>"Grandin discovered that cows were being made nervous by visual and auditory surprises that had until then been ignored, such as swinging chains and loud, high-pitched banging. Things that felt out of the ordinary signaled danger to cows[.]</p>
<p>"She and a student...proved that cattle that remained calm during handling had higher weight gains than stressed cattle." – pp. 135–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Nature of Death</p>
<p>"[I]s...it...unethical for animals to eat animals[?]</p>
<p>"[S]ays a PETA spokesperson[, 'T]he entirety of human society and moral progress represents an explicit transcendence of what's "natural." '...</p>
<p>"The consequence of deciding [that] meat is immoral is <em>not</em> making animals <em>free.</em> It's not making <em>animals.</em></p>
<p>"Is it more ethical to never create life than to create it and take it away?...</p>
<p>"Grandin documented 'deliberate acts of cruelty,' notes Foer. <em>'Deliberate</em> acts,' he emphasizes, 'occurring on a <em>regular</em> basis'[.]</p>
<p>"But one can find many more acts of cruelty in nature than in the slaughterhouse....</p>
<p>"From the perspective of the calf[,] deliberate, regulated, and painless modern slaughterhouses may be better than the random, painful, and instinctual cruelty of nature....</p>
<p>"And yet some vegetarian journalists, activists, and scientists have sought to demand that others follow their personal [food] preferences in the name of environmental protection, particularly as it relates to climate change, and often in stealth fashion.</p>
<p>" 'Ninety percent of the climate scientists and environmentalists I've met are vegetarian,' Foer told <em>Huffington Post</em> in 2019. 'And the ones that aren't eat very little meat. It's something that seems to go without saying. I wish they would talk about it more, but it's been heartening to see.'</p>
<p>"But it may be that scientists don't talk about it because people would rightly wonder if their vegetarianism biased their scientific objectivity. In my research I kept coming across cases of vegetarian activists who kept their motives hidden....</p>
<p>" 'A few years ago[,] two young guys...asked if they could take footage for a documentary about farm life,' a farmer told Foer. 'Seemed like nice guys. But then they edited it to make it look like the birds were being abused.'...</p>
<p>"Foer notes that PETA activists used the former head of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri as a scientific authority on climate change because 'he argues that vegetarianism is the diet that everyone in the developed world should consume, purely on environmental grounds.'</p>
<p>"Sometimes Foer [irrationally] condemns animal farming for reasons that appear to have more to do with anti-capitalist ideology than the environment. The 'economics of the market inevitably leads toward instability,' he writes.</p>
<p>"Such a logic leads Foer to attack farmed salmon as worse for the environment than wild salmon, even though...farmed salmon...substitute for wild salmon, and open up the potential of reducing overfishing, one of humankind's largest...impacts on wild animals.</p>
<p>"[W]rites University of California journalism professor Michael Pollan...in...his 2007 book, <em>The Omnivore's Dilemma</em>[, 'P]art of me pities...the vegetarian[.] Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.'...</p>
<p>" 'In the eighties, the industry tried to communicate with animal groups and we got burned real bad,' a farmer told Foer. 'So [w]e put up a wall and that was the end. We don't talk[;] don't let people onto the farms. Standard operating procedure. PETA...want[s] to end farming.' " – pp. 137–40</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Taubes...seemed partly vindicated in late summer 2019, when the <em>British Medical Journal</em> published a review of the nutritional science that upended decades of orthodoxy.</p>
<p>" 'Diets that replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat do not convincingly reduce cardiovascular events or mortality,' it found.</p>
<p>[And t]he pro-carb, anti-fat crusade turned out to be as bad for the environment as it was for people. By making pigs less fatty, breeders made them less efficient in converting feed into body mass. More grain and thus more land was required under the low-fat regime than would have been required under a normal-fat one....</p>
<p>"Consumers continue to express anxiety over things like the use of growth-promoting hormones in beef, even though...meat produced with them is safe for human consumption." – pp. 140–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Don't Eat Wild Meat</p>
<p>"The hunting and consumption of wild game remains one of the primary causes of the decline of wild animals in poor and developing nations....</p>
<p>"Poor nations like...Congo desperately need to...increase the productivity of meat production to take pressure off the habitats of mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and other endangered species....</p>
<p>"Creating cheap and easily obtainable substitutes in the form of domesticated meat should thus be a high priority for conservationists. Reducing the amount of land required for meat production will allow for more land for people and wildlife....</p>
<p>"Increasing meat production must go hand-in-hand with increasing agricultural yields to improve and increase feed....</p>
<p>"We must change our thinking, too. Just as we overcame our preference for authentic furs, ivory, and tortoiseshell, we must retrain our preferences toward domesticated meats and away from wild meats, including fish, for wild animals once again to flourish." – pp. 141–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Beyond Food and Evil</p>
<p>"Whatever its psychological origins, vegetarianism appears to stem less from a rational consideration of the evidence than an emotional rejection of killing animals, something Foer acknowledges. 'Food is never simply a calculation about which diet uses the least water or causes the least suffering.'</p>
<p>"[S]aid my colleague Madison[,] 'I went to Paris and accidentally tried pâté'[.]</p>
<p>" 'But you must have decided...the act of killing animals...was okay, ethically?' I asked.</p>
<p>" 'As I've grown up, things don't seem as black and white as they did when I was a kid,' she said. 'When I learned that it wasn't having the impact I thought on combating climate change, I decided it wasn't worth it....Besides, now I more clearly see a separation between humans and animals. Killing a chicken is not the same as murdering a human.'...</p>
<p>" 'The question of eating animals,'...Foer...writes, 'is ultimately driven by our intuitions about what it means to reach an ideal we have named, perhaps incorrectly, "being human." ' " – pp. 142–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 8: Saving Nature Is Bomb</p>
<p>The End of Nuclear Energy</p>
<p>"[N]uclear energy was on the decline well before the...2011...Fukushima accident: not a single...nuclear reactor had begun construction in the United States since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident[.]</p>
<p>"And Fukushima turned public opinion even further against nuclear.</p>
<p>"Every effort to make nuclear plants safer makes them more expensive, according to experts, and...soaring subsidies...from governments...make nuclear one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.</p>
<p>"Meanwhile, from Finland and France to Britain and the United States, nuclear plants are way behind schedule and far over budget....</p>
<p>"Today, the developed world is abandoning nuclear. Germany is almost done phasing it out." – pp. 145–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"At least that's how the story goes. While all of the above is technically accurate, I carefully excluded key facts in order to be misleading in the same ways that antinuclear campaigners have been for fifty years." – p. 146</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">'That Could Be Quite Nasty'</p>
<p>"The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in modern-day Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) was the worst nuclear energy accident in history. [R]adioactive particulate matter escaped.</p>
<p>"[T]hyroid cancer has a mortality rate of only 1 percent[. T]he expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be just 50 to 160 over an eighty-year lifespan.</p>
<p>" 'Thyroid cancer is not what most people think of as...cancer,' said...Gerry Thomas[,] an expert on radiation and health...and...professor...at Imperial College, London[,] 'because it has such a low mortality rate when treated properly....The key is replacement hormones[;] and...thyroxine is dirt cheap.'</p>
<p>"What about non-thyroid cancers? The 2019 HBO miniseries <em>Chernobyl</em> claimed there was 'a dramatic spike in cancer rates across Ukraine and Belarus.' That assertion is false: residents of those two countries were 'exposed to doses slightly above natural background radiation levels,' according to the World Health Organization (WHO). If there are additional cancer deaths they will be 'about 0.6 percent of the cancer deaths expected in this population due to other causes.'</p>
<p>"The WHO claims on its website that Chernobyl could result in the premature deaths of four thousand liquidators, but, says [Thomas], that number is based on a disproven methodology[,] 'LNT,'...the <em>linear no-threshold</em> method of extrapolating deaths from radiation.</p>
<p>"LNT assumes...there is no threshold below which radiation is safe[;] but people who live in places with higher background radiation, like my home state of Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer....</p>
<p>"In Fukushima, Thomas says, nobody will die from [any] radiation they were exposed to[,] because of the nuclear accident." – pp. 148–50</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"It[']s difficult to find other major industrial accidents that kill nobody....</p>
<p>"Nuclear's worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe[,] for the same inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel. Splitting atoms to create heat...requires tiny amounts of fuel." – pp. 150–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">France Beats Germany</p>
<p>"It's true that new nuclear plants are behind schedule and above costs, but this [w]as [also] the case for many highly profitable ones operating today. Because [they] are relatively inexpensive to run, the importance of [their] cost overruns declines over time....</p>
<p>"As for nuclear waste, it is the best and safest kind of waste produced from electricity production. It has never hurt anyone and there is no reason to think it ever will....</p>
<p>"When I talk to people who fear the waste, they often can't articulate why they believe it is dangerous, but it appears to emanate from a conscious or unconscious fear of nuclear weapons....</p>
<p>"Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat. Thus, only nuclear can affordably create the hydrogen gas and electricity that will provide [the] services such as heating, cooking, and transportation, which are currently provided by fossil fuels.</p>
<p>"And only nuclear can accommodate the rising energy consumption that will be driven by the need for things like fertilizer production, fish farming, and factory farming—all of which are highly beneficial to both people and the natural environment.</p>
<p>"And yet the people who say they care and worry the most about climate change tell us we don't need nuclear." – pp. 152–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Atoms for Peace</p>
<p>"In early 1953, Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the first atomic bomb, gave a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations....</p>
<p>"Oppenheimer explained that [n]o defense against...nuclear weapons...was possible, only deterrence, or frightening away adversaries through the threat of assured destruction.</p>
<p>"[In] December [of that year,] America's newly elected president, General Dwight D. Eisenhower[,] stood before the United Nations General Assembly with a message of hope....</p>
<p>"The rules of the game had irrevocably changed, Eisenhower explained....</p>
<p>"Humankind could...redeem itself...by realizing the dream of universal prosperity [through] cheap and abundant energy. 'Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities,' Eisenhower said. 'A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world[, t]hus...serv[ing] the needs[,] rather than the fears of mankind.'...</p>
<p>" 'The United States,' he said, 'pledges...to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but...to his life.'...</p>
<p>" 'Atoms for peace'...was born....</p>
<p>"But the atomic hope wouldn't last[; w]ithin ten years, the war on nuclear power would begin." – pp. 157–60</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The War on Nuclear</p>
<p>"[A] 1961 study...in the journal <em>Science</em>...found that levels of strontium-90, a cancer-causing radioactive isotope, were...higher in children's teeth born during nuclear weapons testing[.] The amount was about 200 times less than the levels known to cause cancer, but enough to generate headlines. Parents demanded that U.S. President John F. Kennedy negotiate an end to weapons testing with the Soviet Union, which he did in 1963.</p>
<p>"One of the men who['d first drawn] attention to radioactive fallout from weapons testing was Barry Commoner[:] a World War II veteran, socialist, and [plant physiolog]ist at Washington University in St. Louis[. I]n the early 1950s...he helped...Nobel Prize–winning physical chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling to circulate a petition calling for a moratorium on weapons testing. Their argument was that the testing risked contaminating the public.</p>
<p>"Commoner viewed nuclear power plants as a 'non-warlike excuse for continuing the development of nuclear energy'[.]" – p. 161</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Opposition to nuclear power started rising in the mid-1960s....</p>
<p>"By 1971, the antinuclear faction had taken over the Sierra Club, which threw its full weight behind an effort to kill nuclear plants in Ohio....</p>
<p>"The Sierra Club was joined by a charismatic and aggressive young attorney named Ralph Nader[.] 'A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland,' Nader told an Ohio newspaper in 1974....</p>
<p>"It would be difficult to exaggerate Hollywood's role in turning the public against nuclear energy. Nuclear is the go-to[,] scary technology for makers of films and television, and not just the bombs, nor even just the power plants, but even the largely harmless used fuel rods....</p>
<p>"The nuclear industry in the West [was] taken aback by the cultural power of the anti[n]uclear movement, and could barely muster a response. What the technology needed...were humanistic and environmentalist defenders like [former] president of the Sierra Club, Will Siri, a biophysicist from the University of California, Berkeley....Instead, it was defended by nuclear engineers and utility executives, who came across as patronizing and uncaring. The industry retreated from public engagement[.]</p>
<p>"[T]wo decades of widespread misinformation...went largely unanswered by anyone[.]" – pp. 163–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Antinuclear environmentalists openly favored coal and other fossil fuels over nuclear. 'We do not need nuclear power,' said Nader. 'We have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we're owning up to[:] the tar sands[,] oil out of shale[,] methane in coal beds'[.]</p>
<p>"It's not that nobody knew of coal's dangers. In 1979, <em>The New York Times</em> published a front-page article noting that coal's death toll would rise to fi[f]ty-six thousand if coal instead of nuclear plants were built....</p>
<p>"All in all, the antinuclear movement managed to help kill...half of [the] nuclear reactors[, even some] after construction[,] that utilities in the United States had planned to build[.]</p>
<p>"Were the antinuclear activists themselves really so afraid of nuclear?...A Sierra Club member who led the campaign to kill Diablo Canyon confessed, 'I really didn't care [about nuclear plant safety] because there are too many people in the world anyway....I think...playing dirty, if you have a noble end, is fine.'</p>
<p>"[Former] Sierra Club staffer [and activist] David Pesonen...adopted the Machiavellian view that the ends justify the means. He scolded an ally for <em>not</em> lying. 'If you had been as unscrupulous as [the opposition] just this once,' said Pesonen, 'it would have strengthened our position immeasurably.'</p>
<p>" 'If you're trying to get people aroused about what is going on,' said one of Pesonen's antinuclear colleagues, 'you use the most emotional issue you can find.'</p>
<p>"The experience left Sierra Club board member and landscape photographer Ansel Adams bitter. 'It shows how people can be really fundamentally dishonest at times,' he said." – pp. 166–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Peace Bomb</p>
<p>" 'I remember once talking with Victor Weisskopf,'...said Pulitzer Prize–winning author...Richard Rhodes[.] 'He said, "We were...at Los Alamos[, and famous Danish physicist Niels] Bohr arrived[. H]e gave us the possibility...there was hope at the end of all this."</p>
<p>" 'How did Bohr do that? He did that by saying that nuclear was a fundamental change in our relationship with the natural world. Inevitably, it's going to change the way nation-states relate to each other. They will no longer be able to dominate one another. Now it would be possible for even a small state to deter a large state that wanted to dominate it.'...</p>
<p>"One of America's leading historians of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, credits nuclear weapons with keeping the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union for so many decades....</p>
<p>"When a <em>New York Times</em> reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, 'Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.'</p>
<p>"After [its use] Oppenheimer [said, 'T]he atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.' " – pp. 171–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 9: Destroying the Environment to Save It</p>
<p>Renewables Predator, Wildlife Prey</p>
<p>"In 2002[,] Lisa Linowes...and her husband purchased property in New Hampshire. They soon learned there was a wind farm being built near town. 'And...like everyone else[, I said], "What's the problem with wind?"</p>
<p>" 'We were all indoctrinated into the idea that renewables are better than fossil fuel and the only reason renewables haven't taken off is because the oil and gas industry squeezed them out of the market,' she said....</p>
<p>"Linowes and others learned that a wind farm requires roughly 450 times more land than a natural gas power plant." – pp. 181–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"No nation has done more to support renewables than Germany. For the last twenty years it has been going through what it calls an <em>Energiewende,</em> or energy transition, from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.</p>
<p>"[D]espite having invested nearly a half-trillion dollars, Germany generated just 42 percent of its electricity from wind, solar, and biomass, as compared to the 71 percent France generated from nuclear in 2019....</p>
<p>"In 2019, German electricity prices were 45 percent higher than the European average.</p>
<p>"In the end, there is no amount of technological innovation that can solve the fundamental problem with renewables. Solar and wind make electricity more expensive for two reasons: they are unreliable, thus requiring 100 percent backup, and energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining....</p>
<p>"The physical demands of renewables thus spark local environmental opposition around the world....</p>
<p>"Globally, 2018 was the first year since 2001 that growth in renewables failed to increase....'The wind power boom is over,' concluded German newsmagazine <em>Der Spiegel</em> in 2019." – pp. 183–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Powering Utopia</p>
<p>"The idea that a prosperous society could be powered by renewables was first proposed in 1833 by a man named John Etzler [in] his utopian manifesto: <em>The Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery.</em>...</p>
<p>"Etzler laid out a plan for scaling up concentrated solar power plants, gigantic wind farms, and dams to store the power when neither wind nor sun was available." – p. 185</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"After World War II, many intellectuals conjured visions of a world powered by renewables. The key to ending humankind's alienation from nature, the influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued in 1954, was for societies to use <em>unreliable,</em> not reliable, renewables. He condemned hydroelectric dams, which created large reservoirs of water that allowed for energy to be created whenever humans needed it. By contrast, he praised windmills.</p>
<p>"In 1962, American socialist writer Murray Bookchin denounced cities for spreading over the countryside like a rampant 'cancer' and praised renewables as an opportunity for bringing land and city into a 'synthesis of man and nature.'</p>
<p>"[Socialist,] antinuclear activist...Commoner similarly saw renewables as the key to bringing modern civilization, or the 'technosphere,' into harmony with the 'ecosphere.' Commoner invented the basic outline of the Green New Deal that was introduced first by European Greens and then by...Ocasio-Cortez in 2019. Commoner viewed the transition to a low-energy, renewable-powered economy as key to 'massively redesigning the major industrial, agricultural, energy, and transportation systems'[.]</p>
<p>"Commoner's vision will sound familiar: farmers should go organic; we should use biofuels and other bioenergies; our cars should be smaller; homes and buildings should be made more energy efficient; and we should reduce our use of plastic....</p>
<p>"Advocates claimed renewables could replace fossil fuels and nuclear. In 1976, [un-degreed energy specialist] Amory Lovins wrote in <em>Foreign Affairs</em> that the obstacles to a renewables economy are 'not mainly technical, but rather social and ethical.' Like Etzler, Lovins dismissed concerns over reliability. 'Directly storing sunlight or wind,' he explained, 'is easy'[.]</p>
<p>"Lovin's policy framework became the policy agenda of nearly all of...the country's largest environmental philanthropies, U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and all of the major 2020 Democratic presidential candidates." – pp. 187–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Why Dilute Energy Destroys</p>
<p>"Since the 1970s, when the renewable energy agenda was proposed as an alternative to nuclear, most scenarios for 100 percent renewables depended heavily on burning biomass when the sun wasn't shining and the wind wasn't blowing....</p>
<p>"If just 10 percent of the electricity in the United States were to come from wood-burning biomass power plants, the fuel to power them would require an area of forest land the size of Texas." – p. 192</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In 2001, researchers found that the build-up of dead insects on wind turbine blades can reduce the electricity they generate by 50 percent.</p>
<p>"In 2018[,] Dr. Franz Trieb of the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, in a major report[,] concluded that 'a rough but conservative estimate of the impact of wind farms on flying insects in Germany' is a 'loss of about 1.2 trillion insects of different species per year,' which 'could be relevant for population stability.'</p>
<p>"While much of the media coverage has blamed industrial agriculture, it is notable that the biggest insect population declines are being reported in Europe and the United States, where the land area dedicated to agriculture has declined...over the last two decades. What have spread are wind turbines." – pp. 195–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Defenders of Wind Wildlife</p>
<p>"In 2015, the novelist and birder Jonathan Franzen questioned whether the emphasis on climate change was sacrificing nature. 'To prevent extinctions in the future,' argued Franzen in <em>The New Yorker,</em> 'it's not enough to curb our carbon emissions. We also have to keep a whole lot of wild birds alive right now.'...</p>
<p>"In 2005, leading bat scientists warned federal regulators that wind turbines threatened migratory bat species....</p>
<p>" 'The politicians fear citizen resistance,' <em>Der Spiegel</em> reported in 2019. 'There is hardly a wind energy project [in Germany] that is not fought.' " – pp. 197–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Starbucks Rule</p>
<p>"The fact that the energy density of fuels, and the power density of their extraction, determine their environmental impact...is not...taught in every environmental studies class....There is a psychological and ideological reason[:] the romantic appeal-to-nature fallacy, where people imagine renewables are more natural than fossil fuels and uranium, and...what's natural is better for the environment.</p>
<p>"Just as people imagined 'natural' products from tortoiseshell and ivory to wild salmon and pasture beef are better than 'artificial' alternatives, people imagine that 'natural' energy from renewables like solar, wood, and wind is better than fossil fuels and nuclear....</p>
<p>"Those communities that have proven most able to resist the introduction of a wind farm tend to be more affluent.</p>
<p>"[R]eported <em>BusinessWeek</em> in 2009[, w]ind developers 'plot where Starbucks are in the general area and then make sure their project is at least thirty miles away.' " – p. 199</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 10: All About the Green</p>
<p>Green on the Inside</p>
<p>"Every major climate activist group in America, including NRDC [(Natural Resources Defense Council)], EDF [(Environmental Defense Fund)], and Sierra Club, has been seeking to close nuclear plants around the United States while taking money from [(] or investing in [)] natural gas companies, renewable energy companies, and their investors who stand to make billions if nuclear plants are closed and replaced by natural gas.</p>
<p>"Killing nuclear plants turns out to be a lucrative business for competitor fossil fuel and renewable energy companies. That's because nuclear plants generate large amounts of electricity. During a ten-year period, Indian Point's owner could bring in $8 billion in revenue....If the plant closes, those billions will flow to natural gas and renewables companies.</p>
<p>"Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF have worked to shut down nuclear plants and replace them with fossil fuels and a smattering of renewables...since the 1970s. They have created detailed reports for policymakers, journalists, and the public purporting to show that neither nuclear plants nor fossil fuels are needed to meet electricity demand, thanks to energy efficiency and renewables. And yet, as we have seen, almost everywhere nuclear plants are closed, or not built, fossil fuels are burned instead.</p>
<p>"The Sierra Club Foundation has taken money directly from solar energy companies....</p>
<p>"EDF's board of trustees and advisory trustees have...included investors and executives from oil, gas, and renewable energy companies, including Halliburton, Sunrun, [and] Northwest Energy[.]</p>
<p>"[T]he environmental movement's strategy [is one] of taking money from oil and gas investors[,] and [then] promoting renewables as a way to greenwash the closure of nuclear plants." – pp. 204–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Brown's Dirty War</p>
<p>"In the late 1960s, the Indonesia...government asked...Edmund 'Pat' Brown[,] California's governor from 1959 to 1967, to help recapitalize its state-owned oil company, Pertamina[.] Brown was well-connected on Wall Street....</p>
<p>"In exchange for Brown's services, Pertamina gave him exclusive rights to sell Indonesian oil in California....</p>
<p>"Shortly after [Pat's son,] Jerry...first became governor, [he] took actions that protected his family's oil monopoly in California. [A] change [in] air pollution regulations meant that [the comparatively cleaner] Indonesia[n] oil would enjoy a monopoly in California[. A] top Jerry Brown political aide–turned–appointee, Richard Maullin, chairman of the California Energy Commission, began pressuring the state's utilities to burn more oil rather than shift to nuclear energy....</p>
<p>"Jerry Brown made the top investment manager for the Getty Oil fortune a state superior court judge. [As] judge, the Getty man lobbied for and passed legislation that protected [the] Getty...family money from taxation. The Getty Oil man's name was Bill Newsom[,] the father of California's current governor, Gavin Newsom....</p>
<p>"Jerry Brown's advocacy for natural gas was part and parcel of his antinuclear work, which didn't end when he left office in 1983. Seven years later, two close allies, Bob Mulholland and Bettina Redway, passed a ballot initiative to shut down the Rancho Seco nuclear plant near Sacramento, California[.]</p>
<p>"Redway's husband, Michael Picker...later play[ed] a central role in overseeing the closure of California['s] last two nuclear plants." – pp. 211–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Bigger than the Internet</p>
<p>" 'Green technology—going green—is bigger than the Internet,'...said [in 2007] John Doerr, an early Google and Amazon investor[.] 'It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.'...</p>
<p>"Between 2009 and 2015, the U.S. government spent about $150 billion on...the predecessor [(which I helped promote)] to...Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal.</p>
<p>"[The s]timulus money wasn't evenly distributed but rather clustered around donors to President Obama and the Democratic Party....</p>
<p>"The people who directed the loan program had been fundraisers for Obama. In March 2011, the U.S. Government Accountability Office...noted that not a single one of the program's first eighteen loans had been documented.</p>
<p>"[F]ew Democratic Party donors outperformed Doerr when it came to receiving federal stimulus loans. More than half of the companies in his Greentech portfolio...received loans or outright grants[.]" – pp. 217–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Leaving a Legacy</p>
<p>"In 2018, Arizona voters considered...a ballot initiative that ostensibly promoted renewables[,] but in reality would have resulted in the premature closure of the...Palo Verde...nuclear plant[,] America's largest single source of zero-emissions clean energy....</p>
<p>"The ballot initiative's sponsor was Tom Steyer[,] who might have benefited personally. And yet few in the mainstream news media explored Steyer's potential conflict of interest.</p>
<p>"During the very same years they were denouncing fossil fuel interests...for funding their political opponents, and demanding universities stop investing in fossil fuels, 350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and [Michael] Bloomberg.</p>
<p>"Where the news media have for decades demonized Exxon, the Koch brothers, and climate skeptics, they have largely given a pass to fossil fuel billionaires like Steyer and Bloomberg and the environmentalists they fund.</p>
<p>"Steyer and Bloomberg may be motivated to do good in the world, but [f]inancial conflicts of interest are no less conflicts of interest just because a person is ideologically committed....</p>
<p>"It is hard to imagine a more 'pay-to-play' relationship than the one between Steyer and his [political] grantees. It epitomizes the cynicism of Washington, D.C. And it exposes the news media's double standard.</p>
<p>"If Steyer and other fossil fuel and renewable energy investors get their way and kill some or all of the remaining ninety-nine U.S. nuclear reactors, which provide nearly 20 percent of America's electricity, they will not only make a fortune, they will spike emissions and eliminate the only real hope for phasing out fossil fuels before 2050." – pp. 220–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 11: The Denial of Power</p>
<p>Power Tripping</p>
<p>"In 2019, some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people started responding to demands that we act on climate change....</p>
<p>"Prince Harry...described the climate emergency to...assembled guests, bare-footed[.]</p>
<p>"[Some objected to] celebrities [with] high-energy lifestyles...moralizing for low-energy lives....</p>
<p>" 'Imagine being attacked,' said Ellen DeGeneres, 'when all you're trying to do is make the world a better place.'</p>
<p>"Al Gore wouldn't have been...embarrassed...for living in a...home that used twelve times more energy than the average home in Nashville, Tennessee, had he not claimed, 'We are going to have to change the way we live our lives' to solve climate change." – pp. 222–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Not as We Do</p>
<p>"For two decades after World War II, the World Bank, which is financed by developed nations, loaned money to developing nations to build the basic infrastructure of modern societies: dams, roads, and electricity grids....</p>
<p>"But then, in the late 1980s, under the sway of green NGOs like World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace, the United Nations started to promote a radically different development model: sustainable development." – p. 226</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Power of Electricity</p>
<p>"The United Nations pioneered the notion that poor nations could grow rich without using much energy, in sharp contrast to every other rich nation in the world....</p>
<p>"In 1987, the United Nations published a book called <em>Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future</em>[.]</p>
<p>" 'Both the routine practice of efficient energy use and the development of renewables will [somehow allow] developing countries to realize their growth potential'[,] the report claimed[.]</p>
<p>"And yet [t]here was no example in 1987 of any nation escaping poverty with renewables and energy efficiency.</p>
<p>"The fact that developed nations [had] required fossil fuels to grow wealthy could not possibly have been a mystery to the lead author of <em>Our Common Future,</em> Gro Brundtland. After all, she was the former prime minister of Norway, a nation that just a decade earlier had become one of the richest in the world thanks to its abundant oil and gas reserves....</p>
<p>"The United Nations and environmental NGOs described their work as helping poor nations 'avoid the mistakes made in the industriali[z]ed world'[.]</p>
<p>" '[S]ome European politicians or technocrats think that Africa could and should develop by eliminating corruption first,'...Dinh...told me. 'Never mind that not a single country in the world has become developed through that route.'</p>
<p>"As climate change emerged as an elite concern in the 1990s, efforts within developed nations to cut off financing for cheap energy, industrial agriculture, and modern infrastructure to poor and develop[ing] nations grew stronger.</p>
<p>"By 2014, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the...Committee on Appropriations, sought to cut off U.S. development funding to poor nations seeking to build hydroelectric dams[.]</p>
<p>"European governments actively promote bioenergy in poor nations....</p>
<p>"In 2017, Eva Müller, the director of forestry at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, claimed, 'Woodfuel is kinder to the environment than fossil fuels'[.]</p>
<p>"Not all environmentalists oppose cheap energy, including hydroelectric dams and fossil fuels for poor nations. In my experience[,] perhaps most environmentalists in developed nations believe it is unethical for rich nations to deprive poor ones of the technologies responsible for our prosperity....</p>
<p>"Poor nations, claimed...IPCC in 2018, can leapfrog [over] centralized energy sources like dams, natural gas plants, and nuclear plants to [arrive at] decentralized energy sources such as solar panels and batteries....</p>
<p>" 'Time and...again I have seen NGOs and politicians in rich countries advocate that the poor follow a path that they, the rich, never have followed,'...wrote...Harvard[-educated] South African...environmental engineer...John Briscoe[,] 'nor are willing to follow.' " – pp. 226–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">'A Stain on the Race'</p>
<p>"In 1793, British philosopher William Godwin published <em>An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness</em>[,] argu[ing] that...rationalism would...massive[ly] reduc[e] human suffering.</p>
<p>"One year later, the Marquis de Condorcet, a French nobleman and mathematician, published...<em>Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind</em>[.] He championed...using technology to grow more food on less land in order to support a larger...population[, and] us[ing] science and reason...to advance human progress.</p>
<p>"Godwin and Condorcet's combined ideas were a vision of what we now call the Enlightenment, and both thinkers were 'humanists' because they believed humans were special through our unique capacity to reason. They had effectively secularized the Judeo-Christian concept that humans were chosen by God to have dominion over Earth.</p>
<p>"As feudal dictatorships gave way to capitalist democracies, Enlightenment humanism became the dominant political ideology....</p>
<p>"Thomas Robert Malthus, an economist, grew so annoyed with [the] Enlightenment['s] optimism that...he sought to refute Godwin and Condorcet in a 1798 book called <em>An Essay on the Principle of Population.</em></p>
<p>"Malthus argued that...humans...reproduced 'geometrically[,' so t]he result of progress would...inevitably be overpopulation and famine. [He] wrote[, 'P]remature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.'...</p>
<p>"Malthus added this remarkable passage to the second edition[:] 'A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.'</p>
<p>"Godwin [suggested] birth control[.]</p>
<p>"Malthus responded not by arguing that humans <em>wouldn't</em> use birth control but rather that they <em>shouldn't.</em> Why? Because doing so would be 'unnatural.'</p>
<p>"[So,] the only way Malthus's prediction of population outstripping resources could be correct is if everybody in the future subscribed to Malthus's opposition to birth control.</p>
<p>"Malthus...advocated that policymakers maintain the [current] aristocratic system by favoring agriculture over manufacturing, and pointed to the superiority of country life[:] or rather, the country life that he, as an aristocrat who avoided manual labor, enjoyed....</p>
<p>"Malthus came of age in what historians call the 'advanced organic economy,' which, due to its reliance on renewables, namely wood fuel and waterwheels, 'condemned the majority of the population to poverty' for inherently physical reasons." – pp. 229–31</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"To this day, when people think of the Great Famine, they tend to focus on the...1845...fungus and overlook the fact that, for the next four years, Ireland exported food, including beef, to England. Irish families had to sell their pigs in order to pay the rent, even as their children were starving....</p>
<p>"The real reason the Irish were starving, held good opinion in Britain during the famine, was the Irish people's lack of moral restraint. Increasing the wages of Irish workers, <em>The Economist</em> warned, 'would stimulate every man to marry and populate as fast as he could, like rabbits in a warren.'</p>
<p>"<em>The Economist</em> and other British elites simply repeated the thinking pioneered a half-century earlier by Malthus....</p>
<p>"The British governor general of India between 1876 and 1880 argued that the Indian population 'has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.'</p>
<p>"[A] historian writes[,] 'The famine relief offered to the starving by Lytton's administration was less in terms of calorific intake than that Hitler gave[,] to those interned in Buchenwald concentration camp.'</p>
<p>"In 1942 and 1943, as India produced food and manufactured goods for the British war effort, food shortages emerged. Food imports could have alleviated the crisis, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to allow it.</p>
<p>"Why? 'Much of the answer must lie in the Malthusian mentality of Churchill and his key advisors,' concludes historian Robert Mayhew....</p>
<p>"Adolph Hitler, too, was inspired by Malthus. 'The productivity of the soil can only be increased within defined limits and up to a certain point,' he wrote in <em>Mein Kampf.</em>...</p>
<p>" 'Strong and direct connections can be drawn between [Malthus's] work,' historian Mayhew concludes, 'and some of the most abhorrent moments in twentieth-century history.' " – pp. 231–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In the early twentieth century, the Tennessee Valley region of the United States was a lot like...Congo today....</p>
<p>"By 1933[,] George Norris, a progressive Republican senator[,] had convinced Congress and...newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create...the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)....</p>
<p>"In 1930, forty-two-year-old Rhodes scholar and Tennessee poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in the opening essay in a famous collection, <em>I'll Take My Stand,</em> 'the latter-day societies have been seized—none quite so violently as our American one—with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.'</p>
<p>"Ransom and the other 'Southern Agrarians' disparaged cities and industry for their impact on the environment and on people. They declared farm machinery, paved roads, and indoor plumbing as part of the 'disease of modern industrial civilization.'...</p>
<p>"The people of the Tennessee Valley region who suffered from malaria and hunger likely might have disagreed with the view that they had been living at peace with nature....</p>
<p>"Ransom, Malthus, and the Malthusians who came after him were socially and politically conservative. Malthus was against birth control, viewing it as against God's plan for humans. He was against social welfare programs for the poor, viewing th[ose] as self-defeating. British leaders who justified their policies based on Malthus's thinking were conservatives.</p>
<p>"[S]ocialists and leftists loathed Malthus. Marx and Engels called him a 'stain on the human race.' Malthus, in their view, had made an avoidable situation look inevitable, or 'natural.' In his 1879 book, <em>Progress and Poverty,</em> the progressive American thinker Henry George attacked Malthus as a defender of inequality. 'What gave Malthus his popularity among the ruling classes,' George wrote, 'was the fact that he furnished a plausible reason for the assumption that some have a better right to existence than others.' " – pp. 233–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"But then, after World War II, Malthusianism switched sides and became a left-wing political movement in the form of environmentalism, while anti-Malthusianism became a right-wing political movement in the form of libertarian, pro-business, free market conservatism....</p>
<p>"The most prominent critic of Malthusian alarmists was Julian Simon, an economist who argued 'natural resources are not finite,' and that children [a]ren't just mouths to feed[,] but rather grow up to be producers, not [merely] consumers. Simon was embraced by conservative and libertarian scholars, think tanks, and media[—but,] not [by] left-wing and progressive ones." – p. 235</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Lifeboat Ethics</p>
<p>"In 1948[, literary ornithologist] William Vogt published a best-selling book, <em>Road to Survival</em>[. He] warned of rampant breeding in poor nations, particularly India. 'Before the imposition of Pax Britannica, India had an estimated population of less than 100 million people,' Vogt wrote. 'While economic and sanitary conditions were being "improved," the Indians went to their accustomed way, breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish....Sex play is the national sport.'...</p>
<p>"Vogt attacked the medical profession's 'duty to keep alive as many people as possible.'</p>
<p>"Vogt felt he had a solution[: 'i]nternational control of resources exploitation, in order to protect technologically retarded nations'[.]</p>
<p>"American leaders and elites embraced Malthusian ideas just as British elites had. In 1965, in the first televised State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson...called for 'population control.'</p>
<p><em>The New York Times</em> scolded Johnson for not being Malthusian enough....</p>
<p>"That same year, the journal <em>Science</em> published an article, '[The] Tragedy of the Commons,' by University of California at Santa Barbara [zoologist and micro]biologist Garrett Hardin, which argued that environmental collapse was inevitable because of uncontrolled breeding, and that the only way to avoid the tragedy was 'mutual coercion,' in which everybody agree[s] to similar sacrifices.</p>
<p>"Many conservation leaders embraced Malthusianism. In 1968, Sierra Club executive director David Brower conceived and edited a book, <em>The Population Bomb,</em> by Stanford University [entom]ologist Paul [Ralph] Ehrlich, which claimed the world was on the brink of mass starvation....</p>
<p>"Like Vogt and Malthus before him, Ehrlich was particularly concerned with breeding by poor people in developing nations....Ehrlich described the Indians he looked down upon [as] 'people eating, people washing, people sleeping....People defecating and urinating. People, people, people, people.'</p>
<p>"Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on <em>The Tonight Show</em> six times[.]</p>
<p>"Malthusianism grew an even harder edge in the 1970s. Hardin...published an essay, 'Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor'[.]</p>
<p>"The picture Hardin painted was of keeping people out of the lifeboat. Otherwise[,] people trying to get in would doom the people in the lifeboat, in addition to themselves.</p>
<p>" 'However humanitarian our intent,' said Hardin, 'every Indian life saved through medical or nutritional assistance from abroad diminishes the quality of life for those who remain, and for subsequent generations.'...</p>
<p>"In 1972, an NGO called the Club of Rome published <em>The Limits to Growth,</em> a report concluding that the planet was on the brink of ecological collapse[.]</p>
<p>"The collapse of civilization was 'a grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and "progress." '...</p>
<p>"The Malthusian Ehrlich and the ostensibly socialist Commoner clashed over population and poverty....Commoner blamed industrial capitalism for environmental degradation, where Ehrlich blamed too many people.</p>
<p>"The clash resolved itself when [the] Malthusians including Ehrlich [somehow] accepted a redistributive agenda of rich nations assisting poor nations...so long as th[e] money went to charity and not...infrastructure. This was the seed of what the [United Nations] would christen 'sustainable development.'</p>
<p>"Lovins, for his part, married the demand for energy scarcity to a romantic vision of a 'soft energy' future that [also] rejected the infrastructure of the rich world. In 1976, <em>Foreign Affairs</em> published [his] thirteen-thousand-word essay...making the case for small-scale energy production[.]</p>
<p>"Lovins viewed electricity as authoritarian, disempowering, and alienating. 'In an electrical world, your lifeline comes not from an understandable neighborhood technology run by people you know who are at your own social level, but rather from an alien, remote, and perhaps humiliatingly uncontrollable technology run by [a] faraway, bureaucratized, technical elite who have probably never heard of you,' he wrote.</p>
<p>"The [new] Malthusians significantly modified Malthus. Where Malthus [had] warned that overpopulation would result in a scarcity of food, Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned [instead] that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse.</p>
<p>"Ehrlich and Lovins said they opposed nuclear energy [precisely] because it was abundant....</p>
<p>" 'It'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy,' said Lovins, 'because of what we would do with it.' Ehrlich agreed[: 'G]iving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a...gun.' " – pp. 235–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Power Against Progress</p>
<p>"So much death and suffering was coming[,] believed...Ehrlich and [University of California, Berkeley aero/astronauticist and theoretical plasma physicist] John Holdren[, that] humankind needed to play 'triage,' and leave some people to die....</p>
<p>"Ehrlich and Holdren argued[,] 'Most plans for modernizing agriculture in less-developed nations call for...greatly increased use of fertilizers and other farm chemicals, tractors and other machinery, irrigation, and supporting transportation networks—all of which require large inputs of fossil fuels'[.]</p>
<p>"A better way, they said, was 'much greater use of human labor'[.]</p>
<p>"Malthusians justified their opposition to the extension of cheap energy and agricultural modernization[,] to poor nations[,] by using left-wing and socialist language of redistribution. It wasn't that poor nations needed to develop[:] it was that rich nations needed to consume less.</p>
<p>"Ehrlich and Holdren claimed in their 1977 textbook[,] <em>Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment</em>[,] that the only way to feed seven billion people by the year 2000 was for people in the rich world to eat less meat and dairy—the same recommendation IPCC made in 2019....</p>
<p>"Where in 1977, Ehrlich and Holdren proposed international control of the 'development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources[' as did Vogt before them,] many green NGOs and U.N. agencies today similarly seek control over energy and food policies in developing nations[,] in the name of climate change and biodiversity." – pp. 239–40</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In 1930, Democrats had understood the necessity of cheap energy and food to lifting people out of poverty, but by 1980, President Jimmy Carter's administration had endorsed the 'limits to growth' hypothesis....</p>
<p>"In 1972, the editor of <em>Nature</em>...noted that fear-mongering 'seems like patronizing neo-colonialism to people elsewhere.'</p>
<p>"Others agreed. One demographer said the problem wasn't a population explosion but rather a 'nonsense explosion.' " – p. 240</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In 1963, two economists published an influential book called <em>Scarcity and Growth.</em> [T]hey described how nuclear changed the classical economic assumption of natural resources as scarce and limited....</p>
<p>"Policymakers, journalists, conservationists, and other educated elites in the fifties and sixties knew that nuclear was unlimited energy[: which] meant unlimited food and water.</p>
<p>"[Earlier,] inspired by the discovery of radium by Paul and Marie Curie[, Nobel Prize–winning radiochemist] Frederick Soddy [had produced] a best-selling book[,] <em>The Interpretation of Radium: Being the Substance of Six Free Popular Experimental Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1908</em> describing a...similar vision of a nuclear-powered world, and [of] the benefits that would result from such high power densities....</p>
<p>"Nuclear energy thus created a serious problem for Malthusians and anyone else who wanted to argue that energy, fertilizer, and food were scarce....</p>
<p>" 'If a doubling of the state's population in the next twenty years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth,' wrote the Sierra Club's executive director, [while] opposing [the] Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, '[California's] scenic character will be destroyed.'</p>
<p>"[So, in response, they] stoked [subconscious] fears of the bomb[: t]hey called the growing population in developing nations a 'population explosion.' And [Ehrlich] titled his book, <em>The Population Bomb.</em></p>
<p>"[M]ixing up reactors and bombs was, as we saw, the go-to strategy for Malthusian environmentalists.</p>
<p>"And, as would become routine in U.N. reports, including those published by the IPCC for the next three decades, the United Nations' 1987 report <em>Our Common Future</em> attacked nuclear energy as unsafe and strongly recommended against its expansion.</p>
<p>"There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse." – pp. 241–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The Climate Bomb</p>
<p>"As it became clear that the growth in the global birth rate had peaked, Malthusian thinkers started to look to climate change as a replacement apocalypse for overpopulation and resource scarcity.</p>
<p>"The influential Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider embraced the Malthusianism of...Holdren and...Ehrlich, and...invited them to educate his scientists.</p>
<p>"[W]rote Schneider[,] 'That talk [by Holdren] helped the [National Center for Atmospheric Research] scientists to see the big picture clearly and early on.'</p>
<p>"[A]t a conference organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1976, Schneider said he made the case that 'humans were multiplying out of control and were using technology and organization in a dangerous, unsustainable way.'</p>
<p>"Schneider attracted media attention by speaking of climate change in apocalyptic terms....</p>
<p>"In 1982, a group of economists...call[ing] themselves 'ecological economists' met in Stockholm, Sweden, and published a manifesto arguing that nature imposes hard limits on human activity.</p>
<p>" 'Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems,' notes an environmental historian....'The problem [they proposed] lay in overloading systems and causing them to collapse.'</p>
<p>"Ecological economics, not to be confused with the mainstream environmental economics used by IPCC and other scientific bodies, was popular among philanthropies and environmental leaders in wealthy nations....</p>
<p>"McKibben has done more to popularize Malthusian ideas than any other writer. The first book about global warming written for a popular audience was his 1989 book, <em>The End of Nature.</em> In it, McKibben argued that humankind's impact on the planet would require the same Malthusian program developed by Ehrlich and Commoner in the 1970s. Economic growth would have to end. Rich nations must return to farming[,] and transfer wealth to poor nations so they could improve their lives modestly but not industrialize. And the human population would have to shrink to between 100 million and 2 billion.</p>
<p>"Where just a few years earlier, Malthusians had demanded limits on energy consumption by claiming fossil fuels were scarce, now they demanded limits by claiming the atmosphere was scarce. 'It's not that we're running out of stuff,' explained McKibben in 1998[,] 'what we're running out of[,] are what the scientists call "sinks." '...</p>
<p>"By the twenty-first century[,] Schneider was as much an activist as a scientist. [He] writes[,] 'I remembered my "five horsemen of the environmental apocalypse": ignorance, greed, denial, tribalism, and short-term thinking.' " – pp. 242–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Environmentalists used climate change as a fresh reason for opposing hydroelectric dams and flood control[.]</p>
<p>" 'Look at the food crisis last year,' said Briscoe in 2011....'The NGOs did not reflect on the fact that many NGOs had [successfully] lobbied against many irrigation projects and other agricultural modernization projects because these "were not pro-poor and destroyed the environment," ' Briscoe said." – p. 245</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[A] little-known but influential environmental NGO[,] International Rivers, based in Berkeley, California...has, since its founding in 1985, helped [to] stop 217 dams from being built, mostly in poor nations.</p>
<p>"[I]n 2003, Sebastian Mallaby, a journalist from <em>The Washington Post,</em> discovered International Rivers had severely misrepresented the situation on the ground in Uganda, where the group was trying to stop a dam....</p>
<p>"Mallaby wrote[,] 'The dam people...promised generous financial terms, and the villagers were happy to accept them and relocate.</p>
<p>"[I]n my [own] interviews[, n]ot only were Congolese...enthusiastic about the Virunga Park dam, [but] Rwandans...near hydroelectric dams [also] were ecstatic at the prospects of getting electricity.</p>
<p>"Why is International Rivers so opposed to dams? Partly because dams can make it harder to do recreational rafting. 'The Batoka scheme will flood the gorge and drown the massive rapids that have made Victoria Falls a prime whitewater rafting location,' laments International Rivers about one project. Its allies consist of rafters around the world.</p>
<p>"[T]he reason so many poor nations begin the process of urbanization, industrialization, and development by building large dams is that they produce inexpensive and reliable power, are simple to build and operate, and can last for a century or longer....</p>
<p>"The Inga Dam would have very-high-power densities and thus lower environmental impact than other dams around the world....And yet International Rivers is not seeking to remove dams in Switzerland nor in California, where for one hundred years they have provided the state with cheap, reliable, and abundant electricity, freshwater for drinking and agriculture, and flood control." – pp. 245–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Experiments in Poverty</p>
<p>"[C]elebrities who moralize about climate change...are flaunting their special status. Hypocrisy...is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules[.]</p>
<p>"Were...statements...environmentalists made in support of the right of poor nations to develop [also] mere virtue signaling?</p>
<p>"[I]n...September...2019, Thunberg...said, 'We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.'...</p>
<p>"Economic growth is necessary for creating the infrastructure required for protecting people from natural disasters, climate-related or not. And economic growth created Sweden's wealth, including that of Thunberg's own family. It is fair to say that without economic growth, the person who is Greta Thunberg would not exist." – p. 247</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In 2013, while in Tanzania to promote 'Power Africa,' a U.S. government program supporting electrification, President Barack Obama dribbled...a modified[, energy-storing] soccer ball known as...Soccket. [It] wasn't...the kind of energy that could industrialize Africa.</p>
<p>"Two years later, an Indian village made worldwide headlines after it rebelled against the solar panel and battery 'micro-grid' [that] Greenpeace had created[,] as a supposed model of energy leapfrogging for the world's poorest people. The electricity was unreliable and expensive....</p>
<p>"I pressed...Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University...in...Kolkata[,] India, and an IPCC coordinating lead author[,] on why her chapter suggested nations could leapfrog. She...then expressed frustration with people who advocate energy[-]demand reductions, even among India's poorest....</p>
<p>" 'Because it's an experiment on the most vulnerable people in the world?' I asked.</p>
<p>" 'Yeah,' she said." – pp. 248–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 12: False Gods for Lost Souls</p>
<p>Parable Bears</p>
<p>"[In] 2017, <em>National Geographic</em> posted a video, set to sad music, of an emaciated and slow-moving polar bear[.]</p>
<p>"One of the viewers was student climate activist...Thunberg....'[W]hen I was younger[,] our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears, and so on,' she recalled in spring 2019. 'I cried through all the movies.'</p>
<p>"Climate change is polar bears' greatest threat, concluded scientists in 2017, because it is melting the arctic ice caps at a rate of 4 percent per year....</p>
<p>"For forty years, climate denialists funded by fossil fuel companies have misled the public about the science of climate change in the same way that tobacco companies misled the public about the science linking smoking and cancer, argued Harvard historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in their influential 2010 book, <em>Merchants of Doubt.</em></p>
<p>"[I]n 1983[,] the National Academy of Sciences[,] which the U.S. government created in 1863 to objectively evaluate scientific questions for policymakers[,] published its first major report on climate change....</p>
<p>"Right-wingers had effectively hijacked the [process, the] historians [argued; theoretical physicist and oceanographer] William Nierenberg, who chaired the National Academy of Sciences' Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee, was a political conservative who trampled over the views of natural scientists like John Perry, a meteorologist, who had concluded, 'The problem is already upon us.'</p>
<p>"Oreskes and Conway write, 'Perry would be proven right, but [economist Thomas] Schelling's view would prevail politically....</p>
<p>"Schelling's view was simply that the effects of restricting energy consumption could be worse than the effects of global warming. That view was mainstream back then and remains so today.</p>
<p>"[And,] there [i]s no evidence for polar bear famine.</p>
<p>"[T]he misinformation about polar bears perfectly captures the ways in which many of the stories people tell about climate change don't have much to do with science." – pp. 250–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Climate Politics Takes Its Tol</p>
<p>"As a university student in the Netherlands, Richard Tol was a member of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Concerned about climate change, he earned a PhD...in 1997[,] becoming one of the most-cited economists in the world on the topic.</p>
<p>"Now a professor at the University of Sussex, in Britain, Tol became involved with the IPCC shortly after it was created, in 1994....</p>
<p>"Tol's reputation came, in part, from being on a team that rigorously established that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet. 'We were the first to show that in a statistically sound way,' he says.</p>
<p>"In 2012, Tol was named the convening lead author of one of the chapters in...IPCC's fifth review of climate change[.] He was assigned to the team to draft...IPCC's <em>Summary for Policymakers</em>[.]</p>
<p>"Tol said that the primary message of an earlier draft of the <em>Summary</em> was[:] 'Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.'...</p>
<p>" 'IPCC is partly a scientific organi[z]ation and partly a political organi[z]ation,' Tol explained. As a 'political organi[z]ation, its job is to justify greenhouse gas emission[s] reduction.'...</p>
<p>"Two years later, despite Tol's protests, IPCC approved a <em>Summary for Policymakers</em> that was far more apocalyptic than the science warranted....'IPCC shifted from..."Not without risk, but manageable," to "We're all gonna die," ' explained Tol. It was a shift, he said, 'from what I think is a relatively accurate assessment of recent developments in [the] literature to...the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse[:] Pestilence, Death, Famine[,] and War were all there.'...</p>
<p>"Pielke...found instances where IPCC authors were exaggerating or misrepresenting the science for effect.</p>
<p>" 'What does Pielke think about this?' an external IPCC reviewer...asked[,] about a claim being made about climate change and natural disasters. The official IPCC response was, 'I believe Pielke agrees.' But[,] he had never been consulted....'IPCC...fabricated a response [from me] to justify keeping that...misleading...material in the report[,' he] said.</p>
<p>"[E]nvironment ministers from around the world demanded an independent review of IPCC policies and procedures by the InterAcademy Council, the international organization of national science academies. The InterAcademy Council made recommendations for improving research quality[, which] IPCC adopted, such as better practices for including research that had not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.</p>
<p>"But...IPCC kept publishing apocalyptic summaries and press releases, and IPCC contributors and lead authors kept making apocalyptic claims, such as[:] that sea level rise will be 'unmanageable' and that 'the potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing.' And, as Tol noted, journalists exaggerated further. The system appeared biased toward exaggeration.</p>
<p>"Ausubel was one of the first to recognize the politicization of climate science. After pioneering ways to forecast energy demand, [energy] transitions, and emissions for <em>Changing Climate,</em> he helped create...IPCC. 'And then the expected happened,' Ausubel said. 'Opportunists flowed in. By 1992, I stopped wanting to go to climate meetings.'</p>
<p>"In response to...IPCC's decision to let...exaggerators write the <em>Summary for Policymakers,</em> Tol resigned. 'I simply thought it was incredible,' he said. 'I told Chris Field, the chairman, about this, and I quietly withdrew.' " – pp. 253–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"This book began with a defense of the science assembled by...IPCC and others against those who claim climate change will be apocalyptic. We saw how the scientific consensus, as reflected in IPCC reports, supports Tol's view that, 'Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.'</p>
<p>"Now we must address the question of how so many people, myself included, came to believe that climate change threatened not only the end of polar bears but the end of humanity.</p>
<p>"The answer is, in part, that while...IPCC's science is broadly sound, its <em>Summary for Policymakers,</em> press releases, and authors' statements betray ideological motivations, a tendency toward exaggeration, and an absence of important context.</p>
<p>"As we saw, IPCC authors and press statements have claimed sea level rise will be 'unmanageable,' world food supplies are in jeopardy, vegetarianism would significantly reduce emissions, poor nations can grow rich with renewables, and nuclear energy is relatively dangerous.</p>
<p>"The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context. Leading media companies have been exaggerating climate change at least since the 1980s. And, as we have seen, elite publications like <em>The New York Times</em> and <em>The New Yorker</em> have frequently and uncritically repeated debunked Malthusian dogma for well more than a half century.</p>
<p>"IPCC and other scientific organizations are [the] most misleading in what their summaries and press releases don't say—or at least[,] not clearly. They don't clearly say that the death toll from natural disasters has radically declined[,] and should decline further with continued adaptation. They don't clearly say that wood fuel build-up and constructing homes near forests matters more than climate change[,] in determining the severity and impact of fires in much of the world. And they don't clearly say that fertilizer, tractors, and irrigation matter more than climate change to crop yields." – pp. 256–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Who Framed Roger Pielke?</p>
