America's Ruling Class

Recently I read an article in The American Spectator entitled America's Ruling Class-And the Peril's of Revolution. I disagreed powerfully with Angelo M. Codevilla's conclusions, but thought that many of his arguments made sense, with strong logical foundations. A dangerous contradiction, and one that I've not experienced so strongly since reading The Unabomber Manifesto (and like The Unabomber Manifesto, America's Ruling class goes from "yeah, I agree," to "wtf are you smoking" fairly quickly).

Mr. Codevilla's thesis is that the political disenchantment in America, as most contemporanious represented by the Tea Party, comes from the growing power of a new ruling class since World War II, that class' arrogance, and its failure to govern. The common people of America, sick at this unnatural state of affairs, are beginning to rise up in revolt.

Who are America's ruling class?

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct... Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The ruling class encompasses Democrats and Republicans. At its top are Senators and Congressmen, its ranks are swelled by public servants, teachers, union members, and those who suckle at the trough of public money, ranging from welfare queens to non-profit activists to research scientists.

I took immediate offense to this, but as I calmed down, I realized that the reason I got angry was that Mr. Codevilla was right. I am a member of America's ruling class. My education at a state university is subsidized by local taxes, and I plan to find more government grants soon. My friends are liberals who speak in a certain language, many of whom work in the non-profit sector. And I am skeptical of the ability of business to help America, and am sanguine about the power of intelligent government intervention.

America does having a ruling class, and no one can deny the influence of the federal government, and its followers. "By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty... By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support." Nor can I deny that this ruling class has failed America. Since WW2, we've seen four useless quagmire wars in Asia, the decline of American education, immense increases in pollution, a decline in global prestige, massive government debt, an expansion of regulation without a commensurate expansion in safety etc etc. The ruling class is separated from its intellectual foundations, and is less intelligent and less coherent than ever before. They have failed to make a case for their position, and now in the everyday process of politics, denigrate their own ability to govern.

The Center Cannot Hold
Codevilla posits as a counter-weight the forgotten America of ordinary people, what he calls the "Country Class." These plain folks are fed up with an intrusive, top heavy, inefficient and unresponsive federal government. They believe in local autonomy, the family, and the Bible, and their beliefs are cruelly mocked by the ruling class.

Describing America's country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.

Wait, what? This class doesn't match any group I've heard of. Social conservatives are more eager than anyone short of radical Marxists to re-engineer society, in their case along Biblical lines. Libertarians want freedom to pursue their own rights, but trample over the ability of people to collectively face challenges. There is no such thing as a 'redistribution of wealth', all distributions are redistributions, and even hunter-gatherer tribes share food. The kind of society that Codevilla envisions is not Industrial, or old agricultural (as in Europe), it appears closest to the historical idealization of the American West. This lifestyle was contingent on a specific set of historical factors, primarily open land, that will not appear again. My personal experience of the country class, from the Tea Party, is that they are not rugged individualists, they are proles. They are worn out cogs in the social machine.

The country class wants local autonomy to choose their own school boards and curricula, but this is suicidal in a modern economy. Global competitiveness is dependent on a set of skills that can be assumed nationwide. Companies need to trust that their employees in Los Angeles have the same skills as their employees in Fargo, lest the company collapse through inefficiency and misunderstanding. They decry the intrusion of the Federal government, then demand agricultural subsidies, social security, and disaster relief. Without pork-barrel projects like the interstate highway system and rural electrification, the countryside would be a desolate wasteland of third world poverty.

Mr Codevilla shows his true colors: "Restoring localities' traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional 'police' powers over behavior in public places." What are these 'traditional police powers', not having to read suspects their Miranda Rights? What about immigrants? And where is the Military-Industrial Complex in Codevilla's society, the generals, spies, and defense contractors who justify so much of America's dysfunctional foreign policy in the name of 'national security'. I do not wish to call names, but under Codevilla's rejection of the Democratic-Republican establishment is a desire to raise up a new Military-Christian alliance, in short, fundamentalist fascism. Cities, the main drivers of American prosperity, would see their complex institutional networks disbanded in the name of 'autonomy.' And individually, small towns would slip into religious hysteria and xenophobic paranioa; Arizona's laws against illegal immigrants, and the Salem Witch Hunts.

