Charles Murray’s Praise of Human Misery
I kind of scanned Charles Murray’s recent big AEI speech expecting to read something interesting, since I’d seen quite a few conservatives offer it lavish praise. As best I could tell, though, his argument is that the problem with a social democratic model is that it makes people too fat and happy, thus depriving them of the higher contentment offered by suffering and misery. Damon Linker has a good summary:
But that’s not all. Because genuine happiness, for Murray, requires spending one’s life striving to overcome an endless series of challenges and obstacles, the lavish European safety net ensures that individual Europeans will never experience spiritual contentment or satisfaction. The assumption seems to be that a life of leisure — or at least a life with open access to health care, quality child care, generous unemployment insurance, and 4 – 6 weeks of guaranteed vacation time a year — will be an unhappy one. (It doesn’t sound half-bad to me, but I’m a Euro-loving liberal.)
Luckily, though, there is the American alternative (at least until Barack Obama gets through with us). Unlike coddled Europeans, Americans face the constant possibility of personal economic catastrophe. They work their lives away just to make ends meet, never knowing if they’ll be rewarded for their efforts by being fired by their employer or impoverished by medical bills after a life-threatening illness. And that constant insecurity is what opens up the possibility of genuine happiness for them, because if they manage to survive, let alone thrive, they’ll know that they did it on their own, without the help of the state, through heroic acts of self-reliance. This ideology — equal parts Christian masochism, Emersonian individualism, and Nietzschean striving — forms the core of American exceptionalism, according to Murray.
It’s really that weird, and as Linker notes has important similarities with the Donner Party conservatism that John Holbo found in David Frum’s Dead Right.
115 Responses to “Charles Murray’s Praise of Human Misery”
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March 23rd, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Actually, I hypothesize that beating the living shit out of Charles Murray with a big stick would provide genuine happiness.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Charles Murray, neo-Calvinist.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:46 pm
This actually fits perfectly with George Lakoff’s Strong Father conservative model. He says a lot of things that I summarize into – for conservatives, virtue lies in individual actions, not in the outcome.
And Don Williams has an excellent point below.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:46 pm
How is this any different than when liberals say people are happier when they have less so long as their neighbours have much less?
And if we are really concerned with maximizing happiness through welfare why do France, Germany, and Italy usually rank lower than us but Denmark, Sweden, and Ireland rank higher?
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I can only imagine how grueling working for a think tank must be.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I guess I don’t have a degree from Harvard in moral philosophy, but one would think that someone who did would recognize a stark exposition between Aristotelianism and Epicureanism. Aristotle (along with pretty much every big foot Greek thinker except Epicurus) thought that human well being consists in the possession of virtue, in being an excellent man, while Epicurus thought that human well being was all about pleasure without pain. They are radically different ways of looking at things.
It seems to me that the US used to be strongly Aristotelian, i.e. one must be an Aristotelian and not an Epicure for JFK’s speeches (We should send a man to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard) to sound appealing. We’ve undoubtledly gotten more Epicurean since then, and it seems that a European type setup would definitely appeal to Epicureans than rugged individualism.
The one thing that will be lost though, is that Epicureans rarely do anything in the slightest bit interesting. Happy losers may be happy, but they are boring.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I refer you to the greatest essay on this branch of Conservatism. By John someone, I don’t know who. It is a must read. A bit of a slog but highly entertaining. Read it closely. Twice.
The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundation is hereby laid for a desirable social order.
http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
These guys hate evrything about being liberal,progressive,democratic and especially european anything.I wonder what it would be like having a decent health care plan,a good infrastructure with good roads and bridges, police and fire fighters,good public education and free/ subsidized college for my kid?I think Americans would thrive and proper under these conditions,oh wait a minute we can`t have that,our REICH WINGS NUTS can`t handle anything European except BMW`s, Bently`s,Dom P,Swiss Chocolates and Swiss watches, the one thing about these guys is that they never met an import they didn`t like.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Oh, sorry, should have read through to the end. Yes that John.
My bad. Well there is the link.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
However if you work for a major financial corporation the government will supply it with trillions of dollars to assure its survival and you with a salary 10 to 1000 times the median and then you might contribute to AEI and pay Murray to say the things you want to hear all dressed up with allusions to the history of Western Civilization.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Oh, right misery is happiness. Also war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Murray wasn’t content to rely upon the genuine case for America vs. Europe, which is that our Hobbesian society probably does have something to do with higher levels of innovation. It’s not a connection I’m happy about, but there’s too much there to deny. But for some reason Murray prefers to value the struggle itself rather than the posited fruits of the struggle, and that’s just craziness.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:09 pm
There is a difference between a struggle that results in an outcome and the sisyphisian struggles to avoid bankruptcy, loss of health insurance, and near-permanent unemployment that people like Murray, Bennett, and Frum espouse.
The “Donner Party Conservatism” doesn’t, contra j mct, claim that struggles are good in the service of accomplishment at the end of the task. Rather, they support the use of human misery and economic insecurity as a means controlling the public culture to ensure that everyone stays within certain bounds of cultural behavior of which they approve.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Charles Murray is a crypto-racist fuckwit asshole. Well, he is.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Funny how the Frum of 2008-09 is saying exactly the opposite of the Frum of 2003, and the Frum of 2003 sounds like a more erudite version of the 2009 Limbaugh. And, of course, Murray is getting such rave reviews from the Amen Choir at NRO these days precisely because he adds a veneer of erudition to Limbaughism.
Reading Holbo’s post helps explain Limbaugh’s enduring popularity with conservatives: there’s no other pundit you’d rather have with you at the Donner Party….
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
What a pernicious dumbfuck. Obsessive careerism of this kind is for people who have no leisure time oppoprtunity cost — in other words people whose private lives suck so much ass they’re better off at the office.
The dirty fucking hippies were right.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
A life with healthy doses of leisure and financial security does not exclude challenge or struggle; rather, it allows them to be directed toward social and higher emotional needs, rather than mere survival, and to be rooted in reflection rather than in narrow calculation and fear.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
A long time ago-A million years BC
The best things in life were absolutely free
But no one appreciated a sky that was always blue
And no one congratulated a moon that was always new
So it was planned that they would vanish now and then
And you must pay to get them back again
That’s what storms were made for
So you mustn’t be afraid for…………
Every time it rains, it rains
Pennies from Heaven
Don’t you know each cloud contains
Pennies from Heaven
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Re Charles Murray
Let’s recall that racist goat fucker Murray was the co-author of, “The Bell Curve,” a piece of shit writing that has been totally discredited. Paying attention to this fucktard makes about as much sense as paying attention to cokehead Larry Kudlow.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:48 pm
“It seems to me that the US used to be strongly Aristotelian, i.e. one must be an Aristotelian and not an Epicure for JFK’s speeches (We should send a man to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard) to sound appealing. We’ve undoubtledly gotten more Epicurean since then, and it seems that a European type setup would definitely appeal to Epicureans than rugged individualism.
The one thing that will be lost though, is that Epicureans rarely do anything in the slightest bit interesting. Happy losers may be happy, but they are boring.”
Is Harry Lime conservatism a step up or a step down from Donner Party conservatism? Peace, democracy, and broadly shared prosperity are booorrrring. We must start wars and spend billions of dollars planting flags on other planets… because hardship and strife are AWESOME!
It’s always been fascinating to me how conservatives sing from the anti-elitism hymnal whenever it suits their purposes, but whenever the subject shifts from political rhetoric to philosophy it swiftly becomes apparent that what bothers them the most about Old Europe is its democratic populism. These nations actually strive to make the lives of their citizens safer and more comfortable… gasp… quelle horreur!
I don’t think anyone doubts that there is virtue inherent to struggling against the odds and overcoming them. But I really find it difficult to conceive of a more elitist worldview than one which says the state should deliberately foster an environment of risk and poverty in order to improve the virtuosity of the masses… for their own good… but of course they wouldn’t dare extend the same “compassion” toward their own children, who will naturally go to the best schools and have a healthy safety net invested in a conservative portfolio.
I mean, it’s fine to look to Aristotle for a personal philosophy… y’all love the individualism, right? But as a political philosophy in the modern democratic world, the ancient Greeks were a tad… authoritarian and elitist, don’t you think? To be fair, Pericles didn’t exactly have a society with a large, well-fed middle class to work with, and he had the threat of being annihilated by Persians to deal with. But your pseudo-intellectual conservative Aristotlean line of thinking leads inexorably to the conclusion that it’s virtuous for our leaders to make the middle class miserable and insecure and invent a fake Persian threat.
Come to think of it, that explains a hell of a lot.
This whole pseudo-philosophy collapses upon even the slightest inspection. But hey, it makes for a snappy campaign ad. Yay America! Boo France!
