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Conservatarian: Down with unnecessary labels

Charles Cooke of National Review is one smart cookie. His cover story on the cult of charlatan Neil deGrasse Tyson is a must-read for anyone dubious of progressivism. Like many of his polemics at Bill Buckley’s legacy publication, Cooke deftly tarnishes the idol of simple, left-wing secularists who scoff at Bible-toting bumpkins in flyover country. Truly, few things top a good takedown of a cultural icon.

With such talent, I was disappointed by the title and subject of Cooke’s forthcoming book. Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the thing will be well-written and full of keen insights laced with erudite quotations. But the name turns me off. Cooke is calling the book, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. It sounds like a cool, promising subject brought down by a neologism that will fit shoulder-to-shoulder in an ocean of increasingly pedantic political labels.

To be sure, Cooke is far from the first thinker to utilize the term “conservatarian.” His “manifesto” seems like an attempt to pioneer its launch into the popular lexicon though. The book’s synopsis describes Cooke’s offering as a “call to arms” that can “help Republicans mend the many ills that have plagued their party in recent years.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I also don’t find anything wrong with libertarians or conservatives. From a political perspective, I easily identify with the non-aggression principle of libertarianism. When it comes to worldly matters and personal disposition, I hoist my flag with Tory conservatism. And on some issues, such as the plight of the poor, I can be a downright bleeding heart liberal.

But what’s the difference? And should it really matter what label we use?

These are questions that constantly come up when discussing political matters. Matters of governance are often talked about in terms of ideology, rather than the utility or ethical nature of the law. Balancing the budget is called a “conservative” policy. Easing punishment for drug offenders is seen as “liberal.” Rarely is public policy talked in terms of common sense. That’s because ideological labels are a tribal contest. Each has their cheerleaders and detractors, similar to professional sports. The difference is that Nancy Pelosi’s collagen-stuffed face can’t be fixed with a skirt and pompoms, and Karl Rove is about as agile as an obese penguin.

Lumping ideas into firm categories leaves out the messiness that follows public policy. Just like spouses, there is no perfect government. Logrolling exists for a reason. Democracy, whether representative or pure, is a give-and-take system. Laws come out of the legislative process with all kinds of inputs from people with varying perspectives. No policy embodies the core philosophy of Edmund Burke or Paul Krugman. Compromise is the only universal in representative government.

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Britannus Americanus: A Letter from a Jacobite

FROM THE PEN OF AN AMERICAN.
TIME, DATE, LOCATION UNDISCLOSED.*

O Britannus Americanus! That great Spectre by which the entire World knows most keenly the Mind and Wit of the Puritan,—a Form of Mankind whose presence upon the Earth we should, as I will shortly endeavour to shew, not much have suffered without,—New England, the Symbol living and breathing of the Usurpation by which the Anglo-Saxon has found himself, in your mad Twenty-First Century, abolish’d by his own hand, in its grand Accusations against the fornication and impurity of other nations reveals itself,—if you, my Dear Reader, would countenance such a comparison,—to be Babylon’s Whore reconstituted, and the said Whore has perhaps too late begun to choke upon her Luxury and Splendour that we might save ourselves, that she might not choke us too with the Wine of her mad Fornication, our greatest Efforts to spew it from our mouths notwithstanding.

What a grand Irony it is for me to make such a Proclamation, recalling that New England’s own Theologians spoke in so similar a manner. Finely unlike the Puritans, you will however note, my Dear Reader, that I do not claim the Authority of the Good Lord, nor His Glory, nor even His particular Favour. In the present Treatment I aim merely to shew, with brief specimens from the relevant History as necessary, that the Anglo-Saxon Race, perhaps once granted indeed the Favour of the Lord, has most surely lost it,—or as it would be said in the old Chinese Tradition, that he is now without the Mandate of Heaven.

