In Search of the People (Part I)

We have previously discussed the role of Motte and Bailey tactics in leftist revolutionary thought. Words like critical thinking, education, racism, oppression, and genocide do not mean what most people think they mean. Specifically, they have nothing to do with physical violence, teaching people to read and think for themselves. Instead, these words are simply reduced to matters of whether you support the leftist revolutionary agenda. If you do not, then you are guilty of racism, oppression, and genocide. If you are a parent or teacher, you are guilty of failing to educate children and teach them critical thinking skills. Because of this, leftist revolutionaries are justified in using violence against you.

Here, I would like to turn to the word “people.” Within classical liberal thought, people are important in the sense that everyone should have equal rights and be equal before the law regardless of their birth or personal wealth. For leftist revolutionaries, while they pretend to support the masses, in actuality the People are those who support leftist revolutionaries as opposed to the vast majority of individuals who live in a country who are alienated from themselves and suffer from false consciousness. This has important implications for democracy. Democracy, for leftist revolutionaries, is about not elections and rule by the majority of voters. On the contrary, a country like North Korea is a true people’s democracy as Kim Jong Un represents the true consciousness of the People. This notion of the people goes back to Rousseau, who had even greater contempt for the masses than even Plato.   

Much of the story of leftist revolutionary movements can be seen as a search for the People. Leftist revolutionary intellectuals can never be more than a small percentage of any society. In order to seize power, they have needed to hold up some larger group and pretend to rule in their name. This has meant finding a group that not only is physically oppressed and demands reforms but is so alienated from the rest of society that their needs can only be satisfied through a complete revolution.

Consider the example of the French Revolution. The French political system in 1789 was in need of reform such as the elimination of feudal privileges and that the monarch should share power with a national assembly. These were things for which there was widespread support throughout French society. The problem for the French Revolution was what to do after the low-hanging fruit was dealt with in the summer of 1789. There was no national consensus for any truly revolutionary changes. As such, the radicals of the revolution ran into stiff opposition not just from aristocrats who fled abroad and supported foreign invasion to restore the ancient regime, but also from peasants. 

This challenge to the Revolution helped bring about the Reign of Terror. Robespierre was faced with the problem that for all his talk about the People, the majority of actual people in France were quite counter-revolutionary. As a Rousseauian, Robespierre’s solution was simply to define the People as those who supported the Jacobins, with himself then as the embodiment of the will of the People. He could then commit mass murder against Frenchmen in the name of the People and turn himself into a dictator. As the majority of Frenchmen lacked a revolutionary consciousness, they did not count as the People. As such, they needed to be reeducated or killed in order for the real people to come into themselves.

One of the main ways that the French Revolution influenced classical Marxism is that it taught Marxists to distinguish between peasants and urban workers and assume that only rural workers counted as the People. Peasants lacked a revolutionary consciousness. They still clung to Christian beliefs and the land that they worked on. Allow for some basic land reform to turn peasants into small landowners and peasants would turn into the staunchest defenders of the establishment. By contrast, Marxists assumed that urban workers could be turned into a properly revolutionary class. By moving to the city, workers could be assumed to have dropped their Christianity and their dreams of owning some land or a small business. Trapped under the heel of a capitalist boss, the worker would have no choice but to embrace a total revolution of society.

The main threat to urban workers developing a revolutionary consciousness was nationalism. Workers, having abandoned their precocial identity as living in a village or province, might, upon moving to large cities, choose to identify with the nation and believe that they could improve their lot by engaging in national politics instead of a global revolution. As such, nationalism needed to be denounced. Those who believed in their nation could not be the People. 

The classical Marxist opposition to the bourgeoise, religion, and nationalism helps explain the deeply seeded anti-Semitism within Marxism and the wider left. Historically, Jews have functioned as an economic class, a religion, and as an ethnicity. All three of these manifestations of Judaism were problematic from a Marxist perspective. Obviously, Marxists could not accept the role that Jews have historically played as merchants and moneylenders. Jews also needed to abandon their beliefs in being chosen by God. Finally, Jews could no longer think of themselves as a people but instead should assimilate into the wider human family. Take away Judaism as an economic class, a religion, and an ethnicity and there is nothing left. As such, for Marxists, Jews did not exist as a people and Judaism needed to disappear. Only by abandoning Jewish peoplehood could Judaism join the People. 

One of the ironies of Marxist anti-Semitism is that it was not lessened by the large numbers of Jewish Marxists. On the contrary, Jewish Marxists promoted anti-Semitism. To be accepted as a Marxist, a Jew needed to demonstrate that they rejected everything about Judaism. At most a non-particularist version of Judaism (Tikkun Olam) could be allowed to survive. Such a Judaism is not any kind of Judaism at all but it is useful for covering the fact that the goal is the elimination of Judaism. Following this logic, Jewish identity could be allowed as long as a Jew used their position as a Jew to denounce Judaism and argue that they were not being anti-Semitic in doing so on the grounds that they were Jewish and were fulfilling the true Jewish spirit of humanistic universalism.     

Am I to Blame for Killing Your Lord (or for Racism)?

 

As a principled classical liberal, I believe in the importance of reading things that one disagrees with the goal of being able to pass an Ideological Turing Test. This means being able to talk about a position in such a way that people will not be able to tell the difference between your description and the words of genuine supporters. I do read plenty of things that I disagree with. That being said, recently I find that a large percentage of that reading is being taken up by contemporary Christian conservatives like David F. Wells, and Voddie Bauchman. This is to say nothing of my great love for classical Christian writers like C. S. Lewis, who I have been reading since my Yeshiva University days, and G. K. Chesterton, and John Bunyan. All of these are writers that I can listen to for hours at a time with great pleasure. By contrast, I have a difficult time with Woke writers such as Robin DiAngelo, and Ibram X. Kendi to the point that I cannot listen to them for more than a few minutes without getting annoyed. The reason for this, I suspect, has much to do with my annoyance, as a teenager, with Rabbi Avigdor Miller; I take their criticism personally.

By contrast, I do not take Christianity as a personal threat to me. As I once explained to my students, I am privileged to be able to read the New Testament in a post-Vatican II world where the Catholic Church has denounced anti-Semitism and specifically the charge that the Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus. This means that I can read the New Testament, and by extension the wider corpus of Christian literature, without getting hung up on whether someone is blaming me for killing their Lord even to the point of wanting me dead. I am well aware of the historical reality of Jews shuddering in fear on Easter Sunday from drunken peasants who had just been told by their priest that the Jews murdered Jesus. This only highlights the fact that this is not the world in which I live. On the contrary, as far as I can tell, conservative Christians are far more likely on Easter to contemplate how fortunate they are that the Jewish people gave them their Savior and that it is a wonderful thing that the Jews have returned to the land of Israel just like in the days of Jesus. 

I am particularly grateful to the Protestant tradition with its emphasis on total depravity. From this perspective, the Jews, as a group, can never bear particular responsibility for crucifying Jesus. All human beings are equally depraved in their sinfulness. This means that Jews cannot be worse than anyone else. Furthermore, since Jesus died for the sins of the entire world, the sins of both Jews and Gentiles equally serve as nails in the Cross. 

Conservative Christians may wish that I convert to their religion and even believe that I will be condemned to Hell for all eternity for not accepting Jesus. That being said, I do not believe that they take my failure to convert personally. It is not as if I am, in some sense, torturing Jesus with my Jewish practices, beyond all the other eight billion sinners on the planet, showing that, if I had lived in the first century, I would have been crying out for Jesus' crucifixion just as loudly as my ancestors. 

When I read Woke literature, the essential point that I cannot ignore is precisely that I am being personally held responsible for American racism (or sexism, homophobia, or economic inequality). It does not matter that I do not feel any ill will towards black people, particularly as this group includes members of my family. Nor does it matter that none of my ancestors lived in the United States before the 20th century so none of them were owners of African-American slaves. The mere fact that I hold ideas they deem racist (mainly anything they strongly disagree with), makes me racist even if I never had any racist intent. The mere fact that I have white skin means that I have, in some sense, benefited from racism. By not getting on board with their plan to end racism, I fail to be an "anti-racist" and this, according to Kendi, makes me a racist.

The claim that I am responsible for racism has much in common with the traditional Christian anti-Semitic charge of deicide. My ancestors were never threatened by Christians out of a belief that my ancestors personally crucified Jesus. The assumption was that my ancestors, by remaining Jews, showed that they would have crucified him. As such, it was like they crucified him. As long as there were people, like Jews, exposed to Christian teachings but who stubbornly still rejected it, Jesus, in some sense, would continue to suffer on the Cross. From this perspective, the only solution would be to eliminate Jews either through conversion or through violence. 

