Civil War II Journal: To See, You Must Look

     The more you look, the more you see. -- Robert M. Pirsig

     The observation above seems a tautology. Its import rests on connotations that strike some as “obvious” but leave others scratching their heads:

• To look is an act of volition; it requires the willingness to see.
• To see is to perceive reality and to accept it as supreme over all preconceptions about it.

     As with so many other things, it does seem perfectly simple once you understand it:

     Almost all knowledge, after all, fell into that category. It was either perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into fiction. As a Jesuit—even here, fifty light-years from Rome—Ruiz-Sanchez knew something about knowledge that Lucien le Comte des Bois-d’Averoigne had forgotten, and that Cleaver would never learn: that all knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
     The residuum was faith.

     [James Blish, A Case of Conscience ]

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     The chaos of contemporary sociodynamics arises from a rampant particularism: the assignment of personal allegiances to ever more narrowly defined groups or – in the current argot – “identities.” Today the focus is upon political and racial allegiances.

     It’s an open secret that political affiliation tends to condition attitudes toward lawbreakers and miscreants. For example, as the mainstream media are now firmly aligned with the Left, they routinely downplay horrors committed by the Left and its mascot groups. When we in the Right dare to expose such media malfeasance, Leftists try their damnedest to silence us. Failing that, they strive to shout us down: “Racist!” “Sexist!” “Homophobe!” “Xenophobe!” and so forth.

     The mainstream media also strain to give the Left’s preferred coloration to the statements and actions of politicians in the Right. Who could possibly forget how the media characterized President Trump’s magnificent Mount Rushmore speech? “Divisive” was the mildest of their condemnations. Anyone who listened to the speech or read the transcript would know the condemnations for lies...but persons on the Left would rather swallow the media’s portrayal uncritically, in a state of self-imposed ignorance, than check it against the facts.

     Is it possible that we in the Right are guilty of the same sort of self-imposed blindness in the service of our partisanry? Yes, it is. However, I can’t put my finger on an example of it. That should tell you something as well, especially if you can cite examples of it.

     Allegiance groups are hardening the boundaries that define them, partly in response to the hostility of their opponents, but also to keep their allegiants within them. Fewer and fewer persons are actually willing to look. The consequences for what they see “should” be “obvious.”

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All the Protestants...hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics...hate the Protestants,
All the Hindus hate all the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews!

[Tom Lehrer, “National Brotherhood Week”]

     Left versus Right. Black versus White. Urban versus Suburban / Rural. Muslims versus Non-Muslims. Homosexuals versus Heterosexuals. White Collar versus Blue Collar. And Establishmentarians versus Everybody Else.

     I am put in mind of George Alec Effinger’s marvelous, horrifying short story “All The Last Wars At Once.” What will be left when the shooting stops? Will there be a foundation upon which we can reconstruct our traditional E Pluribus Unum? Will there be anything worth saving?

     Unclear. Massively unclear! And mortally frightening to those who love this country and its ideals, and who honor those who have labored, sacrificed, and bled to actualize them. Millions of good-hearted people from coast to coast are screaming for it to stop, to recognize the brotherhood of all men and return to public order. They’ve had enough and they want their country’s previous, admittedly imperfect harmony restored.

     I can’t convince myself that it’s possible. The divisions have been cleaved too deeply. The hatreds have been too greatly inflamed. And some of the groups involved have admitted quite candidly that their aim is to destroy the American sociopolitical order. In favor of what? It varies...but the destruction of the existing order, they maintain, is absolutely required.

     I look with both eyes open, and that is what I see.

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     I want to be wrong about this. I want the country of my youth back; yea verily, just as much as I want my youth back. But the more I look, the more evidence I see that the struggle has become total and final: those who cherish America as it was versus those who seek to tear it down. I remain alert for evidence to the contrary. Where is it?

     Where are the Leftists who will restrain their violent ideological brethren?
     Where are the blacks who will discipline their unruly co-racialists?
     Where are the homosexuals who want only to be left in peace?
     Where are the Muslims who will corral the jihadis?

     And where oh where are the academics, entertainers, and assorted glitterati who will rein in their fellows who persistently condemn us in the Right as ignorant, subhuman, aspiring totalitarians?