<p>"In...2015, Raúl Grijalva, a U.S. congressman from Arizona, sent a letter to the University of Colorado's president suggesting that...Pielke might have taken money from the fossil fuel industry....</p>
<p>"Starting in 2008[,] Center for American Progress (CAP)...was able to persuade many in the news media that Pielke was a [paid] climate skeptic.</p>
<p>"[T]he...University of Colorado president cooperated and investigated Pielke[, finding] that Pielke had never received any funding from fossil fuel companies." – pp. 257–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"The effort to delegitimize Pielke was one of the most audacious and effective attacks by a fossil fuel–funded think tank on a climate expert in history.</p>
<p>"[R]enewable energy and natural gas interests funded CAP during the period when CAP was overseeing both Obama's green stimulus program and the administration's effort to pass cap-and-trade climate legislation in Congress...between 2009 and 2010....</p>
<p>"Democratic, progressive, and environmental leaders [believed] they needed...to claim that climate change's impacts are happening right now, and are catastrophic, in order to pass legislation to subsidize renewables and tax fossil fuels, and recruit, mobilize, and win over swing voters....</p>
<p>"It felt like a witch hunt[.] The scapegoating of Pielke, like apocalyptic environmentalism more broadly, had an undeniably religious quality to it." – pp. 259–60</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">False Gods</p>
<p>"In 2019[,] McKibben...argued that climate change is the 'greatest challenge humans have ever faced.'...</p>
<p>"McKibben['s] organization, 350.org, has a nearly $20 million annual budget. He is respected by other journalists, members of Congress, presidential candidates, and millions of Americans.</p>
<p>"[F]or McKibben's claim to be true, climate change must prove to be a greater challenge than coping with the Black Death, which killed about half of all Europeans[:] about fifty million people; the control of infectious diseases, which killed hundreds of millions; [and] the great wars of Europe and the Holocaust, which killed more than 100 million people[.]</p>
<p>"And climate change must prove to be greater than...the monumental...contemporary challenge...of lifting one billion souls out of extreme poverty in a world where manufacturing is playing a smaller role in economic development[.]</p>
<p>"McKibben's apocalyptic vision didn't start with climate change. In 1971, when...McKibben was eleven years old, police arrested his father for defending the right of Vietnam Veterans Against the War to gather [publicly. His] mother says [he] was 'furious...he wasn't allowed to be arrested with his father.'...</p>
<p>"After Harvard, McKibben says his 'leftism grew more righteous.'...In...his 1989 <em>The End of Nature,</em> he described climate change as an apocalyptic threat, like nuclear war.</p>
<p>"The underlying problem, said McKibben, was spiritual. Through capitalist industrialization, humankind had lost its connection to nature. 'We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves,' he wrote[.] 'That is what this all boils down to.' " – pp. 260–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In the early twentieth century[,] American scholar William James defined religion as the belief in 'an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in adjusting ourselves thereto.'...For environmentalists, the unseen order we need to adjust ourselves to is nature.</p>
<p>"Throughout this book we have seen environmental support for various behaviors, technologies, and policies motivated not by what the science tells us but by intuitive views of nature. These intuitive views rest on the appeal-to-nature fallacy.</p>
<p>"Th[is] fallacy holds that 'natural' things, e.g., tortoiseshell, ivory, wild fish, organic fertilizer, wood fuel, and solar farms, are better for people and the environment than 'artificial' things, e.g., plastics from fossil fuels, farmed fish, chemical fertilizer, and nuclear plants.</p>
<p>"[This] is fallacious for two reasons. First, the artificial things are as natural as the natural things. They are simply newer. Second, the older, 'natural' things are 'bad,' not good, if 'good' is defined as protecting sea turtles, elephants, and wild fish.</p>
<p>"This background and largely unconscious idea of nature is, in my experience, very strong. I have seen many environmentalists dismiss evidence demonstrating, for example, the larger impact of renewable energy and organic farming on landscapes. 'Natural' things must, by definition, be better for the environment.</p>
<p>"Irrational ideas about nature repeatedly creep into...environmental sciences. In the 1940s, scientists attempted to create a science of nature, ecology, which was based on cybernetics, the science of self-regulating systems[.]</p>
<p>"The assumption was that nature, when left alone, achieves a kind of harmony or equilibrium....</p>
<p>"But 'nature' doesn't operate like a self-regulating system. In reality, different natural environments change constantly. Species come and go. There is no whole or 'system' to collapse. There's just a changing mix of plants, animals, and other organisms over time. We might prefer one version of that mixture, like the Amazon rainforest, but there is nothing in the mixture telling us that it is better or worse than some other combination[.]</p>
<p>"Apocalyptic scientists and activists list various changes, such as melting ice sheets, changing ocean circulations, and deforestation, and suggest that they will add up to an apocalyptic sum greater than their parts.</p>
<p>"[T]he notion of nature existing in a delicate balance is Neoplatonism, and ungrounded in empirical reality. 'The commonplaces of modern ecology, such as "everything connects," ' writes environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff, 'recall...the [N]eoplatonic view of nature as an integrated mechanism into which every species fits.'</p>
<p>"Some ecological scientists recognized that they had inadvertently and unconsciously imposed a fundamentally religious idea onto science. 'I am convinced that modern ecological theory, so important in our attitudes towards nature and man's interference with it,' admitted one, 'owes its origin to the [Judeo-Christian intelligent] design argument[:] The wisdom of the creator is self-evident. [N]o living thing is useless, and all are related one to the other.' " – pp. 261–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations. It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose. It designates good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. And it does so in the language of science, which provides it with legitimacy.</p>
<p>"On the one hand, environmentalism and its sister religion, vegetarianism, appear to be a radical break from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. For starters, environmentalists themselves do not tend to be believers, or strong believers, in Judeo-Christianity. In particular, environmentalists reject the view that humans have, or should have, dominion, or control, over Earth.</p>
<p>"On the other hand, apocalyptic environmentalism is a kind of new Judeo-Christian religion, one that has replaced God with nature. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to God. In the apocalyptic environmental tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to nature. In some Judeo-Christian traditions, priests play the role of interpreting God's will or laws, including discerning right from wrong. In the apocalyptic environmentalist tradition, scientists play that role. 'I want you to listen to the scientists,' Thunberg and others repeat.</p>
<p>"Most environmentalists are unaware that they are repeating Judeo-Christian myths, concludes [economist] Robert H. Nelson [in his] 2010 [book,] <em>The New Holy Wars.</em> Because Judeo-Christian myths and morals are prevalent in our culture, environmentalists know them subconsciously and repeat them unintentionally, albeit in the ostensibly secular language of science and nature.</p>
<p>"Having first experienced and then studied the phenomenon for fifteen years, I believe that secular people are attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism because it meets some of the same psychological and spiritual needs as Judeo-Christianity and other religions. Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars, as we will see, believe we need in order to find meaning in our lives.</p>
<p>"At the same time, apocalyptic environmentalism does all of this while retaining the illusion among its adherents that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy. 'For the many people skeptical of institutional Christian religion,' wr[ites Nelson], 'but seeking greater religious meaning in their lives, that is no doubt part of the attraction of secular religion.'</p>
<p>"There is nothing wrong with religions and often a great deal right about them. They have long provided people with the meaning and purpose they need, particularly in order to survive life's many challenges....</p>
<p>"The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs [which] its ostensibly secular devotees seek." – pp. 263–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Apocalypse Angst</p>
<p>"To believe in imminent apocalypse is, according to one scholar, to believe that 'the accepted texture of reality is about to undergo a staggering transformation, in which the long-established institutions and ways of life will be destroyed.'</p>
<p>"[T]o some extent, th[is] is what is happening, and has been happening[,] since...the rise of the [I]ndustrial [R]evolution[.]</p>
<p>"For thousands of years, religion sought to constrain what we today call science[:] efforts to understand the world, including ourselves. [T]he pursuit of knowledge outside of morality was dangerous.</p>
<p>"After the rediscovery of classical texts...in the Middle Ages, Western thinkers initially concentrated on reconciling classical philosophy with Christianity. Over time[,] the focus shifted to making sense of the natural world, leading to what is called the scientific revolution. Although most early scientists professed that they did their science in service of God, they pursued knowledge without knowing whether it would lead to good or ill....</p>
<p>"During the Enlightenment, philosophers tried to apply the same rational approach to morality and politics in the form of 'secular humanism.' It borrowed from Judeo-Christianity the idea that humans were special, but it emphasized the use of science and reason in the pursuit of virtue[.]</p>
<p>"[I]t quickly became clear there was no 'objective' basis for morality....By the 1920s, European philosophers argued that moral jud[g]ments could not be justified empirically[.]</p>
<p>"After World War II, many leading scholars and universities in Europe and the United States rejected the teaching of morality and virtue as unscientific and thus without value. 'Reason reveals life to be without purpose or meaning,' was the intellectual consensus, a historian notes. 'Science is the only legitimate exercise of the intellect, but that leads inevitably to technology[,] and...ultimately...to the bomb.</p>
<p>" 'From humanists we learned that science threaten[s] civilization,' the historian added. 'From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied there is no hope.' The result, he argued, was a 'culture of despair.'</p>
<p>"Apocalyptic environmentalism emerged from this crisis of faith and...became pronounced during moments of global change....In 1970, [a]mid...national turmoil over the Vietnam War[,] Earth Day was held...wh[ile] fears of overpopulation were at their peak[.] In 1983, during heightened Cold War tensions, more than 300,000 people protested in London's Hyde Park against nuclear weapons. And in the early 1990s, [as] the Cold War...end[ed,] climate change emerged as the new apocalyptic threat.</p>
<p>"After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people in the West no longer had an external enemy against which to direct their negative energy and define themselves. 'Being the sole winner in a conflict means concentrating on oneself all the criticism that could earlier be deflected onto others,' observed Pascal Bruckner in <em>The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.</em></p>
<p>"In the wake of the 2016 elections in Britain and the United States, where voters rejected...the established global order, climate alarmism grew more extreme.</p>
<p>"Where environmentalism had until recently offered the prospects of utopia in the form of a return to low-energy and renewable-powered agrarian societies, it is striking the extent to which apocalyptic environmentalist leaders have deemphasized that vision for an emphasis on climate Armageddon.</p>
<p>"Green utopianism is still there. Apocalyptic environmentalists in Europe and the United States advocate a Green New Deal not just to reduce carbon emissions but also to create good jobs with high pay, reduce economic inequality, and improve community life.</p>
<p>"But negativity has triumphed over positivity. In place of love, forgiveness, kindness, and the kingdom of heaven, today's apocalyptic environmentalism offers fear, anger, and the narrow prospects of avoiding extinction." – pp. 265–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"[A]nthropologist Ernest Becker [in his] Pulitzer Prize[–winning 1973] book[,] <em>The Denial of Death,</em> believed...that...we are all born with strong survival instincts. [We] repress [our] fears, making them mostly unconscious.</p>
<p>"To defend ourselves...against this low-level fear[,] we create what [he] calls an 'immortality project,' a way of feeling that some part of us will live on after our deaths....</p>
<p>"We subconsciously cast ourselves as the heroes of our immortality projects. '[T]he cultural hero,'...Becker wrote[,] 'is...a mythical hero-system in which people serve[,] in order to earn a feeling of primary value[,] of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.'</p>
<p>"Such appear to be the benefits of climate activism. 'Extinction Rebellion,'...Lunnon told me, 'offered a way of being courageous.'...Lights...pointed to research [asserting] 'children who engage with climate activism have better mental health then kids who know about climate change but...do [no]thing about it.' And Thunberg's climate activism allowed her to escape depression. 'It is like day and night,' said her father. 'It is an incredible transformation.'</p>
<p>"[E]nvironmentalism and vegetarianism...represent 'the will to give a future to the entire planet, including its animals,' conclude the Italian psychologists who studied vegetarian beliefs....</p>
<p>"For Becker, an exaggerated fear of death reveals a deep and often subconscious dissatisfaction with one's life....</p>
<p>"I [myself] was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment....</p>
<p>"Because addressing our personal lives is painful and difficult, suggests Becker, we often look for external demons to conquer. Doing so makes us feel heroic, and creates a feeling of immortality through the recognition, validation, and love we receive from others." – pp. 267–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Lost Souls</p>
<p>"[C]ould a...hatred of human civilization, and perhaps humanity itself, be behind claims of environmental apocalypse?</p>
<p>"[This] might help explain why the people who are the most alarmist about environmental problems are also the most opposed to the technologies capable of addressing them, from fertilizer and flood control to natural gas and nuclear power.</p>
<p>"After two weeks of Extinction Rebellion parading coffins through the street[,] one British columnist...wrote[,] 'This is an upper-middle-class death cult.' " – p. 270</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">" 'I want you to panic,' said Thunberg to a gathering of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2019....</p>
<p>"Two days later[,] Extinction Rebellion protestors stood [a]top...a train...in the London Tube....</p>
<p>"Many in the crowd were gripped by a sudden, uncontrollable fear and wildly unthinking behavior. In other words, they were in a panic.</p>
<p>"[O]n British television['s] <em>This Morning</em>[,] Lunnon...said[, 'I]t's taken us being this disruptive to get on your program[. U]nless we do very, very disruptive actions, people do not want to talk to us.'</p>
<p>"On BBC's <em>Newsnight,</em> as host Emma Barnett was wrapping up the program, Lunnon practically shout[ed], 'No! We waited! We waited for thirty years for capitalism to work and it hasn't worked!'...</p>
<p>"Thunberg sp[oke] to the United Nations in September 2019. '[Y]ou all come to us young people for hope?' she said, practically shouting. 'How dare you!' " – pp. 270–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"The late British philosopher Roger Scruton thought deeply about the politics of anger.</p>
<p>"[W]hen 'resentment loses the specificity of its target and becomes directed to society as a whole,' Scruton...argued, [a]t that point [it] becomes 'an existential posture' adopted not 'to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves....That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.'...</p>
<p>"Young people...might understandably believe, upon listening to Lunnon and Thunberg, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions....Given [i]t's what climate activists have been taught to believe, it's understandable that so many of them would be so angry.</p>
<p>"In reality, [e]missions are a by[p]roduct of energy consumption, which has been ne[eded] for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, [to] achieve human dignity.</p>
<p>"[P]eople tend to feel put down by climate activists who condemn economic growth, eating meat, flying, and driving. 'Why would people listen to you,' asked Lunnon, 'when...you're some kind of new age Puritan?'</p>
<p>"As such, while some climate leaders and activists may derive psychological benefits from climate alarmism[,] many more people are harmed by it, including the alarmists themselves.</p>
<p>"[A]fter Extinction Rebellion's protests[,] 'I was hearing people my age saying things I found quite disturbing,' says Jeffrey. ' "It's too late to do anything." "There is no future anymore." "We're basically doomed." "We should give up." '...</p>
<p>"Twenty years ago, I [myself] discovered that the more apocalyptic environmentalist books and articles I read, the sadder and more anxious I felt. This was in sharp contrast to how I felt after reading histories of the civil rights movement, whose leaders were committed to an ethos, and [a] politics, of love, not anger.</p>
<p>"[S]everal years later[,] I started to question environmentalism's claims about energy, technology, and the natural environment.</p>
<p>"Now[,] I can see that much of my sadness over environmental problems was a projection, and misplaced. There is more reason for optimism than pessimism.</p>
<p>"Conventional air pollution peaked fifty years ago in developed nations[,] and carbon emissions have peaked or will soon peak in most others.</p>
<p>"The amount of land we use for meat production is declining. Forests in rich nations are growing back and wildlife are returning.</p>
<p>"There is no reason poor nations can't develop and adapt to climate change.</p>
<p>"[I]f we embrace technology, [then] habitats available for endangered species, including...gorillas...and penguins, should keep growing in size.</p>
<p>"[The] work to do...has to do with accelerating...existing, positive trends, not trying to reverse them in a bid to return to low-energy agrarian societies.</p>
<p>"And so, while I can empathize with the sadness and loneliness behind the anger and fearmongering about climate change, deforestation, and species extinction, I can see that much of it is wrong[—]based on unaddressed anxieties, disempowering ideologies, and misrepresentations of the evidence." – pp. 272–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Environmental Humanism</p>
<p>"The answer from many rational environmentalists, including myself, who are alarmed by the religious fanaticism of apocalyptic environmentalism, has been that we need to better maintain the divide between science and religion, just as scientists need to maintain the divide between their personal values and the facts they study.</p>
<p>"Others, like Scruton, urge us to aim for a world 'where conflicts are resolved according to a shared conception of justice' and the 'building and governance of institutions'[.]</p>
<p>"But Scruton himself doubted that such a rationalist project could succeed against the apocalyptic tendencies of the regressive left. 'Clearly we are dealing with the religious need, a need planted in our "species being," ' he writes. 'There is a longing for membership that no amount of rational thought...can ever eradicate.'</p>
<p>"Attempts to affirm the boundary between science and religion will thus likely not work so long as apocalyptic environmentalists speak to deep human needs for meaning and purpose and environmental rationalists don't.</p>
<p>"As such, we need to go beyond rationalism and re-embrace humanism, which affirms humankind's specialness, against Malthusian and apocalyptic environmentalists who condemn human civilization and humanity itself. As environmental humanists, whether scientists, journalists, or activists, we must ground ourselves first in our commitment to the transcendent moral purpose of universal human flourishing and environmental progress, and then in rationality....</p>
<p>"The 'corrective spice' to science, said...Sir Francis...Bacon, was 'charity (or love).'</p>
<p>"[Thus,] when we hear activists, journalists, IPCC scientists, and others claim [that] climate change will be apocalyptic unless we make immediate, radical changes, including massive reductions in energy consumption, we might consider whether they are motivated by love for humanity or something closer to its opposite." – pp. 274–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"I[']ve kept Bernadette in the foreground throughout [this book,] to remind us...to feel gratitude for the civilization we take for granted, put claims of climate apocalypse in perspective, and inspire empathy and solidarity for those who do not yet enjoy the fruits of prosperity.</p>
<p>"The stories we tell [do] matter. The picture promoted by apocalyptic environmentalists is inaccurate and dehumanizing. Humans are not unthinkingly destroying nature. Climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, and species extinction are not, fundamentally, consequences of greed and hubris but rather side effects of economic development[,] motivated by a humanistic desire to improve people's lives.</p>
<p>"A core ethic of environmental humanism is that rich nations must support, not deny, development to poor nations. Specifically, rich nations should lift the various restrictions on development aid for energy production[,] in poor and developing nations.</p>
<p>"[F]actories...remain the only way we know...to transform large numbers of unskilled subsistence farmers into city people. The main opposition to [c]heap hydroelectricity [through] the Grand Inga Dam[,] outside of...Congo[,] comes from apocalyptic environmentalists. Environmental humanists should stand up to them." – pp. 275–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"News media, editors, and journalists might consider whether their constant sensationalizing of environmental problems is consistent with their professional commitment to fairness and accuracy, and their personal commitment to being a positive force in the world. While I am skeptical that stealth environmental activists working as journalists are likely to change how they do their reporting, I am hopeful that competition from outside [of] traditional news media institutions, made possible by social media, will inject new competitiveness into environmental journalism and raise standards.</p>
<p>"Improving environmental journalism requires coming to grips with some fundamentals. Power density determines environmental impact. As such, coal is good when it replaces wood and bad when it replaces natural gas or nuclear. Natural gas is good when it replaces coal and bad when it replaces uranium. Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind's environmental footprint. Power-dense farming, including of fish, creates the prospect of shrinking humankind's largest environmental impact.</p>
<p>"We need to correct our misunderstanding of nuclear energy. It was born from good intentions, not bad ones, nor from some mindless accident of science. Nuclear weapons were created to prevent war and end war, and that is all they have been used for[,] and all they will ever be good for. The United States and other developed nations should renew the commitments they made under 'atoms for peace' in the 1950s in the form of a Green Nuclear Deal, for reasons including but going beyond climate change.</p>
<p>"Th[is] will require recognizing that nuclear weapons, like nuclear energy, are here to stay. We can't get rid of them[—]even if we wanted to[—]for reasons experts have understood since 1945....</p>
<p>"The continued existence of nuclear weapons...stimulate[s] some amount of...existential angst. We need to find a better way to manage, and channel, those anxieties. Confronting them directly as objects of death, and even as symbols of the apocalypse, may help....</p>
<p>"I told...Rhodes [that] I thought the continued existence of nuclear weapons should remind us to be happy to be alive.</p>
<p>" 'You mean like a <em>memento mori,"</em> [he] said[.]</p>
<p>"The classic <em>memento mori</em> is the skull...seen in still-life paintings by European artists...after the Black Death....</p>
<p>"When psychologists...encourage people to imagine they are dying, and to look back on their lives, they tend to do so with gratitude, appreciation, and greater love toward those around them.</p>
<p>"The same has been true for me after visiting poor and developing nations[.]" – pp. 277–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Love > Science</p>
<p>"[At] Environmental Progress, which [is] my new...organization...in Berkeley, California, [n]ature and prosperity for all determine how we do our research, not the other way around....</p>
<p>"When my staff and I meet[,] images of a high-energy, prosperous world with flourishing wildlife frame our thinking. They represent our commitment to goals that are human and natural, rational and moral, and physical and spiritual. Research should be, we believe, in [the] service of some ultimate value. Our [values] are the love of humanity, and the love of nature.</p>
<p>"[While] renovating the office, I realized we had created a shrine, of sorts, to a vision that could be fairly called spiritual. 'Nature and prosperity for all' is our transcendent moral purpose. [And] Environmental Progress is our immortality project." – pp. 279–81</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">"In 2015, [my wife] Helen [Jeehyun Lee] and I viewed the endangered mountain gorillas[,] up-close and in-person....</p>
<p>"We smelled the gorillas before we saw them. Their smell was unique[:] a pungent mix of very strong body odor, musky perfume, and skunk....</p>
<p>"Finally we were treated to the sight of an infant gorilla. Its mother lay a few feet away. She smiled at us as her baby played near her. It felt like we were two individuals in a single primate community. Scientists warn against the anthropomorphization of animals, but it is impossible not to see gorillas as kin[—]particularly when they are smiling at you.</p>
<p>"People who see gorillas in the wild feel awe and wonder[:] a mix of happiness, surprise, and a bit of fear. 'This wonderful and frightful production of nature walks upright like a man,' wrote a sea captain[.]</p>
<p>"Scientists have long named self-interest as a reason...why humans should care about endangered species like the mountain gorilla. But if the mountain gorillas were ever to go extinct, humankind would become spiritually, not materially, poorer.</p>
<p>"Happily, nobody saves mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and sea turtles because they believe human civilization depends on it. We save them [because] we love them." – pp. 281–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Epilogue</p>
<p>"Few things make one feel...immortal[,] more...than saving the life of a nuclear plant.</p>
<p>"[S]o, between 2016 and 2020, I worked with environmental humanists around the world to save nuclear power plants....Where nuclear energy was viewed...as optional, it is today increasingly viewed as essential for dealing with climate change.</p>
<p>"[Yet] California and New York are moving forward with plans to prematurely close [the] Diablo Canyon and Indian Point nuclear plants, which provide reliable and low-cost[,] carbon-free power to roughly six million people[.]</p>
<p>"Zion Lights of Extinction Rebellion told me she had changed her mind [about nuclear energy] after a scientist friend told her it was safe. 'I said, "That's not what I've been told." And he said, "Don't just listen to what people tell you." And so I looked it up and he was right. The data shows it is safe.'</p>
<p>"I...testif[ied] before Congress on the state of climate science...in January 2020....I noted...that some scientists, journalists, and activists were finally pushing back against...both [of the] extremes[:] den[ial,] and...exaggerat[ion].</p>
<p>"Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. [W]hile some environmentalists claim [that] their agenda w[ould] also deliver a greener prosperity, the evidence shows that an organic, low-energy, and renewable-powered world would be worse...for most people and for the natural environment.</p>
<p>"While environmental alarmism may be a permanent feature of public life, it need not be so loud....With care, persistence...and, I dare say, love, I believe we can moderate the extremes[,] and deepen understanding and respect[,] in the process. In so trying, I believe we will bring ourselves closer to the transcendent moral purpose most people...share: nature and prosperity for all." – pp. 283–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-89371218715540066742022-03-02T20:55:00.020-05:002022-03-06T12:19:21.492-05:00Alexis Carrel's Man, the Unknown<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Man, the Unknown,</em> Alexis Carrel, 1935:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Dedication</p>
<p>"To My Friends[,]
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1072707763&title=Frederic_René_Coudert_Jr.">Frederic R[ené] Coudert[, Jr., 1871–1955 or 1898–1972,</a>
see also
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1064405134&title=Frederic_René_Coudert_Sr.">here</a>
and
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20220302230835/https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/81/Coudert-Brothers.html">here]</a>
and
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1046733690&title=Boris_Bakhmeteff">Boris A. Bakhmeteff[,]</a>
this book is dedicated[.]"</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Preface</p>
<p>"The author of this book...spends...his time in a laboratory studying living matter.</p>
<p>"[T]he author...undertook it [b]ecause men cannot follow modern civilization along its present course, because they are degenerating. They have been fascinated by the beauty of the sciences of inert matter. They have not understood that their body and consciousness are subjected to natural laws, more obscure than, but as inexorable as, the laws of the sidereal world. Neither have they understood that they cannot transgress these laws without being punished. They must, therefore, learn the necessary relations of the cosmic universe, of their fellow men, and of their inner selves, and also those of their tissues and their mind. Indeed, man stands above all things. Should he degenerate, the beauty of civilization, and even the grandeur of the physical universe, would vanish. [T]his book was written...in the confusion, the noise, and the weariness of New York [City]. From Frederic R. Coudert[, Jr.] came the impulse responsible for this book. [T]he majority of the nations follow the lead of North America. Those countries that have blindly adopted the spirit and the techniques of industrial civilization...are exposed to the same dangers as the United States. Humanity's attention must turn from the machines and the world of inanimate matter to the body and the soul of man, to the organic and mental processes which have created the machines and the universe of Newton and Einstein....</p>
<p>"We are beginning to realize the weakness of our civilization. Many want to shake off the dogmas imposed on them by modern society. This book has been written for them, and also for those who are bold enough to understand the necessity, not only of mental, political, and social changes, but of the overthrow of industrial civilization and of the advent of another conception of human progress. This book is, therefore, dedicated to all whose everyday task is the rearing of children, the formation or the guidance of the individual....It is offered to all as a simple account of facts revealed about human beings by scientific observation." – pp. ix–xv</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter I: The Need of a Better Knowledge of Man</p>
<p>"There is a strange disparity between the sciences of inert matter and those of life. Astronomy, mechanics, and physics are based on concepts which can be expressed, tersely and elegantly, in mathematical language....They search for reality beyond the realm of common thought[,] up to unutterable abstractions consisting only of equations of symbols....Those who investigate...the phenomena of life are as if lost in an inextricable jungle, in the midst of a magic forest, whose countless trees unceasingly change their place and their shape. They are crushed under a mass of facts[.] Descriptive science classifies phenomena. But the unchanging relations between variable quantities—that is, the natural laws, only appear when science becomes more abstract....</p>
<p>"The science of...living beings...still remains in the descriptive state. Man is an indivisible whole of extreme complexity....There is no method capable of apprehending him simultaneously in his entirety[.] In order to analyze ourselves, we are obliged to seek the help of various techniques and, therefore, to utilize several sciences. Naturally, all these sciences arrive at a different conception of their common object. They abstract only from man what is attainable by their special methods....They leave behind them a residue, too important to be neglected....Man, as known to the specialists, is far from being the concrete man, the real man. He is nothing but a schema, consisting of other schemata built up by the techniques of each science. He is, at the same time, the corpse dissected by the anatomists, the consciousness observed by the psychologists and the great teachers of the spiritual life, and the personality which introspection shows to everyone as [dwelling] in the depth of himself. He is the chemical substances constituting the tissues and humors of the body. He is the amazing community of cells and nutrient fluids whose organic laws are studied by the physiologists. He is the compound of tissues and consciousness that hygienists and educators endeavor to lead to its optimum development while it extends into time. He is the <em>homo [e]conomicus</em> who must ceaselessly consume manufactured products in order that the machines, of which he is made a slave, may be kept at work. But he is also the poet, the hero, and the saint. He is not only the prodigiously complex being analyzed by our scientific techniques, but also the tendencies, the conjectures, the aspirations of humanity. Our conceptions of him are imbued with metaphysics. They are founded on so many and such imprecise data that the temptation is great to choose among them those which please us. Therefore, our idea of man varies according to our feelings and our beliefs....Although we possess the treasure of the observations accumulated by the scientists, the philosophers, the poets, and the great mystics of all times, we have grasped only certain aspects of ourselves. We do not apprehend man as a whole. We know him as composed of distinct parts. And even these parts are created by our methods. Each one of us is made up of a procession of phantoms, in the midst of which strides an unknowable reality.</p>
<p>"In fact, our ignorance is profound. Most of the questions put to themselves by those who study human beings remain without answer....</p>
<p>"We are very far from knowing what relations exist between skeleton, muscles, and organs, and mental and spiritual activities. We are ignorant of the factors that bring about nervous equilibrium and resistance to fatigue and to diseases. We do not know how moral sense, judgment, and audacity could be augmented. What is the relative importance of intellectual, moral, and mystical activities? What is the significance of esthetic and religious sense? What form of energy is responsible for telepathic communications? Without any doubt, certain physiological and mental factors determine happiness or misery, success or failure. But we do not know what they are. We cannot artificially give to any individual the aptitude for happiness. As yet, we do not know what environment is the most favorable for the optimum development of civilized man. Is it possible to suppress struggle, effort, and suffering from our physiological and spiritual formation? How can we prevent the degeneracy of man in modern civilization? Many other questions could be asked on subjects which are to us of the utmost interest. They would also remain unanswered. It is quite evident that the accomplishments of all the sciences having man as an object remain insufficient, and that our knowledge of ourselves is still most rudimentary." – pp. 1–5</p>
<p>"Our mind is so constructed as to delight in contemplating simple facts. We feel a kind of repugnance in attacking such a complex problem as that of the constitution of living beings and of man. The intellect...is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life....The methods of nature are never so precise as those of man. We do not find in the universe the clearness and accuracy of our thought. We attempt, therefore, to abstract from the complexity of phenomena some simple systems whose components bear to one another certain relations susceptible of being described mathematically. This power of abstraction of the human intellect is responsible for the amazing progress of physics and chemistry....</p>
<p>"What method could bring to light the chemical constitution of the nucleus of the sexual cells, of its chromosomes, and of the genes that compose these chromosomes? Nevertheless, those very minute aggregates of chemicals are of capital importance, because they contain the future of the individual and of the race....We do not possess any technique capable of penetrating the mysteries of the brain, and of the harmonious association of its cells. Our mind, which loves the simple beauty of mathematical formulas, is bewildered when it contemplates the stupendous mass of cells, humors, and consciousness which make up the individual. We try, therefore, to apply to this compound the concepts that have proved useful in the realm of physics, chemistry, and mechanics, and in the philosophical and religious disciplines. Such an attempt does not meet with much success, because we can be reduced neither to a physicochemical system nor to a spiritual entity....</p>
<p>"The knowledge of ourselves will never attain the elegant simplicity, the abstractness, and the beauty of physics. [T]he science of man is the most difficult of all sciences." – pp. 8–10</p>
<p>"The environment which has molded the body and the soul of our ancestors during many millenniums has now been replaced by another. This silent revolution has taken place almost without our noticing it. We have not realized its importance. Nevertheless, it is one of the most dramatic events in the history of humanity. For any modification in their surroundings inevitably and profoundly disturbs all living beings. We must, therefore, ascertain the extent of the transformations imposed by science upon the ancestral mode of life, and consequently upon ourselves.</p>
<p>"Since the advent of industry, a large part of the population has been compelled to live in restricted areas. The workmen are herded together, either in the suburbs of the large cities or in villages built for them. They are occupied in the factories during fixed hours, doing easy, monotonous, and well-paid work. The cities are also inhabited by office workers[.] Factories and offices are large, well lighted, clean. Their temperature is uniform. Modern heating and refrigerating apparatuses raise the temperature during the winter and lower it during the summer. The skyscrapers of the great cities have transformed the streets into gloomy canyons. But inside of the buildings, the light of the sun is replaced by electric bulbs rich in ultra-violet rays. Instead of the air of the street, polluted by gasoline fumes, the offices and workshops receive pure air drawn in from the upper atmosphere by ventilators on the roof. The dwellers of the modern city are protected against all inclemencies of the weather. But they are no longer able to live as did our ancestors, near their workshops, their stores, or their offices....The workmen and the humblest employees live in dwellings better appointed than those of the rich of former times. The heating apparatuses that automatically regulate the temperature of the houses, the bathrooms, the refrigerators, the electric stoves, the domestic machinery for preparing food and cleaning rooms, and the garages for the automobiles, give to the abode of everybody, not only in the city and the suburbs, but also in the country, a degree of comfort which previously was found only in that of a very few privileged individuals.</p>
<p>"Simultaneously with the habitat, the mode of life has been transformed. This transformation is due chiefly to the increase in the rapidity of communications. Indeed, it is evident that modern trains and steamers, airplanes, automobiles, telegraph, telephone, and wireless have modified the relations of men and of nations all over the world. Each individual does a great many more things than formerly. He takes part in a much larger number of events. Every day he comes into contact with more people. Quiet and unemployed moments are exceptional in his existence. The narrow groups of the family and of the parish have been dissolved. Intimacy no longer exists. For the life of the small group has been substituted that of the herd. Solitude is looked upon as a punishment or as a rare luxury. The frequent attendance at [events] ha[s] engendered in all the habit of living in common. The telephone, the radio, and the gramophone records carry unceasingly the vulgarity of the crowd, as well as its pleasures and its psychology, into everyone's house, even in the most isolated and remote villages. Each individual is always in direct or indirect communication with other human beings, and keeps himself constantly informed about the small or important events taking place in his town, or his city, or at the other end of the world....</p>
<p>"Everywhere, in the cities, as well as in the country, in private houses as in factories, in the workshop, on the roads, in the fields, and on the farms, machines have decreased the intensity of human effort. Today, it is not necessary to walk. Elevators have replaced stairs. Everybody rides in buses, motors, or street cars, even when the distance to be covered is very short. Natural bodily exercises, such as walking and running over rough ground, mountain-climbing, tilling the land by hand, clearing forests with the ax, working while exposed to rain, sun, wind, cold, or heat, have given place to well-regulated sports that involve almost no risk, and to machines that abolish muscular effort. Everywhere...athletes train and fight while protected against the inclemencies of the weather. In this manner all can develop their muscles without being subjected to the fatigue and the hardships involved in the exercises pertaining to a more primitive form of life.</p>
<p>"The aliments of our ancestors, which consisted chiefly of coarse flour, meat, and alcoholic drinks, have been replaced by much more delicate and varied food. Beef and mutton are no longer the staple foods. The principal elements of modern diet are milk, cream, butter, cereals refined by the elimination of the shells of the grain, fruits of tropical as well as of temperate countries, fresh or canned vegetables, salads, large quantities of sugar in the form of pies, candies, and puddings. Alcohol alone has kept its place. [F]ood...is now very artificial and abundant....The regularity of the working-hours in offices and factories has entailed that of the meals. Owing to the wealth which was general until a few years ago, and to the decline in the religious spirit and in the observance of ritualistic fasts, human beings have never been fed so punctually and uninterruptedly.</p>
<p>"[T]he main interest of...educational establishments consists in the promotion of mental and muscular strength.</p>
<p>"[M]edicine, by a better conception of the nature of diseases..., has extended its beneficent influence...to all who formerly could not endure the conditions of a rougher life....It has also given to each individual much greater security against pain and disease.</p>
<p>"The intellectual and moral surroundings in which we are immersed have equally been molded by science. There is a profound difference between the world that permeates the mind of modern men and the world wherein our ancestors lived. Before the intellectual victories that have brought us wealth and comfort, moral values have naturally given ground. Reason has swept away religious beliefs. The knowledge of the natural laws, and the power given us by this knowledge over the material world, and also over human beings, alone are of importance.</p>
<p>"[S]cience is the mother of wealth, comfort, and health. However, the intellectual atmosphere, in which modern men live, rapidly changes. Financial magnates, professors, scientists, and economic experts are losing their hold over the public. The people of today are sufficiently educated to read newspapers and magazines, to listen to the speeches broadcasted by politicians, business men, charlatans, and apostles. They are saturated with commercial, political, or social propaganda, whose techniques are becoming more and more perfect. At the same time they read articles and books wherein science and philosophy are popularized....Our universe is exclusively mechanical. It cannot be otherwise, since it has been created from an unknown substratum by the techniques of physics and astronomy. Just as are all the surroundings of modern men, it is the expression of the amazing development of the sciences of inert matter." – pp. 10–17</p>
<p>"The profound changes imposed on the habits of men by the applications of science have occurred recently. In fact, we are still in the midst of the industrial revolution. It is difficult, therefore, to know exactly how the substitution of an artificial mode of existence for the natural one and a complete modification of their environment have acted upon civilized human beings....</p>
<p>"It is evident that men have joyfully welcomed modern civilization. They have abandoned the countryside and flocked to the cities and the factories. They eagerly adopt the mode of life and the ways of acting and of thinking of the new era. They lay aside their old habits without hesitation, because these habits demand a greater effort. It is less fatiguing to work in a factory or an office than on a farm. But even in the country, new techniques have relieved the harshness of existence. Modern houses make life easier for everybody. By their comfort, their warmth, and their pleasant lighting, they give their inmates a feeling of rest and contentment. Their up-to-date appointments considerably decrease the labor that, in bygone days, housekeeping demanded from women. Besides the lessening of muscular effort and the possession of comfort, human beings have accepted cheerfully the privilege of never being alone, of enjoying the innumerable distractions of the city, of living among huge crowds, of never thinking. They also appreciate being released, through a purely intellectual education, from the moral restraint imposed upon them by Puritan discipline and religious principles. In truth, modern life has set them free. It incites them to acquire wealth by any and every possible means[.] It has liberated them from all superstitions. It allows them the frequent excitation and the easy satisfaction of their sexual appetites. It does away with constraint, discipline, effort, everything that is inconvenient and laborious. The people, especially those belonging to the lower classes, are happier from a material standpoint than in former times. However, some of them progressively cease to appreciate the distractions and the vulgar pleasures of modern life. Occasionally, their health does not permit them to continue indefinitely the alimentary, alcoholic, and sexual excesses to which they are led by the suppression of all discipline....</p>
<p>"It is certain, nevertheless, that health is improving. Not only has mortality decreased, but each individual is handsomer, larger, and stronger. Today, children are much taller than their parents. An abundance of good food and physical exercises have augmented the size of the body and its muscular strength. Often the best athletes at the international games come from the United States. In the athletic teams of the American universities, there are many individuals who are really magnificent specimens of human beings. Under the present educational conditions, bones and muscles develop perfectly. America has succeeded in reproducing the most admirable forms of ancient beauty. However,...resistance to fatigue and worry seems to have decreased. It appears that the individuals accustomed to natural bodily exercise, to hardships, and to the inclemencies of the weather, as were their fathers, are capable of harder and more sustained efforts than our athletes. We know that the products of modern education need much sleep, good food, and regular habits. Their nervous system is delicate. They do not endure the mode of existence in the large cities, the confinement in offices, the worries of business, and even the everyday difficulties and sufferings of life. They easily break down. Perhaps the triumphs of hygiene, medicine, and modern education are not so advantageous as we are led to believe....</p>
<p>"In spite of the immense sums of money expended on the education of the children and the young people of the United States, the intellectual elite does not seem to have increased. The average man and woman are, without any doubt, better educated and, superficially at least, more refined. The taste for reading is greater. More reviews and books are bought by the public than in former times. The number of people who are interested in science, letters, and art has grown. But most of them are chiefly attracted by the lowest form of literature and by the imitations of science and of art. It seems that the excellent hygienic conditions in which children are reared, and the care lavished upon them in school, have not raised their intellectual and moral standards. There may possibly be some antagonism between their physical development and their mental size. After all, we do not know whether a larger stature in a given race expresses a state of progress, as is assumed today, or of degeneracy. [C]hildren are much happier in the schools where compulsion has been suppressed, where they are allowed exclusively to study the subjects in which they are interested, where intellectual effort and voluntary attention are not exacted. What are the results of such an education? In modern civilization, the individual is characterized chiefly by a fairly great activity, entirely directed toward the practical side of life, by much ignorance, by a certain shrewdness, and by a kind of mental weakness which leaves him under the influence of the environment wherein he happens to be placed. It appears that intelligence itself gives way when character weakens....</p>
<p>"Modern civilization seems to be incapable of producing people endowed with imagination, intelligence, and courage. In practically every country there is a decrease in the intellectual and moral caliber of those who carry the responsibility of public affairs. [D]espite the immense hopes which humanity has placed in modern civilization, such a civilization has failed in developing men of sufficient intelligence and audacity to guide it along the dangerous road on which it is stumbling. Human beings have not grown so rapidly as the institutions sprung from their brains. It is chiefly the intellectual and moral deficiencies of the political leaders, and their ignorance, which endanger modern nations.</p>
<p>"Finally, we must ascertain how the new mode of life will influence the future of the race. The response of the women to the modifications brought about in the ancestral habits by industrial civilization has been immediate and decisive. The birth rate has at once fallen. This event has been felt most precociously and seriously in the social classes and in the nations which were the first to benefit from the progress brought about...by the applications of scientific discoveries. Voluntary sterility is not a new thing in the history of the world. It has already been observed in a certain period of past civilizations. It is a classical symptom. We know its significance.</p>
<p>"It is evident, then, that the changes produced in our environment by technology have influenced us profoundly. Their effects assume an unexpected character. They are strikingly different from those which were hoped for[.]" – pp. 17–22</p>
<p>"Modern civilization finds itself in a difficult position because it does not suit us. It has been erected without any knowledge of our real nature. It was born from the whims of scientific discoveries, from the appetites of men, their illusions, their theories, and their desires. Although constructed by our efforts, it is not adjusted to our size and shape.</p>
<p>"Obviously, science follows no plan. It develops at random. Its progress depends on fortuitous conditions, such as the birth of men of genius, the form of their mind, the direction taken by their curiosity. It is not at all actuated by a desire to improve the state of human beings. The discoveries responsible for industrial civilization were brought forth at the fancy of the scientists' intuitions and of the more or less casual circumstances of their careers....Men of science do not know where they are going. They are guided by chance, by subtle reasoning, by a sort of clairvoyance. [D]iscoveries are developed without any prevision of their consequences. These consequences, however, have revolutionized the world and made our civilization what it is.</p>
<p>"From the wealth of science we have selected certain parts. And our choice has in no way been influenced by a consideration of the higher interests of humanity. It has simply followed the direction of our natural tendencies. The principles of the greatest convenience and of the least effort, the pleasure procured by speed, change, and comfort, and also the need of escaping from ourselves, are the determining factors in the success of new inventions. But no one has ever asked himself how we would stand the enormous acceleration of the rhythm of life resulting from rapid transportation, telegraph, telephone, modern business methods, machines that write and calculate, and those that do all the housekeeping drudgery of former times. The tendency responsible for the universal adoption of the airplane, the automobile, the cinema, the telephone, the radio, and, in the near future, of television, is as natural as that which, in the night of the ages, led our ancestors to drink alcohol. Steam-heated houses, electric lighting, elevators, biological morals, and chemical adulteration of foodstuffs have been accepted solely because those innovations were agreeable and convenient. But no account whatever has been taken of their probable effect on human beings.</p>
<p>"In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected. Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost, in order that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as possible. It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings who run the machines, and without giving any consideration to the effects produced on the individuals and on their descendants by the artificial mode of existence imposed by the factory. The great cities have been built with no regard for us. The shape and dimensions of the skyscrapers depend entirely on the necessity of obtaining the maximum income per square foot of ground, and of offering to the tenants offices and apartments that please them. This caused the construction of gigantic buildings where too large masses of human beings are crowded together. Civilized men like such a way of living. While they enjoy the comfort and banal luxury of their dwelling, they do not realize that they are deprived of the necessities of life. The modern city consists of monstrous edifices and of dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gases, torn by the noise of the taxicabs, trucks, and trolleys, and thronged ceaselessly by great crowds. Obviously, it has not been planned for the good of its inhabitants.</p>
<p>"Our life is influenced in a large measure by commercial advertising. Such publicity is undertaken only in the interest of the advertisers and not of the consumers....Enormous amounts of money are spent for publicity. As a result, large quantities of alimentary and pharmaceutical products, at the least useless, and often harmful, have become a necessity for civilized men. In this manner the greediness of individuals, sufficiently shrewd to create a popular demand for the goods that they have for sale, plays a leading part in the modern world.</p>
<p>"However, the propaganda that directs our ways of living is not always inspired by selfish motives. [I]t often aims at the common good. But its effect may also be harmful when it emanates from people having a false or incomplete conception of the human being. For example, should physicians, by prescribing special foods, as most of them do, accelerate the growth of young children? In such an instance, their action is based on an incomplete knowledge of the subject. Are larger and heavier children better than smaller ones? Intelligence, alertness, audacity, and resistance to disease do not depend on the same factors as the weight of the body. The education dispensed by schools and universities consists chiefly in a training of the memory and of the muscles, in certain social manners, in a worship of athletics. Are such disciplines really suitable for modern men who need, above all other things, mental equilibrium, nervous stability, sound judgment, audacity, moral courage, and endurance?...Although physicians, educators, and hygienists most generously lavish their efforts for the benefit of mankind, they do not attain their goal. For they deal with schemata containing only a part of the reality. The same may be said of all those who substitute their desires, their dreams, or their doctrines for the concrete human being. These theorists build up civilizations which, although designed by them for man, fit only an incomplete or monstrous image of man. The systems of government, entirely constructed in the minds of doctrinaires, are valueless. The principles of the French Revolution, the visions of Marx and Lenin, apply only to abstract men. It must be clearly realized that the laws of human relations are still unknown. Sociology and economics are conjectural sciences—that is, pseudo-sciences.</p>
<p>"Thus, it appears that the environment, which science and technology have succeeded in developing for man, does not suit him, because it has been constructed at random, without regard for his true self." – pp. 23–27</p>
<p>"The sciences of inert matter have made immense progress, while those of living beings remain in a rudimentary state....The applications of scientific discoveries have transformed the material and mental worlds. These transformations exert on us a profound influence. Their unfortunate effect comes from the fact that they have been made without consideration for our nature. Our ignorance of ourselves has given to mechanics, physics, and chemistry the power to modify at random the ancestral forms of life.</p>
<p>"Man should be the measure of all. On the contrary, he is a stranger in the world that he has created. He has been incapable of organizing this world for himself, because he did not possess a practical knowledge of his own nature. Thus, the enormous advance gained by the sciences of inanimate matter over those of living things is one of the greatest catastrophes ever suffered by humanity. The environment born of our intelligence and our inventions is adjusted neither to our stature nor to our shape. We are unhappy. We degenerate morally and mentally. The groups and the nations in which industrial civilization has attained its highest development are precisely those which are becoming weaker. And whose return to barbarism is the most rapid. But they do not realize it. They are without protection against the hostile surroundings that science has built about them. In truth, our civilization, like those preceding it, has created certain conditions of existence which, for reasons still obscure, render life itself impossible. The anxiety and the woes of the inhabitants of the modern city arise from their political, economic, and social institutions, but, above all, from their own weakness. We are the victims of the backwardness of the sciences of life over those of matter.</p>
<p>"The only possible remedy for this evil is a much more profound knowledge of ourselves....We shall thus learn how to adapt ourselves to our surroundings, and how to change them, should a revolution become indispensable. In bringing to light our true nature, our potentialities, and the way to actualize them, this science will give us the explanation of our physiological weakening, and of our moral and intellectual diseases. We have no other means of learning the inexorable rules of our organic and spiritual activities, of distinguishing the prohibited from the lawful, of realizing that we are not free to modify, according to our fancy, our environment, and ourselves. Since the natural conditions of existence have been destroyed by modern civilization, the science of man has become the most necessary of all sciences." – pp. 27–29</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter II: The Science of Man</p>
<p>"The confusion in our knowledge of ourselves comes chiefly from the presence, among the positive facts, of the remains of scientific, philosophic, and religious systems. If our mind adheres to any system whatsoever, the aspect and the significance of concrete phenomena are changed. At all times, humanity has contemplated itself through glasses colored by doctrines, beliefs, and illusions. These false or inexact ideas must be discarded." – p. 34</p>
<p>"The best way to increase the intelligence of scientists would be to decrease their number. After all, the knowledge of man could be developed by a very small group of workers, provided that they were endowed with creative imagination and given powerful means for carrying out their researches. Great sums of money are wasted every year on scientific research...because those who are entrusted with this work do not generally possess the qualities necessary to the conquerors of new worlds. And also because the few individuals endowed with this exceptional power live under conditions precluding intellectual creation....Modern life is opposed to the life of the mind. However, men of science have to be mere units of a herd whose appetites are purely material and whose habits are entirely different from theirs. They vainly exhaust their strength and spend their time in the pursuit of the conditions demanded by the elaboration of thought. No one of them is wealthy enough to procure the isolation and the silence which in former times everybody could have for nothing, even in the largest cities. No attempt has so far been made to create, in the midst of the agitation of the new city, islands of solitude where meditation would be possible." – p. 49</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter III: Body and Physiological Activities</p>
<p>"It is possible, by means of proper diet and mode of living, to augment or diminish the stature of the individuals composing a nation. Likewise, to modify the quality of their tissues and probably also of their mind. We must not blindly change the dimensions of the human body in order to give it more beauty and muscular strength. In fact, seemingly unimportant alterations of our size and form could cause profound modifications of our physiological and mental activities. There is no advantage in increasing man's stature by artificial means. Alertness, endurance, and audacity do not grow with the volume of the body. Men of genius are not tall. Mussolini is of medium size, and Napoleon was short....</p>
<p>"The man of the Renaissance, whose life was a constant fight, who was exposed continuously to dangers and to inclemencies,...did not resemble modern man who lives in a steam-heated apartment, an air-conditioned office, a closed car, who contemplates absurd films, listens to his radio, and plays golf and bridge. Each epoch puts its seal on human beings. We begin to observe the new types created by motor-cars, cinemas, and athletics. Some, more frequent in Latin countries, are characterized by an adipose aspect, flabby tissues, discolored skin, protruding abdomen, thin legs, awkward posture, unintelligent and brutal face. Others appear, especially among Anglo-Saxons, and show broad shoulders, narrow waist, and birdlike cranium. Our form is molded by our physiological habits, and even by our usual thoughts. Its characteristics are partly due to the muscles running under the skin or along the bones. The size of these muscles depends on the exercise to which they are submitted. The beauty of the body comes from the harmonious development of the muscles and the skeleton. It reached the height of perfection at the epoch of Pericles, in the Greek athletes whom Phidias and his disciples immortalized in their statues. The shape of the face, the mouth, the cheeks, the eyelids, and the lines of the visage are determined by the habitual condition of the flat muscles, which move in the adipose tissue underlying the skin. And the state of those muscles depends on that of our mind....Unwittingly, our visage progressively models itself upon our states of consciousness. With the advance of age it becomes more and more pregnant with the feelings, the appetites, and the aspirations of the whole being. The beauty of youth comes from the natural harmony of the lineaments of the human face. That, so rare, of an old man, from his soul.</p>
