On definitions

(With apologies to the lamented William Safire.)

Steven Pinker devotes a fair amount of effort and prose to the problem of why and how liberal academia has redefined “human nature” (in short, by asserting that it doesn’t exist, and effectively quashing any attempt to revive it), in his book The Blank Slate:  The Modern Denial of Human Nature.  Jonathan Haidt, in his research into human morality and its various cultural expressions, has discovered that academia has, for decades, denied essential components of morality.  Pete Larson and his amateur paleontology team discovered that academic prejudice can have life-changing ramifications, as detailed in his 1990s legal struggles, his 1996 incarceration in prison, the loss of his prized, once-in-a-lifetime specimen and the summary of all these travails, the documentary feature Dinosaur 13 and the book on which it is based, Rex Appeal: The Amazing Story of Sue,the Dinosaur That Changed Science, the Law, and My Life, by Larson and his wife, journalist Kristin Donnan.

Folks, this is elitism.  This is the result of people who don’t work for a living, don’t participate meaningfully in the market, and regard themselves as authorities on everything indoctrinating us, taking stances on issues in which they do not belong, and imposing their will on the political discourse.  Pinker notes that, throughout the 60s, 70s and well into the 80s, if not later, the label “intellectual” implied Marxism, and academics rejected the application of that label to anyone who professed a preference for markets.  This, rather than an antipathy to intelligence and education, is why Republicans such as Richard Nixon were noted for their “anti-intellectualism.”  Among my own collection of books on humanity and society, it’s difficult to find a sociology text whose author doesn’t self-identify as Marxist; the one I’ve cited most frequently, Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: an Introduction by David Byrne, speaks less about the role of complexity theory in explicating market behavior than it does about how to use sociology as a tool to promote communism.  The prevailing assumption on the part of this elite seems to be that capitalism is a quaint, childishly simple economic system that should be replaced by something more directed, more planned, more orderly…something designed.  Something they design, something they impose.  This is, they believe, the source of their power and relevance:  the influence they wield on our youth, and that they will wield, Come the Revolution, on the new order.  Markets and free societies, you see, happen organically; they require no planners or authorities. 

In the case of Larson, paleontological authorities at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology who objected to his amateur, profit-seeking approach to locating, recovering and preparing fossils applied pressure to the Department of Justice, and later to a federal court presided over by  Judge Richard Battey, whose antipathy toward the Larson brothers and their team stemmed from their request for him to recuse himself from their case due to a conflict of interest; he subsequently sentenced Peter to two years in federal prison for the outrageous criminal offense of failing to fill out a government form when transporting travelers checks between the United States and South America.  Richard Stucky, a former president of the Society, has lobbied Congress to prohibit all but “authorized paleontologists” from recovering fossils on public lands, essentially placing fossils in the public domain; his group has vehemently decried the use of profit motive in fossil-hunting, and has argued that the Larsons represent the very worst element in science.  Meanwhile, well-known and respected paleontologists such as Robert Bakker and Jack Horner (himself only having ever attained an honorary degree, being unable to fulfill the requirements for a Bachelor’s during his own paleontological training) have defended the Larsons’ work, not only on the basis of their prodigious contributions to the world’s wealth of major dinosaur finds, but for their meticulous technique, which has informed even their own work.

I’ll deal with the leftist / academic distrust of distributed intelligence and decentralization later, in my ongoing series on markets.  For now, I want to focus on their influence on language, specifically on definitions. 

1.  Morality

I attended public school in Texas.  This had its pros and cons.  I attended grades two through five in the Groesbeck Independent School District, which was at the time outgrowing its elementary school.  My fifth year took place on the junior high school campus, which was adjacent to the high school campus.  You can imagine the hijinks that ensued when the junior high schoolers saw their turf invaded by fifth-graders…hijinks that didn’t end with the school day, since all three schools utilized the same bus system.  But the social aspect of school in a small town is a topic for another series of posts.  The scholastic aspect is what’s relevant here.  In fourth grade, my science teacher, Mr. Driscoll, refused to discuss evolution with the class, because it was against his beliefs.  I took that personally, and embarked on a personal study of evolution that has proven richly rewarding, informing much of my life and my other studies, including my economic and political interests.  So thanks for that, Mr. Driscoll.  In 1981, my family moved back to Houston, and I entered school in the award-winning northwest Houston district of Cypress-Fairbanks.  My high school years were spent mostly at Langham Creek High, which later went on to achieve a Presidential Fitness award.  The quality of the teaching was, in other words, quite high, although the social environment retained some of the more unfortunate aspects of rural schooling.  Such is adolescence.

I didn’t become particularly politically aware until my 12^th year, and only then in response to what I was starting to perceive as a distinct bias on the part of the social sciences teachers.  My own slightly liberal slant was undoubtedly the result of peer influence, and was as unnoticed by myself as my own Texan accent.  The government, history and social studies teachers were generally willing to permit debates between teams of students, and it was through this mechanism that I started to become aware of ideological distinctions and the reasoning (or lack thereof) behind those positions. 