     To any men of good will who sit silent among the left-inclined, the blacks, the homosexuals, the Muslims, and the rest: Show yourselves! If you retain your decency, step forward. Proclaim the brotherhood of man: that as we are equal in our Creator’s eyes, we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us. That all lives matter! Rebuke and restrain those of your particular “identity” who would dare to say otherwise. Else I will disbelieve in you. I will have no choice.

     I will continue to look, and I will report what I see.

Clusters And Bubbles

     I was musing over a handful of topics for a column when I came upon this Chris Muir strip:

     Chris’s gift for portraying important (albeit unpleasant) truths in pictorial form is one I’ve envied for a long time. Those three frames are equivalent to a really long essay – and as a bonus, they make one laugh. Amazing!

     I hope he won’t mind if I add a few words of my own.

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     Time was, the houses of Congress were in session for only a few weeks per year. The rest of the year, the Senators and Congressmen were in their home states and districts – and not to do “constituent service.” The nation’s legislators were working people, in contrast to the “professional politician” of today.

     As time passed and Congress arrogated more and more power to itself, Congressional sessions were lengthened. Today they occupy by far the greater part of the year. That creates a rationale for federal legislators to live in the District of Columbia or nearby. In consequence, their social circle is – drumroll, please – one another, rather than the people of the districts that put them in their offices.

     I’m not aware of any book that traces the emergence of the social and political environment the members of the federal power elite inhabit. I’d love for there to be one. It would be my first hardcover purchase of 2020. For as Chris implies in the above, it was the concentration of power-mongers in a small geographical region that gave rise to the “Washington bubble:” the sense that the consensus among D.C.’s political class is what really matters, rather than the rights, prerogatives, preferences, and opinions of private American citizens. A delineation of how that mindset evolved within the clustering confines of Washington would be instructive, to say the least. It would also point the way toward the dilution thereof.

     The same effect is visible in other bubbles that have clustered geographically. One of the most obvious is the media bubble. Media types associate almost exclusively with one another. What they “know” consists of the consensus among their fellows. They have little contact with private Americans who might differ with them. To a large extent this is a consequence of their concentration in three left-liberal urban enclaves.

     What other occupations exhibit such clustering tendencies? Correlate them with the social, economic, and political opinions prevalent therein. What does the pattern tell you?

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     President Trump’s recent move to push a major executive department out of the D.C. area suggests that he’s aware of the consequences of clustering and has decided to act against them. It might not prove entirely effective; after all, social circles once established can be rendered portable. But it’s a nice experiment, a first strike against one of the most pernicious tendencies in American sociopolitics: the “Us versus Them” effect that arises from the identification of political-class members with one another rather than with the interests of Americans generally.

     Of course, the political class hates him for it. How could it be otherwise? They’re jealous of their lifestyle and perquisites, which they would strain to replicate once moved from D.C. to Wichita. And to be surrounded by all those commoners! How would they transmit their ruling-class attitudes to their progeny, that the kiddies would be properly prepared to ascend into the halls of power in their turn? Think of the children!

     It only sounds satirical, Gentle Reader. The cluster makes the bubble possible. If we destroy the cluster, we have a chance to make the bubble burst. Not a guarantee, mind you – and all taken with all, I’d prefer to see something more wholesale. But a chance is better than continuing to wring our hands over the status quo.

A Loss Of Some Magnitude: A Sunday Rumination

     As I prepared myself for Mass this morning – and remember, it’s Gaudete Sunday, so be sure to get in some rejoicing – I was struck by a thought that seemed to come completely out of left field. It was about the inseparability of gain from loss: the impossibility of making progress in any dimension without simultaneously and unavoidably losing ground in some other. And as it is Sunday, a day on which my attention is turned to matters of faith and the spirit, that got me thinking about some of the gains and losses we have experienced, over the century behind us, that pertain to those things.

     One thing we have lost – or have sacrificed voluntarily – is the use of our religious affiliation as an organizing principle.

     That phrase might look a bit odd to a Twenty-First Century American Christian. Yet a few moments’ thought will unpack it easily.

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     One’s religious affiliation was at one time a major determinant – for some, the sole determinant of importance – of one’s major life choices and activities. Think about the decisions Americans once made based on the dictates and constraints of their chosen faith and denomination:

• Where to live;
• Whom to marry;
• Where to school the kids;
• Where to attend services (of course);
• How to spend a large fraction of one’s “free time.”

