I’ve been reading some of the novels by Gene Stratton-Porter, one of the most popular writers of the early 20th century. Of particular note are her classics for young adults, Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909). One of her last novels, Her Father’s Daughter (1921), features as a prominent theme the danger posed by Japanese immigrants to California. In developing this theme the author unfortunately resorted to cliches and hyperbole that lowered the quality of the writing. She also assured herself of being cast into outer darkness by critics 100 years later for her “racism,” which cast a shadow over her other books that were innocent of any racial agenda. Still, for me the question always must return to a practical issue. Should Americans in 1920 have allowed unlimited Japanese immigration, and turned California into a Japanese-controlled territory? And if this would have been a satisfactory result, why would keeping California “Anglo-Saxon” have been an unsatisfactory one?
Although a Japanese-American California might have been one of the more pleasant among various possible results of mass immigration, white Americans at the time felt that they wanted to remain the majority people in every state of their nation. From this followed the famous Immigration Act of 1924, which established the national origins quotas on immigration based on the ethnic makeup of the existing population of America that held until the Immigration Act of 1965. This attempted solution to the immigration problem may have been imperfect, but it nevertheless provided the demographic stability that brought American society to its cultural peak in the mid-20th century. None of us are likely to see anything like that period in our lifetimes.
It seems to me that Mrs. Porter was expressing a legitimate fear in Her Father’s Daughter, whether or not present-day people find her ways of expressing it acceptable. She also was prescient about the danger of a people failing to reproduce itself. A passive acceptance of mass immigration would seem, logically, to go together with an indifference towards self-reproduction. In Her Father’s Daughter she has one character say:
“As a nation, our people are pampering themselves and living for their own pleasures. They won’t take the trouble or endure the pain required to bear and to rear children; and the day is rolling toward us, with every turn of the planet one day closer, when we are going to be outnumbered by a combination of peoples who can take our own tricks and beat us with them. We must pass along the good word that the one thing America needs above every other thing on earth is HOMES AND HEARTS BIG ENOUGH FOR CHILDREN, as were the homes of our grandfathers, when no joy in life equaled the joy of a new child in the family, and if you didn’t have a dozen you weren’t doing your manifest duty.”
In Gene Stratton-Porter, Novelist and Naturalist (Indiana Historical Society, 1990), Judith Reick Long notes the likely influence on Mrs. Porter by Theodore Roosevelt, one of the great popularizers of the movement to get all Americans closer to the vitalizing, cleansing forces of nature, through such things as Scouting, national parks, and so on. Interestingly, Roosevelt had expressed the same fear that Americans were in danger of failing to reproduce themselves in his speech at the Sorbonne in 1910:
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is to remember that chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.
Can the American people hear the truth of these words anymore? Or is that nasty word “race” too distracting? If there is a better way to word this message, I would like to know. We need to get the message out quickly.
A work of art is, at once, the creation of an individual or individuals, and the collective product of a particular culture or civilization. It seems to me a clear mark of the decline of American (and Western) civilization that very few universally acknowledged masterpieces of art and literature have appeared in the past several decades. I suspect that works at the level of the creations of a Beethoven or Dostoevsky are not forthcoming at present. What is missing is not the individual talent, but a solid cultural framework – a commonly held body of traditions and experiences, with a common orientation towards truth and beauty. In a society lacking this, art ends up decadent, or escapist, or satirical, or simply incompetent.
This is not to say that artists of today have nothing worthwhile to do. Probably the need for artists and writers is greater than ever today, to help us understand the truths that a rational, quantitative approach cannot apprehend, and to comfort and encourage us by evoking the beautiful and true in a world in which these qualities are hard to find. But we should expect that works engaging honestly with the ugly realities of our society will bear the marks of doing so, and may not be able to lift their audience to the heights that have been reached in other eras.
Consider, for example, dystopian fiction, a genre exemplified, in the 20th century, by great works like Brave New World; 1984; and The Camp of the Saints. The particular evils associated with modernity seem to naturally suggest to writers scenarios which take those evils to their ultimate logical conclusion. The artistic results are unlikely to be beautiful, but by showing the ugly and evil results of seemingly benign ideologies of social equality, they can nevertheless be of great value.
Gary Wolf, the creator of the site AWOL Civilization, specializes in dystopian fiction. In his description of the site, he writes: “This website can be summarized in one phrase: ‘Updating Orwell for the era of political correctness.’ ” Mr. Wolf’s writing ranges from sophisticated cultural commentary to satiric lists of the headlines he imagines appearing in the future, when political correctness has been carried to levels we can hardly imagine even today. I particularly enjoyed Michelle Knows Best, his ‘70s TV sitcom-style chronicle of the ghastly events unfolding in America from week to week, from the perspective of the Obama White House. The laughter provided made it a little easier to bear the ongoing tragedy. But Mr. Wolf’s preferred genre – at least for now – is dystopian fiction. He aims, with much humor and spoofing but a deadly seriousness of spirit, to portray the future of America and the West if today’s trends are allowed to continue. Naturally, he hopes that doing so will help prevent the worst from occurring.
I was a little sorry to learn – just when I’d finally gotten around to linking Mr. Wolf’s site on this blog – that he is putting it on hiatus for the foreseeable future. But his reason is unimpeachable: he wishes to devote himself exclusively to writing a new novel. I recently read his latest, entitled The Kicker of St. John’s Wood (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2009).
Kicker is a light first-person narrative in the style of a mystery or spy thriller, short enough to be read in a day. If the cover were truer to the contents it would show a dark-skinned beauty clad in the brutal armor of a professional football player, holding a ball and looking out with frightened eyes as a pile of giant men move in to flatten her. It does convey the central theme, though: the introduction of women to professional football, engineered by a coalition of American leftists and United Nations bureaucrats as an adjunct to their plot to overthrow democracy in the United States. The year is 2020, and the story is narrated by one Jayesh Blackstone, the English-born son of an American father and an Indian mother. Jayesh, a thoughtful, literary-minded chap, found his way to the unlikely profession of American football through his unique talent for kicking. When his team makes it to the Super Bowl, he finds himself forced to kick with a female holder, thus becoming an unwilling player in an international theatre of political correctness. As events unfold, he uncovers a larger and much more sinister plot, which sends him traveling around the world James Bond-style to save a friend who has fallen into the clutches of the villains. These events force Jayesh to figure out who he is and what he stands for.