<p>"The visage expresses still deeper things than the hidden activities of consciousness. In this open book one can read not only the vices, the virtues, the intelligence, the stupidity, the feelings, the most carefully concealed habits, of an individual, but also the constitution of his body, and his tendencies to organic and mental diseases. In fact, the aspect of bones, muscles, fat, skin, and hair depends on the nutrition of tissues. And the nutrition of tissues is regulated by the composition of blood plasma, that is, by the activity of the glandular and digestive systems. The state of the organs is revealed by the aspect of the body. The surface of the skin reflects the functional conditions of the endocrine glands, the stomach, the intestines, and the nervous system. It points out the morbid tendencies of the individual. In fact, people who belong to different morphological classes—for instance, to the cerebral, digestive, muscular, or respiratory types—are not liable to the same organic or mental diseases. There are great functional disparities between tall and spare men, and broad and short ones. The tall type, either asthenic or athletic, is predisposed to tuberculosis and to dementia praecox. The short, py[k]nic type, to cyclic mania, diabetes, rheumatism, and gout. In the diagnosis and prognosis of diseases, ancient physicians, quite rightly, attributed great importance to temperament, idiosyncrasies, and diatheses. Each man bears on his face the description of his body and his soul." – pp. 62–4</p>
<p>"Through its outer surface, the body enters into communication with all the things of the cosmic universe. [T]he skin is the dwelling-place of an immense quantity of small receptor organs, each of which registers, according to its own structure, the changes taking place in the environment.</p>
<p>"[E]verything reaching the brain has to enter the sensory organs—that is, to influence the nervous layer enveloping our body. The unknown agent of telepathic communications is perhaps the only exception to this rule. In clairvoyance, it looks as though the subject directly grasps the external reality without the help of the usual nerve channels. But such phenomena are rare. As a rule, the senses are the gateway through which the physical and psychological universe penetrates our organism. Thus, the quality of an individual partly depends on that of his surface. For the brain is molded by the continual messages it receives from the outer world. Therefore, the state of our envelope should not be modified thoughtlessly by new habits of life....</p>
<p>"Atmospheric air, before reaching the pulmonary alveoli, passes through the nose, the pharynx, the larynx, the trachea, and the bronchi, where it is moistened and freed from dust and microbes. But this natural protection is now insufficient because the air of cities has been polluted by coal dust, gasoline fumes, and bacteria set free by the multitude of human beings. Respiratory mucosa is much more delicate than skin. It is defenseless against strong irritants. Its fragility may cause entire populations to be exerminated by toxic gases in the great wars of the future....</p>
<p>"Thus, our body constitutes a closed universe, limited on one side by the skin, and on the other by the mucosas covering our inner surfaces. [T]he skin...accomplishes the miracle of being a barrier at once closed and open. For it does not protect our nervous system against our mental surroundings. We may be wounded, and even killed, by subtle enemies which, ignoring our anatomical frontiers, invade our consciousness, like aviators bombarding a city without taking any notice of its fortifications." – pp. 65–9</p>
<p>"Despite its minuteness, each cell is a very complex organism....Cells can now be filmed and magnified to such an extent that, when thrown on the screen, they are larger than a man. All their organs are then visible. In the middle of their body floats a kind of ovoid, elastic-walled balloon, the nucleus, which appears to be full of an inert and transparent jelly. In this jelly are seen two nucleoli, which slowly and unceasingly change their shape. Around the nucleus there is a great agitation of small particles. The movements are particularly active around a cluster of vesicles, corresponding to the organ called by anatomists the apparatus of Golgi or of Renaut, and whose functions are connected with the nutrition of the cell. Small and indistinct granules form a kind of whirlpool in that same district. Larger globules endlessly zigzag through the cell, going as far as the extremities of its mobile and transitory arms. But the most remarkable organs are long filaments, the mitochondrias, which resemble snakes or, in certain cells, short bacteria. Vesicles, granulations, globules, and filaments glide, dance, and undulate perpetually in the free spaces of the cell body....</p>
<p>"The genes are generally invisible. However, we know that they dwell in the chromosomes, those elongated bodies seen in the clear fluid of the nucleus when the cell is going to divide. At this moment the chromosomes form in a more or less distinct manner two groups. These groups move away from each other. At the same time, the entire cell shakes violently, tosses its contents in all directions, and divides into two parts. These parts, the daughter cells, withdraw from each other while still united by some elastic filaments. These filaments stretch and finally give way. Thus, two new elements of the organism have become individualized.</p>
<p>"Cells, like animals, belong to many different races....Epithelial cells...constitute the brain, the skin, the endocrine glands, etc. Connective cells build up the framework of the organs....Around them appear various substances, such as cartilage, calcium, fibrous tissue, elastic fibers, which give skeleton, muscles, blood vessels, and organs the solidity and elasticity indispensable to their functions. In addition, they metamorphose into contractile elements. These are the muscles of the heart, of the vessels, of the digestive apparatus, and also of the locomotive system. [C]onnective and epithelial cells['] movements are slow. They glide in their medium like oil spreading over the surface of water. They drag with them their nucleus, suspended in the fluid mass of their body. They differ markedly from the mobile cells. Those cells include the different types of leu[k]ocytes of the blood and of the tissues. Their motion is rapid. The leu[k]ocytes, characterized by the presence of several nuclei, resemble am[o]ebas. The lymphocytes crawl more slowly, like small worms. The larger ones, the monocytes, have the appearance of an octopus. They extrude long tentacles from their substance, and also surround themselves with a thin, undulating membrane. After having enveloped dead cells and microbes in the folds of this membrane, they voraciously devour them....</p>
<p>"Besides the activities which they usually display, [t]issue cells...possess others, generally hidden, but capable of becoming actual in response to certain changes of the medium. They are thus enabled to deal with the unforeseeable events taking place in the course of normal life and during illnesses....</p>
<p>"The existence of tissues cannot be conceived without that of a fluid medium....All spatial ordering of bodily structures is commanded by their food requirements. The architectural plan of each organ is inspired by the need of the cells to be immersed in a medium always rich in foodstuffs and never encumbered by waste products." – pp. 72–6</p>
<p>"The organic medium is a part of the tissues. [It] is composed of blood, flowing in the vessels, and of fluids, plasma or lymph, which filter through the walls of the capillaries into the tissues. There is a general organic medium, the blood, and regional media, consisting of the interstitial lymph of each organ. An organ may be compared to a pond completely filled with aquatic plants and fed by a small brook. The almost stagnant water is polluted by waste products, dead fragments of plants, and chemical substances set free by them. The degree of stagnation and of pollution of the water depends on the rapidity and the volume of the brook. Such is the case with interstitial lymph. In short, the composition of the regional media inhabited by the various cells of the body rests...on blood.</p>
<p>"The blood is a tissue, like all the other tissues....But [its] cells are not, like those of the other tissues, immobilized in a framework. They are suspended in a viscous liquid, the plasma. Blood is a moving tissue, finding its way into all parts of the body. It carries to each cell the proper nourishment. Acting, at the same time, as a main sewer that takes away the waste products set free by living tissues. It also contains chemical substances and cells capable of repairing organs wherever necessary.</p>
<p>"[B]lood plasma['s] red corpuscles are not living cells. They are tiny sacks full of hemoglobin. During their passage through the lungs they take on a load of oxygen which, a few instants later, they hand over to the greedy tissue cells....The white corpuscles, on the contrary, are living organisms. Sometimes they float in the blood stream, sometimes they escape from the capillary vessels by slipping through their walls into the tissues, and creep on the surface of the cells of the mucous membranes, of the intestines, of the glands, and of all the organs....</p>
<p>"Each organ, each tissue, creates its own medium at the expense of blood plasma. On the reciprocal adjustment of the cells and their medium are based the health or disease, strength or weakness, happiness or misery, of each one of us." – pp. 76–80</p>
<p>"Between the liquids composing the organic medium, and the world of tissues and organs, there are perpetual chemical exchanges. Nutritive activity is a mode of being of the cells, as fundamental as structure and form. As soon as their chemical exchanges, or metabolism, cease, the organs come into equilibrium with their medium and die. Nutrition is synonymous with existence. Living tissues crave oxygen and take it from blood. This means, in physicochemical terms, that they possess a high reducing potential, that a complex system of chemical substances and of ferments enables them to use atmospheric oxygen for energy-producing reactions. From the oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon supplied by sugars and fats, living cells procure the mechanical energy necessary for the maintenance of their structure and for their movements, the electrical energy manifesting itself in every change of the organic conditions, and the heat indispensable to chemical reactions and physiological processes. They also find in blood plasma the nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, etc., which they utilize for the construction of new cells, and in the processes of growth and repair. With the help of their ferments they divide the proteins, sugars, and fats contained in their medium into smaller and smaller fragments, and make use of the energy so liberated. They simultaneously build up, by means of energy-absorbing reactions, certain compounds more complex and having a higher energy potential, and they incorporate them in their own substance....</p>
<p>"Brain, liver, and endocrine glands need a great deal of chemical energy. But muscular exercise raises the intensity of the exchanges in the most marked manner. Nevertheless, all our activities cannot be expressed in chemical terms. Intellectual work, strange to say, does not increase metabolism. It seems to require no energy, or to consume a quantity of it too small to be detected by our present techniques. It is, indeed, an astonishing fact that human thought, which has transformed the surface of the earth, destroyed and built nations, discovered new universes in the immensity of the sidereal spaces, is elaborated without demanding a measurable amount of energy. The mightiest effort of our intelligence has incomparably less effect on metabolism then the contraction of the biceps when this muscle lifts a weight of a few grams. The ambition of Caesar, the meditation of Newton, the inspiration of Beethoven, the passionate contemplation of Pasteur, did not [appreciably] modify the chemical exchanges of these great men[.]</p>
<p>"[B]ears and raccoons lower their metabolism in winter, and fall into a state of slower life. Certain arthropodous animals, <em>Tardigrada,</em> completely stop their metabolism when they are dried. A condition of latent life is thus induced. After a lapse of several weeks, if one moistens these desiccated animals, they revive, and the rhythm of their life again becomes normal. We have not yet discovered the secret of producing such a suspension of nutrition in domestic animals and in man. It would be an evident advantage in cold countries if a state of latent life could be induced in sheep and cows for the duration of the winter. It might be possible, perhaps, to prolong life, cure certain diseases, and give higher opportunities to exceptionally gifted individuals, if human beings could be made to hibernate from time to time." – pp. 80–2</p>
<p>"In the course of the chemical exchanges, waste products, or catabolites are set free by tissues and organs. They tend to accumulate in the regional medium and to render it uninhabitable for the cells. The phenomenon of nutrition, therefore, requires the existence of apparatuses capable of assuring, through a rapid circulation of lymph and blood, the replacement of the nutritive substances used by the tissues, and the elimination of waste products. [L]iving tissues consume large amounts of oxygen and glucose. They also liberate into the inner medium considerable quantities of carbonic, lactic, hydrochloric, phosphoric acids, etc. [The equivalent of] a human body...cultivated <em>in vitro</em> would demand about two hundred thousand liters of nutritive fluid. It is on account of the marvelous perfection of the apparatuses responsible for the circulation of the blood, its wealth of nutritive substances, and the constant elimination of the waste products, that our tissues can live in [only] six or seven liters of fluid[.]</p>
<p>"The speed of circulation is sufficiently great to prevent the composition of blood from being modified by the catabolites of tissues. The acidity of plasma increases only after violent exercise. Each organ regulates the volume and the rapidity of its blood flow by means of vasomotor nerves. The interstitial lymph becomes acid as soon as circulation slackens or stops....</p>
<p>"Blood maintains its composition constant by perpetually passing through apparatuses where it is purified and recuperates the nutritive substances removed by the tissues. When venous blood returns from the muscles and the organs, it is full of carbonic acid and waste products of nutrition. [D]uring its passage through the lungs, blood gets rid of carbonic acid only. It still contains nonvolatile acids, and all other waste products of metabolism. Its purification is completed during its passage through the kidneys. The kidneys separate from the blood certain substances that are eliminated in the urine. They also regulate the quantity of salts indispensable to plasma in order that its osmotic tension may remain constant. The functioning of the kidneys and of the lungs is of a prodigious efficiency. It is the intense activity of these viscera that permits the fluid medium required by living tissues to be so limited, and the human body to possess such compactness and agility." – pp. 83–5</p>
<p>"The nutritive material carried by the blood to the tissues derives from...atmospheric air by the agency of the lungs, from the intestinal surface, and, finally, from the endocrine glands. All substances used by the organism, with the exception of oxygen, are supplied by the intestines[.] The food is successively treated by the saliva, the gastric juice, and the secretions of pancreas, liver, and intestinal mucosa. Digestive ferments divide the molecules of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats into smaller fragments. These fragments are capable of traversing the mucous membranes, which defend our inner frontier. They are then absorbed by the blood and lymph vessels of the intestinal mucosa, and penetrate the organic medium.</p>
<p>"[T]he chemical elements of the outer world act on each individual in different ways, according to the specific constitution of his intestinal mucosa. From these elements are built our tissues and our humors. Man is literally made from the dust of the earth. For this reason his physiological and mental activities are profoundly influenced by the geological constitution of the country where he lives, by the nature of the animals and plants on which he generally feeds. His structure and his functions depend also on the selection he makes of certain elements among the vegetal and animal foods at his disposal. The chiefs always had a diet quite different from that of their slaves. Those who fought, commanded, and conquered used chiefly meats and fermented drinks, whereas the peaceful, the weak, and the submissive were satisfied with milk, vegetables, fruits, and cereals. Our aptitudes and our destiny come, in some measure, from the nature of the chemical substances that construct our tissues. It seems as though human beings, like animals, could be artificially given certain bodily and mental characteristics if subjected from childhood to appropriate diets....</p>
<p>"The organism has the peculiar property of being its own builder, of manufacturing new compounds from the chemical substances of the blood. These compounds serve to feed certain tissues and to stimulate certain functions. This sort of creation of itself by itself is analogous to the training of the will by an effort of the will. Glands, such as the thyroid, the suprarenal, the pancreas, etc., synthe[s]ize from the chemicals in solution in the organic medium a number of new compounds, thyroxin, adrenalin, insulin, etc. They are true chemical transformers. In this way, substances indispensable for the nutrition of cells and organs, and for physiological and mental activities, are produced. Such a phenomenon is as strange as if certain parts of a motor should create the oil used by other parts of the machine, the substances accelerating the combustion of the fuel, and even the thoughts of the engineer. Obviously, tissues are unable to feed exclusively on the compounds supplied by the diet after their passage through the intestinal mucosa. These compounds have to be remolded by the glands. To these glands is due the existence of the body with its manifold activities.</p>
<p>"Man is, first of all, a nutritive process. He consists of a ceaseless motion of chemical substances. One can compare him to the flame of a candle, or to the fountains playing in the gardens of Versailles. Those beings, made of burning gases or of water, are both permanent and transitory. Their existence depends on a stream of gas or of liquid. Like ourselves, they change according to the quality and the quantity of the substances which animate them. As a large river coming from the external world and returning to it, matter perpetually flows through all the cells of the body. During its passing, it yields to tissues the energy they need, and also the chemicals which build the temporary and fragile structures of our organs and humors. The corporeal substratum of all human activities originates from the inanimate world and, sooner or later, goes back to it. Our organism is made from the same elements as lifeless things. Therefore, we should not be surprised, as some modern physiologists still are, to find at work within our own self the usual laws of physics and of chemistry as they exist in the cosmic world. Since we are parts of the material universe, the absence of those laws is unthinkable." – pp. 85–9</p>
<p>"Testicles and ovaries possess functions of overwhelming importance. They generate male or female cells. Simultaneously, they secrete into the blood certain substances, which impress the male or female characteristics on our tissues, humors, and consciousness, and give to all our functions their character of intensity. The testicle engenders audacity, violence, and brutality, the qualities distinguishing the fighting bull from the ox drawing the plow along the furrow. The ovary affects the organism of the woman in an analogous manner....</p>
<p>"The differences existing between man and woman do not come from the particular form of the sexual organs, the presence of the uterus, from gestation, or from the mode of education. They are of a more fundamental nature. They are caused by the very structure of the tissues and by the impregnation of the entire organism with specific chemical substances secreted by the ovary. Ignorance of these fundamental facts has led promoters of feminism to believe that both sexes should have the same education, the same powers, and the same responsibilities. In reality, woman differs profoundly from man. Every one of the cells of her body bears the mark of her sex. The same is true of her organs and, above all, of her nervous system. Physiological laws are as inexorable as those of the sidereal world. They cannot be replaced by human wishes. We are obliged to accept them just as they are. Women should develop their aptitudes in accordance with their own nature, without trying to imitate the males. Their part in the progress of civilization is higher than that of men. They should not abandon their specific functions.</p>
<p>"[F]emales, at any rate among mammals, seem only to attain their full development after one or more pregnancies. Women who have no children are not so well balanced and become more nervous than the others. In short, the presence of the fetus, whose tissues greatly differ from hers because they are young and are, in part, those of her husband, acts profoundly on the woman. The importance to her of the generative function has not been sufficiently recognized. Such function is indispensable to her optimum development. It is, therefore, absurd to turn women against maternity. The same intellectual and physical training, and the same ambitions, should not be given to young girls as to boys. Educators should pay very close attention to the organic and mental peculiarities of the male and the female, and to their natural functions. Between the two sexes there are irrevocable differences. And it is imperative to take them into account in constructing the civilized world." – pp. 89–92</p>
<p>"Through his nervous system man records the stimuli impinging upon him from his environment. His organs and muscles supply the appropriate answer....The sympathetic system, autonomous and unconscious, controls the organs. Th[is] second system depends on the first. This double apparatus gives to the complexity of our body the simplicity required for its action on the outside world.</p>
<p>"The central system consists of the brain, the cerebellum, and the spinal cord....It is composed of a soft, whitish, extremely fragile substance, filling the skull and the spinal column....An immense number of nervous fibers intersect the organism in every direction. Their microscopic endings creep between the cells of the skin, around the acini of the glands and their excretory ducts, in the coat of the arteries and the veins, into the contractile envelopes of the stomach and the intestines, on the surface of the muscular fibers, etc. They spread their delicate network through the whole body.</p>
<p>"[H]eart, stomach, and intestines are quite independent of our will. However, if we pay too much attention to them, their automatism may be disturbed....</p>
<p>"Pavlov conditional reflexes take place in the cerebral cortex....</p>
<p>"Muscles...function[ly] are...a part of the brain. It is with their help and that of the bones that human intelligence has put its mark on the world. Man has been given power over his environment by the shape of his skeleton. The limbs consist of articulated levers, composed of three segments. The upper limb is mounted upon a mobile plate, the shoulder blade, while the osseous girdle, the pelvis, to which the lower limb is jointed, is almost rigid and immobile. The motive muscles lie along the bones. Near the extremity of the arm, these muscles resolve into tendons, which move the fingers and the hand itself. The hand is a masterpiece. Simultaneously, it feels and it acts. It acts as if endowed with sight. Owing to the unique properties of its skin, its tactile nerves, its muscles, and its bones, the hand is capable of manufacturing arms and tools. We never would have acquired our mastery over matter without the aid of our fingers, those five small levers, each composed of three articulated segments, which are mounted upon the metacarpus and the bones of the wrist. The hand adapts itself to the roughest work as well as to the most delicate. It has wielded with equal skill the flint knife of the primitive hunter, the blacksmith's hammer, the woodcutter's ax, the farmer's plow, the sword of the medieval knight, the controls of the modern aviator, the artist's brush, the journalist's pen, the threads of the silk-weaver. It is able to kill and to bless, to steal and to give, to sow grain on the surface of the fields and to throw grenades in the trenches. The elasticity, strength, and adaptiveness of the lower limbs, whose pendulum-like oscillations determine walking and running, have never been equaled by our machines[.] The three levers, articulated on the pelvis, adapt themselves with marvelous suppleness to all postures, efforts, and movements....</p>
<p>"There is another organic system composed of cerebral substance, nerves, muscles, and cartilages, which, to the same degree as the hand, has determined the superiority of man over all living beings. It consists of the tongue and the larynx, and their nervous apparatus. Owing to this system, we are capable of expressing our thoughts, of communicating with our fellow men by means of sounds. Were it not for language, civilization would not exist. The use of speech, like that of the hand, has greatly aided the development of the brain. The cerebral parts of the hand, the tongue, and the larynx extend over a large area of the brain surface." – pp. 92–8</p>
<p>"Organs are provided with sensitive nerves. They send frequent messages to the nervous centers[.] When a man...feels that he is in danger, that death approaches, such warning probably comes to him from the center of visceral consciousness. And visceral consciousness is rarely mistaken. Of course, in the inhabitants of the new city, sympathetic functions are often as ill balanced as mental activities. The autonomous system seems to become less capable of protecting the heart, stomach, intestines, and glands from the worries of existence. Against the dangers and brutality of primitive life it effectively defended the organs. But it is not strong enough to resist the constant shocks of modern life." – pp. 102–3</p>
<p>"[I]solated red and white corpuscles [can] manage to construct a segment of circulatory apparatus[.] The spontaneous tendency toward formation of the organs by their constitutive cells, like the social aptitude of the insects,...cannot be explained in the light of our present concepts.</p>
<p>"An organ builds itself by techniques very foreign to the human mind....An organ develops by means such as those attributed to fairies in the tales told to children in bygone times. It is engendered by cells which, to all appearances, have a knowledge of the future edifice[.]</p>
<p>"These methods used by the organism do not have the simplicity of ours. They appear strange to us. Our intelligence does not encounter itself in the intraorganic world....For the moment, we cannot understand the mode of organization of our body and its nutritive, nervous, and mental activities. [T]he childish physicochemical conceptions of the human being, in which so many physiologists and physicians still believe, have to be definitely abandoned. We must also dismiss the philosophical and humanistic dreams of physicists and astronomers. Following many others, Jeans believes and teaches that God, creator of the sidereal universe, is a mathematician. If that is so, the material world, the living beings, and man have been created, obviously, by different Gods. How naive our speculations! Our knowledge of the human body is, in truth, most rudimentary. It is impossible, for the present, to grasp its constitution. We must, then, be content with the scientific observation of our organic and mental activities. And, without any other guide, march forward into the unknown." – pp. 107–9</p>
<p>"Our body is extremely robust. It adapts itself to all climates, arctic cold as well as tropical heat. It also resists starvation, weather inclemencies, fatigue, hardships, overwork. Man is the hardiest of all animals, and the white races, builders of our civilization, the hardiest of all races. [M]an['s] endurance comes...from...his tissues'...property of growing instead of wearing out, from the strange power displayed by the organism in meeting a new situation by adaptive changes. Resistance to disease, work, and worries, capacity for effort, and nervous equilibrium are the signs of the superiority of a man. Such qualities characterized the founders of our civilization in the United States as well as in Europe. The great white races owe their success to the perfection of their nervous system—nervous system which although very delicate and excitable, can, however, be disciplined. To the exceptional qualities of their tissues and consciousness is due the predominance over the rest of the world of the peoples of western Europe, and of their swarms in the United States.</p>
<p>"We are ignorant of the nature of this organic robustness, of this nervous and mental superiority. Must they be attributed to the structure of the cells, to the chemical substances they synthe[s]ize, to the mode of integration of the organs by the humors and nerves? We do not know. These qualities are hereditary. They have existed in our people for many centuries. But even in the greatest and richest nations they may disappear. The history of past civilizations shows that such a calamity is possible. But it does not explain clearly its genesis. Obviously, the resistance of the body and the mind must be conserved at all costs in a great nation. Mental and nervous strength is infinitely more important than muscular strength. The descendant of a great race, if he has not degenerated, is endowed with natural immunity to fatigue and to fear. He does not think about his health or his security. He is not interested in medicine, and ignores physicians. He does not believe that the Golden Age will arrive when physiological chemists have obtained in a pure state all vitami[n]s and secretory products of endocrine glands. He looks upon himself as destined to fight, to love, to think, and to conquer. He knows that safety should not be first. His action on his environment is as essentially simple as the leap of a wild animal upon its prey. No more than the animal does he feel his structural complexity....</p>
<p>"Many people, although they are not ill, are not in good health. Perhaps the quality of some of their tissues is defective....Such individuals feel profoundly these organic deficiencies, which bring them much misery. The future discoverer of a method for inducing tissues and organs to develop harmoniously will be a greater benefactor of humanity than Pasteur himself. For he will present man with the most precious of all gifts, with an almost divine offering, the aptitude for happiness.</p>
<p>"The weakening of the body has many causes. It is well known that the quality of tissues is lowered by too poor or too rich a diet, by alcoholism, syphilis, consanguineous unions, and also by prosperity and leisure. Wealth is as dangerous as ignorance and poverty. Civilized men degenerate in tropical climates. On the contrary, they thrive in temperate or cold countries. They need a way of life involving constant struggle, mental and muscular effort, physiological and moral discipline, and some privations. Such conditions inure the body to fatigue and to sorrows. They protect it against disease, and especially against nervous diseases. They irresistibly drive humanity to the conquest of the external world." – pp. 109–112</p>
<p>"[M]an is...subject to the organic and functional disorders brought...by excess of food, insufficient physical exercise, and overwork. The lack of equilibrium and the neuroses of the visceral nervous system bring about many affections of the stomach and the intestines. Heart diseases become more frequent. And also diabetes. The maladies of the central nervous system are innumerable. In the course of his life, every individual suffers from some attack of neurasthenia, of nervous depression, engendered by constant agitation, noise, and worries. Although modern hygiene has made human existence far safer, longer, and more pleasant, diseases have not been mastered. They have simply changed in nature.</p>
<p>"This change comes undoubtedly from the elimination of infections. But it may be due also to modifications in the constitution of tissues under the influence of the new modes of life. The organism seems to have become more susceptible to degenerative diseases. It is continually subjected to nervous and mental shocks, to toxic substances manufactured by disturbed organs, to those contained in food and air. It is also affected by the deficiencies of the essential physiological and mental functions. The staple foods may not contain the same nutritive substances as in former times. Mass production has modified the composition of wheat, eggs, milk, fruit, and butter, although these articles have retained their familiar appearance. Chemical fertilizers, by increasing the abundance of the crops without replacing all the exhausted elements of the soil, have indirectly contributed to change the nutritive value of cereal grains and of vegetables. Hens have been compelled, by artificial diet and mode of living, to enter the ranks of mass producers. Has not the quality of their eggs been modified? The same question may be asked about milk, because cows are now confined to the stable all the year round, and are fed on manufactured provender....We cannot understand the characteristics of...the degenerative diseases, the diseases resulting from civilization[,] before having considered the nature of our mental activities. In disease as in health, body and consciousness, although distinct, are inseparable." – pp. 115–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter IV: Mental Activities</p>
<p>"Intelligence projects its visions on the perpetually changing screen of our affective states, of our sorrows or our joys, of our love or our hatred. To study this aspect of ourselves, we separate it artificially from an indivisible wholeness....Everyone knows that love, hate, anger, and fear are capable of bringing confusion even to logic. In order to manifest themselves, these states of consciousness require certain modifications of the chemical exchanges. The more intense the emotional disturbances, the more active become these exchanges. We know that, on the contrary, metabolism is not modified by intellectual work. Affective functions are very near the physiological. They give to each human being his temperament. Temperament changes from one individual to the other, from one race to the other. It is a mixture of mental, physiological, and structural characteristics. It is man himself. It is responsible for his narrowness, his mediocrity, or his strength. What factors bring about the weakening of temperament in certain social groups and in certain nations? It seems that the violence of the emotional moods diminishes when wealth increases, when education is generalized, when diet becomes more elaborate. At the same time, affective functions are observed to separate from intelligence, and to exaggerate unduly certain of their aspects. The forms of life, of education, or of food brought by modern civilization perhaps tend to give us the qualities of cattle, or to develop our emotional impulses inharmoniously....</p>
<p>"Today [m]oral sense...may be observed, even in a state of high development, in certain social groups and in certain countries. It has manifested itself at all epochs. In the course of the history of mankind its importance has been demonstrated to be fundamental. It is related both to intelligence and to esthetic and religious senses....In highly civilized beings, will and intelligence are one and the same function. From will and intelligence come all moral values.</p>
<p>"Moral sense, like intellectual activity, apparently depends on certain structural and functional states of the body. These states result from the immanent constitution of our tissues and our minds, and also from factors which have acted upon us during our development. [H]uman beings possess innate tendencies to selfishness, meanness, or pity. These tendencies appear very early in life. They are obvious to any careful observer....</p>
<p>"The definition of good and evil...is related to basic necessities of individual and social life. However, it is somewhat arbitrary. But at each epoch and in each country it should be very clearly defined and identical for all classes of individuals. The good is equivalent to justice, charity, beauty. The evil, to selfishness, meanness, ugliness. In modern civilization, the theoretical rules of conduct are based upon the remains of Christian morals. No one obeys them. Modern man has rejected all discipline of his appetites. However, biological and industrial morals have no practical value, because they are artificial and take into consideration only one aspect of the human being. They ignore some of our most essential activities. They do not give to man an armor strong enough to protect him against his own inherent vices....</p>
<p>"Everyone should realize the necessity of selecting the right and avoiding the wrong, of submitting himself to such necessity by an effort of his own will. The Roman Catholic Church, in its deep understanding of human psychology, has given to moral activities a far higher place than to intellectual ones. [M]oral sense is more important than intelligence. When it disappears from a nation the whole social structure slowly commences to crumble away. In biological research, we have not given so far to moral activities the importance that they deserve. Moral sense must be studied in as positive a manner as intelligence....</p>
<p>"Moral beauty is an exceptional and very striking phenomenon. He who has contemplated it but once never forgets its aspect. This form of beauty is far more impressive than the beauty of nature and of science. It gives to those who possess its divine gifts, a strange, an inexplicable power. It increases the strength of intellect. It establishes peace among men. Much more than science, art, and religious rites, moral beauty is the basis of civilization." – pp. 126–31</p>
<p>"In the history of the saints, one reads descriptions of...levitations. [S]everal of the Christian mystics have manifested this strange phenomenon. The subject, absorbed in his prayer,...gently rises above the ground. But it has not been possible so far to bring these extraordinary facts into the field of scientific observation....</p>
<p>"In all countries, at all times, people have believed in the existence of miracles, in the more or less rapid healing of the sick at...certain sanctuaries. But after the great impetus of science during the nineteenth century, such belief completely disappeared....However, in view of the facts observed during the last fifty years this attitude cannot be sustained. The most important cases of miraculous healing have been recorded by the Medical Bureau of Lourdes....The miracle is chiefly characterized by an extreme acceleration of the processes of organic repair. There is...no need for the patient himself to pray....It is sufficient that some one around him be in a state of prayer. Such facts are of profound significance. They show the reality of certain relations, of still unknown nature, between psychological and organic processes. They prove the objective importance of the spiritual activities[.] They open to man a new world." – pp. 147–50</p>
<p>"The psychological state of the social group determines, in a large measure, the number, the quality, and the intensity of the manifestations of individual consciousness. If the social environment is mediocre, intelligence and moral sense fail to develop. These activities may become thoroughly vitiated by bad surroundings. We are immersed in the habits of our epoch, like tissue cells in the organic fluids. Like these cells, we are incapable of defending ourselves against the influence of the community....</p>
<p>"Formal teaching reaches intelligence alone. Moral sense, beauty, and mysticity are learned only when present in our surroundings and part of our daily life....</p>
<p>"Civilization has not succeeded, so far, in creating an environment suitable to mental activities. The low intellectual and spiritual value of most human beings is due largely to deficiencies of their psychological atmosphere. The supremacy of matter and the dogmas of industrial religion have destroyed culture, beauty, and morals, as they were understood by the Christian civilization, mother of modern science....The intellectual classes have been debased by the immense spread of newspapers, cheap literature, radios, and cinemas....School children and students form their minds on the silly programs of public entertainments. Social environment, instead of favoring the growth of intelligence, opposes it with all its might....</p>
<p>"Moral sense is almost completely ignored by modern society. We have, in fact, suppressed its manifestations....Ministers have rationalized religion. They have destroyed its mystical basis....In their half-empty churches they vainly preach a weak morality. They are content with the part of policemen, helping in the interest of the wealthy to preserve the framework of present society. Or, like politicians, they flatter the appetites of the crowd.</p>
<p>"Man is powerless against such psychological attacks. He necessarily yields to the influence of his group. If one lives in the company of criminals or fools, one becomes a criminal or a fool. Isolation is the only hope of salvation." – pp. 150–4</p>
<p>"It is remarkable that mental diseases by themselves are more numerous than all the other diseases put together. Hospitals for the insane are full to overflowing, and unable to receive all those who should be restrained. [S]everal hundred thousand persons, not mentioned in any statistics, are affected with psychoneuroses. These figures show how great is the fragility of the consciousness of civilized men, and how important for modern society is the problem of mental health. The diseases of the mind are a serious menace. They...are to be feared, not only because they increase the number of criminals, but chiefly because they profoundly weaken the dominant white races....The frequency of neurosis and psychosis is doubtless the expression of a very grave defect of modern civilization. The new habits of existence have certainly not improved our mental health....</p>
<p>"Feeble-mindedness and insanity are perhaps the price of industrial civilization, and of the resulting changes in our ways of life....We must, therefore, ascertain how modern life acts upon consciousness....</p>
<p>"The factors promoting the development of idiocy and insanity are of great complexity. Dementia praecox and circular insanity manifest themselves more especially in the social groups where life is restless and disordered, food too elaborate or too poor, and syphilis frequent. And also when the nervous system is hereditarily unstable, when moral discipline has been suppressed, when selfishness, irresponsibility, and dispersion are customary. There are probably some relations between these factors and the genesis of psychoses. The modern habits of living hide a fundamental defect. In the environment created by technology, our most specific functions develop incompletely. Despite the marvels of scientific civilization, human personality tends to dissolve." – pp. 154–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter V: Inward Time</p>
<p>"[A]n individual and a nation cannot be placed in the same temporal scale. Social problems should not be considered in the same light as individual ones. They evolve very slowly. Our observations and our experiences are always too short. For this reason, they have little significance. The results of a modification in the material and mental conditions of the existence of a population rarely manifest themselves in less than a century. However, the investigation of the great biological questions is confined to isolated individuals. There is no provision for the continuation of their work when they die. In a like manner, scientific and political institutions are conceived in terms of individual duration. The Roman Catholic Church is the only organization to have realized that the progress of humanity is very slow, that the passing of a generation is an insignificant event in the history of the world....The advent of scientific civilization necessitates a fresh discussion of all fundamental subjects. We are witnessing our own moral, intellectual, and social failure. We have been living under the delusion that democracies would survive through the weak and short-sighted efforts of the ignorant. We begin to understand that they are decaying. Problems involving the future of the great races demand a solution. It is now imperative to prepare for distant events, to mold young generations with a different ideal. The government of nations by men who estimate time in function of their own duration leads, as we well know, to confusion and to failure. We have to stretch our temporal outlook beyond ourselves....</p>
<p>"Women should be mothers when they are still very young. Thus, they would not be isolated from their children by a temporal gap too great to be bridged, even by love." – pp. 186–8</p>
<p>"The molding of the organism according to a selected pattern must take into account the nature of duration, the constitution of our temporal dimension. Our interventions have to be made in the cadence of inner time. Man is like a viscous liquid flowing into the physical continuum. He cannot instantaneously change his direction. We should not endeavor to modify his mental and structural form by rough procedures, as one shapes a statue of marble by blows of the hammer....No profound changes of the body as a whole can be obtained rapidly. Our action must blend with the physiological processes, substratum of inner time, by following their own rhythm. [T]he mental factors act only in a progressive manner. Our interventions in the building up of body and consciousness have their full effects only when they conform to the laws of our duration....</p>
<p>"Under the influence of environment, personality may spread and become very thin, or concentrate and acquire great strength. The growth of personality involves a constant trimming of our self. At the beginning of life, man is endowed with vast potentialities. He is limited in his development only by the extensible frontiers of his ancestral predispositions. But at each instant he has to make a choice....In our infancy we carry within ourselves numerous virtual beings, who die one by one. In our old age, we are surrounded by an escort of those we could have been, of all our aborted potentialities. Every man is a fluid that becomes solid, a treasure that grows poorer, a history in the making, a personality that is being created. And our progress, or our disintegration, depends on physical, chemical, and physiological factors, on viruses and bacteria, on psychological influences, and, finally, on our own will. We are constantly being made by our environment and by our self." – pp. 189–90</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter VI: Adaptive Functions</p>
<p>"When...injured[,] the organism immediately adapts itself to such a new situation. Everything happens as if a series of measures, some immediate, some delayed, were taken by the body in order to repair the lesions of the tissues....They all turn toward the end to be attained, the reconstruction of the destroyed structures....</p>
<p>"Tissues become what they have to be in order to accomplish the common task. For example, a shred of muscle close to the focus of fracture metamorphoses into cartilage....Later, cartilage transforms into osseous tissue....Each phenomenon results from the preceding one. [T]he actualization within the cells of certain potential properties...give[s] to anatomical structures the power to regenerate...in a manner consistent with the interests of the whole body.</p>
<p>"[A] wound only cicatrizes if cicatrization is advantageous to the body. When the tissues uncovered by the extirpation of the skin are completely protected against microbes, air, and other causes of irritation, regeneration does not take place. In fact, under such conditions it is useless. The wound, therefore, does not heal and remains in its initial state. Such a state is maintained as long as the tissues are guarded against the attacks of the outer world as perfectly as they would be by the regenerated skin. As soon as some blood, a few microbes, or an ordinary dressing is allowed to come in contact with the damaged surface and to irritate it, the process of healing starts and continues irresistably until cicatrization is complete.</p>
<p>"Skin...consists of superposed sheets of flat cells, the epithelial cells. These cells lie on the dermis—that is, on a soft and elastic layer of connective tissue containing many small blood vessels. When a piece of skin is removed, the bottom of the wound is seen to consist of fatty tissue and muscles. After three or four days its surface becomes smooth, glistening, and red. Then it abruptly begins to decrease with great rapidity. This phenomenon is due to a sort of contraction of the new tissue covering the wound. At the same time, the skin cells commence to glide over the red surface as a white edge. Finally, they cover its entire area. A definitive scar is formed. This scar is due to the collaboration of two types of tissue, the connective tissue filling the wound, and the epithelial cells, which advance over its surface from the borders. Connective tissue is responsible for the contraction of the wound. Epithelial tissue, for the membrane that ultimately covers it. The progressive decrease of the wounded area in the course of repair is expressed by an exponential curve. However, if one prevents either the epithelial tissue or the connective tissue from accomplishing its respective tasks, the curve does not change. It does not change because the deficiency of one of the factors of repair is compensated by the acceleration of the other. Obviously, the progress of the phenomenon depends on the end to be attained. If one of the regenerating mechanisms fails, it is replaced by the other. The result alone is invariable. And not the procedure. In a like manner, after a hemorrhage, arterial pressure and blood volume are reestablished by two converging mechanisms. On one side, by contraction of the blood vessels and by diminution of their capacity. On the other side, by the bringing of a quantity of liquid from the tissues and the digestive apparatus. But each of these mechanisms is capable of compensating the failure of the other." – pp. 199–203</p>
<p>"The knowledge of the processes of healing has brought modern surgery into being. Surgeons would not be able to treat wounds if adaptation did not exist. They have no influence on the healing mechanisms. They content themselves with guiding the spontaneous activity of those mechanisms. For example, they manage to bring the edges of a wound, or the ends of a broken bone, into such a position that regeneration takes place without defective scar and deformity. [T]hey have to make long incisions and extensive wounds. [T]he organism [is] capable of making its own repairs. Surgery is based on the existence of this phenomenon. [I]t has surpassed the most ambitious hopes of medicine of former times....</p>
<p>"The reason behind such success is simple. Surgery has merely learned that the normal processes of healing must not be hindered. It has succeeded in preventing microbes from getting into wounds. Operations, before the discoveries of Pasteur and Lister, were always followed by invasion of bacteria. Such attacks caused suppuration, gaseous grangrene, and infection of the whole body. They often ended in death. Modern techniques have practically eliminated microbes from operative wounds. In this manner they save the life of the patient and lead him to a rapid recovery. For microbes have the power to obstruct or delay adaptive processes and repair. As soon as wounds were protected against bacteria[,] surgery began to grow....</p>
<p>"This success came from the clear understanding of certain adaptive phenomena. It is indispensable, not only to preserve the wounds from infection, but also to respect, in the course of operative handling, their structural and functional conditions. Tissues are endangered [even] by most antiseptic substances. They must not be crushed by forceps, compressed by apparatuses, or pulled about by the fingers of a brutal operator. Halsted and the surgeons of his school have shown how delicately wounds must be treated if they are to keep intact their regenerative power. The result of an operation depends both on the state of the tissues and on that of the patient. Modern techniques take into consideration every factor capable of modifying physiological and mental activities." – pp. 203–5</p>
<p>"The individual does not generally get without effort the position he covets in the group of which he is a member. He wants wealth, knowledge, power, pleasures. He is driven by his greed, his ambition, his curiosity, his sexual appetite. But he finds himself in an environment always indifferent, sometimes hostile. He quickly realizes that he must fight for what he wants. His mode of reaction to his social surroundings depends on his specific constitution. Some people become accommodated to the world by conquering it. Others by escaping from it. Still others refuse to accept its rules. The natural attitude of the individual toward his fellow men is one of strife. Consciousness responds to the enmity of the environment by an effort directed against it. Intelligence and cunning then develop, as well as the desire to learn, the will to work, to possess, and to dominate. The passion for conquest...led...Mussolini to the building up of a great nation[.] The same spirit drives the modern human being to robbery, to murder, and to the great financial and economic enterprises characterizing our civilization. But its impulse also builds hospitals, laboratories, universities, and churches. It impels men to fortune and to death[.] But never to happiness.</p>
<p>"The second mode of adaptation is flight. Some abandon the struggle and descend to a social level where competition is no longer necessary. They become factory workers, proletarians. Others take refuge within their own self. At the same time they can adapt themselves, in some measure, to the social group, and even conquer it through the superiority of their intelligence. But they do not fight. They are members of the community only in appearance. In fact, they live in an inner world of their own." – pp. 219–21</p>
<p>"Certain forms of modern life lead directly to degeneration. There are social conditions as fatal to white men as are warm and humid climates. We react to poverty, anxieties, and sorrows by working and struggling. We can stand tyranny, revolution, and war. But we are not able to fight successfully against misery or prosperity. The individual and the race are weakened by extreme poverty. Wealth is just as dangerous. Nevertheless, there are still families which, in spite of having had money and power for centuries, have kept their strength. But, in former times, power and money derived from the ownership of land. To hold the land required struggle, administrative ability, and leadership. This indispensable effort prevented degeneration. Today, wealth does not bring in its train any responsibility toward the community. Irresponsibility, even in the absence of wealth, is harmful. In the poor, as well as in the rich, leisure engenders degeneration. Cinemas, concerts, radios, automobiles, and athletics are no substitutes for intelligent work. We are far from having solved this momentous problem of idleness created by prosperity, modern machinery, or unemployment. By imposing leisure upon man, scientific civilization has brought him great misfortune. We are as incapable of fighting the consequences of indolence and irresponsibility as cancer and mental diseases." – pp. 222–3</p>
<p>"The usage of the digestive functions has...been modified. Hard foods, such as stale bread or tough meat, are no longer permitted in our diet. [J]aws are made to grind resistant matter, and...the stomach is constructed to digest natural products. [C]hildren are fed chiefly on soft, mashed, pulped food, and milk. Their jaws, their teeth, and the muscles of their face are not subjected to sufficiently hard work. It is the same with the muscles and glands of their digestive apparatus. The frequency, the regularity, and the abundance of meals render useless an adaptive function that has played an important part in the survival of human races, the adaptation to lack of food. In primitive life men were subjected to long periods of fasting. When want did not compel them to starve, they voluntarily deprived themselves of food. All religions have insisted upon the necessity of fasting. Privation of food at first brings about a sensation of hunger, occasionally some nervous stimulation, and later a feeling of weakness. But it also determines certain hidden phenomena which are far more important. The sugar of the liver, the fat of the subcutaneous deposits, are mobilized, and also the proteins of the muscles and the glands. All the organs sacrifice their own substances in order to maintain blood, heart, and brain in a normal condition. Fasting purifies and profoundly modifies our tissues." – pp. 228–9</p>
<p>"As optimum development requires the activity of all organic systems, a decrease in the value of man necessarily follows the decay of the adaptive functions. [M]odern men need more nervous resistance, intelligence, and moral energy than muscular power. The acquisition of these qualities calls for effort, struggle, and discipline. It also demands that human beings should not be exposed to conditions of existence to which they are unadaptable. Apparently, there is no adaptation possible to ceaseless agitation, intellectual dispersion, alcoholism, precocious sexual excesses, noise, polluted air, and adulterated foods. If such is the case, we must modify our mode of life and our environment, even at the cost of a destructive revolution. After all, the purpose of civilization is not the progress of science and machines, but the progress of man." – pp. 232–3</p>
<p>"Any change in the environment elicits a response of all physiological and mental processes. Those movements of the functional systems...are the agents of his formation and of his progress. They are endowed with a property of capital importance. The property of being easily modified by certain chemical, physical, and psychological factors, which we know well how to handle. We can use these factors as tools, and thus successfully intervene in the development of human activities. In fact, the knowledge of the mechanisms of adaptation gives man the power of renovating and of constructing himself." – p. 234</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter VII: The Individual</p>
<p>"Individuals have been separated into intellectual, sensitive, and voluntary types. In each category, there are the hesitating, the annoying, the impulsive, the incoherent, the weak, the dispersed, the restless, and also the reflective, the self-controlled, the honest, the well balanced. Among the intellectual, several distinct groups are observed. The broad-minded, whose ideas are numerous, who assimilate, coordinate, and unite a most varied knowledge. The narrow-minded, incapable of grasping vast ensembles, but who master perfectly the details of one subject." – p. 243</p>
<p>"[C]ertain individuals...are able to spread across space and time and to grasp concrete reality. [L]ike the great prophets of science, art, and religion, they often succeed in apprehending in the abysses of the unknown, elusive and sublime beings called mathematical abstractions, Platonic Ideas, absolute beauty, God." – p. 262</p>
<p>"The intellectual weakness observed in schools and universities, and in the population in general, comes from developmental disorders, and not from hereditary defects. When these flabby, silly young people are removed from their customary environment and placed in more primitive conditions of life, they sometimes change for the better and recover their virility. The atrophic character of the products of our civilization, therefore, is not incurable. It is far from being always the expression of a racial degeneration.</p>
<p>"Among the multitude of weak and defective there are, however, some completely developed men. These men, when closely observed, appear to be superior to the classical schemata. In fact, the individual whose potentialities are all actualized does not resemble the human being pictured by the specialists. He is not the fragments of consciousness which psychologists attempt to measure. He is not to be found in the chemical reactions, the functional processes, and the organs which physicians have divided between themselves. Neither is he the abstraction whose concrete manifestations the educators try to guide. He is almost completely wanting in the rudimentary being manufactured by social workers, prison wardens, economists, sociologists, and politicians. In fact, he never appears to a specialist unless this specialist is willing to look at him as a whole. He is much more than the sum of all the facts accumulated by the particular sciences. We never apprehend him in his entirety. He contains vast, unknown regions. His potentialities are almost inexhaustible. Like the great natural phenomena, he is still unintelligible. When one contemplates him in the harmony of all his organic and spiritual activities, one experiences a profound esthetic emotion. Such an individual is truly the creator and the center of the universe." – pp. 268–9</p>
<p>"Modern society ignores the individual. It only takes account of human beings. It believes in the reality of the Universals and treats men as abstractions. The confusion of the concepts of individual and of human being has led industrial civilization to a fundamental error, the standardization of men. If we were all identical, we could be reared and made to live and work in great herds, like cattle. But each one has his own personality. He cannot be treated like a symbol. Children should not be placed, at a very early age, in schools where they are educated wholesale. As is well known, most great men have been brought up in comparative solitude, or have refused to enter the mold of the school. [E]ducation should be the object of unfailing guidance. Such guidance belongs to the parents. They alone, and more especially the mother, have observed, since their origin, the physiological and mental peculiarities whose orientation is the aim of education. Modern society has committed a serious mistake by entirely substituting the school for the familial training. The mothers abandon their children to the kindergarten in order to attend to their careers, their social ambitions, their sexual pleasures, their literary or artistic fancies, or simply to play bridge, go to the cinema, and waste their time in busy idleness. They are, thus, responsible for the disappearance of the familial group where the child was kept in contact with adults and learned a great deal from them....When [t]he child...is only a unit in a school he remains incomplete. In order to reach his full strength, the individual requires the relative isolation and the attention of the restricted social group consisting of the family.</p>
<p>"The neglect of individuality by our social institutions is, likewise, responsible for the atrophy of the adults. Man does not stand, without damage, the mode of existence and the uniform and stupid work imposed on factory and office workers, on all those who take part in mass production. In the immensity of modern cities he is isolated and as if lost. He is an economic abstraction, a unit of the herd. He gives up his individuality. He has neither responsibility nor dignity. Above the multitude stand out the rich men, the powerful politicians, the bandits. The others are only nameless grains of dust. On the contrary, the individual remains a man when he belongs to a small group, when he inhabits a village or a small town where his relative importance is greater, when he can hope to become, in his turn, an influential citizen. The contempt for individuality has brought about its factual disappearance.</p>
<p>"Another error, due to the confusion of the concepts of human being and individual, is democratic equality. This dogma is now breaking down under the blows of the experience of the nations....The democratic creed does not take account of the constitution of our body and of our consciousness. It does not apply to the concrete fact which the individual is. Indeed, human beings are equal. But individuals are not. The equality of their rights is an illusion. The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education. It is absurd to give them the same electoral power as the fully developed individuals. Sexes are not equal. To disregard all these inequalities is very dangerous. The democratic principle has contributed to the collapse of civilization in opposing the development of an elite. It is obvious that, on the contrary, individual inequalities must be respected. In modern society the great, the small, the average, and the mediocre are needed. But we should not attempt to develop the higher types by the same procedures as the lower. The standardization of men by the democratic ideal has already determined the predominance of the weak. Everywhere, the weak are preferred to the strong. They are aided and protected, often admired. Like the invalid, the criminal, and the insane, they attract the sympathy of the public. The myth of equality, the love of the symbol, the contempt for the concrete fact, are, in a large measure, guilty of the collapse of individuality. As it was impossible to raise the inferior types, the only means of producing democratic equality among men was to bring all to the lowest level. Thus vanished personality....</p>
<p>"We have...ignored certain aspects of...man['s] physiological activities. We have not asked how tissues and consciousness would accommodate themselves to the changes in the mode of life imposed upon us. We have totally forgotten the important role of the adaptive functions, and the momentous consequences of their enforced rest. Our present weakness comes both from our unappreciation of individuality and from our ignorance of the constitution of the human being." – pp. 269–72</p>
<p>"We know that [m]an...cannot adapt himself to the environment created by technology, that such environment brings about his degradation....The dogmas of scientific religion and industrial morals have fallen under the onslaught of biological reality. Life always gives an identical answer when asked to trespass on forbidden ground. It weakens. And civilizations collapse. The sciences of inert matter have led us into a country that is not ours. We have blindly accepted all their gifts. The individual has become narrow, specialized, immoral, unintelligent, incapable of managing himself and his own institutions. But at the same time the biological sciences have revealed to us the most precious of all secrets—the laws of the development of our body and of our consciousness. This knowledge has brought to humanity the means of renovating itself. As long as the hereditary qualities of the race remain present, the strength and the audacity of his forefathers can be resurrected in modern man by his own will. But is he still capable of such an effort?" – p. 273</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter VIII: The Remaking of Man</p>