The said Usurpation by which England would appear to have lost the Divine Mandate is that by which she declared her rightful King to have lost it himself. Hear me, Britannia, where you have still ears to hear: You have wrongly killed your King, Charles the First, a Good King and a Good Christian! You were furthermore given the blessing of Cromwell’s demise, only to allow the overthrow of James the Second and Seventh by William of Orange! You dare still to give this latter Usurpation the happy Appellation of “the Glorious Revolution”! It ought not to give the Reader any great shock that I am therefore a Jacobite; that I am of the sure belief that England’s last chance for Redemption was,—and perhaps remains if God’s Mercy should allow it,—the restoration of her rightful Line of Kingly Succession.

I am not without fear,—as I assume the Reader to be so intelligent to suppose,—that the Jacobite position cannot be but a Symbol and a kind of Moral Statement. For Old England’s Ruination is New England’s Ruination, and New England’s Ruination is that of the whole World.

O Britannus Americanus, you great whore among Nations! You have cast away the yoke of Old England only more easily to despoil the riches of a New World! It is only a natural consequence, then, that America should find her Manners and Customs to an ever-augmenting degree untethered to anything which might best be called Anglo-Saxon. For it is you, New England, you who are to blame for the Fall of the Old American South, the Exploitation of the Old American West, and the Overthrow of the World’s Old Order; it is you who brought the frenzied burning of supposed witches to a new Continent and who, after ages have passed, taken Sodomy as a Sacrament with the very same Ferocity with which you once punished it!; and it is you, indeed, who have left us,—we the sad Remainder who speak your time-tested Tongue,—sarded and sodomised, so coarsely fuck’d, by a Novus Ordo Sæclorum over which even you no longer reign! By your thousand prides and your myriad vanities, the Possibility is not at all faint that we all may perish! I can only pray that the divers Nations with which you share North America will unchain themselves from you, just as you so duplicitously unchained them from Old England.

*The auspices by whose guidance I was given the letter above would be so foreign—and perhaps even distasteful—to the sensibilities of the present day that they would be almost impossible to articulate without a serious risk of miscomprehension. Let it suffice to note the striking resemblance of quills to wands.

The casual, everyday Marxism that is all too often ignored

The Daily Caller was good enough to let me publish a piece on why #Shirtstorm is a symptom of fashionable neo-Marxism in our culture. Here’s an excerpt:

The Verge, a tech site that tipped its hand as unethical and agenda-pushing during GamerGate, ran a headline reading, “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” They are literally convinced that fashion, in both the clothing and radical chic senses, is so important that they don’t even care about forward leaps in science. Think I am mischaracterizing them? The subtitle reads “That’s one small step for man, three steps back for humankind.” Wearing a shirt that the groovy people at The Verge don’t like is three times as bad as making a breakthrough in space exploration is good.

The feminism that we have making noise right now isn’t the feminism that fought for equality and against discrimination. Rather than being based in enlightenment values of humanism and equality under the law, it is grounded in neo-Marxist theory of power and oppression. You know when people say that only women can be victims of sexism because of some non-falsifiable, abstract, aggregate definition of power? You were hearing neo-Marxist critical theory.

Escalating this kind of outrage is a pretty dangerous gambit, I think. As with all anti-rationalist narratives, this bizarre campaign is eventually going to buckle under the weight of its own accumulated contradictions.

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Nozick’s experience machine in the age of the Oculus Rift

The year is 1974. Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia has just hit the shelves. A few dozen pages in, Nozick prods you to consider a simple thought experiment: Imagine you had a choice between everyday reality and a fabricated, alternative existence provided by what he called “the experience machine.”

This apparatus, invented by neuroscientists, could be set in advance to provide you the feeling of all your desired experiences over the course of your life. Nozick assures us that this simulated existence would seem entirely real, although you’d merely be floating in a tank, attached to electrodes.