In Kicker, all major institutions of Western society have been taken over completely by the forces of modern liberalism in their various embodiments – to quote Wolf’s site again: “political correctness, multiculturalism, the victim industry, declining standards, affirmative action, feminism, post-modernism, scientific hoaxes on a global scale, and the rest of the intellectual decadence that is reducing the greatest civilization of all time to a state of mental cacophony.” Racial and gender equality, white American guilt, anti-Christian sentiment, are all tools used cynically by leaders and institutions for no other purpose than to amass power. 1984 indeed.
The results of this takeover of society tend to take the form of parody rather than realistic projections. Feminism, for instance, is personified in the beliefs of Ashley, a radical feminist writing a Ph.D. dissertation on “the contribution of Christian fundamentalism to sexist attitudes in professional sports.” Despite her beliefs, Ashley “hooks up” with Jayesh just as any football groupie might do, then insists that their physical interaction follow the rules of “alternating reciprocity” in which the partners take turns making sexual moves in order to ensure “equality” – an obvious take-off on such things as sexual conduct codes on college campuses. Ashley’s initial intention was to observe some real-life football players for her research. However, in spy-novel manner, the female antagonist soon finds that her lover has brought out feelings that are incompatible with her formal allegiances.
Ashley’s dissertation contends that:
Christian fundamentalists, spreading out from their original cells in Texas, gradually took over the educational institutions in the American heartland (and seriously threatened to take over the rest). The central pillar of their influence was the entrenched patriarchy, which was fueled by violent sports, such as football and ice hockey; merciless economic exploitation of the weak members of society; war; racism; homophobia; and the relegation of women to the most menial and accursed existence they have ever experienced on the face of the earth. The men indoctrinated in this way become addicted to a steady diet of sports, guns, porn, and cut-throat business practices. If they are not stopped soon, they may very well attempt a violent takeover of the U.S. government, depose President Malpomme [the “bad apple” female U.S. president who is in fact plotting a takeover herself], and institute a regime of martial law. (p. 20)
In real life, feminists do not write like this (if only they did write this clearly!), but the point should be taken. Is the substance of what they are saying much different?
Despite Kicker’s use of feminism as the central adversarial ideology, the story suggests that the real threat is something different, bigger, more difficult to pin down. This threat is personified in the character Joseph Hoompty Azala, a sinister United Nations bureaucrat from India, who alternates cajoling with threats as he attempts to win his perceived co-ethnic, Jayesh, over to his side.
“You know, Jayesh, I think there is one thing we can agree on right now, and that is the subject of your American women. They are corrupting society with their behavior. We have great fears in my country that it will spread. This is very dangerous. In Asia, as in most of the world, the women are busy with their real obligations; that is, taking care of their families. Look what is happening to the Super Bowl. A woman playing in your greatest game? You can’t be too happy about that.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, newly fascinated by the man across the table….
“Tell me,” I said, “if my American women repel you, why are you cooperating so closely with our chief woman, President Malpomme?”
Azala began rubbing his thumb against the handle of his fork. “Because she supports us on almost every issue. One has to be realistic, n’est-ce pas?
“Yes, I suppose.”
“She will be replaced, like all your presidents.” (p. 79)
This scene suggests the true nature of the alliance between Western liberals and the Western-educated Third World bureaucrats found in the United Nations and other international organizations. The latter use the former to gain power and funding in support of their own ends, which ultimately have very little to do with democracy and human rights as we understand them.
As suggested by the unusual ethnic background of its protagonist, Kicker also ventures, gently, into the role played by demographic change in the Western civilizational crisis. Jayesh is of mixed Indian and Western background, but regards himself as not at all Indian. When so labeled, he responds with gentle exasperation:
What good would it do to explain…one more time that my only connection to India, aside from my first name, is that it happens to be my mother’s native land. I never lived there, I don’t speak any of the dialects, I’m not a Hindu, and we never ate curry at my house while I was growing up (my father hated it). (p. 3)
This turns out to be not quite true. Jayesh’s main spiritual influence comes from his Indian grandfather, and he later finds himself drawn to an Indian woman who belongs to a revolutionary movement. Consequently, political events force him to decide just what his identity is. Here, his relationship with his multi-ethnic football teammates, based on a shared goal, shared standards, and absolute mutual trust, suggests the model for a functioning multiethnic American society. Jayesh’s true fellow countrymen, it seems, are not ethnic Indians but rather people like Thelonius Brown, a patriotic black man who loathes being thought of as a victim of racism, and other characters who refuse to be pigeonholed into superficial “ethnic” identities. Conversely, the novel imputes a complex Norwegian, Apache, Scottish, and Russian Jewish origin to one white character. What makes Jayesh align himself with America is that “In America, I can define myself. It’s quite a luxury. Of course some people don’t like that.” (p. 158)
I have no doubt that there are plenty of non-white and mixed-race Americans who, like Jayesh, dislike being categorized as “disadvantaged minorities” and would side with the majority culture if forced to make a choice. At the same time, the effects of 40 years of mass non-Western immigration are beginning to throw into doubt the idea that America can survive as a “proposition nation” consisting, not of a concrete, particular people, but as a collection of all the cultures and ethnic groups of the world, united only by some abstract creed of personal freedom. When the European, Christian element of the population is reduced to minority status, will honorable members of the new majority take over the role of custodians of our traditional culture? If our present culture of race-based power jockeying and creeping race-motivated socialism is any indication, the answer is: certainly not.
