The Secret Knowledge

I have seen visitors at an art exhibition clear their paper plates of the residue of bad cheese, and put the plates in their purse, so as to avoid the waste of paper. Is this fun? Is it productive? Or is it just, rather, the physicalization of that same do-goodishness the apotheosis of which is the bumper sticker?

Do bumper stickers save whales, and free Tibet? By what magical process?

Dennis Prager said that the beautiful one-word haiku, the bumper sticker “Coexist,” that cunning exhortation both verbal and pictorial, its letters made of the Islamic crescent, the Cross, the six-point star, et cetera, that this work of art appears in the country on earth and in history uniquely dedicated to and achieving freedom of religion. He remarked, further, that were one to affix this bumper sticker to his car in Iran the car would be keyed and its occupants beheaded.

Macaulay suggests that the Puritans were expelled from England not because of their religion, but because everyone had sickened of their kvetching.

My daughter comes home from her high school music class and reports that the teacher has announced that the mnemonic for the lines in the treble clef will no longer be “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” which would be sexist, but “Every Good Baby Does Fine.”

Bruno Bettelheim, a holocaust survivor, wrote that the genius of the Nazi salute was that it prescribed the constant repetition of an action. It did not ask for belief, it inculcated belief, as one, perhaps opposed to the Nazis, but forced to give the salute some hundreds of times a day, eventually tired of the unuttered proviso “but I don’t believe it.” He tired of feeling like a hypocrite, and came to take out the anger this feeling produced not on his oppressors, but on those who did not salute wholeheartedly—who, that is, preserved a measure of autonomy.

The puritan has become, of late, the totalitarian, where every last thing, thought, and utterance in the Liberal Day must be an assertion of some Liberal Value; One-Worldness, Compassion, Conservation, Equality, the dread of giving offense, and guilt.

What is the actual human mechanism devoted to the dread of giving offense? It is called culture. It, in its entirety, consists of rules worked out through human interactions sufficiently successful to have been relegated to unconscious habit.

When all human interactions are brought to conscious consideration, the result is anxiety and fear. Consider any first meeting or ceremony where the forms are unknown: a dinner party, for example, of such formality that one was unsure which fork to use, and how and when to address one’s tablemates; a meeting with a head of state, or a celebrity. Human beings, in such circumstances, may be brought to a literal state of immobility through fear of violating a norm and of behaving in a, thus, shameful fashion.

This is the state of the contemporary Liberal world—the fear of giving offense has been self-inculcated in a group which must, now, consider literally every word and action, for potential violation of the New Norms. To further compound the dilemma, the norms themselves are inchoate: consider a high school teacher coming upon two students kissing in the hallway, in violation of school rules. Suppose the two students are gay. Can you imagine a teacher who would not at the very least hesitate in or mitigate her caution or censure in fear of offending the students? Consider the Black Power agitation and vandalism of the sixties, and the school administrators who allowed it on campus—not out of fear for their person, but out of fear that to defend the actual university culture of civility would be to give offense. It is not the absence of government, but the rejection of culture which leads to anarchy.

18

THE NOBLE SAVAGE

There is a curious disconnection between the Left’s worship of the tribal and its religious belief in the power of Government. It may be that its mythology runs like this: The Noble Savage acts in a manner more in tune with Nature. He is uncorrupted, save by the advent of the Whites, who took his land (Israel, the American West, the British Empire). Prior to their coming, he dwelt in peace, tilling the soil according to immemorial principles, and ruled chiefly by his love of the plants and seasons and their influence upon all things. If he had a religion it was that of God as Nature. And we, Westerners, killed and kill him, through greed for his possessions (natural resources).

But the so-believing, the adorers of Third World music, native crafts, and the disheveled dress of their notional American Native Tribe (the poor, the homeless), these, nonetheless, continue to enshrine Big Government as the only tool capable of returning Man from Hell to Eden.

The same Democracy, then, which, in its nonelected quality (civilization) inexorably populated the world, ever widening the polity, and obliterating the Tribe and its supposed blessings, is held by the Left to be that tool capable of reversing the process and restoring us to the Tribe, its campfire, its wise elders, its superabundance of untouched wilderness and game. We’re going to vote on it, and when we have enough votes, we’re going to return to the campfire. There will be no more pollution, for we will vote to stop our polluting ways; there will be no more war, as all sovereign States will be subsumed into a large tribe of the mutually understanding (cf. the United Nations), there will be no more Poverty, because the Earth Holds Enough for All, and lacks only that Wise Leadership which will see to its Just Distribution (a dictator). And all that stands between this utopia and our present state of stupid error are the Conservatives, who believe only in Greed.

How did the Conservatives Get That Way? No one on the Left knows. The generous response was that they must have been dropped on their head as babies, lacking which excuse the Conservative point of view is (to the Left) incomprehensible indwelling Evil.⁴³

For to the Left, Government is the water in which they swim, the underlying belief of their lives: Government is not merely one of the ways in which humanity may be convened to order its various affairs (the others being Religion and the Free Market), but the only way. Liberalism is that religion which has, for the Left, replaced Religion, for which the prime purpose of Government is to expand Equality, which may also be stated thus: to expand its own powers.

For if Government is not only good, but the only source of good, why should it not be elaborated and empowered to address any and all issues?

This is the vision of FDR, who elaborated a bad economic downturn into the worst depression in history. In an attempt to Do Good for All, he dismantled the free market, and, so, the economy⁴⁴ and saddled our country not only with “social programs,” but with the deeper, unconscious legacy of belief in Social Programs, irrespective of their effectiveness. Roosevelt’s great domestic bequest was this syllogism: If anything called a Social Program fails, expand it.

This is the meaning of Social Justice. It means actions by the State in the name of Justice, which is to say under complete protection and immunity from review. Its end is dictatorship. This progression, from Social Justice to Judicial Activism and control of means of production and distribution, can be seen in the history of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the USSR, North Korea, China, Cuba, wherever the Socialists took power and brought terror; and yet the Left, longing for the campfire, votes for collectivism, for bigger and more powerful and more “feeling” Government. Why?