It was not until I entered college in the fall of 1988 that I became fully exposed to the degree of ideological influence that academia could impose.  I was lucky in that my poli-sci professor, Jeffrey Segal, was reasonably objective.  He had coauthored one of the course texts, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model, which analyzed the history of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in light of the “attitudinal model” of jurisprudence, and found that this model correlated much more strongly with SCOTUS’ decisions than any other existing model.  In short, the Court rules on the basis of its prevailing ideological bias, with Constitutional considerations only weakly contributing to the outcome.  Segal and his coauthor, Harold Spaeth, agreed, for instance, that the decision in Roe v. Wade was unconstitutional and based on flawed precedent (Griswold v. Connecticut), despite the fact that one of them was pro-life and the other pro-choice (Segal never revealed which was which, and I have never been able to determine that from the text).

Most of the ideological bias came to me in other courses, such as English Literature.  The professor was rarely on the scene, and classroom discussion was led by a TA who showed up every day in beach-bum hippie garb.  He was genial and smart, but far from neutral in his regard for the social value of the literature we were studying.

Even then, though, in the years transitioning the Eighties into the Nineties, there wasn’t much complete overturn of concepts I’d been taught in public school.  “Morality,” defined in my high school texts as the sum total of norms and values imposed on the individual by society, still seemed to mean pretty much the same thing in my college classes.  Had I gone into a political speciality, however, I probably would have quickly found that concept falling by the wayside in favor of more “enlightened” definitions; as an engineering student, I wasn’t required to take multiple courses in government, and was never fully exposed to the academic biases that some of my peers have been.  (One of my friends, Cris, obtained a Cum Laude graduation in macroeconomics a couple of years ago, making his college experience much more recent than mine.  He recounts having to challenge the progressive doctrine being pushed in some of his classes, although at least in his focus courses, integrity won out over politics.)

It wasn’t until around the turn of the century when I finally got into the Internet in a steady way, and began arguing politics on the Delphi forums and newsgroups.  In the decade or so between my college experience and this new exposure to the political discourse, some definitions seemed to have changed profoundly, or been taught quite differently in other institutions.  In particular, the liberal contingent disagreed with morality as a collective phenomenon rooted in norms and values.  They seemed to regard morality in much the same way as the religious fundamentalists did, as something absolute, something deeply rooted in first principles, a standard to which all people, of all times in all places, could be held.  The problems with this kind of moral sensibility become manifest when reviewing all the exceptions that have to be made in order to correct for past abuses made to the special interests that are now therefore entitled to violations.  In this view, white collar crime is worse than violent crime, because rich old white men have no justification for committing crime, whereas poor urbanites—especially those in ethnic minorities—can be “expected” to engage in crime.  (The inherent racism in assuming special justification for any kind of activity on a purely ethnic basis is something I leave to the reader to weigh.)  In this view, abortion-on-demand is justifiable because women have been oppressed in the past.  In this view, welfare handouts are are justifiable, at least for American blacks, as reparations for slavery, and for native Americans as reparations for genocide.  The common element in these exceptions is the willingness to punish the people of today—by excusing crimes committed against them, by taxing their wealth for redistribution, by allowing them to be killed before they’re even born—for the sins of the people who lived decades, even generations ago, or sometimes—as in the case of abortion—for the mistakes made much more recently by their own parents.

Morality, however, while having an absolute behavioral basis, has no absolute cultural expression.  Morality should be viewed like language in order to fully understand this point.  Humans obviously have the capacity for language.  Children aren’t so much taught to speak as they instinctively learn, applying a number of techniques:  babbling (experimental vocalization), followed by imitative vocalization, concurrent with listening to adults and children speaking, gradually obtaining a grasp of cadence, inflection, syntax, vocabulary and etiquette.  Children will learn to speak if exposed to language, and little to no special instruction is required to make this happen.  It’s interesting, for instance, that children will readily eschew the cadences, vocabulary and etiquette of their parents in favor of those of their peers, demonstrating that peer pressure and imitation account for a greater portion of the learning than what is self-consciously taught.  Language tends to stratify, in any one culture, into age-group-imposed variations, with the greatest rate of innovation often occurring in the youth groups, over time adding slang to the lexicon (some of which may eventually become standard, or at least generally-accepted, usage).  Linguistic customs are in fact among the wide range of shibboleths (musical preferences, vehicular preferences, attire, modes of entertainment and social engagement) that social contexts use to identify in-group members.