Similarly, from the Woke perspective, I am guilty of racism simply because I am white. This is possible because, as with the Christian notion of sin, racism is assumed to be systemic. It is not about what you do but about who you are. In Christianity, this notion of sin is countered by the doctrine of total depravity. Since all humans are equally guilty of sin, no person can set themselves over anyone else in judgment and demand that they atone. No one can claim that they have committed the sin of lust in their hearts fewer times than me and are therefore less guilty of fornication. By contrast, for Wokeness, being marginalized means that you can lecture others about their privilege. For example, a black person can lecture me about my racism on the assumption that the mere fact that they are black means that they are less guilty of racism. It should be noted that, from the Woke perspective, it is impossible for a black person to ever be guilty of racism against whites, no matter how hateful their words are, while white people are guilty of racism simply by being white. The black person, it is assumed, does not wield power, while the white person, by virtue of their skin color, does. 

Something that I find fascinating about DiAngelo is that she specifically targets Jews as one of her main examples of whites trying to deny their complacency with racism. The white Jew tries to claim that they cannot really be guilty of racism because, as a Jew, they have also experienced oppression. This is parallel to the traditional Christian anti-Semitic argument that Jews bear a unique kind of guilt for the death of Jesus because Jews claim that they are saved through their works in following the Law and do not need Jesus. Just as Jews present a challenge to Christianity by opening up the possibility that some people might not really be tainted by Original Sin and therefore do not need Jesus, the white Jew challenges people like DiAngelo with the possibility that skin color might not be the best prism for understanding oppression. As such, white Jews bear a special guilt for racism. Since the Woke definition of racism is built around power. 

I can read conservative Christian writers, whose theology is premised around the doctrine of total depravity (distinct from Christian white nationalists) because I do not have to worry that they want me dead or that someone might "misunderstand" their words and try to kill me. When it comes to Woke writers, I have a difficult time interpreting them as anything other than dog-whistling calls to kill me as a white person who refuses to own up to the fact that I am responsible for most of the evil in the world today. For example, there is the wide support for the Palestinian cause and the willingness to tie it to American civil rights movements. If members of Black Lives Matter openly proclaim that their cause is simply another side of the Palestinian "fight for justice," I have no objection to taking them at their word and concluding that they are a terrorist organization committed to violence. Let us assume that, at the very least, they consider the murder of millions of Jews in Israel as an acceptable price for making Palestine free from sea to sea. I should also assume that they support something similar here in the United States where whites pay their "reparations" by accepting that it is only just and right that they should be robbed and even murdered. The fact that whites include Jewish whites and even Holocaust survivors will not cause them to pause. On the contrary, white Jews are particularly guilty of racism in that they have served to bring "Zionism" to American shores. 

From this perspective, no reasonable dialogue is possible. This certainly makes it harder to justify reading their books. It is not as if I am going to be sitting down with the Woke to show them that I have taken their concerns to heart and it might be possible to reach a compromise. If Wokeness is simply a plot to offer intellectual cover for mass murder then the only reason to read Woke literature is to convince the non-Woke of this fact and to warn the Woke that we know that their claims regarding social justice are a sham and are not going to submit to their moral blackmail.              

Legalizing Discrimination: A Liberal Solution to the Recent Supreme Court Rulings

 

Last week, the Supreme Court offered two rulings along 6-3 ideological lines that upset many liberals, which I would like to discuss here. In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the court ruled against the affirmative action programs of Harvard and North Carolina, arguing that they discriminated against Asian students. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the court ruled that a Christian website designer could refuse to design same-sex wedding websites. I empathize with liberals and recognize that liberals deserve to live in states and have institutions that reflect their values. I would like to propose a solution that would give liberals the opportunity to rule parts of America according to their desires without interference from conservatives; we should eliminate the 1964 Civil Rights Act and limit the power of the Fourteenth Amendment so that it does not mean that constitutional rights apply to states. 

At first glance, liberals may be horrified by the thought of eliminating the legal foundations of modern civil rights law and suspect that I am trying to bring back segregation. This is not my intention. I honestly want to help liberals on the principle that people should be able to come together to form social and political institutions based on their particular values. By definition, such institutions must discriminate against someone. In the name of intellectual consistency, I am willing to defend the right to freedom of association even for my political opponents and even for those people who intend to use that right to discriminate against me. 

Eliminate laws that prohibit the federal government from funding institutions that practice discrimination and Harvard will be able to practice "affirmative action" to its heart's content. There will be no need to find clever workarounds. Harvard will be able to openly put a cap on the number of Asian students they will accept. If Harvard also decides that there are too many Jews, well that was why Brandeis University was created in the first place. To be clear, I do not support any government funding for universities or any kind of education. In fact, it is my hope that allowing universities to engage in discrimination will serve as a valuable step toward abolishing federal funding for education. If my proposal leads to federal funds going to whites-only colleges then hopefully liberals will join me in working to establish a wall between government and education. If they do not then they will be the ones propping up discrimination.   

Similarly, the First Amendment should not apply to states. Were it not for an expansionist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, only Congress would be forbidden from establishing a religion. Liberal states like Colorado should be allowed to establish a tax-payer-funded LGBTQ+ Church, with inquisitors to hunt down and arrest anyone who fails to actively affirm the Sparkle Creed. 

It should be understood that while it is possible for there to be a wall separating education and state, there can be no consistent wall between church and state. Religions do not require any beliefs regarding gods or the supernatural. Any group that comes together will be motivated by a set of values and those values will be a religion of some kind. Anyone who says otherwise can be assumed to be attempting to force their values on the rest of society by pretending that their values are not really a religion. I prefer to deal with honest theocrats.  

Part of bringing back actual federalism is to recognize that different states are going to operate as different social and political experiments. Different states are going to establish different kinds of religions. It may be that they will also make different judgments about which groups have been oppressed and which groups have been privileged. They will then attempt to make their state more "equitable" by creating affirmative action programs to help those groups deemed to be historically oppressed. Some states might decide to focus on helping Jamaican immigrants while other states might focus on people who fled Red China. Finally, other states might want to help rural Appalachian whites. Those who belong to the wrong religion or to a group deemed to have unfairly benefited from privilege can either continue to live under a dhimmi status or they can emigrate to a state where their god is not a symbol of hate and where their skin color does not mark them as systemic oppressors.  

Racism or Confession as a Social/Political Skill

 

The beginning of Home Alone 2 offers us an excellent example of a well-handled confession on the part of Kevin's older brother, Buzz. One would think that Kevin has the moral high ground against Buzz, who instigated the fight during the staged Christmas pageant. What Buzz understands, though, is that this is not about what either he or Kevin actually did but about the legitimacy of the McCallister family as a social unit. What the rest of the family cares about is the fact that they were humiliated by Kevin and Buzz fighting, which showed everyone in the theater that the McCallisters are not a real family but a collection of individuals who place their petty egos over the common good. As such, the point of Buzz's speech is to acknowledge the authority of the family and apologize primarily to them. The fact that Buzz is insincere actually benefits his cause as it demonstrates his willingness to follow the rules of the family game and place them above any personal morality. 

Kevin makes the mistake of thinking that this is about personal morality. Buzz wronged him so he had the right to respond. Buzz was insincere with his apology so he is not obligated to apologize to Buzz. Since the family, is not about to punish Buzz, they are all in league with Buzz to humiliate him so he has no obligation to apologize to them. To bow to the authority of the family would mean giving up his moral claim of being wronged by Buzz. Kevin cannot place the family's interest over his personal hurt and, therefore, falls into Buzz's trap. It is Kevin ends up being seen as the wrongdoer in the incident and is sent to bed. In the end, Buzz, despite his dubious morality, wins because he has superior social skills. One might even say that his lack of morality has helped him develop superior social skills in the sense of making the Machiavellian jump of recognizing the existence of a political mindset that is distinct and often contrary to conventional morality. 

In defense of the McCallister family, one could argue that they are right to punish Kevin. As a kid, Kevin is incredibly self-centered and focuses on his personal dignity. He needs to learn the importance of family. (This is Kevin's emotional arc that is crudely shoehorned into both movies, in between having the Wet Bandits comically walking into his booby traps.)   

Let us now move to a scenario inspired by Bill Cosby. Imagine two students caught smoking in the bathroom. Both students are brought before the school administrator and asked to confess and apologize. It would seem that, as the students have both committed the exact same action, they should receive the same punishment with the confessional and apology being mere incidental parts of the story. In truth, the response of the student to being caught is actually more important than the infraction itself. As such, even minor differences in how students respond to being caught will have a greater effect on how they are punished than even their actual deeds.  

As we have seen with the case of Kevin and Buzz, when someone commits an infraction there are two wrongs committed. There is the action itself (whether fighting during a public recital, smoking in the bathroom, or first-degree homicide) and then there is the challenge to the legitimacy of the social unit (whether the family or larger units such as a school or even a country). The implication here is that the transgressor does not accept the right of the social unit to impose obligations. Since societies tend to rely more on the soft power of people not being able to even conceive of rebellion in order to function than on actual coercion, the belief that one is allowed to break the rules is an even graver threat than the actual rule-breaking itself. This is one of the reasons why it is so important for courts to get defendants to plead guilty. The convict who admits that they were wrong and throws themselves at the mercy of the court, affirms the court's and, by extension, society's legitimate authority to punish. The crime that initially struck at the authority of society now comes to strengthen that authority.  