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:57 pm
A life with healthy doses of leisure and financial security does not exclude challenge or struggle; rather, it allows them to be directed toward social and higher emotional needs, rather than mere survival, and to be rooted in reflection rather than in narrow calculation and fear.
False dichotomy. The choice isn’t between lavish European-style social welfare and mere “survival” but between Euro-style social welfare and something less than that, like American-style social welfare. You don’t have to be a strong libertarian to conclude that the American system is more conducive to maximizing happiness.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:58 pm
“Racist goat fucker” he might be, please don’t make Yglesias look bad by calling for beating him with a stick in the comments. Higher ground, please.
Also, when you say that the bell curve has been discredited, include a citation. It can’t just be an argument by faith and authority. I tried to sit down and find out what the best “debunking” was, and I doubt I did. Here’s one of the book I read:
“Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to THE BELL CURVE”
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success-Scientists-Statistics/dp/0387949860/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237830917&sr=8-1
I mostly agree with Yglesias wrt politics. But I do think the left needs to do more to address underclass problems and underclass problems. Otherwise the right will continue to make hay out of this issue.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
it swiftly becomes apparent that what bothers them the most about Old Europe is its democratic populism
The idea that European democracy (not sure what “Old Europe” is supposed to be) is more populist than American democracy is laughable.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Re Victor
1. The Bell Curve was discredited in a chapter of a book by Steven Jay Gould.
2. Mr. Don Williams, the blogs’ resident Bolshevik likes to picture himself as a peasant with a pitchfork.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:09 pm
That’s the most brilliant piece of satire I’ve read since “A Modest Proposal.”
It’s satire, right?
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:19 pm
jeff, it’s quite clear that Murray already believes our modern society’s safety net, modest as it is, makes life not worth living. And it’s hard to say how are modern health insurance system is in any way conducive to maximizing human happiness. I suspect you’re trying to pick a fight by being purposefully obtuse. Which is nice, because I kind of miss Mixner.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:39 pm
The idea that European democracy (not sure what “Old Europe” is supposed to be) is more populist than American democracy is laughable.
The very fact that you would laugh at this notion shows just how far around the bend American political discourse has gone.
I mean, on the one hand, we have a society that levies taxes upon those who possess wealth and property in order to subsidize health care for everyone. And these are the “elitists”. And then we have people who insist that wealthy individuals are entitled to amass as much wealth as they possibly can and extend their lives by any means necessary… while working stiffs are expected to live in fear of being bankrupted by a single accident or illness. And these people are “populists.”
Blows the fucking mind.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I don’t think it surprises anyone that powerful institutions and the most privileged classes of individuals benefit from the lower classes’ only expectation of reward being in the afterlife, y’know. The relative proportions of social virtues to economic insecurity tend to vary, but they’re consistently the recipe base for neo-feudalism.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:39 pm
“Racist goat fucker” he might be, please don’t make Yglesias look bad by calling for beating him with a stick in the comments. Higher ground, please.
You think the nutbags give a shit if Yglesias looks bad? Half the time they’re accusing him of being a trust fund scumbag. They have no shame or conscience.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:42 pm
jeff,
Undeniably, there are more than two options here; I was abbreviating. The current American social model leaves a lot to be desired when you consider ubiquitous complaints about the cost of higher education and the exorbitant and tenuously available healthcare arrangements we currently live under. Further, despite the collapse in real estate values (which has brought problems of its own), the insecurity of American middle class living standards is clearly demonstrated in their accumulation of debt, which wasn’t rooted in sheer carelessness but in housing and other basic costs. Absenteeism, stress-related illness, inadequate child care, violence — these and many other symptoms sugest our social model hews closer to mere (or unhappy) survival than advocates for the status who would have us believe.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Re SLC “Mr. Don Williams, the blogs’ resident Bolshevik likes to picture himself as a peasant with a pitchfork.”
—————–
Sorry , Comrade SLC.
Operational Security precludes me from responding to speculation re the contents of my armory. Can neither confirm nor deny existence of pitchfork.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Corrected link.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:49 pm
This life of no vacations and constant fear of a medical catastrophe that will bankrupt one– if it’s so great, why isn’t Murray volunteering to lead it?
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:52 pm
All along, the conservative press has described Europe as a hyper-regulated hellhole, where jobs are impossible to find, where pay is low, where the red tape is suffocating, where Muslims are outbreeding white people and instituting Sharia, where God has been forsaken, where men are effeminate and women don’t shave, a land of stasis and body odor and immigrants. So many problems! So many obstacles to overcome! So many opportunities for really deep spiritual fulfillment! What went wrong?
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Links not working … Try Google, Warren and Tyagi, What’s Hurting the Middle Class? for a quick version of their argument, or see their book The Two-Income Trap.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Re latts at 30: “I don’t think it surprises anyone that powerful institutions and the most privileged classes of individuals benefit from the lower classes’ only expectation of reward being in the afterlife, y’know. ”
————–
Hell, the Founding Fathers counted on it. Edward Gibbon explained it to them in 1776, in Decline and Fall:
“The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. ”
“The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.”
The clergy knows who’s dropping what into the collection plate.
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:05 pm
By John someone, I don’t know who
That would be “Belle Waring’s husband.”
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Suffering certainly can build character. But, the Murrays of the world cultivate their smugness at the expense of other people’s misery. Also, I’m reminded of Celine’s rationale for loving feudal times: “The serf’s life consisted of drudgery, impoverishment, and despair. And, The Church was telling them that when they died – they’d go straight to Hell. So, there were no false hopes.”
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:29 pm
In the upcoming Coen Brothers adaptation of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray will be played by Richard Jenkins.
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Well, I think one falsely presumes a dichotomy between the comfortable lives of Murray et al and the poorer people. The fact of the matter, one thing that the conservative order (and I) prizes is continuity. And part of that continuity involves leaving a heritage to your children, whether in the form of property or money or even just a family myth, all of which are encourage by a Hobbesian condition of struggle. (The world is more unpredictable, so you want to leave your children more resources for success.)
And I think that’s a good thing. People being motivated to create benefit and advantages for their children; this motivates innovation and wealth creation. And frankly, having each generation start over again is like re-inventing the wheel. Bill Gates himself was a the great-grandson of the found of National City Bank, and the son of a top Seattle corporate lawyer.
One product of social democracy, one very pernicious aspect of it, is elimination of generational continuity within families, which is essential to an ordered society. Having an external condition of struggle would strength this continuity.
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Clearly, Murray is arguing like a hypocrite here. American capitalism is hardly opposed to wealth and comfort per se, and it’s hardly known for its asceticism or its tough work ethic. Rather, it produces untold wealth and comfort for some, and forces others into unemployment or worthless jobs over which they can exert no control, and in which they can take no pride. Furthermore, it’s the very American capitalism which he praises which has systematically undermined labor and exalted leisure, and which has destroyed the manufacturing and agricultural bases on which a healthy society depends. Whatever the problems of modern America, it’s clear that Murray offers no solution.
However, morally corrupt and racist hypocrite though he may be, he hints at a real and genuine problem. What happens if modern capitalism, in either it free-market or its social democratic guises, succeeds in making life too easy and comfortable? All human virtue depends to some degree on struggling against either natural or moral evil: in fact, virtue cannot exist in the total absence of suffering, privation and evil. It is said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should die for his friends”. But the corollary of this is that a world without death would be a world without sacrifice, and therefore a world without love.
Modern capitalism, in its obsessive pursuit of wealth, comfort and freedom as the only goods worth having, has already done much to undermine virtue and moral goodness. It’s undermined virtue in the relations between rich and poor, ruler and subject, man and woman, parent and child, man and God, and man and nature. By making it possible for people to focus more on pleasing themselves, it has contributed to our self-love, which is the first and primal sin. What good is courage in a world with few threats to life? What good is generosity in a world where goods are so plentiful that everyone has everything they want? What good is sacrifice in a world in which sacrifice is unneccessary? And what good is subordinating oneself to the collective, in a world in which individuals are rich enough and free enough not to even have or want a collective?
These are deep questions, and it pains me- though I’m not surprised- to see that they don’t even seem to have occurred to Yglesias and his hipster crew. Too many of today’s hipsters don’t even think that there could be anything to life beyond pot, porn and PlayStations. Sacrifice? What good is that? Love? Obedience? Generosity? Courage? Who needs ‘em?
This is hardly necessarily a right-wing critique either- it was in large part Sorel’s left-wing critique of capitalism. Sorel was smart enough to see that capitalism produced untold wealth, comfort and freedom, and he hated it for that very reason. The aim of society should be to encourage the development of virtue in its citizens, and virtue is possible only in a society in which individuals are constantly struggling against evil, and constantly called upon to sacrifice themselves for the collective. Sorel’s utopia of autonomous mountain communes, inhabited by selfless, heroic workers who cared nothing for themselves and everything for the collective, driven by a perpetual state of frenzied rage against the decadence of modern capitalism, is to me a much more compelling vision than Yglesias’ cosmopolitan utopia of TiVo, fast cars, lattes, and blow-jobs.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Furthermore, it’s the very American capitalism which he praises which has systematically undermined labor and exalted leisure, and which has destroyed the manufacturing and agricultural bases on which a healthy society depends.