In this, language reflects the nature / nurture dichotomy that typifies cultural features.  We have the capacity for culture and for certain behaviors; these capacities are innate, instinctive, universal to all (normal) people in all societies.  But the way in which these behaviors and cultural features are expressed is subject to substantial variability.  Culture differentiates over time in a way analogous to how populations and species do, and for similar reasons:  different sets of environmental pressures to which to adapt.  So it is with morality.  We’re born with a capacity for morality, but the specifics of the morals imposed on us vary considerably from society to society, as well as over time.  Consider how clothing differentiates over time.  In the natural state, where human groups are small and highly mobile, cultural identity must be advertised from a reasonably safe distance, so that friend and foe can be distinguished readily.  So clothing, skin scarification, paint, headdresses and other adornments are prominent, garish, and distinctive.  Within an ethnicity or over a wide region, these may amount to variations on a theme, since groups in these settings will be exposed to the same kinds of materials, the same seasonal availability thereof, and the same general understanding of what the structures and colors signify.  Ostrich feathers and warthog tusks might be common in one part of the continent, and so might make for ready adornments; the length of the feathers in a headdress might serve as an indication of age, and therefore of rank status, while the number of tusks might signify the number of wives, or the number of enemy combatants killed in warfare.  But over wider areas, this relationship breaks down, since warthogs and ostriches have bounded geographic ranges and preferred habitats; so the variability in garb and decoration increases, with some tribes perhaps preferring lion claws to tusks, and others preferring mummified bat wings to ostrich feathers.  A graphic representation of how sartorial variability increases with distance from an epicenter of innovation would resemble a map of how culture itself diversifies with distance from a site of technological or agricultural improvement, how dialect diversifies from a root language, how populations subspeciate and then speciate over increasingly wide geographic regions.

Morality is in fact found, to some degree, in a wide range of social animals.  The purpose of morality is to promote group cohesion by encouraging members of the group to adhere to a common standard of behavior.  Any social population that exhibits the ability for its members to diverge substantially from a hardcoded script of instinctive behaviors will probably, upon inspection, be found to have some kind of moral sensibility.  (Populations whose members are bound strictly to an instinctive program of behaviors probably don’t need morality, at least in the sense we’re familiar with, but that’s not to say that we mightn’t find some analogous feature in their societies.)  This is one of the central assertions of the ethological theories advanced by Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen (famously, in Lorenz’ popular book On Aggression, and also championed by Robert Ardrey in his series on human evolution, beginning with African Genesis). 

The blueprint for the theory is fairly straightforward, premised on V. C. Wynne-Edwards’ definition of “society”:  the pursuit of conventional prizes by conventional means.  “Convensional prizes” are those things that individuals within a population compete for:  territory, rank status, resources, and mates.  “Conventional means” are those practices that allow this competition to occur with a minimum of disturbance to the group’s security and structure.  Lorenz defined “aggression” as the fighting instinct in beast and man which is directed against members of the same species; that set of behaviors whereby competition for territory, rank status, resources and mates takes place.  Under normal circumstances, in most species, this competition takes place in a more or less orderly fashion, under regular circumstances (such as during a specific time of year, in specific arenas, with an upper limit on the extent of the ensuing violence).  Very few species engage in combat with lethal potential.  Rattlesnakes, for instance, have ritual combat in which contending males seek to raise the forward part of their bodies higher than the opponent, often intertwining and pushing against them until one become exhausted.  Ungulates are famed for engaging in head-butting contests.  Birds and lizards engage in ritual display, which in birds are also accompanied by loud vocalizations.  (Contrary to popular conception, male birds don’t sing to attract mates, but to declare and defend ownership of a specific territory.  The mates accrue to those who maintain the most attractive territories.)  The common element to these contests is the exhibition of strength and endurance, which in the context of sexual selection translates to health and the ability to expend energy in the pursuit of biological success.  When a social species’ behavior is complex enough that substantial deviation from instinct can occur, there is enhanced potential for ritual combat to exceed these parameters.  As John C. Calhoun’s “behavioral sink” experiments with rats demonstrated—and as history continues to demonstrate wherever and whenever human society collapses—norms are essential to maintaining order and peace in society.  As stress (particularly population stress) on society increases, some individuals lose the ability to adhere to norm, and violence and depredation is the result.  But as long as population levels remain reasonable, and resource contention remains moderated by norms—and, in many cases, by the moderating, pacifying influence of the elders in the hierarchy—ritual conflict can take place in its circumscribed arena without spilling over into the general population. 

Lorenz and Tinbergen observed morality, or at least a primitive counterpart, in several different kinds of animals, including herring gulls and chacma baboons.  Morality, they found, is imposed by the group, particularly by the elder members, those who tend to occupy the higher rungs of the hierarchy.  Behaviors that are wildly out of norm are regarded with suspicion, even hostility; herring gulls that were netted for study, and thrashed in panic, were immediately set upon by their neighbors in the colony.  A female baboon, raised in captivity and therefore unaware of the signals used by the wild troop to rally and begin moving, was repeatedly bitten on the neck by a dominant male who couldn’t understand why she didn’t get the message.  More recently, documentary filmmakers have captured footage of a male coyote, exceeding his station by attempting to mate with the alpha female, being driven out of the pack by the other members.  It is clear that morality, or at least its progenitor behaviors, existed long ago in the animal kingdom, and that humanity came into that endowment not by means of devising it from scratch, but by way of accepting it as a fait accompli from our immediate ancestors.

