The Secret Knowledge

They believe that our enemies, like the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, will be so moved by some unnamable but real excellence on our part, that they will forswear their desire for our destruction (recognizing it, now, as an unnecessary expenditure of effort) and beat their swords into plowshares.

But the Left does not stop to consider that if we, the most prosperous country in the history of the world, choose neither to exploit nor to defend our property, someone else will take it, and if we announce, indeed, proclaim our passivity, we will only advance that bad day.

The Left insisted that we abandon, in 1973, a war we had just won in Vietnam, and go on home, as the Left today insists we withdraw from Afghanistan and withdraw from Iraq. Leaving to one side legitimate legislative differences over the strategic worth of any one conflict, what real or potential enemy could possibly misinterpret its possibilities of gain in the light of our absolutely predictable absence of resolve?

Just as the Left, geopolitically, does not recognize enmity (other than on the part of the Right), it judicially does not recognize crime; or that which, historically, was known as crime (that is, behavior transgressive of those statutes enacted for the protection of society), calling it “error,” or the effect of “environment,” or searching for any artifice to free itself of the mature human necessity of choice and enforcement. ²⁸ So doing, the Left everywhere relaxes those judicial norms which alone can give some measure of certainty to the populace.

(Note that in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, an 1872 Utopian novel, crime was considered sickness, and the criminal coddled and condoled with, while sickness was treated as crime. I will not belabor the similarity to the Left’s New Age health movement, which, in its charms, potions, and essences and practices, discards science in favor of “ancient wisdom.”)

My generation huddles in ignorance that is felt, on the Left, as a worship of man’s “natural state,” this supposedly being, all human history to the contrary, one of health and peace, ignoring and in fact rejecting both our imperfections as a species and our differences as individuals.

The random distribution of abilities and ambitions, which has allowed human beings to thrive and communities to grow, and which gives to the group strength and to the individual the possibility of achievement and, so, happiness in the approbation of the group, is derided by the Left as nonsense. To them, each child is born a blank slate, and any difference in subsequent individual accomplishment, status, or wealth, must, thus, be due to some maleficent influence, which is to say, to exploitation.²⁹ As if we were created to thrive in a society made exclusively of cobblers, or second basemen, surgeons, or deliverymen. The Left sees trade—the source of wealth—as exploitation; and, each child being born equal, all differences in wealth, again, as theft. (Here forgetting the lessons of the schoolyard—that one child may prefer the orange and the other the candy bar, and, so, both may be made happy by an exchange. Is this simplistic? No, it is simple: left to our own devices, we human beings increase our happiness by unfettered trade, and however much we may vote for Government Supervision [state control] we all delight in barter, and the free give and take of the flea market.)³⁰

To correct this observed inequality, which the Left sees as unnatural, it invented the term “social justice.” But a system of Justice already exists, formulated by Legislature, in supposed expression of the will of the people, and administered by the Judiciary. This is called the Judicial System. What, then, is this additional, amorphous “social justice”? It can only mean, as Hayek wrote, “State Justice.” Here, though the Left will not follow the reasoning out to its end, the State (operating upon what basis it alone knows, and responsible to no law enacted by the people) confiscates wealth accumulated under existing laws and redistributes it to those it deems worthy.

History proves that the worthiest in these Marxist schemes are, or quickly become, those in charge of distribution, which is to say “the State,” its constitutional powers usurped by those we know as “dictators.”

To the Left it is the State which should distribute place, wealth, and status. This is called “correcting structural error,” or redressing “the legacy of Slavery,” or Affirmative Action, or constraining unfair Executive Compensation; but it is and can only be that Spoils System which is decried at the ward level as “cronyism,” and lauded at the national level as “social justice.” It is nothing other than the distribution of goods and services by the government for ends not specified in the Constitution; and in response to pressure from or in attempts to curry favor with groups seeking preferments or goods not obtainable either under the law, or through those practices of mutual benefit called the Free Market. What obscenities are created in the name of “social justice?” What could possibly be less just than policies destructive of initiative and based upon genetics? (As Thomas Sowell writes, “Are we to say of two babies, born on the same day, that one is born owing something to the other?”) Can this Social Eugenicism possibly be corrective of anything?

But how, to the Left, to explain the difference in status, in wealth, in happiness, among human beings? (And let us note that the Left, though decrying inequality in the abstract, contains none or few who are willing to redress the differences between their financial state and that of any of their less favored brethren by putting the wealth of the two into one pot and each taking half.)

Proverbs informs us that the poor will always be with us; that, just as one may not, as a judge, favor the rich, neither can one favor the poor, but must do justice according to the law—that is to say, that one must judge whether the law has been transgressed, a consideration in which the state of the offender (past his mental competency) must play no part.

The Bible is the wisdom tradition of the West. It is from the precepts of the Bible that the legal systems of the West have been developed—these systems, worked out over millennia, for dealing with inequality, with injustice, with greed, are reducible to that which the Christians call the Golden Rule, and which was, previously, propounded by Rabbi Hillel: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.”

These rules and laws form a framework which allows the individual foreknowledge of that which is permitted and that which is forbidden. This foreknowledge, a real right-of-property, is that upon which the individual makes decisions. It constitutes a practicable system for dealing with a tragical existence and a deeply flawed human nature: it asserts not the perfection, but the imperfectibility of Man. These assertions (and their attendant investigations and observations, known as philosophy and religion) may be called, in their entirety, the Tragic View.

The Left has abandoned the Tragic View,³¹ and considers life and man as unconstrained in our ability to understand and to supersede all strife and inequality. The Tragic View, however, holds that life is complicated and man flawed, and so, our actions must be guided by laws difficult both of formulation and of observance; that these laws, being the product of Man, will, themselves, be flawed, that they will not cover all instances, that their observation and correct application will often cause anxiety, and, indeed trauma, but that the health of a society (both moral and material) must rest on the attempt to do so.

The tragic view recognizes that it is possible to obviate the necessity of choice only by surrender of responsibility (worship of a dictator, or charismatic figure, guru, politician, or theory)—that between Good and Evil there is no choice, and thus moral choice means a choice between two evils.

Having renounced the necessity of dealing with complexity, the Left imagines and endorses a “post- governmental” era, in which the individual need not consider the economic and social results of his actions and his vote. He may choose not to choose, and merely endorse “Change,” and reject any request for information about the actual mechanics of this “Change,” by referring to “Hope.”