America's ruling class has failed, but the solution that Codevilla advocates, a return to local autonomy, and "[An] attack on the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own is in effect the break-up of the American Empire (and we are an empire, even domestically). He may believe that America's grand democratic experiment that he claims to defend can survive this assault, but I feel differently. We are tottering on the edge of the knife. We must unite to survive. Policy debate and disagreement are vital to the health of our democracy, but the empty repetition that "Washington is broken" has to end.

Next Week on We Alone on Earth: America's New Ruling Class.

(PS: Apologies for typos, this was banged out in a hurry and I don't have time to proof read right now.)

The Structure of Religion

I've been thinking a little on the nature of religion, both for my own personal reasons and to formulate a wider policy. No decision can be made in the presence of inaccurate observations, and I think religions can be characterized by three elements.

1) Gnosis: Human beings have religious experiences, this is an undeniable fact. We are on a very basic neurochemical level capable of experiencing sensations of the presence of supernatural beings and of a deep connectedness to the universe. There is a physiogical basis to these feelings, for example epilepsy and various entheogenic drugs, but their physical nature renders these experiences no less meaningful. If you feel like you're talking to God, I cannot invalidate your personal experience of the divine. The presence or absence of supernatural beings has no bearing on the existence of the sensation of gnosis.

2) Community: If a successful meme against Christianity were developed, people would still go the church on Sunday for the social aspects. As a community, you're either a member of not, but just because We Alone didn't have a church upbringing, and parent/elderly focused communities have little personal relevance, doesn't mean that others do not find these communities valuable. As long as communities don't violate the UN Charter on Human Rights, I don't believe we have a right to interfere with their existence. Even if we disagree, we must get along.

3) Memeplex: As this blog has stated in the past, religion is a collection of memes. Some are these are mythical, like Genesis, others are ethical. Religious mythology gets a bad rap here, because many of its adherents believe they can't follow both it, and the scientific explanation of the universe, hence Young Earth Creationism in school, and teaching the controversy. Here, we must make a stand. I don't like state supported meme-myths, but the scientific memeplex is required for an understanding of scientific fact, and we have to promote scientific fact in school.

As for ethics, religious values are a good enough operating system for society. Logical philosophical ethics, like utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, break down in boundary cases. I feel that the ad hoc nature of religious ethics actually leads to a more resilient social structure. The problem is when these ethics also call for denying gay people basic human rights, or advocate stoning women for insane offenses a la fundamentalist Islam. Again, here we must make a stand.

The problem with trying to alter religious memeplexes is that religions, as self perpetuation memes, demand rigid adherence to orthodoxy. for example, the Koran states that it is eternally true. I don't know if there's a good way to encourage social and memetic flexibility without knocking the heart out of the rest of the system. Reform Judaism and mainline Protestantism are fairly moribund.

If there is an answer, it lies in gnosis. The direct experience of God revitalizes religions, and causes a questioning of pre-existing doctrine. Ironically, by bringing people closer to god, we might be able to ameliorate the more damaging aspects of religion.

Mutual Disrespect

"Do you have anything besides... existential destruction of all attempts at reasoning this evening?"
"... Yeah, it's a bit bleak isn't it."
"Can you articulate what if anything is problematic with religion?"
"The usual response is that it's the enemy of reason, etc., but then you have to argue that reason is a good thing.
I would be more inclined just to state that religions are groups of replicators which manifest a great deal of power and use it in ways often contrary to the interests of 'humanity,' and other replicator-groups with the same power and the same human-orthogonal utility functions are much more readily criticized, e.g. nationalisms, political ideologies, secular traditions, technologies, 'globalization', but religion is uniquely sacred, and 'respectable' members of society are obliged to pay lip service to it.

We act like the solution to religious strife is some kind of limp 'mutual respect', where a rabbi and a priest and an imam sit in the same room and say nice things about each other. I'd prefer mutual disrespect. I'd prefer that they sit in that room and argue about total nonsense until they turn blue, and let the rest of the world see how utterly silly it is."