OK, so morality isn’t unique to humanity.  As it happens, this can also be said of culture in general.  “Culture” can be defined as the set of practices that are learned and / or taught, and therefore cannot be ascribed solely to instinct.  Culture has been observed in apes, notably by Jane Goodall.  Chimpanzees, for instance, have enough intelligence and inquisitiveness to be able to learn a great deal from their elders, and to come up with novel solutions to problems relating to finding food.  Chimps in parts of Africa extract termites from logs manufacture tools called “brush-tipped probes,” whereas chimps in other areas manufacture tools called “brush sticks,” distinguished by the means and extent they’re stripped of leaves.  So far, there doesn’t appear to be any particular advantage of one method over another; they cannot, for the time being, be argued to be the inevitable result of natural selection modifying behavior over time.  They are, however, quite definitely learned.  The capacity for using tools is innate; the specifics of tool manufacture and use vary from group to group.

What this ultimately means is that there cannot be a universal morality.  Only in the total absence of cultural variability could norms and values be regarded, in toto, as human universals.  Because every human group exists in a unique combination of historical, climatic, sociopolitical and ethnic environmental factors, the culture that arises in each has unique features, and this applies as much to morality as to any other.  The norms of the Aztecs called for periodic human sacrifice and the torture of war captives.  The norms of lowland New Guineans called for headhunting and periodic warfare against neighboring tribes.  The norms of modern Yanomamo call for violent, painful ritual combat, total war with neighboring villages, and the rape and enslavement of captives.  Cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris, in his book Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture,  describes how the Maring tribe of New Guinea, at intervals determined by the rate at which their domestic pig population expanded (thereby imposing resource pressure on the Maring themselves), engaged in total, genocidal war with their neighbors.  In previous eras, headhunting was also a norm, one that was repressed by Christian missionaries.  As the practice vanished from the social scene, its power to promote group cohesion dried up as well, and many New Guinean tribes fell completely apart.

This understanding of morality is difficult to come by for some folks, who regard “morality” as being defined by “social justice.”  Ardrey argued that group cohesion arises via the interplay of factors related to the “Amity / Enmity Complex,” the set of behaviors that allow individuals to regard some other individuals as kin, while regarding still other individuals as outsiders.  This in-group / out-group identification approach to understanding morality is found in a number of disciplines, from psychiatry (in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung) to mythography (in the works of Joseph Campbell).  Just as linguistic variability can serve to distinguish youth culture from its elders, and face paint and feathers can distinguish one tribe from another, norms can distinguish one society from another.  Religion, as keeper and promulgator of norms, coevolved with civilization in order to promote group cohesion in the increasingly dense and complex society that was developing.  Liberals and anarchists, who see in religion only a source of persecution and war, resist comprehending this point.  They see nothing “moral” in forced conversions, in Crusades, or in the Inquisition.  By focusing on the pathological expressions of religious group cohesion, they are ignoring the wider world of civilization itself, which cannot have come into existence, evolving from the ancestral, tribal condition, without features such as religion to expand the concept of “kin” from having a narrow, purely ethnic connotation to having a broader, cultural one.  This “expanding the circle” phenomenon is the subject of Peter Singer’s book The Expanding Circle, and the general process of pacification-via-civilization is the subject of Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature.  The executive summary of both books can be stated as “civilization expands our notion of kinship, which is itself instinctive, from its basic form (rooted in genetic kinship) to a more elaborate, inclusive form (rooted in shared culture).”  Norms and values are what comprise that shared culture.  This is a pretty simple, obvious insight, one that is supported by a wealth of anthropological, ethological and psychological research, but it takes little more than a hostility to religion to render it completely invisible.

What people with that hostility will argue is that morality isn’t imposed by society, but is rather a set of rules the individual decides upon for himself, never comprehending that they are confusing morality and ethic.  They argue that, for this reason, religion isn’t necessary, and given the evident problems posed by religion, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, oblivious to the fact that morality cannot be “universal” or “absolute” while at the same time personal and individually-defined.  They declare that morality is about doing what is “right,” without specifying who or what defines what “right” is.  They exhibit an unwillingness to acknowledge what “normal” means, and to accept that “norms” and “normative” share the same root. 

What is “normal” is defined by the majority.  The fat part of the bell curve is the normal part of a distribution.  This is a pretty hateful truth to that ideological contingent that seeks to redefine “normal,” to normalize abnormality, and to garner approval for practices that the majority disapproves of.  But it’s a truth that is central to the democratic process, to civilized society, to animal society in general.  One’s membership in and participation in the group takes place only with the group’s approval.  This simple fact of human nature—of animal nature—has ramifications for issues such as marriage equality, illegal immigration, and welfare entitlements, which is no doubt among the most important reasons why it is so vociferously resisted by progressives.