No offense, Hector, but reading your comment I can’t help wondering if you listen to Holiday in Cambodia and think, “Hey, those Khmer Rouge had a pretty good idea, there!”
Youre a star-belly sneech
You suck like a leach
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you
Well you’ll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son.
Is a holiday in cambodia
Where people dress in black
A holiday in cambodia
Where you’ll kiss ass or crack
Add some praying, and it sounds like a veritable virtue factory!!
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:25 pm
So, the logical conclusion is that the wealthy are amoral and lacking in character. Bet he doesn’t go there.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Absenteeism, stress-related illness, inadequate child care, violence — these and many other symptoms sugest our social model hews closer to mere (or unhappy) survival than advocates for the status who would have us believe.
Baloney. Look at indicators like GDP per capita, the Human Development Index, measures of political and social freedom and equality, and international comparisons of happiness. The U.S. beats most European nations. Life in America is much better than people like you would have us believe.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:28 pm
If Mr. Murray had the courage of his own convictions, he would lament the discovery of sulfa drugs, anti-biotics, pollio vaccine and immunizations of all kinds, and all the modern pharmacopia. For what more rupturous misery can there be than suffering from all sorts of ailments and defeating them soley by the virtue of the strength of your own immune system?
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:37 pm
The very fact that you would laugh at this notion shows just how far around the bend American political discourse has gone.
I think it’s you who’s gone round the bend. The United States has one of the most populist forms of democracy in the world. We devolve vast political power to state and local governments. We use direct elections to fill numerous public offices that in other countries are filled by political appointments. We hold frequent elections on strict schedules. We decide numerous issues through ballot propositions. And so on.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Try Google, Warren and Tyagi, What’s Hurting the Middle Class? for a quick version of their argument, or see their book The Two-Income Trap.
Perhaps you could summarize their claims for us. In what ways do you believe the middle class is worse off, or merely no better off, than it was a generation ago?
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Re jeff at 48: “I think it’s you who’s gone round the bend. The United States has one of the most populist forms of democracy in the world.”
—————
You’re full of shit, jeff. The USA has an incarceration rate that is 4 times higher than that of China’s. And our Gini index of income inequality puts us close to China and Mexico for economic injustice.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_Human_Development_Report_2007-2008.png
You shouldn’t believe everything those deceitful dumbfucks at Fox tell you.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:52 pm
“Aristotle (along with pretty much every big foot Greek thinker except Epicurus) thought that human well being consists in the possession of virtue, in being an excellent man”
I think you’re entirely misinterpreting Aristotle here. Being an excellent man, for Aristotle, has very little to do with struggle. Aristotle in fact argues that the gentleman does the right thing almost effortlessly.
It’s more Machiavelli (and later Hobbes) who depict virtu as a struggle against Fortuna.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
You’re full of shit, jeff.
Your brain’s full of shit, Don.
The USA has an incarceration rate that is 4 times higher than that of China’s.
So what?
And our Gini index of income inequality puts us close to China and Mexico for economic injustice.
Since you have presented no argument regarding the relationship between income inequality and economic injustice, this is also irrelevant. Not everyone shares your prejudice that higher income inequality = higher economic injustice, you know.
You shouldn’t believe everything those deceitful dumbfucks at Fox tell you.
You shouldn’t believe everything those fuckwads at moveon.org tell you.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
This seems a rather superfluous debate. Most people, that is to say, the democratic majority, simply don’t matter very much in the greater schemes of things, in the happenings, the peaks and troughs of civilisation. Civilisation is molded by Great Men, not by mediocre types.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:03 pm
You want to see what sort of people the Euro welfare state produces? Look at the young Briton who just died, Jade Goody. Dumb as a box of rocks, ignorant, drug-addled, promiscuous, irresponsible, etc. This is a people that once strode the world. Pathetic.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
“Weird”? How about “demented”, “brainsick” or “crackers”?
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
ECHO….Echo….echo
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Isn’t this a much wordier and less interesting version of that speech Captain Kirk would always give after forced the natives of some planet to fend for themselves instead of rely on a computer, spores, or godlike aliens to make them happy and content?
Ah, here we go: “Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through – struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.”
Of course, Captain Kirk was a citizen of a utopian social democracy that pushed outward into space precisely because things were prosperous and content at home. But I don’t think Mr. Murray is willing to trade us more manned space exploration in exchange for social democracy at home.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
I don’t understand why many libertarians and fiscal canservatives continue to operate under the illusion of rugged individualism to explain someone’s success.
It is just a childish and silly way to view reality.
You can take any successful person and add up all the things(technology, medicine, a healthy water supply, the idustrial revolution, free public education, etc) that existed before they came along that helped to make their “success” possible and the absurdity of that kind of thinking is readily apparent.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:42 pm
I don’t understand why many liberals and social democracts continue to operate under the illusion of ruthless exploitation or pure dumb luck to explain someone’s success.
It is just a childish and silly way to view reality.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:03 pm
As a Family Physician at an academic medical center, I encounter the struggling underclass every working day of my life. I’ve learned a few things:
1. The vast majority of these people are exactly like me; they want the same things (financial security, a job, especially a meaningful one, friends and family to love and to be loved by)– and yet their lives are so much harder than mine. Every day they have to struggle with issues that people like me (and, I suspect, Mr. Murray) never have to worry about: food, shelter, and clothing, for example. It takes an enormous amount of effort for them to get health care at a price that isn’t ruinous; some of them have to come three hundred miles or more to get care for even the simplest medical problems, because of the requirements of the state program that provides their coverage. And yet, it is extraordinarily rare for me to find any one of them who is happy, who glories in the struggle, who gets out of bed each day energized to go out into the real world, red in tooth and claw, to push once again the boulder up the Sisyphean mountain.
I think that the people who glory in the struggle of life tend to be those who start out from a pretty secure foundation, and who have a pretty good idea that, most of the time, at least, their struggle is going to be successful. The people I try to take care of have pretty lousy foundations, and their usual expectation is that their struggles aren’t going to leave them very much better off. And, of course, I never see the ones who have given up, who lack the energy and the will to try any more. And yet, are they not my (and your) brothers and sisters? Don’t they deserve compassion and care, as much as Mr. Murray? Jesus of Nazareth seemed to think so.
I would be much more inclined to take the writings of persons such as Mr. Murray seriously if they would quit their well-paid jobs, give up their health insurance, pensions, investments, etc., and go to work for minimum wage at Wal-mart. In other words, walk the walk before you talk the talk.
Myself, I’m going to go back to work, trying to take decent care of the wretched refuse of our teeming shore, realizing that I don’t have to take any life lessons from the likes of Mr. Murray.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I don’t understand why many libertarians and fiscal canservatives continue to operate under the illusion of rugged individualism to explain someone’s success.
Self-flattery, because most of them see themselves in those dominant roles (if denied the status they deserve by liberals). It’s no coincidence that so many libertarians are moderately clever white guys with misanthropic tendencies, after all, and conservatives are pretty much just authoritarians who want to squash someone else to feel secure.
That’s also why they’re so incredibly unpleasant IME; people who so clearly lack perspective and humility aren’t really worth knowing.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Re: for conservatives, virtue lies in individual actions, not in the outcome.
Conservatives wouldn’t know virtue if it came up and bit them in the rear. Murray is just trying to rationalize his own life of ease and comfort while ignoring human suffering. I would not care to meet the Lord someday with that attitude.
Re: You want to see what sort of people the Euro welfare state produces? Look at the young Briton who just died, Jade Goody.
Are you seriously suggesting that the country which gave the world Brittney Spears and assorted other bimbos and dolts doesn’t excel at producing worldclass stupidity?
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:12 pm
The absurd thing about Murray’s argument is that it’s Aristoteleanism without the Aristotle’s communitarian spirit – which is what the philosopher himself identified as the central focus of his ethical and political work. Appropriating Aristotle to Murray’s extreme anti-government libertarian philosophy is as gross and implausible a distortion of Aristotle as the appropriation of Nietzsche by the Nazis.
The central idea of Aristotle’s ethical philosophy is that the true happiness of the individual lies in pursuing a virtuous life within the community. The point is to break down the idea of an essential conflict between the good of the polis and the good of the individual; our true good as individuals is to pursue social virtue in the polis. Murray, in contrast, defines the virutous life in terms of an extreme form of individualism – you should be able to be completely self-sufficient, not rely on anyone else for anything, etc. – and demonizes the idea of communal inter-dependence. It’s an absurd picture of what it means to be virtuous, more or less the exact opposite of what Aristotle believed or intended.