<p>"Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself....It has shown him...how to mold his body and his soul on patterns born of his wishes....To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering....He will not submit to such treatment unless driven by necessity. While surrounded by the comfort, the beauty, and the mechanical marvels engendered by technology, he does not understand how urgent is this operation. He fails to realize that he is degenerating. Why should he strive to modify his ways of being, living, and thinking?</p>
<p>"Fortunately, an event unforeseen by engineers, economists, and politicians took place. The superb edifice of American finance and economics suddenly collapsed....Are the causes of the crisis uniquely economic and financial? Should we not also incriminate the corruption and the stupidity of the politicians and the financiers, the ignorance and the illusions of the economists? Has not modern life decreased the intelligence and the morality of the whole nation? Why must we pay several billions of dollars each year to fight criminals? Why do the gangsters continue victoriously to attack banks, kill policemen, kidnap, ransom, or assassinate children, in spite of the immense amount of money spent in opposing them? Why are there so many feeble-minded and insane among civilized people? Does not the world crisis depend on individual and social factors that are more important than the economic ones? It is to be hoped that the spectacle of civilization at this beginning of its decline will compel us to ascertain whether the causes of the catastrophe do not lie within ourselves, as well as in our institutions. And that we will fully realize the imperativeness of our renovation.</p>
<p>"Then, we will be faced by a single obstacle, our inertia. [T]he economic crisis came before the complete destruction of our ancestral qualities by the idleness, corruption, and softness of life. We know that intellectual apathy, immorality, and criminality are not, in general, hereditary....We can develop...children['s] innate qualities if we wish earnestly to do so. We have at our disposal all the might of science. There are still many men capable of using this power unselfishly. Modern society has not stifled all the focuses of intellectual culture, moral courage, virtue, and audacity. The flame is still burning. The evil is not irreparable. But the remaking of the individual demands the transformation of modern life. It cannot take place without a material and mental revolution. To understand the necessity of a change, and to possess the scientific means of realizing this change, are not sufficient. The spontaneous crash of technological civilization may help to release the impulses required for the destruction of our present habits and the creation of new modes of life....</p>
<p>"Man has sunk into indifference to almost everything except money. [But] the races responsible for the construction of our world are not extinct. The ancestral potentialities still exist in the germ-plasm of their weak offspring....We must not forget the stupendous task we have accomplished since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the small area of the states of western Europe, amid unceasing wars, famines, and epidemics, we have succeeded in keeping, throughout the Middle Ages, the relics of antique culture. During long, dark centuries we shed our blood on all sides in the defense of Christendom against our enemies of the north, the east, and the south. At the cost of immense efforts we succeeded in thrusting back the sleep of Islamism. Then a miracle happened. From the mind of men sharpened by scholastic discipline, sprang science. And, strange to say, science was cultivated by those men of the Occident for itself, for its truth and its beauty, with complete disinterestedness. Instead of stagnating...as it did in the Orient and...in China, this science, in four hundred years, has transformed the world. Our fathers have made a prodigious effort. Most of their European and American descendants have forgotten the past. History is also ignored by those who now profit from our material civilization. By the white who, in the Middle Ages, did not fight beside us on the European battlefields, by the yellow, the brown, and the black[.] What we accomplished once[,] we are capable of accomplishing again. Should our civilization collapse, we would build up another one. But is it indispensable to suffer the agony of chaos before reaching order and peace? Can we not rise again, without undergoing the bloody regeneration of total overthrow? Are we capable of renovating ourselves, of avoiding the cataclysms which are imminent, and of continuing our ascension?" – pp. 274–8</p>
<p>"The error responsible for our sufferings comes from a wrong interpretation of a great idea of Galileo. Galileo, as is well known, distinguished the primary qualities of things, dimensions and weight, which are easily measurable, from their secondary qualities, form, color, odor, which cannot be measured. The quantitative was separated from the qualitative....In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as, for instance, the physicochemical equilibria of blood serum. The separation of the qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and the soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow, and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation.</p>
<p>"[W]e must...attribute to secondary qualities the same importance as to primary qualities. We should also reject the dualism of Descartes. Mind will be replaced in matter. The soul will no longer be distinct from the body. Mental manifestations, as well as physiological processes, will be within our reach. Indeed, the qualitative is more difficult to study than the quantitative. Concrete facts do not satisfy our mind, which prefers the definitive aspect of abstractions. But science must not be cultivated only for itself, for the elegance of its methods, for its light and its beauty. Its goal is the material and spiritual benefit of man. As much importance should be given to feelings as to thermodynamics. It is indispensable that our thought embraces all aspects of reality. Instead of discarding the residues of scientific abstractions we will utilize those residues as fully as the abstractions. We will not accept the tyranny of the quantitative, the superiority of mechanics, physics, or chemistry. We will renounce the intellectual attitude generated by the Renaissance, and its arbitrary definition of the real. But we must retain all the conquests made since Galileo's day. The spirit and the techniques of science are our most precious possessions.</p>
<p>"It will be difficult to get rid of a doctrine which, during more than three hundred years, has dominated the intelligence of the civilized. The majority of men of science believe in the reality of the Universals, the exclusive right to existence of the quantitative, the supremacy of matter, the separation of the mind from the body, and the subordinated position of the mind. They will not easily give up this faith....The little garden which each scientist easily cultivates would be turned into a forest, which would have to be cleared. If scientific civilization should leave the road that it has followed since the Renaissance and return to the naive observation of the concrete, strange events would immediately take place. Matter would lose its supremacy. Mental activities would become as important as physiological ones. The study of moral, esthetic, and religious functions would appear as indispensable as that of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The present methods of education would seem absurd. Schools and universities would be obliged to modify their programs. Hygienists would be asked why they concern themselves exclusively with the prevention of organic diseases, and not with that of mental and nervous disturbances. Why they pay no attention to spiritual health. Why they segregate people ill with infections, and not those who propagate intellectual and moral maladies. Why the habits responsible for organic diseases are considered dangerous, and not those which bring on corruption, criminality, and insanity....Economists would realize that human beings think, feel, and suffer, that they should be given other things than work, food, and leisure, that they have spiritual as well as physiological needs. And also that the causes of economic and financial crises may be moral and intellectual. We should no longer be obliged to accept the barbarous conditions of life in great cities, the tyranny of factory and office, the sacrifice of moral dignity to economic interest, of mind to money, as benefactions conferred upon us by modern civilization. We should reject mechanical inventions that hinder human development. Economics would no longer appear as the ultimate reason of everything. It is obvious that the liberation of man from the materialistic creed would transform most of the aspects of our existence. Therefore, modern society will oppose with all its might this progress in our conceptions.</p>
<p>"However, we must take care that the failure of materialism does not bring about a spiritual reaction. Since technology and worship of matter have not been a success, the temptation may be great to choose the opposite cult, the cult of mind. The primacy of psychology would be no less dangerous than that of physiology, physics, and chemistry....The study of the physical properties of blood serum...is as indispensable as that of dreams, libido, mediumistic states, psychological effects of prayer, memory of words, etc. Substitution of the spiritual for the material would not correct the error made by the Renaissance. The exclusion of matter would be still more detrimental to man than that of mind. Salvation will be found only in the relinquishing of all doctrines. In the full acceptation of the data of observation. In the realization of the fact that man is no less and no more than these data." – pp. 278–82</p>
<p>"This superscience will be utilizable only if...it animates our intelligence. But is it possible for a single brain to assimilate such a gigantic amount of knowledge?...In about twenty-five years of uninterrupted study, one could learn these sciences. At the age of fifty, those who have submitted themselves to this discipline could effectively direct the construction of the human being and of a civilization based on his true nature. Indeed, the few gifted individuals who dedicate themselves to this work will have to renounce the common modes of existence....They must live like the monks of the great contemplative orders[.] In the course of the history of all great nations, many have sacrificed themselves for the salvation of the community. Sacrifice seems to be a necessary condition of progress. There are now, as in former times, men ready for the supreme renunciation. If the multitudes inhabiting the defenseless cities of the seacoast were menaced by shells and gases, no army aviator would hesitate to thrust himself, his plane, and his bombs against the invaders. Why should not some individuals sacrifice their lives to acquire the science indispensable to the making of man and of his environment? [T]he task is extremely difficult. But minds capable of undertaking it can be discovered. The weakness of many of the scientists whom we meet in universities and laboratories is due to the mediocrity of their goal and to the narrowness of their life. Men grow when inspired by a high purpose, when contemplating vast horizons. The sacrifice of oneself is not very difficult for one burning with the passion for a great adventure. And there is no more beautiful and dangerous adventure than the renovation of modern man." – pp. 285–6</p>
<p>"The making of man requires the development of institutions wherein body and mind can be formed according to natural laws, and not to the prejudices of the various schools of educators. It is essential that the individual, from infancy, be liberated from the dogmas of industrial civilization and the principles which are the very basis of modern society....</p>
<p>"Great...advance has been realized in Genoa by [endocrinologist] Nicola Pende in his Institute [of Individual Biotypology and Orthogenesis] for the study of the human individual. [T]his feeling has by no means been formulated as clearly here as in Italy....</p>
<p>"We need...an institution capable of providing for the uninterrupted pursuit for at least a century of the investigations concerning man. Modern society should be given an intellectual focus, an immortal brain, capable of conceiving and planning its future[.] Such an organization would be the salvation of the white races in their staggering advance toward civilization. This thinking center would consist...of a few individuals...trained in the knowledge of man by many years of study. It should perpetuate itself automatically[.] Democratic rulers, as well as dictators, could receive from this source of scientific truth the information that they need in order to develop a civilization really suitable to man.</p>
<p>"The members of this high council would be free from research and teaching....They would dedicate their lives to the contemplation of the economic, sociological, psychological, physiological, and pathological phenomena manifested by the civilized nations and their constitutive individuals. And to that of the development of science and of the influence of its applications to our habits of life and of thought. They would endeavor to discover how modern civilization could mold itself to man without crushing any of his essential qualities. Their silent meditation would protect the inhabitants of the new city from the mechanical inventions which are dangerous for their body or their mind, from the adulteration of thought as well as food, from the whims of the specialists in education, nutrition, morals, sociology, etc., from all progress inspired, not by the needs of the public, but by the greed or the illusions of their inventors. An institution of this sort would acquire enough knowledge to prevent the organic and mental deterioration of civilized nations. Its members should be given a position as highly considered, as free from political intrigues and from cheap publicity, as that of the justices of the Supreme Court. [T]hey would be the defenders of the body and the soul of a great race in its tragic struggle against the blind sciences of matter." – pp. 286–93</p>
<p>"We must rescue the individual from the state of intellectual, moral, and physiological atrophy brought about by modern conditions of life. Develop all his potential activities. Give him health. Reestablish him in his unity, in the harmony of his personality. Induce him to utilize all the hereditary qualities of his tissues and his consciousness. Break the shell in which education and society have succeeded in enclosing him. And reject all systems....</p>
<p>"Each individual has the power to modify his way of life, to create around him an environment slightly different from that of the unthinking crowd. He is capable of isolating himself in some measure, of imposing upon himself certain physiological and mental disciplines, certain work, certain habits, of acquiring the mastery of his body and mind....In order to combat...his material, mental, and economic environment...victoriously, he must associate with others having the same purpose. Revolutions often start with small groups in which the new tendencies ferment and grow. During the eighteenth century such groups prepared the overthrow of absolute monarchy in France....Today, the principles of industrial civilization should be fought with the same relentless vigor[.] But the struggle will be harder because the mode of existence brought to us by technology is as pleasant as the habit of taking alcohol, opium, or cocaine. The few individuals who are animated by the spirit of revolt might organize in secret groups. At present, the protection of children is almost impossible. The influence of the school, private as well as public, cannot be counterbalanced. The young who have been freed by intelligent parents from the usual medical, pedagogical, and social superstitions, relapse through the example of their comrades. All are obliged to conform to the habits of the herd. The renovation of the individual demands his affiliation with a group sufficiently numerous to separate from others and to possess its own schools. Under the impulse of the centers of new thought, some universities may perhaps be led to abandon the classical forms of education and prepare youth for the life of tomorrow with the help of disciplines based on the true nature of man.</p>
<p>"A group, although very small, is capable of eluding the harmful influence of the society of its epoch by imposing upon its members rules of conduct modeled on military or monastic discipline. Such a method is far from being new. Humanity has already lived through periods when communities of men or women separated from others and adopted strict regulations, in order to attain their ideals. Such groups were responsible for the development of our civilization during the Middle Ages. [A]ll submitted to strict physiological and mental discipline....Two essential conditions for the progress of the individual are relative isolation and discipline. Each individual, even in the new city, can submit himself to these conditions. One has the power of refusing to go to certain plays or cinemas, to send one's children to certain schools, to listen to radio programs, to read certain newspapers, certain books, etc. But it is chiefly through intellectual and moral discipline, and the rejection of the habits of the herd, that we can reconstruct ourselves....</p>
<p>"It is a well-established fact that discipline gives great strength to men. An ascetic and mystic minority would rapidly acquire an irresistible power over the dissolute and degraded majority. Such a minority would be in a position to impose, by persuasion or perhaps by force, other ways of life upon the majority. None of the dogmas of modern society are immutable. Gigantic factories, office buildings rising to the sky, inhuman cities, industrial morals, faith in mass production, are not indispensable to civilization. Other modes of existence and of thought are possible. Culture without comfort, beauty without luxury, machines without enslaving factories, science without the worship of matter, would restore to man his intelligence, his moral sense, his virility, and lead him to the summit of his development." – pp. 293–6</p>
<p>"[N]atural selection has not played its part for a long while. [M]any inferior individuals have been conserved through the efforts of hygiene and medicine. But we cannot prevent the reproduction of the weak [o]r destroy sickly or defective children[.] The only way to obviate the disastrous predominance of the weak is to develop the strong. Our efforts to render normal the unfit are evidently useless. We should, then, turn our attention toward promoting the optimum growth of the fit. By making the strong still stronger, we could effectively help the weak. For the herd always profits by the ideas and inventions of the elite....</p>
<p>"We must single out the children who are endowed with high potentialities, and develop them as completely as possible. And in this manner give to the nation a non-hereditary aristocracy....The issue of the Crusaders is by no means extinct.</p>
<p>"[T]he separation of the population of a free country into different classes is not due to chance or to social conventions. It rests on a solid biological basis, the physiological and mental peculiarities of the individuals. In democratic countries, such as the United States and France,...any man had the possibility during the last century of rising to the position his capacities enabled him to hold. Today, most of the members of the proletarian class owe their situation to the hereditary weakness of their organs and their mind. [U]nknown farmers,...the backbone of the European nations, were...of a weaker organic and psychological constitution than the medieval barons who conquered the land and defended it victoriously against all invaders....Today, the weak should not be artificially maintained in wealth and power. It is imperative that social classes should be synonymous with biological classes. Each individual must rise or sink to the level for which he is fitted by the quality of his tissues and of his soul. The social ascension of those who possess the best organs and the best minds should be aided. Each one must have his natural place. Modern nations will save themselves by developing the strong. Not by protecting the weak." – pp. 296–9</p>
<p>"A great race must propagate its best elements. However, in the most highly civilized nations reproduction is decreasing and yields inferior products. Women voluntarily deteriorate through alcohol and tobacco. They subject themselves to dangerous dietary regimens in order to obtain a conventional slenderness of their figure. Besides, they refuse to bear children. Such a defection is due to their education, to the progress of feminism, to the growth of short-sighted selfishness. It also comes from economic conditions, nervous unbalance, instability of marriage, and fear of the burden imposed...by the weakness or precocious corruption of children. The women belonging to the oldest stock, whose children would, in all probability, be of good quality, and who are in a position to bring them up intelligently, are almost sterile. It is the newcomers, peasants and proletarians from primitive...countries, who beget large families. But their offspring are far from having the value of those who came from the first settlers of North America. There is no hope for an increase in the birth rate before a revolution takes place in the habits of thinking and living, and a new ideal rises above the horizon....</p>
<p>"Of course, the reproduction of human beings cannot be regulated as in animals....A medical examination should perhaps be imposed on people about to marry, as for admission into the army or the navy, or for employees in hotels, hospitals, and department stores. It seems that eugenics, to be useful, should be voluntary. By an appropriate education, each one could be made to realize what wretchedness is in store for those who marry into families contaminated by...insanity, or feeble-mindedness. Such families should be considered by young people at least as undesirable as those which are poor. In truth, they are more dangerous than gangsters and murderers. No criminal causes so much misery in a human group as the tendency to insanity. Voluntary eugenics is not impossible. Indeed, love is supposed to blow as freely as the wind. But the belief in this peculiarity of love is shaken by the fact that many young men fall in love only with rich girls, and vice versa....None should marry a human being suffering from hidden hereditary defects. Most of man's misfortunes are due to his organic and mental constitution and...to his heredity....No human being has the right to bring misery to another human being. Still less, that of procreating children destined to misery. Thus, eugenics asks for the sacrifice of many individuals. This necessity...seems to be the expression of a natural law. Many living beings are sacrificed at every instant by nature to other living beings. We know the social and individual importance of renunciation. Nations have always paid the highest honors to those who gave up their lives to save their country. The concept of sacrifice, of its absolute social necessity, must be introduced into the mind of modern man....</p>
<p>"We are incapable of inducing a progressive evolution of germ-plasm, of bringing about by appropriate mutations the appearance of superior men. We must be content with facilitating the union of the best elements of the race through education and certain economic advantages. The progress of the strong depends on the conditions of their development and the possibility left to parents of transmitting to their offspring the qualities which they have acquired in the course of their existence. Modern society must, therefore, allow to all a certain stability of life, a home, a garden, some friends. Children must be reared in contact with things which are the expression of the mind of their parents. It is imperative to stop the transformation of the farmer, the artisan, the artist, the professor, and the man of science into manual or intellectual proletarians, possessing nothing but their hands or their brains. The development of this proletariat will be the everlasting shame of industrial civilization. It has contributed to the disappearance of the family as a social unit, and to the weakening of intelligence and moral sense. It is destroying the remains of culture. All forms of the proletariat must be suppressed. Each individual should have the security and the stability required for the foundation of a family. Marriage must cease being only a temporary union....The laws relating to education, and especially to that of girls, to marriage, and divorce should, above all, take into account the interest of children. Women should receive a higher education, not in order to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, but to rear their offspring to be valuable human beings.</p>
<p>"The free practice of eugenics could lead not only to the development of stronger individuals, but also of strains endowed with more endurance, intelligence, and courage. These strains should constitute an aristocracy, from which great men would probably appear. Modern society must promote, by all possible means, the formation of better human stock. No financial or moral rewards should be too great for those who, through the wisdom of their marriage, would engender geniuses. The complexity of our civilization is immense....There is need today of men of larger mental and moral size[.] The establishment of a hereditary biological aristocracy through voluntary eugenics would be an important step toward the solution of our present problems." – pp. 299–303</p>
<p>"Although our knowledge of man is still very incomplete, nevertheless it gives us the power to intervene in his formation, and to help him unfold all his potentialities. To shape him according to our wishes, provided these wishes conform to natural laws....</p>
<p>"Endurance and strength generally develop in the mountains, in the countries where seasons are extreme, where mists are frequent and sunlight rare, where hurricanes blow furiously, where the land is poor and sown with rocks. The schools devoted to the formation of a hard and spirited youth should be established in such countries, and not in southern climates where the sun always shines and the temperature is even and warm. Florida and the French Riviera are suitable for weaklings, invalids, and old people, or normal individuals in need of a short rest. Moral energy, nervous equilibrium, and organic resistance are increased in children when they are trained to withstand heat and cold, dryness and humidity, burning sun and chilling rain, blizzards and fog—in short, the rigors of the seasons in northern countries. The resourcefulness and hardihood of the Yankee were probably due, in a certain measure, to the harshness of a climate where, under the sun of Spain, there are Scandinavian winters. But these climatic factors have lost their efficiency since civilized men are protected from inclemencies of the weather by the comfort and the sedentariness of their life....</p>
<p>"There is no doubt that consciousness is affected by the quantity and the quality of the food. Those who have to dare, dominate, and create should not be fed like manual workers[.] We have to discover what food is suitable for human beings vegetating in offices and factories. What chemical substances could give intelligence, courage, and alertness to the inhabitants of the new city. The race will certainly not be improved merely by supplying children and adolescents with a great abundance of milk, cream, and all known vitami[n]s. It would be most useful to search for new compounds which, instead of uselessly increasing the size and weight of the skeleton and of the muscles, would bring about nervous strength and mental agility. Perhaps some day a scientist will discover how to manufacture great men from ordinary children, in the same manner that bees transform a common larva into a queen by the special food which they know how to prepare." – pp. 303–5</p>
<p>"We know that adaptive processes stimulate organs and functions, that the...effective way of improving tissues and mind is to maintain them in ceaseless activity....If we wish to strengthen...the apparatuses responsible for...nutrition and the organs which enable the body to sustain a prolonged effort, exercises more varied than classical sports are indispensable. These exercises are the same as were practiced daily in a more primitive life....The efforts requiring the help of muscles, vessels, heart, lungs, brain, spinal cord, and mind—that is, of the entire organism—are necessary in the construction of the individual. Running over rough ground, climbing mountains, wrestling, swimming, working in the forests and in the fields, exposure to inclemencies, early moral responsibility, and a general harshness of life bring about the harmony of the muscles, bones, organs, and consciousness.</p>
<p>"In this manner, the organic systems enabling the body to adapt itself to the outside world are trained and fully developed. The climbing of trees or rocks stimulates the activity of the apparatuses regulating the composition of plasma, the circulation of the blood, and the respiration. The organs responsible for the manufacture of red [blood] cells and hemoglobin are set in motion by life at high altitudes. Prolonged running and the necessity of eliminating acid produced by the muscles release processes extending over the entire organism. Unsatisfied thirst drains water from the tissues. Fasting mobilizes the proteins and fatty substances from the organs. Alternation from heat to cold and from cold to heat sets at work the multiple mechanisms regulating the temperature. The adaptive systems may be stimulated in many other ways. The whole body is improved when they are brought into action. Ceaseless work renders all integrating apparatuses stronger, more alert, and better fitted to carry out their many duties.</p>
<p>"The harmony of our organic and psychological functions is one of the most important qualities...we may possess. [I]t always demands a voluntary effort. Equilibrium is obtained in...large measure by intelligence and self-control. Man naturally tends toward the satisfaction of his physiological appetites and artificial needs, such as a craving for alcohol, speed, and ceaseless change. But he degenerates when he satisfies these appetites completely. He must, then, accustom himself to dominate his hunger, his need of sleep, his sexual impulses, his laziness, his fondness for muscular exercise, for alcohol, etc. Too much sleep and food are as dangerous as too little....</p>
<p>"A man's value depends on his capacity to face adverse situations rapidly and without effort. Such alertness is attained by building up many kinds of reflexes and instinctive reactions....Honesty, sincerity, and courage are developed by the same procedures as those used in the formation of reflexes—that is, without argument, without discussion, without explanation. In a word, children must be conditioned.</p>
<p>"Conditioning, according to the terminology of Pavlov, is nothing but the establishment of associated reflexes. It repeats in a scientific and modern form the procedures employed for a long time by animal trainers. In the construction of these reflexes, a relation is established between an unpleasant thing and a thing desired by the subject. The ringing of a bell, the report of a gun, even the crack of a whip, become for a dog the equivalent of the food he likes....Physical pain and hardship are easily supported if they accompany the success of a cherished enterprise. Death itself may smile when it is associated with some great adventure, with the beauty of sacrifice, or with the illumination of the soul that becomes immersed in God." – pp. 305–8</p>
<p>"It is extremely difficult today to give children the advantages resulting from privation, struggle, hardship, and real intellectual culture. And from the development of a potent psychological agency, the inner life. This private, hidden, not-to-be-shared, undemocratic thing appears to the conservatism of many educators to be a damnable sin. However, it remains the source of all originality. Of all great actions. It permits the individual to retain his personality, his poise, and the stability of his nervous system in the confusion of the new city.</p>
<p>"Mental factors influence each individual in a different manner. [M]an does not progress in complete poverty, in prosperity, in peace, in too large a community, or in isolation. He would probably reach his optimum development in the psychological atmosphere created by a moderate amount of economic security, leisure, privation, and struggle. The effects of these conditions differ according to each race and to each individual. The events that crush certain people will drive others to revolt and victory. We have to mold on [each] man his social and economic world. To provide him with the psychological surroundings capable of keeping his organic systems in full activity." – pp. 309–10</p>
<p>"There are...two kinds of health, natural, and artificial. Scientific medicine has given to man artificial health, and protection against most infectious diseases. It is a marvelous gift. [M]an...wants natural health, which comes from resistance to infectious and degenerative diseases, from equilibrium of the nervous system. He must be constructed so as to live without thinking about his health. Medicine will achieve its greatest triumph when it discovers the means of rendering the body and the mind naturally immune to diseases, fatigue, and fear. In remaking modern human beings we must endeavor to give them the freedom and the happiness engendered by the perfect soundness of organic and mental activities.</p>
<p>"This conception of natural health will meet with strong opposition because it disturbs our habits of thought. The present trend of medicine is toward artificial health, toward a kind of directed physiology....We still consider a human being to be a poorly constructed machine, whose parts must be constantly re[i]nforced or repaired. [The] achievements of chemistry and physiology are extremely important [and] throw much light on the hidden mechanisms of the body. But should they be hailed as great triumphs of humanity in its striving toward health? This is far from being certain....</p>
<p>"The possession of natural health would enormously increase the happiness of man....</p>
<p>"The hope of humanity lies in the prevention of degenerative and mental diseases[.]" – pp. 311–4</p>
<p>"We now have to reestablish, in the fullness of his personality, the human being weakened and standardized by modern life. Sexes have again to be clearly defined. Each individual should be either male or female, and never manifest the sexual tendencies, mental characteristics, and ambitions of the opposite sex. Instead of resembling a machine produced in series, man should, on the contrary, emphasize his uniqueness. In order to reconstruct personality, we must break the frame of the school, factory, and office, and reject the very principles of technological civilization....</p>
<p>"We know that it is impossible to bring up individuals wholesale, that the school cannot be considered...a substitute for individual education. [A]ffective, esthetic, and religious activities also need to be developed. Parents have to realize clearly that their part is indispensable....Is it not strange that the educational program for girls does not contain in general any detailed study of infants and children, of their physiological and mental characteristics? Her natural function, which consists not only of bearing, but also of rearing, her young, should be restored to woman....</p>
<p>"There have been, in the past, industrial organizations which enabled...workmen to own a house and land, to work at home when and as they willed, to use their intelligence, to manufacture entire objects, to have the joy of creation. [W]ould it not be possible to use all the young men of the country in...factories for a short period, just as for military service? In this or another way the proletariat could be progressively abolished. Men would live in small communities instead of...immense droves. Each would preserve his human value within his group. Instead of being merely a piece of machinery, he would become a person. Today, the position of the proletarian is as low as was that of the feudal serf. Like the serf, he has no hope of escaping from his bondage, of being independent, of holding authority over others....The white-collar people lose their personality just as factory hands do. In fact, they become proletarians. It seems that modern business organization and mass production are incompatible with the full development of the human self. If such is the case, then industrial civilization, and not just civilized man, must go.</p>
<p>"In recognizing personality, modern society has to accept its disparateness. Each individual must be utilized in accordance with his special characteristics. In attempting to establish equality among men, we have suppressed individual peculiarities which were most useful. For happiness depends on one being exactly fitted to the nature of one's work. And there are many varied tasks in a modern nation. Human types, instead of being standardized, should be diversified, and these constitutional differences maintained and exaggerated by the mode of education and the habits of life. Each type would find its place. Modern society has refused to recognize the dissimilarity of human beings and has crowded them into four classes—the rich, the proletarian, the farmer, and the middle class. The clerk, the policeman, the clergyman, the scientist, the school-teacher, the university professor, the shopkeeper, etc., who constitute the middle class, have practically the same standard of living. Such ill-assorted types are herded together according to their financial position and not in conformity with their individual characteristics. Obviously, they have nothing in common. The best, those who could grow, who try to develop their mental potentialities, are atrophied by the narrowness of their life....It would be far more important to provide those who devote themselves to the things of the mind with the means of developing their personality according to their innate constitution and to their spiritual purpose. Just as, during the Middle Ages, the church created a mode of existence suitable to asceticism, mysticism, and philosophical thinking.</p>
<p>"The brutal materialism of our civilization not only opposes the soaring of intelligence, but also crushes the affective, the gentle, the weak, the lonely, those who love beauty, who look for other things than money, whose sensibility does not stand the struggle of modern life. In past centuries, the many who were too refined, or too incomplete, to fight with the rest were allowed the free development of their personality. Some lived within themselves. Others took refuge in monasteries, in charitable or contemplative orders, where they found poverty and hard work, but also dignity, beauty, and peace. Individuals of this type should be given, instead of the inimical conditions of modern society, an environment more appropriate to the growth and utilization of their specific qualities.</p>
<p>"[T]he immense number of defectives and criminals...are an enormous burden for the part of the population that has remained normal. [G]igantic sums are...required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics[,] useless and harmful beings[.] The abnormal prevent the development of the normal....Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner?...We are not capable of judging men. However, the community must be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements....Criminality and insanity can be prevented only by a better knowledge of man, by eugenics, by changes in education and in social conditions....The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts. Modern society should not hesitate to organize itself with reference to the normal individual. Philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity. The development of human personality is the ultimate purpose of civilization." – pp. 314–9</p>
<p>"The restoration of man to the harmony of his physiological and mental self will transform his universe. We should not forget that the universe modifies its aspects according to the conditions of our body. That it is nothing but the response of our nervous system, our sensory organs, and our techniques to an unknown and probably unknowable reality. That all our states of consciousness, all our dreams, those of the mathematicians as well as those of the lovers, are equally true....The esthetic feeling engendered by...colors, and the measurement of the length of their component light-waves, are two aspects of ourselves and have the same right to existence....The beauty of the universe will necessarily grow with the strength of our organic and psychological activities.</p>
<p>"We must liberate man from the cosmos created by the genius of physicists and astronomers, that cosmos in which, since the Renaissance, he has been imprisoned. Despite its stupendous immensity, the world of matter is too narrow for him. Like his economic and social environment, it does not fit him. We cannot adhere to the [common] faith in its exclusive reality. We know that we are not altogether comprised within its dimensions, that we extend somewhere else, outside the physical continuum. Man...also belongs to another world. A world which, although enclosed within himself, stretches beyond space and time. And of this world, if his will is indomitable, he may travel over the infinite cycles. The cycle of Beauty, contemplated by scientists, artists, and poets. The cycle of Love, that inspires heroism and renunciation. The cycle of Grace, ultimate reward of those who passionately seek the principle of all things. Such is our universe." – pp. 319–20</p>
<p>"[W]e are still immersed in the world created by the sciences of inert matter without any respect for the laws of our development. In a world that is not made for us, because it is born from an error of our reason and from the ignorance of our true self. To such a world we cannot become adapted. We will, then, revolt against it. We will transform its values and organize it with reference to our true needs. Today, the science of man gives us the power to develop all the potentialities of our body. We know the secret mechanisms of our physiological and mental activities and the causes of our weakness. We know how we have transgressed natural laws. We know why we are punished, why we are lost in darkness....</p>
<p>"For the first time in the history of humanity, a crumbling civilization is capable of discerning the causes of its decay. For the first time, it has at its disposal the gigantic strength of science. Will we utilize this knowledge and this power? It is our only hope of escaping the fate common to all great civilizations of the past." – pp. 321–2</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-53252438301337459702022-02-17T20:04:00.001-05:002022-02-17T21:59:37.999-05:00John McWhorter's Woke Racism<p style="padding-bottom: 1%">The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America</em>, John McWhorter, 2021:</p>
<p>"Twenty years ago, a black rapper, in an interview with a white reporter, actually came out and admitted, 'I'm valid when I'm disrespected' in justifying the violence in his lyrics. That is an odd thing for any human being to say, on its face. But for many black people, pointing to being disrespected is a prime driver of their sense of purpose and self." – p. 84</p>
<p>"What ails black America in the twenty-first century would yield considerably to exactly three real-world efforts that combine political feasibility with effectiveness[.]" – pp. 139–40</p>
<p>"However you possibly can, you should:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>"Fight to end the war on drugs;</p></li>
<li><p>"Make sure kids not from book-lined homes are taught to read with phonics; and</p></li>
<li><p>"Advocate vocational training for poor people and battle the idea that 'real' people go to college." – p. 149</p></li>
</ol>
<p>"How about [']doing work['] motivated by something other than working out feelings of guilt and feeling superior to other people while enjoying a sense of belonging?" – p. 171</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>"Just say no[:]</em></p>
<p>"What we must do about the ['woke' religious] Elect is stand up to them....</p>
<p>"People often ask, 'How can I talk to people like this without being called a racist?'</p>
<p>"The answer is: <em>You cannot.</em></p>
<p>"[E]nlightened Americans must become accustomed to being called racists[.]</p>
<p>"We must become more comfortable keeping our own counsel, and letting our own rationality decide whether we are racist, rather than entertaining the eccentric and self-serving renovated definitions of racism forced upon us by religionists." – pp. 172–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>"Sample scripts[:]</em></p>
<p>"If you need perspective, talk to anyone you know from a formerly Communist country....</p>
<p>" 'I don't think I'm a white supremacist, and you aren't going to change my mind. Let's move on to a different topic.'</p>
<p>"[D]o not apologize[.]</p>
<p>" '[I]f you try to get me fired, I will push back and write about <em>you</em> on Twitter.'...</p>
<p>" 'If you insist on exposing my children to this religion when they are supposed to be getting an education, I will gather a group of parents and we will transfer our children to another school.' " – pp. 178–80</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-60068721877256993302022-02-17T18:05:00.002-05:002022-02-17T22:11:57.800-05:00William Allen White's "A Triumph's Evidence"<p style="padding-bottom: 1%">The following are extracts (for review purposes) from "A Triumph's Evidence" in <em>Stratagems and Spoils: Stories of Love and Politics</em>, William Allen White, 1901:</p>
<p>"[Julia Fairbanks] let her hands rest upon [Henry Myton's] shoulders and asked, with gentle earnestness: 'Can't you fix it up with King? Some way, honorably?' She pitched her voice with the [prairie] wind and crooned with it: 'Think of Pleasant Ridge, Henry[:] dreary, dead, desolate; and then of the life you are leaving, with all its opportunities, all its riches. In the Ridge, you are buried; in Washington, you are a power for good. Can't you do more good in Congress, Henry, than King can do harm? I want you to be my great man.'</p>
<p>"Myton saw...a new light[,] beam alluringly in the eyes he loved...and that was the last of him....His lips made the words: 'I'll do anything in the world for you, Julia.' " – p. 125</p>
<p>"Henry Myton went out into the glory of the night. He rejoiced in the awful miracle of the stars....For he was planning, with an alert mind that knew no moral restraint, to gratify Julia Fairbanks's ambition at any cost. As he walked, a bold scheme spread its meshes before his fancy, and with a flush of exaltation, Myton took it up and set it to snare his game." – p. 126</p>
<p>"[Afterward, w]hen Henry Myton returned to his hotel..., he found a note from Julia Fairbanks waiting for him. It was a note that hailed him as Thane of Cawdor, who should be king thereafter....He put the note in his pocket and touched it fondly during the day as he went his way. [W]hen the [nominating] meeting had been called to order, Henry Myton sat alone in the back part of the hall.</p>
<p>"The madness of the chase was gone. The tense cord of his passion for victory relaxed. His energy was spent, and a chill of horror began to creep over Myton as he realized, in a sober reaction from his folly, what he had done. The horror bound him about the body like cold iron. He shuddered as he saw himself more clearly. Self-loathing rose in him and filled the feverish ducts of remorse." – pp. 131–2</p>
<p>"When it was all over, when the speeches were said, when the crowd had dispersed, Myton's heart was numb." – p. 134</p>
<p>"[Julia Fairbanks] came to Myton with her head poised for the crown of her coming glory. Her eyes beamed, her cheeks glowed; her lips were parted and her countenance shone with the vanity of triumph that was palpitating her nerves....</p>
<p>"On the threshold she greated him with 'Senator,' and put the essence of her pride in a smile.</p>
<p>"The smile and her greeting stung him." – p. 135</p>
<p>" 'Julia,' he [said], 'I have done a vile thing. I have sold my honor for money and have bought my way into the United States Senate....I have deceived my best friends. I have traded upon their faith in me and have made mock of the highest sentiments a man may hold. Oh, Julia, Julia, I am in a hell[:] I, who was sanctified by your love[;] I, who was glorified even as the angels are. I am...damned in perfidy.'</p>
<p>"The girl did not understand his mood. She did not wish to realize it. She felt that it placed no serious obstacle in the way of her happiness. She moved toward him and replied:</p>
<p>" 'Oh, no, Henry[;] you are tired to-night[;] to-morrow you will see things differently. Tell me about it, dearest—I am not ashamed of anything you could do.' " – p. 136–7</p>
<p>"A sob shook Myton and he cried: 'My dead self of yesterday is out there [in the prairie wind], Julia, hunting me, haunting me. Hear it? Hear it?' " – pp. 138–9</p>
<p>"About the time of the election of Senator Myton, there was a bitter discussion in the newspapers and magazines over an article read before the national meeting of a society for sociological research, by a professor in a woman's college. In the course of the article were these paragraphs—not altogether impertinent and irrelevant here:</p>
<p>" 'The new woman, that is to say, the educated woman, is just coming into her kingdom. Naturally she will make mistakes. Since the beginning of time, woman generically has been a theorist in worldly affairs. She has been a critic rather than an actor. She has enjoyed the luxury of ideals, but she has had little experience in the rough, hard, disagreeable work of building these ideals into structures of actual life. In this carpen[t]ry women are likely to mash their toes and fingers, and those of their friends and loved ones. Speaking generically again, women have no civic moral sense—they have moral ideals[:] beautiful, exquisitely formed, delicately balanced. But moral sense comes only after hard practice; it is not hereditary; it may not be learned at school; it comes only after diligent practical work. Women and preachers often fail in temporal affairs for the same reason: Their morals are beautiful, but an[e]mic. They are athletes who have exhausted the literature of the subject, but lack gymnastic exercise.</p>
<p>" 'However, there should be no cause for discouragement. Woman was emancipated only yesterday. She must not be expected to live a miracle. She must fail and fail. Her very shortcomings are signs of future success. She is trying—that is a great thing. For what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days?' " – pp. 139–40</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-44225021369011521862021-12-30T21:56:00.032-05:002022-02-17T17:05:19.688-05:00Thomas Frank's The People, No<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism,</em> Thomas Frank, 2020:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 1: What Was Populism?</p>
<p>"Liberalism as we know it now is a movement led by prosperous, highly-educated professionals who see government by prosperous, highly-educated professionals as the highest goal of protest and political action. Where once it was democratic, liberalism is today a politics of an elite.</p>
<p>"What makes this particularly poignant is that we are living through a period of elite failure every bit as spectacular as that of the 1890s. I refer not merely to the opioid crisis, the bank bailouts, and the failure to prosecute any bankers after their last fraud-frenzy, but also to disastrous trade agreements, stupid wars, and deindustrialization...basically, to the whole grand policy vision of the last few decades, as it has been imagined by a tiny clique of norm-worshipping D.C. professionals and think-tankers.</p>
<p>"In this moment of maximum populist possibility, our commentariat proceeds as though the true populist alternative is simply invisible or impossible." – p. 52</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 2: Because Right Is Right and God Is God</p>
<p>"'A Most Lamentable Comedy' was the title that small-town newspaperman William Allen White gave to the anti-Populist novella he published in 1901[, a] thinly disguised account of insurgent politics in Kansas. (note 2-30)...</p>
<p>"In White's telling, Populism was a form of mass hysteria[.] His novella incorporates virtually the entire list of frightful characteristics that pundits of the day attributed to Populism[.]</p>
<p>"[White] shows the...influence of the French social theorist Gustave Le Bon, whose book <em>The Crowd</em>...first appeared in English in 1896. Le Bon's most famous assertion...was that ordinary people, when gathered in crowds, became psychologically subhuman[.] Le Bon...also charged that crowds were irrational, impulsive, suspicious of progress, and fond of authoritarian leaders—precisely the bill of accusations that later generations of American social theorists would use to blast what they called 'populism.' (note 2-31)</p>
<p>"Give the plain people a say, this kind of thinking holds, and by some deep, irrational instinct they will try to smash the social order and to topple the highly educated people who administer it[.] Now, as then, populism is the word we apply to this imagined war of madness against reason, of entropy against order, of the poor against the rich, of the unthinking rabble against society's brains." – pp. 74–7</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 3: Peak Populism in the Proletarian Decade</p>
<p>"The literary critic Kenneth Burke...in...1935 [gave a] speech to a left-wing writers group[.]</p>
<p>"Here is Burke's key insight: 'We convince a man by reason of the values which we and he hold <em>in common.'</em> The alternative, Burke pointed out, is to scold your audience, to assume 'antagonistic modes of thought and expression' and to 'condemn' the unenlightened. What we ought to be doing is not scolding but persuading[.] (note 3-21)" – pp. 97–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 5: Consensus Redensus</p>
<p>"[T]he mid-1950s [was] a time of confidence and unprecedented middle-class prosperity....Huge public fights over ideology need never happen again, American intellectuals agreed; thankfully, the era of mass mobilization had given way to a political system of interest groups and experts, of plenty and of contentment....</p>
<p>"The 'liberal consensus' is the name that is sometimes applied to this smug worldview,...the orthodoxy of the age....Civility was the rule in political speech; pragmatic dealmaking was the political method; and pluralism was the unalterable political fact of the day. 'The problems of modern America were no longer ideological but technical and administrative,'...and the way to address these was 'by knowledgeable experts rather than by mass movements.' (note 5-1)</p>
<p>"'Knowledgeable experts' enjoyed something of a boom in the 1950s. Universities expanded dramatically. All the smart young men had good paying jobs at some center for advanced something, or were introducing modern management techniques to a federal department, or were working as 'systems analysts' in some giant corporate bureaucracy.</p>
<p>"Consensus thinkers were obsessed with the social position of the expert. After all, you couldn't have stability and prosperity without them....In a once-famous 1962 essay, sociologist Daniel Bell...hailed the 'technical and professional intelligentsia' who had ascended to the top echelons and the 'new system of recruitment for power' that had wisely plucked them out of the mass. Even the military, Bell marveled, was now in the hands of this deserving cohort. As he put it, 'the problems of national security...can no longer be settled...by common sense or past experience [but currently require] technicians and political theorists'...under the visionary leadership of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. (note 5-2)...</p>
<p>"[From note 5-2:] Bell continues[:] '[T]he "military intellectual" has emerged, and men like...Kissinger..."move freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department...rather as the Jesuits through the courts of Madrid and Vienna three centuries ago." ' (The quote is from an anonymous article in the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em> from 1961.) [Note 5-2 end]</p>
<p>"There was a wonderful coincidence behind the intellectuals' newfound faith in consensus: those who now organized and administered the great administrative organization were people exactly like them—highly educated professionals. The consensus thinkers saw American society as stable and harmonious because they were now part of its elite, members of the insiders' club just as surely as the press lords and steel magnates of the past." – pp. 148–50</p>
<p>"The early 1950s saw the rise of Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy[;] he was cheered on by millions of average Americans as he accused innocent people...of being Communists. Under the influence of this bullying Republican demagogue, America became hysterical with fear. It indulged in a carnival of persecution that was largely aimed at intellectuals[.] In response, intellectuals began to believe that paranoid hatred of the educated elite was a permanent threat lurking always just beneath democracy's surface. Open societies like ours, they concluded, were in constant danger of convulsions of intolerance brought on by the uneducated rank and file....</p>
<p>"The effect of McCarthyism was to turn the country's intellectuals against ideology even more forcefully. [T]hey pushed toward a theory of democracy in which the passions of the millions were muted in favor of stability or 'equilibrium'—a form of democracy in which everyone accepted that the real power lay with professionals like themselves.</p>
<p>"'Pluralism' was the name the intellectuals gave this model, but the name was misleading. The key to the pluralist system, as the consensus thinkers imagined it, was not people from different walks of life having their say; it was the <em>leaders</em> of different groups coming to agreement quietly around a big mahogany table somewhere. Forget angry crowds marching in the streets by the millions: what you needed to make democracy work was a bunch of professional interest-group leaders, representatives who were highly civilized and who got along well with one another. These leaders and representatives were the key. They would reach across the aisle. They would compromise and make deals. They would find and inhabit the warm and 'vital' center. (note 5-3)</p>
<p>"'Representative government,' wrote Daniel Bell in 1956, was the only way to put 'a check on the tyrannical "popular" majority.' It was the only way to 'achieve consensus—and conciliation.' (note 5-4)</p>
<p>"You could trust representatives. They were professionals. What you could not trust were ordinary citizens coming together in mass movements. The men of the fifties knew that nothing good could ever result from such a thing. Mass movements were unstable and given to extremism. Mass movements did not listen to intellectuals. Their grievances were irrational—expressions of declining status or psychological maladjustment or bigotry or something even worse. Mass movements were swept along by moral passion to do terrible things. Herd average people into mass political groups, expose them to demagogues, and they become...a mob. Awful developments followed inevitably: McCarthyism today, perhaps fascism tomorrow." – pp. 150–2</p>
<p>"'Populism' was thought to incorporate many sins in the eyes of the liberal consensus, but most of them were attributed to the same perceived error that conservatives had identified in decades before: a refusal of deference. Populism was egalitarianism taken to such an extreme that it rejected legitimate hierarchies along with wrongful ones—legitimate hierarchies being, of course, the ones that the intellectuals themselves had climbed, the hierarchies of scholarly achievement. Populism represented the denial of their expertise. As Daniel Bell put it in <em>The End of Ideology,</em> 'populism goes further' than merely rejecting economic status: 'that some are more qualified than others to assert opinions is vehemently denied.' (note 5-6)</p>
<p>"We have heard several versions of this view already. That democracy means the overthrow of all standards of excellence is the baseline fear of the anti-populist tradition going back at least to the 1890s if not to the French Revolution. But Bell didn't acknowledge that he was part of any such tradition. Nor did he name any actual Populists when he made the above statement; he just asserted it and moved on. As we shall see again and again with the consensus intellectuals, they seemed to believe they could say whatever they wanted about populism without any obligation to prove it[.]" – pp. 153–4</p>
<p>"Richard Hofstadter, the most famous American historian of his day, retold the story of the 1890s People's Party in his enormously influential 1955 book, <em>The Age of Reform.</em></p>
<p>"[Hofstadter] accused the Populists of losing faith in progress,...argued that the Populists despised immigrants[,] that they were 'profoundly nationalistic'[, that they] understood history by referring to crackpot conspiracy theories having to do with bankers and gold,...and [that] they were 'chiefly' responsible for anti-Semitism in America, blaming Jewish bankers for the farmer's problems. (note 5-7)</p>
<p>"The Populists,...Hofstadter explained,...were not people of the city, 'the home of intellectual complexity.' What's more, farmers of the 1890s were a group that was on the way down, 'losing in status and respect' in comparison to successful, upwardly mobile city folk. Losing status made them anxious, and anxiety, in turn, made them reach for irrational explanations and embrace the politics of resentment. (note 5-8)</p>
<p>"In [Hofstadter's] famous 1964 essay, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics,' he again highlighted the Pops' [supposed] fondness for the language of conspiracy....</p>
<p>"Hofstadter's psychoanalysis of the People's Party was hugely influential in its day, powerfully reinforcing elite fears of grass-roots movements and relaunching 'populism' as the generic name for the familiar political specter that always haunts the respectable. Few of the details in the historian's dark portrait stood the test of academic scrutiny, however. Many of the items I mentioned above turned out, upon investigation, to have been based on either a tendentious reading, or a whopping exaggeration, or else an outright error.</p>
<p>"Looking back from sixty years on, the motives behind Hofstadter's war on the reformers of the 1890s appear to have been both petty and distinctly of-their-time. What I mean by this is that Hofstadter seems to have chosen Populism as a proxy in his lifelong personal war against a previous generation of scholars, the so-called progressive historians, who cherished memories of Populism but whose symbols and theories had degenerated into patriotic clichés by the 1950s. (note 5-10) What better way to spite them than to revive the old anti-populist stereotypes of the 1890s?</p>
<p>"The central idea of the progressive historians' vision of the past had been social conflict, Hofstadter later wrote, meaning a struggle that always featured the same two sides, changing form but recurring throughout our history: radical versus conservative, farmer versus capitalist, the heirs of Jefferson versus the heirs of Hamilton. Thus when we find Hofstadter accusing the Populists of oversimplifying the political struggle in which they were engaged, imagining it as a war between 'the people' and the 'money power,' we understand that he is also criticizing his scholarly predecessors, who said similar things all the time. (note 5-11) </p>
<p>"But by 1955 that older generation of historians was gone. In putting Populism behind us, <em>The Age of Reform</em> was meant as a sort of manifesto for the new breed, with their faith in pluralism, professionalism, and benevolent, administrative capitalism. Hofstadter sifted through the nation's reform tradition, dismissing things that were no longer useful—mass movements, for example—and celebrating what he felt had paved the way for the post-ideological present. (note 5-12) </p>
<p>"Reviving the 1890s depiction of social protest as a species of resentment and unreason turned out to be exactly the thing to do in 1955. <em>The Age of Reform</em> perfectly captured the rationality-worshipping tenor of its times. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It has been described as 'the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America.' (note 5-14) And it transformed 'populism' back into a term of top-down abuse[.]" – pp. 154–8</p>
<p>"Using the tools Hofstadter provided them, American intellectuals quickly built anti-populism into a towering structure of liberal social theory....</p>
<p>"The most memorable effort along these lines was <em>The Torment of Secrecy,</em> a 1956 study of McCarthyism by the sociologist Edward Shils....Shils...pile[d] up...prizes and professorships and prestigious appointments[,] but when he turned to populism, the sociologist did not proceed empirically as Richard Hofstadter had done, combing through Populist books and manifestos. Instead, he advanced on his target by means of assertion and stereotype[.]</p>
<p>"Shils proceeded to establish that populists held [certain] views[,] in the same way that his predecessors...in 1896 and 1936...had: simply by saying so. When Shils asserted it, however, it was not the same as when a conservative Republican asserted it[,] in a pamphlet with a hysterical title like <em>The Platform of Anarchy.</em> What Edward Shils wrote was social science. It was scholarship. (note 5-15)...</p>
<p>"Before long we come to Shils' real concern: the threat populism posed to intellectuals like him and his colleagues. Obviously the danger was substantial: 'When populism goes on the warpath, among those they wish to strike are the "overeducated," those who are "too clever," "the highbrows," the "longhairs," the "eggheads," whose education has led them away from the simple wisdom and virtue of the people.' Shils knew that populists did things like this because those are things that Joe McCarthy did[.] (note 5-17)...</p>