What happens when one of the students has a better instinctual understanding of the social theory of crime and punishment particularly as applied to white middle-class people perhaps because they are themselves white middle-class kids? As such, they are able to assume the proper contrite pose and tone that the white middle-class administrators expect. Now, what if the other student is an inner-city black kid who lacks the training to handle white middle-class administrators? (Alternatively, what if the student is on the autism spectrum and struggles, in general, to strike the right tone with neurotypicals?) 

If the white middle-class kid gets away with a slap on the wrist and the poor black kid gets the book thrown at him, is that racism? the skin color of the students would not offer decisive proof as the school could point to a subtle but real distinction in how the students behaved. Furthermore, the fact that we are dealing with subtleties traps us into having to give the administration a lot of leeway to call things as they instinctually see fit. To say that administrators should not be attempting to force middle-class "white" values on students and to do so is racism is also far from obvious as the administrators can argue that part of their job is to teach students to function within a society run by middle-class white people. Even if we disagree with them, the fact that they sincerely believe this and see themselves acting for the benefit of the black students makes it rather difficult to say that they are racists. 

Coming Out of the Closet to Claim Group Rights

Essential for understanding African American history in this country is the fact that, for hundreds of years blacks were persecuted as a group. It was not just that blacks were disproportionally targeted for slavery, lynchings, and ultimately the system of Jim Crow, these things were part of an organized conspiracy against black people for the simple reason that they were black. By the end of the 18^th century, whites had developed the sense that the new United States was founded as a white man’s republic and therefore required a rigid distinction between whites and blacks that kept blacks in a subordinate position. This racism served a practical purpose in that it gave American whites, who otherwise did not have much in common with each other a sense that they were bonded into a common project. (This is not to defend American racism. On the contrary, this is a reason to take racists seriously and not as mere rhetoric.) This belief in America as a white man’s republic obviously existed in a dialectic with the belief in America as the country of “all men are created equal.” It is to America’s credit that, in the long march of history, the belief in all men are created equal has tended to win out over the white man’s republic.

The fact that African-Americans have been persecuted as a group is important because it establishes at least hypothetical grounds for blacks to make demands from white society that go beyond the elimination of laws that outright discriminated against blacks. The fact that I have personally never owned slaves and no African American alive today has ever been formally enslaved in this country does not mean that I do not owe something to African Americans. As critical race theorists would argue, I have benefited from systemic racism. Perhaps I should be willing to accept non-discrimination laws applied to private businesses, affirmative action, or even allow for my tax dollars to fund reparations?

To be clear, there is a risk in having blacks pushing the claim to be a distinct group as the traditional argument for their civil rights rested on the premise that blacks were not really a group. On the contrary, the idea was supposed to be that the notion that the color of a person’s skin could affect a person’s identity was a ridiculous notion invented by foolish racists. If blacks are going to be so reckless as to undermine the entire case for their civil rights and claim that they really are different from white people, they might be left to reap the consequences.

It is interesting to compare the case for black civil rights to LGBTQ+ rights as it is hardly obvious that LGBTQ+ people can actually claim to be a group let alone a historically persecuted one. For one thing, their opponents generally tend not to see them as members of a group but simply as people engaged in an action. It is that action that is the source of the opposition.

Furthermore, LGBTQ+ people are not, in any obvious way born LGBTQ+. We can say that black is a meaningful group in large part because we can accept that a newborn can, in some real sense, be classified as black. (We can go around a maternity ward and point to the black, white, Asian, and Hispanic babies and say that they are all beautiful in God's eyes and that it is wonderful to have such diversity.) What does it mean to say that a newborn is LGBTQ+. Think of it this way; how many black teenagers have undergone the experience of coming “out of the closet” to their parents? “Mom and Dad, I want you to know that I am black.” To which the parents respond: “Are you sure that you are black. Maybe, if you listened to more country music, you will become white.” LGBTQ+ people historically have not been raised by LGBTQ+ parents with an LGBTQ+ identity. It would seem that this is merely something that they decide for themselves. As such, it should make no wider claims on heterosexuals beyond the right to be left alone.  

Consider the consequences of coming out at an even later point in life. It is hardly obvious that a forty-year-old man who comes out of the closet has really discovered his “true identity” that he has been hiding, perhaps even from himself, all along. On the contrary, this sounds like someone going through a mid-life crisis that has led them to take on a "new hobby." Such behavior should be tolerated with amusement but there is no need to grant the person any kind of moral support for they have not done anything virtuous. Note that this all assumes that our middle-aged out of the closet gay person has not abandoned a wife and children to pursue his gay lifestyle. If he has then he is liable for social condemnation and possibly even legal penalties.

If LGBTQ+ people are not a group then they cannot make a claim to be persecuted as a group. For that matter, it would not be possible for them to be discriminated against. To be clear, I agree that anti-sodomy laws were wrong as they violated personal liberty. Then again, I believe with equal conviction that drug laws are wrong. This is not because they discriminate against potheads and keep them from becoming their true high selves. I do not accept that Pothead counts as a meaningful group. Human beings should have the right to ingest substances. Similarly, human beings should have the right to engage in consensual adult acts whether it is sodomy or incest. To be clear, in none of these cases should the right to engage in an action be confused with a right to a job or to social respectability.   

Something that I find fascinating about the LGBTQ+ movement is how they have managed to turn what should be an argument against them in their favor. It is argued that the fact that LGBTQ+ people are usually not raised with an LGBTQ+ identity is one of the ways that they are persecuted. LGBTQ+ people grow up "deprived" of their "authentic" selves. They have to struggle against a heteronormative society that tries to inflict heteronormativity upon them tempting them to live "inauthentically." From this perspective, even the progressive parent who never consciously attempts to stop their child from assuming an LGBTQ+ identity is still guilty of anti-LGBTQ+ persecution merely for raising the kid in an "inauthentic" fashion on the assumption that they are heterosexual or cisgender. This is sort of like the frum-novel trope where the Jewish kid is raised by Gentiles who try to keep the "truth" of his Judaism from him only for his "Jewish spark" to shine through in the end. (Note that the claims of an authentic LGBTQ+ self and an authentic Jewish self are both metaphysical claims. As such, the First Amendment would require that the government take them as equally valid.)   

A practical policy implication of this argument that LGBTQ+ people are a group even to the point of claiming that LGBTQ+ kids exist, is a push to bring LGBTQ+ material into schools. The goal is to teach kids about LGBTQ+ practices but, more than that, they wish to teach that LGBTQ+ people are a legitimate group with the moral high ground due to their "authentic" living earned by struggling against the constraints of a persecuting culture. This leaves children with an obvious question: might they really be LGBTQ+? If they come out as such, they will be praised for showing the "courage" to be their "authentic" selves. The more there are children who can be convinced to do this, the easier it becomes to argue that LGBTQ+ people really are a group. If children really are born LGBTQ+ and only needed adults to give them the language and the support structure to come out of the closet in ways that are in "no way manipulative," then being LGBTQ+ must be a legitimate identity. As such, society must not only eliminate all laws that ban LGBTQ+ practices but also "atone" for the crime of not previously recognizing that such an identity existed. 

Arguably, this would require greater government action than rectifying American racism. Consider, blacks have never had to seriously struggle against people who refused to accept that there was such a thing as black people in the genetic sense. For LGBTQ+ people to receive their full rights as a group, it might be necessary, regardless of the First Amendment, that everyone must be forced to acknowledge that they really are a group. 

To Be Woke At a Wedding

 

I was recently back on the East Coast for my sister's wedding in Baltimore. On the ride there, I got into a conversation with my stepmother where she asked me for a clear definition of the word "Woke." I found myself struggling to come up with a definition that could pass an ideological Turing Test where it would not be obvious that I am opposed to Woke thinking. Part of the problem is that Woke arguments function dishonestly using motte and bailey tactics, switching back and forth between its innocuous and radical claims when convenient. The actual claims of the Woke quickly veer into Poe Law territory that defies parody. Just as I might have been tempted to invent a Westboro Baptist Church to parody Christian fundamentalism, my parody of Wokeness would have involved white people paying a white woman thousands of dollars to tell them that they are racist. The problem is that Robin DiAngelo is not a work of fiction. The wedding itself ended up providing me with a useful framework with which to explain Wokeness. I noticed that almost all of the waiting staff at the wedding was black. By contrast, the vast majority of the guests were white. What might this mean from a Woke perspective?