And it relies on a view of government that is, again, more or less the exact opposite of Aristotle believed. For Aristotle, the purpose of government is to embody the virtuous characteristics of the community. Aristotle wants a government that is honored and respected in the community, that serves the community’s highest ideals. His preferred government is rule by the gentry class. Nothing at all like the libertarian government is always stupid idea.
Of course, Aristotle’s view was the ideology of many of the founding Federalists. But over the generations, that view has been shouted down by those who define the American tradition in accordance with libertarian dogma. To see those same conservatives appropriate Aristotle himself to their cause is downright disgusting.
Here’s my bet: Charles Murray was first introduced to the ideas of Aristotle by Ayn Rand. Her crappy dishonest interpretation of Aristotle has stuck with him ever since. I wonder if he has even read Aristotle himself.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:23 pm
It’s no coincidence that so many libertarians are moderately clever white guys with misanthropic tendencies, after all, and conservatives are pretty much just authoritarians who want to squash someone else to feel secure.
Do you seriously think this kind of nonsense constitutes serious argumentation?
Back at ya: It’s no coincidence that so many leftwingers are moderately clever white guys with guilt complexes, after all, and liberals are pretty much just authoritarians who want to squash someone else to feel morally superior.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:24 pm
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March 23rd, 2009 at 7:42 pm
while I agree with your points, Satya, we should be careful about using the word “communitarianism” in association with Aristotle.
First, “communitarianism” means something specific in current political discourse that Aristotle didn’t necessarily agree with.
Second, I’m not certain Aristotle thought that the polis (or city or community or political state) itself was unreservedly good simply. The human polis is natural – for Aristotleans humans naturally live in cities (the great Jewish medieval philosopher Joseph Albo compares humans to bees in this respect). But while it is always better for humans to live politically together for Aristotle, that does not mean all cities are equally good – there is a wide variance in human politics.
Third, the best life for Aristotle is not that of the gentleman or gentry – the gentry who live a life devoted to politics. The best life simply is that of the philosopher, who is a much more ambigious figure within the city. It is not clear that the philosopher makes the city better, while this is clear about the good statesman. It is not clear even which city the philosopher will advise or reside in, while the statesman is devoted to his native city. Remember that Aristotle preferred to reside in Athens rather than his native Stageira, Xenophon preferred to serve Sparta rather than his native Athens, Thomas Aquinas resided in France rather than his native Italy, and so on.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Re: Remember that Aristotle preferred to reside in Athens rather than his native Stageira
For the very good reason that the place had been sacked and razed by the Macedonians. Aristotle did bargain with Philip II to have it rebuilt and its survivors bought out of slavery as his price for tutoring the young Alexander.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:38 pm
So Murray goes to Europe, like Columban to Alemanninc heathen, and tells the aborigines that the only sources of happiness are: family, community, vocation and health. The listeners were quite contumacious. “They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.
It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising.” I tell you, history runs full circle: “The apostles [Columban and Gall] found the Suevi and Allemanns worshipers of Woden, and stubborn in their opposition to the Gospel.”
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Do you seriously think this kind of nonsense constitutes serious argumentation?
A Charles Murray thread involves ’serious argumentation?’ That’s news, and more than he deserves.
But yes, that’s pretty much what I think of conservatives and libertarians; God knows, I’ve lived among them (religious nuts, good ole boys, ‘bidnessmen,’ gun nuts, and all manner of GOP base types in particular, with Randroids being the self-appointed ‘intellectuals’) all my life. PS: the Viagra spam @ 65 is IMO somewhat more amusing for that reason.
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Obviously this guy never had to worry about going broke, having a sick kid with no healthcare, losing his house, not being able to send his kids to college, having enough to eat, etc. or he wouldnt talk about those things as virtues.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Murray is certainly controversial (and seems to enjoy his notoriety), but there is definitely something thought provoking in his latest speech, something that you will miss if you let your revulsion for Murray prevent you from parsing his argument.
The problem with the European model is that by substituting government policy for individual action, it tends to rob people of the ability to derive deep satisfaction from their lives. If the government takes care of the effort and guarantees the results, can any human activity provide real happiness?
Aha, you might say, but doesn’t the U.S. model allow far too many to fall through the cracks and suffer? Too many children live in poverty and go uninsured. Could it be that the price of our American attitude is too high?
That’s where I think our public discourse has failed us. Forcing people to choose between freedom and compassion assumes a false dichotomy. There is a middle way between social Darwinism and the nanny state.
It’s no surprise that I’m a fan of the miserly safety net, which I’ve proposed as a solution to the issues of poverty and the credit crunch. The miserly safety net neatly combines the most economical solution with build-in safeguards against gaming the system (because the benefits it provides are so miserly that only someone without another viable alternative would opt in).
But after reading Murray’s speech, I realize that the miserly safety net has yet another advantage: It protects people without removing the incentive to or possibility of bettering themselves through their own efforts.
An overly generous welfare system not only introduces perverse incentives for slackerhood; that very slackerhood (however appealing it might sound to some) precludes true happiness. Despite its good intentions, by crowding out the need to work, the European model actually *reduces* happiness.
Working hard to provide for one’s family can give a man a sense of self-worth, but not if he feels like a chump when others can do nothing and receive a higher standard of living from government dole.
Ultimately, the limited nature of the nanny state is implicit in its very name: When it comes to parenting, is the best way of raising a successful child to give it everything without having to work for it? Of course not; doing so cheats the child out of the very important pleasure of doing things for him or herself. Government shouldn’t cheat its own citizens out their happiness.
My full post is here:
http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2009/03/danger-of-generous-safety-nets-why.html
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Murray forgot to mention that a man working as a janitor can’t support a family.
Other than that, I’m sure this is a perfectly satisfying kind of life — as long as Murray himself does not have to live it.
Seriously, this is the most repugnant piece of writing I have seen in a long, long time. It’s like something out of Dickens, only without the charm.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Ultimately, the limited nature of the nanny state is implicit in its very name: When it comes to parenting, is the best way of raising a successful child to give it everything without having to work for it? Of course not; doing so cheats the child out of the very important pleasure of doing things for him or herself. Government shouldn’t cheat its own citizens out their happiness.
Why not, Chris. It worked quite well for our former president. And as far as I can tell, he is as happy as a pig in mud.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Kathy,
Yes, we all see how well George H. W. Bush’s protection of his wayward son turned out for the American people.
That’s precisely my point–the Bushes should have been there for W during his bad times, but they shouldn’t have bailed out his oil company, bought him a baseball team, or given him the Presidency.
The same holds true for other countries–just look at France and the Enarques.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:07 am
What are the odds that our host read far enough to catch the bit about the separation of the elites from the rest of America?
Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers—and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn’t gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal.
To say nothing about having no friends who are not on Facebook.
March 24th, 2009 at 7:30 am
“Ultimately, the limited nature of the nanny state is implicit in its very name”
Yes, because we can gain valuable and authentic lessons about the nature of societal arrangements by the derogatory names given them by their ideological opponents.
On the other hand, Chris Yeh, you do provide 1) a great illustration of gVOR08’s point about Lakoff’s ‘Strict Father’ conservatism, and 2) are, I think, the first person on the thread to point out Murray’s governing philosophy, which is indeed Social Darwinism.
(Something which has, I hopefully don’t need to add, the same relation to actual modern evolutionary biology as defenestration-as-a-political-strategy does to the law of gravity.)
I’m not even going to comment on our self-styled Great Man and private-school aristocrat some comments back, who takes the absolutely opposite view about scion-coddling, in terms of actual kids- I think Andrew Carnegie would have some interesting things to say about that.
“It’s no surprise that I’m a fan of the miserly safety net,
You mean the system we have now?
(See also: public beliefs about % spent on non-military foreign aid, or on defense (would a military budget twice that of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea combined be a rise or drastic cut in military spending).
March 24th, 2009 at 7:41 am
The problem with the European model is that by substituting government policy for individual action, it tends to rob people of the ability to derive deep satisfaction from their lives. If the government takes care of the effort and guarantees the results, can any human activity provide real happiness?
But this is simply drivel. No European government does anything like this. A slightly enhanced safety net is not the same as the complete destruction of every opportunity for individual initiative. This is like saying that there are flaws with the US social model of arming everyone over the age of five with automatic weapons and settling civil disputes in the Thunderdome.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:30 am
if they manage to survive, let alone thrive, they’ll know that they did it on their own, without the help of the state, through heroic acts of self-reliance.
So the possibility of “happiness” comes toward the end of one’s life? And the alternatives available to individuals are so sparse and stark as “help of the state” or “heroic act of self reliance?” Do bequests or friendly favors contribute toward acting heroically?
