The Secret Knowledge

It is self-evident that a racialist view of the world must result in injustice. That that injustice may be calculated to benefit members of a group which may have been previously oppressed may stand as an explanation for immoral behavior, but it does not excuse it.

Shelby Steele was asked, by a good-willed White person, “What can we”—by which the speaker meant the Whites, and/or the American Government—“do for the Blacks?” He responded, “Leave us alone.”

Who is wise enough to model human behavior? No one.

Our country has created the most effective and beneficent, the most productive and the most just civilization in the history of the world, by forming laws based upon that shared truth: compassion no less than greed will, in the hands of the State, cause misery. It is not the job of the State to be compassionate, but to be just. Should the State provide a safety net for the needy, and the afflicted, to care, in the words of Lincoln (the words of the Torah) for the widow and the orphan? Of course, but it must not legislate upon the basis of classes of people, judging their entitlement to state benefits by gender or race. Such a view is both immoral and absurd. The Dred Scott decision (in 1857) accelerated and ensured the Civil War.

Our new Justice Sotomayor has declared that Hispanic women are more compassionate than White men. This should disqualify her from sitting on the bench. Why? Is it true? Who can say. Some Hispanic women are probably more compassionate than some White men, but who would want a justice of the Supreme Court who held this belief? Must it not indicate that she would, in a close case, credit the claims or arguments of a Hispanic woman over that of a White man? One would think so, if her belief, unfounded in anything other than her experience, is so strong that she felt, as an officer of the court, safe in proclaiming it.

Further, and more importantly, does one want a Supreme Court justice who feels it important to dispense compassion? Is not her job, rather, to dispense Justice, which is to say, to rule, blind to the attractiveness of the litigants or of their claims, upon the applicability of laws made previously and held to be fair, by legislators ignorant of the identity of litigants?

In the days of the acceptability of corporal punishment of children (well within my memory), the old parental phrase, whilst searching for the strap, was, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” The parent may have believed it, but that did not make it true, and it did not matter that the parent administered the strap in the—in his mind—cause of love; a legal and a moral test would have been for the child to respond, “Fine, then let me whip you.”

For how would the compassionate new justice respond to a White Male who asserted (with equal right or lack thereof), “I am a good judge, as White males are more compassionate, as is well-known, than Hispanic females”?

Here the case is shown, in its enormity, as congruent with that of the slave masters who considered themselves beneficent, and the slaves better off than freed men and women. To which Lincoln responded, yes, but I do not see any slave owners offering to trade places with them.

The human mind may be worshipped, but it cannot be trusted. This is why we have laws. Gene Debs said, “Even if I could, I would not lead you into the Promised Land, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out.” I thought this a rather flat and obvious epigram, as a youth. But I don’t think so now.

Moses was debarred from taking the Jews into the Promised Land. This could be considered a blessing, as he was to be spared the charade of their behavior in his absence. He got his reward on this side of the river—he was assigned a task, and worked ’til he saw his work completed.

Everything, indeed, must have an end, which is another way to look at the story—that the Five Books end with the Jewish People set free, not only of the authority of Pharaoh, but of that of Moses. If Moses had lived, their history beyond the Jordan would have been one with their history in the Wilderness: revolts against authority and sinful blunders followed by pleas for intercession. With Moses gone, the Jews had nothing between themselves and the word of God, and were free to obey or disobey at will, reap the rewards, or suffer the consequences. If Moses had led them in, someone else could have led them out.

Demagoguery is the attempt to convince the People that they can be led into the Promised Land—it is the trick of the snake oil salesmen, the “energy therapists,” the purveyors of “health water,” and, on the other side of the spectrum, the politician and that dictator into which he will evolve absent a vigilant electorate willing to admit its errors.

It is good for the State if the electorate has seen enough of life to notice the similarities between “Lose Weight Without Dieting,” and “Hope.” The magicians say the more intelligent the viewer is, the easier he can be fooled. To put it differently, the more educated a person is, the easier it is to engage him in an abstraction.

It has taken me rather an effort of will to wrench myself free from various abstractions regarding human interaction. A sample of these would include: that poverty can be eradicated, that greed is the cause of poverty, that poverty is the cause of crime, that Government, given enough money, can cure all ills, and that, thus, it should be so engaged.

These insupportable opinions (prejudices, really), function, in the West, much like a routine of magic tricks. The magician pulls a rabbit out of a supposedly empty hat, and while one wonders, “How did he do that?” he is already diverting the audience to a new trick—for he cannot give the audience time to dwell upon the effect. Neither can he repeat it—for the trick is a confounding of cause and effect. We watch the trick, and, in our surprise at its conclusion, remember it as the demonstration of a proposition. (I will cause a live cockatoo to appear from the front of my frilly shirt; watch.)

That is what the mind remembers, but that is not what actually occurred; for, had the magician said, “Watch my shirt to see if you can find the cockatoo,” the audience would do so. No, the magician makes a magic pass or two, and the shirt, upon which we had previously devoted no attention, gives forth the cockatoo, AS IF FROM NOWHERE. But the cockatoo did not come from nowhere, it was the frill on the shirt.

The trick of the politician and his fellow mountebanks, “Earn big money while never leaving your house!” is an inversion of the above: the dupe is told the proposition (I will now change the frill into a cockatoo; I will raise productivity and, thus, wealth, by taxing everyone to death, and driving capital out of the market), and then he is distracted from the fact that the trick has no conclusion. The politician says, “Watch closely, watch closely,” and then “Wait, wait, wait . . .” and, while our attention is diverted, he makes off with the money.

What did he just do, the opposition asks? He ruined the economy, took our savings, destroyed our ability to do business, and indebted our grandchildren. “Wait wait wait,” say the believers, “You fool: didn’t he say, ‘It might take time?’ ” And should the believers grow restive, a new effect (crisis) is right around the