In this respect it must be said that Kicker does not fully tackle the implications of phenomena like Hispanic immigration and the growth of Islam in America, although there are a few hints of these issues in the text. Still, Mr. Wolf’s delightful pummeling of political correctness as he reveals its essential tyranny will be appreciated by open-minded moderates and rock-ribbed conservatives alike. The dystopian vision, paradoxically, can help one imagine a better future. I, for one, look forward to the knock on my door by some Paul Revere who has a simple plan of action for taking back our country:
“All right, listen up,” he declared. “Things are happening very quickly, and there’s no time for explanations. Go back to your rooms. Pack one small travel bag each, and keep it light. Hopefully we will return soon for the rest of our belongings. A helicopter is on its way here to pick us up. The war has begun, my friends. Meet me here, just outside, in exactly five minutes. Go!” (p. 205)
Although I am no longer very young – or perhaps because of this – I am greatly drawn to vintage books for children and young adults. The stories told and the values they embody are often vastly different from those we encounter today. The world of these books is a world where Westerners struggle in love, war, work, and school without the burden of guilt based on race, sex, and the like. One common theme is personal courage and the triumph of brave individuals over adversity.
One such book, A Book of Brave Deeds (Chicago : Auxiliary Educational League, 1947), collects famous stories of heroism, mainly in times of war, for the benefit of its readers. Here, I encountered a story I’d never heard before: Sergeant Custume’s heroic sacrifice defending the Irish town of Athlone from English and Dutch forces during the Williamite War in Ireland (1689-1691). The war was fought between the supporters of Protestant William III (William of Orange) and those of the Catholic James II, over who would be King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. James had been deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 by William, who ruled jointly with James’s daughter Mary.
At the peak of James’s efforts to recover the crown, Irish and French forces (James was supported by Louis XIV) controlled most of the major towns in Ireland outside of the province of Ulster. James affirmed the independence of an Irish Parliament and promised to restore lands to the Catholic Gentry which had been confiscated in the 1652 Act for the Settlement of Ireland. Williamite forces, including English, German, Dutch, Danish, and French troops, gained significant ground with their victory in the Battle of the Boyne (June 1690), but failed to dislodge the French and Irish from Limerick.
William entrusted the Dutch general Godert de Ginkell with the taking of the strategically important town of Athlone on the River Shannon. The bloody siege of Athlone was the occasion of the “brave deed” here related. The east part of the city had already been taken by Ginkell, but the Irish occupying the west part – across the river – bunkered down. Ginkell proceeded to reduce the Irish section of the city to rubble with his guns, but was prevented from entering it by a break in the bridge. To solve this problem, the “wily” general made use of a wheeled drawbridge designed by a German engineer (!) and was able to outmaneuver Irish opposition to set it in place. Athlone was doomed. At this moment the hero appears:
A sergeant in Maxwell’s dragoons, Custume by name, grasped the situation at a glance, and cried aloud, as he stepped out from the huddled ranks of his comrades, in words that Irish history will never cease to preserve —
“Are there ten men here, who will die with me for Ireland?”
Not a second’s pause now—there were not ten, but hundreds upon hundreds; and from amongst the strongest and most active of them the devoted sergeant picked out the number he had stated. All of them were in the full armour of their corps-back-piece and front-piece of wrought steel, thigh pieces that stood out over the knee as well, and great jackboots of horsehide, stout enough to ward off most bullets, and to resist any sabre-slash the arm of man could deliver.
“Fling aside your swords, men; ’tis axes we want!” was the sergeant’s next order.
Immediately he was obeyed, for there were plenty of tools all around, and then, with the simple words, “Follow me, boys – for Ireland!” Custume ran up to the inside of the Irish breastwork, climbed over it with the agility of a cat, and landed on the opposite side face to face with the English, was closely followed by his sacrificial ten, and forthwith all set to work to hew away the gallery, to wrench up and fling into the river the planks just laid down, to destroy the dire machine designed to destroy themselves, their comrades, and their cause!
The eleven are mowed down by artillery, but not before doing considerable damage to the gallery, and they are followed by another nine who manage to destroy it, sending an “exultant scream of triumph” up from the Irish soldiers. Of these, only two are able to return to their side alive. The story does not end in victory, for Athlone was eventually captured “chiefly owing to the absurd conflicts between [French general] Saint Ruth and the Irish commanding officers,” but the English “never made the slightest impression by way of the bridge which the twenty Irish Heroes died in defending.”
The story perhaps does not need any particular comment; but why do we not tell our boys stories like this anymore? The broad reason is the proliferation of a kind of pacifism within our culture: celebration of battle and of the sacrifice of one’s life for one’s country is supposed to be what got us into the carnage of the First World War and beyond. While there may be some truth to this, I am more impressed by the fact that these stories celebrate courage regardless of the affiliation of the courageous person. Thus the English have long admired their enemy Joan of Arc, for instance. Americans once were capable of admiring the bravery of American Indians without regretting that the Indians were ultimately defeated.
The story of Sergeant Custume is taken from Stephen J. Mac Kenna’s Brave Men in Action: Some Thrilling Stories of the British Flag (Sampson Low: London, 1878), and can be found in part on Google Books. The author explains his purpose as follows:
In the mass of Military and Naval history which we have as a nation by this time accumulated, individual efforts, in contra-distinction to the greater operations of Armies and Fleets, are apt to become forgotten – we lose sight of the Soldier or Sailor in the vast labours of the Commander-in-Chief or the Admiral.
“Brave Men In Action” is intended to make the Person more prominent than the Force, and therefore in most of the articles Incidents are brought boldly into the foreground of the picture, while the Action is only outlined so far as is needful to the proper comprehension of the selected deed of daring.
Some stories of this sort are true and others mainly fiction, but they show a true side of man, one upon which civilization depends. I think we need to go back to teaching our children, and ourselves, the “proper comprehension” of brave deeds.
Independence Day in the United States is a time for reflecting on, and celebrating, the Founding of our country. The problem with that these days is that our nation, as she shows herself to the world today, has little connection or affinity with the time or spirit of that founding. This is as true of our publicly-expressed ideals as it is in our demographic makeup. I have no disagreement with Rick Darby on his feeling that, in terms of our public life, we have little to celebrate today.
I recently read a biography of James Madison that was written at around the turn of the (last) century. It was inspiring and valuable, because I was able to feel a connection to another one of the great men who founded the United States of America. Yet I was not sure how to draw upon Madison to speak to us in our present crisis of mass immigration and untrammeled liberalism. Even in 1900, a biographer of Madison saw his value in terms of his liberal values: opposing slavery, supporting freedom of religion, and arguing for a strong, centralized federal government. Yet while I affirm such Madisonian views as positive elements of our national character, they are not going to be of help in resisting current trends such as race replacement and the growth of Islam. Some might say they are part of the problem, though I do not go that far.