     Some of those choices have been ripped out of our hands by economic forces. For example, rare is the family in our time that can afford a genuine religious education for its children, no matter how much they might want it. Property taxes have greatly diminished the ability and the willingness of typical parents to pay for a religious education. Other choices have been greatly affected by material matters regardless of whether we’re aware of it. For example, one’s choice of residential neighborhood is likely to be constrained by where one can work – a choice that grows steadily more confining as the specialization of all occupations accelerates.

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     Whereas one’s faith was once a major principle of organization, by which one’s major life choices were guided if not determined, for the great majority of contemporary American believers it has taken a distant back seat to other considerations.

     This is not uniformly true, of course. Some sects still treat their faith as the consideration that eclipses all others. For example, the typical Hasidic Jewish family will almost certainly be found in a neighborhood that’s populated all but exclusively by other Hasidic Jewish families. Mormons also tend to dominate the neighborhoods in which they live, though not to the degree of the Hasidim. And Jewish parents still urge their children to marry within their faith, though they no longer chant the Kaddish if Junior should marry a gentile.

     Alongside those things, Americans’ faith was once an important determinant of their use of the leisure time. Adults would involve themselves in charities organized by the church or synagogue. Children would participate in games and sports affiliated with their church or synagogue. There was a greater emphasis on outreach as well, a practice that today seems confined to the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Much of this vanished with the old public service pitches about how “the family that prays together stays together” and how we should “go to the church of your choice.”

     Some would say we’re better off today – that contemporary life is freer and richer for the reduction of churchly importance in our lives. But it occurs to me that many of the social malaises we know today were all but entirely absent among those who put faith and involvement in it at the center of their lives.

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     Before the rising cost of living forced American wives out of their homes and into wage employment, the Missus had more hours per week and more energy for neighborhood involvement. In a faith-centered community, such involvements were likely to draw in the other family members. That strengthened the attachment of the various family members both to the faith and to the family. Divorces were rare. Children tended to marry from within the neighborhood, and therefore within the faith. The whole edifice was strengthened.

     Yes, there were drawbacks. It could seem confining. A genuinely unhappy couple could find the stresses to be unbearable. And the kids would complain, as kids always have and always will, about Mom and Dad imposing on “their time.” Nothing worth having comes without cost.

     But what do we lament today? Marriages that fly apart at a touch. Large scale anomie among the young and pervasive loneliness among adults. Neighborhoods in which the neighbors are strangers to one another. A general rootlessness in which the only things that seem to endure are taxes and zoning inspectors. And piles and piles of gadgets that absorb an unholy fraction of our time and attention...whether we will it or not.

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When I wrote the following in Which Art In Hope:

     “Excuse me, Miss,” Stromberg’s voice boomed out. Teresza jerked her head around to find the sociologist and most of the class staring straight at her. “Yes, you who’re holding Mr. Morelon’s hand in a grip of steel.” A titter ran through the hall. Teresza flushed. “Do you have an opinion on the subject?”
     “Uh, no, Professor.” Teresza rose and gathered her thoughts as best she could. “I was just surprised to hear that they had all that junk.”
     Stromberg smiled broadly. “Everyone is, Miss...?”
     “Chistyakowski.”
     The sociologist frowned. “Teresza Chistyakowski? Aren’t you a junior?”
     How on Hope did he know? “Yes, sir.”
     “Then you must have taken this course two years ago.”
     Teresza nodded. “Yes, sir, with Professor Friedland.”
     Stromberg started to say something else, but apparently changed tracks before it could come out. “Well, you may take my word for it, Miss. In 2061, thirty-four percent of the economy of the richest sector, which was called the United States, was devoted to entertainment and diversions. As a category, that outstripped the second largest sector, medical services, by more than two to one. If our histories are accurate, its products were consumed with an unbelievable avidity, and its customers were perpetually hungry for more.”

     ...I was principally concerned with family shrinkage and the prevalent obsession with material goods of a transiently entertaining variety. I hadn’t yet started to think about the importance of faith in holding the family together. But the connection is strong.

     There is no Last Graf. It’s wrong to encourage people to adopt a faith for “practical reasons” or to advance “community integrity.” Nor is there any prospect of strengthening religious involvements among people who lack the desire. But the loss of religious affiliation as an organizing principle counterbalances our material gains rather dramatically. Sometimes the loss seems the larger of the two.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Watch Or Not, As You Prefer

     (An impulse I couldn’t resist. Sorry.)