March 24th, 2009 at 9:33 am
There is a middle way between social Darwinism and the nanny state.
Yes. It’s called social democracy and a robust safety net. It can be found in many European countries, and it has a nascent existence within the United States.
Picking up on bdbd’s observation that Murray is calling for things like “happiness” to be something that one only comes to looking back after a lifetime of hardship, the problem, of course, is that if Murray expects people to want to have families and children, he forgets that children are going to look at the lifetime of hardship and unhappiness and insecurity that their families were forced to endure and decide that this isn’t how they envision their lives turning out.
What was the country with the highest birthrate in Europe? The Darwinian hellhole that is Iceland. (national bankruptcy aside)
March 24th, 2009 at 10:17 am
“For the very good reason that the place had been sacked and razed by the Macedonians. Aristotle did bargain with Philip II to have it rebuilt and its survivors bought out of slavery as his price for tutoring the young Alexander.”
True, but Aristotle did not return to Stageira, preferring to remain in Athens.
March 24th, 2009 at 10:38 am
“But this is simply drivel. No European government does anything like this. A slightly enhanced safety net is not the same as the complete destruction of every opportunity for individual initiative.”
This. You beat me to it, ajay.
I can’t help noting that the ‘whole purpose of life is struggle’ idea is shared with a certain famously-20th C. ideology . . . something about bundled sticks (but this is getting into “the Nazis liked organic food too!!” territory – it’s more that it’s a common inheritance from late 19th C. social darwinism.
March 24th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Garrett seems to share the same experiences as I.
When I lived in the US, I was working 3 P-T jobs while trying to earn a basic bachelor’s degree. I worked alongside people in similar conditions… most eventually left school and gave up their dreams.
When I lived in Europe & Canada, people were basically the same but far more successful. Education rates were higher, and nobody worked through school.
Even the statistics confirm my experience – the Europeans are more likely to become rich with higher mobility, they have higher graduation rates, better social conditions, better childcare, lower crime, etc. People actually succeed more when the opportunity is there.
If one actually follows Jeff’s advice and looks at measures of happiness or HDI, they see the US ranks below most European Social-Democracies and has been falling consistently in the last few years.
The only measure the US does well in is GDP per capita… entirely because Americans work so much longer than their European counterparts. From polling, Americans would much rather work like the Europeans if they could, but the choice is not available. Likewise, the only demographics more likely to be employed in America are the elderly and youth… the elderly must work because of poor pensions and the youth work more because they are less likely to be in school.
A higher GDP per capita under these conditions makes for a worse society.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Dan S.,
Well, I think that in large part the purpose of life _is_ struggle, and a world without struggle and suffering would be a world without virtue and meaning. Would you care to actually respond to my post above, or prefer to make feeble accusations of Fascism?
Parenthetically, I think that much of social liberalism boils down to creating a world safe for soft effete p*ssies, a world of unlimited comfort, a world where nothing goes wrong, and that’s part of why I dislike it so much. As the saying goes, a fool-proof world will be a world inhabited only by fools.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Eventually, those “effete p*ssies” always kick the asses of those “suffering is virtue” conservatives and the world progresses.
The hunter-gatherers may have seen virtue in working harder and longer than those agricultural weenies, but they eventually died out.
The fundamentals just favor the easy-going Social Democracies and welfare states. They have superior health & education, while their children don’t need to overcome high crime and poverty. Sure, success is easier… the median US income of $24K is very low by most European standards, especially when you account for Government services.
At the end of the day, the Social Democracies are healthier, safer, better educated, more comfortable and happier because it’s easier. A country that intentionally holds obstacles to keep its population “virtuous” cannot hope to compete against these advantages.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Nietz,
You seem to think I’m some sort of defender of American capitalism. On the contrary, I’m on the left economically, and very critical of capitalism. I just don’t think that a decadent dystopia of comfort and freedom is a good alternative- I’m more with Sorel than with Mill there.
The great power that is going to best survive the coming economic crisis, which will make the Great Depression look like peanuts, is not the US and it isn’t France. It is Russia. Precisely because the Russians are not effete p*ssies, and they know how to suffer, and how suffering can be redemptive. When the social democrats and the market capitalists have destroyed themselves in futile efforts to keep their wealth from draining away, Russia will inherit the rubble, and she and her South American allies will establish a better order for the world.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I am just trying to be as practical as possible.
If I had to place my bets, I am putting it on the nations that produce the most educated, healthy, and financially / socially secure populations – specifically, the Northern Europeans.
I don’t care who is proud to overcome obstacles and become a doctor. I care who actually produces the most doctors.
It seems to be a common theme when new innovations & conquerers defeat a weak competitor. The defeated always claim they had some moral superiority because they had the heart & desire to fight against greater odds. You still lost.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Yes, we all see how well George H. W. Bush’s protection of his wayward son turned out for the American people.
Which is precisely my point, obviously. Of course Bush pere’s making sure that his son got everything he didn’t deserve and hadn’t worked for handed to him was disastrous for the American people. The point is that it happened. The point is that Bush fils DID achieve the pinnacles of power, influence, and wealth despite having no talent or personal accomplishments of any note, and even more to the point, despite having lied and betrayed, treated human beings like objects, and despite having screwed up everything he ever touched or tried. The point is that not having ever, once, achieved anything through his own effort most decidedly and absolutely indisputably did not detract from Bush fils’ happiness. To the contrary: It facilitated it.
Your argument that humans are happiest when they suffer as much as possible while having recourse to no, or very few, sources of practical and emotional help, is not just morally heinous but also completely without factual merit.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Wow. While I don’t generally feel ad hominem is worth descending to, I absolutely have to ask -
Unlike coddled Europeans, Americans face the constant possibility of personal economic catastrophe.
Into which of those two categories – coddled, or facing the possibility of personal economic catastrophe – does Charles Murray fall, I wonder? (actually, I don’t wonder at all.)
March 24th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Oh great. Hector ranting about p*ss**s. A drag queen engaging in an ongoing act of grisly necrophilia, trumpeting values he doesn’t understand and perverting them beyond recognition.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
It strikes me that America’s most famous entreneurs – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Spielberg, Wozniak, Walton, Getty, etc. etc., were never boyz from da hood or the ghetto or barrio.
Rather, they were born into and raised in comfort and security and had sufficient basic resources – a family and social strata safety net, to allow them the luxury of striving for excellentc.
This is a point that is continually missed by the ‘virtue through suffering” bunch.
Having experienced poverty myself, I did not find it ennobling or fortifying. Having seen the effects on poverty in others, I do not see it as constructive. Having watched people wrestle with budgets and subsistence existence, working class and always one paycheque away from the streetcorner, I don’t see them as all that better off.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Skeptic,
You appear to misinterpret me. I don’t think that American capitalism should further immiserate the poor. Rather, I wish that American capitalism be replaced by a better system, in which people will be invigorated and ennobled by constant struggle. Not just against pain and death, but also against the evil outside and the evil within. I want the Charles Murrays of the world to be drafted into that struggle as much as the boys from the hood.
I’m straight, by the way, and your drag queen implication is laughable. You seem like a decent fellow- I wish that you would realize that the hipster cosmopolites aren’t your friends. They have as much contempt for timber industry workers as the Charles Murrays of the world. Indeed, the Charles Murrays and the Hillary Clintons are flip sides of the same coin.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Here in Canada, the political opposition to the welfare state came substantially from the so-called National Citizens’ Coalition, which is bankrolled by insurance companies.
So….no cradle-to-grave government security blanket is allowed! Instead, everybody should but insurance for whatever risks exist.
This is Conservative Freedom.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Here in Canada, the political opposition to the welfare state came substantially from the so-called National Citizens’ Coalition, which is bankrolled by insurance companies.
So….no cradle-to-grave government security blanket is allowed! Instead, everybody should BUY insurance for whatever risks exist.
This is Conservative Freedom.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Marinara
Here is the difference between what I wrote in criticism of the libertarian/fiscal conservative viewpoint, and your criticism of the so called liberal viewpoint.
They really BELIEVE what I attributed to them. They state that belief overe and over again, and without a doubt it is a silly and childish way to view reality.
I don’t know a single person who is liberal who believes success is based on just dumb luck or exploitation.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
My problem, Hector, is that I understand you all too well. But no need to dwell on that.
Overall, the problem is that people develop these completely ludicrous ideas of social engineering that no one would waste a second on if applied anywhere else. I blame it on the pronounced streak of mysticism and mystical thinking that permeates the American character.
Look, no one sane would buy into the notion that your car would be better and more virtuous if you didn’t bother to change the oil, didn’t bother to check the tires, replace the fluids or do all the basic maintenance. Skip all that, and you do not have a car invigorated by struggle, your merely working your way towards premature junk.