First, to be Woke means to notice this fact that the people serving had a different skin color from the guests. As such, one should not be so literally colorblind as to not notice the different skin colors around you. Second, one should know enough about American History in general and about Baltimore in particular to recognize that this is not simply a coincidence. Black people are more likely to be economically disadvantaged to the point that they would find themselves working service jobs like being a waiter at a wedding.

These two aspects of Wokeness are fairly uncontroversial as so far all we have done is state an empirical and a historical fact. We have not made any value judgments about my sister, her new husband, and the hundreds of guests at the wedding. Furthermore, there is no particular course of action to be demanded beyond not abusing the staff or anyone with less money than you do. It is here that the radical nature of Wokeness shows its face. 

From a Woke perspective, the people attending the wedding are guilty of perpetuating systematic racism. It does not matter that the people attending may honestly feel no ill will toward black people, were perfectly civil to the blacks who served them, and never actively helped prop up segregation. Furthermore, it does not matter that most of the people attending the wedding were Jewish and that many of them were actually of Middle Eastern descent and not European at all. The claim that Jews have a history of being persecuted and were even victims of the Holocaust is itself a form of racism as it allows Jews to uphold their white privilege and not do the necessary work of dismantling white supremacy. (Note that Robin DiAngelo actually uses Judaism as an example of a defense mechanism used by people at her workshops to deny that growing up white in America makes you inherently complicit in racism.)

It is precisely when it comes to the question of what should be done that we sink into the realm of the Poe Law and Wokeness becomes a self-parody. Clearly, my sister needs to make more black friends. If need be, she should have hired black people to be her friends and come to the wedding. This could have been a form of reparations. Perhaps, she should have refused to hire black people. The fact that these people would not have had a job would help awaken their revolutionary consciousness to overthrow white supremacy. 

My wife and kids are people of color (POC). If we were properly Woke, we would have denounced my sister for having such a racist wedding where black people served white people. Furthermore, my sister showed her racism by inviting her brother's racially mixed family. Clearly, the only reason why she would have invited her brother to her wedding was so his family could offer some token diversity, rendering her racism less obvious to the not-truly Woke. 

Of course, the fact that I married a POC also makes me racist. The fact that I am attracted to this woman could only be because I objectify black women and wish to pretend that I am not racist. As such, my wife should divorce me and take away my kids to protect them from my racism. Even my wife, though, cannot escape the taint of racism. As a white-passing person, she benefits from white privilege while still being able to point out that she is a POC when convenient. The reason why she married a white man was in order to improve her standing as a white-passing person, thus perpetuating the white supremacist hierarchy with whites at the top and POCs scrambling to gain a higher place in the pyramid by making themselves as white-passing as they can and practicing white supremacist values like the traditional family and punctuality. She has spent her life being nice to white people, who are all racist, allowing them to pretend to not be racist by being friends with her. This has culminated with her marrying into my clearly very racist family, allowing us to pretend to not be racist.          

One of the hallmarks of the Woke version of racism is that white people are constantly going to try to pretend that they are not really racist by doing things that appear superficially tolerant like inviting their POC sisters-in-law to their weddings. This is a play on the Christian doctrine of total depravity. Part of being totally depraved is that even when you follow God's commandments, you are only doing it because you fear Hell and not out of love for God. The sinner loves sin so much that even with the fires of Hell raging beneath them they will not genuinely repent but will try to fool God with sham repentance. As such, their supposed good deeds are even more hateful to God than their sins. In Puritan thought, the believer needs to undergo a process where they almost despair of the possibility of ever being saved but continue to try to be virtuous. They might then find themselves filled with the knowledge of Grace and realize that it does not matter that they are the worst of sinners because God has arbitrarily chosen to save them through the death of Jesus. Similarly, in the Woke religion, being white makes you inherently racist, particularly when you try to not be racist. The only way to be anti-racist is to accept that you are racist and that there is nothing you can do to fix that. Unlike Christian total depravity, in the Woke religion, there is no black Jesus who is going to die to atone for your racism. To expect that of a POC would be, dare I say it, racist.        

Voting Rights for Racists: The Case for Legalized Discrimination in Government Jobs

 

In the past, I have argued that discrimination on the part of private businesses should be a legally protected right. How could an educated person such as myself, who is part of a racially mixed family, support "hate?" I believe that opponents of Israel should be allowed to use BDS despite the fact that it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy designed to discriminate against Jews and ultimately to offer moral cover to people who wish to murder Jews. Universities should be allowed to accept black students over white ones regardless of qualifications. For that matter, schools should be allowed to operate programs and create spaces solely for people of color. I may find these practices to be morally repellent but then again I am morally opposed to Aryan coffee shops and strip clubs. These are examples of social crimes where patrons of a business do not cause anyone physical harm but are encouraged to inculcate values that I believe are ultimately detrimental to a well-functioning society and yet I still believe that they should be legal.  

As a classical liberal, I accept the horrific doctrine that people should be allowed to openly support socially destructive ideas to the point that they cause actual harm. The reason for this is that I assume that the tradeoff is going to be even worse. For example, while strip clubs teach men to objectify women and not get married, they are not going to cause nearly as much harm as government-licensed Puritans armed with a modesty checklist who rely on government power as opposed to articulating a case to society (as well as themselves) why specific modes of dress (or the lack of which) should be opposed. If I can defend the right of businessmen to operate strip clubs, I fail to see how I can reject the notion that businessmen have the right to be racists and openly discriminate in their hiring. 

For a long time, I have accepted a distinction between discrimination carried out by private businesses and that of the government. This distinction increasingly seems strained to my mind. Imagine an election between evil billionaire Monty Burns and Lieutenant Uhura (may the memory of Nichelle Nichols be a blessing). Burns wins the election by openly appealing to the racism of voters. Furthermore, we are able to find enough voters to cover the margin of victory who confess that they voted for Burns not because they supported tax cuts for billionaires and the elimination of government oversight over nuclear power plants over more funding for linguistics and space travel but only because they refused to vote for blacks. As such, it is an objective fact that Uhura was discriminated against based on her skin color. Does this mean that what the voters did was illegal and the election should be overturned?

It is important to keep in mind that voters have the right to be idiots. Democracy is not about giving voters the best leaders. It is about giving them the leaders they deserve and giving it to them "good and hard." The racists who voted for Burns deserve whatever Burns will do to them and the liberals who voted for Uhura do not deserve much better as they agreed to be part of the same country as the Burns voters and have not tried to secede. 

Once we acknowledge that voters have the right to discriminate against political candidates, why not allow their racist elected officials to fulfill the wishes of their racist electorate by discriminating who is hired for government jobs? Why should Burns not have the right to fulfill his campaign pledge of paying for his billionaire tax cut by firing black teachers if that is what his voters elected him to do?

It should be noted that there are limits to this line of thinking. For example, it would not apply to the criminal justice system. If the district attorney would, as his closing argument, choose to lead the jury in a round of singing "kill the n-word," the conviction of the black defendant could be overturned. There is a difference between voters and jurors, mainly that jurors do not have the right to be irresponsible and follow their own bad judgment; they are required to follow a clear set of legal instructions given to them by the judge who in turn is bound by a code of legal ethics. Attorneys, unlike political candidates, are not allowed to use a wide variety of dishonest tactics to manipulate jurors. Defendants, regardless of their skin color, have a right to a fair trial and the burden of proof is on the prosecution and the judge to make sure they get one. Similarly, blacks cannot be kept from voting as they have a right to vote. 

All of this is distinct from a job, whether in the private or government sectors, as no one has a right to a job. By contrast, people have the right to discriminate and hand jobs to people for reasons that have nothing to do with qualifications or actual life choices. Your height and looks are based on your genetics. You never got to choose them and they are unlikely to be connected to your job performance. That being said, the reality is that people are discriminated against due to being short and ugly. It is certainly unfair but that is life. Why should we treat discrimination based on skin color any differently?                

Racism and the Fundamental Attribution Error

I recently started listening to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfiction series Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on Audible. There is an episode where Harry explains the fundamental attribution error. Living in our own heads, we are inclined to recognize the role that circumstances play in our behavior. I got angry and shouted not because I am a bad person who hates other people but because I just received some really distressing news. If did something good, it is likely because I did not find it so difficult to do so I felt it was my responsibility to offer a hand. When it comes to other people, though, we are less inclined to acknowledge such complexity. Other people act the way that they do because it is fundamentally who they are. Either they are wicked satanic sinners who act out of a conscious hatred of the good or they are heroic saints deserving of veneration. The practical implication of this mistake is that, if you believe that people act according to their fixed nature, then what people do is who they are. A person who does bad things is a bad person. 

It occurred to me that racism can be seen as an extreme version of this fundamental attribution error. Not only is Aleksis, in all of his complexity, going to be reduced to a liar, instead of someone who might shade the truth depending on the circumstances but now we are going to say that Latvians, an entity that is millions of times more complicated, are liars. It should be noted that the claim that Latvians are liars is an indisputable truth. It may also be true that Jews, Hungarians, and transgender Manhattanites are liars as well, along with the entire human race. Let us not get sidetracked here; I am talking about Latvians.  