Pacifying The Proles

     The aim of the High is to remain where they are. – George Orwell, 1984

     "Government's a dubious glory...You pay for your power and wealth by balancing on the sharp edge of the blade. That great amorphous thing out there -- the people -- has turned and swallowed many governments. They can do it in the flash of an angry uprising. The way you prevent that is by giving good government, not perfect government -- but good. Otherwise, sooner or later, your turn comes." [Frank Herbert, The Godmakers ]

     The moral dimension of arranging the assassination of a popular politician didn’t trouble Wriston at all. Living in the public eye had always entailed increased risk. Historically, whenever some troublemaker had roused the rabble to a greater pitch than the Establishment of that time and place could tolerate, it had disposed of him with no compunction and extreme prejudice. There were parts of the world where that was still the inevitable price of rising to power—places where a dismissal from high office was always administered with high-velocity lead. Power seekers in such lands arrived in their palaces with their death warrants already signed and sealed; they merely awaited delivery. [Shadow Of A Sword]

     However they represent themselves, and whoever their true beneficiaries may be, all political Establishments must take care to do one crucial thing: to keep “the proles” in their place. To fail at this is to fall to the scythe.

     Perhaps the most curious feature of Orwell’s great dystopian novel is his paucity of elaboration on how The Party kept the proles from rising against it. Clearly there had to be some mechanism for keeping them pacified, but the only thing Orwell mentions is a lottery upon which the proles are encouraged to focus, and whose largest prizes always seem to go to persons no one knows. Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian vision Brave New World, makes use of a drug, “soma,” which has both euphoric and tranquilizing properties and which is distributed freely to the Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon classes.

     The emperors of classical Rome famously employed a panem et circenses technique: “bread and circuses,” to keep the plebes fed and diverted. Free grain was distributed regularly, without any attempt by the Empire to determine whether the recipient was in need. Spectacles in the Coliseum and lesser regional arenas were used to entertain the plebes and exhaust their energies. It worked to an extent, but to maintain its effect it had to be increased as time passed. Toward the end of the Empire, grain distributions and Empire-sponsored spectacles were held on 220 of the 360 days in the Roman calendar. It was one of the influences that ultimately crashed the Roman order.

     Suzanne Collins’s dystopian Hunger Games trilogy, whose totalitarian state is named Panem in obvious homage to the Roman technique, portrays an almost perfect parallel approach to the pacification of the masses – but with a difference: those outside the ruling caste cannot become prosperous. The State’s exactions limit the commoners to little better than subsistence, and sometimes less. The theory behind that approach would be that a people barely able to feed itself would not have the time or surplus energy for political restiveness. It doesn’t work out that way in Collins’s books. Neither did it hold for long in the U.S.S.R.

     In Western societies of our time, the tranquilizers and pacifiers must be more subtly engineered. Moreover, a variety of them must be provided. The Establishment cannot allow their function to be too obvious. Neither can it ensure that a sufficient fraction of the common folk will fasten on any particular one. Yet the underlying pattern hearkens back to Rome.

     America has a luxurious welfare state, in theory a compassionate effort to relieve the extremes of poverty but in practice a mechanism for binding its supposed beneficiaries to the State’s teats. The giveaway here is how the definition of “poverty” has mutated over time. Today a “poor American,” entitled to the State’s generous “benefits,” would be about equivalent to a member of the working class in other Western societies. He’d certainly be in no danger of starvation or death by exposure. Little to nothing is asked of him in return for the State’s largesse. The arrangement suggests that the point is not to get people out of poverty but to enroll as many welfare clients as possible.

     America also has its spectacles. They’re not provided by the State, but they function similarly to those once held in Rome’s Coliseum. Various forms of inexpensive entertainment, many of them provided to us in the comfort of our homes, occupy a large fraction of Americans’ free time. Over time those entertainments have steadily increased their emphasis on the two indispensable elements of anything intended to hold a commoner’s attention: sex and violence. The barons of the entertainment industry have been careful to maintain close relations with the political powers that be, a point that should not be lost on the reader.

     And it works. For decades the combination succeeded in diverting a sufficient fraction of the populace from any serious degree of attention to political goings-on: sufficient, that is, that the Establishment has managed to retain control of the fraction that bothers itself over such things. Only in the most recent years has its grip begun to slip.

     Why? How is it that so meticulously designed and carefully maintained a system for keeping us proles in our place should have begun to lose its purchase? Have the giveaways and the spectacles lost part of their savor? Have they who engineered the system become incompetent or negligent? Or has the passage of time actuated influences of power great enough to countervail our contemporary bread and circuses?