Any farmer tells you, you want good crops, you fertilize the soil, you plant on time, you till the field, you weed, you use insecticides and pesticides as are necessary, irrigate if that’s required.
Now if a right winger came to you with the notion that this is mollycoddling and will produce a morally polluted crop derived from a dystopia of ease and comfort. Well… I’d laugh at him, box his ears and run him off, and under no circumstances would I let him near a crop.
Any businessman knows that you build a business by investing in it. By taking measures that ensure stability = permanent employees rather than casual labourers, purchasing machines and tools, acquiring space, offices, etc.
You go to a businessman and tell him “it would be better and more virtuous, and produce a better business, if you did not bother with a listed phone number, your clients would be ennobled by the effort of finding you, do not spend money on tools and infrastructure to make your products, for making junk is ennobling.” Why, that businessman would laugh at you, box your ears, run you off and never let you near his business.
But suddenly, some idiot on the right wing proposes this as a serious theory of social engineering, and people take it seriously to the point of actually debating it in a thread?
Unbelievable.
And the mythology of Europeans as backwards, lazy and indolent? Yeah, right. Technologically, America is already falling behind the Europeans and Japanese. Their cultures are more innovative, harder working, more entrepreneurial, more flexible. Why? Because these cultures invest in their people in pragmatic, matter of fact ways, the way a farmer invests in his crop, a businessman invests in his business or an automobile owner invests in his machine.
What makes America different, is that we sit around and have lunatic debates on subjects that are bone obvious, instead of getting on with the job and then moving on to the next level.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Skeptic,
I’ve worked with farmers quite a bit. I know how the process works, thanks very much. I can’t believe you think there’s an analogy. The difference, not to be bleeding obvious, is that people, unlike an orange tree, have a mind and a soul. You can’t have a healthy society if you only feed the body and not the soul.
And as a matter of fact, we have learned that sometimes the answer to, say, a mild insect problem is _not_ to nuke the plot with insecticides. Because we’ve learned enough, over the last century, to realize that it’s better to look not just at the orange tree, but at the farm ecosystem in general. And that sometimes, nuking that one pest with an insecticide without considering your effect on the all the other insects- including those that compete with it, those that prey on it, those that it might prey on- can actually make your problem worse in the long run.
Similarly, we can’t focus narrowly on meeting some human needs, without taking into account others as well. Man doesn’t only need food, shelter, education and medicine, though he direly needs those things. He also needs things like fulfiling work in a context where he- individually or collectively- exerts some control over his labor power, and in which he is making something socially necessary. A welfare state that doesn’t take into account man’s spiritual needs is no better than an orange farmer who trusts that all insect problems can be deal with by giant applications of pesticides. And after much experience in the 20th century, we now know that approach doesn’t work with oranges. I say that it doesn’t work with people as well.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
There seems to have been some confusion on people’s part regarding my use of the term “miserly safety net”. For example, Dan argues that the current system in the US is a miserly safety net. I disagree. What we have is a dysfunctional safety net.
A true safety net would protect everyone. I am actually in favor of universally guaranteed housing, food, and healthcare…but in such a way that this safety net would only be used as a last resort.
Here is what I wrote about providing food and shelter to all Americans:
http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2008/05/modest-proposal-to-solve-poverty.html
In the spirit of Scott Adams, who uses his blog to offer simple solutions to the world’s most intractable problems, I’d like to offer my thoughts on solving the problems of poverty and the welfare state.
On the one hand, it seems wrong for so many to live in squalor during a time of such plenty.
On the other hand, the generous European welfare state has largely failed; given the choice between hard work and no work with the same standard of living, many choose the path of least resistance.
The logical conclusion is to provide a universal safety net, but make sure that the services it provides are spartan and undesirable, so that no one is tempted to live a parasitic existence.
Here’s how it might work. Let’s assume that the most important thing to do is to provide food and shelter. Since McDonalds, and Taco Bell have already managed to push the price of meals down to $1 or less, we’ll focus on the shelter part of the equation.
1) Set up a government program, Project Shelter, that will provide free shelter to any citizen (the issue of what to do with immigrants shall be left for another post).
2) Every citizen has the opportunity to sign up for a Project Shelter account either online or at a government office.
3) Any hotel or place of lodging can opt into being a Project Shelter provider. In addition to providing shelter, they must also provide some means of using the Internet, such as an open computer cluster.
4) Anyone with a Project Shelter account can go to any Project Shelter provider and get one free night of accomodation per day. To do so, they log into the provider’s page on the Project Shelter web site (probably from the provider’s computer cluster).
5) The government reimburses providers $10 for each night of shelter that they provide through this program. This is done monthly via ACH.
Let’s examine why this would work.
A) Almost no new infrastructure. Rather than building government housing or using some elaborate system of subsidies, there is a single program with a reasonable cost.
B) By limiting the payment to $10 per night, it almost certainly guarantees that the accommodations will be spartan and uncomfortable. There’s little incentive for folks to try to join the program unless they are truly destitute (though I can imagine this being used by road-tripping college students…who don’t mind sleeping with the homeless). The same holds true for the requirement of daily logins.
C) Using a centralized Web site should limit opportunities for fraud, and make it relatively easy to investigate disputes and punish wrongdoers.
D) By simply offering reimbursement and specifying nothing else, we open up the floodgates of entrepreneurship.* Since few existing hotels will want to participate, innovative entrepreneurs will probably build Japanese-style “capsule” hotels, start marketing to homeless people, and compete to offer the best amenities they can to attract business, while still making a profit on $10/guest/day.
* Honesty compels me to point out one could imagine (as I did) that extralegal entrepreneurs might also take up the cause by purchasing accounts from the homeless in exchange for cash up front, or simply extorting them by violence. But I think that a random inspection regime for providers, and the value that a homeless person would place on nightly shelter would limit such abuses.
Even if you’re unemployed and broke, this program would give you a clean, safe place to live and improve your chances of finding work. Moreover, just about anyone should be able to find some way to scrape together $2-3/day for food. And if a few hard-working entrepreneurs or aspiring artists were to use the program to quit their day jobs and take a chance on achieving their dream, I’d still consider it money well spent.
What do you think?
March 24th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I don’t really buy this thinking at all. People in welfare states just don’t have US-style poverty traps… they still have all the drive and ambition and growth.
If we exclude those who have to work past retirement, Europe employs just as much of its population as the US. The welfare states actually employ MORE of their populations, thanks to higher female participation – probably due to universal childcare. I believe Denmark has the highest employment participation in the developed world.
The only people the US manages to employ better are those we shouldn’t *want* working… kids who would rather be in school and the elderly.
I think if you seriously want to address poverty then you need to accept most are single-mothers and their children. Most of these mothers are working. Such poverty doesn’t exist in welfare states because they have decided children should be given every opportunity to reach their true potential.
Unmarried parents are the norm in welfare states, yet they have the lowest poverty in the world.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
According to the OECD Education at a Glance (which I trust far more than Murray’s theory of scientific progress), the early US lead in innovation is over.
They attribute the early US gains after World War 2, when the US created the GI Bill and outspent everyone else through Government research. The conservatives were very much against this idea, arguing if you gave everyone a free university education then you’d just get kids hanging around universities on taxpayer funds.
The end result was incredibly successful and quickly copied by Europe. Today, nearly every European nation offers tuition-free university.
But if you look at current data, the US will inevitably fall behind. The US and Mexico have the highest dropout rates of more than 50%. Educational achievement, publication rates, comparative testing… the US used to easily rank the top in these, but is now well below average. Younger Americans are still better educated than their parents, but they have not kept up with the faster development in Europe or other advanced nations.
As older generations start to retire, this difference will be much more pronounced.
March 24th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
“Dan S., Well, I think that in large part the purpose of life _is_ struggle, and a world without struggle and suffering would be a world without virtue and meaning. Would you care to actually respond to my post above, or prefer to make feeble accusations of Fascism?”
Hector, I wasn’t actually directing that at you. Now it’s true, I had considered – re: some Pandagon comments pondering the ideological makeup of the Yglesias commentariat (why it consistently attracts a certain number of sexist or racist guys, as opposed to, eg, Atrios’ site) – going off on a colorful soliloquy about the various . . . interesting characters here, including you, based off the Blowfish’s little speech in the second-season opener of Torchwood (a show that I, er, can’t imagine you’d enjoy . . .), but in the end it was just too difficult . . .
So, yeah, I was talking about Murray. And while the fascist parallel was genuinely what sprung right to mind, given that ‘the purpose of life is struggle’ is such a basic cornerstone, I think I acknowledged that, taxonomically speaking, we’re talking about a primitive trait they’ve inherited from their ideological common ancestor.