What is really interesting is that it is not just racists that make this fundamental attribution. To be an anti-racist also requires making the fundamental attribution error. In reading someone like Ibram X. Kendi, one cannot escape the Manichean logic of either you are a racist or an anti-racist. This follows the larger critical tradition as we have seen with Paulo Freire. There is no sense that people say or do things based on particular circumstances. 

It is not practical to truly escape racist or otherwise prejudiced thinking. Everyone has a narrative about why the world is not a better place. This usually implies some sort of villain. Since the problems of this world clearly go beyond the lifespan of any individual person, it is inevitable that people will place some group or institution as their villain such as Latvian Hungarian Jews. If you are Richard Weaver, the big bad is William of Occam and 13th-century nominalism along with minor bads such as 20th-century jazz. One can hope that, with the help of a classical liberal education, a person can come to construct ever more intelligent narratives with factually more plausible groups of villains and gain a degree of skepticism even over their own narratives. That being said, just as every person shades the truth from time to time, everyone will make reductive statements about other groups that are less than charitable and demonstrate a lack of awareness or empathy for that group's historical circumstances. 

To make things even more difficult, any attempt to make a pro-tolerance statement about a particular group means that you are not making statements about other groups and, as such those groups are of lesser importance. For example, to put up a "Black Lives Matter" sign in your yard is not just to say that black lives matter but to say that, in some sense, black lives matter more than Uighur lives. To be clear, it may be ultimately defensible to argue that black lives may be more relevant to your situation as an American and therefore you have constructed a narrative in which blacks are the victims even as you lack a similar narrative to wrap your head around Uighur history. That being said, this is hardly an innocent claim. 

The anti-racist needs to take all of these very real human foibles and label people as either racists or anti-racists. It is the same temptation as racism to wish to simplify the world into either good or bad people. Clearly, people are not one thing or another. As with every other virtue and vice, people exist along a spectrum and do better or worse depending on the particular circumstance. 

Obviously, the anti-racist cannot denounce say the Trump voter as racist without making themselves vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In the case of Kendi, he holds up Angela Davis as a model anti-racist. This is a person who defended jailing Jewish Soviet dissidents. In a sane world, Kendi could be forgiven for being a non-Jew who never internalized the history of Jewish suffering into his psyche. If we are to play by Kendi's rules, both Kendi and Davis must be rejected as anti-Semites. 

The traditional leftist solution to this problem is to engage in special pleading. Firstly, only certain kinds of blanket statements regarding racial groups really count as racism. It is not racist to declare white gun owners responsible for a Hispanic teenager going on a shooting spree because white people are responsible for most of the evil in this world as all true anti-racists know. Second, the anti-racist redeems himself through leftist politics.   

My purpose is not to say that, since everyone is a racist to some degree, it is ok to be racist. The fact that everyone lies and that society requires the grease of some judicious "manipulating of the truth" does not make lying ok. Whether we always know precisely where to draw the line, we can still recognize, at least in theory, a difference between the person who makes the honest attempt to be truthful and the person who no longer holds that they have a moral responsibility to society to tell the truth. Similarly, even if the wheels of society need to be greased with some prejudice, there is a difference between a person who imperfectly tries to still expand their circle of moral responsibility and the person who does not believe that they have moral obligations to members of the "wrong" groups. Can I tell you, in every case, who belongs in what category? I have no wish to fall into the fundamental attribution error any more than I have to. People exist along a spectrum. I will stand up for my imperfect sense of what is right and I will leave it to everyone else to judge their own hearts. 

What Does It Mean to Think Critically?

 

Ideological battles are usually won or lost based on who can control the language in use. In the struggle against critical theory, one of the disadvantages we in the opposition are saddled with is that the supporters of critical theory control the word "critical." In my education classes, people like Paulo Freire are presented as supporting "critical thinking." From this perspective, who can oppose critical theory? Clearly, students should not simply take what they learn at face value. A teacher's job is to give students the tools to question what they read and see. The problem is that the word "critical" can mean very different things depending on whether you are coming from the classical liberal tradition of the Enlightenment or from critical theory. 

Enlightenment critical thinking can, perhaps, best be seen in Kant's famous "What is Enlightenment?" essay. Kant's Enlightenment is about the power of the individual to challenge the claims of established social and political institutions. For example, if my priest waves his Bible at me and insists that I obey him, I have the right to read the Bible for myself to decide how the Bible should be interpreted or even if it should be accepted as an authority at all. In this, Kant was the heir to the Protestant tradition that placed the individual as the primary actor in the drama of salvation as opposed to the community. It is the individual who reads the Bible and chooses to believe. 

Whether you are a Protestant or an Enlightenment philosopher, critical thinking is something carried out by individuals. Furthermore, the entire foundation of critical thinking presupposes the existence of autonomous individuals existing separate from institutions. It is only from this outside perspective that it is possible to critique institutions. It is only possible to attack Catholicism, for example, if you can first imagine yourself as a non-Catholic. If a person cannot conceive of joining another religion or rejecting all religions, then their arguments will never rise above criticisms of particular Catholics and calls to reform the Church to make it better match Catholic ideals. 

It is here that science becomes important. Science is fundamentally a process through which one can make objective statements about the nature of the world that are disconnected from any kind of traditional authority. As such, science provides a platform outside of any particular culture by which that culture can be critically judged. For example, I can tell my priest that I do not believe that the Earth was created according to the Book of Genesis because I have science that tells me that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Furthermore, the truths of science are, theoretically at least, equally accessible to the Pacific Islander as the European. A native can be a perfectly competent scientist without European science missionaries coming to him with a science textbook to "believe" in or demand that he accepts a wider set of European cultural values.   

The classical liberal placement of the individual as the one engaged in critical thinking explains the importance of freedom of thought. Since one of the ways we develop ideas is by talking to (and arguing with) other people, the primary manifestation of freedom of thought is freedom of expression. People have the right to come up with their own narratives of how the world works. This even includes people with absurd ideas like the sixteenth-century Italian miller Menocchio, who was murdered by the Inquisition for the crime of telling people that the universe was like a giant piece of fermenting cheese. Trying to make sense of the universe, no matter how bad we are at it, is a fundamental part of our humanity. As such it is a right that cannot simply be sacrificed merely based on a utilitarian calculus as to what is to the public benefit.   

Because critical thought is the product of individuals, there can be a distinction between words and physical violence. Assuming you are not engaged in a conspiracy to commit physical violence, your words cannot be violence. I can speak and write every blasphemy against the Christian religion without harming any individual Christians in the slightest. As long as we assume that only individuals are truly real as moral units, there can be freedom of expression because no individual can be harmed by words. The moment we accept that a collective entity like the Catholic Church possesses an objective moral reality then this distinction between speech and violence collapses. The Church can be harmed by my blasphemy, which would make blasphemy an act of violence. Hence, all speech potentially becomes violence. This renders freedom of expression, the right to be wrong and even offensive, a dead letter.  

Contrary to the classical liberal notion of critical thinking, which is based on the autonomous individual, critical theory comes from Marxism. As such, its foundational moral unit is the group. This changes the meaning of critical thinking. For example, in classical Marxism, to think critically means to come to a recognition that economic classes and not individuals are the fundamental structure of society. The worker comes to know that he is oppressed not by his boss and landlord but by this entity called capitalism. It is capitalism that is responsible for the many seemingly disconnected problems he sees in the world. The practical implication of this is that a fundamental revolution in the nature of society is necessary. It might be possible to fix the problem with the boss and the landlord through negotiation or even legal reform. Capitalism, as something that infuses everything in society, can only be defeated through revolution. 

This basic structure of Marxist thought evolved, in the 20th century, into critical theory, which placed culture at the center of the story instead of economics. This came to include issues like race, gender, and sexuality. Hence critical theory functions as a methodology of coming to the realization, for example, of how one is oppressed by the entity of cisgender heterosexual white men and it is this structure and not just capitalism that needs to be overthrown.  

In a sense, classical liberal critical thought and critical theory mean opposite things. Classical liberal critical thought is premised on the individual coming into the consciousness of their individual reason and using it to challenge established power structures (or simply to argue with random strangers on the internet). By contrast, critical theory maintains that autonomous individual thought does not really exist. There are only forms of group thought. For example, my beliefs are not my own but are the products of my bourgeois upbringing. My classical liberalism is merely a cover for my capitalist ideology. My defense of free speech is merely an apology for the right of capitalists to use their economic power to promote their ideology.