     There are several candidate explanations. Some involve grand socioeconomic theories of history. Others rely on a Hegelian / Marxian dialectical account, despite the crudity of such an approach. A few posit the importance of world-historical individuals credited with the power to shape events by their personal force, a theory that recent events support to some degree.

     We cannot be certain which of these explanations is at all valid. What we can know, with a confidence approaching certainty, is that the pacification system of the century behind us is failing. The masters of our Establishment will strive to buttress it, for the alternative – from their perspective, of course – is worse. Attention to developments will pay as never before.

     Be watchful. Keep your powder dry.

The Identitarian Dynamic

     I’m not back “all the way” yet, Gentle Reader. There’s still too much on my platter for me to be as regular as I normally strive to be. But I have enough gas in the tank for a short piece.

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     I wrote some time ago about the influence of a tribal orientation on sociodynamics. The part that’s most relevant to contemporary political divisions and attitudes ran thus:

     Should political incentives arise that reinforce tribal distinctions and preferences, havoc will ensue. A nation-state cannot endure under conditions of internal inter-tribal strife; as Abraham Lincoln put it, a house divided cannot stand. There must ultimately be either a convulsive reduction of the tribes to political passivity, for example by warfare, or a parting of the ways that dissolves the nation-state into two or more separate units, as happened after the British relinquished the rule of India....

     Most fascinating of all, interior conflicts brought about by political forces can actually germinate new tribes within the nation-state. Those conflicts, and the nascent tribes they elicit, can arise from:

• Legal privileges granted to some persons but not others;
• National policies that have regionally, racially, sexually, ethnically, occupationally, religiously, or otherwise discriminatory effects;
• De facto infringements or abridgements of the rights of recognizable groups.

     When such forces cause new tribes to arise within an existing nation-state, their tribalism tends to be irruptive, disruptive...and sometimes violent. The extent to which they take hold and attract allegiants is the measure of their impact upon the health of such a nation, and the prospects for its continued existence.

     When you hear someone decrying “racism,” or “sexism,” or “Islamophobia,” or lambasting the “white identity movement,” or the renascent American nationalism that’s accompanied the ascendancy of President Donald Trump, compare what he’s saying to the dynamic implied by the above. This is particularly important as regards one of the occupational tribes that has recently emerged: the journalists’ tribe.

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     This recent exchange between CNN “reporter” Jim Acosta and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is massively illuminating:

     Acosta has acquired a reputation as the worst of the worst in the legacy media’s cadre. He’s rude, arrogant, and insistent: the archetype of an entitled personality. When he doesn’t get what he wants, he bitches at maximum volume. Nothing can restore order except his forcible expulsion from the room. And his network is solidly behind him and his tactics.

     Acosta is the perfect representative for journalistic identitarianism. That tribe has emerged in response to Donald Trump’s accurate characterization of the legacy media as fundamentally opposed to the interests of the American people. Under current conditions, it’s unlikely to dissipate. The legacy media have been enlisted as an auxiliary arm of the Democrat Party. Its barons are determined to keep what kowtowing to the Democrats has “earned” them – access to the luminaries and power-brokers of the Left – and will therefore brook no divergence from the existing playbook. If you doubt this, consider the unsavory case of Sarah Jeong.

     Journalistic tribalism is occupational in nature. There aren’t many other occupations following that pattern at this time, but one exceptionally important one must be mentioned: bureaucratic tribalism. It’s been “under the radar” for many years – see the David Boren quote embedded in this piece — but it’s now “coming out” for all to see as Trump’s “drain the swamp” agenda progresses. Tribalist sociodynamics apply to bureaucrats quite as much as to the races, sexes, sexual orientations, the journalism trade, and so forth.

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     One final thought for today, which deserves to be in large font:

Tribalism + Politics == Warfare.

     Our social peace has been riven entirely because of tribal dynamics. Until the tribes disperse – i.e., until they subordinate their tribal allegiances to the higher cause of the nation – the mud-slinging, disruptions of public events, and violence will continue. Indeed, they’ll grow worse as some tribes perceive themselves to be winning (or losing) against their rivals.

     The prospects for social harmony in the near future are bleak. Nor is there any palliative available, other than the individual decision to withdraw completely from social and political life. Perhaps the most penetrating statement that could be made about it all came from Winston Churchill:

     Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.

     Keep the faith.