Liberal academia doesn’t like morality to be complex and nuanced.  It doesn’t like morality to be diverse and normative.  It prefers that morality be universal and absolute, except when it prefers that morality be entirely individual.  It prefers that morality be concerned with social justice, except when morality is in a position to be compared and contrasted vis-à-vis civil rights and equality (think “cultural relativism,” especially with regard to how women and minority religious groups are treated in majority-Muslim nations).  It doesn’t like that in-group / out-group identification requires approval and entails disapproval, except when approving of progressives and disapproving of conservatives, libertarians, and capitalists, all of whom can be dismissed on the basis of racism, sexism, homophobia, or some other catch-all label (I’ll leave it to the reader to weigh the inherent bigotry in such prejudices).

The preferred liberal definition of “morality” is the set of rules for conduct which promote altruism and reciprocity.  This is actually acceptable, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.  Altruism is promoted instinctively by kin selection in most social animals; it’s a mandatory behavioral complex, reinforced by instinct.  Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the “selfish gene” in order to explicate kin selection, which is the operative form of inclusive fitness in small groups.  Individuals within a population to which they are closely related have a tendency to be willing to risk their lives in defense of the group, share resources, even to their own detriment, and otherwise put themselves out in order to help the others.  This is because they all tend to share some genes.  Obviously natural selection rewards (with reproductive opportunities) those who survive long enough to secure mates, so risking one’s life would tend to be contraindicated under normal circumstances.  But in groups of highly-related individuals, one individual doesn’t have to survive and reproduce in order for his genes to survive to the next generation.  As long as his close relatives survive, those genes survive.  So inclusive fitness arises as a set of mechanisms whereby individuals can ensure the survival of those genes by risking themselves.  Dawkins regards kin selection as the only existing form of inclusive fitness, but there is evidence for another:  group selection, which promotes the survival of groups without a high degree of relatedness.  It is the set of mechanisms whereby individuals can ensure the survival of completely unrelated individuals.  It should be obvious, with a bit of reflection, that this kind of inclusion cannot be reinforced by instinct, as there is no genetic feedback between the act of altruism and the survival of the genes of the altruistic individual.  It would appear that it can only come into existence in large groups, and then only under the influence of cultural factors that can stand in for genes.

This is what makes civilization possible.  The inherent clannishness of human groups would prevent their integration into larger communities, on which they’d have to share a fixed group territory, abandoning their roving ways and their constant conflict with other groups, in the absence of cultural features that can promote the shift from kin selection to group selection.  And yet here we are, all civilized.  The cultural features that came into existence—the features that in fact distinguish civilization from the natural state—are formalized religion, government, formalized marriage, traditions and markets.  It may be purely accidental that these are the features to which progressives and anarchists tend to be most hostile, but it is certainly ironic; the eradication of these features from civilization would erode group cohesion to the point where civilization would become untenable.

Morality encompasses several of these features.  Religion codifies morals and imposes them from the bottom up, by describing a family structure and imposing barriers to entry that demand adherence to norms before the individual can commit to a marriage, and enforces them with peer pressure.  Government imposes morals by standardizing practices and public conduct, enforcing them with legal penalties.  Tradition promotes group cohesion by bringing together people from all walks of life in shared activity.  Marriage provides a stable structure for the raising of children and the generational transfer of values.

Clearly, morality is concerned with more than just altruism.  Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt undertook a study of morality, proceeding from the common academic assumption that it consists of a set of behavioral responses that can be quantified along a couple of different axes, with names like “care / harm” and “fairness / cheating”.  After interviewing people in cultures all over the world, he was compelled to expand on that phase space out to a five-axis model, and in the time since his original publication, another axis has been identified.  One of the more intriguing findings in his work is the discovery that liberals and conservatives tend to regard morality very differently, not only in outward expression but in terms of internal processing.  This difference appears to be neurological in origin, and not the result of indoctrination; in other words, some people are born with a hardwired predisposition to become ideologically conservative, and others are born to become liberal.  This could be the result of a form of “differential selection” akin to what predestines some people to be alpha males and others to be omegas.  Whatever the case, conservatives, in cultures all over the world, engage in moral processing that entails considering five or even six dimensions, whereas liberals limit their moral processing to no more than three, and often just one (combining the “care / harm” and “fairness / cheating” dimension into a single one, which could be labeled “reciprocity”).  By focusing on the “fairness” of a policy or practice, they ignore the cohesive impact of loyalty, sanctity and liberty.  Indeed, many liberals seem entirely incapable of considering how these things have moral value and are useful in social settings.  This is one reason why it’s so damnably difficult to discuss these matters with progressives.

The reason I started with morality is that it is the most thoroughly studied of the relevant concepts, empirically speaking, while at the same time the most controversial, given the progressive attachment to an incomplete definition.  It therefore made for the most exhaustive (and exhausting) discussion, but now that we’ve got the heaviest lifting out of the way, we can move on to the corollary definitions.

2.  Civilization

This is a more recent source of contention, in my experience.  I’ve been engaging in debate with communists for a decade or so by now, but recently I was exposed to a passel of them who’ve been mutually-supporting each other in debate for quite some time in a social media group, and who have therefore been steeping in the same concepts, arguments and jibes, learning tricks from each other and adopting similar rhetoric, expressions and idioms.  Rather than dealing with isolated communists with individual variations on the Marxist ideology, I was faced with a more or less unified front.  It was an opportunity to observe the Amity / Enmity Complex in action, and to become acquainted with a wider range of collectivist arguments.  It was an eye-opening experience.