I’ve been thinking about that, in fact, and have three possibilities to suggest, in terms of what Murray’s really doing here:
1) Murray’s babble about happiness is, technically speaking, bullshit – he probably doesn’t care whether it’s true or not, because that’s not the point. It functions to the extent that it serves to advance his actual agenda. As everyone unfortunately familiar with his earlier work could guess, that agenda is an eugenic one: he believes that the welfare state, by keeping life from being a ceaseless and brutal struggle for existence, allows the intellectually less fit, the inferior people, the untermenschen, to breed unchecked and thus exerts a dysgenic pressure upon society. (In a perfect world, Murray is shoved so far up his own arse that he disappears, in a kind of inverse case to that unfortunate mythological Greek king, but alas . . )
Or,
2) Happiness, eugenics – with Murray, these are mere outward containers for what is ultimately a sort of mindlessly emotive political aesthetics (see that marvelous Holbo piece. Seriously.), an irritable mental gesture, dogmatic ideology, etc, etc.
(At a first glance, the evidence could support either of these – he’s gone, over the last 25 years, from saying the welfare state is bad b/c it made things worse for poor/minority folks to saying the welfare state is bad b/c eugenics to saying the welfare state is bad because it robs them of the chance to experience the true ’spiritual’ satisfaction derived from miserable suffering; up next, the welfare state is bad b/c sparkly sparkly vampires, or something. There’s a clear and boringly predictable constant here – kill the welfare state! Are there no workhouses?, etc., etc. – but our question is: why?
A side observation, though, is the example of the Overton window in action – the foot in the door, for Murray and others, was opposing social programs for poor &/or minority people; the end game is (surprise!) dismantling social security*, medicare, etc., etc., etc. (At the moment we have Claire McCaskill twittering mindlessly about ‘entitlement reform’ and how we have to rein in big bad social security and medicare before it eats our children or some such. First they came for the poor/minorities, and I didn’t speak up b/c I wasn’t a poor or a minorities, and now somehow I’m up to ears in quinty-gazillion dollars of debt b/c a family member had a serious medical problem, and if we lose the house where will our elderly parents live, as they’ve been staying with us as so to avoid the eat cat food/freeze and die when the heat gets shut off option, and so on. )
Oh, and 3) is, well, a somewhat more sincere and complicated version of 2), really. Frankly, Murray is so full of crap that Don Williams could spend all eternity beating it out of him with an endless renewed stick in some sort of scatalogical Tartatus, and it would barely dent its soft and stinking surface.
Anyway, Hector, the kind of notions of struggle (and happiness) you’re yalking about just aren’t really relevant to what everybody else is talking about here; they just have the same name. Body, spirit, etc. (Merciful heavens, much more of this and I’m going to have to break out some spirits.) Although your terror of degeneration, and ’softness’ does mirror Murray’s spew, I think. Which gets us to your hysterical fear of (”a world safe for “) “soft effete p*ssies“.
Granted, I’m not sure why you’re so upset at the idea of accommodating pampered kitties, although I’m not the best person to talk to, as I’ve considered basically surrounding our yard with a giant cage so our little guy could roam around inside it relatively risk-free** . . . wait, that’s not what you mean?
Oh! But . . . er . . . I mean, I’d think vaginas should be soft, you know? And “effete” – well, that’s a really strange way to put it, but again, shouldn’t they be, I guess? Certainly the idea of “masculine” ones might be a little hard to swallow . . . (speaking strictly of the organ in question, not any current or former attributes of its possessor) . . .
No? Then what are you talking abou- Oh! Ok! Frantic gender panic-fueled rantings and rank misogyny/homophobia! Oh god, how hideous and disgusting women and their soft, enveloping womanly. . . womanly-ness are, that anything that supposedly resembles them – let alone, horror of horrors, menwho do so – is cause for such revulsion! How marvelous! How wonderful! How – {vomits}.
Chris Yeh – you’re right, I was somewhat confused by your earlier comment. I thought perhaps you were, perhaps, somewhat misled or misguided – I stand corrected. You are, in fact, a horrible person, and in a just world beautiful women would look away from you in revulsion, powerful men would have you dragged away by hired security, and children would jeer and pelt you with soft pats of dung, possibly Murray’s.***
* Just imagine a world where the Republicans had managed to privatize social security.
** Something he has absolutely no desire to do, having had his fill of outdoors as a little lost baby. But there is a potential conversation to be had about increasing middle+class risk aversion and desire for control (however – sometimes – reasonable and not-unwarranted it may be); from the days when their children, dogs and cats spent the day roaming free to the current situation. However, spittle-flecked screeching about soft, effete, etc. isn’t a productive way to start it).
*** Of course, in a just world – well, most of us better hope we never end up in a truly just world. At least unleavened without significant sprinklings of mercy.
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March 25th, 2009 at 12:04 am
Although, Hector, I should say I wholeheartedly agree with most of your comment #96 (brutally literalistic analogy-reading and crankishly persistant gender non-neutrality aside – if you don’t like the agri-analogy, look at the car and business ones instead). I’d add, though, that it can’t be the government’s place to feed people’s souls, but rather help provide conditions where they are free to cultivate their own gardens. When it comes to “[they] also need[] things like fulfiling work in a context where [they]- individually or collectively- exert[] some control over [their] labor power“, I completely agree. (”socially necessary, I don’t know if that’s the case. It’s nice, but I think we need some room for socially unnecessary things. Because I’m a liberal, you know.)
“It’s like something out of Dickens, only without the charm.
Oh yes. If Murray was a Dickens character, he would be named something like Grizzlewit.
“You go to a businessman and tell him “it would be better and more virtuous, and produce a better business, if you did not bother with a listed phone number, your clients would be ennobled by the effort of finding you, do not spend money on tools and infrastructure to make your products, for making junk is ennobling.” Why, that businessman would laugh at you, box your ears, run you off and never let you near his business.”
Skeptic, I think this also obliquely gets to something in Yeh’s post that I could perhaps comment on more coherently if it didn’t make we want to kick something – that stale odor of pinched, puritanical moralizing run amok, obsessed with the notion that those horrible lazy parasitic poor people whose situation is All Their Fault are Getting Away With Something. Talk to anyone’s who’s been/is on food stamps, and even just once got something the tiniest bit special, the smallest possible piece of joy, for a child’s birthday or as recompense for a truly bad day or whatever, something that doesn’t state monotonously that ‘you are garbage, and deserve scarcely more than nothing, save what is allowed you as befits your station’, and much more often than not they’ll tell you about the person in line or at the register who muttered on and on under (or quite above) their breath about what disgusting parasites -to paraphrase – they are.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Dan,
I’ve got to admit, I’m a perplexed by your response to my comment. Here’s what you said:
“Chris Yeh – you’re right, I was somewhat confused by your earlier comment. I thought perhaps you were, perhaps, somewhat misled or misguided – I stand corrected. You are, in fact, a horrible person, and in a just world beautiful women would look away from you in revulsion, powerful men would have you dragged away by hired security, and children would jeer and pelt you with soft pats of dung, possibly Murray’s.”
I may or may not be a horrible person that should be dragged away by hired security, but it would be easier for me to turn aside from the path of supervillainy if you were willing to provide an actual criticism of my proposals, as well as a concrete alternative.
As it is, I’m left with the vague impression that you think providing lower-quality (free) shelter to the poor is stigmatizing.
Does that mean that we shouldn’t provide benefits to the needy unless they are of the same quality as those available to the general middle-class public? That strikes me as impractical and fraught with dangerous incentives.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Iteresting post…. Murray is totally misguided though. I’m an American currently living in China and use the whole economic crisis debate is way different here… talking to Chinese people, they believe America has an incredibly generous saftey net ever – people here get SHIT if they fail or fall on hard times. And there’s no real upside for them – they’re not particularly happy, and they don’t seem to ‘create’ (invent) anything of value.
March 25th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
100[Dan S.]: I hereby bequeath to you my stock phrase, ‘REAL men have always found women to be suspiciously effeminate.’ (As I’m no Galombosian, I’ll keep using it.) Most of the previous eight years’ agenda seems to have more to do with looking butch than getting anything useful done.
Hector: Fortunately, your definition of ‘happiness’ is one of many, and you do not (yet) have the power to make it a societal norm. I think your definition of ‘happiness’ is Romantic in the worst sense of the word, and if that makes me less human…well, I happen to be a trans-humanist _precisely_ because so many seem to think that unasked-for pain and struggle make us human. Personally, as is the case with ‘Death brings meaning to Life,’ I think this is pure Sour Grapes.
(Come on, isn’t creating a life without suffering worth it, if only to allow us to laugh at everything else the Buddha said?)