Today, July 4 is an occasion for platitudes about the United States as embodying some ideal of universal freedom and tolerance – the liberal view of who we are. The non-liberal elements of our identity – that we are an English-speaking, European people of Christian heritage – are seen as inessential, or even as impediments to the true meaning and value of our nationhood.
So, what do we reactionaries, traditionalists, and nationalists celebrate today? At the very least, that we have an identity and an Independence Day that belongs to us, even if its true meaning is lost to the majority of people today.
I must apologize for invoking ’70s and ’80s British music in a blog about American heritage these days, but it’s part of my frame of reference and sometimes of some use to me. There was a song by a group called The Jam called “Going Underground” that once meant a lot to me. In high school and college, I liked the idea of being involved in “alternative” or “underground” culture, which at the time I understood to be something vaguely libertarian or left-wing. The truth, though, was that the appeal of the “alternative” musical groups came from their sound and sense of fashion and intelligent lyrics, and not inherently from their liberal or left-wing politics. The Jam song went like this:
What you see is what you get
You’ve made your bed, you better lie in it
You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust…
And the public gets what the public wants
But I want nothing this society’s got -
I’m going underground
Well the brass bands play and feet start to pound
Going underground
Well let the boys all sing and the boys all shout for tomorrow
(P.S. I decided to remove the video upon re-watching it. The imagery on the video doesn’t belong on today’s post, although it’s mild enough for that period of music.)
Nowadays, I realize that to really be “underground” is not to be liberal, but to be traditionalist or conservative. This is the position that really challenges the ruling order, and that really takes courage and non-conformity to hold. When we traditionalists celebrate the Founding of our nation (whichever one we may belong to), we have to do it, to some extent, “underground,” outside of the parades, fireworks, and sports events that mark Independence Day in the United States.
And, one thing we assuredly can celebrate is that sympathy for a traditionalist position, and resistance to the current order, is growing, even if we are hard-pressed to find positive manifestations of this. But remember, it’s still early!
So as not to leave out a traditional American element on this day, I refer the reader to the poem “The Swamp Fox,” written by a very politically incorrect Southern writer, William Gilmore Simms, about Francis Marion, who doggedly opposed the British in their occupation of South Carolina during the Revolutionary War:
“We follow where the Swamp Fox guides,
We leave the swamp and cypress tree,
Our spurs are in our coursers’ sides,
And ready for the strife are we—
The Tory camp is now in sight,
And there he cowers within his den—
He hears our shouts, he dreads the fight,
He fears, and flies from Marion’s men.”
Best wishes on this Independence Day. May it be a time of public celebration and private inspiration to all my readers.
It seems to me perfectly natural and right that one should become more conservative as one gets older. It’s not that there is anything wrong with being traditional in one’s youth, but youth is naturally a time for self-discovery and testing boundaries, and it’s important then to develop qualities like courage and creativity, even at the expense of making some mistakes. The older generation, on the other hand, is responsible for preserving and defending the standards and traditions that they know, from experience, to be important to the entire society.
This, though, is probably a matter of maturity rather than conservatism in a political sense. In the political sense, it is by no means true that people always move from liberal to conservative as they get older. With the prevailing liberalization of society, in fact, the default tendency is to become more liberal. This is true of many people of my parents’ generation, who when they were younger would have viscerally opposed the public acceptance of homosexuality or the legitimization of Malcolm X as a social leader. It’s true of numerous public figures like George Will. If you live in a liberal community or work in a public institution where the prevailing winds blow liberal, it is hard to sustain the constant assault on your conservative values. You want to be liked, after all! I myself was at heart pretty much liberal until the shock of 9/11, when I began to see that our inability to effectively respond to the most audacious and flagrant attacks our nation had endured in its entire history was rooted in our moral weakness. That began a process of exploration of self and society that continues for me to this day, some of the results of which are posted on these pages.
I can’t imagine returning to any of my former default liberal stances, because although I may not have figured out exactly what to replace them with, I am sure that as they stood they are wrong. It seems clear to me, for example, that if we don’t get a grip on marriage and figure out some way to get men and women to marry at a reasonably young age and stay married, family life as we have known it, and everything this has meant to us, will be largely replaced by much less nourishing and stable alternative arrangements. I don’t think this is a possibility, I think it’s a certainty. And nowadays, for most social problems, I tend to take a conservative stance – which is not the same thing as wanting to put things back just as they were in the past.
And yet it is a fact that even people who have gone quite far in committing themselves to a conservative or traditional position do reverse themselves sometimes. I’m thinking of a number of male friends of mine who are or were either conservative or libertarian. My assumption, or wishful thought, is that such persons should naturally become more conservative as time goes on and they see more and more evidence that liberalism just isn’t working. To my surprise, though, this is not always the case. One of my friends, for instance, was publicly quite active in the Republican Party up until 2008 and took quite a bit of flak for it at his very liberal workplace, but has lately been complaining about the “extremists” in that party and claiming that national health care may be a great thing. I know another fellow, in his mid-30s, who was very active in his church and, as far as I could see, a rock-solid conservative, but who has lately dropped church entirely and spends his energy trying to pick up women at clubs. (Maybe he finally broke after failing to find a wife at church.) One of my on-line friends, with whom I thought I shared many values, recently told me that he was through with the “far right” and that he thought we may be heading for a “hedonistic utopia,” which he had decided to enjoy rather than resist.
What surprises me about individuals like these is that they seem to have truthfully seen the false and self-destructive nature of liberalism and stood against it, but then somehow changed their minds, at least partially. This, to me, is more puzzling than the case of people with a liberal worldview simply holding on to or expanding that view. How can you see the truth, and then deliberately forget it?
But these persons, if they were reading this, would certainly deny that they are suppressing or forgetting anything. They see reality; I am clinging to unfounded beliefs. Or, maybe more likely: nothing is certain, and they’re choosing to be more optimistic, or to think more flexibly (OK, maybe this is not my strong point!), or to live more in the moment. Who knows how it will all turn out?