We see this in Freire, where one is either a member of the oppressor or the oppressed class. Critical for Freire, is the idea that oppressors cannot, simply, through the power of their own reason, reject their oppressor nature and join with the oppressed. A wealthy person cannot study public policy, decide that there is a lot of oppression, and work with poor people to advocate for better laws. Even if the laws on the ground are changed, the fundamental oppressive structure would remain and might even be strengthened now that the wealthy liberal can plausibly claim to be a humanitarian and justify his continued hold on power. The only way for the wealthy to be redeemed is through the revolution which will fundamentally refashion the very structure of society as well as human nature itself.

A similar pattern can also be seen in Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. It needs to be emphasized that the white racist villains of her narrative who use their emotional fragility to avoid talking about race and, therefore, prop up the system of white supremacy, are not Klansmen or even Trump voters; they are the seemingly well-meaning white liberals who attend her diversity workshops but insist that they are not racist and are even offended by the idea. White people need to accept that, by virtue of growing up in American society and benefiting from white privilege, they are racists. The structural racism that permeates all aspects of American society will not disappear until white people confess their complicity in racism without even asking black people to forgive them. To ask for forgiveness is to imply that it is possible for white people, as individuals, to atone for racism without the revolutionary restructuring of society. 

DiAngelo's version of white complicity in structural racism has a lot in common with Protestant notions of total depravity where humans are so caught up in Original Sin that even their reason is tainted. A person must simultaneously accept that they are sinners, without the power to change their way, and that it does not matter because Jesus has atoned for them. For DiAngelo, it is impossible for a white person to reason themselves out of the web of privileges that they have grown up taking for granted and the prejudices used to defend them simply through rationally thinking that people should not be judged by the color of their skin. Instead, critical thinking becomes the exercise in which the white person recognizes that their reason cannot redeem them from the sin of racism.   

One of the implications of critical theory is that it undermines freedom of thought. Since we are no longer concerned with individuals but abstract forces that are granted a moral reality, words now become a form of violence. While it is axiomatic for a classical liberal that even the vilest racist taunts should be tolerated because words are not violence and people have the right to be wrong, for critical theory, the merest disagreement becomes an act of violence. If you believe that white people are not so bad, it is not just that you are wrong. Such words allow white supremacy to persist and cause blacks to die at the hands of the police. Therefore, if you reject the principles of critical theory, you are literally murdering black people on the street and deserve to be treated as a killer. 

If non-tax-payer-funded schools wish to teach critical theory, that is their right. That being said, intellectual honesty demands that those teaching critical theory be clear as to what critical theory is and how it is distinct from critical thinking. Critical thinking relies on the rationality of individuals to challenge established ways of thinking. Critical theory, on the other hand, is the very denial that such a thing is possible. Critical thinking teaches that people can be wrong in their ideas and that is fine because words are not violence. For critical theory, it is precisely words that are the true form of violence as words have the power to undermine group identities.                    

Are You an Augustinian or a Rousseauian? Why the Origins of Evil Is Important for Conservatives and Liberals

At the heart of the debate between conservatives and liberals is the question of evil. Both conservatives and liberals may look around and recognize that much of the world is not as it ideally should be but they will disagree as to why this is the case. For a conservative, the source of evil lies in human beings themselves. The liberal will see the source of evil within society. 

The conservative view can best be seen in the thought of Augustine of Hippo, who saw even infants as sinners ruled by self-love. This flaw only becomes even more manifest in older children when they come to suspect that they are not what they should be but, rather than improve themselves, they come to actively hate the good. For example, the child hates learning Greek in school, which requires effort and discipline. His teachers are not content to leave him in his comforting idleness but desire the child's good. Therefore, the child hates them along with anyone else who might attempt to direct him onto a good path. Seeking refuge from the good with its demands, the child eventually comes to actively embrace evil. For example, stealing pears and throwing them away because he knows it is wrong. 

Self-love is so dangerous because it never goes away even when a person honestly tries to be better. The adult who decides to finally focus on his studies and earn a degree will find himself pursuing even greater depravities like becoming an honored teacher of philosophy. With his mastery of being able to talk about ethics, he will finally become truly impervious to anyone questioning his complete lack of virtue. 

In the world of Augustinian psychology, there are essentially two kinds of people, the tragically flawed and the satanically evil. There are the people who try to do what they intellectually know is the right thing even though, in the long run, they are doomed to fail. The other kind of person clings to their claim of righteousness by pretending that their self-love is actually a virtue. Such people are satanic in the sense that they do evil not out of some venial weakness of character but because they actually believe that evil is the true good. 

The solution for the conservative, even if it is a highly imperfect one, is to keep the individual, with his self-love, in check through social organizations. This includes the brute force of the law but more importantly the family and organized religion, which inculcate a person with a moral code and a conscience. This makes it possible for a person to not constantly pursue their self-love even when no one is around and there is no fear of punishment.

This notion of self-love as an inescapable fact of human psychology can also be seen in thinkers like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith. There is the hope that, under the right system, self-love can be harnessed for the public benefit. That being said, the starting assumption is that there is no way to remove self-love and create truly selfless people. Even the man who sacrifices his finger to save China will never escape the fact that losing that one finger will cause him greater suffering than the deaths of millions of strangers. 

If Augustine was the paradigmatic conservative, Rousseau can be seen as the paradigmatic liberal. Rousseau rejected Original Sin. People are born fundamentally good because nature is inherently good. It is society that corrupts them. People left to their own devices would be noble savages without a thought of preferring themselves to others. It was only with the invention of private property that people learned to be greedy. Education made people arrogant by causing them to assume that the greater their book learning, the wiser they were when, in truth, greater book learning simply meant less connection to the truths of nature.    

This question about the origin of evil becomes important when we consider the prospect revolution as a solution to the problem of evil. If you are an Augustinian, you are likely to recognize that human beings, with their self-love, will eventually corrupt any set of institutions they are allowed to control. As such, rather than reign in self-love, the institution will come to serve that self-love. Therefore, from time to time certain reforms must be made in order to allow those institutions to resume their job of keeping human self-love in check. What you are not going to consider is tearing institutions down in the hope that better ones will grow in their place. It would be the height of madness to assume that the same people who lack virtue even when they are kept in check will suddenly conquer their self-love once there is nothing left to stop them.  

This is the critical context for understanding Edmund Burke. It may be one thing for British colonists in America to rebel against the Crown in the name of traditional English liberties with the local colony governments remaining largely the same. This is not the same thing as the French deciding to tear down centuries of monarchial tradition because of something some of them read in Rousseau. 

The Rousseauians, like Maxmillian Robespierre, who carried out the French Revolution and eventually the Reign of Terror did not ask themselves who will guard against the revolutionaries. On the contrary, the revolutionary, by the mere fact of being a revolutionary, was assumed to be free from the taint of social corruption. If you believe that society corrupts then struggling against society should protect a person from corruption and make them virtuous. Hence, Robespierre thought of himself as incorruptible. 

From the conservative perspective, the problem with any revolutionary movement comes out of this confidence that self-love can be circumvented. We are self-loving beings who seek to pretend, especially to ourselves, that we are not in order that we should be able to pursue our self-love without being held in check by society or even our own conscience. This renders revolutionaries morally perverse. You are going to take people who are already predisposed to self-love and being deceitful about it. You are then going to allow them to overthrow the very system that keeps their self-love in check, all while telling these revolutionaries that they are above self-love. Is it any wonder that the end results are monsters, who commit mass murder? 

To be clear, Augustinian politics is no guard against corruption. This should come as no surprise as people remain tainted by self-love no matter if they become kings or even popes. On the contrary, the loftier the position the more likely they are to be seduced by their self-love, believing that their self-love is somehow really the selfless caring for humanity. That being said, Augustinian politics, because it does not believe in the perfectibility of human beings, is protected from sinking into the totalitarianism that is the logical endpoint of Rousseauian politics. 

To bring this around to our modern political discourse, if you are an Augustinian, you may honestly believe that racism, as a type of tribalism that ultimately comes from self-love, is an evil that needs to be fought. One might even support laws banning discrimination. What you are not going to do is make any pretense that racism can be eradicated. You are certainly not going to engage in anything so reckless as tearing down social systems in a bid to eliminate "structural racism." You cannot change the reality that people have their thumbs on the moral scales in favor of people they perceive as being more like them. What you can do is to strengthen those social systems that will speak to people's sense of decency and keep self-love in check. 

A Bill of Rights for Nazis

 

One of the challenges in promoting liberty is that defending liberty, in its truly principled sense, means defending the rights of not only the people you moderately dislike but also those who you truly believe are a threat to society. Most people support rights for themselves and those within their rather narrow Overton Window. Modern leftism has only helped in this regard as it allows people to take this position and feel morally superior for doing so. From this perspective, there is no reason not to expand the definition of liberty to include not only negative rights like protection from physical violence but also positive liberty to make other people maintain your sense of dignity so you do not suffer any microaggressions. As long as it is only your side that has such a right to dignity, making such demands is simply playing with house money. There are few people willing to defend the rights of their enemies. For this reason, I have a suggestion that would greatly clarify discussions about liberty. When we say that people have rights, we mean Nazis. If you are not willing to defend Nazis enjoying a right, it is not really a right and should be disregarded. (If there are any actual Nazis reading this blog, feel free to substitute black gay Jews.) 