Hedonism is the view that pleasure (sometimes also labeled “happiness”) is the chief good humans strive for. If hedonism holds, then, by definition, all human action would be strictly a means to that end. When prompted with the opportunity to pre-program a lifetime of pleasurable experiences, hedonists would rejoice: they would strap into the experience machine. However, most people, feeling a deep unease even contemplating the choice, indicate they would decline the offer. From this we are left to conclude that people value more in life than felt experience alone. Nozick’s clever hypothetical is generally viewed as convincing among contemporary philosophers as a robust challenge to hedonism and utilitarian theories in moral and political philosophy based on it.

Now let’s flash forward forty years from the thought experiment’s formal philosophical introduction and have a look at the current state of affairs. Does the experience machine, or something like it, exist?

The world we live in is digitized and connected like never before and it just so happens that a lot of people spend a lot of time taking advantage of that. Some of today’s widely used technologies can feel like low-level experience machines, although none come close to being a proxy for Nozick’s. That is all about to change. Oculus, a kickstarter-launched company has created what might be the next screen to claim its place in the pixilated lineage of groundbreaking electronic devices. Its virtual reality (VR) headset, dubbed the Rift, provides an immersive first-person sensory experience that will have a wide range of applications in the future. Facebook executives thought so highly of the technology that they speculated it could become the globe’s “next major computing platform” and promptly coughed up two billion dollars to make it their own.

While virtual reality has been around for quite some time in various forms, this recent innovation represents a large shift towards real-life experience machines. Call it Nozick’s axis:

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While the Rift is impressive, any possibility of realizing Nozick’s famous thought experiment depends on how well VR matches up against certain characteristics of the conceptual machine.

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Keep digging: ISI employee Stephen Herreid doubles down on character assassination

Grand inquisitor, Intercollegiate Studies Institute employee, and amateur blues musician Stephen Herreid feels very threatened that I said he should apologize to Artur Rosman for this disgusting post, so he decided to publish my email to him and insinuate that I’m guilty of conservative treason. You can read it here. Honestly I think I come off pretty well.

I mentioned that he works at ISI and that I hoped the number of articles — really, there are a lot, this is not a one-off thing — he has written going after trads and porchers hadn’t been encouraged by his superiors; he says he found that “menacing.” Boo hoo. I know many who share the concern that the institution, for which I have great respect and have benefitted from professionally, not devolve into GOP/conservative movement boosterism of the sort Herreid seems to wish he was the vanguard of. He edited the acronym ISI out of my email to him, presumably because he knows what he’s doing is shameful, so I note it here in the hope that this sparks some conversation.

There’s a lot wrong with Herreid’s post; I said if he didn’t apologize he could expect to hear from the blog, by which I meant this space, not the Daily Caller, which is not a blog. He knows that, but frames the piece around the Daily Caller so he can claim I’m holding a double standard, criticizing him for his ad hominem attack while working for a publication founded and edited by a person who defended Romney’s 47 percent remark. I suspect he also knows that there’s a big difference between making an intellectual argument about tax-payers and tax-receivers and attacking the character of the poor.

He claims:

J. Arthur Bloom … criticized me in an email sent to my place of work, made allusions to my employers that I found menacing, and seemed to me to be trying to use a reputable, patriotic, pro-free-market publication to intimidate me into apologizing for my defense of the American way. I cannot respect that, even if Bloom does claim to represent a publication that I very much admire.

If Herreid thinks it’s necessary to treat Rosman the way he did to defend the American way, then there’s really nothing further to be said. The ends justify the means. Vote GOP. And if Herreid feels intimidated that I said I’d blog about him, well, maybe he’s not the brave defender Christendom needs.

The Mitrailleuse will continue to be a place where well-intentioned people of the left and right can discuss ways to get away from people who conduct themselves like Mr. Herreid.

Update: I’m reminded of something a wise person once wrote to me: “It is very easy to convince yourself that you’ve dealt handily with the devil without selling so much as an inch of your soul. But the devil knows the difference, and so do you.” Just so.