I don’t believe it, though. I can’t look at the growth of Islam in our and fool myself into thinking it just might happily resolve itself into something benign without our having to fight it. I can’t look at the efforts of “marriage equality” activists to force their relationships into the institution of marriage, and believe that this won’t harm children, families, and the larger society. I can’t look at illegal “Hispanic” immigrants marching in favor of an amnesty for themselves, and believe that my American society can assimilate their presence. I don’t see sexual hedonism as leading to anything but heartbreak, mutual alienation, and sad children or no children in the long run. A hedonist utopia? A hedonist hell, more likely.
(I feel compelled to interject here that I am no “puritan” and am quite a fun-loving person. But you’ll have to take my word for it!)
Furthermore, all these issues are connected. I believe Pat Robertson said something about 9/11 being a punishment for our acceptance of homosexuality. I do not consider that to be a factually true statement, and Robertson may be crazy for all I know, but there is metaphorical truth in it. There is a connection between our loosening up and de-valuing of traditional marriage (and other relationships and sets of obligations that transcend individual desire), and our ensuing softness and spinelessness as a society that the Muslims observed and correctly saw as an indication that we were ripe for them to prey on.
On such matters, I’m going to continue to try to show people I care about that those connections are real – and I hope this does not preclude also learning from the perspectives of others! It is not that I know much; but all anyone can do is try to express what he sees. Those who feel I’m missing something will, I hope, try to set me straight.
I’ll really make sure to post something this weekend. Please bear with me! Writing for the HA is one of the things I most like to do, but my “real” life doesn’t always allow it.
Flight of the Conchords, “New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk-parody band,” were the rage in our household for a while a couple of years ago.
I’ve always wanted to share the economic insight (or question, at least) offered in this song with my readers:
They’re turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers
But what’s the real cost, ‘cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper
Why are we still paying so much for sneakers when you got little kid slaves making them
What are your overheads?
I recently heard that one of the English groups I liked in my youth, the Specials, had re-united and were touring again. This prompted me to go to YouTube and listen to several of their old songs. The Specials were a mixed-race group with a Jamaican ska-influenced sound and left-wing lyrics that often focused on opposing the “racism” of late-1970s Britain. While I rejected the political sentiments of this music long ago, some of the songs are striking in their awareness of the dramatic changes that were beginning to be felt in Britain as a result of immigration.
I first heard about the Specials as a young teenager, watching a news report on American television in 1981 covering the riots in Toxteth, Liverpool. The piece was introduced with a clip of a song called “Ghost Town.” “This,” the narrator said solemnly, “is the most popular song in England.” It had reached the top of the British charts at the same time that the riots broke out, and its eerie, haunted-house strains highlighted the ominous news that there were now race riots in England.
This town is coming like a ghost town
All the clubs are being closed down
This place is coming like a ghost town
Bands won’t play no more – too much fighting on the dance floor
But hearing “Ghost Town” in 2010 now makes me think of Detroit and many other urban areas in the U.S. to which that epithet applies very well. And this reminds me of another fact that had been reported in America at the time of the 1981 riots: British authorities were said to be reading reports and consulting with American authorities on the racial riots that had taken place in the United States in the 1960s, in hopes of learning how to handle the British situation appropriately. One even sensed that some Americans enjoyed the idea of being in a position to offer advice in this matter.
What can be learned today from America’s black riots? With Hispanics, Muslims, and other groups growing in population and power, the traditional 90% white, 10% black dynamic no longer generally applies. And yet, the way in which white Americans respond to all nonwhite groups in this country has been largely conditioned by the history of our interactions with those of African descent. Nor has the threat of black-on-white mob violence disappeared, as shown by the recent phenomenon of “flash mobs.” I therefore thought I’d approach the subject by looking at the 1965 Watts riots. To get a sense of how these events were regarded at the time, I used a book written in 1966 with the refreshingly clear title Black Riot in Los Angeles. The author, Spencer Crump, was a writer on California history and seems to have been writing for the L.A. Times as recently as the early 1990s.
The Watts riots (which really took place in a wide area of south Los Angeles) were triggered by the routine arrest of 21-year-old Marquette Frye for drunk driving (reported by a black man) by a California Highway Patrol officer. Frye, his brother, and their mother physically tangled with officers, who called for enforcements as an angry crowd gathered. The crowd threw rocks at the departing vehicle and the riots began. For the next five days black mobs totaling up to 10,000 people went on a rampage in southern Los Angeles, severely beating any white person unfortunate enough to fall in their path. They looted stores and then set them on fire with Molotov cocktails, shooting at police and firemen who tried to extinguish the fires. The situation was not helped by a hesitant response on the part of the deputy governor and by disagreements between various authorities. The riots were finally quelled by 13,900 National Guard troops using sweep tactics; over 1,650 officers from the police and sheriff’s department were engaged. The results: 600 buildings were damaged or destroyed, a loss estimated at over $40 million. Over 1,000 people were injured. 34 were killed, including a fireman, a deputy sheriff, and a policeman; 25 of the dead were black.
Reading the book was painful for me. I was born in the mid-1960s and although the events of that time are not part of my personal memory, I recognize the America of that time as the world of my parents and grandparents. 1965, in particular, seems to me one of the most important years in American history, the year that the Civil Rights and Immigration Acts became law, inaugurating the anti-discrimination practices and the mass non-Western immigration have altered our country almost beyond recognition in the ensuing decades. I believe it is deeply significant that 1965 was also the year of large-scale black rioting in Los Angeles. This shocking explosion of violence against white people and white property in relatively liberal California took place just as white society was, collectively, making an enormous commitment to raising the material and social status of black Americans. As I read about the agony and bewilderment of civic leaders grappling with this attack on their society, I felt as if I were watching the beginning of the crumbling of that society.
What was the source of black grievance and anger? Certainly the dramatic growth of the black population through migration – from 75,000 in 1940 to 420,000 in 1965 – and their crowding into substandard areas, had set the stage for civil strife. The “McCone Report” to Governor Edmond Brown expresses what I think was the common consensus at the time, that black unrest throughout the United States was due to the following “fundamental causes”:
- Not enough jobs to go around, and within this scarcity not enough by a wide margin of a character which the untrained Negro could fill.