Among the things I quickly learned was that “civilization” doesn’t mean what anthropologists define it to mean.  There is no such thing as the “natural state”; humans entered the world in a full-blown civilized state.  There is nothing, in other words, that distinguishes civilization from the ancestral environment; there are only degrees of refinement of civilization.  Agriculture, urbanization, ceremonial centers, trade based on a division of labor:  these things don’t define civilization, and so are exempt from discussion.  Simply being a society composed of human beings defines civilization.  To argue otherwise is to unfairly promote a “classist” view of society, in which some societies are “superior to” others by virtue of a greater degree of technological advancement or global influence.

Yeah.  Seriously.

3.  Capitalism

Capitalism is simply a form of market economy –an economy that relies on a division of labor and requires the voluntary exchange between individuals who participate in trade only when both parties perceive they will come away from the exchange better off than before—that operates by way of the advancement of privately-owned property, useful for producing some good or service (the “means of production”), to laborers who then use it in that capacity while in exchange returning some portion of the proceeds back to the owner of the property.  In a market economy, consumer sovereignty compels firms to produce what is demanded, at prices that can be afforded; capitalism, by way of competition, enforces allocative and productive efficiencies, ensuring that wealth is created and that society’s standing tends to increase over time, in terms of needs being met, convenience, and leisure.

Right? 

According to socialists, capitalism is an economic system that relies on the exploitation of laborers who are forced to sacrifice the surplus value they create to thieves who leech off society and offer nothing of value.  

Yes, I have actually been given that definition as canonical.

Since I’m already dealing with this particular form of lunacy in a series on free markets, I’ll spare you another 10-page diatribe and move right on.

4.  Human nature

This is what it all boils down to.  Communists, and progressives in general, deny the existence of human nature.  This denial is the subject of Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which goes into great detail on how liberal academics have not only repudiated any hypothesis, theory or discipline which acknowledges human universals, but have mobilized student activists to repress any discussion of it on campuses.  Communism can really only succeed and thrive if humans lack an innate drive to compete and acquire territory; therefore, humanity cannot be allowed to have any instinctive drives.  We must be infinitely malleable, willing to accept any programming imposed on us by our benevolent social engineers.  It goes without saying that in my arguments with communists, I’ve received far more pushback on the existence of human nature than on any other issue, including the comparative merits of capitalism and collectivism. 

This pushback, however, rarely takes any kind of rational form.  One of the most annoying things about arguing with Marxists is the utter rejection of any science that doesn’t bear Marx’ stamp of approval.  Marx was many things:  a capitalist, a shyster, an angry authoritarian maladaptive.  But he was no anthropologist.  The vast majority of scientific findings relevant to the debate between collectivism and markets came to light only after his death.  His supposedly “scientific” ideology rejects almost the entirety of modern science.  Postmoderns reject any thesis that can be perceived as having an ideological bias.  Capitalism and markets are obviously ideologically biased; evolutionary psychology is obviously ideologically biased; ethology is obviously ethologically biased; physical anthropology and paleoanthropology are obviously ideologically biased.  The only discipline that isn’t ideologically biased is sociology, and the only economic model that isn’t ideologically biased is Marxism.  So say the Marxists.  On what basis do they distinguish the valid (non-biased) worldviews from the biased ones?  Who the hell knows?  They sure as hell ain’t sayin. 

5.  Liberalism

This is the definition that irritates me the most, because it’s the one most calculated to dig at non-Marxists.  It’s classic out-group identification, although the communists never acknowledge this.  They begin with a damnably accurate statement, that classical liberalism began as an Enlightenment-era philosophy that emphasized liberty and the equality of all men (in a legal, rather than socioeconomic sense).  They properly point out that “liberty” and “liberal” derive from the same root, and initially carried similar connotations.  But they then go on to ignore the evolutionary process that has followed since that inception.

What classical liberals believed was necessary to the pursuit of liberty was a reduction in the power and scope of government, in combination with a democratic process that placed government under the control and consent of the governed.  The founders of the United States embarked on the first, and so far greatest, libertarian experiment in history.  Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence, which laid out a list of grievances and a rationale for addressing those grievances, and in so doing elucidated the Non-Aggression Principle in full.  The Constitution laid out the powers of the branches of the federal government, limiting its operations to just those powers, and reserving everything else for the states and the people themselves.  These two documents together serve as the blueprint for classical liberalism.  The government isn’t tasked with “taking care of” the people, but with preserving their rights.  All men are created equal, in terms of access to rights—property rights and civil rights—including due process and legal representation, as well as participation in the legal process.  Men are not expected to be equal in terms of social status, economic achievement, or influence on society outside the democratic process.  