Years ago, I think it’s in the EPIC/{New Deal}-era Heinlein story, ‘Coventry’, written before he found his {Nancy Reagan}-equivalent (the Talmud speaks of a good man who married a bad woman, and became bad), in which a man giving an Hector/Kirk-like speech about his society’s turning soft and bad because there is no struggle is answered by something like, ‘…there is still danger in experimental laboratories and hardship in the mountains of the Moon; you have no right to inflict your violent character on others.’ I’m also reminded of a beautiful speech, I think it’s by Lord Redlady, in C.I.A. man Paul Linebarger’s “The Planet Buyer” (part of “Norstrilia “) about civilised men are more dangerous than barbarians, butch as the latter might seem….
March 25th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
And a simple, anecdotal (and so not authoritative, hear that Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and occasionally Obama) and highly subjective observation, but middle-class Europeans I’ve known (casually, and not Biblically, unfortunately in some cases) always reminded me of _some_other_people_ I had known similarly. Finally, it hit me: they reminded me of the few Americans I’d known who had been born rich. Pleasant, solid, no core of survival-circuit anxiety I saw in myself, and in the Merkins around me. …the anxiety that makes it easy to say, ‘Screw those losers!,’ making it both symptom and infectious agent.
March 26th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Dan S.,
“Misogyny”? How tiresome. You’re the one who is seeking, through legalized abortion, to deny and negate the essential nature of women, and make them just as cruel and exploitative as men.
The evidence is clear that the liberal-cosmopolites endorse wholesale p*ssification. Look, they jeer at the traditional masculine virtues like courage, obedience, loyalty, and martial prowess, and they mock the idea that suffering, pain, and death can be good things. They see no place for virtue in the world, and think that comfort is better than virtue as a goal for society. They think an ideal world would be one where we didn’t have to work, and had as many lattes, blow jobs and PlayStations as we wanted. The utopia of decadent playboys, in other words.
Look, do you even _get_, at any level, the argument that all the human virtues find their origin in the struggle against evil and suffering, and that a world without suffering or evil would be a world without virtue? Is that, really, the kind of world you want? And no, I’ll use the rhetoric I choose, and I choose it to be as deliberately abusive as possible. The liberal cosmopolite hipsters need to know that civilized people do not consider them to be serious people or our intellectual and moral equals.
March 26th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Re: there is still danger in experimental laboratories and hardship in the mountains of the Moon; you have no right to inflict your violent character on others.
Er, yes, yes I do. Because those ‘others’ are simply wrong, and in a decent society their opinions would not be entitled to equal respect, or in fact to any respect at all in the political arena.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:23 am
““Misogyny”? How tiresome.”
I agree. It is very tiresome, rather boring, and also smells unpleasant, like damp week-old kitchen trash. Luckily, like damp week-old kitchen trash, it’s possible to try to remove it from one’s premises (if more difficult)
You’re the one who is seeking [attempted threadjack removed] to deny and negate the essential nature of women”
Gender essentialism – it’s what’s for dinner! (made, of course, by women, as per their essential nature),
“and make them just as cruel and exploitative as men.”
Misandry as well, which after all is only par for the course. It’s truly odd how anti-feminists always turn out to loathe guys as well, far beyond even what’s expected of the cartoonish hairy-legged ball-busting man-hating feminists that haunt their fantasies. I guess it’s because they’re generally miserable misanthropic bastards, but still, it just seems so pointless . . .
“Look, they jeer at the traditional masculine virtues . . . ”
Trojan, Spartan, close enough
“had as many lattes, blow jobs and PlayStations as we wanted.”
I’m waiting for a PlayStation that can also make lattes and give blowjobs. Well, I’m not, to be honest – if nothing else, one can see that going horribly wrong . . .
“Look, do you even _get_, at any level, the argument that all the human virtues find their origin in the struggle against evil and suffering, and that a world without suffering or evil would be a world without virtue? ”
Ultimately, that’s probably above my paygrade, but let’s go with it. First, as other folks have mentioned, the idea that we’re anywhere near a world without evil and suffering, that such a world is even remotely possible without vast changes – including, as Fnord mentions, what it even means to be human – would be laughable if it didn’t refer to so much misery. It’s like an australopithecine fretting about anthropogenic global warming, but more so. Secondly, wouldn’t that seem to say that the desire to help people get decently comfortable lives – even with lattes, though personally I’d pass – is a thing of virtue?
“And no, I’ll use the rhetoric I choose, and I choose it to be as deliberately abusive as possible.
Given that I’m ranting up in #100 about Yeh being a moral leper, it would be a bit hypocritical of me to complain that you’re being abusive. The problem is who you’re abusing (or more accurately, who you’re abusing by how you’re abusing). Basically, your abuse boils down, if translated into schoolyardese, to ‘you’re a girl! a girly girl! Girl!’. The problem here (besides that you’re presumably an adult) is . . . Well, ok: let’s say that Steve Sailer showed up and decided to insult another white person by saying, in essence (and clearly as an insult, a horrible thing, not as some confusion or ill-conceived attempt at colorblindness), ‘you’re black! Blacky blacky black!’. (Or more verbosely, ‘you kinky-haired Africanoid brown-skin!’).
Does that help? (Now, I have additional problems with the original “soft effete vagina’ example, because I actually think it’s ok if William wants a doll or Sally likes to climb trees; honestly, my sociopolitical philosophy can largely be described as “Free To Be… You And Me liberalism”*. But I don’t know if that’s something you can get, in a certain sense, at any level, both from fundamental outlook and because it’s surely such a threatening, frightening concept.
* When I was a kid, I actually randomly happened to run into Marlo Thomas in Central Park one day. It was very cool.)
March 26th, 2009 at 11:55 am
“Does that help?”
Just to expand on that a bit – so (again, as par the course) you’re putting women up a (extremely uncomfortable, restrictive, and imprisoning) pedestal (ie, you imply they’re kinder and less exploitative than men), but then it becomes clear you think they’re horrible icky things, and only stuck them up there to keep them far away (or possibly so you could push them over onto your hipster enemies). Now, you could say, “oh, no, that’s not it – given my hateful and reactionary views, it’s just that I think that being a woman is a perfectly fine thing – for women, and only a horrible unnatural thing when men try it, just like being a man is perfectly fine – for men, but a horrible unnatural thing for women”. And on a certain level that’s entirely right, but again our hypothetical Sailer-comment can help; after all, serious racists would be horrified both at black people acting white and white people acting black.
“Look, they jeer at the traditional masculine virtues like courage, obedience, loyalty, and martial prowess
And even sticking to quite traditional values, it’s laughably easy to see how quickly this falls apart. Courage? Two words: giving birth. Obedience? Fill in the blank: “to love, honor, and _ _ _ _” (you can even buy a vowel! Or two! Heck, 2.5!) Loyalty? Think how women are supposed to sacrifice for their families. Martial prowess? Ok, you have me there (in terms of traditional values) but since I always get “martial” and “marital” confused, whatever (”Hey, there isn’t any camouflage gear in here at all! And what are you supposed to do with those?”)
March 26th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Chris Yeh –
“I may or may not be a horrible person that should be dragged away by hired security, but it would be easier for me to turn aside from the path of supervillain
Oh, I don’t think you’re super-villain-like, really – much more akin to the drearily mundane nuisance-folk who make help life crappier in petty, unpleasant ways – the small-time bully (schoolyard, workplace, or bureaucratic varieties), people who steal things you leave on your desk, etc.
“if you were willing to provide an actual criticism of my proposals, as well as a concrete alternative.”
Well, I don’t know about the “concrete alternative” (these are blog comments after all – frankly, I’m shocked that you suggest such a thing), but I’ll try actual criticism. There’s other things to do as well, of course, along with explaining why your suggestion is so distasteful, so it may be a couple of hours. I’m sure you’re crushed and disappointed (if, for some reason, you’re still actually reading), but try to be strong. Otherwise Hector will cal you soft, effete, and lacking in the manly virtues, and then we’ll all have to giggle at him.
March 26th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Dan S.,
This thread is about to disappear into the archives, so if you want to continue this debate (and I’d love to continue it) you can do so on my blog: http://www.patriabolivariana2008.blogspot.com
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March 27th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
No, Hector, a decent society would allow both you and people who aren’t wrong to express their opinions, and probably there would be people who would express their respect for each, probably disjoint sets.
However, for that society to be decent by my lights, it wouldn’t hold your ideas about virtue and happiness to stand in the way of no-one’s ahving all the lattes, Play-Stations, and blowjobs he and/or she might want, as long as it didn’t Destroy the Environment or Oppress the Workers and Peasants, preferably by no-one’s being a worker or peasant. Part of the difference is that under such circumstances you would be free to suffer all the privation you’d like, whilst those of us in need of a laugh could stand around and alternately shout, with equal fervour both times, both ‘This is madness!’ and its exact synonym, ‘This! Is! SPAAAAAARTAAAA!’
March 29th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Dan,
I would love to better understand your way of thinking (and perhaps have you better understand mine). Contact me privately, and I’d be delighted to explore at greater length. I am honestly interested in your criticisms.
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