- Not enough schooling designed to meet the special needs of the disadvantaged Negro child, whose environment from infancy onward places him under a serious handicap.
- A resentment, even hatred, of the police, as the symbol of authority. (127)
Crump, whose views were certainly “liberal” as defined in the mid-1960s, accepts this assessment, while agreeing with the popular criticism that the report did not offer anything new. He also considers many other possible aggravating factors, ranging from the influence of TV shows showing all white people as affluent and happy, to the irritating effects of the hot weather and smog!
But how does one really explain acts of violence performed by a mob? Here, Crump seems to be at a loss:
The Los Angeles riots were motivated by as many factors, with varying intensities of course, as there were rioters. Investigating commissions can only make generalities as to the causes: it would require an army of skilled psychologists to interview each rioter at the moment of violence to determine his or her motivations in joining the frenzied, angry mob.
The individual answers would vary radically, just as there are variants in human personalities.
Rioting might attract one person because of deep, unhappy feelings over denials of rights to the Negro race, while another might rush to join the destruction simply because he loves violence. The opportunity to obtain – gratis – the treasures displayed in a store window could be the incentive for rioting.
Yet another person might be inclined to join the mob because of the fear that not to do so would indicate rejection of his race. Others might participate because of inclinations to be led easily.
The fact that approximately two-thirds of the rioters arrested had police records certainly indicates that the tragic Los Angeles violence in a sense was a criminal riot as well as one that drew participants of a particular race.
The immense unemployment problem in the area also gives speculation that the violence was a poverty riot even though its participants also had the pigmentation of their skin in common. (21)
I don’t think these would be the reasons given today, as I will explain momentarily, but I think that today we share the desire to explain, as in the report, a frightening phenomenon like a black riot in terms of controllable factors. What I don’t think white Americans were able to come to terms with in 1965 was that the riots were motivated by hatred of white people, and the predatory desire to hurt or kill them and take their property. This can be seen in photographs showing rioters leering at the camera with “we’re gonna get you” expressions and in others showing men, women, boys, and girls eagerly scrambling for looted merchandise. This is not a protest or a cry for help; it is a roaming pack of savages looking for prey.
Crump aims to give a balanced account: he considers the possibility that low numbers of black police officers, prejudiced treatment of black people by white officers, and other factors need to be addressed. He is mildly critical of Chief William H. Parker, the public figure hated most by L.A.’s blacks, whose attitude, which seems to me in fact the right one, can be gleaned from such statements as “I’m a policeman, not a social worker.” On the other hand, he gives little credence to the idea that there exists systematic “police brutality,” and speaks of “the Los Angeles Negro community’s almost fanatical distrust of police in general.” It does not occur to him that any serious checks should be made on police power.
Yet the book as a whole makes it very clear that U.S. society in 1965 was set and determined to solve the Negro problem through aggressive, expensive programs to correct the inequalities between blacks and whites in wealth, education, and power. The eruption of black riots might have provoked Americans to question the assumption that black discontent was based purely on material inequalities or the wish to be “included” in the larger society. Americans might have questioned whether ordinary school improvements in class size, library resources, and the like could have put a dent in the problem of black illiteracy:
On the basis of [achievement test] scores, it appears that the average student in the fifth grade in schools in the disadvantaged areas is unable to read and understand his textbook materials, to read and understand a daily newspaper, or to make use of reading and writing for ordinary purposes in his daily life. (Report, 141)
They might have scrutinized the words and actions of black leaders, such as the Reverend James Edward Jones, sole black member of the McCone commission, who objected to the report’s statement that efforts to ameliorate the condition of the Negro will be of no use “unless he helps himself.” Having been excluded from society, Jones said, they could not be expected to “take responsibility.” At what point, Americans might have asked, would the disadvantaged Negroes be ready to assume the responsibilities that go with citizenship, and until that happened, how were police and other authorities supposed to treat them?
But in the end, the only solution that Americans were able to contemplate was the institution of programs to end racial inequality. Such programs were presented, contradictorily, as being urgently needed while at the same time not at all certain to succeed:
What can be done to prevent a recurrence of the nightmare of August? It stands to reason that what we and other cities have been doing, costly as it all has been, is not enough. Improving the conditions of Negro life will demand adjustments on a scale unknown to any great society. The programs that we are recommending will be expensive and burdensome. And the burden, along with the expense, will fall on all segments of our society – on the public and private sectors, on industry and labor, on company presidents and hourly employees, and most indispensably, upon the members and leaders of the Negro community. For unless the disadvantaged are resolved to help themselves, whatever else is done by others is bound to fail. (Report, 128)
For the record, I do not wish to dismiss the grievances that must have been common to all black Americans in the early 1960s. Residents of the ghetto, in particular, probably had little contact with white people other than landlords, store owners, and police; and although I am certain that the majority of whites treated blacks decently, I am equally sure that all blacks had unpleasant experiences and felt themselves outside of the mainstream much of the time. Those of high ability must have been particularly frustrated. From a black point of view, things must look much better today, with the development of a substantial black middle class and with numerous blacks in positions of leadership.
However, in many ways the reforms have been a total failure. Conditions in the ghettos themselves appear to be even worse than they were in 1965. The rate of violent crime for black Americans is at least seven times that for whites. In government and education, race-based appointments of black people (I leave out the other ethnic groups from this discussion) have become standard practice, with all the associated corruption and dysfunction that one would expect.
Also, the riots themselves have now been widely legitimated as justified acts of protest. If Crump were to present his bland list of possible reasons for rioting today, he would be shouted down by people openly supporting the rioters. I imagine this would include nearly 100% of the black community. For instance, in this retrospective on the 1965 riots in the Los Angeles Times, one Tommy Jacquette boasts (I see that he has recently died) of his participation in those riots and defends them without reservation:
People keep calling it a riot, but we call it a revolt because it had a legitimate purpose. It was a response to police brutality and social exploitation of a community and of a people, and we would no more call this a riot than Jewish people would call the extermination of the Jewish people “relocation.” A riot is a drunken brawl at USC because they lost a football game.
Jacquette, incidentally, entered the same vocation as that formerly followed by Mr. Obama: he became a “community organizer.” I wonder what Mr. Obama’s view is on the Watts riots.