The conflict between equality and liberty comes into existence whenever government is used to promote the former at the expense of the latter.  Liberty requires little more than an absence, or at least a paucity, of government interference in our lives.  Socioeconomic equality, by contrast, requires burdensome government intervention.  This conflict has given us the modern-day division between classical liberals and modern progressives, who believe that the government has a responsibility both to “take care of” its citizens and to promote socioeconomic equality.  The measures taken in pursuit of these policy preferences violate the policy preferences of classical liberals.  Redistribution of wealth, for instance, violates property rights, and also intrudes on organic group cohesion by requiring individuals to subsidize the lifestyles of others whose way of life may be regarded as abhorrent or contrary to the donor’s values.

This is why what was formerly known as “liberalism” is now regarded as having evolved, and diversified, into at least three schisms.  “Libertarianism”—which shares that same root—is focused on liberty, and therefore on restricting the size and power of government.  It hews closely to the ideology of the majority of the Founders.  It is not totally distinct from what is called “neoliberalism,” which is focused primarily on laissez-faire economic policy.  (For libertarians who regard a free market and a free society as essentially synonymous, there is really no distinction there at all, although some neoliberals could be regarded more as anarchists than as libertarians; hence the label “ancap,” or anarchist-capitalist.)  There is also modern liberalism or “progressivism,” which, as mentioned, is quite distinct from these strains.  One might also regard modern conservatism as a continuation of classical liberalism, although it grades from libertarianism to social conservatism, which tends to be more focused on conformity and the “sanctity” aspect of morality than on those, like “liberty,” that are endorsed by libertarians.

To recapitulate my public school experience, my social studies training defined “liberalism” as a preference for social change, typically quite rapid, and often imposed by government.  In the context of modern liberalism, this is exactly correct.  Modern liberalism is dominated by progressive ideology, and progressivism is all about using government force to engineer society into evolving in a specific direction.  This of course ignores that evolution requires diversification; it ignores that complex systems (such as markets, and societies entire) cannot be directed or regulated; it ignores that massive government intervention is required to compel people to disavow majority values and adopt the values of a minority special-interest group.

But there it is.  Classical liberalism is about preserving liberty by restraining government; modern liberalism is about expanding government power, at the expense of liberty, in order to equalize economic outcomes.  The difference between classical and modern liberalism is statism.  And that’s a pretty profound difference.  It’s a difference that is nonetheless entirely meaningless to Marxists, despite the fact that their own claims to ideological distinctiveness are premised on their belief that pure communism would in fact result in statelessness.

The fact of the matter is that statelessness can never be achieved in a civilized society.  The fact of the matter is that the revolutionary aspect of Marxism grants it a greater commonality with progressivism than with anarchistic systems like neoliberalism.  The fact of the matter is that modern liberalism, in its preference for collectivist redistribution, is more akin to Marxism than it is to neoliberalism.  The fact of the matter is that Marxism owes its existence, no less than libertarianism, to the same evolutionary process that began with the Enlightenment, and therefore is unjustified in distinguishing and elevating itself in the self-conscious way it attempts.

But to a communist, there are only two ideologies:  Marxism, and everything else.  And “everything else” gets lumped under the label “liberalism.”

I hate being called a liberal.

6.  Statism

Communists also tend to divide governmental systems into two categories:  “anarchism” and “statism.”  They refuse to admit ancaps into the pantheon of anarchists; only communists need apply.

Libertarians cannot be statist.  Libertarians do not believe in the use of government force to solve society’s problems.

I hate being called a statist.

7.  Fascism

Communists also tend to divide economic systems into two categories:  “socialism” and “fascism.”  They refuse to acknowledge that fascism is a form of collectivism, and therefore has a good deal more in common with communism than with free-market capitalism.  Fascism, in the words of Mussolini, is the logical extreme of corporatism; it is the merger of state power with industrial power.  This is the exact opposite of a free market; in an ideally libertarian society, there would be little to no regulation, no lobby, and no income tax, and therefore no conduit for corruption, no unholy symbiosis between state and industry, no power to influence consumer activity, no forced redistribution, and no subsidizing of a military-industrial complex or promoting state monopoly. 

To be fair, it’s not just communists that commit this error.  I’ve seen non-socialist anarchists imply that the existence of any law, of any government at all is tantamount to fascism.

I hate being called a fascist.

But at least I know better than to take it personally.  I know what these words really mean, you see.  When used in error, they’re either used out of ignorance, or in an ad-hom attempt to get my goat.

And I never let the bastards get me down.  Every time I'm called a fascist, I simply point out the commonalities between Nazism and Stalinism, and watch the froth fly.

Illegal Immigration, Illegally Legalized

There's much ballyhoo at the moment over Obama's executive order imposing leniency on four million or so "undocumented immigrants" within U. S. borders.  A concise summary of the order can be found at Vox.  The controversy is multifaceted:

--His action does nothing to disincentivize the coming of yet more illegals.
--It may overstep his authority as Executive, and therefore be unconstitutional.
--The timing is, to say the least, quite suspect.

I'll deal with each issue in turn.