<p>"As a description of the actual Populist tradition this was nonsense, but Shils sailed right on, enlarging the populists' supposed hatred of learning into a hatred of quality and refinement in general. 'Populists, whether they are radical reformers or congressional investigators,' he wrote, 'are all extremely suspicious and hostile towards the more sophisticated person.' In Shils's system, populism is the name one gives to any situation in which 'there is an ideology of popular resentment against the order imposed on society by a long-established, differentiated ruling class.' (note 5-18) In other words, any objection that ordinary people might have to any system of domination is in fact little more than nihilistic demagoguery and the rejection of all standards.</p>
<p>"The populist, Shils went on in his bombastic way, 'denies autonomy' to any institution of government. Populists hate bureaucracy. They despise the justice system and politicians in general. They hate learning. They deny the right of privacy. But oh, they love bullshit: this is the definition of the species. 'Populism acclaims the demagogue who...break[s] through the formalistic barriers erected by lawyers, pedants and bureaucrats[.]' (note 5-19)</p>
<p>"It's kind of a peculiar experience to see someone defending intellectualism so ferociously while engaging in intellectual practice of the kind that would score him a flat 'F' were <em>The Torment of Secrecy</em> turned in as a sociology term paper. Virtually nothing in Shils's denunciation of populism is tied to supporting evidence....</p>
<p>"Still, <em>The Torment of Secrecy</em> was another influential work. This was where the word 'populist' left the historical rails and began its long career wandering hither and yon, haunting the scholarly mind. This was the missing link where the anti-populist stereotype built up for six decades by American conservatives was adopted by the theorists of liberalism and then spread into every corner of the international world of scholarship.</p>
<p>"The reason for the book's influence is clear enough: it flattered the powerful. What Shils meant to do with his attack on populism was build support for a liberal democratic system where political actors wisely limit their ambitions to what he calls 'gradual increments of change.' To achieve such a system, what was required from working-class people was acceptance of hierarchy, meaning 'deference' toward 'those who govern,' like in Britain. (note 5-20)</p>
<p>"What was required from those who ruled, meanwhile, was a certain chumminess toward one another—'a sense of affinity among the elites,' as Shils put it. People on top, he pleaded, must respect others on top. (note 5-21)</p>
<p>"From this nifty hierarchy 'only extremism is excluded.' Only populists are to be ostracized.</p>
<p>"Perhaps you recognize what Shils is describing: It is the current liberal ideal of Washington, D.C. It is the philosophy of mainstream American journalism. It is the strategic model for the cautious, scholarly, consensus-minded Clinton and Obama administrations, extending their hands in friendship to fellow elites in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. This is where it all begins." – pp. 158–62</p>
<p>"To declare that the people were the problem with democracy was to make a spectacular break with the Jeffersonian tradition, but the strictures of social science required more. One had to be precise. Which group of people, specifically, was the problem?</p>
<p>"The answer was provided by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. In 1959 he discovered that the great danger to self-government was what he called 'working-class authoritarianism.'</p>
<p>"Lipset was perfectly candid about this. What he called the 'lower-class individual' was not really suited to democratic self-government. The 'norms of democracy,' he wrote, could only be appreciated by someone with 'a high level of sophistication and ego security.' Working-class people weren't 'sophisticated' by definition, and this led to all sorts of problems: they fell for demagogues, they hated minorities, they were suspicious of intellectuals, and so on. (note 5-22)...</p>
<p>"Tellingly, Lipset introduced his findings about 'working-class authoritarianism' not as useful information in its own right but as 'a tragic dilemma for those intellectuals' who had once believed in ordinary people. In the world of the consensus it was intellectuals who mattered, and Lipset merely wanted to draw their attention, in a collegial and scholarly way, to the fact that when they said noble things about 'the proletariat,' they were making an unfortunate mistake. (note 5-25)...</p>
<p>"'Authoritarianism,' scholars would come to agree, was a property associated with working-class voters, with populism, and the answer to it was rule by elites. White-collar authorities had to be strengthened in order to fend off working-class authoritarianism.</p>
<p>"Now, we have seen lots of authoritarian deeds in this book—strike-breaking private armies and so on—but precious few of them can be laid at the feet of the working class. On the contrary: it has consistently been elite fears of working-class votes that give...rise to Democracy Scares. This historical contradiction of the 'working-class authoritarian' thesis seems to have been obvious to no one, however. Elites must have greater authority, the argument went, or else authoritarianism will win out. This can only mean that some group's authority is nonauthoritarian by definition—and it is of course the enlightened authority of the highly educated who are always the heroes of consensus literature.</p>
<p>"They are the ones who know how to meet the grievances of the working class with stone-faced discipline. The populists may crave authority, but we the authorities will break them of that." – pp. 163–5</p>
<p>"Thanks to the work of Hofstadter, Bell, Shils, and Lipset, anti-populism became one of the great themes of the consensus years. Everyone wanted it to be true. Everyone agreed on it. Mass movements of working people were dangerous.</p>
<p>"And then: the whole scholarly edifice came crashing down....Soon it became clear that Hofstadter had done little archival research on Populism....</p>
<p>"Historians who did do research in Populist archives...proved that Populism wasn't any more backward-looking than any other movement that protested capitalism. That the Pops weren't against industrialization[.] That they weren't hostile to education. That they weren't nativists[.] (note 5-26)</p>
<p>"[T]he historian Norman Pollack...showed that...'the incidence of Populist anti-Semitism was infinitesimal.' (note 5-27)</p>
<p>"To identify 'status anxiety' as the source of mass protest movements—and also as the reason to dismiss them as irrational—sounded ever so scientific, but it turned out to be completely arbitrary, a label the critic (or historian) could affix to almost any group he chose in order to disparage it. To apply the term to the Populists, Hofstadter basically had to ignore the movement's voluminous and extremely rational concern with practical economic matters. Remember, the Pops came up during a time of terrible farm prices and a severe business depression. They faced these developments squarely and with comparatively little scapegoating, kind of an impressive achievement for the nineteenth century when you think about it. Dismissing their discontent as 'status anxiety' comes close to denying the reality of economic hardship altogether. (note 5-28)</p>
<p>"[From note 5-28:] Here is [historian] Michael Rogin's take: 'Populism was hardly a moralistic flight from an environment in which everyone else was concerned with facts. The movement made an effort to come to grips with the transformation of American society [in the second Industrial Revolution – MB]. Simply because Populism faced the changes America was undergoing while other groups in part denied or repressed them, it is not to blame for the more desperate political responses like McCarthyism.' [Note 5-28 end]</p>
<p>"Under this hailstorm of rebuke, Richard Hofstadter eventually gave up trying to defend the Populism chapters of <em>The Age of Reform.</em> (note 5-29) His status-anxiety theory was tossed into the dumpster of discredited hypotheses[.] Christopher Lasch, who was Hofstadter's protégé at Columbia, believed Hofstadter's contempt for Populism in fact betrayed his cohort's 'cultural prejudices' against the lower middle class. (note 5-30)" – pp. 165–6</p>
<p>"Here's the crazy thing, though. Academic anti-populism lives on. Indeed, it thrives. The almost complete discrediting of its founding text seems to count for nothing. Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational; that threaten democracy's norms with their anti-intellectual demagoguery. Upon Hofstadter's famous mistake the burgeoning pedagogy of 'populism studies' builds its theories and convenes its panels. Out of this scholarly blunder of the 1950s has grown the common sense of ruling elites everywhere.</p>
<p>"But of course it's not just Hofstadter's mistake. Consensus-era anti-populism built upon prejudices that were inherited from conservatives in the 1930s, which they had inherited from conservatives in the 1890s....[T]he elements of the anti-populist stereotype remained stubbornly the same, and so did the social position of those who embraced it. Indeed, it seems that whenever we find someone attacking populism, their underlying purpose is to shore up the legitimacy of whatever system it is that has made them an elite.</p>
<p>"What motivated adherents of this anti-populist creed, in each historical iteration, was raw self-interest. The core of the consensus school's viewpoint, as Michael Rogin described it, was 'the hope that if only responsible elites could be left alone, if only political issues could be kept from the people, the elites would make wise decisions.' (note 5-31) This is the essence of anti-populism always.</p>
<p>"Today the 'hope' for wise decisions by elites rolls irresistibly on, while the war on populism continues in almost exactly the same terms used by Hofstadter and Shils in the consensus days of 1955, the same terms used by America's eminent lawyers in 1936 and by America's leading economists and aristocrats in 1896. It doesn't seem to matter that the theory is based on a debunked historical hypothesis. On it goes, repeating the same eternal archetype: the bigotry of ordinary people, the folly of protest movements, and the wisdom of elites....</p>
<p>"When someone moans about populism, we know instantly that they are summoning up a vision of a society directed by responsible professionals, always including themselves, always concurring prudently with one another, always doing their best to steer the world through complex problems. These professionals are all highly educated; in fact, they probably all went to a tiny handful of schools. If it's pundits we're talking about, they work for one of a tiny handful of media outlets; if it's policy advisers, they work for one of a tiny handful of think tanks. They might not all agree with one another down to the letter, but agreement itself—consensus—remains for them the noblest of goals." – pp. 167–8</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 6: Lift Every Voice</p>
<p>"After 1965, as the Vietnam War became issue number one, the New Left exploded in size. At its zenith, SDS [(Students for a Democratic Society)] had around one hundred thousand members—small by historical standards, but with a cultural reach that far exceeded those numbers. Its ideas spread from the elite campuses to the vast world of college students, giving us 'the Sixties' as everyone remembers it: constant protests, [etc.]" – p. 184</p>
<p>"The Democratic Party itself did the opposite of what [Martin Luther King's] reformers hoped. Instead of embracing a bold agenda of redistribution, the party descended into a civil war in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. The winners of that tussle were ultimately the party's anti-populists—technocrats who believed that reforms, if any were warranted, had to come from the highly educated leadership class.</p>
<p>"As for the New Left, it failed to become the next step in the grand march of progress, always remaining a movement of college students, not 'the people.' Its members never transcended their essential identity: these were proto-professionals, young people in training for positions in the upper reaches of America's middle-class society. They were a charming elite and even an alienated elite, but an elite nevertheless. (note 6-20)</p>
<p>"And they acted like one. In the early days of SDS, the group's understanding of capitalism didn't have a whole lot to do with traditional working-class concerns—with hard work for lousy pay, for example, or with monopoly, or with the power of banks. (note 6-21) Indeed, what made them a 'new' Left was the singular belief that educated people like them, rather than the working class, were now the agents of political progress. In this they bore a strong resemblance to the consensus intellectuals who taught them, scholars who believed progress would come from the enlightened people in society's higher-educated ranks, not from mass movements or blue-collar workers....As Tom Hayden, the principal author of <em>The Port Huron Statement,</em> recalled years later, he had believed that humanity had entered 'a whole new period of history in which the Left had to go from a belief in labor as the agency of change to students as an agency of change.' (note 6-22)</p>
<p>"Social class was a persistent stumbling block for the New Left. One anecdote [historian James] Miller relates in his history of SDS is how the group's organizers, trying to bring together the unemployed in several northern cities, eventually lost interest in the poor folks they were trying to help—because those poor folks often turned out to think America needed to fight communism in Vietnam. (note 6-23)...</p>
<p>"[From note 6-21:] When the early SDS howled calamity, it often meant a calamity of the middle-class soul: of the individual all stifled and isolated and alienated because of the conformist demands of mass society. 'Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today,' declared the <em>Port Huron Statement.</em> 'These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.' And so on. [Note 6-21 end]</p>
<p>"Eventually the romantic populism of the early 1960s drained away completely. It happened in movement politics and it happened in the larger culture....</p>
<p>"By the time the clock ran out on the New Left, its activists had come to believe that the American people...were not the would-be beneficiaries of progressive reform; they were <em>the enemy,</em> facilitators of the evil Amerikan empire.</p>
<p>"'Working people' here in the USA were not anything special, a 1969 SDS manifesto declared; just another 'particular privileged interest' bought off with imperialist plunder. The only 'people' who mattered by then were the 'oppressed peoples of the world,' the peasants of Vietnam and the Third World, and with them the white New Left boldly declared its solidarity. SDS was a 'Revolutionary Youth Movement' now, an armed ally of the global people's uprising in whose eyes <em>all</em> Americans (with the exception of African Americans) were suspect. (note 6-24)...</p>
<p>"The New Left succeeded in stripping the aura of nobility away from what the Pops called the 'producing classes,' and [succeeded] in inventing an understanding of radicalism in which politics was no longer really about accomplishing public things for the common good. Instead, politics was becoming, at least in part, a path to personal fulfillment or healing. Protest degenerated into 'street theater'; 'radical style' came to trump 'radical substance,' as the historian Christopher Lasch put it; a satisfying sense of personal righteousness became the ultimate end of political action. (note 6-25)</p>
<p>"It was the opposite of what King and [close associate and political strategist Bayard] Rustin were after, what populism is always after: a grand coalition of social forces that would reform capitalism in the interests of the great majority. That was lost in the late sixties[.]" – pp. 185–8</p>
<p>"[A]n insight the protesters of that era missed [was]: organizations of ordinary working people are often a force for democratic progress by their very nature, regardless of the ignorance or bigotry of [some] individual members of those organizations.</p>
<p>"The radicals missed the point then, and everyone misses the point today. The social stereotypes established in those last awful years of the sixties have stuck with us. Like the geriatric Rolling Stones, they chug along imperturbably though they are now decades past their rightful retirement. We cannot shake them. When we recall that King and Rustin and...president of the powerful United Auto Workers [union] Walter Reuther hoped for a grand alliance of ordinary people, we have trouble imagining what they might have had in mind. But white working-class people as enemies of progress—oh, <em>that</em> we understand.</p>
<p>"The big counterculture think-book of 1970, <em>The Greening of America,</em> described 'blue-collar workers' as 'those arch-opponents of the new consciousness.' [I]t exhorted us to have pity on th[o]se monstrous proles[, stereotyping them as] '"fascist"[ic;] tight-lipped[;] tense[;] crew cut[;] correctly dressed[;] church-going[; showing the] American flag[;] hostile [to] communists, youth, and blacks[; with] little...love[,] poetry[,] music[,] nature, or joy[;] dominated by fear[;] narrow-minded[ly] prejudice[d;] self-defeating[ly] materialis[tic;] lonely[;] suspicio[us;] angry[;] envious[;] bitter[;] self-hating[;] ravag[ing their] environment[;] fle[eing] from consciousness and responsibility[;] turned against [their] own nature.' And so on. (note 6-27)...</p>
<p><em>The Greening of America</em> is dedicated to 'the students at Yale,' where its author taught in the Law School. That the stereotype [which] the book did so much to bolster might have been a straightforward expression of his cohort's structural antagonism to working-class people appears not to have occurred to its author. In hindsight, however, it is obvious: in 1896 the young gentlemen of Yale heckled working-class champion William Jennings Bryan; in 1970 their votary trolled the white working class generally for its lousy consciousness. And somewhere in between this myth was blithely cemented: The Ivy League elite were not only society's rulers, but also society's rebels and revolutionaries, its designated conscience. The successful were not only more capable than those who toil; they were morally superior as well. [T]he ruling class ruled because it deserved to rule.</p>
<p>"[I]n [the] final scene [of the movie] <em>Easy Rider,</em> the glamorous young bikers with the awesome rock 'n' roll soundtrack are brutally and pointlessly shot to death by a pair of heavily accented, obviously impoverished rednecks riding in the cab of an old pickup truck. Who are these villians? As the sharp-eyed historian Jefferson Cowie points out, 'It is almost impossible to not see these characters as a quote from <em>The Grapes of Wrath.'</em> (note 6-29)</p>
<p>"In other words, they were the Joads, the very symbols of resilient thirties populism, reimagined for the sixties and for the decades to come as murderers...as pigheaded killers of everything that is fun and joyful and enlightened and tolerant and cool in American life. As fascists." – pp. 189–91</p>
<p>"In this way the consensus school's anti-populism was elevated by its enemy the counterculture into wisdom for the ages[;] this essential bit of class profiling was set in stone. Working-class whites were reactionary and authoritarian." – pp. 191–2</p>
<p>"In an interview in 1970,...Richard Hofstadter...referred to the sixties as 'the Age of Rubbish' and criticized left-wing college students for an 'elitism' that was 'based on moral indignation against most of the rest of us.' [H]e referred to the vast numbers of Americans who 'intensely dislike young people—college students mainly[.]' He resented students for their precious radicalism...and he cast this resentment in stark, class-based terms. 'The activist young operate from elitist premises which they themselves aren't aware of, but which working people are acutely aware of. The kids ask for two weeks off for conducting political activities[.] People who work in offices and on assembly lines can't negotiate such arrangements[.] The kids implicitly assume a certain kind of indulgence that other types of people in this society don't get. This is intensely resented. The kids dislike the idea that they're thinking and acting as an elite, but they are.' (note 6-33)...</p>
<p>"[So] Hofstadter himself became a populist, of exactly the embittered kind he had spent his career analyzing." – pp. 194–5</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 8: Let Us Now Scold Uncouth Men</p>
<p>"Lawrence Goodwyn, the great historian of mass democratic uprisings, once wrote that to build a movement like the People's Party of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, one must 'connect with people <em>as they are in society,</em> that is to say, in a state that sophisticated modern observers are inclined to regard as one of 'inadequate consciousness.' (note 8-5)</p>
<p>"Goodwyn also warned against a politics of 'individual righteousness,' a tendency toward 'celebrating the purity' of one's so-called radicalism. If you wish to democratize the country's economic structure, he argued, you must practice 'ideological patience,' a suspension of moral judgment of ordinary Americans. (note 8-6) Only then can you start to build a movement that is hopeful and powerful and that changes society forever.</p>
<p>"If you're not interested in democratizing the country's economic structure, however, individual righteousness might be just the thing for you. This model deals with ordinary citizens by judging and purging; by canceling and scolding. It's not about building; it's about purity, about stainless moral virtue. Its favorite math is subtraction; its most cherished rhetorical form is denunciation; its goal is to bring the corps of the righteous into a tight orbit around the most righteous one of all.</p>
<p>"What swept over huge parts of American liberalism after the disaster of November 8, 2016, was the opposite of Goodwyn's 'ideological patience.' It was a paroxysm of scolding, a furor for informing Trump voters what inadequate and indeed rotten people they were. The elitist trend that had been building among liberals for decades hurried to its loud, carping consummation.</p>
<p>"Where populism is optimistic about rank-and-file voters, the variety of liberalism I have in mind regards them with a combination of suspicion and disgust. It dreams not of organizing humanity but of policing it. It is a geyser of moral rebuke, erupting against teenagers who have committed some act of cultural appropriation, against the hiring of an actor for an inappropriate role, against a public speech by someone with unpopular views, against the wrongful dumping of household trash, against inappropriate tree-pruning techniques spotted in a nearby suburb. Its characteristic goal is not to get banks and monopolies under control, as populism typically does, but to set up a nonprofit, attract funding from banks and monopolies, and then...to scold the world for its sins." – pp. 228–9</p>
<p>"Why the ruling class must continue to rule is always the great theme of Democracy Scares, voiced by eminent economist and newspaper editor alike. In our own time, even comedians have a role to play in the operation. <em>In Defense of Elitism,</em> a 2019 account of the Trump era by <em>Time</em> magazine humorist Joel Stein, describes the essential divide between liberals and Trump supporters like this: 'Elites are people who think; populists are people who believe.' Populists are creatures of intuition and childlike impulse, people who think that facts 'are indistinguishable from lies.' Elites accept the expertise of experts; populism, however, is little more than 'a primal scream for primordial masculinity.' Just as in 1896, populism is supposed to represent the appetites and vulgar urges of the body, in revolt against the higher faculties of thought and reason. (note 8-7)</p>
<p>"The idea of ordinary people having a say in matters of state is strictly a joke. In a precise replay of conservative humorists of 1896, the liberal humorist of 2019 laughs off the suggestion that farmers be represented on the sophisticated body that decides U.S. monetary policy: 'Imagine if farmers' were involved in such decisions, Joel Stein guffaws, 'trying to figure out how to establish central bank liquidity swap lines during a financial crisis.' What our age urgently requires, he announces, is the opposite of that: a wide-ranging acknowledgement that elites are legitimate; that meritocracy is fair; that domination is rightful when the dominant group is made up of people who, like Stein and his friends, went to name-brand colleges. If ordinary people want things to change, I suppose, they must implore the brainy to change them. After all, democracy is, as he puts it, 'a government of the nerds, by the nerds, and for the nerds.' (note 8-8)</p>
<p>"What is especially disheartening about this 'defense of elitism' is the author's apparent unfamiliarity with liberalism's non-elitist past, of a time when liberalism was an expression of the democratic hopes of ordinary people[—]yet [it's] utterly typical of the resistance culture of our time, where more and more one notices a frank acknowledgment of liberalism [being] the politics of a highly educated upper class. (note 8-9)...</p>
<p>"What is missing from this vision of exuberant, future-minded liberalism is labor, the driving force of so many reform movements since the 1890s." – pp. 229–31</p>
<p>"[If you t]alk about the deindustrialization of vast parts of the country, the decimation of unions, the destruction of small towns by monopoly forces, [then] a certain kind of Democratic partisan...hears 'Trump voter.' The enlightened liberal shuns such people. They are to be scolded, not championed....</p>
<p>"On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump made a point of...criticizing the nation's trade agreements[.] At the time[,] liberal pundits pretty much ignored the matter.</p>
<p>"Once Trump had won, a panicked punditburo swung into action, insisting in a crescendo of consensus that trade had little to do with the country's deindustrialization[. T]he initial reaction...was virtually unanimous and unfolded along the same lines as in 1896: the rationality of working-class grievances had to be denied. (note 8-12)</p>
<p>"The outcome of the 2016 election, the same punditburo insisted, could not and must not be explained by reference to economic factors or to long-term, class-related trends.</p>
<p>"[T]o acknowledge those plain facts was to come dangerously close to voicing the intolerable heresy that the D.C. opinion cartel dubbed the 'economic anxiety' thesis—the idea that people voted for Trump out of understandable worries about wages or opioids or unemployment or deindustrialization. The reason this was intolerable, one suspects, is because it suggested that there was a rational element to certain groups' support for Trump and also that there was something less than A+ about the professional-class Camelot over which the Democrats presided for eight years. Just as in 1896, the rationality of certain low-class voters was ruled out from the start.</p>
<p>"[T]he message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism." – pp. 233–5</p>
<p>"[Soon after the 2016 election,] our country's best-informed opinionators...were...determined to believe in the essential monstrousness of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.</p>
<p>"Why did these liberals adopt this ferociously anti-populist line so quickly? There were many conventional explanations for Trump's...win other than the general wickedness of the American people....</p>
<p>"But acknowledging that some Trump voters might be desperate and otherwise decent people became a thing unsayable in the small world of America's opinion class. [Instead, t]he total depravity of those people was the only acceptable explanation....Trump's rise was not about politics, it was about sin, and it was the task of progressives to scold the unrighteous for their iniquity. [As an] exception[, i]n early 2017, the liberal <em>New York Times</em> columnist Nicholas Kristof...reminded his audience [that] 'Tolerance is a liberal value'[. Then, a] few weeks later, [he] recounted the outpouring of rage he had received since making this suggestion, writing that 'Nothing I've written since the election has engendered more anger...than my periodic assertions that Trump voters are human, too.'</p>
<p>"To scold...and conspicuously withhold forgiveness. [V]arious high-minded progressive commentators announced that they so hated the world that they were never, <em>ever</em> going to absolve those who had trespassed politically against them. Reasoning in 2019 that 'conservatives spat in our face and elected an abusive, racist, misogynist criminal,' the author and blogger Amanda Marcotte advised against forgiving rank-and-file Republican voters. '[S]hould progressives impose social consequences, declining friendships and putting a chill on family relationships, in order to send the message that supporting Trump was not OK and will not be shrugged off as a harmless lark?'</p>
<p>"Blacklisting was one of the weapons to which this ferocious moral crusade inevitably turned....What I find shocking is how comfortable liberals have become with the weapons of the boss....</p>
<p>"What is certain is that the liberalism of scolding will never give rise to the kind of mass movement that this country needs. It is almost entirely a politics of individual righteousness, an angry refusal of Goodwyn's 'ideological patience.' Its appeal comes not from the prospect of democratizing the economy but from the psychic satisfaction of wagging a finger in some stupid proletarian's face, forever." – pp. 237–41</p>
<p>"What these examples show us is a generation of centrist liberals collectively despairing over democracy itself. After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda [from Republicans], Democrats turned against the idea of 'the people' altogether. (note 8-17)</p>
<p>"America was founded with the phrase 'We the People,' but William Galston, co-inventor of the concept of the Learning Class, urges us to get over our obsession with popular sovereignty. As he writes in <em>Anti-Pluralism,</em> his 2018 attack on populism, 'We should set aside this narrow and complacent conviction; there are viable alternatives to the people as sources of legitimacy.' (note 8-18)</p>
<p>"There certainly are. In the pages of this book, we have seen anti-populists explain that they deserve to rule because they are better educated, or wealthier, or more rational, or harder working. The contemporary culture of constant moral scolding is in perfect accordance with this way of thinking[.]</p>
<p>"The [current] liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter...is populism's opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition for the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn't seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these institutions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be 'good.' The wealthy liberal neighborhoods of America have become utopias of scolding because scolding is how this kind of concentrated power relates to ordinary citizens. This isn't 'working-class authoritarianism'; it's the opposite. [Of t]hose people on top, this kind of liberalism says: They have more than you because they deserve to have more than you. Those fine people dominate you because they are better than you." – pp. 241–2</p>
<p>"Populism was and is relentlessly optimistic—about people, about political possibilities, about life, and about America in general.</p>
<p>"Anti-populism is all about despair. Its attitude toward ordinary humans is bitter. Its hope for human redemption is nil. Its vision of the common good is bleak....</p>
<p>"Its darkest moments of all come when it contemplates climate change. I have in mind a much-discussed op-ed the <em>New York Times</em> ran in December 2018[. T]he philosophy professor who wrote it, Todd May, is a well-known anti-Trump activist[.] To me, his essay's appearance...felt like a political act, like the final verdict of a dejected elite on a stubborn population that refuses to heed its admonitions...that revels in falsehoods and that persistently chooses ridiculous demagogues over responsible experts.</p>
<p>"May's subject is human extinction—whether it should happen or whether it shouldn't. The professor phrases his indictment of mankind with a certain delicacy, but it's impossible to miss his point. We are a harmful species, he charges, 'causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit' the earth. He names climate change and factory farming as the worst of our trespasses, and declares that 'if this were all to the story there would be no tragedy. The elimination of the human species would be a good thing, full stop.'</p>
<p>"But there are other considerations, the professor admits. People do some worthwhile things. Also, it would be cruel 'to demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives.' May's answer, ultimately, is to have it both ways: 'It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off and yet would be a tragedy.'</p>
<p>"This kind of highbrow pessimism, this barely concealed longing for the death of the species, is an attitude you come across all the time these days in enlightened liberal circles. (note 8-19) It is the inevitable flip side of the moralistic politics I have described in this chapter: the wages for our sins; the recompense for our irredeemable stupidity....</p>
<p>"I think of Carl Sandburg, the twentieth century's 'Poet of the People[.]' And I think of Sandburg's 'Chicago,' the greatest populist poem of them all[.] It's a song about loving life despite it all, loving the life of the people[:] 'Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,/ Laughing!'" – pp. 242–4</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Conclusion: The Question</p>
<p>"We have seen how a party of democratic inclusion chose to remodel itself as the expression of an elite consensus, and how a party of concentrated private power started passing itself off as a down-home friend of ordinary Americans[,] and between these two parties the greatest democracy in the world has become a paradise for the privileged....</p>
<p>"A joyless politics of reprimand is all that centrism has left: a politics of individual righteousness that regards the public not as a force to be organized but as a threat to be scolded and disciplined. Unfortunately, it is an ineffective politics in addition to an unhappy one....</p>
<p>"There is another way, reader. [T]here is a tradition that trusts in the people, that responds to their needs, that turns resentment into progress. That same populist tradition is and has always been at war with monopoly, with corporate authority, with billionaire privilege, with inequality....</p>
<p>"Indeed, you can't really have...the war on concentrated economic power...without...a broad-minded acceptance of average people. That is because the only real answer to plutocracy is a mass movement of ordinary working people, hailing from all different backgrounds, brought together by a common desire to dismantle the forces that make their toil so profitless and to figure out how they might gain control over their lives.</p>
<p>"The demand for economic democracy is how you build a mass movement of ordinary people. And a mass movement of ordinary people, in turn, is how you achieve economic democracy. Which is to say that the answer both to Trumpist fraud and to liberal elitism must come from us—from the democratic public itself." – pp. 245–7</p>
<p>"This is not an idle dream. We know what genuine populism looks like; we have seen it crop up in the agrarian 1890s, in the New Deal 1930s, in the civil rights days of the 1960s." – p. 248</p>
<p>"[P]opulism...is...the classic, all-American response to...plutocracy[. I]t is also the naturally dominant rhetorical element in our political tradition.</p>
<p>"[P]opulism is deep in the grain of the democratic personality. Americans do not defer to their social superiors: we are natural-born egalitarians. Populism...deflate[s] pretentiousness of every description.</p>
<p>"In political contests in most parts of America, the candidate who captures this refusal of deference...more often than not...wins. [P]opulist protest against the economic elite is what made the Democrats the majority party for so many decades.</p>
<p>"[W]e know that anti-elitism works...because we have seen it working against us for fifty years. The Republican Party owes its successful hold on power to adopting...anti-elitist themes[.]</p>
<p>"Populism is the supreme rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of American politics. On the other hand, the impulse to identify your goals with the elite—with <em>any</em> elite, even a moral one—is a kind of political death wish. In a democracy, a faction that chooses to go about its business by admiring its own moral goodness and scolding average voters as insensitive clods is a faction that is not interested in winning." – pp. 252–4</p>
<p>"Thanks to insurgent campaigns like the one mounted by Bernie Sanders for the presidency in 2016, we know fairly precisely what a modern-day populism looks like.</p>
<p>"[T]he key to making it work is movement-building on a massive scale[:] enlisting millions of ordinary people who have lost their faith in democracy.</p>
<p>"[T]he place it must come first is the Democratic Party. The party of technocrats and consultants...must eventually give way to the populism that we must have. Thus will the Democratic Party learn once again to breathe hope into those who despair.</p>
<p>"The populism I am describing is not formless anger that might lash out in any direction. It is not racism. It is not resentment. It is not demagoguery. It is, instead, to ask the most profound question of them all: 'For whom does America exist?'...</p>
<p>"For whom[—i]ts billionaires? Its celebrities? Its tech companies? Are we the people...just glorified security guards, obeying orders to protect their holdings?...</p>
<p>"Or is it the other way around—are they supposed to serve us?</p>
<p>"Let us resolve to ask that far-reaching question again[.] This time around, there can be only one possible answer." – pp. 254–6</p>
<hr style="padding-top: 1%; margin-right: 80%; border-width: 0; border-bottom-width: 1px">
<small>
<p>2-30 – William Allen White, "A Most Lamentable Comedy," <em>Stratagems and Spoils: Stories of Love and Politics</em> (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).
<br>2-31 – Gustave Le Bon, <em>The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind</em> (Ernest Benn Limited, 1952 [1896]).</p>
<p>3-21 – Kenneth Burke, "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," <em>American Writers' Congress,</em> ed. Henry Hart (International Publishers, 1935), pp 87–94.</p>
<p>5-1 – Richard H. Pells, <em>The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s</em> (Harper & Row, 1985), p. 130.
<br>5-2 – Daniel Bell, "The Dispossessed" [1962], <em>The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated</em> (Doubleday, 1963), pp. 22, 32.
<br>5-3 – Michael Paul Rogin, <em>The Intellectuals and McCarthy</em> (MIT Press, 1967), pp. 274–75.
<br>5-4 – Daniel Bell, <em>The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties</em> (Free Press, 1962), pp. 122, 123.
<br>5-6 – Ibid., p. 114.
<br>5-7 – Richard Hofstadter, <em>The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.</em> (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), pp. 62, 82, 85, 78.
<br>5-8 – Ibid., pp. 73, 78, 34.
<br>5-10 – Christopher Lasch, "On Richard Hofstadter," <em>New York Review of Books,</em> March 8, 1973.
<br>5-11 – Richard Hofstadter, <em>The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington</em> (Vintage, 1970), chap. 12. Hofstadter, <em>The Age of Reform,</em> p. 65.
<br>5-12 – Hofstadter, <em>The Age of Reform,</em> pp. 126–27.
<br>5-14 – Historian Alan Brinkley (in 1985), as quoted in David S. Brown, <em>Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography</em> (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 99.
<br>5-15 – Edward Shils, <em>The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies</em> (Ivan R. Dee, 1996 [1956]), p. 98.
<br>5-17 – Ibid., p. 100.
<br>5-18 – Ibid., p. 101.
<br>5-19 – Ibid., p. 104.
<br>5-20 – Ibid., p. 49.
<br>5-21 – Ibid., p. 227.
<br>5-22 – Seymour Lipset, <em>Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics</em> (Anchor, 1963 [1959]), p. 108.
<br>5-25 – Ibid., p. 87.
<br>5-26 – Walter Nugent, <em>The Tolerant Populists</em> (University of Chicago Press, 1963), [etc.] There are probably a hundred more.
<br>5-27 – Norman Pollack, "The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism," <em>American Historical Review</em> 68, no. 1 (October 1962).
<br>5-28 – Argument of historian David Potter, summarized in David S. Brown, <em>Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography</em> (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 117. Rogin, <em>The Intellectuals and McCarthy,</em> pp. 32–33.
<br>5-29 – Brown, <em>Richard Hofstadter,</em> pp. 118–19.
<br>5-30 – Christopher Lasch, <em>The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics</em> (Norton, 1991), p. 457.
<br>5-31 – Rogin, <em>The Intellectuals and McCarthy,</em> p. 275.</p>
<p>6-20 – Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism," <em>Radical America</em> 11, no. 3 (May/June 1977): 7–22.
<br>6-21 – See main text.
<br>6-22 – James Miller, <em>Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago</em> (Touchstone, 1987), pp. 23, 87.
<br>6-23 – Ibid., p. 214.
<br>6-24 – Harold Jacobs, ed., <em>Weatherman</em> (Ramparts Books, 1970), p. 52.
<br>6-25 – Miller, <em>Democracy Is in the Streets,</em> pp. 59, 60. Christopher Lasch, <em>The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations</em> (Norton, 1978), p. 83.
<br>6-27 – Charles A. Reich, <em>The Greening of America</em> (Bantam, 1971), pp. 305–6, 320.
<br>6-29 – Jefferson Cowie, <em>Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class</em> (New Press, 2010), p. 190.
<br>6-33 – Richard Hofstadter, "The Age of Rubbish," <em>Newsweek,</em> July 4, 1970.</p>
<p>8-5 – Lawrence Goodwyn, "Organizing Democracy: The Limits of Theory and Practice," <em>Democracy</em> 1, no. 1 (1981): 51, 59.
<br>8-6 – "Individual righteousness," "Celebrating the purity": Lawrence Goodwyn, <em>The Populist Moment</em> (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 292. "Ideological patience": Goodwyn, "Organizing Democracy."
<br>8-7 – Joel Stein, <em>In Defense of Elites: Why I'm Better Than You and You're Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book</em> (Grand Central Publishing, 2019), pp. xvi, 161, 177.
<br>8-8 – Ibid., pp. 254, 239.
<br>8-9 – An anti-polarization group called "More in Common," <em>The Hidden Tribes of America</em> (October 2018: https://hiddentribes.us).
<br>8-12 – "Don't Blame China for Taking U.S. Jobs," <em>Fortune,</em> November 8, 2016, "The real reason for disappearing jobs isn't trade—it's robots," <em>CNBC,</em> November 21, 2016, etc. See [a] summary of the ups and downs of the pundit consensus by Gwynne Guilford, "The Epic Mistake about Manufacturing That's Cost Americans Millions of Jobs," <em>Quartz,</em> May 3, 2018.
<br>8-17 – David Adler, "Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists," <em>New York Times,</em> May 23, 2018.
<br>8-18 – William Galston, <em>Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy</em> (Yale University Press, 2018), p. 22.
<br>8-19 – See the literature on the "Anthropocene."</p>
</small>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-75848918521078741322021-12-24T19:53:00.007-05:002022-02-17T17:06:55.640-05:00Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution<p>First, some background:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1061527939&title=Mykolaiv">Mykolaiv</a> [from Wikipedia]</p>
<p>Mykolaiv[, also] known as...Nikolayev[,] a city in southern Ukraine, [is an] administrative [and] shipbuilding center of the Black Sea....</p>
<p>"Mykolaiv's orderly layout reflects the fact that its development has been well planned from the founding of the city. Its main streets, including the three main east–west Avenues, are very wide and tree-lined. Much of Mykolaiv's land area consists of beautiful parks....</p>
<p>"[The city] was f]ounded by Prince Grigory Potemkin [in] 1789[.] The shipyards were built first[.]</p>
<p>"The city's climate is moderately continental with mild winters and hot summers....</p>
<p>"Mykolaiv was a major Jewish cent[er] of [the] Russian Empire in the 19th century. [For example,] Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson...was born in Mykolaiv [i]n 1902....</p>
<p>"[The city's e]thnicity [in] 1897 [included] Russians 66.3% [and] Jews 19.5%[.]" – Wikipedia</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1059029894&title=Julius_Martov">Julius Martov</a> [from Wikipedia]</p>
<p>"Julius Martov...born Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum (24 Nov 1873–4 Apr 1923) was a politician and revolutionary who became the leader of the Mensheviks in early 20th-century Russia. He was arguably the closest friend Vladimir Lenin ever had, and was a friend and mentor of Leon Trotsky[.]</p>
<p>"Martov was born to a middle-class, educated and politically aware Jewish family in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (modern day Istanbul)....In his teens, he admired the Narodniks, but the famine crisis made him a Marxist: 'It suddenly became clear to me how superficial and groundless the whole of my revolutionism had been until then, and how my subjective political romanticism was dwarfed before the philosophical and sociological heights of Marxism.'" – Wikipedia</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1060701040&title=Leon_Trotsky">Leon Trotsky</a> [from Wikipedia]</p>
<p>"Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 Nov 1879–21 Aug 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Ukrainian-Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism which has become known as Trotskyism.</p>
<p>"Born into a wealthy Ukrainian-Jewish family in [southern] Ukraine[,] Trotsky embraced Marxism after moving to Nikolayev [a.k.a. Mykolaiv] in 1896. In 1898 Tsarist authorities arrested him for revolutionary activities and subsequently exiled him to Siberia. He escaped from Siberia in 1902 and moved to London, where he befriended Vladimir Lenin. In 1903 he sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks during the...Social Democratic Labour Party's initial organisational split. Trotsky helped organize the failed Russian Revolution of [all of] 1905, after which he was again arrested and exiled to Siberia. He once again escaped, and spent the following 10 years working in Britain, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the United States. After the...February...1917...Revolution brought an end to the Tsarist monarchy, Trotsky returned from New York [City] to Russia and became a leader in the Bolshevik faction. [H]e played a key role in the October Revolution of...1917 that overthrew the...Provisional Government." – Wikipedia</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">See also: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1060443153&title=1905_Russian_Revolution">1905 Russian Revolution</a> [from Wikipedia].</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>History of the Russian Revolution,</em> Leon Trotsky, 1930, translated by Max Eastman, 2017 (1932):</p>
<p>A Note About the Author [by Max Eastman]</p>
<p>"[Trotsky] organized the defense of the new workers' republic, creating the Red Army and conducting a war against the counterrevolutionary forces, backed up with ammunition and supplies by all the great powers of the world[,] a war which was fought on fourteen different fronts with a battle line 7,000 miles long and which was carried to victory under his leadership....</p>
<p>"Trotsky came to New York, after being exiled from Switzerland, France and Spain as a dangerous agitator against the imperialist war, was welcomed by the Slavic laboring population here as the hero of their past revolution, an inevitable leader in the revolution to come. He addressed immense mass meetings, one of them that many Americans remember in the Hippodrome, and earned his living as an editor of the Russian revolutionary daily, <em>Novy Mir....</em></p>
<p>"Lenin exclaimed [of Trotsky,] striking his fist on the table: 'Show me another man who could organize almost a model army in a single year!'</p>
<p>"[F]rom the study of Trotsky written by A.V. Lunacharsky...published...in 1923 in...<em>Revolutionary Silhouettes[:]</em></p>
<p>"'For work in political groups Trotsky seemed little fitted, but in the ocean of historic events, where such personal features lose their importance, only his favorable side came to the front....</p>
<p>"'The chief external endowments of Trotsky are his oratorical gift and his talent as a writer....</p>
<p>"'As a political man of wisdom, Trotsky stands on the same height that he does as an orator. And how could it be otherwise? The most skillful orator whose speech is not illumined with thought is nothing but an idle virtuoso, and all his oratory is a tinkling cymbal.'" – pp. x–xiii</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Preface [by Trotsky]</p>
<p>"The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events. [A]t those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime....</p>
<p>"The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense, and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution.</p>
<p>"The point is that society does not change its institutions as need arises, the way a mechanic changes his instruments. On the contrary, society actually takes the institutions which hang upon it as given once and for all. For decades the oppositional criticism is nothing more than a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure....Entirely exceptional conditions, independent of the will of persons and parties, are necessary in order to tear off from discontent the fetters of conservatism, and bring the masses to insurrection.</p>
<p>"The swift changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of man's mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and passions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities of 'demagogues.'</p>
<p>"The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis—the active orientation of the masses by a method of successive approximations. The different stages of a revolutionary process, certified by a change of parties in which the more extreme always supersedes the less, express the growing pressure to the left of the masses[.]</p>
<p>"[A] revolutionary party bases its tactics upon a calculation of the changes of mass consciousness." – pp. xv–xvii</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Volume One: The Overthrow of Tsarism</p>
<p>Chapter 1: Peculiarities of Russia's Development</p>
<p>"The ancient civilizations of Egypt, India, and China had a character self-sufficient enough, and they had time enough at their disposal, to bring their social relations, in spite of low productive powers, almost to the same detailed completion to which their craftsmen brought the products of their craft....</p>
<p>"A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. But this does not mean that it...reproduces all the stages of their past....Capitalism...prepares and...realizes the universality and permanence of man's development....Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order....</p>
<p>"[T]he introduction of certain elements of Western technique and training, above all military and industrial, under Peter I, led to a strengthening of serfdom as the fundamental form of labor organization....</p>
<p>"Unevenness...reveals itself...in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity, their backward culture is compelled to make leaps....</p>
<p>"The Byzantine autocratism, officially adopted by the Muscovite tsars at the beginning of the sixteenth century,...gained the subjection of the nobility by making the peasantry their slaves, and upon this foundation created the St. Petersburg imperial absolutism. [S]erfdom, born at the end of the sixteenth century, took form in the seventeenth, flowered in the eighteenth, and was juridically annulled only in 1861.</p>
<p>"The clergy, following after the nobility, played no small role in the formation of the tsarist autocracy, but nevertheless a servile role. The church never rose in Russia to that commanding height that it attained in the Catholic West; it was satisfied with the role of spiritual servant of the autocracy, and counted this a recompense for its humility....In the Petersburg period, the dependence of the church upon the state became still more servile. Two hundred thousand priests and monks were in all essentials a part of the bureaucracy, a sort of police of the gospel. In return for this, the monopoly of the orthodox clergy in matters of faith, land, and income was defended by a more regular kind of police....</p>
<p>"The meagerness...of all the old Russian history...finds its most depressing expression in the absence of real medieval cities as centers of commerce and craft. Handicraft did not succeed in Russia in separating itself from agriculture, but preserved its character of home industry. The old Russian cities were commercial, administrative, military, and manorial—centers of consumption, consequently, not of production. [N]omad traders could not possibly occupy that place in social life which belonged in the West to the craft-guild and merchant-industrial petty and middle bourgeoisie....The chief roads of Russian trade, moreover, led across the border, thus from time immemorial giving the leadership to foreign commercial capital, and imparting a semi-colonial character to the whole process, in which the Russian trader was a mediator between the Western cities and the Russian villages. This kind of economic relation developed further during the epoch of Russian capitalism and found its extreme expression in the imperialist war.</p>
<p>"The insignificance of the Russian cities...also made impossible a Reformation—that is, a replacement of the feudal-bureaucratic orthodoxy by some sort of modernized kind of Christianity adapted to the demands of a bourgeois society. The struggle against the state church did not go further than the creation of peasant sects[.]</p>
<p>"Without the industrial democracy of the cities, a peasant war could not develop into a revolution, just as the peasant sects could not rise to the height of a Reformation....</p>
<p>"The landlords who owned factories were the first among their caste to favor replacing serfdom by wage labor....In 1861 the noble bureaucracy, relying upon the liberal landlords, carried out its peasant reform....</p>
<p>"[T]he separate branches of industry made a series of special leaps over technical productive stages that had been measured in the West by decades....Between the first revolution [in 1905] and the [Great] war [in 1914], industrial production in Russia approximately doubled. [T]he possibility of this swift growth was determined by [Russia's] very backwardness[.]</p>
<p>"Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain respects even outstripped them. [T]he giant enterprises, above 1000 workers each, employed in the United States 17.8 percent of the workers and in Russia 41.4 percent!...</p>
<p>"[I]n Russia the proletariat did not arise gradually through the ages, carrying with itself the burden of the past as in England, but in leaps involving sharp changes of environment, ties, relations, and a sharp break with the past. It is just this fact—combined with the concentrated oppressions of tsarism—that made the Russian workers hospitable to the boldest conclusions of revolutionary thought—just as the backward industries were hospitable to the last word in capitalist organization....</p>
<p>"A yearly inflow of fresh labor forces from the country in all the industrial districts kept renewing the bonds of the proletariat with its fundamental social reservoir.</p>
<p>"The incapacity of the bourgeoisie for political action was immediately caused by its relation to the proletariat and the peasantry. It could not lead after it workers who stood hostile in their everyday life, and had so early learned to generalize their problems. But it was likewise incapable of leading after it the peasantry, because it...dreaded a shake-up of property relations in any form....</p>
<p>"The Russo-Japanese war had made tsarism totter. Against the background of a mass movement the liberal bourgeoisie had frightened the monarchy with its opposition. The workers had organized independently of the bourgeoisie, and in opposition to it, in soviets, a form of organization then first called into being....The liberals demonstratively backed away from the revolution exactly at the moment when it became clear that to shake tsarism would not be enough, it must be overthrown. [T]sarism came out of the experience of 1905 alive and strong enough....</p>
<p>"The revolution of 1917 still had as its immediate task the overthrow of the bureaucratic monarchy, but in distinction from the older bourgeois revolutions, the decisive force now was a new class formed on the basis of a concentrated industry, and armed with new organizations, new methods of struggle. [S]tarting with the overthrow of a decayed medieval structure, the revolution in the course of a few months placed the proletariat and the Communist Party in power....</p>
<p>"While the workers were covering the whole country with soviets, including in them the soldiers and part of the peasantry, the bourgeoisie still continued to dicker[.]</p>
<p>"In the middle of the seventeenth century, the bourgeois revolution in England developed under the guise of a religious reformation. A struggle for the right to pray according to one's own prayer book was identified with the struggle against the king, the aristocracy, the princes of the church, and Rome. The Presbyterians and Puritans were deeply convinced that they were placing their earthly interests under the unshakable protection of the divine Providence. The goals for which the new classes were struggling commingled inseparably in their consciousness with texts from the Bible and the forms of churchly ritual....</p>
<p>"In France,...the revolution...found its expression and justification for the tasks of the bourgeois society, not in texts from the Bible, but in the abstractions of democracy....</p>
<p>"Each of the great revolutions marked off a new stage of the bourgeois society, and new forms of consciousness for its classes. Just as France stepped over the Reformation, so Russia stepped over the formal democracy." – pp. 3–11</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 2: Tsarist Russia in the War</p>
<p>"Russia, as one of the great powers, could not help participating in the scramble of the advanced capitalist countries [during the war. I]n the preceding epoch she could not help introducing shops, factories, railroads, rapid-fire guns, and airplanes....</p>
<p>"The Chinese compradors are the classic type of the national bourgeoisie, a kind of mediating agency between foreign finance capital and the economy of their own country....</p>
<p>The semi-annulment of serfdom and the introduction of universal military service had modernized the army only as far as it had the country. [T]he tsar's army was constructed and armed upon Western models, but this was more form than essence. There was no correspondence between the cultural level of the peasant-soldier and modern military technique. In the commanding staff, the ignorance, light-mindedness, and thievery of the ruling classes found their expression. Industry and transport continually revealed their bankruptcy before the concentrated demands of wartime. Although appropriately armed, as it seemed, on the first day of the war, the troops soon turned out to have neither weapons nor even shoes....</p>
<p>"In answer to alarmed questions from his colleagues as to the situation at the front, the war minister Polivanov answered in these words: 'I place my trust in...the mercy of Saint Nicholas Mirlikisky, Protector of Holy Russia[.]'...</p>
<p>The ministers themselves...wasted hours in those days discussing such problems as whether to remove or not to remove the bones of the saints from Kiev....</p>
<p>"In the past, Russia had been successful against inwardly decomposing states like Turkey, Poland, and Persia....</p>
<p>"The Russian army lost in the whole war more men than any army which ever participated in a national war—approximately two and a half million killed, or 40 percent of all the losses of the Entente. In the first months, the soldiers fell under shell fire unthinkingly or thinking little; but from day to day they gathered experience—bitter experience of the lower ranks who are ignorantly commanded. They measured the confusion of the generals by the number of purposeless maneuvers on soleless shoes, the number of dinners not eaten....</p>
<p>The swiftest of all to disintegrate was the peasant infantry....As early as September 17, 1915, [soon-to-be northern front commander] Kuropatkin wrote, citing [liberal Kadet leader] Guchkov: 'The lower orders began the war with enthusiasm; but now they are weary, and with the continual retreats have lost faith in a victory.'...</p>
<p>"An observant woman, Feodorchenko, serving as sister of mercy, listened to the conversations of the soldiers[.] The little book thus produced, <em>The People at War,</em> permits us to look in that laboratory where bombs, barbed-wire entanglements, suffocating gases, and the baseness of those in power had been fashioning for long months the consciousness of several million Russian peasants, and where along with human bones age-old prejudices were cracking. In many of the self-made aphorisms of the soldiers appear already the slogans of the coming civil war....</p>
<p>"'The army in the rear and especially at the front,' reports a secret service agent, 'is full of elements of which some are capable of becoming active forces of insurrection, and others may merely refuse to engage in punitive activities.' The Gendarme Administration of the Petrograd province declares in October 1916...that 'the relation between officers and soldiers is extremely tense, even bloody encounters are taking place....Everyone who comes near the army must carry away a complete and convincing impression of the utter moral disintegration of the troops.'...On October 30, 1916, the director of the police department wrote...of 'the weariness of war to be observed everywhere, and the longing for a swift peace, regardless of the conditions upon which it is concluded.' In a few months, all these gentleman...will nevertheless assert that the revolution killed patriotism in the army, and that the Bolsheviks snatched a sure victory out of their hands." – pp. 13–18</p>
<p>"[T]ens of hundreds of millions, mounting up to billions, flowed down through distributing canals, abundantly irrigating the industries and incidentally nourishing numberless appetites....</p>
<p>"Nobody had any fear of spending too much. A continual shower of gold fell from above. 'Society' held out its hands and pockets....All came running to grab and gobble, in fear lest the blessed rain should stop. And all rejected with indignation the shameful idea of a premature peace....</p>
<p>"The Duma, divided on the eve of the war, achieved in 1915 its patriotic oppositional majority which received the name of 'Progressive Bloc.' The official aim of this bloc was of course declared to be a 'satisfaction of the needs created by the war.'...The minister of the interior, Prince Sherbatov, at that time characterized the bloc as a temporary 'union called forth by the danger of social revolution.'...Miliukov, the leader of the Kadets, and thus also of the opposition bloc, said at a conference of his party: 'We are treading a volcano....The tension has reached its extreme limit....A carelessly dropped match will be enough to start a terrible conflagration....Whatever the government—whether good or bad—a strong government is needed now more than ever before.'...</p>
<p>"How did the tsar's government...survive for over a year and a half after that?...[T]he profits...continued. However, the chief cause of the successful propping up of the monarchy for twelve months before its fall was to be found in a sharp division in the popular discontent. The chief of the Moscow Secret Service Department reported a rightward tendency of the bourgeoisie under the influence of 'a fear of possible revolutionary excesses after the war.' During the war, we note, a revolution was still considered impossible....</p>
<p>"The Duma again assembled on November 1[, 1916]. The tension in the country had become unbearable. Decisive steps were expected of the Duma. It was necessary to do something, or at the very least say something. The Progressive Bloc found itself compelled to resort to parliamentary exposures. Counting over from the tribune the chief steps taken by the government, Miliukov asked after each one: 'Was this stupidity or treason?' High notes were sounded also by other deputies. The government was almost without defenders. It answered in the usual way: the speeches of the Duma orators were forbidden publication. The speeches therefore circulated by the million....</p>
<p>"A group of extreme rights, sturdy bureaucrats inspired by Durnovo, who had put down the revolution of 1905, took that moment to present to the tsar a proposed program....The authors of the program speak against any concessions whatever to the bourgeois opposition...because...the liberals are 'so weak, so disunited, and...so mediocre...that their triumph...would be unstable.'...A revolutionist, they point out, is a different thing[:] 'The danger and strength of these parties lies in the fact that they have an idea, they have money (!), they have a crowd ready and well organized.' The revolutionary parties 'can count on the sympathy of an overwhelming majority of the peasantry, which will follow the proletariat the very moment the revolutionary leaders point a finger to other people's land.'...</p>
<p>"The positive part of their program was not new, but consistent: a government of ruthless partisans of the autocracy; abolition of the Duma; martial law in both capitals [Moscow and St. Petersburg – MB]; preparation of forces for putting down a rebellion. This program did in its essentials become the basis of the government policy of the last prerevolutionary months. But its success presupposed a power which Durnovo had in his hands in the winter of 1905, but which by the autumn of 1917 no longer existed....Ministers were shifted upon the principle of 'our people'—meaning those unconditionally devoted to the tsar and tsarina. But these 'our people'—especially the renegade Protopopov—were insignificant and pitiful. [T]he military forces prepared for putting down the rebellion were themselves seized by rebellion....</p>
<p>"All the organizations of the enfranchised bourgeoisie supported the November speeches of the Duma opposition with a series of new declarations. [Per] the resolution of the Union of Cities on December 9: 'Irresponsible criminals, fanatics, are preparing for Russia's defeat, shame and slavery.' The...Duma was urged 'not to disperse until the formation of a responsible government is attained.' Even the State Council, organ of the bureaucracy and of the vast properties, expressed itself in favor of calling to power people who enjoyed the confidence of the country. A similar intercession was made by a session of the united nobility....But nothing was changed. The monarchy would not let the last shreds of power slip out of its hands.</p>