This brings me back to the Toxteth riots. For it may be that it is now time for Americans to learn from the British, and maybe wider European, experience. One of the most important things we should note about the Toxteth riots is how similar they were to the earlier riots in the United States. They, too, were triggered by encounters between urban blacks and white police, with the former claiming “racism” and “brutality” and engaging in the same type of destructive activity. And they, too, were followed by a massive expansion of programs designed to eliminate the inequality that was supposedly the cause of the violence. To me this suggests that the riots cannot be explained by the particular nature of American (or British) society, nor by the particular history of how a black minority came to exist in that society. They were, rather, the product of deep group differences between the white and the black elements in any society that has both.
Now, I would actually be sympathetic to the law-abiding black person who complains that he is the victim of undue attention from police. However, I believe this phenomenon is a reflection of a messy reality without any perfect solution. No social program can change the fact that in any white society with a sizable black minority, the white part will be forced to police the black part. This is true in terms of sheer numbers, of course, but it also true in the sense that that concentrated black populations tend to be more violent and disorderly than the surrounding white communities, which means that you will always end up with white police giving disproportionate attention to black people. This, in turn, will breed the hatred of the police that we saw in 1965 and that is still characteristic of urban blacks today. Undoubtedly, it will also breed a harsh attitude on the part of some of the white officers.
This may not be the dynamic that applies with other ethnic groups, but it always seems to apply in the white-black case. And this becomes a lose-lose situation for white policemen and other authority figures because if they enforce the law harshly they will be hated for “brutality,” and if they are lax they will be hated for “neglect.” Hiring a certain number of black policemen will also not solve the problem, because they will either be thought of as tools of the whites, or it will be demanded that their numbers be increased until they make up the majority of the police force. This is what we see in black cities like New Orleans. I’ll leave aside the issue of the actual quality of such police forces, and simply point out that this logically amounts either to segregation, or to the reversal of the original situation so that blacks police whites. It has not solved what seems to be a problem inherent to the coexistence of the two races in the same society.
A second point: acts of mob violence must be punished by retaliations that affect the community from which the violence originated. The McCone report recognized the need to maintain authority:
Our society is held together by respect for law. A group of officers who represent a tiny fraction of one percent of the population is the thin thread that enforces observance of law by those few who would do otherwise. If police authority is destroyed, if their effectiveness is impaired, and if their determination to use the authority vested in them to preserve a law abiding community is frustrated, all of society will suffer because groups would feel free to disobey the law and inevitably their number would increase. Chaos might easily result. (Report, p. 134)
But Americans were unwilling to consider that perhaps the only way to enforce that “respect for law” was to allow the group that flouted it to suffer, collectively, the consequences of doing so. I would suggest that the period following the Watts riots was the wrong period to initiate a set of programs providing benefits for the black residents of that area. I do not know what should have been done, but it should have involved, if anything, a visible reduction of existing benefits and a ratcheting up of security and law enforcement. (I imagine significant improvements were made in some police procedures.) Instead, America moved ahead with its liberal solution to the problem.
There are intractable differences between whites and blacks on the group level, although these can often be overcome, and may not even matter in many cases, on the individual level. I would like to see more white Americans take an honest look at these differences and ask themselves how these differences might be managed in a way that does not require them to give up their safety, comfort, self-esteem, and cultural standards. These may seem like bleak and unsatisfying conclusions. But recognizing the constraints that reality sets upon us is the very thing that can free us to take actions that, while not leading to any utopia, may actually work.
References
Spencer Crump, Black Riot in Los Angeles, Los Angeles: Trans-Anglo Books, 1966.
During the Bush years, liberal white Americans seemed to live in constant anger, sincerely felt, over the frustration and humiliation of living under a president they despised who was carrying out a war they hated. At the same time, it was becoming apparent to some people of a more conservative bent (most of whom at had initially supported that president and that war) that despite individual victories for their side the country as a whole was continuing to drift to the left. Now that we have a left-wing president and a Democratic majority in Congress, that drift has turned into a series of huge tectonic jolts. Ironically, the open display on the part of many Democrats and ethnic interest groups of an unlimited willingness to destroy whatever remains of the traditional social order has energized many conservatives to resist this destruction. In this sense it is an exciting time to inhabit the right end of the spectrum. Sooner or later, though, conservatives will see that their energy and excitement will not be able to reverse the leftward movement in the long term.
One theoretical reason for the ineffectiveness of today’s conservatism is its failure to oppose liberal principles. Liberalism as it exists today demands that every inequality between men and women, whites and minorities, citizens and foreigners, Christians and Muslims, wealthy and poor, be eradicated; for this it will use any means at hand, including legal coercion, mass immigration, and redistribution of wealth. Republicans, and intellectual conservatives, oppose this coercion and redistribution in the context of individual issues, but are rarely willing to argue for social policies that affirm and reinforce certain types of inequality. Nor are they willing to defend their own society as having a particular character, viz., to affirm that the United States is essentially an English-speaking, white, Christian civilization, an extraordinarily obvious fact that has been deleted from our collective memory (or turned into our deepest shame). Their conservatism is limited; they are essentially liberal in their core beliefs. We are left unable to take the most basic steps to protect our security, prosperity, and freedom – and we keep moving to the left.
We need to learn to articulate non-liberal principles and say and defend them until they are once more current in our society. A non-liberal principle, it seems to me, is one that affirms or justifies a non-egalitarian social institution or practice in terms of eternal or transcendent truths. “Men and women are naturally different,” “Islam mandates eternal war against unbelievers” “the different racial groups differ in average capacities of various types,” and the like are non-liberal facts; non-liberal principles which guide, say, the institution of marriage, immigration policy, or educational practices are based on the recognition of such facts. How many conservatives are ready to do this intellectual work?
Russell Kirk’s Portable Conservative Reader contains a section called “Critical Conservatism” which gives some samples of how this intellectual work might proceed. One is the 1915 essay “Property and Law” by Paul Elmer More, from which I posted a quote last week. This essay is an excellent illustration of what it means to articulate a non-liberal principle. It starts with More’s expressed concern that during a “long strike in the mines of Colorado, with violence on both sides and bitter recriminations,” no word was expressed by the mine owners and conservative press on behalf of property rights. Rather, they argued for their side in terms of “the inalienable right of every American citizen to work without interference” (as John D. Rockefeller put it; p. 436). That is, they argued in terms of liberal equality, rather than defending the principle of private property, which inherently means the acceptance of inequality.