What might a bill of rights for Nazis look like? The foundation for all rights is property. Nazis have the right to own homes, with printing presses in their basements, which they can use to produce leaflets. By extension, they are allowed to own computers and make use of the internet to present their ideas to a wider audience and win converts to their ideology. They are allowed to enjoy such rights even when they are able to use them to make life less convenient for others. Protecting the right of Nazis to make anti-Semitic jokes in my presence is more important than my dignity.   

I accept that Nazis have the right to have an ideology. In this case that would mean racial supremacy. They can also believe in the inferiority of groups like blacks and Jews and oppose interracial mixing. They even have the right to raise their children in their ideology. While their ideology violates the Constitution and Nazis would be forbidden to enact their vision for society on a national level, this is no different from any other kind of religion. Most religious people recognize that liberal democracy involves a bargain. In exchange for surrendering the right to take over the country, they are promised the right to practice their religion and raise their children in it without interference from the government. In theory at least, there should be no difference between a Nazi believing in the inferiority of non-whites but that he is obligated to respect their political rights and the idea that unbelievers are doomed to Hell but Natural Law still obligates believers to accept the political authority of the ungodly. 

Even though Nazis do not have the right to overthrow the Constitution or reinterpret it in keeping with their moral assumptions as a living document, Nazis should still have the right to form small enclave communities to practice their chosen lifestyle. Because of this, it should be legal for there to be Nazi towns in which discrimination is legal. (If this Nazi town wished to secede from the United States to form its own white supremacist country, I would say good riddance to them.)

You might be tempted to argue that Nazism inherently involves some kind of conspiracy to overthrow a free society and that the government has the right to take proactive actions to protect the public. The problem is that you have to realize that I already believe that socialism is an inherent conspiracy against the Constitution and a free society regardless of whether the word democratic is attached to it. Hence, I am very open to the idea of murdering socialists if given an excuse. If you wish to avoid a genocidal left vs. right civil war, you have no choice but to tolerate all non-violent Nazi activities even though their actions cause real psychological harm.  

The main limitation to these rights is the Non-Aggression-Principle. Nazis do not have the right to initiate acts of violence against their opponents. This includes conspiring to commit acts of violence. For example, while Nazis have the right to pass on their beliefs to their children, the moment a teacher actually tells Nazi children that Dylan Roof is a hero to be imitated, the lives of everyone in that school become forfeit. This would be no different from Israel having the right (distinct from being a good idea) to bomb a Hamas school. Alternatively, you can imagine the United States government having the right to bomb schools in Mexico that teach their students that Pancho Villa was a hero for raiding across the American border and killing American citizens. This is simply the logical conclusion of the right of self-defense enlarged to a national scale.  

One might be tempted to argue that Nazis are different from other groups in that they "hate." That is a misunderstanding. Nazis, like everyone else, have something that they love, like their mythical Aryan race. They fear that something, like Jews, threatens what they love and are willing to take action. By this definition of hatred, everyone is guilty, particularly those who believe that hatred is somehow a damaging charge unique to their opponents. What is relevant is whether or not someone is a party to a conspiracy to commit violence. From this perspective, charges of hatred are merely a distraction. You can choose to accuse someone of plotting to murder you, risking the possibility that people will think that you are mistaken and kill you in order to protect the social contract or you can shut your mouth and learn to live with the fact that there are people out there who do not like you.   

I admit to being torn as to whether there is a constitutional right to march in the streets. As long as the government owns the streets we have to accept that they are going to be used to promote local prejudices. This is better than leaving roads in control of the federal government and the prejudices of whatever party is currently in power. Local prejudices are less of a problem as they can be countered by people moving. Let us be very clear, if you wish to claim that Nazis do not have a constitutional right to march through black or Jewish neighborhoods then you have to be consistent and admit that cities should have the theoretical right not to allow gay pride marches if it is deemed offensive to local sensibilities. 

Do you really want there to be laws against discrimination? If a company hired a person unaware that they were a Nazi and that person came to work with a swastika tattooed on their forehead, the company should have the right to fire the person on the spot. The same logic should apply to someone who gets a sex change operation without notifying a company about their orientation. Granted, I personally am not inclined to make an issue out of gender identity but that is my personal preference.

Saying that you only oppose discrimination for things that are intrinsic to someone and which they cannot control does not help you very much. It is not so obvious that Nazis are able to help themselves in their ideological preferences any more so than homosexuals. If you accept critical race theory assumptions regarding race, consistency would demand that you acknowledge that white people cannot stop themselves from becoming white supremacists and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for their actions. Furthermore, our society regularly discriminates based on things people cannot control. There is not a whole lot about intelligence that can be decoupled from a person's genetics or how they were raised yet college admissions still make use of academic test scores.   

It should be understood that the purpose of rights is not to create a truly just society. That is impossible and any attempt to do so will lead to mass murder. Part of the problem is that while we can easily imagine people wanting to kill us out of greed, we have a harder time imagining people who want to kill us because they honestly believe that we are maliciously standing in the way of making the world a better place. It is not even that such people are ignorant. On the contrary, the more they know about us, the more they might be likely to believe that we need to be eliminated. Do you really want to risk living under my version of a "just society" and accept what I might be willing to do to get there or do you say "over my dead body?" What you need to understand is that I am likely to want to lay down my life to stop your "just society" because I believe that yours might be paved with even more bodies. 

The real goal of acknowledging rights is to avoid full-on Hobbesian civil war where we burn down civilization in the hope of killing off the "bad guys" and being able to rebuild a better world from the ashes. (Think Germany or Japan in 1945.) The price you pay for leaving society standing is that there are going to be all kinds of pathologies that will never be rooted out. If you are not willing to kill a child over some problem you are not truly serious about solving it. 

How do you get as many people as possible to give up on attempting to create their version of a just society? Alternatively, how do you convince the losers of culture wars not to blackmail society by threatening that, if they are going to be defeated, they are going to go down fighting and try to kill as many of their enemies as they can? You promise them that, in return for not burning down the country, they will be able to live their lives and raise their children in peace from everyone else's "just society." Hence, the underlying philosophy of rights is to live and let live. Leave me alone and do not do anything that I might interpret as you plotting to kill me and I promise to not kill you to forestall any chance of you carrying out your plan.   

Whenever you demand protection for yourself as some kind of right, you open the door for your mortal enemies to claim that same right and use it against you. Therefore, it only makes sense to ask for the bare minimum of life, liberty, and property in order to allow yourself to stay alive and raise your children as you see fit. Make no mistake, the price you pay for these rights is obscenely high. It means that Nazis get to enjoy these same rights and use them to ruin any chance that we can have a society free of racism. Think of what they can do if allowed a more expansive set of rights.

The Logic of Confessing To Be a Racist (or a Witch)

Here is an example of the kind of thing that scares me about the current state of racial discourse in this country. On the surface, these celebrities are coming out for important issues, sensitivity to others, opposing racism, and stopping police violence. I agree with them on all of these issues. One might even say that I agree with them so much that I should ignore objections to some of the wording. These are clearly, passionate people whose hearts are in the right place.

What I see, though, is an attempt to confess to racism as a means of protecting oneself from the charge of racism. This is not taking responsibility for injustice in our society. If it were, these actors would be donating the vast majority of their salaries to charity. This looks like Pontius Pilating oneself and allowing other people, not as privileged, to take the fall for an absurd charge, mainly that if you told a joke that did not go over well or refrained from denouncing someone else, you are responsible for cops shooting black people in the street. What makes this line of thinking so convincing is that these privileged white celebrities seem to be admitting to their own role in this process and confessing. One might think that if they are admitting that they used to be at least a little bit complicit in racism then it must be true and this country must be awash in racism.

Any attempt to counter this argument by saying that it is ridiculous to claim that "black people are being slaughtered in the streets" opens one up to the accusation of covert racism. A true anti-racist would know not to get caught up in semantics in the face of the larger important truth that American society is racist. These celebrities care so much about racism that they are willing to say things that racists will jump on as factually incorrect. If they were interested in looking good, they would have been more precise with their words. Of course, only a racist would try to question whether some of the rhetoric is over the top in order to cause people to doubt whether racism is really a problem.

This line of thinking becomes significantly less convincing when you realize that it is the basic model of confession from witch trials. You are accused of something absurd like having sex with the Devil. Of course, the real charge is not a satanic orgy but whether or not you support the witch-finder's claim that eccentric and difficult old ladies are really witches in disguise. From this perspective, not only are these people really satanic but anyone who questions this fact is also with Satan. Witch-finders are such godly men that they open themselves to the mockery of skeptics, who are also always secret Satanists. If the witch-finders were in it for themselves, they would have moderated their claims to make themselves sound more reasonable even at the price of not baiting the true witches into revealing themselves.