<p>"The last session of the last Duma was convoked, after waverings and delays, on February 14, 1917. Only two weeks remained before the coming of revolution. [A]longside an announcement by the chief of the Petrograd Military District, General Khabalov, forbidding demonstrations, was printed a letter from Miliukov warning the workers against 'dangerous and bad counsel' issuing from 'dark sources.'...Pretending that the question of power no longer interested it, the Duma occupied itself with a critical but still strictly business question: food supplies. The mood was languid, as [president] Rodzianko subsequently remembered: 'We felt the impotence of the Duma, weariness of a futile struggle.' Miliukov kept repeating that the Progressive Bloc 'will act with words and with words only.'" – pp. 19–25</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter 3: The Proletariat and the Peasantry</p>
<p>"The Russian proletariat learned its first steps in the political circumstances created by a despotic state. Strikes forbidden by law, underground circles, illegal proclamations, street demonstrations, encounters with the police and with troops—such was the school created by the combination of a swiftly developing capitalism with an absolutism slowly surrendering its positions. The concentration of the workers in colossal enterprises, the intense character of governmental persecution, and finally the impulsiveness of a young and fresh proletariat, brought it about that the political strike, so rare in western Europe, became in Russia the fundamental method of struggle....</p>
<p>"With the weakness of the petty bourgeois democracy, the scatteredness and political blindness of the peasant movement, the revolutionary strike of the workers becomes the battering ram which the awakening nation directs against the walls of absolutism....</p>
<p>"The first war months are marked by political inertness in the working class, but already in the spring of 1915 the numbness begins to pass....</p>
<p>"Would the mass offensive of 1912–1914 have led directly to an overthrow of tsarism if the war had not broken out?...</p>
<p>"The Bolshevik faction in the Duma, [a]long with the Menshevik deputies,...introduced a declaration in which it promised 'to defend the cultural weal of the people against all attacks wheresoever originating.'...Not one of the Russian organizations or groups of the party took the openly defeatist position which Lenin came out for abroad....In contrast to the Narodniks and Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks began in 1914 to develop among the masses a printed and oral agitation against the [Great] war. The [Bolshevik] Duma deputies soon...renewed their revolutionary work....In November [2014] the Bolshevik deputies were arrested....The police department remarked with satisfaction that the severe sentences dealt out to the deputies did not evoke any movement of protest among the workers.</p>
<p>"It seemed as though the war had produced a new working class....</p>
<p>"[O]n the 16th of August[, 1915 Prime Minister] Goremykin expressed himself...concisely: 'The trouble among the workers' leaders is that they have no organization, since it was broken up by the arrest of the five members of the Duma.' The minister of the interior added: 'We must not amnesty the members of the Duma (Bolsheviks)—they are the organizing center of the movement in its most dangerous form.'...</p>
<p>"After the arrest of the Duma faction, the Bolsheviks had no centralized party organization at all....However, the reviving strike movement gave them...some strength in the factories. They gradually began to find each other....The underground work revived. In the police department they wrote later: 'Ever since the beginning of the war, the Leninists, who have behind them in Russia an overwhelming majority of the underground social democratic organizations, have in their larger centers...been issuing in considerable numbers revolutionary appeals with a demand to stop the war, overthrow the existing government, and found a republic. And this work has had its palpable result in workers' strikes and disorders.'</p>
<p>"The industrialists grew less and less willing to grant anything to the workers, and the government, as usual, answered every strike with severe repressions. All this pushed the minds of the workers from the particular to the general, from economics to politics: 'We must all strike at once.' Thus arose the idea of the general strike....In the first few months of 1917, political strikes involved six times as many workers as economic....</p>
<p>"Many of the old beliefs are burned up in the fires of this struggle....The terrible pressure of the war and the national ruin is accelerating the process of struggle to such a degree that broad masses of the workers, right up to the very revolution, have not freed themselves from many opinions and prejudices brought with them from the village or from the petty bourgeois family circle in the town. This fact will set its stamp on the first stage of the February Revolution.</p>
<p>"By the end of 1916, prices are rising by leaps and bounds. To the inflation and the breakdown of transport, there is added an actual lack of goods....In October the struggle enters its decisive phase, uniting all forms of discontent in one....A wave of meetings runs through the factories. The topics: food supplies, high cost of living, war, [and] government. Bolshevik leaflets are distributed; political strikes begin; improvised demonstrations occur at factory gates; cases of fraternization between certain factories and the soldiers are observed[.]</p>
<p>"Comparing the situation with that in 1905, the director of the police department, Vassiliev, reaches a very uncomforting conclusion: 'The mood of the opposition has gone very far—far beyond anything to be seen in the broad masses during the above-mentioned period of disturbance.' Vassiliev rests no hope in the garrison; even the police officers are not entirely reliable. The Intelligence Department reports a revival of the slogan of the general strike, the danger of a resurrection of the terror. Soldiers and officers arriving from the front say of the present situation: 'What is there to wait for?—Why don't you take and bump off such-and-such a scoundrel? If we were here, we wouldn't waste much time thinking,' etc. Shliapnikov, a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, himself a former metalworker, describes how nervous the workers were in those days: 'Sometimes a whistle would be enough, or any kind of noise—the workers would take it for a signal to stop the factory.' This detail is equally remarkable both as a political symptom and as a psychological fact: the revolution is there in the nerves before it comes out on the street....</p>
<p>"The first two months of 1917 show 575,000 political strikers, the lion's share of them in the capital....The mood was tense....The workers all felt that no retreat was possible. In every factory, an active nucleus was forming, oftenest around the Bolsheviks. Strikes and meetings went on continuously throughout the first two weeks of February." – pp. 26–34</p>
<p>"The belated half-liberation of the peasants in 1861 had found agricultural industry almost on the same level as two hundred years before....The peasantry felt still more caught in a trap because the process was not taking place in the seventeenth but in the nineteenth century—that is, in the conditions of an advanced money economy[.] The learned agronomes and economists...proposed to the peasant to make a jump to a higher level of technique and culture without disturbing the landlord, the bailiff, or the tsar. But no economic regime, least of all an agricultural regime, the most tardy of all, has ever disappeared before exhausting all its possibilities. Before feeling compelled to pass over to a more intensive economic culture, the peasant had to make a last attempt to broaden his three fields [with]in the three-field system....This could obviously be achieved only at the expense of nonpeasant lands. Choking in the narrowness of his land area, under the smarting whip of...the market, the muzhik was inexorably forced to attempt to get rid of the landlord once and for all.</p>
<p>"On the eve of the first revolution, the whole stretch of arable land within the limits of European Russia was estimated at 280 million dessiatins. The communal allotments constituted about 140 million. The crown lands, above 5 million. Church and monastery lands, about 2.5 million. Of the privately owned land, 70 million dessiatins belonged to the 30,000 great landlords, each of whom owned above 500 dessiatins. This 70 million was about what would have belonged to 10 million peasant families. The land statistics constitute the finished program of a peasant war.</p>
<p>"The landlords were not settled with in the first revolution....</p>
<p>"However, the defeated revolution did not pass without leaving traces in the village....The frightened landlords not only made considerable concessions in the matter of rentals, but also began a large-scale selling of their landed estates. These fruits of the revolution were enjoyed by the better-off peasants, who were able to rent and buy the landlords' land.v
<p>"However, the broadest gates were opened for the emerging of capitalist farmers from the peasant class by the law of November 9, 1906, the chief reform introduced by the victorious counterrevolution. Giving the right even to a small minority of the peasants of the commune, against the will of the majority, to cut out from the communal land a section to be owned independently, the law of November 9 constituted an explosive capitalist shell directed against the commune. The president of the Council of Ministers, Stolypin, described the essence of this governmental policy toward the peasants as 'banking on the strong ones.' This meant: encourage the upper circles of the peasantry to get hold of the communal land by buying up these 'liberated' sections, and convert these new capitalist farmers into a support for the existing regime....</p>
<p>"Agriculture entered upon a state of indubitable capitalist boom....This meant that broad masses of the peasantry had been proletarianized, and the upper circles of the villages were throwing on the market more and more grain.</p>
<p>"To replace the compulsory communal ties of the peasantry, there developed very swiftly a voluntary cooperation, which succeeded in penetrating quite deeply into the peasant masses in the course of a few years, and immediately became a subject of liberal and democratic idealization. Real power in the cooperatives belonged, however, only to the rich peasants, whose interests in the last analysis they served. The Narodnik intelligentsia, by concentrating its chief forces in peasant cooperation, finally succeeded in shifting its love for the people onto good solid bourgeois rails. In this way was prepared, partially at least, the political bloc of the 'anti-capitalist' party of the Social Revolutionaries with the Kadets, the capitalist party <em>par excellence....</em></p>
<p>"Before it could become a support to the existing order, this peasant bourgeoisie had need of some order of its own wherewith to cling to its conquered positions....The peasant deputy Petrichenko once declared from the tribune of the Duma: 'No matter how long you debate you won't create a new planet—that means that you will have to give us the land.' This peasant...was a Right deputy, a monarchist....</p>
<p>"Peasant hostility toward the war sharpened from month to month. In October 1916, the Petrograd Gendarme Administration reported that in the villages they had already ceased to believe in the success of the war—the report being based on the words of insurance agents, teachers, traders, etc. 'All are waiting and impatiently demanding: When will this cursed war finally end?'...</p>
<p>"The possessing classes could not but foresee that the village was going to present its bill. But they drove away these black thoughts, hoping to wriggle out of it somehow. [T]he peasant...thought that first of all the thing to do was to smoke out the landlord, and then see....v
<p>"But all the same the peasantry, even after learning to handle firearms, could never of its own force have achieved the agrarian democratic revolution—that is, its own revolution. It had to have leadership. For the first time in world history the peasant was destined to find a leader in the person of the worker. In that lies the fundamental, and you may say the whole, difference between the Russian Revolution and all those preceding it.</p>
<p>"In England serfdom had disappeared in actual fact by the end of the fourteenth century—that is, two centuries before it arose in Russia, and four and a half centuries before it was abolished. The expropriation of the landed property of the peasants dragged along in England through one Reformation and two revolutions to the nineteenth century. The capitalist development, not forced from the outside, thus had sufficient time to liquidate the independent peasant long before the proletariat awoke to political life.</p>
<p>"In France, the struggle with royal absolutism, the aristocracy, and the princes of the church, compelled the bourgeoisie in various of its layers, and in several installments, to achieve a radical agrarian revolution at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For long after that an independent peasantry constituted the support of the bourgeois order, and in 1871 it helped the bourgeoisie put down the Paris Commune.</p>
<p>"In Germany, the bourgeoisie proved incapable of a revolutionary solution of the agrarian problem, and in 1848 betrayed the peasants to the landlords, just as Luther some three centuries before in the peasant wars had betrayed them to the princes. On the other hand, the German proletariat was still too weak in the middle of the nineteenth century to take the leadership of the peasantry. As a result, the capitalist development of Germany got sufficient time, although not so long a period as in England, to subordinate agriculture, as it emerged from the uncompleted bourgeois revolution, to its own interests.</p>
<p>"The peasant reform of 1861 was carried out in Russia by an aristocratic and bureaucratic monarchy under pressure of the demands of a bourgeois society, but with the bourgeoisie completely powerless politically. The character of this peasant emancipation was such that the forced capitalistic transformation of the country inevitably converted the agrarian problem into a problem of revolution. The Russian bourgeois dreamed of an agrarian evolution on the French plan, or the Danish, or the American—anything you want, only not the Russian. He neglected, however, to supply himself in good season with a French history or an American social structure. The democratic intelligentsia, notwithstanding its revolutionary past, took its stand in the decisive hour with the liberal bourgeoisie and the landlord, and not with the revolutionary village. In these circumstances, only the working class could stand at the head of the peasant revolution.</p>
<p>"The law of combined development of backward countries—in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors—here rises before us in its most finished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian Revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realize the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species: a peasant war—that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development—and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalizing its decline. That is the essence of 1917." – pp. 34–9</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-16559289844030108172021-12-16T13:31:00.019-05:002022-02-17T17:08:43.902-05:00First Psychoanalyst & Nature of Clinical Evidence—from Erikson's Insight and Responsibility<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from The First Psychoanalyst & The Nature of Clinical Evidence (chapters I and II) from <em>Insight and Responsibility: Lectures on the Ethical Implications of Psychoanalytic Insight</em>, Erik H. Erikson, 1964:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter I: The First Psychoanalyst (lecture delivered 1956)</p>
<p>"It is a solemn and yet always a deeply incongruous occasion when we select an anniversary to honor a man who in lonely years struggled through a unique experience and won a new kind of knowledge for mankind." – p. 19</p>
<p>"For...comparison, let us consider the circumstances of another discovery of the nineteenth century, the discovery of a man who was also lonely and calumniated, and who was also eventually recognized as a changer of man's image: Charles Darwin. [H]e had failed in medicine...partially because of an intellectual selectivity which forbade him to learn passively[.]</p>
<p>"[C]utting across existing classifications which assumed a parallel, linear origin of all species from a common pool of creation, [Darwin] saw everywhere transitions, transmutations, variations, signs of a dynamic struggle for adaptation. The law of natural selection began to 'haunt him.' And he perceived that man must come under the same law[.]</p>
<p>"[Darwin] became physically incapacitated by insomnia, nausea, and chills[:] 'I could...collect facts bearing on the origin of species...when I could do nothing else from illness.'...</p>
<p>"'We physicists have known sin,' Oppenheimer has said; but it does not take the use of scientific data for mankind's material destruction to make a scientist feel or behave as if he had sinned. It is enough to have persisted, with the naïveté of genius, in the dissolution of one of the prejudices on which the security and the familiarity of the contemporary image of man is built. But a creative man has no choice. He may come across his supreme task almost accidently. But once the issue is joined, his task proves to be at the same time intimately related to his most personal conflicts, to his superior selective perception, and to the stubbornness of his one-way will: he must court sickness, failure, or insanity, in order to test the alternative whether the established world will crush him, or whether he will disestablish a sector of this world's outworn fundaments and make place for a new one." – pp. 21–3</p>
<p>"What geology was to Darwin, physiology was to Freud: a schooling in method. The ideology of the physicalistic physiologic method of the time was formulated in an oath by two of its outstanding teachers, [Emil] Du Bois[-]Reymond and [Ernst von] Brücke: 'to put in power this truth: No other forces than the common physical chemical ones are active within the organism....One has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical mathematical method, or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical physical forces inherent in matter.' (note 1)...</p>
<p>"[Freud's coauthor] Dr. Jose[f] Breuer[, the developer of the cathartic method in which patients described ever-earlier instances of their symptoms – MB] had shown him that there was a laboratory hidden in the very practice of neurology.</p>
<p>"Freud's new laboratory, then, were patients, mostly women, who brought him symptoms which only an overly-serious and searching observer could accept as constituting a field activated by dignified forces. These ladies suffered from neuralgic pains and anesthesias, from partial paralyses and contractions, from tics and convulsions, from nausea and finickiness, from the inability to see and from visual hallucinations, from the inability to remember and from painful floods of memory....The dominant neuropathology of the day...assumed some of their disturbances to be a consequence of hereditary degenerative processes in the brain....</p>
<p>"As Freud listened to his hypnotized patients, he realized that they were urgently, desperately offering him series of memories which...were...variations in search of a theme...which was often found in a historical model event....</p>
<p>"It fits our image of those Victorian days—a time when children in all, and women in most circumstances were to be seen but not heard—that the majority of symptoms would prove to lead back to events when violently aroused affects (love, sex, rage, fear) had come into conflict with narrow standards of propriety and breeding. The symptoms, then, were delayed involuntary communications: using the whole body as spokesman, they were saying what common language permits common people to say directly[.] Freud the neurologist now became 'haunted' by the basic conviction that any neurotic symptom, traced along a path of associated experiences (not of neurological pathways), would lead to the revival in memory of earlier and earlier conflicts, and in doing so would yield a complete history of its origin.</p>
<p>"As Freud proceeded with his reconstruction of the pasts of his patients, a dangerous insight dawned on him; such conflicts as his patients revealed were, in principle, shared by all men....He became aware of the fact that man, in principle, does not remember or understand much of what is most significant in his childhood, and more, that he does not want to. Here, a mysterious <em>individual prehistory</em> seemed to loom up, as important for psychology as Darwin's biological prehistory was for biology....</p>
<p>"For Freud's psychologic findings, there were, at first, only physiologic methods, his own speculations, and the sayings of writers and philosophers, who, in their way, it seemed, had known it all....He now investigated memories as representative cross sections of a patient's emotional condition. In successive memories, he traced trends which led, like pathways, to the traumatic past; there experiences of a disruptive nature loomed like lesions interfering with growth....</p>
<p>"Before Copernicus, vanity as well as knowledge insisted that the earth must be in the exact nodal center of God's universe. Well, we know now where we are. Before Darwin, man could claim a different origin from the rest of the animal world with whom he shares a slim margin of the earth's crust and atmosphere. Before Freud, man (that is, man of the male sex and of the better classes) was convinced that he was fully conscious of all there was to him, and sure of his divine values. Childhood was a mere training ground, in charge of that intermediary race, women.</p>
<p>"In such a world female hysteria was implicitly acknowledged by men and men doctors as a symptom of the natural inferiority, the easy degeneracy, of women. When Freud presented to the Vienna Medical Society a case of <em>male</em> hysteria, the reaction of his colleagues convinced him that years of isolation lay ahead of him....Yet, their reaction [was] only one small aspect of a memorable crisis [from] which a new science was almost stillborn, [including] because of disturbances in the instrument of observation, the observer's mind." – pp. 24–8</p>
<p>"Freud...realized that in hypnosis the patients had at their disposal a depth of understanding and a freedom of affect which they did not marshal in normal life. This he had not imposed by suggestion: it was their judgment and their affect, and if they had it in hypnosis, it was part of them. Perhaps, if he treated them like whole people, they would learn to realize the wholeness which was theirs. He now offered them a conscious and direct partnership: he made the patient's healthy, if submerged, part his partner in understanding the unhealthy part. Thus was established one basic principle of psychoanalysis, namely, that <em>one can study the human mind only by engaging the fully motivated partnership of the observed individual, and by entering into a sincere contract with him....</em></p>
<p>"[Freud] realized that habit and convention had made him and his fellow physicians indulge in an autocratic pattern, with not much more circumspection or justification than the very paternal authorities who he now felt had made the patients sick in the first place. He began to divine the second principle of psychoanalysis, namely, that <em>you will not see in another what you have not learned to recognize in yourself....</em></p>
<p>"Freud had to relinquish a most important ingredient of the doctor role of the times: the all-knowing father role, which was safely anchored in the whole contemporary cult of the paternal male as the master of every human endeavor except the nursery and the kitchen." (note 2) – pp. 28–9</p>
<p>"The second problem which isolated Freud in those years was the course taken by his search for the 'energy of equal dignity' which might be the quantity and the power in mental life; for the mental mechanisms which normally maintain such power in a state of constancy; and for those inner conditions which unleash its destructiveness....A long treatise recently found with some of Freud's letters reveals the whole extent of Freud's conflict between the creative urge to say in psychological terms what only literature had known before him, and on the other hand, his desperate obedience to physiology. (note 3)...</p>
<p>"Freud['s] patients, he had become convinced, were suffering primarily from...one irrepressible 'affect,' namely, sexual sensuality, the existence of which had been consistently denied by their overclothed parents, while engaged in only with furtive shame and degradation by many of their mothers. In the epidemiological fact of widespread female hysteria, Freud faced the specific symptoms of the Victorian age, the price paid, especially by women, for the hypocritical double standard of the sexes in the dominant classes, the masters of commerce and the would-be masters of industrial power....In introducing the energy concept of a sexual libido,...Freud found at once [a personally safe – MB] answer to the questions posed by his patients' memories, and [a] theory...consistent with his search for a 'dignified force.' But alas, it was also the most irrationally repugnant solution thinkable in his prudish times, and [still] a solution of emotional danger to the observer. For, indeed, where 'to draw the line'?...</p>
<p>"[Earlier, c]ertain of being on the right track [i]n search for a pathogenic Ur-event, he [had been] led to [view] as historically real the patients' accounts of passive sexual experiences in the first years of childhood, and to consider the fathers of the patients the perpetrators in such events. [Yet, he sensed a personal danger to himself in this perspective. – MB As h]e later confessed: 'At that time, I would gladly have dropped the whole thing.'...</p>
<p>"[I]t was only too easy to do what had become civilization's 'second nature,' that is, in the face of the man's sexual and aggressive drives[,] to beat a hasty retreat into romanticism and religionism[.]</p>
<p>"[S]exual...seductions of children do occur, and are dangerous to them. But more important, the general provocation and exploitation of the child's immature emotions by parent and grandparent for the sake of their own petty emotional relief, of suppressed vengefulness, of sensual self-indulgence, and of sly righteousness must be recognized not only as evident in case histories, but as a universal potentiality often practiced and hypocritically rationalized by very 'moral' individuals, indeed....What today is decried as 'momism' in the United States existed in analogous form in the father's role in the Victorian world: it is only necessary to think of Hitler's official account of his father-hate, and the appeal of this account for millions of young Germans, to know that this is a smoldering theme of general explosiveness. In finding access to the altogether fateful domain of man's prolonged childhood, Freud discovered that infantile man, in addition to and often under the guise of being trained, is being ruefully exploited, only to become in adulthood nature's most systematic and sadistic exploiter. Freud's search thus added another perspective of as yet unforeseeable importance to the image of man." – pp. 30–4</p>
<p>"[I]n 1894, Freud consulted [his] friend...Dr. Wilhelm...Fliess in regard to his own symptoms and moods, which he condenses in [a] word [meaning] something like 'misery of the heart.'...At this time, Freud speaks of his discoveries with the anguish of one who has seen a promised land which he must not set his foot on: 'I have the distinct feeling,' he writes, 'that I have touched on one of the great secrets of nature.' This tedium of thought seems to have joined the 'heart misery' and was now joined by a mistrust of his friend. He wrote, 'Something from the deepest depths of my own neurosis has ranged itself against my taking a further step in understanding of the neuroses, and you have somehow been involved.'</p>
<p>"Freud, at this point, had developed toward Fliess what later, when he understood it, he called a transference[.]</p>
<p>"Freud thus discovered another principle in his new work, namely, that <em>psychological discovery is accompanied by some irrational involvement of the observer, and that it cannot be communicated to another without a certain irrational involvement of both.</em> [H]ere it is not enough to put on an armor of superiority or aloofness....Here, only the observer's improved insight into himself can right the instrument, protect the observer, and permit the communication of the observed....</p>
<p>"A dream, [Freud] now reported to Fliess, had clearly revealed to him the fact...that [a] wish to blame all fathers for their children's neuroses had dominated him....</p>
<p>"[In order to escape his personal danger, – MB] Freud...concluded that 'I can only analyze myself with objectively acquired knowledge.' This insight is the basis for what later became the training analysis, that is, the preventive and didactic psychoanalytic treatment of every prospective psychoanalyst....</p>
<p>"[A]round the turn of the century,...<em>The Interpretation of Dreams</em> (note 4)...appear[ed]. Freud then, as later, considered this book his most fundamental contribution[.] For months, for years, there were no book reviews, no sales to speak of. Where there was interest, it was mostly disbelief and calumniation. At this time, Freud seems temporarily to have despaired of his medical way of life. Fliess offered a meeting at Easter. But...Freud refused. 'It is more probable that I shall avoid you,' he writes. 'I have conquered my depression, and now...it is slowly healing....In your company...I should unburden my woes to you and come back dissatisfied[.]" [Freud probably feared what his subconscious might express on meeting Fliess—that it would escalate its blaming of children's neuroses on their fathers. – MB] – pp. 35–8</p>
<p>"These, then, were the dimensions of the crisis during which and through which psychoanalysis was born.</p>
<p>"Most striking...[i]n the letters...is a theme of European dimensions, namely, an intense, a 'deeply neurotic' urge to see Rome. At first, he wants to arrange to see his friend [Fliess] there. But he writes, 'We are not in Rome yet,' or, 'I am further away from Rome than at any time since we met[.]' Only when his fundamental work, <em>The Interpretation of Dreams</em> is published, does Freud decide to spend Easter in Rome: 'Not that there is any justification for it, I have achieved nothing yet...and in any case, circumstances will probably make it impossible.'</p>
<p>"What did Rome mean to Freud?...We recognize in it the fate of Hannibal, who had kindled the imagination of the Jewish boy: the Semitic warlord had never conquered Rome. [T]he final wish which Freud sent to Fliess [was]: 'Next Easter in Rome.'</p>
<p>"Freud is now forty-four years of age." – pp. 39–40</p>
<p>"I believe that an innovator's achievement can be seen most dramatically in that moment when he, alone against historical adversity and inner doubts, and armed only with the means of persuasion, gives a new direction to human awareness[.]" – p. 42</p>
<p>"That shift in self-awareness...implies a fundamentally new <em>ethical orientation of adult man's relationship to childhood:</em> to his own childhood, now behind and within him; to his own child before him; and to every man's children around him....</p>
<p>"[T]he collective life of mankind, in all its historical lawfulness, is fed by the energies and images of successive generations; and...each generation brings to human fate an inescapable conflict between its ethical and rational aims and its infantile fixations. This conflict...is a condition of man's humanity—and the prime cause of his bottomless inhumanity. For whenever and wherever man abandons his ethical position, he does so only at the cost of massive regressions endangering the very safeguards of his nature....</p>
<p>"In Freud, a genius turned a new instrument of observation back on his childhood, back on all childhood. He invented a specific method for the detection of that which universally spoils the genius of the child in every human being....Since then, the nature of growth in childhood has been studied by ingenious observers all over the world: never before has mankind known more about its own past—phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Thus, we may see Freud as a pioneer in a self-healing, balancing trend in human awareness." – pp. 44–6</p>
<p>"Freud, before he went into medicine, wanted to become...a lawmaker[.] When, in 1938,...Freud...was exiled from his country, he carried under his arm a manuscript on Moses, the supreme law-giver of the Jewish people...whose unique gifts Freud had accepted as his own. With grim pride he had chosen [this role, and] the role of one who opens perspectives on [new] fertile fields[.] Freud the physician[,] in finding a method of healing himself in the very practice of emotional cure[,] has given a new, a psychological rationale for man's laws. He has made [a] decisive step toward a true interpenetration of the psychological with...the political in the human order.</p>
<p>"If...others see in him primarily the destroyer of precious illusions, if not of essential values, I would remind you...that, in 1930, the Secretary of the Goethe Prize Committee informed Freud of his award[.] In his dedication the Secretary suggested that 'the Mephistophelic bend toward ruthless disillusion was the inseparable counterpart of the Faustian veneration of man's creative potentials.'" – pp. 45–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter II: The Nature of Clinical Evidence (lecture delivered 1957)</p>
<p>"[M]ore than any other clinician the psychotherapist must include in his field of observation a <em>specific self-awareness</em> in the very act of perceiving his patient's actions and reactions. [T]here is a core of <em>disciplined subjectivity</em> in clinical work[.]" – p. 53</p>
<p>"[T]he psychotherapist...will enter...the patient's...life history and join the grouping of individuals already significant in it....</p>
<p>"The analogy between the clinician and the historian...centers in the case-historian's function in the art of history-taking, of becoming part of a life history. Here the analogy breaks down; it could remain relevant only if the historian were also a kind of clinical statesman, correcting events as he records them, and recording changes as he directs them. Such a conscious clinician-historian-statesman may well emerge in the future.</p>
<p>"Let me restate the psychotherapeutic encounter, then, as an historical one. A person has declared an emergency and has surrendered his self-regulation to a treatment procedure....To some degree, he has had to interrupt his autonomous life-history as lived in the unself-conscious balances of his private and his public life in order, for a while, to 'favor' a part-aspect of himself and to observe it with the diagnostic help of a curative method. 'Under observation,' he becomes self-observant. As a patient he is inclined, and as a client often encouraged, to historicize his own position by thinking back to the onset of the disturbance, and to ponder what world order (magic[al], scientific, ethical) was violated and must be restored before his self-regulation can be reassumed. He participates in becoming a <em>case,</em> a fact which...may forever change his view of himself.</p>
<p>"The clinician...finds himself part of another man's most intimate life history. Luckily he also remains the functionary of a healing profession with a systematic orientation, based on a coherent world image—be it the theory that a sick man is beset by evil spirits or under the temptation of the devil, the victim of chemical poisons or of faulty heritage, racked by inner conflicts, or blinded by a dangerous ideology. In inviting his client to look at himself with the help of professional theories and techniques, the clinician makes himself part of the client's life history, even as the client becomes a case in the history of healing.</p>
<p>"The disciplined psychotherapist of today finds himself heir to medical methods and concepts, although he may decide to counteract these with a determined turn to existential or social views concerning his person-to-person encounter in the therapeutic setting." – pp. 53–6</p>
<p>"[W]e consider a patient's 'associations' our best leads to the meaning of an as yet obscure item brought up in a clinical encounter[.] By associated evidence we mean everything which comes to the patient's mind during and after the report of that item. [W]e can assume that what we call the synthesizing function of the ego will tend to associate what 'belongs together,' be the associated items ever so remote in history, separate in space, and contradictory in logical terms. Once the therapist has convinced himself of a certain combination in the patient of character, intelligence, and a wish to get well, he can rely on the patient's capacity to produce during a series of therapeutic encounters a sequence of themes, thoughts, and affects which seek their own concordance and provide their own cross-references." – p. 58</p>
<p>"Does it...contradict Freudian symbolism if I emphasize in [a given dream image] a representation of...lack of identity? In the context of the 'classical' interpretation, the dream image would be primarily symbolic of a sexual idea which is to be warded off, in ours a representation of a danger to the continuous existence of individual identity." – p. 70</p>
<p>"It is a mark of the good clinician that much can go on in him without clogging his communication at the moment of therapeutic intervention, when only the central theme may come to his awareness. Since a clinician's identity as a worker is based...on decisive learning experiences during the formative years of his first acquaintance with the field[,] he cannot avoid carrying with him some traditional formulations which may range in their effect...to burdening dogmatisms. [T]here is a systematic relationship between clinical observation on the one hand and, on the other, such conceptual points of view as Freud has introduced into psychiatry: a <em>structural</em> point of view denoting a kind of anatomy of the mind, a <em>dynamic</em> point of view denoting a kind of physiology of mental forces, a <em>genetic</em> point of view reconstructing the growth of the mind and the stages marking its strengths and its dangers, and finally, an <em>adaptive</em> point of view. (note 5) But...it stands to reason that clinical evidence is characterized by an immediacy which transcends formulations ultimately derived from mechanistic patterns of thought.</p>
<p>"The 'points of view' introduced into psychiatry and psychology by Freud are, at this time, subject to a strange fate. [T]hey were the bridges by which generations of medical clinicians could apply their anatomical, physiological, and pathological modes of thinking to the workings of the mind....A transfer of concepts from one field to another has in other fields led...to a necessary transcendence of the borrowed concepts by newer and more adequate ones. In psychoanalysis, the fate of the 'points of view' was pre-ordained:...in the study of the mind they sooner or later served improper reifications, as though libido or the death-instinct or the ego really existed. Freud was sovereignly aware of this danger, but always willing to learn by giving a mode of thought free reign to see to what useful model it might lead. He also had the courage, the authority, and the inner consistency to reverse such a direction when it became useless or absurd. Generations of clinical practitioners cannot be expected to be equally detached or authoritative. Thus it cannot be denied that in much clinical literature the clinical evidence secured with the help of inferences based on Freud's theories has been increasingly used and slanted to verify the original theories. This, in turn, could only lead to a gradual estrangement between theory and clinical observation." – pp. 76–7</p>
<hr style="padding-top: 1%; margin-right: 80%; border-width: 0; border-bottom-width: 1px">
<small><p>1 – Ernest Jones, <em>The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud</em>, New York: Basic Books, 1953.
<br>2 – Sigmund Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" [1905], <em>Standard Edition</em>, 7:3–122, London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
<br>3 – Sigmund Freud, <em>The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887–1902</em>, edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, New York: Basic Books, 1954.
<br>4 – Sigmund Freud, <em>The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], Standard Edition</em>, 4, London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
<br>5 – David Rapaport and M. Gill, "The Points of View and Assumptions of Metapsychology," <em>International Journal of Psycho-analysis</em>, 40:1–10, 1959.</p></small>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-57244092876224070512021-12-05T13:14:00.007-05:002022-11-05T14:39:18.495-04:00Hegel's Dialectic—from Jacob Taubes' Occidental Eschatology<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from a chapter, Hegel's Dialectic (in Book IV: The Philosophical Eschatology of Europe) from <em>Occidental Eschatology,</em> Jacob Taubes, translated by David Ratmoko, 2009 (originally published in German in 1947):</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Book IV: The Philosophical Eschatology of Europe</p>
<p>Hegel's Dialectic</p>
<p>"[Immanuel] Kant [(1724–1804)] is the Old Testament and [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel [(1770–1831)] the New Testament of German Idealism. That is how the young Hegel himself understood his relationship with Kant, whose law of duty he equated with the law of the Old Testament. Hegel seeks to derive his own system strictly from the New Testament, particularly from the sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and St John's Gospel. The foundations of Hegel's doctrine are still openly visible in the fragments of his...<em>Early Theological Writings...,</em> which...are fundamental to understanding all of the later works of Hegel, as well as to grasping his central theme of the dialectic[.]" – p. 149</p>
<p>"Kant regards the <em>shalt</em> of the law not as 'an order given by an external agency' but as a 'consequence of one's own understanding,' 'as respect for duty[.]'...Kant turns against mere legality by showing that 'the legal is universal and the force of its obligation resides within this universality[.]' (note 144)...[However, since] the command of duty is universal, which remains opposed to the particular,...the latter is the oppressed when the former reigns....The man of the command and the man of duty are both slaves, the only difference being that the former carries his lord outside himself and the latter within himself. Kant's <em>morality</em> is in effect still <em>legality,</em> for the Kantian <em>ought</em> is not sublated [(removed or denied)] in [our] being....</p>
<p>"But Jesus, who overcomes the law with love, moves beyond Kantian morality. 'Against complete subservience to the law of an alien Lord, Jesus opposes not a partial subjugation to a law of one's own, the self-coercion of Kantian virtue, but rather virtues without lordship and without submission, that is, modifications of love.' (note 146)...</p>
<p>"This spirit of Jesus, a spirit raised above morality, is present in the Sermon on the Mount, which is an attempt elaborated in several examples 'to strip the laws of legality, of their legal form. It does not teach respect for the laws; rather, it exhibits that which fulfils the law and annuls it as a law, and thus is something higher than obedience to the law and makes the law superfluous. Since the commands of duty presuppose a separation (between reason and inclination) and since the dominance of the concept declares itself in a <em>thou shalt,</em> that which is raised above this separation is by contrast an <em>is...,</em> a modification of life.' (note 148)</p>
<p>" '[I]n love all thought of duties vanishes.' (note 149)</p>
<p>"Love, seen as an ideal which no human being can attain, is turned upside down, 'for such an <em>ideal</em> in which duties are represented as willingly done, is self-contradictory since duties require an opposition, and an action which we like to do requires none.' (note 150)</p>
<p>"In <em>love</em> there is 'unity between inclination and the law, in which the latter loses its form as law.' (note 151) The correspondence between inclination and the law is 'the <em>pleroma</em> (fulfillment) of the law,' a state in which there is a synthesis of the subject and object, in which the subject and object have lost their opposition to one another: 'A synthesis in which the law (which Kant calls objective for that reason) loses its universality and the subject its particularity—so both lose their opposition to one another.' (note 152) The opposition between duty and inclination becomes unity in the modifications of love....</p>
<p>"[T]he young Hegel['s] <em>metaphysics of love...</em>reveals the modifications of love. All forms of separation, all constraints on relationships, have disappeared in the true nature of love. True being exists in love alone because 'union and being are synonymous.' (note 154)...</p>
<p>" 'Of course <em>love cannot be commanded;</em> of course it is <em>pathological</em> [in the sense of <em>pathos</em>], an inclination—but this does not detract from its greatness. It does not degrade love that its essence does not dominate something alien to it....But this does not mean that it is something subordinate to duty and right; on the contrary, it is rather love's triumph that it lords over nothing, is without any hostile power over another. <em>Love has conquered</em> does not mean the same as <em>duty has conquered,</em> i.e. subdued its enemies; it means that love has overcome hostility.' (note 155)</p>
<p>"Whereas duty, by setting boundaries beyond itself, always leaves an objective law intact, the power of this objectivity is broken by love because it is boundless. Love is the 'union of the spirit and the divine; to love God is to feel one's self in the all of life with no external restrictions in the infinite.' (note 156)" – pp. 149–51</p>
<p>"[T]he outline of the Hegelian dialectic...drives toward the negation of opposition in unification, which in turn is only possible in the complete surrender of love. The rhythm of the dialectic, which is learned from life, is steeped in the mystery of love: 'Love acquires this wealth of life in the exchange of every thought, every kind of manifold inner experience, for it seeks out differences and devises unifications <em>ad infinitum;</em> it turns to the full variety of nature in order to drink love out of every life.' (note 167) Once this synthesis is achieved, that which has been united cannot again become separate[.]" – pp. 153–4</p>
<p>"In the twelfth fragment, which presents the fundamental structure of the...Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate..., Hegel uses St John's Gospel and sayings from the Sermon on the Mount to develop the principle of dialectic, which is not to negate the object but to reconcile...it. The reconciliation of fate through love is the theme of the work which Hegel encapsulates in draft form: 'The forgiveness of sins is not the cancellation of punishment (because every punishment is...something objective, which cannot be annulled). It is not the removal of a bad conscience, because a deed cannot become undone; rather, it is the reconciliation of fate by love.' (note 171) Hegel's love is opposed to Kant's morality: 'A return to morality does not cancel sins and their punishment, fate; the deed remains. On the contrary it becomes even more irksome; the more morality there is, the more deeply the immorality of it is felt. Punishment, its fate, is not removed because morality is still opposed by an objective force.' (note 172) Love is the blossom of life and, in its widest sense, 'the Kingdom of God, the whole tree with all essential modifications and stages of development.' (note 173) Hegel's world is thus completely contracted into the mystery of love, and the dialectic of the entire process is summarized in the truth of love.</p>
<p>"The substance of love, moreover, is God, and so religion can be described as the self-consciousness of God: 'Religion and love are one. The beloved is not opposed to us, he is one with our being; we only see ourselves in him—and yet[,] there again[,] he is not us—a miracle, which we are unable to fathom.' (note 174)...'Love can only exist in response to its equivalent, in response to the mirror image, the echo of our being.' (note 175) 'God is love, love is God; there is no other godhead than love—only that which is ungodly, without love, must contain God in its idea, outside itself.' (note 176) In this way love is perfected in the revelation of life and always ahead [of] the revelation of God, as described in all its modifications by Hegel in his works. All of Hegel's system is fundamentally the philosophy of religion, the depiction of the self-revelation of God.</p>
<p>"The dialectic, which uncovers the seal of love in the essence of life, bears the sign of the spirit as an indelible watermark....'When...man...equates infinite life with the spirit of the whole outside himself, because he is limited, and at the same time sets himself apart from himself, the limited one, thus raising himself to life and reaching the most intimate union with it, then he is worshipping God.' (note 178)" – pp. 154–6</p>
<hr style="padding-top: 1%; margin-right: 80%; border-width: 0; border-bottom-width: 1px">
<small><p>144 – Hegel, 1907, p. 265. [Hegel, 1996, p. 211.—Trans.]
<br>146 – Ibid., p. 293.
<br>148 – Ibid., p. 266. [Hegel, 1996, p. 212. (trans. modified).—Trans.]
<br>149 – Ibid., p. 267. [Ibid.—Trans.]
<br>150 – Ibid. [Ibid. p. 213.—Trans.]
<br>151 – Ibid., p. 268. [Ibid. p. 214.—Trans.]
<br>152 – Ibid.
<br>154 – Ibid., p. 383.
<br>155 – Ibid., p. 295 ff. [Hegel, 1996, p. 247.—Trans.]
<br>156 – Ibid.
<br>167 – Ibid., p. 380. [Hegel, 1996, p. 307.—Trans.]
<br>171 – Ibid., p. 393.
<br>172 – Ibid.
<br>173 – Ibid., p. 394.
<br>174 – Ibid., p. 396.
<br>175 – Ibid.
<br>176 – Ibid., p. 391.
<br>178 – Ibid., p. 347.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. <em>Theologische Jugendschriften.</em> Ed. Herman Nohl. Tübingen, 1907.
<br>———. <em>Early Theological Writings.</em> Trans. T.M. Knox. Philadelphia, 1996.</p></small>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-32355352908119325882021-11-12T22:32:00.011-05:002022-02-17T17:13:43.678-05:00Fanatics & Good and Bad Mass Movements—from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer<p>The following are extracts (for review purposes) from The Fanatics & Good and Bad Mass Movements (Chapters XVI and XVIII in Part 4: Beginning and End) from <em>The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements</em>, Eric Hoffer, 1951:</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter XVI: The Fanatics</p>
<p>"When the moment is ripe, only the fanatic can hatch a genuine mass movement. Without him the disaffection engendered by militant men of words remains undirected and can vent itself only in pointless and easily suppressed disorders....</p>
<p>"When the old order begins to fall apart, many of the vociferous men of words, who prayed so long for the day, are in a funk. The first glimpse of the face of anarchy frightens them out of their wits. They forget all they said about the 'poor simple folk' and run for help to strong men of action...who know how to deal with the rabble and how to stem the tide of chaos.</p>
<p>"Not so the fanatic. Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. He glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end. To hell with reforms! All that already exists is rubbish, and there is no sense in reforming rubbish....He alone knows the innermost craving of the masses in action: the craving for communion, for the mustering of the host, for the dissolution of cursed individuality in the majesty and grandeur of a mighty whole. Posterity is king[.]" – § 110</p>
<p>"Whence come the fanatics? Mostly from the ranks of the noncreative men of words. The most significant division between men of words is between those who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot. The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing order, is actually attached to the present. His passion is to reform and not to destroy....When the struggle with the old order is bitter and chaotic and victory can be won only by utmost unity and self-sacrifice, the creative man of words is usually shoved aside and the management of affairs falls into the hands of the noncreative men of words—the eternal misfits and the fanatical contemners of the present.</p>
<p>"The man who wants to [create something] great..., and knows that never in all eternity will he be able to realize this, his innermost desire, can find no peace in a stable social order—old or new. He sees his life as irrevocably spoiled and the world perpetually out of joint. He feels at home only in a state of chaos....Only when engaged in change does he have a sense of freedom and the feeling that he is growing and developing. It is because he can never be reconciled with his self that he fears finality and a fixed order of things. Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler are outstanding examples of fanatics arising from the ranks of noncreative men of words....</p>
<p>"The creative man of words is ill at ease in the atmosphere of an active movement. He feels that its whirl and passion sap his creative energies. So long as he is conscious of the creative flow within him, he will not find fulfillment in leading millions and in winning victories. The result is that, once the movement starts rolling, he either retires voluntarily or is pushed aside. Moreover, since the genuine man of words can never wholeheartedly and for long suppress his critical faculty, he is inevitably cast in the role of the heretic. Thus unless the creative man of words stifles the newborn movement by allying himself with practical men of action or unless he dies at the right moment, he is likely to end up either a shunned recluse or in exile or facing a firing squad." – § 111</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Chapter XVIII: Good and Bad Mass Movements</p>
<p>The Unattractiveness and Sterility of the Active Phase</p>
<p>"The interference of an active mass movement with the creative process is deep-reaching and manifold:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The fervor it generates drains the energies which would have flowed into creative work. Fervor has the same effect on creativeness as dissipation;</p></li>
<li><p>It subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement. Literature, art and science must be propagandistic and they must be 'practical.' The true-believing writer, artist or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce;</p></li>
<li><p>Where a mass movement opens vast fields of action (war, colonization, industrialization), there is an additional drain of creative energy; [and]</p></li>
<li><p>The fanatical state of mind by itself can stifle all forms of creative work. The fanatic's disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life. The things which stir the creative worker seem to him either trivial or corrupt....Said Rabbi Jacob (first century, A.D.): 'He who walks in the way...and interrupts his study [of the Torah] saying: "How beautiful is this tree" [or] "How beautiful is this ploughed field"...[has] made himself guilty against his own soul.' (note 6)...The blindness of the fanatic is a source of strength (he sees no obstacles), but it is the cause of intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>"The fanatic is also mentally cocky, and hence barren of new beginnings. At the root of his cockiness is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula—his formula. He is thus without the fruitful intervals of groping, when the mind is as it were in solution—ready for all manner of new reactions, new combinations and new beginnings." – § 118</p>
<p>"The principles, methods, techniques, etcetera which a mass movement applies and exploits are usually the product of a creativeness which was or still is active outside the sphere of the movement. All active mass movements have that unabashed imitativeness which we have come to associate with the Japanese. Even in the field of propaganda the Nazis and the Communists imitate more than they originate. They sell their brand of holy cause the way the capitalist advertiser sells his brand of soap or cigarettes. (note 7) Much that strikes us as new in the methods of the Nazis and Communists stems from the fact that they are running (or trying to run) vast territorial empires the way a Ford or a DuPont runs his industrial empire." – § 119</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Some Factors Which Determine the Length of the Active Phase</p>
<p>"A mass movement with a concrete, limited objective is likely to have a shorter active phase than a movement with a nebulous, indefinite objective. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for the development of chronic extremism....</p>
<p>"When a mass movement is set in motion to free a nation from tyranny, either domestic or foreign, or to resist an aggressor, or to renovate a backward society, there is a natural point of termination once the struggle with the enemy is over or the process of reorganization is nearing completion. On the other hand, when the objective is an ideal society of perfect unity and selflessness—whether it be the City of God, a Communist heaven on earth, or Hitler's warrior state—the active phase is without an automatic end. Where unity and self-sacrifice are indispensable for the normal functioning of a society, everyday life is likely to be either religiofied (common tasks turned into holy causes) or militarized. In either case, the pattern developed by the active phase is likely to be fixed and perpetuated. Jacob Burckhardt and Ernest Renan were among the very few in the hopeful second half of the nineteenth century who sensed the ominous implications lurking in the coming millennium. Burckhardt saw the militarized society: 'I have a premonition...: the military state must become one great factory[.]' (note 9)...Renan's insight went deeper. He felt that socialism was the coming religion of the Occident, and that being a secular religion it would lead to a religiofication of politics and economics. (note 10)" – § 120</p>
<p>"There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive. The horror a small nation has of wasting its precious human material, its urgent need for internal harmony and cohesion as a safeguard against aggression from without, and, finally, the feeling of its people that they are all of one family make it possible to foster a readiness for utmost co-operation without recourse to either religiofication or militarization. It would probably be fortunate for the Occident if the working out of all extreme social experiments were left wholly to small states with homogeneous, civilized populations. The principle of a pilot plant, practiced in the large mass-production industries, could thus perhaps be employed in the realization of social progress....</p>
<p>"There is one other connection between the quality of the masses and the nature and duration of an active mass movement. The fact is that the Japanese, Russians and Germans, who allow the interminable continuation of an active mass movement without a show of opposition, were inured to submissiveness or iron discipline for generations before the rise of their respective modern mass movements....Whoever reads what Madame de Staël said of the Germans over a century ago cannot but realize what ideal material they are for an interminable mass movement: 'The Germans,' she said, 'are vigorously submissive. They employ philosophical reasonings to explain what is the least philosophic thing in the world, respect for force and the fear which transforms that respect into admiration.' (note 12)</p>
<p>"One cannot maintain with certitude that it would be impossible for a Hitler or a Stalin to rise in a country with an established tradition of freedom. What can be asserted with some plausibility is that in a traditionally free country a Hitler or a Stalin might not find it too difficult to gain power but extremely hard to maintain himself indefinitely. Any marked improvement in economic conditions would almost certainly activate the tradition of freedom which is a tradition of revolt. In Russia...the individual who pitted himself against Stalin had nothing to identify himself with, and his capacity to resist coercion was nil. But in a traditionally free country the individual who pits himself against coercion does not feel an isolated human atom but one of a mighty race—his rebellious ancestors." – § 121</p>
<p>"The manner in which a mass movement starts out can also have some effect on the duration and mode of termination of the active phase of the movement. When we see the Reformation, the Puritan, American and French revolutions and many of the nationalist uprisings terminate, after a relatively short active phase, in a social order marked by increased individual liberty, we are witnessing the realization of moods and examples which characterized the earliest days of these movements. All of them started out by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more clear-cut this initial act of defiance and the more vivid its memory in the minds of the people, the more likely is the eventual emergence of individual liberty. There was no such clear-cut act of defiance in the rise of Christianity. It did not start by overthrowing a king, a hierarchy, a state or a church. Martyrs there were, but not individuals shaking their fists under the nose of proud authority and defying it in the view of the whole world. (note 14) Hence perhaps the fact that the authoritarian order ushered in by Christianity endured almost unchallenged for fifteen hundred years. The eventual emancipation of the Christian mind at the time of the Renaissance in Italy drew its inspiration not from the history of early Christianity but from the stirring examples of individual independence and defiance in the Graeco-Roman past. There is a similar lack of a dramatic act of defiance at the birth of Islam and of the Japanese collective body, and in neither are there even now signs of genuine individual emancipation. German nationalism, too, unlike the nationalism of most Western countries, did not start with a spectacular act of defiance against established authority. It was taken under the wing from its beginning by the Prussian army. (note 15) The seed of individual liberty in Germany is in its Protestantism and not its nationalism. The Reformation, the American, French and Russian revolutions and most of the nationalist movements opened with a grandiose overture of individual defiance, and the memory of it is kept green." – § 123</p>
<p>"The readiness for united action and self-sacrifice is...a mass movement phenomenon. In normal times a democratic nation is an institutionalized association of more or less free individuals. When its existence is threatened and it has to unify its people and generate in them a spirit of utmost self-sacrifice, the democratic nation must transform itself into something akin to a militant church or a revolutionary party. This process of religiofication, though often difficult and slow, does not involve deep-reaching changes....</p>
<p>"It is nevertheless true that in times like the Hitler decade the ability to produce a mass movement in short order is of vital importance to a nation. The mastery of the art of religiofication is an essential requirement in the leader of a democratic nation, even though the need to practice it might not arise. And it is perhaps true that extreme intellectual fastidiousness or a businessman's practical-mindedness disqualifies a man for national leadership. There are also perhaps certain qualities in the normal life of a democratic nation which can facilitate the process of religiofication in time of crisis and are therefore the elements of a potential national virility. The measure of a nation's potential virility is as the reservoir of its longing....When a nation ceases to want things fervently or directs its desires toward an ideal that is concrete and limited, its potential virility is impaired. Only a goal which lends itself to continued perfection can keep a nation potentially virile even though its desires are continually fulfilled. The goal need not be sublime. The gross ideal of an ever-rising standard of living has kept this nation fairly virile." – § 124</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Useful Mass Movements</p>
<p>"[M]ass movements are often a factor in the awakening and renovation of stagnant societies....</p>
<p>"It is probably better for a country that when its government begins to show signs of chronic incompetence it should be overthrown by a mighty mass upheaval...than that it should be allowed to fall and crumble of itself. A genuine popular upheaval is often an invigorating, renovating and integrating process. Where governments are allowed to die a lingering death, the result is often stagnation and decay—perhaps irremediable decay....</p>
<p>"J.B.S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D. (note 20) It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection." – § 125</p>
<hr style="padding-top: 1%; margin-right: 80%; border-width: 0; border-bottom-width: 1px">
<small><p>6 – Pirke Aboth, <em>The Sayings of the Jewish Fathers</em> (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1929), p. 36.
<br>7 – Eva Lips, <em>Savage Symphony</em> (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 18.
<br>9 – In a letter to his friend Preen. Quoted by James Hastings Nichols in his introduction to the English translation of Jacob C. Burckhardt's <em>Force and Freedom</em> (New York: Pantheon Books, 1943), p. 40.
<br>10 – Ernest Renan, <em>History of the People of Israel</em> (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1888–1896), Vol. V, p. 360.
<br>12 – Quoted by W.R. Inge, "Patriotism," <em>Nineteen Modern Essays</em>, ed. W.A. Archbold (New York: Longmans, Green & Company, 1926), p. 213.
<br>14 – "The Christian resistance to authority was indeed more than heroic, but it was not heroic." Sir J.R. Seeley, <em>Lectures and Essays</em> (London: Macmillan, 1895), p. 81.
<br>15 – Said Hardenberg to the King of Prussia after the defeat at Jena: "Your Majesty, we must do from above what the French have done from below."