Why, faced with violent strikes and militant socialist rhetoric comparing mine owners to murderers, was no defense made of property rights? More traces the undermining of the idea of property rights to Rousseau, who saw them as originally having been created by a class of men who, having used their superior abilities to acquire possessions, protected those possessions from the masses by passing laws in defense of property. Rousseau observed that in this way “property is the basis of civilization” (p. 440). With the establishment of property, the originally small natural differences between individuals were magnified into the enormous ones observable in modern civilization. More acknowledges that there is truth in what Rousseau says, but denies that doing away with property rights can lead to general happiness:
It is a fact that property has been the basis of civilization, and that with property there has come a change from natural inequality to what is assumed to be unnatural injustice. But it is not a fact that barbarism is in general a state of innocence and happiness. (p. 438)
More challenges head-on the basic premises of the socialism:
Socialism rests on two assumptions. First, that community of ownership will, for practical purposes, eliminate the greed and injustice of civilized life. This I deny, believing it to be demonstrably false in view of the present nature of most men, and, I might add, in view of the notorious quarrelsomeness of the socialists among themselves. Secondly, that under community of control the material productivity of society will not be seriously diminished. This question I leave to the economists, though here too it would appear to follow demonstrably from the nature of man that the capacity to manage and the readiness to be managed are necessary to efficient production. (p. 440)
More also denies that socialism is based on scientific principles, or as Marxism put it, the “economic interpretation of history.”
…the real strength of socialism, the force that some think is driving us along the edge of revolution, is in no sense a reasoned conviction that public ownership is better than private ownership, but rather a profound emotional protest against the inequalities of ownership. (p. 441)
He then states his anti-Marxist, conservative principle in refreshingly bold terms: “To the civilized man the rights of property are more important than the right to life.” (p. 442)
The reader who does not find the truth of this statement to be obvious should “read the whole thing,” as they say, which includes a discussion of Roman law that I could not completely follow. But the basic idea is clear enough. He does not mean that property is more important than life, in the sense that if I am starving to death I should choose to die rather than steal an apple from my wealthy neighbor’s orchard. He means that one of the main functions of the legal system of a civilized society must be to keep property secure, even though, life and human nature being what they are, there will inevitably occur large and small injustices, and even loss of life from time to time, under any such system. Despite this, he insists, “it is better that legal robbery should exist along with the maintenance of law, than that legal robbery should be suppressed at the expense of law” (p. 445). In closing, he suggests that the Church and the University have generally been have always been “strongly reactionary against any innovations which threaten the entrenched rights of property” because they understood that the spiritual and intellectual vocations that they supported depended upon the security of property. (He did not anticipate the left-wing universities and liberal churches of today!). “[I]f property is secure, it may be the means to an end, whereas if it is insecure it will be the end itself” (p. 450).
More’s essay does not completely fit with the current situation, since socialism, in the sense of a movement for communal ownership of the means of production by workers, is not the dominant ideology today (which is why it is not very effective to call Obama a “socialist,” although it is true in a moral sense). Property rights are still sometimes violated by violent demonstrations, but more often by taxation and regulation of how property may be used – say, anti-discrimination laws, or the ongoing government takeover of the practice of medicine. But the broader truth of what he says has not changed at all. Indeed, it seems to me that the wedding of jealously-guarded personal freedom with firmly-secured property rights is part of the essence of traditional American (or Anglosphere) society.
Other conservative principles, similarly, express the idea that in a civilized society, the whole is in some sense more important than the individual parts, or the transcendent more important than the particular. As a former libertarian, I hate to admit this, but it is true. For instance, that the security of the country is more important than the comfort of the individual. That the preservation of the family is more important than personal sexual fulfillment. Or that the majority culture is more important than any minority sub-culture. One can always cite egregious counter-examples that seem to prove these principles untrue, but to believe them thus refuted is to confuse individual exceptions with rules of general conduct.
A propos of the discussion of property, I was interested to read in a biography of Thomas Jefferson about the public response to his impending bankruptcy in the last year of his life:
At the opening of the year 1826, the last of his life, Jefferson’s financial embarrassments threatened to drive him into bankruptcy and the loss of his estate. In despair he turned to the Virginia Legislature, asking permission to sell part of his property by lottery. “If it can be yielded,” he wrote to a friend in the legislature, “I can save the house of Monticello and a farm adjoining to end my days in and bury my bones. His countrymen came forward with voluntary subscriptions to save his estate. New York contributed eight thousand five hundred dollars, Philadelphia five thousand dollars, Baltimore three thousand dollars. The project of the lottery was suspended, and the immediate demands were met….The aged statesman was fortunately left to end his days under the happy delusion that this “pure and unsolicited offering of love” by his fellow countrymen would suffice not only to pay off all his debts but to leave his dependants in ease at Monticello. (David Muzzey, Thomas Jefferson, p. 303)
What is of interest to the present discussion is not Jefferson’s unfortunate insolvency at the end of his life, but that the American people found it desirable that the property of one of our great statesmen be kept intact, although this would bring no material gain to any of them as individuals. They recognized its spiritual importance to us (and the value of giving a living president the dignity of remaining there), as a symbol of our identity and history. They did not hold rights to it as property, but they knew that as a symbol of the nation it belonged, in a sense, to every American. This is why, for similar reasons, the destruction of the World Trade Towers was in reality an attack on all American people, and not just those who owned or happened to be in the towers that day. Materialists do not see this. They would rather that the British royal family’s property be taken away from them and redistributed among the people; they would rather that a cathedral be made into a homeless shelter.
The spiritual happiness of a civilized people is indeed dependent on property rights. The transcendent is more important than the particular, but is realized, on this earth at least, only through the particular. If conservatives, traditionalists, and other committed patriots can seize on these truths and make them their own, things may begin to turn in their favor again.
Citations
Russell Kirk, The Portable Conservative Reader, New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
David Muzzey, Thomas Jefferson, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918.
Posted by stephenhopewell 