The fact that a witch trial is not really about factual guilt but about supporting the right team allows the witch-finder to argue that even innocent people should confess. Either you are guilty of witchcraft or you are not. If you are guilty then obviously you should confess and name other people. We will then forgive you as we are good Christians. If you are not guilty, you should still confess and name the people we tell you to name because that is what a truly innocent person who is really on our side would do. Denying that you are a witch is actually worse than being a witch. A witch who confesses at least is showing remorse. Claiming you are innocent simply means that not only are you a witch but an obdurate one at that who deserves to die. Your plan, even if it costs you your life, is to cause people to question whether or not there really are witches, allowing Satan to act unchecked. This is in contrast to the confessed witch who offers "undeniable" proof that witches exist. Why would someone confess to being a witch if they were innocent?

If this sounds implausible to you that the modern people untainted by superstition could operate like this understand that the Stalinist show trials ran on this logic. The Party, under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, has accused you of betraying the Revolution and of being a foreign agent. You deny this? Are you claiming that the Party made a mistake? That is even worse. You are denying the very essence of revolutionary solidarity and not just giving in to momentary treason out of greed and pride.

It has been suggested that many of the victims of the Stalinist purges consciously martyred themselves by confessing to ludicrous charges. They confessed and died rather than provide ammunition to opponents to anti-Communists who claimed that the Soviet Union was a tyrannical state that arrested innocent people. Instead, these former Communist leaders died to help strengthen the people's faith in the Party that it was always right even when it appeared to be wrong. Ultimate faith is when you declare your belief in something that so defies reason that only a person who has totally submitted their mind to the authority of a particular institution could successfully do it. You may have a difficult time believing that revolutionary heroes could be traitors but you know to have faith in the Party. And then, lo and behold, the accused confess. It must be true. Why would innocent people confess? You see, the Party is always right.

One of the signs of a witch hunt is that it quickly becomes clear that the issue at stake is not about particular facts on the ground but whether or not you are on the right side of some Manichean struggle. Unlike those on the Left who literally believe we are in danger of falling into a Fascist state and that if you disagree with their approach to handling racism, you are guilty of racism, I do not believe that Leftists are necessarily crypto-Stalinists nor do you have to agree with me on much of anything to not be a mass murderer. I believe that the world is a lot more complicated than good people who are on my side and the bad people who are not. There is no pledge of allegiance that you can say that will make you one of my good guys nor is there a confession you can offer that will take away the taint of being one of my bad guys. The good news is that you are not in danger of suddenly falling from my good graces. You are allowed to be a person doing the best you can with the limited amount of information and attention you have.

Can There Be a Video Game Too Immoral to Play?

In a Jonathan Haidt style exercise of asking disturbing moral questions that people feel strongly about even as they are unable to defend their positions, I asked a student of mine whether it is possible for there to be a video that would be immoral to play. He immediately jumped on the obvious liberal utilitarian response of no; simply playing a game, by definition, cannot, in of itself, harm anyone so it can never be immoral.

Level One: Wolfenstein 3D.




This classic game involves running around and systematically shooting people and dogs, who scream and produce pools of highly pixelated blood. Of course, the people you are shooting are Nazis (as are the dogs one guesses) so pretending to commit mass murder is, perhaps, defensible.

Level Two: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR).




It is a feature of a number of Star Wars games that you can choose to turn to the Dark Side. This means that instead of light-sabering and blasting your way through stormtroopers (the moral equivalent of Nazis) you can murder innocent people on your path to becoming the Sith Lord ruler of the galaxy, bringing misery to trillions of beings.




In defense of KOTOR, the violence here is safely out of the realm of reality. None of us can use the Force (let alone become Sith Lords) or lightsabers. Perhaps, the distance from actual mass murder is enough that pretending to commit such horrors is not in bad taste.

Level Three: Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

GTA allows you to play a street-level criminal. You can commit crimes ranging from selling drugs to running over the prostitutes of a rival pimp and shooting police officers. Unlike Sith Lord, this is a plausible career choice for players. This raises the question of whether GTA encourages violence. Alternatively, a person who likes GTA is at least signaling that he might wish to behave like this in real life. Clearly, a game like GTA forces our utilitarian to hunker down on his insistence that direct physical harm should be relevant. He is particularly vulnerable here as it is hardly obvious that banning the game would not reduce crime. By insisting on only direct harm, our utilitarian is showing that it is his liberal convictions that dominate.

Level Four: Racial Violence

It is my understanding that neo-nazis and others of that ilk have produced games that allow players to fight a race war against blacks, Jews, and other "undesirables." Imagine a game where you can shoot your way through a black church and then burn it down with small children inside.

My student conceded that such a game would be immoral to play though he could not offer a reason why pretending to murder black people in church should be wrong while pretending to murder cops is ok. It cannot be simply that playing a racist game is itself racist and not just pretend racism. To be ok with shooting cops in a game also demonstrates a lack of concern for the lives of cops, particularly to the extent that you are not ok with shooting blacks in a game.

The stakes here are very high and not just for video games. Once we acknowledge that there are some things so horrible that you should not even pretend to do them, much of literature becomes endangered. Plato famously wanted to ban the Homeric epics on account of their immoral behavior. In defense of Plato, the fact that Achilles and Odysseus make lies, murder, and sexual assault appear respectable, arguably makes the Illiad and the Odyssey a greater moral threat to society than a racist video game.

I agree with my student that there is an important line between GTA and racist violence games. If I were to defend this position, I would argue that even pretend racist violence is out of bounds because it violates a kind of social contract in ways that regular pretend violence does not. Chris Caldwell argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act created a new constitution with the power to trump even the actual Constitution. Similarly, we can see American whites after the Civil Rights Movement agreeing to a new social contract with blacks. Since blacks had the moral high ground due to the fact that America's history of slavery and segregation was particularly embarrassing during a period of post-colonialism and the Cold War, they could demand not only technical legal equality but also that the American narrative should be reimagined to place the struggle over racism at the center. Blacks got to become an essential part of the American story and not just an inconvenient historical quirk. Liberal whites got to be the whites who fought for equality. Now for a white person to now be a "good American" they must actively present themselves as active opponents of racism.

Part of what makes this new social contract possible is that whites consistently underestimate the difficulty of living up to their end of it. It is easy to condemn racism as something other less enlightened people do. Truly opposing racism is actually quite impossible. For a white person to argue that they are free from racism is to demonstrate that they are actually racist as they fail to appreciate the true centrality of racism. To the extent that any white person can escape the taint of racism, it loses some of its centrality and reduces the relevance of blacks.

To be white in America is to be Tantalus, ever reaching for that reasonable goal of not judging people by the color of their skin and hoping that black people will give them absolution. If we only denounce other white people slightly less embedded within this narrative then that absolution can be ours. This game gains its highly seductive power precisely because it appears so reasonable. Racism is real and it should be denounced. Reasonable people should be able to agree that certain things, particularly within the context of the real horrors of American history, should not be said or done. So only a "racist" could reject this process. For example, I oppose the use of blackface and the n-word. I oppose Trump largely because he empowers genuine racists. Does this protect me against the charge of racism? To believe that it might would demonstrate that I am, in fact, a secret racist.

From this perspective, playing a racist game raises a different question from playing a murderer. For the American post-Civil Rights narrative to function, we must see the murder of blacks as different from other kinds of murder to the extent that we would take racist murder as something personal that strikes at our very being. Anything else demonstrates that we do not truly buy into the notion that racial struggle is central to American identity or worse that we take the white-supremacist side. Regardless of how we really feel about a racist game, it is of even greater importance that we condemn other people for being open to playing such games. Who can resist the opportunity to earn a little absolution for racism at so little cost by taking a stance against a hypothetical game?

There is a certain irony here. Freedom of expression is an intrinsic part of American identity. As such, it would be considered un-American to condemn the playing of a game even one that advocates murdering prostitutes and cops. To even attempt to argue from the perspective of virtue ethics that such a game could corrupt one's soul simply and that one should at least be bothered by the concept demonstrates that one is not sufficiently embedded within the American notions of freedom of expression. To support censorship when it comes to racist violence becomes a kind of antinomian embrace of American values. You value the new narrative of defining America in terms of the struggle against racism that you are even willing to support censorship, risking your American identity.

As Haidt argues, our moral values are intuitively formed in our emotions and it is left to our intellects to justify our morality after the fact. My objection to racist games is honestly heartfelt. As a product of the post Civil Rights social contract, I was educated to not only oppose racism intellectually but, more importantly, to be horrified at the concept. Any attempt on my part to defend anti-racism on intellectual grounds is bound to feel contrived at best. 

So I put it to my readers, is it immoral to play a racist game as opposed to shooting cops in a game? If so, what intellectual justification are you willing to offer as opposed to strongly worded self-righteousness?