<br>20 – J.B.S. Haldane, <em>The Inequality of Man</em> (New York: Famous Books, Inc., 1938), p. 49.</p></small>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-56799298007766712502021-11-11T22:58:00.005-05:002022-02-17T17:14:45.389-05:00Norman Podhoretz's Why Are Jews Liberals?<p style="padding-bottom: 1%">The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Why Are Jews Liberals?</em>, Norman Podhoretz, 2009:</p>
<p>In addition to the extracts, I also think the high level of education which Jews possess leads to an economic preference for life near large cities, which in turn contributes to preferring liberalism.</p>
<p>"[T]he authoritative Declaration of Principles formulated by [Reform Judaism's] Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 included:</p>
<p>" 'We recognize, in the modern era of <em>universal</em> culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel's great <em>messianic</em> hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men.' " [emphasis added] – p. 89</p>
<p>"[I]n the history of Jewish emancipation[,] the first period covered the 150 years leading up to the French Revolution (1640–1789), and the second, lasting about ninety years (1789–1878), was marked by the achievement through fits and starts of emancipation throughout Western and Central Europe. In the third period, which got under way in 1878, further progress was made in the extension of emancipation to Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>"In each of these periods the opposition to granting legal equality to the Jews was based on a different rationale.</p>
<p>"At the start of the first period, the prevailing justification, left over from the Middle Ages, was religious: the Jew was debarred from equal treatment simply by virtue of the fact that he was not a Christian. But as creeping secularization began undermining the religious rationale, a new one, political in nature, was developed that would ultimately take precedence[.] Now Jews were to be denied equal treatment because they were an unassimilable minority—'a nation within a nation.' But by the time the second period ended, the political objection—even in de facto collaboration with the religious one in those circles where 'nation' meant 'Christian nation'—had proved itself unable to prevent full legal emancipation from being enacted everywhere in Western and Central Europe. In spite of this failure, the political rationale remained very much alive even while pride of place was being given to yet a third rationale that was more suited to the times: that the Jews were neither a religious community nor a nation but a race." – pp. 105–6</p>
<p>"In the late nineteenth century (as witness the claims of the Marxists, the Freudians, and the social Darwinians), a theory needed to be deemed scientific before it could win widespread acceptance—and so it was with the racism that became the latest and most up-to-date basis for opposition to, or rather rollback of, Jewish emancipation." – p. 106</p>
<p>"In 1879, at the very onset of the third period, a journalist named Wilhelm Marr...founded the first popular political organization devoted entirely to defending 'Germandom' from the Jewish threat. He called it 'The League of Anti-Semites.' Because this previously unknown term jibed so well with the new racism, it immediately caught on and became the name of choice for the many anti-Jewish organizations and political parties that followed[.]" – pp. 106–7</p>
<p>"The...situation in the cultural realm, which would prove to be more decisive than the political, was anything but reassuring. In the years leading up to the Dreyfus Affair, assimilated Jews, along with Christians of Jewish origin (who in spite of having been baptized continued generally to be regarded as Jews), had been growing more and more prominent in every area of European culture. They were journalists, they were writers, they were musicians, they were painters and sculptors. Many of them had imagined that so thorough an immersion in[,] and so deep a devotion to[,] the languages and the traditions of the surrounding societies would be welcomed as a mark of how faithfully they were keeping their part of the bargain under which emancipation had been granted. Yet it was becoming increasingly clear that the opposite was the case—that the more complete the integration, the more resentment it was engendering.</p>
<p>"In its early stages, this manifested itself in a nationalist unease over the 'takeover' of the culture by people who, however much they might pretend otherwise, were not really flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone and therefore had no right to speak in 'our' name[.]" – p. 114</p>
<p>"Once the new racism took hold, such feelings...—that the Jews, being a 'nation within a nation,' were unassimilable—...were provided with a much more powerful rationale in the idea that Jews were not merely foreign but mortally dangerous, and all the <em>more</em> so when they strove to assimilate. Richard Wagner, who argued that Jews were incapable of artistic creativity because they were by nature rootless cosmopolitans, did not stop with this essentially nationalist (or '<em>Voelkisch</em>') argument [but] reinforc[ed] it with the new racism[.]</p>
<p>"[W]hen, in 1897, the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was appointed to head the court opera in Vienna, a storm of protest erupted against giving so important a musical post to a Jew. Under the older anti-Jewish dispensations, the fact that Mahler had converted to Catholicism would have deflected or at least lowered the temperature of any such protest. But in the eyes of the new <em>Voelkisch</em>-racist anti-Semitism, Mahler was, and would always remain, a Jew, and therefore incapable of understanding and conveying the true spirit of German music." – p. 115</p>
<p>"It would be a mistake to think—as did many German-Jewish intellectuals who, even after the Holocaust, were unable to rid themselves of the conviction that German culture was superior to all others (especially American)—that only similiterate thugs fell for the <em>Voelkisch</em>-racist view of the Jews." – p. 116</p>
<p>"Roosevelt had become far more than a popular politician or even a great leader to the Jews of America. To say that he was the Messiah would be going too far, but not by all that much." – p. 127</p>
<p>"The reason Jews had been attracted to the Democratic Party in the first place was that it represented the closest American counterpart to the forces on the Left that had favored Jewish emancipation in Europe—just as the Republicans seemed to represent an American version of the conservative forces that had opposed equal rights for Jews in the past." – p. 142</p>
<p>"As the mantra that became familiar in the '60s had it, 'war, racism, and poverty' were America's three great afflictions[.]</p>
<p>"On racism..., the position of the liberal establishment was that the way to solve the 'Negro problem' was through 'integration,' and against this idea, too, we radicals mounted an assault....There was no unified position on the Left as to a viable alternative. [One] faction was advocating 'positive discrimination' or, in its later iteration, 'affirmative action[.]'" – pp. 151–2</p>
<p>"[T]he two decades that followed the end of World War II constituted what some of us were calling a 'Golden Age of Jewish Security'....To the extent that...the Jewish defence agencies...still spent time on anti-Semitism, they largely devoted it to attacking the 'radical Right' and its Christian allies. Yet in an article titled 'The Radical Right and the Rise of the Fundamentalist Minority,' David Danzig, then the program director of the AJC [American Jewish Committee], could find no open or outright anti-Semitism in either the secular or religious components of this movement. He simply took it for granted that such a movement must necessarily represent a danger to Jews. It was an assumption that fit in well with <em>The Authoritarian Personality</em>, a study sponsored by the AJC in 1950 in which the authors, in investigating the psychological roots of totalitarianism, focused entirely on the political Right and never even bothered to consider whether the same qualities might exist on the political Left (which they most certainly did)." – pp. 157–8</p>
<p>"In my talk [to the AJC],...I then quoted the warning of Daniel P. Moynihan (who, although a Democrat, was at that point in his career serving in the White House as Nixon's chief advisor on domestic affairs) that if, under the guise of 'affirmative action,' the merit system were replaced by a system of proportional representation according to race or ethnic origin, the Jews, constituting a mere 3 percent of the population, would be 'driven out.' Yet such a replacement was precisely what was being advocated in powerful circles that continued to regard themselves as impeccably liberal in outlook. To put the matter brutally, in the name of justice to blacks, discriminatory measures were to be instituted once more against the Jews." – pp. 162–3</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-35531989733350541042021-11-11T22:11:00.006-05:002022-02-17T17:15:47.825-05:00Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay's Cynical Theories<p style="padding-bottom: 1%">The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody</em>, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, 2020:</p>
<p>"Postmodernism first burst onto the intellectual scene in the late 1960s and quickly became wildly fashionable among leftist and left-leaning academics. As the intellectual fad grew, its proselytes set to work, producing reams of radically skeptical Theory, in which existing knowledge and ways of obtaining knowledge understood as belonging to Western modernity were indiscriminately criticized and dismantled. The old religions—in the broadest sense of the word—had to be torn down. Thus, the ideas that we can come to know objective reality[,] and that what we call 'truth' in some way corresponds to it[,] were placed on the chopping block, together with the assumptions that modernity had been built upon. The postmodernists sought to render absurd our ways of understanding, approaching, and living in the world[,] and in societies. Despite proving simultaneously modish and influential, this approach had its limits. Endless dismantling and disruption—or, as they call it, <em>deconstruction</em>—is not only destined to consume itself; it is also fated to consume everything interesting and thus [to] render itself <em>boring.</em></p>
<p>"That is, Theory couldn't content itself with nihilistic despair. It needed something to do, something actionable. Because of its own morally and politically charged core, it had to apply itself to the problem it saw at the core of society: unjust access to power. After its first big bang beginning in the late 1960s, the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism burnt itself out by the early 1980s. But postmodernism did not die. From the ashes arose a new set of Theorists whose mission was to make some core tenets of postmodernism applicable[,] and to <em>reconstruct</em> a better world.</p>
<p>"The common wisdom among academics is that, by the 1990s, postmodernism had died. But, in fact, it simply mutated from its earlier high deconstructive phase into a new form. A diverse set of highly politicized and actionable Theories developed out of postmodernism proper. We will call this more recent development <em>applied postmodernism.</em> This change occurred as a new wave of Theorists emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These new applied postmodernists also came from different fields, but, in many respects, their ideas were much more alike than those of their predecessors[,] and provided a more user-friendly approach. During this turn, Theory mutated into a handful of Theories—postcolonial, queer, and critical race—that were put to work in the world[,] to deconstruct social injustice.</p>
<p>"We therefore might think of postmodernism as a kind of fast-evolving virus. Its original and purest form was unsustainable: it tore its hosts apart and destroyed itself. It could not spread from the academy to the general population[,] because it was so difficult to grasp and so seemingly removed from social realities. In its evolved form, [however,] it spread, leaping the 'species' gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious. It mutated around a core of Theory[,] to form several new strains, which are far less playful and far more certain of their own (meta)narratives. These are centered on a practical aim that was absent before: to reconstruct society in the image of an ideology[,] which came to refer to itself as 'Social Justice.' " – pp. 45–6</p>
<p>"For postmodernists, Theory refers to a specific set of beliefs, which posit that the world[,] and our ability to gather knowledge about it[,] work in accordance with the postmodern knowledge and political principles. Theory assumes that objective reality cannot be known, [that] 'truth' is socially constructed[,] through language and 'language games[,]' and is local to a particular culture, and [that] knowledge functions to protect and [to] advance the interests of the privileged. Theory therefore explicitly aims to <em>critically</em> examine discourses. This means something specific. It means to examine them closely so as to expose and disrupt the political power dynamics it assumes are baked into them[,] so that people will be convinced to reject them and [to] initiate an ideological revolution.</p>
<p>"Theory, in this sense, has not gone away, but neither has it stayed the same. Between the late 1980s and roughly 2010, it developed the applicability of its underlying concepts[,] and came to form the basis of entirely new fields of scholarship, which have since become profoundly influential. These new disciplines, which have come to be known loosely as 'Social Justice scholarship,' co-opted the notion of social justice from the civil rights movements and other liberal and progressive theories. Not coincidentally, this all began in earnest just as legal equality had largely been achieved[,] and antiracist, feminist, and LGBT activism began to produce diminishing returns. Now[,] the main barriers to social equality in the West were lingering prejudices, embodied in attitudes, assumptions, expectations, and language. For those tackling these less tangible problems, Theory, with its focus on systems of power and privilege perpetuated through discourses, might have been an ideal tool—except that, as it was wholly deconstructive, indiscriminately radically skeptical, and unpalatably nihilistic, it was not really fit for any productive purpose.</p>
<p>"The new forms of Theory arose within postcolonialism, black feminism...intersectional feminism, critical race (legal) Theory, and queer Theory, all of which sought to describe the world critically <em>in order to change it.</em> Scholars in these fields increasingly argued that, while postmodernism could help reveal the socially constructed nature of knowledge and the associated 'problematics,' [their] activism was simply not compatible with fully radical skepticism. They needed to accept that certain groups of people faced disadvantages and injustices based on who they were, a concept that radically skeptical postmodern thinking readily deconstructed. Some of the new Theorists therefore criticized their predecessors for their privilege, which they claimed was demonstrated by their ability to deconstruct identity and identity-based oppression. Some accused their forebears of being white, male, wealthy, and Western enough to afford to be playful, ironic, and radically skeptical, because society was already set up for their benefit. As a result, while the new Theorists retained much Theory, they did not entirely dispense with stable identity and objective truth. Instead, they laid claim to a limited amount of both, arguing that some identities were privileged over others[,] and that this injustice was objectively true.</p>
<p>"While the original postmodern thinkers dismantled our understanding of knowledge, truth, and societal structures, the new Theorists reconstructed these from the ground up, in accordance with their own narratives[.] Thus, while the original (postmodern) Theorists were fairly aimless, using irony and playfulness to reverse hierarchies[,] and [to] disrupt what they saw as unjust power and knowledge (or power-knowledge) structures, the second wave of <em>(applied)</em> postmodernists focused on dismantling hierarchies[,] and making truth claims about power, language, and oppression. During its applied turn, Theory underwent a <em>moral</em> mutation: it adopted a number of beliefs about the rights and wrongs of power and privilege. The original Theorists were content to observe, bemoan, and play with such phenomena; the new ones wanted to reorder society. If social injustice is caused by legitimizing bad discourses, [then,] they reasoned, social justice can be achieved by delegitimizing them and replacing them with better ones. Those social sciences and humanities scholars who took Theoretical approaches began to form a left-wing moral community, rather than a purely academic one: an intellectual organ more interested in advocating a particular <em>ought[,]</em> than [in] attempting a detached assessment of <em>is</em>—an attitude we usually associate with churches, rather than universities." – pp. 46–8</p>
<p>"By losing the ironic playfulness and despair of meaning characteristic of high-deconstructive postmodernism[,] and by becoming goal-oriented, Theorists of the 1980s and 1990s made postmodernism applicable to institutions and politics. By recovering the idea of identity as something that—although culturally constructed—provided group knowledge and empowerment, they enabled more specific forms of activism-scholarship to develop. Theory therefore turned from being largely descriptive to highly prescriptive—a shift from <em>is</em> to <em>ought.</em> After the applied postmodern turn, postmodernism was no longer a mode of describing society and undermining confidence in long-established models of reality: it now aspired to be a tool of Social Justice. This ambition would come to fruition in the early 2010s, when a second significant evolutionary mutation in postmodernism occurred.</p>
<p>"The new Theories emerging from the applied postmodern turn made it possible for scholars and activists to <em>do</em> something with the postmodern conception of society. If knowledge is a construct of power, which functions through ways of talking about things, knowledge can be changed and power structures toppled by changing the way we talk about things. Thus, applied postmodernism focuses on controlling discourses, especially by <em>problematizing</em> language and imagery it deems Theoretically harmful....The intense scrutiny of language and development of ever stricter rules for terminology pertaining to identity often known as <em>political correctness</em> came to a head in the 1990s and has again become pertinent since the mid-2010s.</p>
<p>"This carries politically actionable conclusions. If what we accept as true is only accepted as such because the discourses of straight, white, wealthy, Western men have been privileged, applied Theory indicates this can be challenged by empowering marginalized identity groups[,] and insisting their voices take precedence. This belief increased the aggressiveness of identity politics to such an extent that it even led to concepts like 'research justice.' This alarming proposal demands that scholars preferentially cite women and minorities—and minimize citations of white Western men—because empirical research that values knowledge production rooted in evidence and reasoned argument is an unfairly privileged cultural construct of white Westerners. It is therefore, in this view, a moral obligation to share the prestige of rigorous research with 'other forms of research,' including superstition, spiritual beliefs, cultural traditions and beliefs, identity-based experiences, and emotional responses.</p>
<p>"As these methods can be applied to virtually anything, a vast body of work drawing on any (or all) identity-based fields has emerged since roughly 2010. It asserts the objective truth of socially constructed knowledge and power hierarchies with absolute certainty. This represents an evolution that began with the applied turn in postmodernism[,] as its new assumptions became known-knowns—that which people take for granted because it is known that they are 'known.'</p>
<p>"These changes have been steadily eroding the barrier between scholarship and activism. It used to be considered a failure of teaching or scholarship to work from a particular ideological standpoint. The teacher or scholar was expected to set aside her own biases and beliefs in order to approach her subject as objectively as possible. Academics were incentivized to do so by knowing that other scholars could—and would—point out evidence of bias or motivated reasoning and counter it with evidence and argument. Teachers could consider their attempts at objectivity successful if their students did not know what their political or ideological positions were.</p>
<p>"This is not how Social Justice scholarship works or is applied to education. Teaching is now supposed to be a political act, and only one type of politics is acceptable—identity politics, as defined by Social Justice and Theory. In subjects ranging from gender studies to English literature, it is now perfectly acceptable to state a theoretical or ideological position and then use that lens to examine the material, without making any attempt to falsify one's interpretation by including disconfirming evidence or alternative explanations. Now, scholars can openly declare themselves to be activists and teach activism in courses that require students to accept the ideological basis of Social Justice as true[,] and [to] produce work that supports it." – pp. 61–3</p>
<p>"While, initially, postcolonial Theory scholarship mostly took the form of literary criticism and the discursive analysis of writing about colonialism...the field gradually expanded and simplified. By the early 2000s, the concept of <em>decolonizing</em> everything had begun to dominate scholarship and activism, and new scholars were using and developing the concepts in different ways, with more actionable elements. They...extended the focus beyond ideas and speech about literal colonialism to perceived attitudes of superiority towards people of certain identity statuses. These included displaced indigenous groups and people from racial or ethnic minorities who could be considered in some way subaltern, diasporic, or hybrid, or whose non-Western beliefs, cultures, or customs had been devalued. The aims of postcolonial Theory also became more concrete: focusing less on disrupting discourses they saw as colonialist in the fairly pessimistic way typical of postmodernism[,] and more on taking active steps to decolonize these, using the militant Social Justice approach that has taken hold since 2010. This has mainly occurred via various <em>decolonize</em> movements, which can be taken as the product of more recent Theorists having reified the assumptions of postcolonial Theory and put them into action.</p>
<p>"What it means to decolonize a thing that is not literally colonized varies considerably. It can refer simply to including scholars of all nationalities and races[.] Such campaigns focus on reducing reliance on white scholars from former colonizing powers and replacing them with scholars of color from formerly colonized regions. However, we also see a drive for a diversity of 'knowledges' and epistemologies—ways of deciding what is true—under Theory[,] often described as '(other) ways of knowing.' This comes with a strong inclination to critique, problematize, and disparage knowledge understood as Western." – p. 77</p>
<p>"If we think of the first postmodernists of the late 1960s as a manifestation of radical skepticism and despair[,] and the second wave, from the late 1980s, as a recovery from hopelessness[,] and a drive to make [the] core ideas politically actionable, [then] this third wave, which became prominent between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, has fully recovered its certainty and activist zeal. The first postmodernists were reacting largely to the failure of Marxism, the longstanding analytical framework of the academic left, and suffering from major disillusionment. Because their theoretical framework of choice was falling apart, they adopted the cynical attitude that nothing could be relied upon anymore. The metanarratives they were skeptical of included Christianity, science, and the concept of progress, among others—but, with the loss of Marxism, came a loss of hope of restructuring society towards 'justice.' They therefore sought only to dismantle, deconstruct, and disrupt existing frameworks ironically, with a kind of joyless playfulness. This was the state of cultural thought in the 1970s.</p>
<p>"By the time this first wave of despairing skepticism—the <em>high deconstructive phase</em> of postmodernism—had worn itself out twenty years later, the academic left had somewhat recovered hope and was looking for more positive and applicable forms of Theory. It took postmodernism's two key principles and four themes, and tried to do something with them. Thus, postmodern Theory developed into the applied postmodern Theories, plural. [For instance,] postcolonial Theory...would, if it could, rescue the 'other' from the West, mostly by tearing the West down....Above all else, intersectional feminism sought empowerment through identity politics and collective action, which largely defines the current cultural mood....So, by the 1990s, the applied postmodern turn had arrived, [which] made postmodern Theory actionable, and focused on identity and identity politics.</p>
<p>"As these Theories developed through the late 1990s into the 2000s within various forms of identity studies...they increasingly combined their aims, to become steadily more intersectional. By the mid-2000s, if you studied one of the key topics—sex, gender identity, race, sexuality, immigration status, indigeneity, colonial status, disability, religion, and weight—you were expected to factor in all the others....This resulted in a form of general scholarship that looks at 'marginalized groups[,]' and multiple systems of power and privilege.</p>
<p>"As so many of these marginalized groups united[,] and the various streams of thought merged to create a single large pool of similar, competing issues, Social Justice scholars and activists also became much more confident in their underlying assumptions. As the 2010s began, the ambiguity and doubt that had characterized postmodernism up until then had almost entirely disappeared[.]" – pp. 184–6</p>
<p>"Social Justice scholarship does not just rely on the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes: it treats them and their underlying assumptions as morally righteous known-knowns—as The Truth According to Social Justice. It therefore constitutes a third distinct phase of postmodernism, one we have called <em>reified postmodernism</em> because it treats the abstractions at the heart of postmodernism as if they were real truths about society.</p>
<p>"To understand how the three phases of postmodernism have developed, imagine a tree with deep roots in radical leftist social theory. The first phase, or <em>high deconstructive phase,</em> from the 1960s to the 1980s (usually simply referred to as 'postmodernism'), gave us the tree trunk: Theory. The second phase, from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, which we call <em>applied postmodernism,</em> gave us the branches—the more applicable Theories and studies, including postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, gender studies, fat studies, disability studies, and many critical <em>anything</em> studies. In the current, third phase, which began in the mid-2000s, Theory has gone from being an assumption to being The Truth, a truth that is taken for granted. This has given us the leaves of the tree of Social Justice scholarship, which combines the previous approaches as needed. The constant in all three phases is Theory, which manifests in the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes.</p>
<p>"Social Justice scholarship does not merely present the postmodern knowledge principle—that objective truth does not exist and [that] knowledge is socially constructed and a product of culture—and the postmodern political principle—society is constructed through knowledge by language and discourses, designed to keep the dominant in power over the oppressed. It treats them as The Truth, tolerates no dissent, and expects everyone to agree or be 'cancelled.' We see this in the obsessive focus on who can produce knowledge and how[,] and in the explicit desire to 'infect' as many other disciplines as possible with Social Justice methods. This is reflected in a clear wish to achieve epistemic and research 'justice[,]' by asserting that rigorous knowledge production is just a product of white, male, and Western culture[,] and thus no better than the Theoretically interpreted lived experiences of members of marginalized groups, which must be constantly elevated and foregrounded.</p>
<p>"The four postmodern themes are not generally treated by Critical Social Justice scholars as a reification of postmodernism. They are facets of The Truth According to Social Justice.</p>
<p>"This has had a number of consequences. Scholars and activists devote tremendous effort to searching for and inflating the smallest infractions—this being the 'critical' approach. They scrupulously examine people's current and past speech, particularly on social media, and punish purveyors of 'hateful' discourses. If the person involved is considered influential, the mob may even try to end her career altogether.</p>
<p>"Social Justice scholarship represents the third phase in the evolution of postmodernism. In this new incarnation, postmodernism...now seeks to apply deconstructive methods and postmodernist principles to the task of creating social change, which it pushes into <em>everything.</em> In the guise of Social Justice scholarship, postmodernism has become a grand, sweeping explanation for society—a metanarrative—of its own.</p>
<p>"So let's return to the contradiction at the heart of reified postmodernism: how can intelligent people profess both radical skepticism and radical relativism—the postmodern knowledge principle—and at the same time assert the Truth According to Social Justice (Theory) with absolute certainty?</p>
<p>"The answer seems to be that the skepticism and relativism of the postmodern knowledge principle are now interpreted in a more restrictive fashion: that it is impossible for humans to obtain reliable knowledge by employing evidence and reason, but, it is now claimed, reliable knowledge can be obtained by listening to the 'lived experience' of members of marginalized groups—or what is really more accurate, to marginalized people's interpretations of their own lived experience, after these have been properly colored by Theory.</p>
<p>"The difficulty with this sort of Social Justice 'way of knowing' is, however, the same as that with all gnostic 'epistemologies' that rely upon feelings, intuition, and subjective experience: what should we do when people's subjective experiences conflict?</p>
<p>"[W]hat Social Justice scholars seem in practice to do is to select certain favored interpretations of marginalized people's experience (those consistent with Theory) and anoint these as the 'authentic' ones; all others are explained away as an unfortunate internalization of dominant ideologies or cynical self-interest...at the price of rendering the Social Justice Theory completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible: [N]o matter what evidence about reality (physical, biological, and social)[,] or philosophical argument may be presented, Theory always can and always does explain it away.</p>
<p>"It is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarratives of Western thought—science and reason along with religion and capitalist economic systems—to make room for a wholly new religion, a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious <em>worldly</em> forces in systems of power and privilege[,] and which sanctifies victimhood. This, increasingly, is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left." – pp. 207–11</p>
<p>"It is not a coincidence that the applied postmodern turn began in the late 1980s, just as the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism, and Gay Pride began to see diminishing returns after twenty years of remarkably rapid progress towards racial, gender, and LGBT equality on a legal and political level. With Jim Crow laws dismantled, Empire fallen, male homosexuality legalized, and discrimination on the grounds of race and sex criminalized, Western society was newly aware and ashamed of its long history of oppression of marginalized groups and wanted to continue righting those wrongs. Since the most significant legal battles had been won, all that remained to tackle were sexist, racist, and homophobic attitudes and discourses. Postmodernism, with its focus on discourses of power and socially constructed knowledge, was perfectly placed to address these." – pp. 230–1</p>
<p>"There is a significant danger in Social Justice imposing its social constructivist beliefs on the institutions of society. A good case study of this is provided by the events at Evergreen State College, which got overtaken by the ideas of critical race Theory generally[,] and of the Theorist and educator Robin DiAngelo specifically. [After a precipitating event,] a contingent of student-activists reacted angrily. The result was mayhem: student-activists began to protest and riot at events all over campus. Proceedings at the college were entirely disrupted[.] The problem escalated to the point where student-activists were barricading doors against the police, holding faculty members as de facto hostages, and, armed with baseball bats, stopping cars to search for [the target of the protest].</p>
<p>"The campus descended into mob madness, and Evergreen has not yet recovered from it.</p>
<p>"There is a one-word answer to how this could have happened: Theory. What happened at Evergreen is a demonstration at the microcosmic scale of what happens when Theory gets applied to an autonomous institution in a real-world setting. The Evergreen establishment set itself up for destruction by accepting enough of the 'antiracism' views of critical race educators like Robin DiAngelo—not least the idea of white fragility—to have lost its ability to mount a defense against the protestors. Indeed, when some students of color expressed support for [the target of the protest] and made similar statements to his, the mob shouted them down and dismissed their own lived experience, most probably because it didn't align with the 'authentic' experience detailed by Theory. Thus, once enough people, most notably the faculty member Naima Lowe, who taught media studies at Evergreen at the time of the meltdown, accused the college of being a racist institution overrun by white supremacy, the faculty and administrators, who had taken on 'antiracist' concepts from critical race Theory, had no recourse but to accept the accusation and start making the changes demanded.</p>
<p>"What else could they do? The Theory of 'white fragility,' among others, tied their hands such that to do anything else was, in the eyes of the prevailing Theory, to confirm their complicity in the very problem they had every reason to deny....Having accepted that 'the question isn't "did racism take place?" but rather "how did racism manifest in that situation?",' the only possible conclusion was that they were working for an intrinsically racist organization. Those were the charges. Having accepted the Social Justice idea that the only possible way <em>not</em> to be complicit in racism is to accept the charge and take on an endless amount of antiracism work, as dictated by Theory, they were powerless against an extremist minority of faculty and students, particularly once administrators like the new president George Bridges got on board. It is extremely unlikely that the majority of the students and faculty at Evergreen who were sympathetic to the concerns voiced by Social Justice knew that this was what they were signing up for.</p>
<p>"This dynamic is predictable once Theory is introduced into a closed system. The ideas begin to gain some currency with some of the population, who become sympathetic partisans and begin to take on the Theoretical worldview. In that state, they 'know' that systemic bigotry is present in all institutions, including their own, and that it lurks beneath the surface in need of exposure and problematization through the 'critical' methods. Eventually, a Theoretically relevant incident occurs or, as may have been the case at Evergreen, is manufactured, and the Theorists within that institution begin to focus intently on the revealed 'problematics' at the bottom of the problem. This will be interpreted systemically, and the community fragments as every discussion and argument turns into a series of accusations and close readings of every utterance made by anyone who isn't being sufficiently Theoretical. To do anything but acquiesce and take up the fight on behalf of Theory is taken to 'prove' one's complicity with the systemic problem at the institution's heart, and there is no recourse. If enough activists have adopted enough Theory in the institution by the time the incident occurs—and there will always be an incident eventually[,] as even a misunderstanding or faux pas will qualify—Theory will consume the institution. If it folds, it deserved it[,] because it was systemically bigoted in the first place. If it survives, even as a fragment of its former self, it will do so consistent with Theory or as a toxic battleground around Theory. This is not a bug of Theory; it's a feature. It is what the 'critical' method at its heart was intended to do from the beginning. Indeed, this dynamic has played out in diverse settings beyond Evergreen, including online forums dedicated to hobbies like knitting, the Atheism Movement of the early 2010s, and even conservative churches." – pp. 231–3</p>
<p>"The ideas of Social Justice scholarship often look good on paper. That's almost always the way with bad theories. Take communism, for example. Communism presents the idea that an advanced and technological society can organize itself around cooperation and shared resources and minimize human exploitation. The injustices that spring from disparities between capitalism's winners and losers can be eliminated. With sufficient information—information that proves incredibly hard to get without markets, as we now know—surely we can redistribute goods and services[,] in much fairer and more equitable ways, and surely the moral benefits are sufficient to inspire all good people to participate in such a system. We just have to get everyone on script. We just all have to cooperate. That's the theory. But, in practice, communism has generated some of the greatest atrocities of history and been responsible for the deaths of millions.</p>
<p>"Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of 'the greater good.' Postmodernism began as a rejection of communism, along with all other grand theories belonging to the modern period, the Enlightenment, and the premodern faiths that came before them. The cynical Theorists whom we now recognize as the original postmodernists laid the groundwork for a new Theoretical approach to human hubris. Rather than following in the footsteps of their predecessors, who attempted grand, sweeping explanations and visions of how the world could and should work, they wanted to tear it all apart, right down to the foundations. They weren't just skeptical of specific visions of human progress: they were radically skeptical of the possibility of progress at all. This cynicism was effective. In becoming politically actionable, this cynicism was specifically applied to remake society—not just to complain about it—and thus evolved into Theories we face today, particularly in Social Justice scholarship and activism. On paper, those Theories seem to say good things. Let's get to the bottom of bigotry, oppression, marginalization, and injustice, and heal the world. If we could all just care a little more, and care in the right way, we could make our way to the right side of history. We just have to get everyone on script. We just have to get everyone to cooperate. We just have to ignore any problems and swear solidarity to the cause.</p>
<p>"It isn't going to work. Social Justice is a nice-looking Theory that, once put into practice, will fail, and which could do tremendous damage in the process. Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative. Nevertheless, metanarratives can sound convincing and obtain sufficient support to significantly influence society and the way it thinks about knowledge, power and language. Why? Partly because we humans aren't as smart as we think we are, partly because most of us are idealists on at least some level, partly because we tend to lie to ourselves when we want something to work. But Theory is a metanarrative and metanarratives are, in fact, unreliable.</p>
<p>"The postmodernists got that right." – pp. 234–5</p>
<p>"The answer to these problems isn't new, though, and perhaps that's why it isn't immediately gratifying. The solution is liberalism, both political (universal liberalism is an antidote to the postmodern political principle) and in terms of knowledge production (Jonathan Rauch's 'liberal science' is the remedy for the postmodern knowledge principle). You don't need to become an expert[.] But you do need to have a little bit of courage to stand up to something with a lot of power. You need to recognize Theory when you see it, and side with the liberal responses to it—which might be no more complicated than saying, 'No, that's your ideological belief, and I don't have to go along with it.' " – pp. 265–6</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-33058323022474321782021-11-11T15:46:00.006-05:002022-02-17T17:16:43.756-05:00Men of Words—from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer<p style="padding-bottom: 1%">The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Men of Words (Chapter XV in Part 4: Beginning and End) from <em>The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements</em>, Eric Hoffer, 1951:</p>
<p>"Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. The discrediting is not an automatic result of the blunders and abuses of those in power, but the deliberate work of men of words with a grievance. Where the articulate are absent or without a grievance, the prevailing dispensation, though incompetent and corrupt, may continue in power[.] On the other hand, a dispensation of undoubted merit and vigor may be swept away if it fails to win the allegiance of the articulate minority.</p>
<p>"[F]anatics can move in and take charge only after the prevailing order has been discredited and has lost the allegiance of the masses. The preliminary work of undermining existing institutions, of familiarizing the masses with the idea of change, and of creating a receptivity to a new faith, can be done only by men who are, first and foremost, talkers or writers and are recognized as such by all. As long as the existing order functions in a more or less orderly fashion, the masses remain basically conservative. They can think of reform but not of total innovation. The fanatical extremist, no matter how eloquent, strikes them as dangerous, traitorous, impractical or even insane. They will not listen to him....</p>
<p>"Things are different in the case of the typical man of words. The masses listen to him because they know that his words, however urgent, cannot have immediate results. The authorities either ignore him or use mild methods to muzzle him. Thus imperceptibly the man of words undermines established institutions, discredits those in power, weakens prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and sets the stage for the rise of a mass movement.</p>
<p>"[T]he readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word[.]" – § 104</p>
<p>"The men of words are of diverse types. They can be priests, scribes, prophets, writers, artists, professors, students and intellectuals in general. Where, as in China, reading and writing is a difficult art, mere literacy can give one the status of a man of words....</p>
<p>"Whatever the type, there is a deep-seated craving common to almost all men of words which determines their attitude to the prevailing order. It is a craving for recognition: a craving for a clearly marked status above the common run of humanity....There is apparently an irremediable insecurity at the core of every intellectual, be he noncreative or creative. Even the most gifted and prolific seem to live a life of eternal self-doubting and have to prove their worth anew each day. What de Rémusat said of Thiers is perhaps true of most men of words: 'he has much more vanity than ambition; and he prefers consideration to obedience, and the appearance of power to power itself. Consult him constantly, and then do just as you please. He will take more notice of your deference to him than of your actions.' (note 3)...</p>
<p>"However much the protesting man of words sees himself as the champion of the downtrodden and injured, the grievance which animates him is, with very few exceptions, private and personal. His pity is usually hatched out of his hatred for the powers that be. (note 4)...When his superior status is suitably acknowledged by those in power, the man of words usually finds all kinds of lofty reasons for siding with the strong against the weak. A Luther, who, when first defying the established church, spoke feelingly of 'the poor, simple, common folk,' (note 7) proclaimed later, when allied with the German princelings, that 'God would prefer to suffer the government to exist no matter how evil, rather than to allow the rabble to riot, no matter how justified they are in doing so.' (note 8)...The pampered and flattered men of words in Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia feel no impulsion to side with the persecuted and terrorized against the ruthless leaders and their secret police." – § 105</p>
<p>"Whenever we find a dispensation enduring beyond its span of competence, there is either an entire absence of an educated class or an intimate alliance between those in power and the men of words....Where all learned men are bureaucrats or where education gives a man an acknowledged superior status, the prevailing order is likely to be free from movements of protest.</p>
<p>"[I]n the tenth century all learned men were priests, whereas in the fifteenth century, as the result of the introduction of printing and paper, learning had ceased to be the monopoly of the church. It was the nonclerical humanists who formed the vanguard of the Reformation. (note 10)...</p>
<p>"The stability of Imperial China, like that of ancient Egypt, was due to an intimate alliance between the bureaucracy and the literati. (note 11)...</p>
<p>"The long endurance of the Roman Empire was due in some degree to the wholehearted partnership between the Roman rulers and the Greek men of words. The conquered Greeks felt that they gave laws and civilization to the conquerors. (note 12)...</p>
<p>"Now it is not altogether farfetched to assume that, had the British in India instead of cultivating the Nizams, Maharajas, Nawabs, Gekawars and so on made an effort to win the Indian intellectual; had they treated him as an equal, encouraged him in his work and allowed him a share of the fleshpots, they could perhaps have maintained their rule there indefinitely. As it was, the British who ruled India were of a type altogether lacking in the aptitude for getting along with intellectuals in any land, and least of all in India. They were men of action imbued with a faith in the innate superiority of the British. For the most part they scorned the Indian intellectual both as a man of words and as an Indian. The British in India tried to preserve the realm of action for themselves. They did not to any real extent encourage the Indians to become engineers, agronomists or technicians. The educational institutions they established produced 'impractical' men of words; and it is an irony of fate that this system, instead of safeguarding British rule, hastened its end.</p>
<p>"Britain's failure in Palestine was also due in part to the lack of rapport between the typical British colonial official and men of words. The majority of the Palestinian Jews, although steeped in action, are by upbringing and tradition men of words, and thin-skinned to a fault. They smarted under the contemptuous attitude of the British official who looked on the Jews as on a pack of unmanly and ungrateful quibblers—an easy prey for the warlike Arabs once Britain withdrew its protective hand....</p>
<p>"In both the Bolshevik and the Nazi regimes there is evident an acute awareness of the fateful relation between men of words and the state. In Russia, men of letters, artists and scholars share the privileges of the ruling group. They are all superior civil servants. And though made to toe the party line, they are but subject to the same discipline imposed on the rest of the elite. In the case of Hitler there was a diabolical realism in his plan to make all learning the monopoly of the elite which was to rule his envisioned world empire and keep the anonymous masses barely literate." – § 106</p>
<p>"The men of letters of eighteenth-century France are the most familiar example of intellectuals pioneering a mass movement. A somewhat similar pattern may be detected in the periods preceding the rise of most movements. The ground for the Reformation was prepared by the men who satirized and denounced the clergy in popular pamphlets, and by men of letters like Johann Reuchlin, who fought and discredited the Roman curia. The rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman world was partly due to the fact that the pagan cults it sought to supplant were already thoroughly discredited. The discrediting was done, before and after the birth of Christianity, by the Greek philosophers who were bored with the puerility of the cults and denounced and ridiculed them in schools and city streets. Christianity made little headway against Judaism because the Jewish religion had the ardent allegiance of the Jewish men of words. The rabbis and their disciples enjoyed an exalted status in Jewish life of that day, where the school and the book supplanted the temple and the fatherland. In any social order where the reign of men of words is so supreme, no opposition can develop within and no foreign mass movement can gain a foothold.</p>
<p>"The mass movements of modern time, whether socialist or nationalist, were invariably pioneered by poets, writers, historians, scholars, philosophers and the like. [A]ll nationalist movements...were conceived not by men of action but by faultfinding intellectuals....It is the deep-seated craving of the man of words for an exalted status which makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed on the class or community (racial, lingual or religious [or sexual—MB]) to which he belongs however loosely." – § 107</p>
<p>"It is easy to see how the faultfinding man of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change. What is not so obvious is the process by which the discrediting of existing beliefs and institutions makes possible the rise of a new fanatical faith. For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words who 'sounds the established order to its source to mark its want of authority and justice' (note 15) often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith. A wide diffusion of doubt and irreverence thus leads often to unexpected results....</p>
<p>"When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point. Thus by denigrating prevailing beliefs and loyalties, the militant man of words unwittingly creates in the disillusioned masses a hunger for faith. For the majority of people cannot endure the barrenness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves. Thus, in spite of himself, the scoffing man of words becomes the precursor of a new faith.</p>
<p>"The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as truth itself. He delights in the clash of thought and in the give-and-take of controversy. If he formulates a philosophy and a doctrine, they are more an exhibition of brilliance and an exercise in dialectics than a program of action and the tenets of a faith. His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal is usually to reason and not to faith. The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith....</p>
<p>"To sum up, the militant man of words prepares the ground for the rise of a mass movement:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>By discrediting prevailing creeds and institutions and detaching from them the allegiance of the people;</p></li>
<li><p>By indirectly creating a hunger for faith in the hearts of those who cannot live without it, so that when the new faith is preached it finds an eager response among the disillusioned masses;</p></li>
<li><p>By furnishing the doctrine and the slogans of the new faith; [and]</p></li>
<li><p>By undermining the convictions of the 'better people'—those who can get along without faith—so that when the new fanaticism makes its appearance they are without the capacity to resist it. They see no sense in dying for convictions and principles, and yield to the new order without a fight. (note 16)</p></li>
</ol>
<p>"Thus when the irreverent intellectual has done his work:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 5%">'The best lack all conviction, while the worst
<br>Are full of passionate intensity.
<br>Surely some revelation is at hand,
<br>Surely the Second Coming is at hand.' (note 17)</p>
<p>The stage is now set for the fanatics." – § 108</p>
<p>"The impression that mass movements, and revolutions in particular, are born of the resolve of the masses to overthrow a corrupt and oppressive tyranny and win for themselves freedom of action, speech and conscience has its origin in the din of words let loose by the intellectual originators of the movement in their skirmishes with the prevailing order. The fact that mass movements as they arise often manifest less individual freedom than the order they supplant, is usually ascribed to the trickery of a power-hungry clique that kidnaps the movement at a critical stage and cheats the masses of the freedom about to dawn. Actually,...the intellectual precursors...take it for granted that the masses who respond to their call and range themselves behind them crave the same things. However, the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They want freedom from 'the fearful burden of free choice,' (note 19) freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but faith—blind, authoritarian faith. They sweep away the old order not to create a society of free and independent men, but to establish uniformity, individual anonymity and a new structure of perfect unity. It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against but its weakness; not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one solid, mighty whole. The persuasiveness of the intellectual demagogue consists not so much in convicting people of the vileness of the established order as in demonstrating its helpless incompetence. The immediate result of a mass movement usually corresponds to what the people want. They are not cheated in the process.</p>
<p>"[O]nce a movement gets rolling, power falls into the hands of those who have neither faith in, nor respect for, the individual. And the reason they prevail is...that their attitude is in full accord with the ruling passions of the masses." – § 109</p>
<hr style="padding-top: 1%; margin-right: 80%; border-width: 0; border-bottom-width: 1px">
<p><small>3 – Quoted by Alexis de Tocqueville, <em>Recollections</em> (New York: Macmillan Company, 1896), p. 331.
<br>4 – Multatuli, <em>Max Havelaar</em> (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1927). Introduction by D.H. Lawrence.
<br>7 – In his letter to the Archbishop of Mainz accompanying his theses. Quoted by Frantz Funck-Brentano, <em>Luther</em> (London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1939), p. 65.
<br>8 – Quoted by Jerome Frank, <em>Fate and Freedom</em> (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1945), p. 281.
<br>10 – "Reformation," <em>Encyclopedia Brittanica.</em>
<br>11 – René Fülöp Miller, <em>Leaders, Dreamers and Rebels</em> (New York: The Viking Press, 1935), p. 85.
<br>12 – Ernest Renan, <em>Antichrist</em> (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1897), p. 245.
<br>15 – Pascal, <em>Pensées.</em>
<br>16 – Demaree Bess quotes a Dutch banker in Holland in 1941: 'We do not want to become martyrs any more than most modern people want martyrdom.' 'The Bitter Fate of Holland,' <em>Saturday Evening Post,</em> Feb. 1, 1941.
<br>17 – William Butler Yeats, 'The Second Coming,' <em>Collected Poems</em> (New York: Macmillan Company, 1933).
<br>19 – Fëdor Dostoyevsky, <em>The Brothers Karamazov,</em> Book V, Chap. 5.</small></p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-90346554362193529162021-11-11T11:35:00.010-05:002022-02-17T17:18:03.744-05:00John McWhorter's Winning The Race<p style="padding-bottom:1%">The following are extracts (for review purposes) from <em>Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis In Black America,</em> John McWhorter, 2005:</p>
<p>"[W]hat turned black Indianapolis down a wayward path was two things....One was the rise of a hostile, anti-establishment ideology as mainstream opinion....The other was the expansion of welfare such that it could provide a passable living indefinitely. The rest was history—ours." – p. 70</p>
<p>"The burden of proof is upon [others] to explain why these two factors—oppositional culture and open-ended welfare—would <em>not</em> have a profound historical impact on poor black communities. That is, they must be prepared to state that they would agree with the following proposition:</p>
<p style="margin-left:4%">When a community experiences a new charismatic oppositional ideology and links it to authentic race membership, and at the same time is encouraged by bureaucrats to sign up for open-ended welfare payments, this will have only marginal effect upon attitudes to employment, self-sufficiency, and adherence to mainstream behavior." – p. 72</p>
<p>"The roots of black America's therapeutic alienation in inner pain ties in [sic] to the teachings of Eric Hoffer in his classic monograph <em>The True Believer</em>. Hoffer wrote in 1951....</p>
<p>"Hoffer was interested in why individuals, originally as self-directed and idiosyncratic as all humans are, so often subsume themselves into ideological movements based on idealized visions of the past and contemptuous caricature of the present, with proposals for the future oddly light on practical programs....[M]uch of his analysis illuminates today's Politically Correct black orthodoxy eerily well.</p>
<p>"'Militant' black ideology, even when diluted into quieter convictions among ordinary people, looks to an idealized African past, insists that the present is still, as Ishmael Reed has it, a matter of endless days 'at the front,' and proposes a 'Black Nationalist' future of hazily described multi-class black 'communities' difficult to imagine in an increasingly miscegenated and multicultural nation....</p>
<p>"Hoffer's thesis is that...individuality is an unnatural condition, lending a sense of existential disconnection, so much so that it is almost intolerably threatening to many people. This makes membership in collective ideological movements spiritually attractive, in absolving them of the discomfiting responsibility of making their way as unbounded independent actors.</p>
<p>"Hence, they embrace movements whose manifestos require elisions of empiricism and logic that appear bizarre to the outside observer, based on visceral sentiment disconnected from concrete reality....We look at [them], not understanding that the root of the allegiance was more a desperate self-erasure than constructive progress.</p>
<p>"Black Power ideology has, obviously, inspired nothing remotely as hideous as Hitler or Mussolini. But the hold that this way of thinking has exerted upon so many is due to the same inner quest for self-abnegation that Hoffer described. Freed from overt segregation and discrimination after the sixties, black Americans were faced for the first time in their history with true choice, with opportunities to succeed—or, crucially, perhaps fail. In other words, the new legislation at last gave blacks their place in civilization, as it were, such that they could play their part on the American stage as individuals. But as Hoffer noted, being an individual can be challenging. The challenge was especially intimidating for a people who had had so little opportunity to prepare themselves for the task.</p>
<p>"Naturally, then, for many the response was a new hypersensitivity to the obstacles, a new fetishization of The Man, not right in front of you but <em>there,</em> all around you, like oxygen or God, holding you back, cutting you down. It's not about me—(that is, I'm not sure how I feel about me)—it's about him. As such, today's black American meme of therapeutic alienation, albeit occupying not the battlefield but the university classroom, the kitchen table, the black call-in radio show, the blogsite, and the hip-hop CD is a product of the same tendencies in mass movements that Hoffer describes in other times and places.</p>
<p>"Hoffer notes that under this kind of movement, 'to rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason,' since the guiding imperative is to march in lockstep to an ideology whose core motivation is opposition to the present at all costs. Thus, a core of black scholars of Black English insisted in 1996 that black students require tutelage in 'Ebonics,' despite reams of studies in contradiction....Those who questioned the orthodoxy were tarred as morally unfit, regardless of the facts they brought to bear on the issue. The key was simply whether you were with us or against us.</p>
<p>"Because reality is always complex, an ideology so compelling as to seduce an individual into marching in step with thousands of others must be based on ideas that address the gut rather than the brain. But because the real world is complex, these ideas can never withstand careful analysis, such that as Hoffer put it, 'a doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.' Thus, it is pretended that race issues are uniquely 'complex,' their mystical underpinnings proposed as justifying assumptions such as that unequal outcomes always mean unequal opportunity. To get down to cases is to be accused of 'not getting it,' with little attempt at logical elucidation necessary. Predictably, adherents value what Hoffer pegged as 'impassioned double-talk and sonorous refrains' more than 'precise words joined together with faultless logic,' and, hence, black scholars like Cornel West rocking black audiences with Latinate words delivered in the cadences of the church and the street, with the content of what they are saying considered a background concern. I have watched black fans of West start mm-hmming to his cadences and angular gestures even when what he was saying was either too arcane for any but one or two scholars in attendance to know whether it was true or too ordinary to merit such vigorous consent on its face alone. The theatrics alone are the message.</p>
<p>"For those uncomfortable to see this ideology likened to Hitler and Mussolini, we might heed thinkers like Erik Erikson, who wrote that in moments of rapid social change, 'youth feels endangered, individually and collectively, whereupon it becomes ready to support doctrines offering a total immersion in a synthetic identity (extreme nationalism, racism, or class consciousness) and a collective condemnation of a totally stereotyped enemy of the new identity.' It is not hard to see post–Civil Rights black America in that description, and Erikson meant exactly what Hoffer did." – pp. 164–7</p>
<p>"My argumentation so far could possibly be misinterpreted as implying that racism alone was what created therapeutic alienation. However, racism had been a reality forever: It must be understood that this response to racism was in turn enabled by a particularity of the moment: whites' new interest in the black condition amid the commitments of the counterculture. This allowed a new vent for a spiritual insecurity among blacks that had existed for centuries with whites uninterested in paying it attention. After all, there are all kinds of human responses to insecurity, and black Americans had previously manifested many of them.</p>
<p>"Insecurity can make you work harder....Insecurity can make you withdraw into yourself and have as little contact with The Man as possible....Insecurity can make you just give up and while away your days in idle misery....Or—insecurity might make you dutifully protest when a white woman uses the word <em>n[——]</em> in condemning it. But that will only happen with the precondition of an Establishment newly receptive to such a 'message.'</p>
<p>"Only in the late sixties...could William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs's <em>Black Rage</em> become a best seller, introducing the idea that blacks' problem was not only discrimination but also whites' deep-seated psychological feelings of bias against blacks. This helped usher in a keystone of therapeutic alienation, that our interest is in whether all whites esteem us in their heart of hearts.</p>
<p>"That seems so ordinary now but is, in fact, a rather eccentric fetish of ours. Blacks before the late sixties assumed that whites did not like us, and thought that sheer opportunity was what their people needed. But starting in the late sixties, endless investigations and condemnations of whites' psychological biases against blacks took center stage—even though blacks' regularly saying that they thought whites would always be racist meant that the goal was less to fix something than to dwell in it indefinitely. As historian Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn has it,</p>
<p style="margin-left:4%">The desired goal was no longer civic equality and participation, but individual psychic well-being. This psychological state was much more nebulous, open to interpretation, difficult to achieve, and controversial than the universal guarantee of political equality sought by the early civil rights movement....</p>
<p>"<em>Black Rage</em> was being planned and written...basically <em>concurrently with</em> the Civil Rights Act. The new focus on psychological issues emerged, then, <em>just as</em> discrimination was outlawed and white consensus on blacks shifted from dismissal to professional guilt....</p>
<p>"Nevertheless, Cobbs pioneered encounter groups in which blacks dressed down whites for their subliminal racism, a trope familiar to any number of people who have sat through corporate diversity 'seminars' since. This kind of thing has only been possible in an America where two conditions reigned. One was that blacks gained a sense of comfort in assailing whites, with only faintly constructive purpose, as a coping strategy for feelings of insecurity....There was another necessary condition: Whites were newly open to pretending to like being yelled at[,] and that has only been the case since the sixties.</p>
<p>"Therapeutic alienation, then, was spurred not only by 'racism,' but also by a particular congruence of sociopolitical factors at a particular time. If the new ideology of the sixties were a response simply to 'oppression' writ large, or blacks being finally 'fed up,' then we might try some thought experiments[:] 1876...1919...1947...</p>
<p>"Well, why not? There is not a thing in any of these hypothetical accounts that would seem at all illogical in John Hope Franklin's keystone black history text <em>From Slavery to Freedom</em>—except for the fact that, we immediately think, if blacks had tried such things in those times, whitey would have crushed us like a bug. Which is true. The angry, theatrical separatism now so often treated as genuine and progressive was impossible until whites were poised to give it the floor. And this means one thing: The privileging of alienation over action so familiar to us is not an inevitable response to being given a really bad hand. If it was, it would have ruled black America, really, starting in the early 1600s. It is one of many responses possible. The one we know is only so common because in the sixties it became <em>possible</em>—and only then." – pp. 167–70</p>
<p>"In 2000, the <em>New York Times</em> solicited opinions for one of those Conversations on Race, in which black psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum...intoned...the solution is 'a structured dialogue about race relations.'</p>
<p>"[W]hat, exactly, would the 'structure' be?...The 'structure'...will be imposed upon the whites. That is, the 'structure' will be one in which Tatum gets what she wants: People like her get to decry with no obligation to make sense, while whites have a choice between nodding sympathetically or being tarred as racists. Anything other than this will not satisfy her[.]</p>
<p>"Logic does not allow that Tatum requires this out of a genuine sense that it will achieve anything for black America. After all, people like her have been foisting this kind of 'structured dialogue' upon white America for forty years, and yet remain aggrieved that a debt remains unpaid to black people, that the day has not yet come when whites across our nation get down on their knees and 'understand,' and forthwith somehow render all blacks backyard-barbecuing middle-class <em>Cosby Show</em> homeowners. Tatum has seen no evidence that this kind of 'dialogue' has any concrete effect—but continues to call for it in prominent venues.</p>
<p>"This is because what really drives her is personal. When one feels inferior to whites deep down, one is uncomfortable presenting oneself as a self-directed individual. That individual wouldn't be good enough. So one seeks a tribal identity, hiding oneself within a multitude living for an abstract ideology larger than any one person. That ideology is one lending a substitute identity, one seductively easy to fall into and soothing to the soul for someone whom history divested of anything more connected with reality. That is an identity based on being the noble underdog battling an evil machine—regardless of what is actually happening in the land that one's ancestors turned upside down to make one's life and career possible." – pp. 184–5</p>
<p>"People embrace alienation as a way of hiding from facing the real world as self-realizing individuals....The <em>New York Times</em> portrayed an aspiring young rapper philosophizing about the problematic tendency for hip-hop to celebrate black pathology. He hit it right on the nose: The nasty lyrics are about the fact that 'I'm valid when I'm disrespected.'" – p. 335</p>
<p>"A black film industry executive says the following in 2005:</p>
<p style="margin-left:4%">I don't think much has changed for black films....</p>
<p>"This man, too, is hindered by history from standing on his own two feet. He is willfully ignoring the heartening progress under his very nose because endlessly rehearsing the same old anti-whitey theatrics gives him a sense of comfort. He is part of a herd nurturing a predictable and eternally <em>self-affirming</em> ideology. He affirms himself via the presumed affirmation of that herd, not via affirmation of himself alone. He stays with that herd because he would not quite know how to affirm his sense of self-worth outside of a herd, as just an individual, himself, engaging with the complexities of the world as it actually is. This is not surpising given the history of his people. However, the fact remains that the worldview of people like this—with the injustices of history resoundingly acknowledged, regretted, and even reviled—does not correspond to current reality. I have ventured an argument as to why, and I do not mean it as a dismissive one. But I do believe that a truly progressive orientation toward black America must refrain from treating views like this as valuable counsel.</p>
<p>"The view that what black America needs is for whites from the suburbs to the Capitol to face their inner racism and learn of remnant racial discrepancies is not complex. Nor is it even accurate, as our pre–Civil Rights ancestors knew so well. It is performance, by people who made the best of themselves with neither of those things even in the cards. But other black people need help now. As they sit mired in what American cultural history did to them, basic morality leaves no room for luckier blacks to nurture a self-indulgent tic passing as politics, thought, and compassion.</p>
<p>"Forty years ago this same tic distracted white and black America into turning black communities across the nation into hells on earth. We're still living with the consequences. Under the influence of this tic, instead of overcoming, we condemn ourselves to merely undergoing. We must take a deep breath, rub our eyes, put our shoulders back, and let this tic go—free at last." – pp. 389–91</p>
<p style="padding-top:1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-35293317383458172082021-05-26T15:54:00.072-04:002022-02-17T17:20:30.019-05:00Abandon-business events and a history book (Cynical Theories)<p>In a previous post, <a href="http://markdblackwell.blogspot.com/2020/10/generational-tipping-point-2021.html">Generational tipping point: 2021</a>, I hypothesized a certain kind of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=978596918&title=Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory">Strauss-Howe generational</a> event. I define "abandon business" events as the yielding of dominance and power by a dominant generation to its successor. This, of course, would affect the entire society.</p>
<p>First, it's fallacious to look for evidence to confirm <em>any</em> hypothesis—per Karl Popper's theory of the separation of science from non-science. The scientific method, according to Popper, excludes this fallacy of verificationism (which is also called evidential induction). It prescribes, instead, that we attempt to <em>falsify</em> all hypotheses. For more on verificationism, see:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#ProbDema">"Karl Popper: The Problem of Demarcation"</a> – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021-Mar-18;</li>
<li><a href="http://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-falsification-of-falsification.html?showComment=1599666309843#c6817656118830081715">"Comment on 'The falsification of falsification' by Ann Althouse"</a> – Openidname, 2020-Sep; and</li>
<li><a href="http://philosophicalapologist.com/2016/08/06/what-is-the-demarcation-problem/">"What is the demarcation problem?"</a>: [skip to] A brief history of demarcation – PhilosophicalApologist, 2016.</li>
</ul>
<p>Here, while seeming to commit perhaps the above-mentioned fallacy of verificationism (i.e., by searching for some evidence to <em>confirm</em> my hypothesis), instead I suggest, for any book of history, that we contemplate <em>all</em> of the dates it mentions (without cherry-picking from them) in order to see whether their associated stories fit (or alternatively <em>falsify</em>) my hypothesis: that a framework of generational abandon-business events influences the course of history. Do the book's meaningful dates fall <em>after</em> the generational events which I hypothesized (even if not particularly closely), so that it's even feasible for the abandon-business events, along with the resulting generational reigns, to have helped to cause the dated events described by the selected history book?</p>
<p>Using the book: <a href="http://www.pitchstonebooks.com/catalog/cynical-theories"><em>Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody</em></a> by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay (2020), the abandon-business events (from my hypothesis) that are relevant to the book are:</p>
<p> Event-Year = Last-Birth-Year + Offset – Event – Generation – (Type)</p>
<p>
1961 = 1900 + 61 – abandon business – Lost generation – (Damaged)
<br>
1985 = 1924 + 61 – abandon business – G.I. generation – (Together)
<br>
2003 = 1942 + 61 – abandon business – Silent generation – (Smooth)
</p>
<p>Thus 1961, 1985, and 2003 were the beginnings of the reigns of the G.I., Silent, and Baby Boom generations, precisely because the Lost, G.I., and Silent generations (the immediate precursor generations) were abandoning business just then:</p>
<p> 1961 = 1900 + 61 – abandon business – Lost generation – (Damaged): This resulted in the reign of the G.I. (Together) generation;</p>
<p> 1985 = 1924 + 61 – abandon business – G.I. generation – (Together): This resulted in the reign of the Silent (Smooth) generation; and</p>
<p> 2003 = 1942 + 61 – abandon business – Silent generation – (Smooth): This resulted in the reign of the Baby Boom (Authentic) generation.</p>
<p>Below, I've quoted all of the book's mentionings of dates in its history of postmodernism. Regarding the three waves ("postmodernism," "applied postmodernism," and "reified postmodernism") described in the book, a separate abandon-business event does seem indeed to have helped to cause each one. The evidence for this is that the three waves occurred during the reigns respectively of the G.I., Silent, and Baby Boom generations.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Finally, here are the quotations (for review purposes, and please keep in mind the three years of 1961, 1985, and 2003):</p>
<p> "Postmodernism first burst onto the intellectual scene in the late 1960s[,] and quickly became wildly fashionable among leftist and left-leaning academics....After its first big bang beginning in the late 1960s, the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism burn[ed] itself out by the early 1980s....The common wisdom among academics is that, by the 1990s, postmodernism had died. But, in fact, it simply mutated from its earlier high deconstructive phase into a new form....This change occurred as a new wave of Theorists emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s." – pp. 45–6</p>
<p> "Theory, in this sense, has not gone away, but neither has it stayed the same. Between the late 1980s and roughly 2010, it developed the applicability of its underlying concepts[,] and came to form the basis of entirely new fields of scholarship, which have since become profoundly influential." – pp. 46–8</p>
<p> "By losing the ironic playfulness and despair of meaning characteristic of high-deconstructive postmodernism[,] and by becoming goal-oriented, Theorists of the 1980s and 1990s made postmodernism applicable to institutions and politics....After the applied postmodern turn, postmodernism was no longer a mode of describing society and undermining confidence in long-established models of reality: it now aspired to be a tool of Social Justice. This ambition would come to fruition in the early 2010s, when a second significant evolutionary mutation in postmodernism occurred....The intense scrutiny of language and development of ever stricter rules for terminology pertaining to identity often known as <em>political correctness</em> came to a head in the 1990s and has again become pertinent since the mid-2010s....As these methods can be applied to virtually anything, a vast body of work drawing on any (or all) identity-based fields has emerged since roughly 2010." – pp. 61–3</p>
<p> "While, initially, postcolonial Theory scholarship mostly took the form of literary criticism and the discursive analysis of writing about colonialism...the field gradually expanded and simplified. By the early 2000s, the concept of <em>decolonizing</em> everything had begun to dominate scholarship and activism, and new scholars were using and developing the concepts in different ways, with more actionable elements....The aims of postcolonial Theory also became more concrete: focusing less on disrupting discourses they saw as colonialist in the fairly pessimistic way typical of postmodernism[,] and more on taking active steps to decolonize these, using the militant Social Justice approach that has taken hold since 2010." – p. 77</p>
<p> "If we think of the first postmodernists of the late 1960s as a manifestation of radical skepticism and despair[,] and the second wave, from the late 1980s, as a recovery from hopelessness[,] and a drive to make [the] core ideas politically actionable, [then] this third wave, which became prominent between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, has fully recovered its certainty and activist zeal. The first postmodernists were reacting largely to the failure of Marxism, the longstanding analytical framework of the academic left, and suffering from major disillusionment....They therefore sought only to dismantle, deconstruct, and disrupt existing frameworks ironically, with a kind of joyless playfulness. This was the state of cultural thought in the 1970s. By the time this first wave of despairing skepticism—the <em>high deconstructive phase</em> of postmodernism—had worn itself out twenty years later [in the 1990s], the academic left had somewhat recovered hope and was looking for more positive and applicable forms of Theory....Above all else, intersectional feminism sought empowerment through identity politics and collective action, which largely defines the current cultural mood....So, by the 1990s, the applied postmodern turn had arrived, [which] made postmodern Theory actionable, and focused on identity and identity politics. As these Theories developed through the late 1990s into the 2000s within various forms of identity studies...they increasingly combined their aims, to become steadily more intersectional. By the mid-2000s, if you studied one of the key topics...you were expected to factor in all the others....As the 2010s began, the ambiguity and doubt that had characterized postmodernism up until then had almost entirely disappeared[.]" – pp. 184–6</p>
<p> "Social Justice scholarship does not just rely on the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes: it treats them and their underlying assumptions as morally righteous known-knowns—as The Truth According to Social Justice. It therefore constitutes a third distinct phase of postmodernism, one we have called <em>reified postmodernism</em> because it treats the abstractions at the heart of postmodernism as if they were real truths about society. To understand how the three phases of postmodernism have developed, imagine a tree with deep roots in radical leftist social theory. The first phase, or <em>high deconstructive phase,</em> from the 1960s to the 1980s (usually simply referred to as 'postmodernism'), gave us the tree trunk: Theory. The second phase, from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, which we call <em>applied postmodernism,</em> gave us the branches....In the current, third phase, which began in the mid-2000s, Theory has gone from being an assumption to being The Truth, a truth that is taken for granted. This has given us the leaves of the tree of Social Justice scholarship, which combines the previous approaches as needed....Social Justice scholarship represents the third phase in the evolution of postmodernism. In this new incarnation, postmodernism...now seeks to apply deconstructive methods and postmodernist principles to the task of creating social change, which it pushes into <em>everything.</em></p>
<p> "[W]hat Social Justice scholars [currently] seem in practice to do is to select certain favored interpretations of marginalized people's experience (those consistent with Theory) and anoint these as the 'authentic' ones; all others are explained away as an unfortunate internalization of dominant ideologies or cynical self-interest...at the price of rendering the Social Justice Theory completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible: [N]o matter what evidence about reality (physical, biological, and social)[,] or philosophical argument may be presented, Theory always can and always does explain it away. It is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarratives of Western thought—science and reason along with religion and capitalist economic systems—to make room for a wholly new religion, a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious <em>worldly</em> forces in systems of power and privilege[,] and which sanctifies victimhood. This, increasingly, is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left." – pp. 207–11</p>
<p> "It is not a coincidence that the applied postmodern turn began in the late 1980s, just as the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism, and Gay Pride began to see diminishing returns after twenty years of remarkably rapid progress towards racial, gender, and LGBT equality on a legal and political level. With Jim Crow laws dismantled, Empire fallen, male homosexuality legalized, and discrimination on the grounds of race and sex criminalized, Western society was newly aware and ashamed of its long history of oppression of marginalized groups and wanted to continue righting those wrongs. Since the most significant legal battles had been won, all that remained to tackle were sexist, racist, and homophobic attitudes and discourses. Postmodernism, with its focus on discourses of power and socially constructed knowledge, was perfectly placed to address these." – pp. 230–1</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-43679212145538161272020-10-07T18:16:00.082-04:002021-11-15T13:58:54.821-05:00Generational tipping point: 2021<p style="padding-top: 1%">ABSTRACT</p>
<p>After defining the concept of "social force," some instances of its withdrawal are observed to precede significant social change; causation is conjectured.</p>
<p>An argument is presented, regarding the Strauss-Howe generations, that their final birth year has importance for understanding social change. This birth year's attainment of various threshold ages is observed to correlate with major historical events. In particular, regarding the final birth year, 61 and 71 years of age are seen to accompany a major and minor diminishment in social influence, respectively, for the entire generation.</p>
<p>Finally, based on this, a prediction is made that in the year 2021 the Baby Boom generation's power will diminish, in a major way.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">INTRODUCTION</p>
<p>The year 2021 will be a tipping point, away from some of the "craziness" which has been developing continually in the past several decades.</p>
<p>To justify this unexpected prediction, first I'll touch on the topic of social force; then I'll pursue in some depth the topic of generations.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">SOCIAL FORCE</p>
<p>Potential social phenomena involve two kinds of social force: one kind that supports, and another kind that resists.</p>
<p>To actually exist, any given phenomenon requires some force to support it (of course). Also, any resisting force must either have withdrawn voluntarily, or else it must have been overpowered. Only then will we see the phenomenon. This view focuses on the static forces involved, and resembles the analysis of static forces in civil engineering.</p>
<p>The removal of a phenomenon is also a phenomenon. The existence of the new phenomenon (which is precisely the absence of the old phenomenon) follows the same static force rules as above. This symmetry is both simplifying and useful.</p>
<p>A dynamic view of forces is useful for understanding social change. Even allowing for mass, inertia, and variable rates of adoption and learning, still the gradual actualization or disappearance of a phenomenon can occur only after some force has been added, or after another force has been withdrawn—or both.</p>
<p>Albeit less known, the second kind of action—the withdrawal of a force—is the focus of this article.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">GENERATIONS</p>
<p>Generations, in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=978596918&title=Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory">Strauss-Howe hypothesis</a>, are cultural and psychological phenomena, irregular in their timing. Each comprises a distinct range of birth years. Their defining boundary years don't match (perhaps naturally) those chosen by most demographers.</p>
<p>Each generation's earlier half (loosely speaking) is called the first wave; its latter half is called the last wave.</p>
<p>The Strauss-Howe generations come in four types; they cycle in the following order:</p>
<p> Damaged, Together, Smooth, Authentic</p>
<p>(These names are my own.) Each name describes that type's basic, differentiating psychological characteristic.</p>
<p>These arise presumably because each generation (of that type) received particular rewards for expressing that characteristic in childhood.</p>
<p>Initially, each generation is raised by the second-previous generation. This fact, interpreted through peer group influence, "sets the pattern" of its basic characteristic. (Its later-born members are raised by the immediately-previous generation.)</p>
<p>Thus—in some way—as children:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>With preponderantly last wave Smooth-generation parents, the Damaged generations' first wave is rewarded for being completely and grittily realistic;</p></li>
<li><p>With preponderantly last wave Authentic-generation parents, the Together generations' first wave is rewarded for playing cooperatively with playmates;</p></li>
<li><p>With preponderantly last wave Damaged-generation parents, the Smooth generations' first wave is rewarded for calming their parents; and</p></li>
<li><p>With preponderantly last wave Together-generation parents, the Authentic generations' first wave is rewarded for expressing their deepest, most honest reactions.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>In the run-up to the American Civil War, an exceptional cycle elided its Together generation. Thus:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>First born in 1843, although with preponderantly last wave Transcendental (Authentic) generation parents, the Progressive (Smooth) generation's first wave was rewarded as usual for calming their parents; and</p></li>
<li><p>First born in 1860, although with preponderantly last wave Gilded (Damaged) generation parents, the Missionary (Authentic) generation's first wave was rewarded as usual for expressing their deepest, most honest reactions.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>By elderhood, each generation type's differentiating characteristic becomes an evolved version of its basic characteristic—so that:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Damaged generation type protects society from damage arising from widespread, unconstrained behavior and external threat;</p></li>
<li><p>The Together generation type confidently (and hugely) reaps rewards bestowable by government;</p></li>
<li><p>The Smooth generation type aids individuals through broad governmental power: promoting and preserving rights, freedoms, and protections; and</p></li>
<li><p>The Authentic generation type destroys society through its individuals' stubborn, independent sense of what's right (idealism): and therefore, through their own, selfish greed.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>In the cycle overall, the Damaged generation type—when its power is greatest (and least opposed)—repairs some of the damage inflicted by the previous cycle, and establishes a new, working social order. Then, by turns—each, when its power is greatest—the Together, Smooth, and Authentic generation types increasingly damage that order, and tear it apart.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">EVENT YEARS</p>
<p>The concept of an "event year", here, is that of a generation altering its deployment of social forces in a major way. Either its last birth-year cohort finally withdraws a social force, or, less importantly, its first birth-year cohort adds one.</p>
<p>Regarding the following list of familiar, recent generations, my idea is for you to try to connect the "Event-Years", at the left edge of their associated charts, to any historical events which come to mind, which occurred soon afterward (perhaps within ten years):</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Millennial generation:</p>
<p> Event-Year = Edge-Birth-Year + Offset – Event – Generation – (Type)</p>
<p> 2016 = 1982 + 34 – manage business – Millennial generation – (Together)
<br> 2000 = 1982 + 18 – upturn academia – Millennial generation – (Together)</p></li>
<li><p>The Gen-X generation:</p>
<p> 1995 = 1961 + 34 – manage business – Gen-X generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1979 = 1961 + 18 – upturn academia – Gen-X generation – (Damaged)</p></li>
<li><p>The Baby Boom generation:</p>
<p> 1977 = 1943 + 34 – manage business – Baby Boom generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1961 = 1943 + 18 – upturn academia – Baby Boom generation – (Authentic)</p></li>
<li><p>The Silent generation:</p>
<p> 2013 = 1942 + 71 – abandon politics and academia – Silent generation – (Smooth)
<br> 2003 = 1942 + 61 – abandon business – Silent generation – (Smooth)
<br> 1959 = 1925 + 34 – manage business – Silent generation – (Smooth)
<br> 1943 = 1925 + 18 – upturn academia – Silent generation – (Smooth)</p></li>
<li><p>The G.I. generation:</p>
<p> 1995 = 1924 + 71 – abandon politics and academia – G.I. generation – (Together)
<br> 1985 = 1924 + 61 – abandon business – G.I. generation – (Together)
<br> 1935 = 1901 + 34 – manage business – G.I. generation – (Together)
<br> 1919 = 1901 + 18 – upturn academia – G.I. generation – (Together)</p></li>
<li><p>The Lost generation:</p>
<p> 1971 = 1900 + 71 – abandon politics and academia – Lost generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1961 = 1900 + 61 – abandon business – Lost generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1917 = 1883 + 34 – manage business – Lost generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1901 = 1883 + 18 – upturn academia – Lost generation – (Damaged)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Why pick these particular numbers as the offsets? Because these are my best assessments of when the corresponding cultural sea changes actually occurred. In other words, why pick:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>71 years, for when control of politics and academia is basically abandoned? This is based on my own tentative observations regarding power in the U.S. Senate, and influential professors;</p></li>
<li><p>61 years, for when business control is basically abandoned? It can't be later, because significant events occurred precisely in the predicted sea change years of 1985, 1961, 1943 and 1648 (see below);</p></li>
<li><p>34 years, for when a presence in business middle management begins? Because, for the predicted sea change years of:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>1995, the Gen-X (Damaged) generation founded the popular, emailed (Matt) Drudge Report in that year;</p></li>
<li><p>1977, the Baby Boom (Authentic) generation adopted a success-oriented lifestyle, including attendance at disco music dance halls, with the release of the film, "Saturday Night Fever" in that year; and</p></li>
<li><p>1959, the Silent (Smooth) generation responded to Volkswagen's "Think small" Beetle advertisement, which spearheaded advertising's Creative Revolution in that year; and</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>18 years, for when student presence in academia begins? It can't be earlier, because the youngest significant college attendance happens then.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Now, let's focus on the "abandon business" events:</p>
<p> 2003 = 1942 + 61 – abandon business – Silent generation – (Smooth)
<br> 1985 = 1924 + 61 – abandon business – G.I. generation – (Together)
<br> 1961 = 1900 + 61 – abandon business – Lost generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1943 = 1882 + 61 – abandon business – Missionary generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1920 = 1859 + 61 – abandon business – Progressive generation – (Smooth)
<br> 1903 = 1842 + 61 – abandon business – Gilded generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1882 = 1821 + 61 – abandon business – Transcendental generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1852 = 1791 + 61 – abandon business – Compromise generation – (Smooth)
<br> 1827 = 1766 + 61 – abandon business – Republican generation – (Together)
<br> 1802 = 1741 + 61 – abandon business – Liberty generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1784 = 1723 + 61 – abandon business – Awakening generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1761 = 1700 + 61 – abandon business – Enlightenment generation – (Smooth)
<br> 1734 = 1673 + 61 – abandon business – Glorious generation – (Together)
<br> 1708 = 1647 + 61 – abandon business – Cavalier generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1678 = 1617 + 61 – abandon business – Puritan generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1648 = 1587 + 61 – abandon business – Parliamentary generation – (Smooth)
<br> 1626 = 1565 + 61 – abandon business – Elizabethan generation – (Together)
<br> 1601 = 1540 + 61 – abandon business – Reprisal generation – (Damaged)
<br> 1572 = 1511 + 61 – abandon business – Reformation generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1543 = 1482 + 61 – abandon business – Humanist generation – (Smooth)
<br> 1521 = 1460 + 61 – abandon business – Arthurian generation – (Together)</p>
<p>These are arguably the tipping points of greatest significance: when the social influence of that generation type basically ceases. Their influence then becomes sorely missed. For instance, the following generation types, by ceasing their influence, seem to have caused these corresponding events:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Silent (Smooth) generation in 2003 ceased "aid[ing] individuals through broad governmental power: promoting and preserving rights, freedoms, and protections."</p>
<ul>
<li><p>This caused the financial sector's rules to evolve gradually toward increasing fraud and cheating of individual investors, including the ballooning of subprime mortgage lending beginning in 2004, eventually resulting in the Great Recession of 2008. And, it caused the Iraq War in 2003;</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The G.I. (Together) generation in 1985 ceased "confidently (and hugely) reap[ing] rewards bestowable by government."</p>
<ul>
<li><p>This caused the creation of the Gramm-Rudman U.S. federal budget restrictions in 1985, and the U.S. Congressional PAYGO rules restricting expenditures in 1990. And, it caused Britain to sign the Single European Act, the beginnings of the European Union, in 1986;</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The Lost (Damaged) generation in 1961 ceased "protect[ing] society from damage arising from widespread, unconstrained behavior and external threat."</p>
<ul>
<li><p>This caused social norms to be loosened, beginning in the 1960s. Noteworthy are the movies released beginning in 1961. And, it caused the U.S. Revenue Act of 1964, which reduced the top marginal tax rate to 77%. It had been at least 91% since 1951;</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The Missionary (Authentic) generation in 1943 ceased "destroy[ing] society through its individuals' stubborn, independent sense of what's right (idealism): and therefore, through their own, selfish greed."</p>
<ul>
<li><p>This caused the world to stop pursuing its dreams of German, Italian and Japanese domination, and the Allies to gain momentum, both in 1943. And, it caused the era of New Deal Liberalism: cooperation among government, corporations and labor;</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The Progressive (Smooth) generation in 1920 ceased "aid[ing] individuals through broad governmental power: promoting and preserving rights, freedoms, and protections."</p>
<ul>
<li><p>This caused the financial sector's rules to evolve gradually toward increasing fraud and cheating of individual investors, which eventually resulted in the Great Depression of the 1930s;</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The Compromise (Smooth) generation in 1852 ceased "aid[ing] individuals through broad governmental power: promoting and preserving rights, freedoms, and protections."</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Regarding individuals who wished to settle safely in U.S. territories (and avoid war), this caused the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, the decisive, uncompromising <em>Dred Scott v. Sandford</em> U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1857, and the American Civil War in 1861;</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The Enlightenment (Smooth) generation in 1761 ceased "aid[ing] individuals through broad governmental power: promoting and preserving rights, freedoms, and protections."</p>
<ul>
<li><p>This caused the "long train of abuses and usurpations" of the American Revolution which began in 1765; and</p></li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>The Parliamentary (Smooth) generation in 1648 ceased "aid[ing] individuals through broad governmental power: promoting and preserving rights, freedoms, and protections."</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Offending those individuals who disliked military takeover of government, this caused the imprisonment of Charles I for trial, and Pride's Purge which created the Rump Parliament, both in 1648.</p></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>The Authentic generation type's abandon-business events are of crucial importance:</p>
<p> 1943 = 1882 + 61 – abandon business – Missionary generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1882 = 1821 + 61 – abandon business – Transcendental generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1784 = 1723 + 61 – abandon business – Awakening generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1678 = 1617 + 61 – abandon business – Puritan generation – (Authentic)
<br> 1572 = 1511 + 61 – abandon business – Reformation generation – (Authentic)</p>
<p>Again, social change is often caused by the withdrawal of a force. Thus:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>For the Missionary (Authentic) generation—see above;</p></li>
<li><p>The Transcendental (Authentic) generation abandoned business in 1882, thus lessening idealism; this caused the disenfranchisement of blacks after the Reconstruction era;</p></li>
<li><p>The Awakening (Authentic) generation abandoned business in 1784, thus lessening selfishness; this caused the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787;</p></li>
<li><p>The Puritan (Authentic) generation abandoned business in 1678, thus lessening idealism; this caused Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688; and</p></li>
<li><p>The Reformation (Authentic) generation abandoned business in 1572, thus lessening idealism; this caused the first successful Elizabethan London theaters to open in 1576.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Note that each such tipping point—when an Authentic generation abandons business—completes a period of great conflict.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">PREDICTION</p>
<p>Finally, most important is the next such tipping point. It will be:</p>
<p> 2021 = 1960 + 61 – abandon business – Baby Boom generation – (Authentic)</p>
<p>Therefore, next year, in 2021, the world will change, in a major way—regardless of whoever wins the U.S. presidential election.</p>
<p>At that upcoming tipping point, the world's craziness—its idealism and selfishness—will slowly cease. Our large corporate businesses will be helmed by enough members of the Gen-X (Damaged) generation for the world to grow sensible and safe again.</p>
<p>Consider all of the Gen-X directed projects, cultural and otherwise, that we've seen recently. These foreshadow the nature, of course, of the upcoming Gen-X order.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2020 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-17103244939943155302019-03-17T12:12:00.003-04:002019-03-26T19:59:56.560-04:00A rewrite of the Ruby example programs from the Tcl/Tk tutorial at TkDocsArguably, for the
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=888076745&title=Ruby_(programming_language)">Ruby</a>
computer programming language, the default
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=888076704&title=Graphical_user_interface">graphical user interface</a>
(GUI) toolkit is Tk (a part of
<a href="https://www.tcl.tk">Tcl/Tk</a>).