The first problem has to do with the fact that the borders are still not secure, and there is nothing in the way of policy that imposes penalties for continuing to violate those borders.  What the order does, effectively, is shield those millions from threat of deportation while permitting them to attempt to find work here.  This is tantamount to rewarding them for having broken the law in the first place, not to mention for having jumped in line before many other immigrants who have taken the time and trouble to go through the legal process, to learn English and American customs, and to attempt to integrate more fully into society.

Predictably, there has been some Republican outrage over the matter, which will be addressed more fully in the "suspect timing" comment below.  Here, I'm concerned with the liberal response to this outrage.  Henry Fernandez at MSNBC argues that Obama has "both precedent and law on his side."  Dale Hansen, in his Huffington Post blog report, asserts that Republican outrage is "misplaced":

Some people are suggesting that by taking such action, Obama is acting like a king or a dictator, despite the fact that Obama has actually used executive orders at lower rates than most of his predecessors.

Faced with this reality, some Republicans claim that it's not how often Obama uses this power but that his actions are unconstitutional or an unprecedented overreach of his power.

The reality is that every president over the last six decades have shielded groups here illegally from deportation. This order may protect more people than usual, but according to legal scholars it is not illegal, unconstitutional, or unprecedented.

In following up on his claim, I checked two of his sources:  Every Immigration-Related Executive Action of the Last 58 Years and Legal scholars argue Obama's immigration actions are lawful, constitutional.

There is at least one obvious problem with each source.  In the first instance, a comparison of the executive orders, on a case-by-case basis, reveals two factors common to previous EOs and absent in this one.  In each prior case, the "amnesty" was issued to a narrow segment of the illegal population, and always in the context of political refuge; and in several notable cases, particularly the Reagan "amnesty" to which liberals frequently compare Obama's, the executive order merely expanded on an already legislatively-passed legal amnesty.  Politifact notes with glee that Reagan "did the A-word," but fails to acknowledge that Reagan was in fact signing into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which was a piece of bipartisan legislation...not an executive order.  By contrast, the "extended voluntary departure" that he granted to some groups--such as Poles, after Poland imposed martial law--falls under an existing State Department directive permitting the executive to withhold deportation proceedings for specified populations until conditions in their home nations improve.

You'll note from the 58-year chart that prior EOs are specific to Poles, Russians, Vietnamese, Cubans, Ugandans, Ethiopians, and other groups fleeing oppressive communist governments and the miserable social and economic conditions those governments imposed.  None of these was a "blanket" form of amnesty intended to grant permanent residence privileges to anybody and everybody who had crossed our border illegally.

So Obama's amnesty is not like those imposed by previous Presidents, which worked within the framework of existing laws.  What we seem to have here, as was the case with his unilateral delaying of key provisions of the ACA after it had become law, is an executive issuing law, and therefore treading on legislative authority.

The second source provided by Hansen asserts that some 135 Constitutional scholars have issued a statement indicating they do not find fault with Obama's action.  Unfortunately, the source does not provide the statement for review, nor list any of the authors.  There is nothing in the AP report to indicate the ideological leanings of those issuing the statement, nor anything in the way of a dissenting opinion from any other Constitutional scholars.  The report seems to be declaring that American legal scholars agree with Obama, and nobody disagrees.

I'm not convinced.  I'm not prepared to declare that what he is doing is thoroughly illegal, although to borrow a phrase from the MSNBC article, such illegality on his part is "not without precedent."  I would love to read those scholars' position in detail, and follow up with positions of other scholars not deemed worthy of mention by AP, MSNBC, or Huffington, before arriving at a firm opinion.

I do, however, have very firm opinion regarding the timing of Obama's announcement.  Within days of the 2014 elections, which demonstrated a thorough national repudiation of the Democrats and the Obama agenda, he appeared on television to justify his executive order, and to argue that it was necessary due to inaction on the part of Congressional Republicans.

Let me reiterate this.  Although immigration reform has been a hot topic in American politics for the past several years, and although the Republicans took the Senate, increased their grip on the House of Representatives, and claimed several governorships and state legislatures, the Obama administration believes that the people of this country are not to be trusted, and that our vote was not a referendum on himself and his policies...despite his campaigning on the basis of "make no mistake:  these policies are on the ballot."  Obama is unwilling to provide the Republicans any time to provide an immigration-reform solution of their own.  This amnesty isn't humanitarian; it's political.  He is leveraging the debate for political capital to bank in the Democrats' accounts.  I've absolutely no doubt that he had this plan, and the announcement, stored up well in advance of the elections, and that had the Democrats instead prevailed, even now immigration reform, Dem style, would be churning its way through both chambers of Congress.

That's not honest.  It's not ethical.  Rather than accepting graciously that "these policies" have been rebuked, and that it's now the Republicans' turn to deal with illegal immigration and everything else, Obama is pandering to the illegal segment of our population, the very same segment whose (illegal) votes and (illegal) participation in social programs the Republicans have been attempting to prevent.

It's neither honest nor ethical, but it is quite Democratic. And it's very much Obama.