A high-level toolkit, it is cross-platform as well.
Some ways of installing Ruby include Tk automatically.<br>
<br>
Tk has been given a beautiful introduction in a
<a href="https://tkdocs.com/tutorial">tutorial</a>
by Mark Roseman at
<a href="https://tkdocs.com">TkDocs</a>.
Begun in 2008 (its full history can be seen
<a href="https://tkdocs.com/changelog.html">here</a>),
it covers multiple languages:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=887178529&title=Perl">Perl 5</a>,
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=887731405&title=Python_(programming_language)">Python 3</a>,
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=888076745&title=Ruby_(programming_language)">Ruby</a>,
and
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=886107507&title=Tcl">Tcl</a>.<br>
<br>
Roseman's tutorial provides eighteen (18) code examples.
They are all written in each of the four languages listed above.
Naturally, the code is written in a way which eschews each language's idiomatic features.
At least, uncomfortably, I experienced this for Ruby!<br>
<br>
In order to learn more fully how to use Tk, I borrowed the tutorial's Ruby example code and rewrote it, using the kind of programming style I might use for production.
All eighteen of the resulting Ruby production-style example programs (each in its own file) together comprise my GitHub repository,
<a href="https://github.com/MarkDBlackwell/tutorial-tkdocs">tutorial-tkdocs</a>.<br>
<br>
Copyright (c) 2019 Mark D. Blackwell.Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-80121134187332402822018-08-21T18:10:00.010-04:002022-02-17T17:23:12.709-05:00Churches (& synagogues) and "When Growth Stalls" by Olson, Bever & Verry<p>(Please read "church" to include "synagogue.")</p>
<p>This post is about how to increase church membership, over the long and medium haul. Doing so, I believe, inevitably will require churches to attract the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=855932839&title=Strauss–Howe_generational_theory">Millennial</a> generation—at least some of them—into membership. (Millennials are people born 1982 through 2004.)</p>
<p>In light of that goal, for most mainstream churches, the following, interesting article (quoted for review purposes) is relevant:</p>
<p>"<a href="https://hbr.org/2008/03/when-growth-stalls">When Growth Stalls</a>", Matthew S. Olson, Derek van Bever, Seth Verry, 2008-March</p>
<p>adapted from the book:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stall-Points-Companies-Growing-Yours-Doesnt/dp/0300136870">Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing—Yours Doesn't Have To</a>, Matthew S. Olson, Derek van Bever, 2008-April</p>
<p>Although truth often is our adversary, it's also our friend (of course). Only by keeping abreast of it, can we securely craft a winning strategy. Please don't feel that this post merely adds insult to injury!</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">ARTICLE EXTRACTS BEGIN</p>
<p>[A] growth stall [is] a crisis that can hit even the most exemplary organizations. [Characteristic] is the stall's suddenness. [M]ost organizations actually accelerate into a stall, experiencing unprecedented progress along key measures[,] just before growth rates tumble. When the momentum is lost, it's as if the props have been knocked out[,] from under their corporate strategy....Typically, few on the senior team see the stall coming; core performance metrics often fail to register trouble on the horizon.</p>
<p>As part of our ongoing research into growth, the Corporate Executive Board recently completed a comprehensive analysis of the growth experiences of some 500 leading corporations in the past half century, focusing particularly on "stall points"—our term for the start of [long-term] reversals in company growth fortunes[.] The study revealed patterns in the incidence, costs, and root causes of growth stalls.</p>
<p>[T]he vast majority of stall factors result from a choice[,] about strategy or organizational design. They are, in other words, controllable by management. Further, even within this broad realm, nearly half of all root causes fall into one of four categories: premium-position captivity, innovation management breakdown, premature core abandonment, and talent bench shortfall.</p>
<p>In this article we'll offer advice for avoiding these hazards, drawing from practices currently in use at large, high-growth companies[,] to foresee possible stalls and [to] head them off. More generally[,] we will explore why management is so often blindsided by these events. As we will show, a large number of global companies may at this moment be perilously close to their own stall points. Knowing how to avoid growth stalls begins with understanding their causes. Let's look at each of the four categories[:]</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><b>When a Premium Position Backfires</b></p>
<p>By far the largest category of factors responsible for serious...stalls is what we have labeled premium-position captivity: the inability of a firm to respond effectively...to a significant shift in customer valuation of product features.</p>
<p>We use the term "captivity" because it suggests how management teams can be hemmed in by a long history of success. A company that solidly occupies a premium market position remains insulated longer than its competitors against evolution in the external environment. It has less reason to doubt its business model, which has historically provided a competitive advantage, and once it perceives the crisis, it changes too little[,] too late. When the towering strengths of a firm are transformed into towering weaknesses, it's a cruel reversal.</p>
<p>In documenting premium-position captivity in leading enterprises, we saw a cycle of disdain, denial, and rationalization that kept many management teams from responding meaningfully to market changes.</p>
<p>In [some] cases,...organizations...simply don't recognize the importance of an emerging...customer preference in their core markets. They continue to place their bets on product or service attributes that are in decline, while disruptive entrants emphasizing different, underrecognized features gain ground.</p>
<p>Easiest to spot in marketing data are pockets of rapid market share loss, particularly in narrow customer segments, and increasing resistance among key customers[.]</p>
<p>When it comes to management attitudes, your ears may pick up the strongest clues: Listen closely to the tone in the executive suite when conversation turns to upstart competitors or to successful rivals that are viewed as less capable. Is it acceptable, or routine, to dismiss them as unworthy? Do your processes for gathering intelligence about your competitors ignore some of these market participants because of their...perceived lack of quality? Indulging in such behavior is common, but it's a luxury that no market leader can afford.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><b>When Innovation Management Breaks Down</b></p>
<p>The second most frequent cause of growth stalls is what we call innovation management breakdown: some chronic problem in managing the internal business processes for updating existing products and services and creating new ones. We saw manifestations of this at every major stage along the activity chain of product innovation, from basic research and development to product commercialization.</p>
<p>Where...growth stalls could be attributed to innovation breakdown, the problems emphatically did not center on individual product launch failures[.] By contrast, the [long-term] growth stalls we identified were attributable to systemic inefficiencies or dysfunctions. [W]hen things go wrong here—at the heart of these organizations' most important business process—extremely serious, multiyear problems result.</p>
<p>As we looked at the variety of ways in which problems in the innovation management process can eventually produce major...stalls, we were struck by the fragility of this chain of activities, and by how vulnerable the whole process is to management decisions made to achieve perfectly valid corporate goals.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><b>When a Core Business Is Abandoned</b></p>
<p>The third major cause of...stalls is premature core abandonment: the failure to fully exploit growth opportunities in the existing core business.</p>
<p>The two most common mistakes we saw in this category were [1.] believing that one's core markets are saturated[;] and [2.] viewing operational impediments in the core business model as a signal to move on to new, presumably easier competitive terrain.</p>
<p>Just as interesting as getting it wrong on core business growth prospects is the tendency of executive teams to simply give up on apparently intractable problems in their core businesses.</p>
<p>Of all the red flags signaling stall risk, one of the most obvious is management's use of the term "mature" to refer to any of its product lines, business units, or divisions....Established businesses should be managed against significant revenue and earnings goals, and business leaders should actively explore the potential of new business models to rejuvenate even the most "mature" businesses.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><b>When Talent Comes Up Short</b></p>
<p>Our fourth major category is talent bench shortfall: a lack of leaders and staff with the skills and capabilities required for strategy execution.</p>
<p>Few companies formally monitor the balance in the executive team[,] between company lifers and newer hires who offer fresh perspectives and approaches. Furthermore, large companies have a fairly poor track record on incorporating new voices into senior management....And management development programs all too often focus on replicating the skill sets of the current leadership, rather than on developing the novel skills and perspectives that tomorrow's leaders will need[, in order] to overcome evolving challenges.</p>
<p>We have identified a simple way to ensure balance in the senior executive ranks...Our analysis...suggests that the sweet spot for external talent is somewhere between 10% and 30% of senior management.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><b>When What You Know Is No Longer So</b></p>
<p>One culprit in all our case studies was management's failure to bring the underlying assumptions that drive company strategy into line with changes in the external environment—whether because of a lack of awareness that the gap existed or was widening, or because of faulty prioritization.</p>
<p>The lack of awareness is particularly vexing, because it is so insidious. Strategic assumptions begin life as observations about customers, competitors, or technologies that arise from direct experience. They are then enshrined in the strategic plan and translated into operational guidance. Eventually they harden into orthodoxy. This explains why, when we examine individual case studies, we so often find that those assumptions the team has held the longest[,] or the most deeply[,] are the likeliest to be its undoing. Some beliefs have come to appear so obvious that it is no longer politic to debate them.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><b>Articulating and Testing Strategic Assumptions</b></p>
<p>What could the company's senior managers have seen in their markets, in their competitors' behavior, in their own internal practices, that might have alerted them to an impending stall? We looked at our detailed case histories for warning signs before the stall point that perhaps hadn't received the scrutiny they deserved, and uncovered 50 red flags, all rooted in the real experience of the companies we studied. Our 20/20 hindsight may enable you to spot signs faster in your own organization[:]</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Red Flags for Growth Stalls</em></p>
<p>Below is a sampling of red flags....To the extent that your senior team and high-potential managers see these as areas for concern, you may be headed for a free fall[:]</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Our core assumptions about the marketplace[,] and...our strategy[,] are not written down[;]</p></li>
<li><p>We haven't revisited our market definition boundaries, and [also] therefore our list of current and emerging competitors, in several years[;]</p></li>
<li><p>We haven't refreshed our working definition of our core market, and [also] therefore our understanding of our market share, in several years[; and]</p></li>
<li><p>We test only infrequently for shifts in key customer groups' valuation of our product/service attributes.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Also included in our tool kit are four practices[,] drawn from those [which] we've seen management teams use. The first two are effective in making strategic assumptions explicit, and the latter two are designed to test those assumptions[,] for ongoing relevance and accuracy[:]</p>
<ol>
<li><p><em>Commission a core-belief identification squad</em></p>
<p>This practice is simple to execute and involves calling on a diverse, cross-functional working group to go hunting for the firm's most deeply held assumptions about itself and the industry in which it operates....The best-functioning squads include a significant share of younger, newer employees, who are less likely to be invested in current orthodoxies.</p>
<p>Their efforts are most fruitful when the team is prepared to raise thorny issues and challenge entrenched beliefs, using methods ranging from reality checks—["] What industry are we in? Who are our customers? ["]—to more provocative explorations: ["] What 10 [ (ten) ] things would you never hear customers say about our business? Which firms have succeeded by breaking the established 'rules' of the industry? What conventions did they overturn? ["]</p>
<p>One leading...company told us that it had used this practice to kick off an inquiry into long-term growth pathways[,] and to challenge conventions that had taken hold through the years.</p>
</li>
<li><p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Conduct a premortem strategic analysis</em></p>
<p>Many leaders have found it useful to charge teams with developing competing visions of the future success—or failure—of the company[,] as it would be reported in a business periodical five years hence....By seeing which issues the scenarios have in common, leadership teams can identify the subset of core beliefs that should be most closely examined and monitored.</p>
</li>
<li><p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Appoint a shadow cabinet</em></p>
<p>[as in the British Parliamentary system, in order "to discuss alternatives to current strategy(,) and (to) look for red flag indicators." — per comment:</p>
<p>"<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2SADSGFS8UE0U/">Learning from Failure—the Competitive Advantage of Silicon Valley</a>", Ian D. Griffin, 2009-March]</p>
<p>[B]ecause senior executives are usually most attached to the assumptions underlying current strategy[,] they find the fresh perspectives offered by this creditable, well-informed constituency extremely valuable.</p>
</li>
<li><p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Invite a venture capitalist to your [periodic] strategy review</em></p>
<p>An effective way to bring an external perspective to bear on strategy assumptions is to ask a qualified venture capitalist to sit in on...strategy and investment reviews and probe for potential weaknesses. The benefits for...managers come...generally from the practical, payback-focused lens that the VC brings to the review.</p>
<p>[ (Instead of a venture capitalist, more appropriate for a church may be an outside expert.) ]</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><b>Renewing Competence in Strategy</b></p>
<p>What gives force to our advocacy is that growth stalls can have dire consequences: They bring down even the most admired companies; they exact a sizable financial and human toll; and their impact may be permanent. After a stall sets in, the odds against recovery rise dramatically with the passage of time.</p>
<p>Compounding this urgency, all signs point to an increasing risk of stalls in the near future. Of particular concern today is the shrinking half-life of established business models. The importance of spotting change[,] early enough to react in time[,] is rising exponentially. The practices we outline here create that early-warning capability. As critical, they make the strategy conversation ongoing[.]</p>
<p>Whatever other concerns are on the strategy agenda, guarding against growth stalls should be at the top. The tools we offer will enable the executive team to continually test the accuracy of its worldview and to flag any flawed assumptions that might trigger a stall[,] if they go uncorrected.</p>
<p>END OF ARTICLE EXTRACTS</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2018 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3755010526029146864.post-80931411834006125782018-08-14T15:31:00.011-04:002022-02-17T17:26:51.730-05:00Young people, the faith and vocational discernment: Pre-synodal final document (2018)<p>In its own, small way, this is in aid of attracting Millennials to American churches.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">INTRODUCTION</p>
<ul>
<li><p>"<a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/10/04/pope-francis-announces-pre-synod-meeting-listen-youths-hopes-doubts">Pope Francis announces pre-synod meeting to listen to youths' hopes, doubts</a>," Junno Arocho Esteves–Catholic News Service, October 4, 2017:</p>
<p>"[T]he synod office said [that the following document's ideas were collected partly from y]oung people attending [a] meeting[: from] bishops' conferences, [young] men and women in consecrated life[,] and seminarians preparing for the priesthood[.]"</p>
</li>
<li><p>"<a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/06/14/cramming-synod-vatican-has-some-questions-young-people">Cramming for Synod, Vatican has some questions for young people</a>," Carol Glatz–Catholic News Service, June 14, 2017:</p>
<p>"This is the first time [that] the Vatican's synod organizing body [has] put a questionnaire online[,] and sought direct input from the public."</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">CONTENT</p>
<p>This Roman Catholic document is interesting, and recent:</p>
<p> Synod Of Bishops, XV Ordinary General Assembly
<br> "<a href="http://www.synod2018.va/content/synod2018/en/news/final-document-from-the-pre-synodal-meeting.html">Young people, the faith and vocational discernment</a>"
<br> Pre-synodal meeting, final document
<br> Rome, March 19–24, 2018</p>
<p>Regarding the following, long quotation, I've whittled it down (for review purposes), by attempting to remove:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Well-known sentiments;</p></li>
<li><p>Obvious statements regarding technology; and</p></li>
<li><p>Anything irrelevant and useless for attracting Millennials to American churches.</p></li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">QUOTATION</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Part One[:] The Challenges and Opportunities of Young People in the World Today</em></p>
<p>1. <b>The Formation of Personality</b></p>
<p>Young people look for a sense of self[,] by seeking communities [which] are supportive, uplifting, authentic[,] and accessible: communities [which] empower them. [T]raditional family models in [some] places are in decline. This leads to young people suffering....Some young people move away from their family traditions, hoping to be more original[,] than what they see as[,] "[S]tuck in the past" and[,] "[O]ld fashioned." On the other hand, in some parts of the world, young people seek identity[,] by remaining rooted within their family traditions[,] and striving to stay true[,] to the way they were raised.</p>
<p>A sense of belonging is a significant factor to the shaping of one's identity....In the Middle East, many young people feel obliged to convert to other religions[,] in order to be accepted by...the surrounding[,] dominant culture. This is also acutely felt by immigrant communities[,] in Europe, who also feel...the pressure to shed their cultural identity[,] and [to] assimilate to the dominant culture. This is an area where the Church needs to...respond...to these issues[,] by showing that there is room[,] for everyone.</p>
<p>It is worth noting that the young person's identity is also shaped[,] by our external [ (to the Church) ] interaction[s] and membership[,] within [various] specific groups, associations[,] and movements[,] which are...active[,] outside of the Church. Sometimes, parishes are no longer places of connection. We also recognize the role of educators and friends, such as leaders of youth groups[,] who can become good examples. We need to find attractive, coherent[,] and authentic models. We need rational and critical explanations to complex issues—simplistic answers do not suffice.</p>
<p>For some, religion is...considered a private matter. Sometimes, we feel that the sacred appears to be something separated[,] from our daily lives. The Church oftentimes appears as too severe[,] and is often associated with excessive moralism. Sometimes, in the Church, it is hard to overcome the logic of[,] "[I]t has always been done this way". We need a Church that is welcoming and merciful,...and [that] loves everyone, even those[,] who are not following the...standards. Many of those[,] who look for a peaceful life[,] end up dedicating themselves to alternative philosophies[,] or experiences.</p>
<p>Other key places of belonging are groups[,] such as[:] social networks, friends[,] and classmates[,] as well as our social[,] and natural[,] environments. These are places where many of us spend most of our time.</p>
<p>Often, our schools do not teach us to develop our critical thinking.</p>
<p>Young people are deeply vested in[,] and concerned about[,] topics such as sexuality, addiction, failed marriages, [and] broken families[,] as well as larger-scale social issues[,] such as organized crime, human trafficking, violence, corruption, exploitation, femicide, all forms of persecution[,] and the degradation of our natural environment. These are of grave concern[,] in vulnerable communities around the world. We are afraid[,] because[,] in many of our countries[,] there is social, political[,] and economic instability.</p>
<p>As we grapple with these challenges, we need inclusion, welcome, mercy[,] and tenderness from the Church—both as an institution[,] and as a community of faith.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">2. <b>Relationship with Other People</b></p>
<p>We have access to new possibilities to overcome differences and divisions in the world, but this is being realized in different realities[,] and to varying degrees. Many young people are used to seeing diversity as a richness[,] and find opportunity in the pluralistic world. Multiculturalism has the potential to facilitate an environment for dialogue[,] and [for] tolerance. We value the diversity of ideas in our globalized world, the respect for other[s'] thoughts[,] and [also] freedom of expression. Still, we want to preserve our cultural identity[,] and [to] avoid uniformity[,] and a throwaway culture.</p>
<p>Countries with Christian roots have a tendency[,] today[,] to gradually reject the Church[,] and religion. Some young people are trying to make sense of faith[,] in an increasingly secular society, where freedom of conscience[,] and religion[,] are under attack. Racism...affects young people....There is still an opportunity for the Church to propose another "way" [than racism] for young people to live their lives[;] but[,] this needs to be done...within often-complicated[,] social frameworks.</p>
<p>In this way[,] it is often hard for young people to even hear the message of the Gospel. [T]ensions between peoples [have] become very common, despite a general appreciation for diversity. [W]e pray for the end of all persecution[.] Moreover, there is still no binding consensus on the question of welcoming migrants and refugees, or on the issues which cause the phenomenon[,] in the first place. This is despite the acknowledgement of the universal call to care for the dignity of every human person.</p>
<p>In a globalized and inter-religious world, the Church needs...not only [to] model[,] but also to elaborate[,] on already[-]existing theological guidelines[:] for peaceful, constructive dialogue[,] with people of other faiths and traditions.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">3. <b>Young People and the Future</b></p>
<p>Young people dream of safety, stability[,] and fulfil[l]ment. Many hope for a better life for their families. In many places of the world, this means looking for physical safety; for others[,] this relates more specifically to finding a good job[,] or a specific lifestyle. A common dream[—]across continents and oceans[—]is the desire to find a place where the young person can feel that he or she belongs.</p>
<p>We envision...a society which is coherent[,] and trusts us. We seek to be listened to[,] and to not merely be spectators in society[,] but active participants. We seek a Church [which] helps us [to] find our vocation, in all of its senses....We need to revitalize th[at] sense of community [which] leads us to a sense of belonging.</p>
<p>Some practical concerns make our lives difficult. Many young people have experienced great traumas[,] in a variety of ways....The Church needs to better support us[,] and [to] provide avenues to assist us[,] in our healing. In some parts of the world, the only way to attain a secure future is to receive higher education[,] or [to] work excessively. While this is a commonly[-]held standard, it is not always possible[,] due to a variety of circumstances [which] young people find themselves in. This idea is a prevalent notion[,] and has consequently affected our understanding of work. Despite this reality, young people wish to affirm the inherent dignity of work. Sometimes, we end up discarding our dreams[: w]e are too afraid, and some of us have stopped dreaming. This is seen in the many socio-economic pressures [which] can severely drain the sense of hope[,] among young people. At times, we have not even had the opportunities to keep dreaming.</p>
<p>[Y]oung people seek to engage with[,] and [to] address[,] the social justice issues of our time. We seek the opportunity to work[,] towards building a better world....We want a world of peace[:] one that harmonizes integral ecology[,] with a sustainable global economy. For young people[,] living in unstable and vulnerable regions of the world, there is a hope[,] and [an] expectation[,] for concrete actions[,] from governments[,] and from society: the end of war and corruption, addressing climate change, social inequalities[,] and security. [R]egardless of context, everyone shares the same innate desire for the higher ideals [of] peace, love, trust, equity, freedom[,] and justice.</p>
<p>Young people dream of a better life[.] They hope for peace[.] Young Africans dream of a self-reliant local church[:] one [which] does not require [any] aid[, because this] feeds into dependency[;] but one [which] is a life-giving contributor to its communities. Despite the many wars[,] and intermittent outbreaks of violence, young people remain hopeful. In many Western countries,...dreams are cent[e]red on personal development[,] and self-realization.</p>
<p>[T]here is a wide gap between the desires of young people[,] and their capacity to make long-term decisions.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">4. <b>Relationship with Technology</b></p>
<p>While technology has, for some, augmented our relationships, for many others[,] it has taken the form of an addiction[:] becoming a replacement for human relationship[,] and even God. Regardless, technology is now a permanent part of the life of young people[,] and must be understood as such.</p>
<p>The impact of social media in the lives of young people [should] not be understated. Social media is a significant part of young people's identity and way of life. Digital environments have a great potential to unite people across geographical distances[.] The exchange of information, ideals, values[,] and common interests is now more possible.</p>
<p>The duplicity of technology[,] however, becomes evident when it leads to the development of certain vices. This danger is manifested through isolation, laziness, desolation[,] and boredom. It is evident that young people[,] around the world[,] are obsessively consuming media products.</p>
<p>Despite living in a hyper-connected world, communication[,] among young people[,] remains limited to those who are similar to them. There is a lack of spaces[,] and opportunities[,] to encounter difference. Mass media culture still exercises a lot of influence over young people's lives and ideals. [And w]ith the advent of social media, this has led to new challenges[, because of] the extent to which [these] new media companies have power[,] over the lives of young people.</p>
<p>Often, young people tend to separate their behavior into online[,] and offline[,] environments. It is necessary to offer formation to young people[,] on how to live their digital lives. Online relationships can become inhuman. Digital spaces blind us to the vulnerability of another human being[,] and prevent us from our own self-reflection....Technology[,] used [in] this way[,] creates a delusional[,] parallel reality[, which] ignores human dignity.</p>
<p>Other risks include: the loss of identity[,] linked to a misrepresentation of the person[;] a virtual construction of personality[;] and the loss of [a] grounded[,] social presence. Furthermore, long-term risks include: the loss of memory, culture, and creativity[, caused by] the immediacy of access to information[;] and a loss of [length of] concentration[,] linked to [information] fragmentation. In addition, there exists a culture[—]and [even a] dictatorship[—]of appearances.</p>
<p>Technology can be detrimental to human dignity[,] if [it is] not used with conscience[,] and caution[,] and if human dignity is not at the center of its usage.</p>
<p>We offer two concrete proposals[,] regarding technology. First, by engaging in a dialogue with young people, the Church should deepen her understanding of technology[,] so as to assist us[,] in discerning its usage. Moreover, the Church should view technology—particularly the [I]nternet—as a fertile place for the New Evangelization....Second, the Church should address...cyber-bullying[,] and the toll [it] take[s,] on our humanity.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">5. <b>Search for Meaning in Life</b></p>
<p>Many young people, when asked the question[,] "What is the meaning of your life?" do not know how to answer. They do not...connect...life and transcendence. Lots of young people, having lost trust in institutions, have become disaffiliated [from] organized religion[,] and would not see themselves as "religious." However, young people are open to the spiritual.</p>
<p>Many [young people] lament how infrequently [they] seek...answers[,] to life's meaning[,] in the context of faith....In many places around the world, young people attach meaning to their lives[,] through their job[-,] and personal[,] success. The difficulty of finding stability[,] in these areas[,] produces insecurity[,] and anxiety. Many...migrate[,] to...a good place to work[: thus choosing to] abandon family[,] and culture.</p>
<p>[O]ther [young people] noted that, [although they] ask questions about the meaning of life, they [often] are not ready to commit themselves[,] to Jesus[. R]eligion is no longer seen as the main stream[,] through which a young person searches for meaning, as they often turn to other[,] modern[,] currents and ideologies. Scandals attributed to the Church—both real and perceived—affect the confidence of young people[, both towards] the Church[,] and [towards] the traditional institutions[,] for which she stands.</p>
<p>The Church can play a...role in ensuring that...young people...feel accepted. This can happen when we seek to promote the dignity of women, both in the Church[,] and in [the] wider society. Today, there is a general problem[,] in society[,] that women are...not given an equal place. This is also true in the Church. [Where can] women...flourish[,] within the Church[,] and society? The Church can approach these problems with real discussion[,] and [with] open-mindedness[,] to different ideas and experiences.</p>
<p>There is...great disagreement among young people, both within the Church[,] and in the wider world, about some of her teachings[: those] which are especially controversial[,] today. [I]rrespective of their level of understanding of Church teaching, there is still disagreement[,] and ongoing discussion[,] among young people[,] on these polemical issues. As a result, they...want the Church to change her teaching[:] or[,] at least[, for themselves] to have access to a better explanation[,] and to more formation[,] on these questions. Even though there is internal debate, [those] young Catholics[,] whose convictions are in conflict with official teaching[,] still desire to be part of the Church.</p>
<p>[T]he relationship to the sacred is complicated. Christianity is often seen as something[,] which belonged to the past[;] and its value [in,] or relevance to[,] our lives[,] is no longer understood. [Yet] in certain communities, priority is given to the sacred[,] since daily life is structured around religion.</p>
<p>[M]any of us...want to know Jesus, yet...struggle to realize[,] that He alone is the source of true self-discovery[;] for[,] it is in a relationship[,] with Him[,] that the human person...comes to discover him[-] or herself. Thus,...young people want authentic witnesses[, who] encourag[e] others to approach...Jesus[.]</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Part Two[:] Faith and Vocation, Discernment and Accompaniment</em></p>
<p>Young people are more receptive to a "[L]iterature of life[,]" than [to] an abstract theological discourse; are conscious and receptive[;] and are also committed[,] to being actively engaged in the world[,] and in the Church.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">6. <b>Young People and Jesus</b></p>
<p>There are many young people who know[,] and have a relationship with[,] Jesus[,] as their Savior[,] and [as] the Son of God. In addition, young people often find closeness to Jesus[,] through [a relationship with] His Mother, Mary. Others may not have such a relationship with Jesus[;] but [instead] see Him as a moral leader[,] and a good man. Many young people perceive Jesus as [merely] a historical figure[:] one[,] of [another] time and culture, who is not relevant to their lives. Still others perceive Him as distant from the human experience[:] which[,] for them[,] is a distance perpetuated by the Church. False images of Jesus[, which] some young people possess[,] often lead them to be unattracted to Him. Erroneous ideals[, about] model Christians[,] feel out of reach to the average person[;] and thus[,] so do the rules[,] set by the Church. Therefore, for some, Christianity is perceived as an unreachable standard.</p>
<p>One way to reconcile the confusions [which] young people have[,] regarding who Jesus is[,] involves a return to Scripture[:] to understand[,] more deeply[,] the person[hood] of Christ[:] His life, and His humanity. Young people need to encounter the mission of Christ, [and] not [to encounter] what they may perceive as an impossible moral expectation. However, they feel uncertain about how to do so. This encounter needs to be fostered in young people[; therefore, this issue] needs to be addressed[,] by the Church.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">7. <b>Faith and the Church</b></p>
<p>For many young people, faith has become private[,] rather than communal[;] and the negative experiences[, which] some young people have had with the Church[,] have contributed to this. There are many young people who relate to God solely on a personal level[:] who are "spiritual but not religious", or [who are] focused only on a relationship with Jesus Christ. For some young people, the Church has developed a culture which focuses[,] heavily[,] on members engaging with the institutional aspect of herself, [and] not [with] the person of Christ. [Some] young people [see] religious leaders as...more focused on administration[,] than [on] community-building[. O]thers see the Church as irrelevant. [S]ome young people[,] who do not live the Gospel[,] feel [yet] connected[,] to the Church....There are many young people[,] who do not feel the need to be [a] part[,] of the Church community[:] and who find meaning to their life[,] outside of the Church.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there is a phenomenon[,] in some areas of the world[,] where young people are leaving the Church[,] in large quantities. Understanding why is crucial[,] in moving forward. [Some y]oung people who are disconnected from[,] or who leave[,] the Church[,] do so after experiencing[:] indifference, judgment[,] and rejection. One could attend, participate in, and leave Mass[,] without experiencing a sense of community[,] or family[:] as [in] the Body of Christ. Christians profess a living God, but some attend Masses[,] or belong to communities[, which] seem dead. Young people are attracted to th[at particular] joy[:] which should be a hallmark of our faith.</p>
<p>Young people express a desire[,] to see a Church [which] is a living testimony[,] to what it teaches[,] and witnesses[: and] to authenticity[,] on the path to holiness[:] which includes acknowledging mistakes[,] and asking for forgiveness. Young people expect leaders[,] of the Church—ordained, religious, and lay—to be the strongest example of this. Knowing that models of faith are authentic[,] and vulnerable[,] allows young people to freely be authentic[,] and vulnerable[,] themselves[: this] is not to destroy the sacredness of the [leaders'] ministry, but so that young people might [further] be inspired[,] by them[,] on the path to holiness.</p>
<p>[Y]oung people have difficulty finding a space[,] in the Church[,] where they can actively participate[,] and lead....There is a [felt] need for trust[,] in young people[: trusting them] to lead[,] and to be protagonists[,] of their own spiritual journey. This is not just to imitate their elders, but to really take ownership[,] of their mission and responsibility, [and to] live [it] out[,] well. Movements[,] and new communities in the Church[,] have developed fruitful ways[,] to not only evangelize young people, but also to empower them to be the primary ambassadors[,] of the faith[,] to their peers.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">8. <b>The Vocational Sense of Life</b></p>
<p>There is a need for a simple and clear understanding of vocation[—]to highlight the sense of call[,] and mission[;] desire[,] and aspiration[—]which makes it a concept more relatable[,] to young people[,] at this stage of their lives....Young people understand the general sense of bringing meaning to life[,] and [of] being alive for a purpose, but many do not know how to connect that to vocation[:] as a gift[,] and [a] call[,] from God.</p>
<p>The term "vocation" has become synonymous with the priesthood and religious life[,] in the culture of the Church. While these are sacred calls[, which thus] should be celebrated, it is important for young people to know that their vocation [actually] is [established] by virtue of their life, and that each person has a responsibility to discern [whichever role] it is[, which] God calls them to be[,] and to do. There is a fullness[, in] each vocation[,] which must be highlighted[,] in order to open the hearts of young people[,] to their [own] possibilities.</p>
<p>The term vocation is not very clear to many young people; hence[,] there is need for greater understanding[, both] of the Christian vocation (...lay ministry, marriage and family, role in society, etc.)[,] and [of] the universal call to holiness.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">9. <b>Vocational Discernment</b></p>
<p>Discerning one's vocation can be an adventure[,] along the journey of life. [M]any young people do not know how to intentionally go about the process of discernment; this is an opportunity[,] for the Church[,] to accompany them.</p>
<p>Many factors [harm] the ability of young people to discern their vocations, such as:...digital media,...mental health and state of mind,...peer pressures, political scenarios,...technology, etc. Spending time in[:] silence, introspection[,] and prayer[;] as well as [in] reading the Scriptures[;] and [in] deepening [one's] self-knowledge[;] are opportunities[, which] very few young people exercise. There is a need[,] for a better introduction to these areas. Engaging[,] with[:] faith-based groups, movements, and like-minded communities[,] can also assist young people in their discernment.</p>
<p>We recognize[,] in particular[,] the unique challenges faced by young women[,] as they discern their vocation[,] and place in the Church. Just as Mary's "yes" to God's call is fundamental to the Christian experience, young women...need space to give their own "yes" to their vocation. We encourage the Church to deepen its understanding of the role of women[,] and to empower young women[.]</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">10. <b>Young People and Accompaniment</b></p>
<p>Young people are looking for companions...who...allow young people to articulate their [own] understanding of faith[,] and their vocation. Such people...need to be...living testimonies to witness. Such a person should evangelize[,] by their life.</p>
<p>Qualities of such a mentor include: a faithful Christian[,] who engages with...the world; someone who constantly seeks holiness; [who] is a confidant[,] without judgement; [who] actively listens to the needs[,] of young people[,] and responds in kind; [who] is deeply loving[,] and self-aware; [who] acknowledges their [own] limits[;] and [who] knows the joys and sorrows of the spiritual journey.</p>
<p>An especially important quality in a mentor is acknowledgement[,] of their humanity—that they are human beings[,] who make mistakes: [that they are] not perfect people[,] but forgiven sinners. Sometimes[,] mentors are put on a pedestal[;] and[,] when they fall, the devastation may impact young people's abilities to continue to engage[,] with the Church.</p>
<p>Mentors should...allow [young people] to be active participants[,] in the journey. They should respect the freedom[, which] comes with a young person's process of discernment[,] and equip them with [the] tools[,] to do [it,] well.</p>
<p>A mentor should believe[,] wholeheartedly[,] in a young person's ability[,] to participate in the life of the Church....This role is not[,] and cannot be[,] limited to priests[,] and [to] consecrated life[;] but, the laity should also be empowered[,] to take on such a role.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%"><em>Part Three[:] The Church's Formative and Pastoral Activity</em></p>
<p>11. <b>The [M]anner of the Church</b></p>
<p>Today's young people are longing for an authentic Church. We want to say, especially to the hierarchy of the Church, that they should be[:] a transparent, welcoming, honest, inviting, communicative, accessible, joyful[,] and interactive community.</p>
<p>A credible Church is one which is not afraid[,] to allow itself [to] be seen[,] as vulnerable. The Church should be sincere[,] in admitting [both] its past and present wrongs[, and] that it is a Church[,] made up of persons[,] who are capable of error[,] and misunderstanding. The Church should condemn [certain] actions[:] such as sexual abuse[,] and the mismanagement of power[,] and wealth. The Church should continue to inforce her no-tolerance stance[,] on sexual abuse[,] within her institutions[;] and her humility will[,] undoubtedly[,] raise [this stance's] credibility[,] among the world's young people. If the Church acts in this way, then it will differentiate itself[,] from other institutions and authorities[,] which young people[—]for the most part[—]already mistrust.</p>
<p>[T]he Church draws the attention of young people[,] by being rooted in Jesus Christ. Christ is the Truth[,] which makes the Church different[,] from any other worldly group[,] with which we may identify. Therefore, we ask that the Church continue to proclaim the joy[,] of the Gospel[,] with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>We desire that the Church spread this message[,] through modern means of communication and expression. The young have many questions[,] about the faith, but [they] desire answers[,] which are not watered-down, [n]or which utilize pre-fabricated formulations....Some perceive the Church to be "anti-science"[; and] so[,] its dialogue with the scientific community is[,] also[,] important. [T]he Church should also care for environmental issues[:] especially, [for] pollution. We also desire to see a Church [which] is empathetic[,] and [which] reaches out[,] to[:] those struggling on the margins, the persecuted[,] and the poor.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">12. <b>Young Leaders</b></p>
<p>[Young people feel that t]he Church must involve young people in its decision-making processes[,] and offer them more leadership roles. [They feel that t]hese positions need to be on [the] parish, diocesan, national[,] and international level, [and] even on a commission to the Vatican. We...feel that we are ready to be leaders.</p>
<p>We need young[-]leadership programs[:] for the formation[,] and continued development[,] of young leaders. Some young women feel that there is a lack of leading female role models within the Church[;] and they[,] too[,] wish to give [of] their intellectual and professional gifts[.]</p>
<p>[W]e want to be a joyful, enthusiastic[,] and missionary presence[,] within the Church. We also strongly express a wish[, to have] a prominent[,] creative voice. This creativity often finds itself in music, liturgy[,] and the arts[. Young people feel that] this is an untapped potential, with the creative side of the Church often dominated by the older Church members.</p>
<p>There is also a desire for strong communities[,] in which young people share their struggles and testimonies[,] with each other. [T]hey wish [these communities] to be more supported,...financially.</p>
<p>[Y]oung people have a passion for political, civil[,] and humanitarian activities. They want to act as Catholics[, yet act] in the public sphere[,] for the betterment of society[,] as a whole. In all [of] these aspects of Church life, young people wish to be accompanied[,] and to be taken seriously[,] as fully responsible members of the Church.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">13. <b>Preferred [P]laces</b></p>
<p>We would like the Church to meet us[,] in...various places[,] in which she[,] currently[,] has little or no presence. [T]he place[,] in which we [most] wish to be met by the Church[,] is the streets, where all people are found. The Church should try to find creative[,] new ways to encounter people[,] where they are comfortable[,] and where they naturally socialize: bars, coffee shops, parks, gyms, stadiums[,] and any other[,] popular[,] cultural centers. Consideration should...be given to...workplace[,] and rural[,] areas. [W]e also need the light of faith[,] in more difficult places[:] such as orphanages,...marginal neighborhoods,...prisons, rehabilitation centers[,] and red-light districts.</p>
<p>Resources are not wasted....It is imperative that those[,] who are already engaged[,] are supported in the Church community[.]</p>
<p>[T]he digital world is one [which] must be taken into account[,] by the Church. We would like to see a Church[, which] is accessible[,] through social media[—]as well as [in] other digital spaces[—so that it can,] more easily and effectively[,] offer information[:] about the Church[,] and its teachings[;] and[, in order] to further the formation of the young person. In short, we should be met[,] where we are—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, socially[,] and physically.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">14. <b>The Initiatives to be Reinforced</b></p>
<p>We long for experiences [which] can deepen our relationship with Jesus[,] in the real world. Initiatives[, which] are successful[,] offer us an experience of God. [W]e respond to initiatives [which] offer us an understanding[:] of the Sacraments, prayer[,] and the liturgy, in order to properly share and defend our faith[, with]in the secular world. The Sacraments are of great value[,] to [those of] us who desire to develop a deeper sense of what they mean[,] in our lives. This is true[,] of[:] marriage preparation, the Sacrament of Reconciliation, preparation for baptism of children[,] and so forth. Because of the lack of clear[,] and attractive[,] presentation[,] as to what the Sacraments truly offer, some of us go through the process of receiving [them, while] undervaluing them.</p>
<p>Some fruitful initiatives are:...courses and programs [which] provide answers and formation[;] outreach ministries; weekend retreats and spiritual exercises; Charismatic events...and worship groups;...pilgrimages;...Bible study groups; [various] faith apps[;] and the immense variety of movements and associations[,] within the Church.</p>
<p>Small, local groups[,] where we can express questions[,] and share in Christian fellowship[,] are...paramount to maintaining the faith.</p>
<p>The social and...spiritual aspects[,] of Church initiatives[,] can be compl[e]mentary to each other. There is also a desire for social outreach[,] and evangelization[,] to people struggling with illnesses and addictions, while also engaging in dialogue with people[,] of varied religious, cultural[,] and socioeconomic contexts.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">15. <b>Instruments to be [U]sed</b></p>
<p>The Church must adopt a language which engages the customs[,] and cultures[,] of the young[,] so that all people have the opportunity to hear the message of the Gospel. [W]e are passionate about...differ[ing] expressions of the Church. Some of us have a passion for "[T]he fire" of contemporary and charismatic movements[, which] focus on the Holy Spirit; others are drawn towards silence[;] meditation[;] and reverential[,] traditional liturgies. All of these things are good[,] as they help us to pray[: all] in [their] different ways. Outside of the Church, many young people live a contented spirituality[—]but[, still,] the Church could engage them[, by employing] the right instruments[:]</p>
<p><b>Multimedia</b> – The [I]nternet offers the Church an unprecedented evangelical opportunity, especially with social media[,] and online[,] video content. As young people, we are digital natives[,] who could lead the way. It is...a great place to encounter[,] and [to] engage [with,] people[, both] of other faiths[,] and [of] none.</p>
<p><b>The Arts and Beauty</b> – Beauty is universally acknowledged[,] and the Church has a history of engaging [with,] and evangelizing through[,] the arts, such as...visual art. Young people[,] especially[,] respond to [this,] and enjoy being creative[,] and expressive.</p>
<p><b>Adoration, Meditation and Contemplation</b> – We also appreciate[, as seen from our secular lives,] the contrast of silence[,] offered by the Church's tradition[s] of Eucharistic Adoration[,] and contemplative prayer. It provides a space[,] away from the constant noise of modern communication[;] it is here[,] that we encounter Jesus. Silence is where we can hear the voice of God[,] and discern His will[,] for us. Many[,] outside of the Church[,] also appreciate meditation[;] the Church's rich culture[,] of this[,] could be a bridge to these secular[,] but spiritual[,] people. [This] can be counter-cultural, but effective.</p>
<p><b>Testimony</b> – The personal stories of the Church are effective ways of evangelizing[,] as [they are] true[,] personal experiences[, which thus] cannot be debated. Modern Christian witnesses[,] and the witness of the persecuted Middle Eastern Christians[,] are particularly strong testimonies[,] to the fullness of life[,] found in the Church. The stories of the Saints are still relevant to us[,] as [they are] paths to holiness[,] and [to] fulfil[l]ment.</p>
<p><b>The Synodal Process</b> – We...feel that this dialogue[,] between the young and the old Church[,] is a vital[,] and fruitful[,] listening process. It would be a shame[,] if this dialogue were not given the opportunity to continue[,] and [to] grow! This culture of openness is extremely healthy[,] for us.</p>
<p style="padding-top: 1%">Copyright (c) 2018 Mark D. Blackwell.</p>Mark D. Blackwellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15999097238112264588noreply@blogger.com0